until there is nothing left of us [3/?]
THIS WORD IS FAR TOO SHORT FOR US
[verse] established dean/castiel, ofc. rated pg. ~5,500
Dean hears the footsteps in the hall.
(c) title from variations on the word love by margaret atwood
a/n: Oh wow, this hasn't been updated in a few months :/ One line shamelessly stolen from Leonard Cohen, because he's a genius and I love him. Also, this was written before 5.16, so the Heaven-talk will not be canon, but just suspend disbelief and it'll be awesome. Unbeta'd because I'm impatient.
Masterlist notes have been updated. Please read them!
(back) the dawn was breaking the bones of your heart
This word is far too short for us
Something happens, they don't know what, but they woke up to a bright yellow sun and white skies. Dean asks Castiel if this is what heaven looks like, half-asleep, pushing his fingers between Castiel's shoulder blades, sinking into the warmth of morning and Castiel's cool bare skin; Castiel says he can't remember.
-//-
The trees along these fences that sink behind the house are crooked and stripped bare, withered and ugly, twisted fingers and they'll be old men someday, still here. Dean thinks he remembers hearing about floods in the north before the radio play became static. It's only now, standing on soft earth, facing a brown-grey stillness, he wonders if there will be a moment where he won't feel that this was the destruction made from the paths of his mistakes.
“I know what you're thinking,” Castiel says. He's standing on the steps, heading out to the pastures to check on the animals, paused, tugging on the hem of the grey sweater he took from Dean, looking comfortable and unfamiliar in faded jeans, dark green rubber boots, a tired ordinary wearisome in his eyes.
“Right this instant?” Dean asks, glancing over his shoulder.
“You shouldn't.”
Dean shrugs, looks back to the fence; even with all the rain, with the storm clouds choking up the curve in the sky, passing over them with lightning and thunder, he thinks these places will stay dead for years. Through a memory, with good eyes, they'll barely see it. It's the filling it in with the cut-brush of bone when they move apart and death will certainly follow him here, tremble to touch him, he knows this, traced with a curse he can't outrun; he thinks that it could come too soon, come too late, let the blame fall into his weathered hands.
It could be shame, it could be edges pulled tight, so wild, wild enough that it's always there, right around the corner, Dean can feel it.
“Give yourself a day just to forget.” Castiel runs his thumbs along Dean's cheekbones, that electric soft spark of skin and skin, the guarded, hesitant stutter of his touch, even now, so much later on. Always so unsure and Dean's leading him, blind and selfish himself, always so trusting. Some days, Dean is stitched up and aching with it, scarred and merely daring it to go on because he sees no way back (but this is not them, can't be them, it's too bitter, too exposed in all those residual shell-shocked ways, but sometimes--sometimes this can't be all that real and he'll smile at the illusions, knowing that they could slip from his fingers and give way to nothing). “It might help.”
Dean grins. “You know I can't make anything that easy.” It falters, Castiel knows this. His own expression moves with Dean, a mirror that Dean can never escape: it's that trust and that fear and how Dean can always get close to it, never enough when it counts the most. He gives in:“You know it's not that easy.”
For a moment, Castiel smiles. Then he kisses Dean so softly, as softly as he can, in the way only he can, in the way that Dean knows he needs, and whispers, “I know.”
Death is hemmed into the sides of the world, the lap of the sky with it's startling blue and gold, the dirt roadway bent into the distance for miles and miles. The land is formless, misused pieces of hills and sky and houses, the faint outlines of these things stuck together with the visible morning light.
There is nothing and no one. Dean tells himself that this is what they wanted.
-\\-
Dean finds a full bottle of gin behind the bedroom dresser. It's not the taste of it that makes it wrong, but the indestructible feeling that it's got running through him, that maybe he was never broken like he half-remembers. He's stupid when he drinks gin and Castiel can't tell the difference, because he's stupid when he drinks gin, too.
The moon is low and silver-grey, and it's reaching all those forgotten places, the sagged trees behind the tool shed, the stretch of earth forever and on merely five miles from where they are, blue veins laced across their pale skin when they hold too tight. Castiel won't let go of his hand and Dean knows he doesn't want him to.
They stand on the back porch, howling into the dark, the gin hot and welcomed on their lips. In the dark, someone, something, answers back. They scream and echo the high-pitched yelp, imagine all those monsters that don't exist so far from anywhere, screaming, collapsed on the porch steps.
They break down the door to the basement, splinters in the palms of their hands, pulling back on the hinges, the doorknob forgotten behind them when Dean yanked too hard and the handle broke right off. They're laughing, spinning and light-headed, Dean stumbling down the steps, Castiel close behind, the bottle clutched in one hand, the other loosely wrapped around Dean's wrist.
“It's dark,” Castiel says.
Dean reaches out for the beaded metal string, tugs sharply. Click-click-click, the light doesn't turn on. He twists, angles, searches Castiel out in the dark, the only light, refracted and chopped moon-blue, spilling off into corners they don't want to explore. “Scared of the ghosts?”
Castiel walks into the light and there's the framed moment of disdain on his face as his hands drag across the top of a dresser. “Someone told me once that there is no such things as ghosts.”
“They probably laugh at scary movies, too.” Dean scoffs. “Pricks.”
They're barefoot on the cement floor, shuffling across the dirt, toes catching in holes, knees bumping into boxes and wood posts. Dean is swearing and he can't feel a thing, indestructible until the gin can't hide him anymore.
“Remind me to never keep anything that I don't need,” Dean tells Castiel, pushing aside a stack of boxes, tumbling over one that fell over and pitching forward. “Look at all this stuff. What for?”
Castiel kneels down, hands reaching out, until the heel of his hand knocks something cool, metal, small. He pulls it out from under the pile of cardboard, damp blankets, plastic dishes, sets it in on his knees and opens it.
“Dean, look.”
It's pictures they find, moments captured in the washed-out sepia, the grainy black and white. Dean leans over Castiel's shoulder, plucks a picture from the box and smiles. They take the tin box to the kitchen where they spill the pictures across the table, squares sheets of matte paper skimming across the tabletop, spread out to the corners, falling to the floor. Under the din of melted candles and flashlights resting against cups and canisters, they sifted through strangers of a past that could have been theirs, that they made theirs, laying claim to histories that existed in only the stories they kept to themselves. They're going to start making up stories, ignoring names and dates and places written in the yellowed borders; out of boredom, out of desire, out of need for roots and deep-set connections and years and years of names that they can trace backwards.
“They look--unhappy,” Castiel says.
“Maybe they didn't like having their pictures taken,” Dean jokes.
Castiel holds up a picture of a child, a girl with dark hair, standing alone on a road, dressed in layers, in unlaced boots, a naked doll at her side. She isn't smiling, her skin sallow and lost against the pale sky framing her; she's a ghost, blurred when the camera moved, shaken and the lack of colour shifted to the side.
“What about her?” Castiel asks and when Dean glances up, he is her, that patched and hollow sorrow that can only come from a life of it, painted in muted colours, distracting in fine detail. A life of it, something you should have always known and Dean has to look away, pushes through the other pictures, seeks out joy that could probably never be found.
“I don't know, Cas,” Dean murmurs, swallowing, shaking his head.
(It's shallow, it's shame.
Dean makes these people his own, pictures of the uncles, cousins, grandmothers he never knew, taken by this wide-awake and knowing gaze of people that lived once, staring back at him from empty fields, church walls, blanked-out snow drifts and tractors, now without names, only marked by squares of colour and light, by the dates they can barely read. Dean makes them his, a family that sat where he is sitting, and it makes him feel so oddly grounded, so wholly disconnected from what he had always had, flustered and delirious, and it's not his to take, not his to keep, never will be--he knows he has his own family, haphazard pieces stuck in awkward places; has Sam on the West coast, Castiel moving pictures beside him, Bobby waiting for them all to come round again--but there are lives left in these boxes, stranded and aimless, and it's the finality of this knowing that starts the stories in his head.
He won't tell, a secret he is bound to forget, but for a moment it's scattered and delicate and golden, something only he can touch.)
Castiel is tucking the pictures he likes into door frames and window sills, ones of houses and of so many people that nothing can be seen, and Dean is trying to remember the stories that Castiel told him, the ones about kings and queens, trees that never burned and lands where diamonds and gold grew from the hills. They never seemed to fit with the small faces, white dots with black eyes and thin mouths, that he saw in the pictures. He tried to change the names, tried to make them the kings and queens, but they always stood on their golden hills and waited with solemn faces, watching their world never unfold, their kingdom breathe into solitude.
It was just too far away.
-//-
“I like that picture,” Dean says.
She's a pretty young girl, her hair pulled back, her slender fingers twisted in dark fabric, holding a baby boy in her lap. She's kneeling in front of a shed, the door thrown open, only the legs of someone visible in the doorway, feet crossed at the ankles. She's smiling at the camera and the baby is smiling, too.
Castiel rests this one in a window pane in their bedroom. When the sun goes down, Dean can't see it anymore and he thinks that maybe she's moved on now, taken the baby boy in the too long jacket with her. A ghost, just like the other girl, the skin that matched the sky, and they let them free, locked for too many years in the basement, in the tin box. Now they're wandering through the walls, sitting in the chairs, talking about who they were and what has changed, grey and black shifted in every picture, saturated and bright, waiting by the windows, by the doors, for someone to come home.
Castiel sits on the end of the bed and Dean watches him for a moment, quiet and patient from knowing too much, learning intricacies, reading movements like so many words. He's blurred, too, all his colours damaged and cracked.
“I wonder what happened to them.” Dean takes Castiel's hand in his own, threads his fingers through,
“I could tell you a story,” Castiel says.
Dean smiles, leaning back against the headboard, closing his eyes. “I'd like that.”
She was just as beautiful as she was in that picture, until the day she died. She was kind and taught her baby boy to be kind, too. They made their own happiness, let every sunrise be their newest beginning. Her baby boy was there with her, sitting on her bed at the end of her days, holding her hand. He sang to her day and night, scared that in time she wouldn't remember the sound.
Dean can only believe that it's true.
-\\-
It's that night he hears footsteps down the hall.
-//-
Castiel is sitting on the kitchen counter, a glass of water in his hands, when Dean comes down the next morning. He's swinging his feet against the cupboards again, tap-tap-tap of his heels against the wood. Dean rests his hands on Castiel's thighs, tilts his head, thumbs rubbing circles, until Castiel looks up at him.
“You weren't there when I woke up,” Dean says.
Castiel sets the glass down and leans forward, kissing Dean on the forehead. “I had to feed the horses.”
Dean hums, closes his eyes. “You're strange.”
Castiel slides off the counter, his feet landing on top of Dean's. They stand there like that, Castiel's hands curled around the edge of the counter, Dean's fingers running along Castiel's arms.
“Do you think they all lived here?” Castiel asks. “The people in the pictures.”
Dean shrugs. “Maybe.”
Castiel steps around Dean, wanders to the table, absently touching the discarded papers and books littering the top, pushing aside the box of pictures, dragging papers beneath his fingertips as he walks to the window and stands there, looking out to the road.
“Hey, did you hear anything last night?” Dean's picked up Castiel's glass and drinks the rest of the water.
Castiel's head turns half-way back; only the sun-blended outline of his nose and lips are visible. “No.”
“I swore I--” Dean shakes his head, hands curling in front of his face, and laughs. “Must've been a dream.”
-\\-
Audrey's standing on the porch when Dean reaches the bend in the road and walks up the hill towards her house.
“Almost thought you three died down there,” Audrey calls out. She reaches into her pocket, a cigarette already in her fingers. “I was just going to come check on you.”
“Two,” Dean says, stopping by the end of the porch. Audrey leans her elbows on the railing, eyebrows raised. “There's only two of us left.”
Audrey grins and taps her cigarette against a beam. “Where'd you hide the body?”
“He thought it was best to move on.” Dean shrugs. Moves the keys between his hands. “Go his own way.”
“You don't think so.”
Dean bristles, frowns up at her. “It's not my decision to make.”
Audrey nods, cigarette hanging from her lips. She lets her head fall to the side, a curl of grey hair falling in front of her eyes. “Right. You here for the car?”
“Just the boxes in the back.”
“Well, just go in.” She waves her hand towards the shed. “Nothing's locked out here.”
Dean grins, holds up his hands. “What if I were a serial killer?”
Audrey regards him, fixed and mock-serious, with narrowed eyes. “Too pretty.”
Dean chuckles, nodding, and turns the keys in his hands. Everyone around here knows everyone, he knows these kinds of places. The key reflects bright white light and he breathes in the dry dead earth. There's histories hundreds of pages long and it's like Audrey could tell all the stories with heartbreaking precision.
“Hey,” Dean calls out and Audrey looks at him like she'd been waiting for too many silent minutes for him to speak, “I was wondering--did a woman ever live in that house? She had a son, probably.”
Audrey shrugs, her turn for jokes, she gives it away in the swift lightness in her lips, her eyes. “Sure, a lot of women lived in that house.”
“If I brought a picture, would you be able to tell me who she was?”
For a moment, Audrey is carefully eager. “Where'd you find pictures?”
“We found gin,” Dean admits. “Then we found pictures.”
She laughs. “Course you did.”
-//-
He thinks he's waking up in the middle of the night and seeing faces in the windows, footsteps down the stairs, voices passing through walls. He thinks he's sitting up at night, thinks he knows what they're saying.
It's got to be bad dreams, dreams coloured in black and white and film grain, because when the sun fills their room, Castiel is tucked into his side, legs tangled, sheets twisted in all their spaces and nothing's changed.
He'll sit in bed, waiting for faint stirs of day night, for Castiel to move away, hoping that they'll come out in daylight and he'll be able to see them.
-\\-
Start with the stonework walls, the wide-set window sill, the iron-cast bed frame, down the halls with the washboard white railing, the china cabinet with the blue and white plates that tell a story in each turn, the sun that can find it's way through the curtains on the door, follow it room by room through the house, to the yellow couch where the books have been gathered and discarded, into the kitchen with the picture window looking across the back fields, the kitchen with the plastered walls and pictures tucked into the beams and wooden shafts. Outside, outside on the back porch with the wicker basket chairs and ivy-riddled tables, they follow each other always and sit, Dean on the second step, Castiel on the last.
“Are you sure you didn't hear anything last night?” Dean will ask most days now and Castiel will pause and Dean, when he is close enough, can feel his heart stutter, and he will always say no, nothing.
-//-
It's the moment of captured panic, a picture that Dean takes, that stops him. The suddenness, the heat of Castiel's skin on his, nails biting into his veins, tugging him back, stumbling over his feet. Dean turns around, laying his hand on top of Castiel's.
“Cas?”
Castiel looks away from the window, down to the floor, to where his fingers clash with Dean's. He pulls back his fingers, opens his hand and sets them down on the counter.
“Hey,” Dean whispers. He wraps his arms around Castiel's shoulders, resting his chin on Castiel's shoulder. When he looks up, he can almost see their reflection in the window, the candles burning behind them, the sky broken into pinks and golds and blues. “You're okay.”
Castiel closes his eyes, nodding. “I know.”
Dean smiles, kisses the dip of Castiel's jaw, his fingers fluttering over his neck, along his collarbone. “You're okay,” he says again, his hand resting over Castiel's heart and they're okay, he's sure of it for now, stuck between heartbeats.
-\\-
Audrey's kneading dough in the kitchen sink, her thin arms working in tandem, muscles moving under skin, as Dean holds out the picture from his seat at the table. She squints her eyes against nothing, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.
“That was my aunt,” she says. She looks back at the sink, wrists and arms dusted with flour, crusted pieces of dough stuck to her shirt, on her fingers when she lifts them up to wipe her face, standing up on her toes. “Her name was Bridget.”
“Really?” Dean looks back at the picture; he can almost see the colour of green-yellow grass now, details emerging and unravelling, switched over in his head.
“Really. She lived in that house till the day she died.”
Dean swallows. “Did she die there?”
Audrey pauses, doesn't look at Dean, nods. “She did.”
Quickly, “And this was her son?”
“Robert. Her one and only. She doted on that boy.” Audrey lifts the roll of dough up and sets it down on top of a towel. She folds the towel over, flipping the dough around, covering it with another towel. “He was everything to her. He didn't go long after her, actually.”
A pretty girl with the baby boy singing to her and nothing seems to fit now, not with the stories in his head, not with the ones Castiel has told him. “He killed himself?”
“No, not exactly,” she says. She rests her hip against the counter and taps the edge of the picture. “Mostly, he couldn't bear being that alone. Didn't have much else besides your blood in times like that.”
“I think I know how he felt,” Dean mutters.
Audrey smiles plainly, knowingly. “Baby, I'm sure everyone has at least once.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Dean nods, stands, shifts and feels something twist and fall into him, heavy and suffocating and too damn familiar. “Anyway, thanks,” he says, waving the picture, turning back towards the door. He hears the sound of lighter flicking open, butane-rush and flame coming alive.
“You ever going to bring that boy back up here?” Audrey mutters around a cigarette. “I like him. You've got him all locked up. What, is he your prisoner or something?”
Dean grins down at the picture before closing the door behind him.
-//-
Dean finds Castiel down at the pastures, sitting on the fence, whispering to the horses grazing near by, up to his knees wet with mud, hands covered black in dirt and grass, happy. Castiel doesn't look up when Dean leans beside him, just reaches out, his fingers finding the back of Dean's neck, brushing along his hairline.
Somehow the scent of still sweltering air, the sustained air of wildflowers and torn long grass, hay shred across the slick ground of the grazing land, the drowsy-dry smell of sweat and dirt and earth calms him into thoughtless admiration, overwhelming relief and brilliant contentment. He rests his forehead on his cross arms and breathes it in: a life, a home, a place far away and insignificant up against the world and steady, always the same.
“I think she's here,” Dean finally says.
“Who?”
“The girl in the picture. She lived in that house.” Dean looks at his feet, drags the heel across a rusted nail. “She died there.”
Castiel's hand lingers too long in one place. “I thought you weren't hunting anymore.”
“I'm not,” Dean says quickly, defensively. “I'm just--investigating.”
Castiel sighs, a laugh caught in between the words he doesn't say and the things he lets go; it's something that Dean's trying to get used to, how convincing Castiel is as a human.
-\\-
Someone's singing, drifting in from the blueblack, through windows and walls, settling into his skin.
Dean sits up in bed. There's someone standing in the doorway. He pulls the sheets back, leans forward.
“Bridget?”
They don't answer.
Dean steps down. “Robert?”
They move. Dean is at the door, they're moving to the staircase.
“I won't hurt you!” he calls out.
They stop, hand on the banister, feet poised to go down, move away, waiting at the edge. They breathe and Dean stops, too.
“Please,” he murmurs.
They don't wait, they step down and disappear seamlessly, quietly, into the darkness.
-//-
The sky is unwrapped around them, the paint on the walls chipping under their fingernails when they linger too long, the books they've unpacked stacked against the walls, the clothes they didn't know they had strewn across the couch, the banister on the stairs, leading a trail to their bedroom, the boxes torn apart and crushed down, sitting in a pile near the door.
They're sitting on the bed and Castiel's reading, his knees pulled to his chest, Dean on his back, his head leaning off the edge of the bed. Everything is different, new, upside down, when he doesn't understand it even though he does.
“Do you want to hear my story?”
Dean hears the page turn.
“I know your stories, Dean.”
“This isn't about me,” Dean says. “It's about them. All the people in the pictures. They aren't like your stories.”
Dean smiles when he hears the book close after a moment. Then, Castiel is lying beside him, his head bent towards the floor, his feet resting on top of Dean's.
“Then I would like to hear it.”
-\\-
Castiel is standing on the back porch, still wearing his jacket, his boots, the jeans that are grass-stained and wrinkled and soft when Dean touches them, and he's not moving.
Dean opens the back door, leans against the frame, hand on the weight of the door, holding it open, letting a northern wind bristle over him. “What are you looking at?”
Castiel starts, usually stops, but this time he keeps walking backwards, not looking, knowing intricately every move to take like he's memorized every step and turn and twist in this place, like he comes to know everything else (like he knows Dean and knows where he presses to find his soft-fever voice, to find the beginning of his boldness, the boundaries of his heart).
“Just looking,” Castiel comments, sitting on a chair pulled away from the table.
Dean rests his hands on Castiel's shoulder when he bends down to slip off his boots. “You look tired.”
“I'm fine,” Castiel says, carried and harsh.
Dean kneels down, his hands on top of Castiel's and Castiel doesn't move his own gaze from the floor and Dean tries and founders to not worry.
“I didn't ask,” Dean whispers, pressing his thumbs into pulse points, hearing the hitch of Castiel's breath. “But okay.”
-//-
Dean takes the picture down from the window, tucks it into his back pocket, hopes Castiel won't notice all the things that have gone missing, won't notice the picture gone from the window, won't notice the sideways glance resting in all of Dean's motions.
He must be missing something and he wants to find it, tear it all apart again and delve in closer, unwrap more unneeded mysteries, let the stories in his head be lies, let there be someone here so he isn't so alone in his built-up travesty, this world of a restless golden light, the displaced and withering threads he loosens when he wants to pull them back, timed intervals and releases when it all comes falling down and he has to stack it back up, tedious and thankless, close-mouthed and desperate. One of those lost and lonely things, and finally having a reason for it. He wonders, when he's distracted and willingly haunted, if he gave everything to have nothing.
Then, Castiel, still learning, still clumsy in his comfort some days, still fascinating and earth-bound and wanting, finds him and Dean takes all those whispers and tear-downs back, the guilt burrowing into his bones, until Castiel doesn't ask what needs to be said, just knows, and kisses it away.
-\\-
He's sitting on the stairs some time well into the night, been there for a few hours, rubbing at his eyes, waiting for a pretty girl and the boy that could never, would never leave, when a weak light comes from the living room to the hallway, yellow spreading and fading to blackness.
Dean bounds down the stairs, his hands out in front of him, guarding and offering, pleading with them, calling out, I don't want to hurt you.
The room is shrouded in yellow light and from the shadows that wander in from the other rooms, it seems as if it's disconnected, floating, an after-thought in the difference between light and day. In the middle of the shine, the room crowded with it, is Castiel. In the startling contrast, Dean can see the grey of his skin, the colourless sharpness of his eyes.
Dean falters, hands lowering. “What are you doing up?” he asks.
Castiel, wide-awake and tired-eyes, holds up a book. “Can't sleep.”
Dean sits down on the couch beside Castiel; he shifts closer to Dean, settles in beside him, book slipping from his grasp, shiver of skin against skin, Castiel sighs, loud and weighted, pressing his lips against Dean's neck.
“When was the last time you slept, Cas?”
Dean feels Castiel's eyelashes flutter. “A few days ago.”
Dean lifts Castiel's chin, looks at him and searches out something he knows he won't find in his stare. “What have you been doing?”
“Reading,” Castiel answers simply, doubtfully.
“Cas,” Dean laughs, a cruel heartache wavering in the core of him that comes from nowhere and everywhere. “Come on,” and his voice wavers, too.
Castiel turns his head, Dean's hands slip. Castiel picks up the book that tumbled to his lap, closes it gently, his hands spread across the spine and cover. “I thought I had heard someone, something.”
Back and forth, back and forth, it trembles and then merely sparks into knowing. “It's been you walking around the house at night?”
The bruise-purple circles under his eyes, the ghostly shake in his voice, the commonplace humanity of his words and conclusions and efforts, and Castiel says, “I have to look after you.”
And Dean laughs, pulls Castiel close, his heart lifting, and kisses him a thousand kisses deep, whispering, “Why are you always trying to save me?”
-//-
Dean's going to take pictures of him and Castiel one day. They'll sit out on the porch in the middle of the day, their fingers sticky with honey, tangled in each other's hair, close enough that they'll taste the words they never need to say. They'll lay in bed, lost in mismatched sheets, the dark sweep of Castiel's hair paired against the pale orange floral pillowcases.
All the pictures will be in colour, gloss finish, stained with fingerprints, scratched on the edges from where Castiel will tuck them into corners. It's going to be moments and all they are for seconds, seconds that will bleed into years, seconds that will become other seconds until they forget the beginning and it will all seem wasted because they won't know any better years from now. They'll be lost for each other and they won't even know it. They won't care.
He's going to hide them in book shelves, behind mirrors, in basements, for people to find. Maybe they'll tell stories about him one day, too, about him and Castiel and how they were so in love and how everything was okay for them, how they had nothing to give and everything to gain, how they were flawed and blameless in all these tragedies; they would map their ideas from the twisted vacancy in their eyes. They would be happy in these stories and they would know the world in a different language then anyone else, formed in the words they borrowed from each other.
People'll tell stories and they'll believe that these stories are true. believe that no one will ever feel the way they did in those moments because they're sure, whoever they are, that's all you need. Dean wishes he could be around to tell them that they are right.
-\\-
The picture is back in the bedroom, that pretty girl with a name and an idea and a story, and the boy that gave her a love undying, watching them from the window, willing them to love swifter, love without measure, love for what they have and what they are going to gain in the land of the free, the country of the longing. The lamp is burning low, they're running out of oil, but tonight, they'll wait for it to burn out before they go looking for more.
“I remember what it looks like,” Castiel says.
“What does?”
“Heaven.” He's curled into Dean's side and Dean can feel the thrum of his voice along his skin. “It looks like pictures, moments. It's different for everyone.”
“What did your heaven look like?” But Dean doesn't know, and no matter how much he tries to avoid it, there will be things that can inadvertently fracture these put together pieces that Castiel holds and aches to keep.
It happens too soon and it's always too late to take it back, but Castiel is learning to understand, mapping out these moments like he does everything else, and Dean is learning too, the crippling wonder in his voice at the naked memories that are lost in him, and he needs to only reach out, reach over, and his faults could be (and are) forgiven in the keeping of a frail and helpless thing that's all their own.
The lamp flickers down and when it goes out, the room washed in soft darkness, Castiel says, “Empty.”
tbc.
[verse] established dean/castiel, ofc. rated pg. ~5,500
Dean hears the footsteps in the hall.
(c) title from variations on the word love by margaret atwood
a/n: Oh wow, this hasn't been updated in a few months :/ One line shamelessly stolen from Leonard Cohen, because he's a genius and I love him. Also, this was written before 5.16, so the Heaven-talk will not be canon, but just suspend disbelief and it'll be awesome. Unbeta'd because I'm impatient.
Masterlist notes have been updated. Please read them!
(back) the dawn was breaking the bones of your heart
This word is far too short for us
Something happens, they don't know what, but they woke up to a bright yellow sun and white skies. Dean asks Castiel if this is what heaven looks like, half-asleep, pushing his fingers between Castiel's shoulder blades, sinking into the warmth of morning and Castiel's cool bare skin; Castiel says he can't remember.
-//-
The trees along these fences that sink behind the house are crooked and stripped bare, withered and ugly, twisted fingers and they'll be old men someday, still here. Dean thinks he remembers hearing about floods in the north before the radio play became static. It's only now, standing on soft earth, facing a brown-grey stillness, he wonders if there will be a moment where he won't feel that this was the destruction made from the paths of his mistakes.
“I know what you're thinking,” Castiel says. He's standing on the steps, heading out to the pastures to check on the animals, paused, tugging on the hem of the grey sweater he took from Dean, looking comfortable and unfamiliar in faded jeans, dark green rubber boots, a tired ordinary wearisome in his eyes.
“Right this instant?” Dean asks, glancing over his shoulder.
“You shouldn't.”
Dean shrugs, looks back to the fence; even with all the rain, with the storm clouds choking up the curve in the sky, passing over them with lightning and thunder, he thinks these places will stay dead for years. Through a memory, with good eyes, they'll barely see it. It's the filling it in with the cut-brush of bone when they move apart and death will certainly follow him here, tremble to touch him, he knows this, traced with a curse he can't outrun; he thinks that it could come too soon, come too late, let the blame fall into his weathered hands.
It could be shame, it could be edges pulled tight, so wild, wild enough that it's always there, right around the corner, Dean can feel it.
“Give yourself a day just to forget.” Castiel runs his thumbs along Dean's cheekbones, that electric soft spark of skin and skin, the guarded, hesitant stutter of his touch, even now, so much later on. Always so unsure and Dean's leading him, blind and selfish himself, always so trusting. Some days, Dean is stitched up and aching with it, scarred and merely daring it to go on because he sees no way back (but this is not them, can't be them, it's too bitter, too exposed in all those residual shell-shocked ways, but sometimes--sometimes this can't be all that real and he'll smile at the illusions, knowing that they could slip from his fingers and give way to nothing). “It might help.”
Dean grins. “You know I can't make anything that easy.” It falters, Castiel knows this. His own expression moves with Dean, a mirror that Dean can never escape: it's that trust and that fear and how Dean can always get close to it, never enough when it counts the most. He gives in:“You know it's not that easy.”
For a moment, Castiel smiles. Then he kisses Dean so softly, as softly as he can, in the way only he can, in the way that Dean knows he needs, and whispers, “I know.”
Death is hemmed into the sides of the world, the lap of the sky with it's startling blue and gold, the dirt roadway bent into the distance for miles and miles. The land is formless, misused pieces of hills and sky and houses, the faint outlines of these things stuck together with the visible morning light.
There is nothing and no one. Dean tells himself that this is what they wanted.
-\\-
Dean finds a full bottle of gin behind the bedroom dresser. It's not the taste of it that makes it wrong, but the indestructible feeling that it's got running through him, that maybe he was never broken like he half-remembers. He's stupid when he drinks gin and Castiel can't tell the difference, because he's stupid when he drinks gin, too.
The moon is low and silver-grey, and it's reaching all those forgotten places, the sagged trees behind the tool shed, the stretch of earth forever and on merely five miles from where they are, blue veins laced across their pale skin when they hold too tight. Castiel won't let go of his hand and Dean knows he doesn't want him to.
They stand on the back porch, howling into the dark, the gin hot and welcomed on their lips. In the dark, someone, something, answers back. They scream and echo the high-pitched yelp, imagine all those monsters that don't exist so far from anywhere, screaming, collapsed on the porch steps.
They break down the door to the basement, splinters in the palms of their hands, pulling back on the hinges, the doorknob forgotten behind them when Dean yanked too hard and the handle broke right off. They're laughing, spinning and light-headed, Dean stumbling down the steps, Castiel close behind, the bottle clutched in one hand, the other loosely wrapped around Dean's wrist.
“It's dark,” Castiel says.
Dean reaches out for the beaded metal string, tugs sharply. Click-click-click, the light doesn't turn on. He twists, angles, searches Castiel out in the dark, the only light, refracted and chopped moon-blue, spilling off into corners they don't want to explore. “Scared of the ghosts?”
Castiel walks into the light and there's the framed moment of disdain on his face as his hands drag across the top of a dresser. “Someone told me once that there is no such things as ghosts.”
“They probably laugh at scary movies, too.” Dean scoffs. “Pricks.”
They're barefoot on the cement floor, shuffling across the dirt, toes catching in holes, knees bumping into boxes and wood posts. Dean is swearing and he can't feel a thing, indestructible until the gin can't hide him anymore.
“Remind me to never keep anything that I don't need,” Dean tells Castiel, pushing aside a stack of boxes, tumbling over one that fell over and pitching forward. “Look at all this stuff. What for?”
Castiel kneels down, hands reaching out, until the heel of his hand knocks something cool, metal, small. He pulls it out from under the pile of cardboard, damp blankets, plastic dishes, sets it in on his knees and opens it.
“Dean, look.”
It's pictures they find, moments captured in the washed-out sepia, the grainy black and white. Dean leans over Castiel's shoulder, plucks a picture from the box and smiles. They take the tin box to the kitchen where they spill the pictures across the table, squares sheets of matte paper skimming across the tabletop, spread out to the corners, falling to the floor. Under the din of melted candles and flashlights resting against cups and canisters, they sifted through strangers of a past that could have been theirs, that they made theirs, laying claim to histories that existed in only the stories they kept to themselves. They're going to start making up stories, ignoring names and dates and places written in the yellowed borders; out of boredom, out of desire, out of need for roots and deep-set connections and years and years of names that they can trace backwards.
“They look--unhappy,” Castiel says.
“Maybe they didn't like having their pictures taken,” Dean jokes.
Castiel holds up a picture of a child, a girl with dark hair, standing alone on a road, dressed in layers, in unlaced boots, a naked doll at her side. She isn't smiling, her skin sallow and lost against the pale sky framing her; she's a ghost, blurred when the camera moved, shaken and the lack of colour shifted to the side.
“What about her?” Castiel asks and when Dean glances up, he is her, that patched and hollow sorrow that can only come from a life of it, painted in muted colours, distracting in fine detail. A life of it, something you should have always known and Dean has to look away, pushes through the other pictures, seeks out joy that could probably never be found.
“I don't know, Cas,” Dean murmurs, swallowing, shaking his head.
(It's shallow, it's shame.
Dean makes these people his own, pictures of the uncles, cousins, grandmothers he never knew, taken by this wide-awake and knowing gaze of people that lived once, staring back at him from empty fields, church walls, blanked-out snow drifts and tractors, now without names, only marked by squares of colour and light, by the dates they can barely read. Dean makes them his, a family that sat where he is sitting, and it makes him feel so oddly grounded, so wholly disconnected from what he had always had, flustered and delirious, and it's not his to take, not his to keep, never will be--he knows he has his own family, haphazard pieces stuck in awkward places; has Sam on the West coast, Castiel moving pictures beside him, Bobby waiting for them all to come round again--but there are lives left in these boxes, stranded and aimless, and it's the finality of this knowing that starts the stories in his head.
He won't tell, a secret he is bound to forget, but for a moment it's scattered and delicate and golden, something only he can touch.)
Castiel is tucking the pictures he likes into door frames and window sills, ones of houses and of so many people that nothing can be seen, and Dean is trying to remember the stories that Castiel told him, the ones about kings and queens, trees that never burned and lands where diamonds and gold grew from the hills. They never seemed to fit with the small faces, white dots with black eyes and thin mouths, that he saw in the pictures. He tried to change the names, tried to make them the kings and queens, but they always stood on their golden hills and waited with solemn faces, watching their world never unfold, their kingdom breathe into solitude.
It was just too far away.
-//-
“I like that picture,” Dean says.
She's a pretty young girl, her hair pulled back, her slender fingers twisted in dark fabric, holding a baby boy in her lap. She's kneeling in front of a shed, the door thrown open, only the legs of someone visible in the doorway, feet crossed at the ankles. She's smiling at the camera and the baby is smiling, too.
Castiel rests this one in a window pane in their bedroom. When the sun goes down, Dean can't see it anymore and he thinks that maybe she's moved on now, taken the baby boy in the too long jacket with her. A ghost, just like the other girl, the skin that matched the sky, and they let them free, locked for too many years in the basement, in the tin box. Now they're wandering through the walls, sitting in the chairs, talking about who they were and what has changed, grey and black shifted in every picture, saturated and bright, waiting by the windows, by the doors, for someone to come home.
Castiel sits on the end of the bed and Dean watches him for a moment, quiet and patient from knowing too much, learning intricacies, reading movements like so many words. He's blurred, too, all his colours damaged and cracked.
“I wonder what happened to them.” Dean takes Castiel's hand in his own, threads his fingers through,
“I could tell you a story,” Castiel says.
Dean smiles, leaning back against the headboard, closing his eyes. “I'd like that.”
She was just as beautiful as she was in that picture, until the day she died. She was kind and taught her baby boy to be kind, too. They made their own happiness, let every sunrise be their newest beginning. Her baby boy was there with her, sitting on her bed at the end of her days, holding her hand. He sang to her day and night, scared that in time she wouldn't remember the sound.
Dean can only believe that it's true.
-\\-
It's that night he hears footsteps down the hall.
-//-
Castiel is sitting on the kitchen counter, a glass of water in his hands, when Dean comes down the next morning. He's swinging his feet against the cupboards again, tap-tap-tap of his heels against the wood. Dean rests his hands on Castiel's thighs, tilts his head, thumbs rubbing circles, until Castiel looks up at him.
“You weren't there when I woke up,” Dean says.
Castiel sets the glass down and leans forward, kissing Dean on the forehead. “I had to feed the horses.”
Dean hums, closes his eyes. “You're strange.”
Castiel slides off the counter, his feet landing on top of Dean's. They stand there like that, Castiel's hands curled around the edge of the counter, Dean's fingers running along Castiel's arms.
“Do you think they all lived here?” Castiel asks. “The people in the pictures.”
Dean shrugs. “Maybe.”
Castiel steps around Dean, wanders to the table, absently touching the discarded papers and books littering the top, pushing aside the box of pictures, dragging papers beneath his fingertips as he walks to the window and stands there, looking out to the road.
“Hey, did you hear anything last night?” Dean's picked up Castiel's glass and drinks the rest of the water.
Castiel's head turns half-way back; only the sun-blended outline of his nose and lips are visible. “No.”
“I swore I--” Dean shakes his head, hands curling in front of his face, and laughs. “Must've been a dream.”
-\\-
Audrey's standing on the porch when Dean reaches the bend in the road and walks up the hill towards her house.
“Almost thought you three died down there,” Audrey calls out. She reaches into her pocket, a cigarette already in her fingers. “I was just going to come check on you.”
“Two,” Dean says, stopping by the end of the porch. Audrey leans her elbows on the railing, eyebrows raised. “There's only two of us left.”
Audrey grins and taps her cigarette against a beam. “Where'd you hide the body?”
“He thought it was best to move on.” Dean shrugs. Moves the keys between his hands. “Go his own way.”
“You don't think so.”
Dean bristles, frowns up at her. “It's not my decision to make.”
Audrey nods, cigarette hanging from her lips. She lets her head fall to the side, a curl of grey hair falling in front of her eyes. “Right. You here for the car?”
“Just the boxes in the back.”
“Well, just go in.” She waves her hand towards the shed. “Nothing's locked out here.”
Dean grins, holds up his hands. “What if I were a serial killer?”
Audrey regards him, fixed and mock-serious, with narrowed eyes. “Too pretty.”
Dean chuckles, nodding, and turns the keys in his hands. Everyone around here knows everyone, he knows these kinds of places. The key reflects bright white light and he breathes in the dry dead earth. There's histories hundreds of pages long and it's like Audrey could tell all the stories with heartbreaking precision.
“Hey,” Dean calls out and Audrey looks at him like she'd been waiting for too many silent minutes for him to speak, “I was wondering--did a woman ever live in that house? She had a son, probably.”
Audrey shrugs, her turn for jokes, she gives it away in the swift lightness in her lips, her eyes. “Sure, a lot of women lived in that house.”
“If I brought a picture, would you be able to tell me who she was?”
For a moment, Audrey is carefully eager. “Where'd you find pictures?”
“We found gin,” Dean admits. “Then we found pictures.”
She laughs. “Course you did.”
-//-
He thinks he's waking up in the middle of the night and seeing faces in the windows, footsteps down the stairs, voices passing through walls. He thinks he's sitting up at night, thinks he knows what they're saying.
It's got to be bad dreams, dreams coloured in black and white and film grain, because when the sun fills their room, Castiel is tucked into his side, legs tangled, sheets twisted in all their spaces and nothing's changed.
He'll sit in bed, waiting for faint stirs of day night, for Castiel to move away, hoping that they'll come out in daylight and he'll be able to see them.
-\\-
Start with the stonework walls, the wide-set window sill, the iron-cast bed frame, down the halls with the washboard white railing, the china cabinet with the blue and white plates that tell a story in each turn, the sun that can find it's way through the curtains on the door, follow it room by room through the house, to the yellow couch where the books have been gathered and discarded, into the kitchen with the picture window looking across the back fields, the kitchen with the plastered walls and pictures tucked into the beams and wooden shafts. Outside, outside on the back porch with the wicker basket chairs and ivy-riddled tables, they follow each other always and sit, Dean on the second step, Castiel on the last.
“Are you sure you didn't hear anything last night?” Dean will ask most days now and Castiel will pause and Dean, when he is close enough, can feel his heart stutter, and he will always say no, nothing.
-//-
It's the moment of captured panic, a picture that Dean takes, that stops him. The suddenness, the heat of Castiel's skin on his, nails biting into his veins, tugging him back, stumbling over his feet. Dean turns around, laying his hand on top of Castiel's.
“Cas?”
Castiel looks away from the window, down to the floor, to where his fingers clash with Dean's. He pulls back his fingers, opens his hand and sets them down on the counter.
“Hey,” Dean whispers. He wraps his arms around Castiel's shoulders, resting his chin on Castiel's shoulder. When he looks up, he can almost see their reflection in the window, the candles burning behind them, the sky broken into pinks and golds and blues. “You're okay.”
Castiel closes his eyes, nodding. “I know.”
Dean smiles, kisses the dip of Castiel's jaw, his fingers fluttering over his neck, along his collarbone. “You're okay,” he says again, his hand resting over Castiel's heart and they're okay, he's sure of it for now, stuck between heartbeats.
-\\-
Audrey's kneading dough in the kitchen sink, her thin arms working in tandem, muscles moving under skin, as Dean holds out the picture from his seat at the table. She squints her eyes against nothing, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.
“That was my aunt,” she says. She looks back at the sink, wrists and arms dusted with flour, crusted pieces of dough stuck to her shirt, on her fingers when she lifts them up to wipe her face, standing up on her toes. “Her name was Bridget.”
“Really?” Dean looks back at the picture; he can almost see the colour of green-yellow grass now, details emerging and unravelling, switched over in his head.
“Really. She lived in that house till the day she died.”
Dean swallows. “Did she die there?”
Audrey pauses, doesn't look at Dean, nods. “She did.”
Quickly, “And this was her son?”
“Robert. Her one and only. She doted on that boy.” Audrey lifts the roll of dough up and sets it down on top of a towel. She folds the towel over, flipping the dough around, covering it with another towel. “He was everything to her. He didn't go long after her, actually.”
A pretty girl with the baby boy singing to her and nothing seems to fit now, not with the stories in his head, not with the ones Castiel has told him. “He killed himself?”
“No, not exactly,” she says. She rests her hip against the counter and taps the edge of the picture. “Mostly, he couldn't bear being that alone. Didn't have much else besides your blood in times like that.”
“I think I know how he felt,” Dean mutters.
Audrey smiles plainly, knowingly. “Baby, I'm sure everyone has at least once.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Dean nods, stands, shifts and feels something twist and fall into him, heavy and suffocating and too damn familiar. “Anyway, thanks,” he says, waving the picture, turning back towards the door. He hears the sound of lighter flicking open, butane-rush and flame coming alive.
“You ever going to bring that boy back up here?” Audrey mutters around a cigarette. “I like him. You've got him all locked up. What, is he your prisoner or something?”
Dean grins down at the picture before closing the door behind him.
-//-
Dean finds Castiel down at the pastures, sitting on the fence, whispering to the horses grazing near by, up to his knees wet with mud, hands covered black in dirt and grass, happy. Castiel doesn't look up when Dean leans beside him, just reaches out, his fingers finding the back of Dean's neck, brushing along his hairline.
Somehow the scent of still sweltering air, the sustained air of wildflowers and torn long grass, hay shred across the slick ground of the grazing land, the drowsy-dry smell of sweat and dirt and earth calms him into thoughtless admiration, overwhelming relief and brilliant contentment. He rests his forehead on his cross arms and breathes it in: a life, a home, a place far away and insignificant up against the world and steady, always the same.
“I think she's here,” Dean finally says.
“Who?”
“The girl in the picture. She lived in that house.” Dean looks at his feet, drags the heel across a rusted nail. “She died there.”
Castiel's hand lingers too long in one place. “I thought you weren't hunting anymore.”
“I'm not,” Dean says quickly, defensively. “I'm just--investigating.”
Castiel sighs, a laugh caught in between the words he doesn't say and the things he lets go; it's something that Dean's trying to get used to, how convincing Castiel is as a human.
-\\-
Someone's singing, drifting in from the blueblack, through windows and walls, settling into his skin.
Dean sits up in bed. There's someone standing in the doorway. He pulls the sheets back, leans forward.
“Bridget?”
They don't answer.
Dean steps down. “Robert?”
They move. Dean is at the door, they're moving to the staircase.
“I won't hurt you!” he calls out.
They stop, hand on the banister, feet poised to go down, move away, waiting at the edge. They breathe and Dean stops, too.
“Please,” he murmurs.
They don't wait, they step down and disappear seamlessly, quietly, into the darkness.
-//-
The sky is unwrapped around them, the paint on the walls chipping under their fingernails when they linger too long, the books they've unpacked stacked against the walls, the clothes they didn't know they had strewn across the couch, the banister on the stairs, leading a trail to their bedroom, the boxes torn apart and crushed down, sitting in a pile near the door.
They're sitting on the bed and Castiel's reading, his knees pulled to his chest, Dean on his back, his head leaning off the edge of the bed. Everything is different, new, upside down, when he doesn't understand it even though he does.
“Do you want to hear my story?”
Dean hears the page turn.
“I know your stories, Dean.”
“This isn't about me,” Dean says. “It's about them. All the people in the pictures. They aren't like your stories.”
Dean smiles when he hears the book close after a moment. Then, Castiel is lying beside him, his head bent towards the floor, his feet resting on top of Dean's.
“Then I would like to hear it.”
-\\-
Castiel is standing on the back porch, still wearing his jacket, his boots, the jeans that are grass-stained and wrinkled and soft when Dean touches them, and he's not moving.
Dean opens the back door, leans against the frame, hand on the weight of the door, holding it open, letting a northern wind bristle over him. “What are you looking at?”
Castiel starts, usually stops, but this time he keeps walking backwards, not looking, knowing intricately every move to take like he's memorized every step and turn and twist in this place, like he comes to know everything else (like he knows Dean and knows where he presses to find his soft-fever voice, to find the beginning of his boldness, the boundaries of his heart).
“Just looking,” Castiel comments, sitting on a chair pulled away from the table.
Dean rests his hands on Castiel's shoulder when he bends down to slip off his boots. “You look tired.”
“I'm fine,” Castiel says, carried and harsh.
Dean kneels down, his hands on top of Castiel's and Castiel doesn't move his own gaze from the floor and Dean tries and founders to not worry.
“I didn't ask,” Dean whispers, pressing his thumbs into pulse points, hearing the hitch of Castiel's breath. “But okay.”
-//-
Dean takes the picture down from the window, tucks it into his back pocket, hopes Castiel won't notice all the things that have gone missing, won't notice the picture gone from the window, won't notice the sideways glance resting in all of Dean's motions.
He must be missing something and he wants to find it, tear it all apart again and delve in closer, unwrap more unneeded mysteries, let the stories in his head be lies, let there be someone here so he isn't so alone in his built-up travesty, this world of a restless golden light, the displaced and withering threads he loosens when he wants to pull them back, timed intervals and releases when it all comes falling down and he has to stack it back up, tedious and thankless, close-mouthed and desperate. One of those lost and lonely things, and finally having a reason for it. He wonders, when he's distracted and willingly haunted, if he gave everything to have nothing.
Then, Castiel, still learning, still clumsy in his comfort some days, still fascinating and earth-bound and wanting, finds him and Dean takes all those whispers and tear-downs back, the guilt burrowing into his bones, until Castiel doesn't ask what needs to be said, just knows, and kisses it away.
-\\-
He's sitting on the stairs some time well into the night, been there for a few hours, rubbing at his eyes, waiting for a pretty girl and the boy that could never, would never leave, when a weak light comes from the living room to the hallway, yellow spreading and fading to blackness.
Dean bounds down the stairs, his hands out in front of him, guarding and offering, pleading with them, calling out, I don't want to hurt you.
The room is shrouded in yellow light and from the shadows that wander in from the other rooms, it seems as if it's disconnected, floating, an after-thought in the difference between light and day. In the middle of the shine, the room crowded with it, is Castiel. In the startling contrast, Dean can see the grey of his skin, the colourless sharpness of his eyes.
Dean falters, hands lowering. “What are you doing up?” he asks.
Castiel, wide-awake and tired-eyes, holds up a book. “Can't sleep.”
Dean sits down on the couch beside Castiel; he shifts closer to Dean, settles in beside him, book slipping from his grasp, shiver of skin against skin, Castiel sighs, loud and weighted, pressing his lips against Dean's neck.
“When was the last time you slept, Cas?”
Dean feels Castiel's eyelashes flutter. “A few days ago.”
Dean lifts Castiel's chin, looks at him and searches out something he knows he won't find in his stare. “What have you been doing?”
“Reading,” Castiel answers simply, doubtfully.
“Cas,” Dean laughs, a cruel heartache wavering in the core of him that comes from nowhere and everywhere. “Come on,” and his voice wavers, too.
Castiel turns his head, Dean's hands slip. Castiel picks up the book that tumbled to his lap, closes it gently, his hands spread across the spine and cover. “I thought I had heard someone, something.”
Back and forth, back and forth, it trembles and then merely sparks into knowing. “It's been you walking around the house at night?”
The bruise-purple circles under his eyes, the ghostly shake in his voice, the commonplace humanity of his words and conclusions and efforts, and Castiel says, “I have to look after you.”
And Dean laughs, pulls Castiel close, his heart lifting, and kisses him a thousand kisses deep, whispering, “Why are you always trying to save me?”
-//-
Dean's going to take pictures of him and Castiel one day. They'll sit out on the porch in the middle of the day, their fingers sticky with honey, tangled in each other's hair, close enough that they'll taste the words they never need to say. They'll lay in bed, lost in mismatched sheets, the dark sweep of Castiel's hair paired against the pale orange floral pillowcases.
All the pictures will be in colour, gloss finish, stained with fingerprints, scratched on the edges from where Castiel will tuck them into corners. It's going to be moments and all they are for seconds, seconds that will bleed into years, seconds that will become other seconds until they forget the beginning and it will all seem wasted because they won't know any better years from now. They'll be lost for each other and they won't even know it. They won't care.
He's going to hide them in book shelves, behind mirrors, in basements, for people to find. Maybe they'll tell stories about him one day, too, about him and Castiel and how they were so in love and how everything was okay for them, how they had nothing to give and everything to gain, how they were flawed and blameless in all these tragedies; they would map their ideas from the twisted vacancy in their eyes. They would be happy in these stories and they would know the world in a different language then anyone else, formed in the words they borrowed from each other.
People'll tell stories and they'll believe that these stories are true. believe that no one will ever feel the way they did in those moments because they're sure, whoever they are, that's all you need. Dean wishes he could be around to tell them that they are right.
-\\-
The picture is back in the bedroom, that pretty girl with a name and an idea and a story, and the boy that gave her a love undying, watching them from the window, willing them to love swifter, love without measure, love for what they have and what they are going to gain in the land of the free, the country of the longing. The lamp is burning low, they're running out of oil, but tonight, they'll wait for it to burn out before they go looking for more.
“I remember what it looks like,” Castiel says.
“What does?”
“Heaven.” He's curled into Dean's side and Dean can feel the thrum of his voice along his skin. “It looks like pictures, moments. It's different for everyone.”
“What did your heaven look like?” But Dean doesn't know, and no matter how much he tries to avoid it, there will be things that can inadvertently fracture these put together pieces that Castiel holds and aches to keep.
It happens too soon and it's always too late to take it back, but Castiel is learning to understand, mapping out these moments like he does everything else, and Dean is learning too, the crippling wonder in his voice at the naked memories that are lost in him, and he needs to only reach out, reach over, and his faults could be (and are) forgiven in the keeping of a frail and helpless thing that's all their own.
The lamp flickers down and when it goes out, the room washed in soft darkness, Castiel says, “Empty.”
tbc.