[FIC] Waves 13/? [College!AU, Hipster!Cas, light M]
Title: Waves
Author:
wormstaches
Rating: light M
Genre and/or Pairing: Dean/Cas, College!AU (Hipster!Cas/Jock!Dean)
Spoilers: None
Warnings: drinking, drug use, mild sex scenes, homophobia, language
Word Count: WIP
Summary: Dean Winchester is the average guy: football, college, kid brother, nice car, girls and beer; his life is black and white, that is until he meets Castiel Collins: pretentious, slutty, sweater-wearing genius, who won’t even take the time to look up at him from his obscure novel while he insults him. And then everything is shades of gray and Dean is drowning.
A/N: I'm never sure what to mark as a warning so if you think something else should be marked, please, please let me know.
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He was running through water, sucking at his legs, tripping him, and the crests of the waves were smiles, wide and bright and slipping into nonexistence in the dark. The sound of the water on the rocks was made of “I love you”s and they flooded into his mouth, pushing at the backs of his eyes until he couldn’t see, at his skull until it broke apart, shattering, and he was falling into the deeps, pressure and dark and big blue, pricks of pain and it was all made of glass, shattering upon him in waves, crashing and loud and bitter “you faggot, I hate you”s screaming in his ears.
Dean jerked awake, panting and wide-eyed, hands frantic at the empty space beside him in the bed, searching for…no one. He laid back down, biting his fist and balling up his eyes to push the sobs back down-- they weren’t there, couldn’t be there; no one had to hear.
• • • • • • • •
Dean had woven the blankets around himself like a cocoon, with only his head poking out when Jo came over the next morning. She began boiling water for instant coffee and he wondered how she just knew to come over like that, when half of him wanted her to and half of him didn’t want to see another human being-- when he needed her.
Jo put some Eggos in the toaster and plopped down on the bed beside him and he winced as the force jostled him. He ached in every corner of his body in every possible way.
She wrinkled her nose in distaste after a moment. “Gross, dude, your bed smells like--” Her eyes widened and her mouth flew open. “No. You didn’t.”
Dean groaned and retreated all the way into his nest, submerging even his head. He bounced again slightly as Jo leapt off.
“God that’s disgusting I’m sitting in your jizz! That’s something you at least warn a girl about!” she shrieked. The waffles popped up and she threw them onto a plate, angrily smearing frosted butter and Aunt Jemimah on them.
She thrust them at Dean dramatically, refusing to look at him before returning to the task of mixing instant coffee powder into the water.
“What the honest to God fuck, Dean?” she asked angrily as he began to eat, blushing and unable to meet her eye.
Dean shrugged and glumly replied, “I dunno, it just happened.”
Jo rolled her eyes and let out a disbelieving grunt. “Having sex with the ex of your recently demolished only serious relationship ever just happened?”
“Yeah…” Dean set the plate down next to him, no longer hungry.
“What, did you trip and fall on his penis or something?” Jo crossed her arms.
Dean looked at his hands in his lap and said nothing.
Jo’s stony silence turned sympathetic.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Dean.”
Dean nodded.
“He was wearing a dress.”
Jo’s eyebrows raised but she said nothing, spearing one of his waffles on a fork and nibbling on it thoughtfully. “If that’s what you’re into.”
Dean grimaced. “Thanks, Jo.”
“Any time,” Jo replied, grinning at him, and Dean, surprisingly, found himself grinning back.
• • • • • • • •
Part of him wanted to laugh and part of him wanted to cry and part of him wanted to shake Cas by the shoulders and call him an idiot and a massive part of him with a hold in all of these other parts just wanted to kiss the I just watched a kitten genocide look off of his face.
Castiel didn’t notice Dean as he sat down beside him on the lawn, giving him a once over and yes, he was definitely losing weight.
“Do I even want to know why you’re in your underwear in a park at seven in the morning?” Dean finally decided to ask.
Cas shifted his gaze from the sky to Dean, yawning-- and could it be possible his eyes were less blue than they had been a month ago?
“Probably not,” he drawled.
“What the fuck. Seriously, what the fuck.”
Cas laughed at that, returning his focus to the slowly drifting clouds.
“This isn’t okay,” Dean said roughly. “You have to stop doing this, Cas. I know you don’t want to hear anything I have to say but if you keep going down this path you’re going to get kicked out and then where will you be.”
“I am fine, Dean. In case you didn’t notice--” Cas hiccupped and it smelled like vomit and booze and made Dean sick to his stomach “--I am fucking excellent, actually.”
“You know that’s a load of bullshit,” he replied.
“Just fuck off, okay, Dean. You don’t know anything and it’s not like you care, like you ever cared.”
“You know that’s not--”
“Not true?” Cas let out a bark of laughter. “It seemed pretty true when you dropped me in front of all your friends.”
“This isn’t you Cas, I know you and this isn’t it. You smell like Kesha, you’re naked in a fucking park, stop it before you lose everything.”
“I have nothing left to lose.” Cas got to his feet and walked away, shoulders back, far too proud for someone who had fallen so low.
• • • • • • • •
He began to not sleep, sorrow a lead weight in his bones, exhausting him and simultaneously keeping him awake. He’d sleep in snatches like surf clinging to the shore and wake from the blue with a jerk, fumbling. His dreams shifted in eddies, dark and roaring and gripped tight and raised to sunny, frosty mornings where we could feel the warmth in his chest and the cold in his bones and under the comforter they’d go-- smiling and laughing and then in the rasping dark their breath would turn to waves and fill his lungs and he’d be drowning again.
Dean stumbled into the Impala on a reflex, black leather and the crackle of cassette tapes building comforting walls, ones he’d helped Cas climb over and ones he reinforced to keep him out. He drove in silence fiddling with the dials on the radio but never turning them on. He wondered how late it was; he passed no cars as the town retreated behind him.
He thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a familiar movement like that of a bird settling after flight. He glanced away from the road and found the passenger seat empty. His reflection met him in the window and beyond the glass the dark landscape sputtered past.
The beach met him in a slick expanse of pulled back tide, the smooth surface glinting under thin light from a sliver of moon. Plovers stirred in droves where the tide kicked at the shore and the froth looked like clouds in an abysmal sky. He looked for stars but found none, just the blinking red lights of airplanes as the sky ran into the sea and it all became one universal boundary. He could almost see his heart out here in the dark, glowing and burning and filling up all the space. Dean ran forward, breath short, seeking the water but finding only heavy sand clinging to his soles, space upon space upon space, no end. He fell, exhausted, sitting with his knees up in the sand. He rested his wrists on his knees and watched the ghostly lines of his fingers flex and intertwine. He counted his heartbeats as they seemed to swell into the air around him and he felt the dampness of the sea sink into his bones and run through his veins with the not-quite sadness not-quite rage feeling that had made a home there.
He wondered when he’d run out of space and why the universe kept expanding instead of closing in until it compressed him to nothingness. That must be preferable to whatever was happening now, like his blood was boiling, pressure pushing out until it seared beneath his skin, stretching his ribs to a point of aching, his throat pulled taut as words clawed their way into his mouth, tearing at his tongue and beating on his teeth, begging to be screamed.
He began shivering and his breath was snatched from his lungs in a gasp before it was even inhaled and Dean wondered if this was what a real, honest-to-god panic attack felt like. He stumbled back to the Impala and hurled himself inside, turning on the ignition but going nowhere, letting heat pump out of the vents as he fought to still the hammering of his heart. There must be a way to stop it, cease this crashing, sourceless pulse that had settled inside him without invitation. He closed his eyes, pressing his knuckles against his teeth sharply and wishing for something to snatch the hole away-- not fill it, just remove it, smooth it out like no one had burrowed in and dug his nest in the first place.
Dean fiddled for the radio and with a slow click the whirr of a CD spinning without playing filled the car. A bass line began, thrumming through the steel frame, accompanied soon by the pluck of a piano. Dean closed his eyes and bit his lips, unable to turn it off but not quite able to listen. He’d forgotten it was in there, that Cas had slipped it in with dexterous fingers on the car ride home over Thanksgiving.
I can give it all on the first date; I don't have to exist outside this place; And dear know that I can change.
They were dancing, not together but those big, blue were locked on him and he knew he was watching, always watching, and waiting. He was pulling him under, a riptide, through the bodies to beneath and just a press, pressure, tearing at his clothes and his hair and tugging him apart until they were one, so deep and vast and he felt himself brush against eternity, swimming in impermanence as the needy surge and rush of their bodies rushed by and was gone in a wave of bliss contained in a fleeting moment, unable to be recovered or remembered in the aftermath.
Dean bit into the white skin of his knuckles harder, searching for the external pain beneath the vibrating beat, something beyond the internal pain pressing against his lungs. He choked, a pitiful noise, the song playing around the caverns of his ears, remembering clasped fingers and a solid weight as they drove through the sunlight, going nowhere because they were already home.
But if stars, shouldn’t shine By the very first time Then dear it’s fine, so fine by me ‘Cos we can give it time So much time With me.
He knew he was trying to say something around the puckering whimpers bursting from his chest and into his mouth with a sour taste. He bit down onto his fist harder, pushing them back. He was begging, incoherent, but he knew the sounds and he knew his body although he wasn’t sure he knew himself anymore because was he even himself when he was alone like this, drowning and falling, lost out there in the blue.
If you want me Let me know Where do you wanna go No need for talking I already know If you want me Why go
He wanted to yell, to cave in the hood and shatter the glass and throw punch after punch until it was all warped and bent and bloody and unrecognizable as any part of him. He wanted to crawl back to Mary and reemerge as something new, without any memory of blue eyes and unwavering faith-- in him. In him, in his ability to mend and care and he was never someone who could do that. Look at him: cast to the side in favor of the younger, not quite enough to keep anyone smiling or laughing or loving.
“I’m not going anywhere, Dean. Ever. I choose you,” He said it as if it was the most natural thing, without even looking up from his coffee and book, jotting down a note in the margin, lashes fluttering above his lowered lids and hovering smile. “You are my faith.”
I can give it all on the first date I don’t have to exist outside this place And dear know that I can change; But if stars, shouldn’t shine By the very first time Then dear it’s fine, so fine by me ‘Cos we can give it time So much time With me.
The notes fell away, pulling the throb with them and Dean was left, shivering and raw and wondering if, despite Mary and Sam and simpler times, he was only just now learning how to miss someone. He thought he had before, but the ache that had filled the empty spaces in his body was unlike any missing he had ever felt before. Longing; onomatopoeic almost. He laughed at this as he turned and drove back the other way, putting the big blue, black in the dark, at his back.
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