In His Image: Yblissede
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In which Castiel considers the human body.
Castiel, Dean, Sam, Gabriel.
yblissede [adj, ppl] (Middle English, also spelt blessed, blist, iblest etc.): Consecrated, hallowed, holy; being the object of adoring reverence; happy, fortunate; bringing or accompanied by blessing or happiness.
This was Dean’s prayer.
Okay, so. Castiel. Hi. Hope I’m not distracting you in the middle of taking down some Biblical old nasty, or something. If you’re even hearing this. Not really sure how this works. So, I’ve been doing some thinking, and… apparently there were some things I missed. But come on - you? Me? How likely was that? I mean, you’re… you, and I don’t just mean you’re an angel and pure and all that shit but… just you. You’re really something, you know that? And I’m… well, you know what I am, Cas. Hell, you stuck me back together, you saw all the bits. But if you were saying anything at all like what it sounded like you were saying… well… look. I know what I want too, okay? I’ve known that for a while. Even though, hey, getting off with someone is one thing but most guys wouldn’t be worth the bother of more than that, of the way people look when they see two men… holding hands, or whatever. But… you, yeah. I want you. As much of you and as long as I can. And probably a hell of a lot more than I can. Just don’t… don’t freak out? Cos I’ll back off, if you want. Or if we try it and it doesn’t work for you. Or if all you want in the end is just… I don’t know, dropping by once a month to say you’re still kicking, well, that’ll suck, but that’s good too. Just… don’t vanish on me, yeah?
Castiel replied as best he could.
---
The next two weeks were… strange. Strange, for many reasons. Castiel was not unaccustomed to leadership, but this - this was far above anything he had ever known. Angels of Zachariah’s station and higher were looking to him for direction, or looking to him to see if he would fail. Even the archangels: Gabriel insisted loudly that Castiel was “the big man,” not he; Raphael, after his dramatic reappearance, was silent and incapable of decision; and only Castiel and Gabriel were aware that Sariel was alive, quietly rebuilding her strength, slumbering in the subconscious mind of her vessel while that particular seventeenth-century matron adjusted herself to her new surroundings in the house and company of a woman named Cathy Randolph.
The strangest thing, however, was Dean. Or rather, Dean’s companionship.
Hey Cas. Wish you were here. I’m imagining you making snarky understatements at this guy. Stops me from punching him in the face. I’d do it too, except for the impressionable little angel on my shoulder. I swear these brothers of yours are like million-year-old kids sometimes. Gabriel even got Raniyel hooked on candy yesterday. Hope you’ve got good dental in your new regime up there.
Hey Cas. You are okay, aren’t you? I mean, sure, Gabriel would let us know if anything actually happened to you, but… just take care of yourself, yeah?
Y’know, I gotta get Gabriel to drop me and my baby back home. Never thought I’d say this, but this is just too much pie. Feel like a kept man. Or the kept man’s brother. Speaking of which, if those two don’t get around to manning up soon, something’s gonna explode. And I’m not talking sex eyes here, I’m talking Betty Crocker levels of sweet.
Hey Cas. You’d like these kids - they’re kind of little monkeys, but they’d go with your weird sense of humour. Not that there’s anything wrong with your sense of humour. I like all your weirdness.
Cas? I don’t change my mind about family, okay?
He saw Dean (and Sam, and Gabriel) occasionally, in passing, in business, with no time for pleasantries beyond the brush of a hand, the quirk of a lip, a look shared that he thought meant something more than it ever had before. But this… it was unfamiliar. The idea that he could keep someone around, have someone around, even when they weren’t there. Even when there was nothing urgent to communicate. Castiel was accustomed to focussing only and wholly on one task at a time - weeks dedicated to one thing, before turning to another - and, while he had come to realise over the past year that Dean found his silent absences disconcerting at best, he had never been quite sure what it was that Dean would have preferred in their place.
Apparently it was this - reaching out just to say something that wasn’t anything much, just to share a thought. I saw this and thought of you. This would make you laugh. How are you going, what are you doing, how’re the newbies holding up, I care, I’m thinking of you, I like having you around.
Strange, but… pleasant. Somewhat more than pleasant. Dean’s voice, thrumming with sincerity and achingly easy humour, became a familiar thing inside his head. This was the Dean that he’d only ever glimpsed in passing before, between tension and urgency and anger and almost-deaths: the Dean he’d grasped for, the Dean he’d come to believe would never stick around. And here he was, daily, far more than daily, reaching out to Castiel.
Actually going to Dean to talk would inevitably take longer than Castiel had to spare, so he didn’t. Instead, he found other ways to reply - a blurry photo sent to Dean’s phone of the dragon that had been ravaging the seashores of Denmark in the process of charging right at him, then another of its corpse; a low-sugar Betty Crocker cupcake dropped on Dean’s bedside table; the sensation of a kiss brushed against his cheek.
Hey Cas. So, just got into bed. And it’s kind of hot over here, so, not wearing anything. Can probably guess what you’ve got on, though. Is it a sin to use prayer like phone sex? Guess it’s kind of weird if you have to listen to it even if you’re not in the mood. Could just talk you through it, and you’d have to keep a straight face to whatever vampire’s ass you’re kicking, or whatever angel you’re talking to. Be better if you were here, though. Soon as you can you’re gonna turn up, right?
And there was an uncertainty there, in the middle of the lazy sensuality of it, that Dean could hide face to face but not in prayer. So Castiel paused in the middle of hunting for the last of the pack of hellhounds loosed indiscriminately in central Poland, and concentrated, just enough for Dean to feel the soft brush of lips across his cheek, then his neck, then his hip.
There was a breathless pause, like Dean was waiting for a punch line, then a groan of frustration and relief. Cas, you sly little son of a bitch, you better deliver when I see you.
When, not if.
Castiel pressed phantom lips as hard as he could like this, which was barely a whisper of weight, to the skin over Dean’s heart. Promising.
The next day, because he might be an angel but he wasn’t innocent, he stole five minutes to retaliate with his own unavoidable, unanswerable teasing. Dean cursed him roundly afterwards for distracting him while he had been attempting to negotiate with an important person in some significant human aid organisation, but Castiel decided the delight and desire thrilling through his every word made the experiment a success.
Castiel went to Gabriel. Once Gabriel stopped laughing at him, he reached into Castiel’s pocket, pulled out his phone, then closed his hand and Castiel’s around it and showed him how to send a text message with a thought, without needing to actually touch the keys and poke around in those strange submenus that always led to Castiel accidentally setting his phone to think he was in Sweden or Jamaica.
Two hours later: Hey, man. Hellhounds, huh? I hear those sons of bitches bite.
Castiel touched his phone, concentrated carefully through its bewildering binary circuits, and made of them a message to Dean.
Dealt with. Sirens, now.
There was a pause, then Dean’s voice again, a lazy drawl like he was trying not to sound ridiculously pleased at getting a response. Respecting the classics, man. Hey, try not to have sex with them, okay?
I shall do my best not to be tempted by the puddle of snakeskin and fish scales and human-like hair underfoot.
Only you could sound prim and badass at the same time.
The affection radiating from Dean’s every utterance like this was more than a little intoxicating. It was almost tempting to keep this distance, to preserve the illusion of longing it offered. The stability of an existence far away from the minor irritants of daily life.
But that would be dishonest. And, if Castiel were frank with himself, dissatisfying.
---
A few days after that, and the tide was definitely beginning to turn in their favour. Castiel left a small garrison to monitor the demon situation in the Middle East, another to watch for any more giant snakes in central Australia, two combing the depths of the Mediterranean for the unspecified sea monster they’d heard word of, and three to liaise with Bobby Singer, and daringly did something very human. He took a half-day off.
It was late evening in Tuscany, and all three of those whose company he desired were safe in Gabriel’s villa. Sam and Dean were arguing vehemently over something - dirty socks and laundry baskets, by the sound of it - in a way that Castiel recognised as habit rather than conflict, mutual irritation and the resolution of stifled tension after a bad day. Gabriel, though, who hadn’t seen them like this nearly so often…
Castiel stopped in the long shadows of the pencil pines and watched for a minute. Dean and Sam were by the pool, voices too loud and gestures too broad and loose to be really angry. Gabriel was sprawled in a deck chair with his back to Castiel, looking for all the world the most relaxed of any of them; except that this was Gabriel, and Castiel had never seen him look small and quiet like that before.
Not in a vessel, at any rate. And not since…
Castiel slid carefully between molecules to reach his side, put a hand on his back and leaned down to kiss him, a firm press of flesh and grace and promise.
Though he must have felt Castiel coming, Gabriel’s eyes were startled, deep amber in the last of the sunset.
“Give them twenty minutes, Gabriel,” Castiel growled against the side of his mouth. “They won’t break. I promise it.”
Gabriel blinked, a slow brush of pale lashes like a quiet revolution. Castiel pulled back enough to let Gabriel focus on him with all his senses, including his human sight; but most particularly conspectus fidei, his perception (for lack of a better human word) of belief, of faith. Opened himself to his older brother and let him bask, wonder, revel in Castiel’s absolute bull-headed certainty that this, this family could last; that this argument was a passing thing; that the war was over.
“Uh, guys?” Sam commented intelligently.
Both Winchesters were staring. Dean’s face had a hint of that particular slack-jawed interest that Castiel was pleased to be able to classify as arousal, even if Dean didn’t know it. Castiel blinked at him, innocently bland.
Gabriel slipped his arm around Castiel’s waist and leered horribly back at the humans. “What? It’s a brother thing.”
“Dude,” Dean said, very carefully, “I don’t kiss Sam like that.”
“Yeah?” Gabriel deliberately, showily, fondled the curve of flesh at the top of Castiel’s hip. “Maybe you’d argue less if you did.”
Dean gave Sam a look of slow, pleading horror. Gabriel burrowed his face into Castiel’s shoulder and laughed. Castiel felt a strange, desperate well of affection in his chest, so he bent to kiss him again.
After all, they had changed and bent more than halfway to meet human (American) cultural ideals. Sam and Dean could learn to take the angelic equivalent, the closest physical translation of that moment of press and brush and warmth amongst those who were particularly close.
It had been centuries since there had been any angel Castiel had trusted enough for this. Far longer for Gabriel. Gabriel opened under his mouth with a sound like a contented cat.
Dinner stretched out over three hours, until the stars had come out and wheeled in a small arc over their heads. Until the wind picked up over the vines, and they retired indoors. They talked about almost nothing, and it was good. Castiel pretended he didn’t know about Gabriel’s foot creeping up the inside of Sam’s leg under the table; that the soft heat in Dean’s eyes whenever they fell on him didn’t make the breath snag heavy and promising in the flesh of his throat, as if his body was making its own plans for this half-day, independent of him.
He suspected he was somewhat less successful at the second pretence.
Dean insisted he take off his coat, that it was somehow the incorrect attire for the occasion (although he’d never objected to it before). Castiel let him remove it, because it seemed to amuse him, and because of the easy light in his eyes and the warm sweet breath against Castiel’s cheek as Dean leaned in close and slid his hands under the edges of the coat, brushing over Castiel’s hips, pulling it open, pushing it off.
Gabriel and Sam were loud and enthusiastic and easy all night, calling each other strange names that seemed to be intended as suggestive. Castiel wasn’t sure wherein lay the sexual appeal of being called a butter muffin, but, to judge by Dean’s expression, neither was he. Dean was grinning at them all, comfortable and happy and hopeful, and Castiel thought simply, Yes.
Finally, Gabriel swung one leg over from the coffee table to tickle Sam in the ribs with his toes, lazily provocative. “Hey there, Little Miss American Pie. You, me, pre-Revolution France - what d’you say?”
Sam stretched in a luxurious and probably deliberate display, hands tucked behind his head, one leg crossed over his knee in front of him, his long sleek body flexing with casual strength. “I say it’s about time you delivered, big talker.”
Gabriel bounced to his feet, his beam making a poor attempt at smug before bypassing it completely in favour of besotted and thrilled. “You coming?” he tossed out casually to Castiel and Dean, in a way that said a yes would be acceptable, but a no would be better.
Dean waved a breezy hand at him from where he was leaning in the door to the terrace. “Nope, we’re good. You two go geek out.”
Gabriel smirked at him, and his eyebrows did a dance of ridiculous suggestion. “Don’t wait up.”
“Hardly likely,” Castiel returned dryly, while his stomach did strange warm somersaults on the inside. Because he was almost certain that Gabriel could return to any point within the next few hours that pleased him, regardless of how long he and Sam spent elsewhen - minutes, or weeks. And therefore, if they did not return within the next two minutes, it could only be because Gabriel was deliberately leaving the house to him and to Dean for the remainder of the night. And the only reason Castiel could think of for Gabriel to try to do that…
Gabriel and Sam vanished, with that disconcerting little rush of non-angelic power that characterised more than half of Gabriel’s abilities since his death. A curious, weighty silence crept in to fill the spaces left behind in the room; and Castiel found himself wishing intensely that he could know what Dean was thinking.
He ran one finger carefully around the rim of his wine glass. “Butter muffin?”
Dean snorted, a messy exhale of fondness and sympathy that made the room feel somehow warmer. “I don’t even know, man. You just gotta go with it.”
Castiel rose, and crossed the room towards him. Dean’s eyes never left him, tracing every careful turn and sidestep he took to navigate Gabriel’s strange accretion of objects. In the doorway, he halted, and faced Dean squarely. Dean’s shoulders were braced firm and broad against the stone of the wall and the wood of the frame; light from the table lamp pooled warm and yellow in the curves of his neck and throat; and the soft curve of his mouth was halfway between smug and uncharacteristically hesitant.
The desire to touch was no longer unfamiliar. It was welcome, a thing to indulge and savour all evening, a promise of future pleasure. But here, now, confronted with the rich textures and planes of Dean’s body and the illegible living gleam under his eyelashes, Castiel found he was unsure where to begin: how to cross that final barrier.
Castiel felt his forehead crinkle.
“I don’t have Gabriel’s… lexicon.”
“Good to know,” Dean said blithely. “That shit sounds contagious.”
“Dean.” Castiel turned the nascent frown on him, and Dean grinned sudden and bright and unrepentant in a way that said he knew perfectly well what the word meant and was just… messing was the word, messing with Castiel.
It was also unexpectedly arousing. Many things about Dean seemed to be, particularly this evening.
“You look happier, Cas.” Castiel made a small noise of enquiry, shifted his feet just a little closer. The stubbled corner of Dean’s jaw caught the shadows in interesting way as he spoke. Suggested soft and sensitive skin just behind it, just under it. “Tonight. Just, you know. Sitting around. Nowhere to be. With a brother you can trust.”
Castiel wasn’t sure what he wanted to do to that spot, but it was certainly appealing. It invited… touch. Perhaps the mouth. The mouth had so far proved the most sensuous and sensitive method of exploring human sensations, with its plethora of nerve endings, its taste buds, its direct route to the inner nose. And he remembered, with perfect and stunning clarity, the feel of Dean’s mouth on his neck: it could feel very good from the other side.
There was a hint of a question there, in what Dean had said. Castiel dutifully (belatedly) concentrated on it.
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I can.” Even to himself, his voice sounded deep, rougher than the situation called for.
Dean’s mouth crooked up at the corners, lush and full, demanding attention. “Cas.” He reached out, hooked two fingers around Castiel’s wrist. “Come here?”
Castiel looked down at the two insignificant, fragile, mechanical creations of skin and bone and muscle and sinew, so much stronger than their strength because it was impossible for Castiel to hurt them; because they meant so much more than their total substance.
Castiel wasn’t sure how this worked, but he was willing (more than) to devote long careful hours to finding out.
He came there. Slipped in against the languid curve of Dean’s body, watched as Dean turned his hand over between both of his own and pressed his beloved desired lips to the centre of Castiel’s palm. The sensation was… dryer than Castiel had expected (he remembered the lush taste of the inside of Dean’s mouth, clearer and more tempting every second), and somehow hotter (or promising more heat). And for some reason that had nothing to do with any physical sensation he could quantify it sent a little frisson of shock through his hand and up his arm, like tiny fire butterflies under the skin.
Dean watched him under his eyelashes, drank in every quiver and drawn breath as he drew his lips slowly from the centre of Castiel’s palm to the heel; kissed his way gentle and deliberate down to the jut of the wrist bone under skin; then back around to the sensitive blue-traced flesh of the inner wrist. The fingers curled up slowly in his wake, quite of their own accord, closing over the chill of the night air where Dean’s mouth had been; until Castiel’s fist nestled in close against the side of Dean’s jaw.
Dean’s eyes glittered, a warning or a tease or both. Then there was a sudden access to heat and tongue as his lips parted for a moment on delicate skin, and he was forging a slow, warm path up the inside of Castiel’s forearm. Castiel watched him with all his senses, revelled in him, in the heat rising inside his body and the pleasure singing through his veins, in all the weight of his attention focussed right back at Castiel. It was almost a surprise when Dean’s mouth opened against the inside of his elbow, lightly then more firmly; then he felt a scrape of teeth.
Something that felt like electricity shot through Castiel’s arm, crackled straight up the back of his neck. He jolted back with a noise that sounded fierce and inhuman even to his own ears (a hungry hybrid of his true voice and the vibration of his body’s vocal folds), and the fingers of his free hand clenched too tight in the fabric of Dean’s shirt.
Half of Dean’s grin was hidden against Castiel’s arm. “Yeah, thought so.”
Castiel caught the scruff of Dean’s neck, dragged him up forcibly and kissed the smug, delighted shape of his mouth. He drank in the startled grunt, the huff of hasty laughter lost under the breathy noises caught against Castiel’s teeth. And in that, he forgot to calculate and quantify - forgot the individuality of each atom in his skin in favour of knowing the taste and give of Dean’s flesh under his mouth. This man, whom he had no need to command or to be commanded by, opening willingly under his touch and delighting in it. Smiling into it, and returning it.
Dean’s hand slid around to cradle the back of Castiel’s head, to hold him firm and steady as if he were somehow precious (and did Dean even know that it was that same tenderness that conquered him, every time?) so that Dean could nudge his mouth just a little wider, slide in deep and easy, take a little more of him. Castiel gave it to him, locked one hand around Dean’s belt and pinned him there so that he could press in closer, crush Dean’s body between his own and the lintel. The heat pounding between his legs flared sweetly as Dean’s hips (and only his hips) pushed back against him, as if to resist.
Castiel’s breath scattered, and he found his hips canting forward sharply, moving of their own accord as they had done last time by the creek that night, to trap Dean’s weight in place. Then again, and once more, three sharp jabs in obedience to that impractical rhythm that Castiel had seen drive men to their ruin in every century and every land.
Dean groaned, ragged and deep, dragged both his hands down to dig in just above Castiel’s belt and pull him in closer. And there, solid evidence under the shove of Castiel’s thigh that Dean did want, as he had not last time - not only with his heart and mind, not as an offer of unreciprocated pleasure, but with his body too. With the hot beat of his blood.
Then the wet demand of the mouth on his eased back, went gentle and considerate, until they were only snatching breaths from mouth to slippery mouth. As if Dean had startled himself, and needed to remind himself that he was not allowed to want or to have. Castiel tamped down the urge to push back in, to shove and to take and give, and pulled back (from the shoulders up) just far enough to glare into Dean’s gaze.
Heat, and light. Eyes that could change the world just by looking at it, by seeing it as it was and seeing how it could be better and glaring at it until those two visions became one. Fixed on Castiel.
Castiel saw the long throb of pain up Dean’s back where the edge of the lintel dug into his flesh; saw the bright faith that lit him up from the inside, faith not in an unseen father but in Sam and (incredibly) in Castiel himself; saw the fire catching every hormone and every vein and every one of Dean’s insecurities and devotions and making him lean forward helplessly, just once more, to catch Castiel’s lips for a moment. Castiel let him pull back again, reluctant, because there was something under there that Dean wanted to say.
Dean pressed their foreheads together, his breath puffing erratically over Castiel’s mouth and chin, and closed his eyes. One hand crept up Castiel’s back, away from where it had been almost edging down south of his belt, and settled large and warm between the jut of his shoulder blades. Holding back. Being careful. Being reverent.
“Cas. Are you sure you want to -”
Which was all Castiel needed to hear to make him narrow his eyes, shove his hand between them, and haul Dean’s belt free of its buckle. “Be quiet, Dean.”
Dean’s eyes went very wide. “Shutting up, right now.”
Because Castiel knew every inch of Dean, inside and out, knew how he was made and how he fit together, but he didn’t know what he felt like. And he had wanted to last time, his hands had ached for it, but it had been a haze of pain and fear and desperate snatching and Dean’s insistence on giving, only giving, but now, here…
The belt dragged free of its loops, one long dry slither then the clink of the buckle hitting the paved floor as Castiel abandoned it to slide his hands up under Dean’s shirt. Spanning his waist; fitting the curves and the planes of his back and his sides and his shoulder blades and his stomach to the curl and reach of Castiel’s own hands; methodically mapping the paths of the blood racing underneath and the way his ribs expanded and fell at each gulp of breath. Dean’s hands got in his way, and he knocked them imperiously aside because this landscape was his to explore, until Dean laughed at him all breath and warmth and haste and he realised what those hands were trying to do.
He graciously allowed Dean just enough space to remove his own shirt. Then, to flick the button on his jeans and drag down the zipper. Then to push the jeans down over his hips - at which point Castiel decided that the mechanics of boot removal would involve far too much in the way of patience, so he banished all of Dean’s clothes to his bedroom with a thought.
Dean cursed, startled and soft, then reached for Castiel’s arms to drag him back in. “Not up for the strip show today, huh?”
Castiel knew what Dean’s body looked like - that was one sense to which it was familiar - so why was it so good to see it now? Why did it give the impression of having so much skin, so much that he’d never be able to encompass it all?
“I want to touch you,” Castiel explained curtly, and his voice felt like it scraped his throat on the way out.
“… Okay.” Dean’s throat bobbed, and his fingers dug hard into the muscles of Castiel’s arms, rough and coaxing all at once. “Okay. Not exactly gonna argue with that.”
Castiel let Dean pull him in slower, until his mouth rested against the curl of Castiel’s ear and Castiel was nuzzling into his cheek. Dean’s hands stayed tight where they were, as if they didn’t trust themselves to wander; but Castiel let one of his travel in a long questing sweep down Dean’s side, from the top of his ribcage to his knee, that smooth powerful line that was usually bisected by waistbands and belts. Dean moved under his hand, shuddered, and his legs crept wider as his thigh nudged in against Castiel’s touch.
“Cas,” Dean groaned, like a prayer and an oath.
Castiel nosed up under his chin, took joy in the flutter and taste of Dean’s pulse under his mouth. Perhaps he could become addicted to that - to chasing it, to learning its rhythms, to teaching it new ones.
“Dean.” It came out gentle into the fragile circle of his collar bone.
Because he had hardly realised, not realised as a real thing, Dean’s bone-deep need for physical touch, aching and visceral in its comfort. Something he had never been able to bring himself to ask of Sam, not at least in the harsh light of day. This, this was something Castiel could give him - wanted to give him, viciously wanted, and Dean even seemed to want to give it back, to want it of Castiel. To wrap him up, envelope him, and keep him safe and coveted and beloved.
Castiel turned his hand, drew the backs of the nails carefully up, to where the muscle of the thigh stretched out and around towards the base of the spine.
Dean’s nose tickled the soft angle behind his ear, sending an increasingly familiar thrill to the pit of his stomach.
“I can hear you thinking,” he breathed.
“That’s bad?” Castiel growled into the thrumming velvet softness of Dean’s jugular.
Dean’s thighs inched wider, welcoming. “No. Shit. No. I like your thoughts.”
Then Dean nudged at the edge of his jaw, teased his head back and up, and kissed him, full and dark and sweet.
Castiel surged forward into it, into the hungry promise of teeth and tongue and the darker places of Dean’s mouth behind them, and Dean shuddered and flinched at the same time.
“Bed,” he suggested firmly and incoherently into it. “And dude, mind the junk.”
Castiel frowned down at where the fastenings of his jeans and belt were pressing, decided that it did look rather uncomfortable for Dean, and rectified the situation by sending all of his own clothes after Dean’s.
“Better?” he enquired slyly, and then almost forgot himself in the smooth shock of skin on skin. He heard the hiss of Dean’s breath and felt the hasty slide of hands hot and possessive over his back and down over one hip, as Dean forgot, for a moment, to be a gentleman. Then they stalled, and Dean growled out an almost audible “Hell yes” which suggested he was recalling his self-control, so Castiel obeyed the demanding beat of his own body, stretched his wings, slid fifteen yards through four internal walls, and tumbled Dean backwards onto his bed.
And this - if the push of Dean’s naked hips against his own was good when they were standing, it was far better when he had Dean sprawled gasping and grinning beneath him. When Dean’s thighs were spread around his own, and Dean was pinned immobile under him, everything focussed on the prickle and tangle of hair, the dig of bone, and the urgent slide of hot slick skin in the centre of it, and Dean was reaching for him with a hopeless tender quirk to his mouth to pull Castiel down again to meet him… here, here at least was the surrender of the flesh, so far from angelic. Far from being the most important thing he’d learned from his foray into mortality, but perhaps the most wholeheartedly luscious.
He heard his own voice, as Dean’s hand dragged too slow down his side, “Dean, could you just…”, sounding so polite while his body demanded all on its own.
And… Castiel had planned this. He had thought about it all very carefully and clearly. He had strategised. He had a list. So many things he wanted to taste, so much skin left still to touch, so many little hitches and colours of sounds from Dean’s throat to categorise. But there were hours left tonight, years and maybe eternity later, and now, for now, he was lost deliciously in a rush of feeling, of being. Of existing right here, in this moment, in this man’s arms.
And it wasn’t only a thing of the flesh, as he had anticipated. Not only desire. It belonged to every other sense, overwhelmed them: all the senses that he had lost and missed savagely when he was bound to his human body (daily, in fighting, in stubbing his toe, in kissing Dean); all the parts of himself that had never felt the touch of another being. Closer than he had been to any living creature before. Almost too much, impatiently too much, too many sensations and too many emotions to savour any of them.
Moments. Impressions. Dean spreading his hand familiar and solid over Castiel’s back, over his pounding heart. The same hand running wonderingly down his spine, as if Castiel’s uncovered skin was a strange secret thing; Dean’s fingers finally, finally crossing the invisible line delineated by his absent belt, and tracing over the soft curves below. Dean’s breath, intimate and sweet in his mouth, and the aching promises contained voicelessly within it. The cool push of Dean’s ring through his hair. The rhythm of his heart and body moving against Castiel, underneath him, and Castiel’s own body matching him in every wave and shove and surrender.
Too much, absolutely; but he didn’t know how to stop.
He gasped Dean’s name, pleading, and Dean caught it and breathed his own back stuttered into his mouth, wet with feeling.
He did the only thing he could, and let himself go. Let Dean roll him over in the sheets and hold him close and take control. Let him work one spit-slick hand between them and turn it into something quick and insistent and terrifying; let him give himself up, gasping and vulnerable and overwhelmed; let him murmur, “I got you, sweetheart, I got you,” over and again like a litany.
And Dean… Dean let him drag at his hair and dig nails into his shoulders; let him gasp and sob and growl and laugh; let him fall apart, here, safe, where there was no one depending on his choices or his impossible quests; let him shake himself to pieces; let him have that.
---
The air was cool and sharp this far above the level of the sea. It sliced and tugged at his skin - pulled the thin air out of his lungs, if he let it. There wasn’t quite enough oxygen up here to sustain a human; and Castiel indulged his body, spent a tiny trickle of grace to concentrate the oxygen in each breath to the level these lungs preferred, even though its absence could do him no essential harm.
Castiel had thought that he knew the human body because he knew every organ and function within it, and every moment in its evolution. Then he had thought he knew it because he had lived in one, not merely as a vessel but bound within it, grudging the loss of his senses and feeling muffled and dim and strangely hypersensitive despite that.
Now, he felt he knew very little, because finally the body was not something foreign but completely a part of him: something he had chosen and kept and taken joy of. And it was not a thing of atoms and rules, not pieces scattered and independent in their meanings. It was an entire creature, more than its total, each part arguing and interlocking and overlapping with the others. The sensations evoked by one powerful, beloved body moving full-length against another were a good deal more than the simple presence or absence of contact on each individual nerve ending.
Castiel thought that that was, perhaps, an appropriate metaphor for humanity; or, perhaps, for the soul. He still had very little idea where one began and the other ended, what a soul meant without being human; but there were years before him for calculating that as well.
Not only desire but intimacy; not only part of him, but the whole. Parts of him he’d never known existed. Perhaps they hadn’t.
He rested his chin on his interlocked hands, looked out over the jagged white and black slopes of the Himalayas, and waited for the slow choking smoke that he had set in the tunnels far below him to drive the barmanous out into the open.
The air shifted and scattered behind him.
“Hey there, hot stuff. Whatcha doing?”
Gabriel was certainly no basis for comparison. Castiel was an angel with a soul, Dean was a human with a soul, and Gabriel was a strange creature of many elements who also possessed the grace of an archangel, and a soul.
“I was sitting quietly by myself and thinking,” Castiel replied dryly.
“Overrated. Scoot up.” And his older brother (and one-time commander) was sliding over to sit on the rock beside him, with one half-manifest wing settling comfortably around Castiel’s shoulders.
“You are strange and exasperating,” Castiel informed him.
“And you’re one to talk,” Gabriel retorted amiably.
Gabriel was radiating awed contentment, singing through his mind and deeper emotions; but subtler, on a level that most angels would have forgotten to notice, his body thrilled with the half-remembered aftermath of pleasure, the same heady tickle that Castiel was refusing to allow to fade within his own veins.
“Your boy’s glowing like a rabbit with jellyfish proteins,” Gabriel tossed to him, unreadable and casual as if it didn’t matter.
“Good,” Castiel took him at the face value of his words. “He deserves happiness.”
He could feel Gabriel’s sideways gaze like a curious weight on the side of his face; but what Gabriel finally asked was rather far from what Castiel had been expecting.
“Show me your wings?”
Castiel felt his eyebrows quirk a fraction without his explicit decision, a habit of the body that he was willing to encourage.
“You can see my wings, Gabriel.”
Gabriel scoffed. “Sure, if you want to get technical about it. Come on - I wanna see how they manifest now.”
Physically. The physical manifestation of his grace - and, now, of his soul. Insofar as anything about any angel was private or individual, it was that. And now… now, that must be even more true, for Castiel.
Castiel only hesitated for a moment before unfolding them.
Gabriel whistled softly through his teeth, and Castiel flinched. But it wasn’t condemnation, nor was it pity: his “Shit, kid, you’ve been through the wringer” was almost matter-of-fact.
“You mind?” Gabriel’s hand hovered just shy of the secondary coverts on the wing nearest him. A perfunctory and (by angelic standards) belated courtesy; by the standards of those accustomed to bodies and restricted to physical touch, perfectly natural.
Castiel said nothing; only tilted that wing forward into the touch, and closed his eyes against the wash of pleasant sensation as Gabriel’s fingers began to comb familiar and strong through the feathers.
This, too, had been unfamiliar for a long time. Dean had barely touched his wings, that one night in the dark; and now, Castiel was too strong for him to see or to touch in such a fashion. But to have a brother who would touch him, a brother he almost trusted…
“Not just me, then.” There was half a smile under Gabriel’s words, and there was a gentle tug on one of the feathers.
He opened his eyes, tipped a questioning look in Gabriel’s direction, and Gabriel traced the tip of one finger around the edge of a median covert. Around the border of gold, rich and deep against velvety black, which had grown in on each feather almost too slowly to notice sometime over the past year.
“Got soul, kiddo,” Gabriel purred, deep and sweet; and yes, Castiel remembered (although he had been too distracted by Sam’s survival and Gabriel’s revival to compute its significance at the time) the clear translucent cut of Gabriel’s damaged wings in the cemetery before Castiel had re-opened his connection to the Garden of Heaven, and the deep burnished gold that had outlined each glass-bright feather afterwards.
Grace, and soul: each burning white on its own, but mix them together and…
Gabriel tugged lightly, curiously, at the gold edges; stroked through the pale grey scars left by Hell’s freezing whips at the centre of the wing; smoothed over the livid little splashes of bone-white from each brother Castiel had slain, since he had rebelled for Dean’s sake. The battered traces of harsh reality, and life lived.
Castiel turned his face away, non-committal.
“They are not so sleek as you would remember.”
Gabriel’s hand stilled, deep in the feathers at the crook of that wing; and when he turned his face back toward Castiel’s the pale slanted moonlight struck deep and pale off the light of his eyes. “Nolite me considerare quod fuscus sim,” he murmured, fiercely quiet, “quia decoloravit me sol. Filii matris mei pugnaverunt contra me. Posuerunt me custodem in vineis, et vineam meam custodio.”
Custodio. I keep.
Castiel blinked back the unexpected and very human response threatening to spill down his cheeks, and searched through that poem (one of the relatively few pieces of human literature stored in the lexicons of his mind, due to its frequent dedication to his Father) for a suitable response.
Through a swollen throat he replied, hoping that it was what Gabriel needed to hear, “Ecce vos pulchri estis, dilecti mei, et decori. Lectulus noster floridus, tigna domorum nostrorum cedrina, laquearia nostra cypressina.”
Gabriel’s rich chuckle told him that he had not only guessed right, but provided his brother with an entertaining double entendre. “Just the one bed? Cheeky boy.”
Castiel gave him a patient look. “The bed is a metaphor, Gabriel.”
“All the best metaphors work on both levels,” Gabriel responded, blithe and lewd.
Then Castiel felt the ripple of malevolent life on the slopes below him; and together, they destroyed the barmanous, the ice-dwelling monsters of rape and devouring.
When they stood together over five enormous befurred corpses and a still dark pool of ice-melt water, Gabriel licked his lips, cocked his head, and spoke.
“You know what I remember about you? Your curiosity.”
It was such a non sequitur that Castiel looked over at him in surprise, and - well - curiosity.
“Oh, not recently.” Gabriel drawled. “Not since humans started moving out of their valleys, making empires, changing the world around them. Not since we had to notice them as more than, you know, a pretty little point on the chain. A sort of a theory. You know. A painting Dad had done and we could all stand around and admire it together and say, oh yes, that corner has some fucking gorgeous brushwork, or whatever. Except then the painting started to come to life and have opinions, and change the rest of the paintings, and talk to us, and Dad… well. Since that changed you’ve been dutiful and obedient and unimaginative as the rest of us had to be, cos we were all second best. Or we thought we were.”
Gabriel was standing with his hands in his pockets and his face tilted up to the stars, a slight shadowed figure limned with silver and touched about with impossibilities. He worried with his teeth at his lower lip for a moment, then tipped his head sideways to grin at Castiel, something whimsical and raw in his voice. “Do you remember that fish, Castiel? The one I told you not to step on? You looked at the fish, and you were excited. How often have you felt that these last four thousand or so?” His voice dropped. “I miss that. Why did we stop doing that? Dad stepped back to let us play - all of us, upstairs and down on the ground - and instead we broke out the army fatigues.”
The stars were spinning overhead, too slowly for the human eye to track. For the first time, Castiel felt it on a level more than factual, felt the earth under him wheeling, dizzy and different, as Gabriel reached into him with words alone and rewrote history.
“You remember more clearly than I do, what came before.”
Gabriel’s eyes were as joyful and deep as millennia.
“No, little bro, I really don’t. You just told yourselves they were irrelevant memories, and I had time to dwell on them.”
“Gabriel…”
“Come on, little sparrow. Stop looking at me like I’m some kind of revelation. You’ve got better places to look for that now.”
“No. Only.” Castiel stopped, looked at him sideways, and laughed, with something more full and bright than amusement. “We missed you. I missed you.”
“Yeah?” Gabriel looked needlessly pleased, then smug. “Not so bad yourself, kid.”
He tossed an age-worn pebble, and it fell almost silently into the dark water. The ripples spread out in a series of concentric circles, a perfect calculation, effortlessly symmetrical. They intersected with others - smaller circles, breaking and splashing against the marks of the drops thrown up by their brothers, against the returning swell of where the first circle had reached the water’s edge. A complex pattern, difficult for the eye to follow, but all logical. All following the strange, intricate laws laid down for the world to run on. Wrinkling the reflection of the stars.
“Look at that. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Castiel looked, and it was.
It would not be the first time that Castiel had put all of his heart and hope into believing in someone. If it failed, it would not be the first time that he had broken - not even the first time he had broken for Dean. But Castiel thought he was willing to face that risk.
Now he had work to do, important work that was all his own. He would rebuild his family, and he would teach them to walk on earth. Dean and Sam and Gabriel were helping him with that, even as they worked to repair a damaged world - they gave the other angels purpose, work, guidance, strange new experiences to provoke strange new thoughts, new revelation. New influences. And he had other brothers to help him, to walk with him, human and angelic, some of whom he might in time learn to love. He was not Dean’s servant, except in the metaphorical sense in which he was a servant to all of humanity, because if he was Dean’s servant he could not properly be his friend.
This time, he thought, he could come to trust Dean, and let Dean trust him back. That was new.
They could work on it.
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