[fic] "Love Such As That" (castiel/dean, sam/dean)
Title: Love Such As That
Author: a_carnal_mink
Pairing: non-explicit Castiel/Dean, even less explicit Sam/Dean if you wish to see it
Length: 3,075 words
Rating: R for language, fellatio, trick-turning
Disclaimer: Supernatural and its wonderful characters belong to Eric Kripke and his associates. Just playing in yer sandbox, dude.
Spoilers: s4
Summary: Castiel tries to make Sam see what he has.
Obituaries. Obituaries. Nothing useful, it seemed. Sam sighed softly and let the newspaper fall to the tabletop, starting with a shock when he was confronted with the angel, Castiel, sitting across from him in the small booth.
'Hello, Sam.' Blue eyes seared straight through to Sam's soul, or so it felt.
'Uh. You, er, you surprised me.' Nervous habit made Sam push his hair out of his eyes, his gaze flitting over his half-finished breakfast, the newspaper, his coffee. He glanced up again, only to be speared by the blue a second time, the angel's head cocked to one side as he regarded Sam with vague interest. Sam cleared his throat and leaned back a little. 'What're you doing here, Castiel? I thought you were supposed to be Dean's guardian angel?'
Castiel straightened his posture, put his clasped hands upon the table. If Sam wasn't mistaken, the angel's expression had a distinctly ticked-off look to it. 'I did not walk into Hell for the pleasure of it,' he told Sam in a low voice. 'I did not raise your brother up and make him whole again, only for you to break once more.'
'I - '
'He sacrificed everything for you, Samuel Winchester. Everything he has in this world AND the next. And how do you repay his sacrifice? How do you return that love?' There was absolutely no mistaking it at all - this definitely was one ticked-off angel. 'You lie,' Castiel answered his own question. 'You deceive. You disobey. You stab him in the back with his own belief in your goodness. I thought your brother was a man devoid of faith, but I was wrong. He believes in you. He has faith in you. What I wonder now is, are you worthy of such devotion?'
A sickly soup of anger and shame and indignant outrage welled up in Sam's throat, but he choked it back down. 'You don't know us,' is all he could come up with. 'You don't know anything about us. You don't know what it was like.'
Castiel stared at him silently for a few long seconds. When he unclasped his hands and reached toward Sam's face with his right, Sam actually flinched, feeling immediately stupid for doing so. Did angels take a swing at people? Uriel probably would, he figured. But Castiel, for all his talk of "warriors of God" and being a "soldier", had a gentleness to him that Sam had occasionally glimpsed, a softening of expression when the angel looked at Dean some times. No longer tensed for a hit to the jaw, Sam tried to remain calm and still while Castiel reached closer.
Index and second finger outstretched, Castiel murmured 'I will show you what it was like,' and touched the centre of Sam's forehead softly.
'Where - ?' Sam looked about him in confusion. 'Where are we?' He and Castiel were standing in a bleak kitchen, its furnishings meagre, its paintwork faded and damaged.
'The outskirts of Pittsburgh,' Castiel responded, leaning against a dented counter and crossing his arms over the front of his trenchcoat. 'But your more pertinent question may well be WHEN are we?'
As if on cue, the swing door banged open and two small boys trudged into the room. They completely ignored the two strange men standing in their kitchen, as though Sam and the angel weren't even there.
'I told ya, Sammy, I ate earlier while you were sleeping,' the taller boy was insisting, his voice sounding stressed and beyond tired.
'D-Dean?' Sam stuttered in disbelief, his gaze flicking quickly between Castiel and the oblivious boys. 'That's Dean?' he asked of the angel. 'And...' he looked properly at the smaller boy now, hardly recognising him at all. 'And me?'
Castiel gave half a tiny nod. 'This is 1992. I think you have recently turned nine years.'
A slow, comprehending smile was pulling at Sam's mouth now. 'Yeah. Pittsburgh, yeah. We spent most of that summer there. Dad was gone for long chunks of time…'
'Dean hadn't, by the way.'
Sam tore his gaze away from the children with some difficulty. 'What?'
Castiel's eyes narrowed slightly. 'He told you he'd eaten earlier. He hadn't.' Castiel let his gaze move sadly over the two brothers on the other side of the room. 'He hasn't eaten in two days at this point.'
Sam felt his eyes grow wide. He watched young-Dean scraping the last specks of peanut butter out of a spent jar and wiping it onto a piece of bread, the last slice of a loaf.
'I hate the end slices!' young-Sam was protesting.
Young-Dean's thin shoulders squared as he held the sorry offering out to his brother. 'Well, you'll just have to put up with it for once.' Noticing something on the bread, he pulled it back toward himself, picked off a tiny bloom of greenish mould, and thrust the rest into young-Sam's chubby hand. 'Ya gotta eat, Sammy. Gotta grow up big and strong.'
'Quit babying me,' young-Sam told him, taking the sandwich and marching out of the kitchen again.
Sam dragged his gaze all over his thirteen-year-old brother, taking in the purple bags under his tired eyes, the dirty fingernails, the thin legs that were beginning to bow with Dean's first big growth spurt. He watched Dean fill a large cup with water at the sink and drink it down, that one action making guilt churn in Sam's gut worse than anything else. He knew what Dean was doing; filling his stomach with water to give himself a feeling of being full. The urge to walk over and take this boy into his arms, just wrap him up tight and hold him was so strong, Sam got half a step across the cracked tile before he remembered that he and the angel were invisible here.
'Your instinct is to comfort him?' Castiel asked quietly at his side.
Sam nodded dumbly.
'And what would you say to this boy? That everything will be alright? That he will grow up strong and beautiful despite these deprivations?'
Sam blinked stubborn tears away. The angel was trying to make him feel guilty - and was succeeding - but he wouldn't let the bastard see if he could help it.
'Fine,' Sam sniffed. 'I get what you're trying to do, okay? I do. I understand that Dean's always put me before himself. That's hardly a newsflash, y'know. You can take me back now.'
'But I still have more to share with you, Sam.'
Two cool fingers touched to his forehead again and Sam staggered a little from the sudden change of place and time. They were in a nighttime alleyway now, the kind that criss-crossed behind the façades of every moderate-sized town in the country. Not full of crackheads or muggers like big city alleys, only garbage and rats and folk who needed just a couple of minutes hidden away for whatever reasons. Like the two men a few feet away from where Sam and Castiel now stood.
It was immediately obvious to Sam what was going on in the half-shadows. One guy leaning back against the brick wall, the other on his knees before him. Sam shot the angel a frowning glance and wondered what a supposedly holy being was doing showing him stuff of this nature. Of course it didn't take long for the answer to present itself in Sam's mind.
Oh god.
The hair, the jacket, the boots - of course Sam recognised him. He wasn't accustomed to seeing Dean on his knees though. And he certainly wasn't aware Dean ever did stuff like this.
'What year?' Sam managed to grind out, wanting to tear his gaze away from the sight before him, but apparently unable to do so. He was just marginally aware of Castiel stepping up close to his side, hovering by his shoulder as they both watched… what they were watching.
'Two-thousand,' came the soft reply. 'You are at home, studying for a test. Dean… Dean is earning the money that will buy a textbook you require for class.'
The man leaning against the wall suddenly grabbed at Dean's head and pushed himself further forward. Sam could hear the choking noise that Dean made, a flash of white-hot fury uncoiling in Sam's chest at the horrible sound.
'Fuck!' the stranger gasped out over Dean's head. 'Fuckin' smart pretty mouth - ' and his knees trembled. 'Yeah,' he exhaled heavily. 'Fuckyeah…' When he pulled his cock back, he was still coming, aiming the last couple of spurts right into Dean's face, smearing it across Dean's high cheekbones.
'Dirty fucker!' Dean spat at him, turning his head away and wiping his hands over and over his face.
'Sorry, man,' the stranger laughed over him, tucking his limp dick back into his pants. 'Those long eyelashes are just too pretty. Makes a guy wanna mess 'em up some. You know how it is.'
Dean stood up, still wiping at his face with one hand as he dusted off the knees of his jeans with the other. 'Pay up, asswipe.'
'You should keep a civil tongue in your head.'
Dean's cocky smirk was almost dazzling, even in the murk of this shady alley. 'Dude, please. Don't even waste the time trying to threaten me. I could kill ya with one hit. Now pay the fuck up.'
Shaking his head, the man dug his wallet out of his coat and thumbed out a fifty. 'Some mouth you've got on you, kid.'
Dean plucked the bill from the guy's hand and gave him a wink. 'So you said earlier.' Dean's phone started ringing in his pocket and he fished it out while the other man left, Dean not even giving him a glance or a word. Dean looked down at his phone's display, grinned and slid it open. 'Sammy! How's my favourite brainiac doin'?' He winced a bit as he got a whiff of his hand, the hand he'd wiped his face with earlier, and swiftly changed the phone to his other as he started to head for the top of the alley. 'Yeah, I'll be home soon. You want me to grab something on the way? Anything you want, bro - my treat.'
Sam watched his brother striding away, practically with a spring in his step, and then turned to Castiel. 'How often? I mean - was this a one-off or what?'
The angel pretended to be interested in the fabric of his tie for a moment, then slowly tilted his face up toward Sam, fine eyebrows arched just enough to imply a question. Did Sam really want to know?
'I think I've seen enough now,' Sam told him as evenly as possible.
Castiel looked him deep in the eye before raising fingers to his forehead once more. Sam found himself and the angel in a hovel, Dean sitting next to a worn bed upon which lay… Sam. It took Sam a second or two to realise that he wasn't sleeping on that stained mattress. He was - oh god, he was -
'I said I'd seen enough!' he railed on Castiel. 'Take me back to my own time now. Put me back in that diner where you found me!'
'Wouldn't you like to hear what Dean told you here? What he said when he had lost you?'
'No! No, I - '
'I just wanted you to be a kid,' Dean was saying. 'Just for a little while longer. I always tried to protect you. Keep you safe. And Dad didn't even need to tell me! It was just always my responsibility, y'know?'
Sam sucked in a ragged breath. He couldn't bring himself to look again at the still form on the bed, couldn't look at his own corpse even though it was constantly in the periphery of his vision, taunting him. But he concentrated on his brother, took in the slump of his broad shoulders, the red rims of those stunning eyes. Dean's chin trembled as he fought to keep himself together just a few moments more.
'It's like I had one job. One job…'
Sam's throat constricted as he heard Dean's voice getting thicker.
'And I screwed it up. I blew it.'
At the same time, tears began to roll down Dean's and Sam's cheeks. Almost in unison, they both lifted a hand to swipe them away.
'And for that, I am sorry.' Dean's voice broke and he wiped hard at his eyes, gathering a shaky breath into himself with a great effort. 'I guess that's what I do. I let down the people I love.'
Sam turned to Castiel, sniffing and wiping at his face. 'Please,' he begged quietly. 'Please don't make me watch this. Don't make me listen to him like this. What he's gonna do…'
'What am I supposed to do?' Dean demanded of his little brother's body. 'What am I SUPPOSED TO DO?!'
Sam jumped at the sudden yell, jumped again when Dean practically walked right through him as he leapt to his feet and began an agitated pacing of the dump of a room.
'I can fix this,' Dean was muttering to himself. 'You gotta let me fix you, Sammy.' Dean stopped by the bed and gazed down at Sam's form like he was staring into the abyss itself. 'Gotta put it right,' he whispered. He reached down and tenderly stroked Sam's hair back from his face, his fingers dancing over Sam's cold forehead as his hands shook. 'I can fix this,' he whispered again, then turned away abruptly and stormed out of the room, out of the shack itself.
'Dean.' Sam's voice was useless here - no one but Castiel could see him or hear him anyhow - but his throat was so raw with emotion by now that he doubted even the angel could hear him across the room. He wiped his sleeve across his cheeks a few times and looked over at Castiel, wondering what was in store for him next.
'I will take you back,' Castiel informed him. 'I'll… give you a moment to compose yourself first.'
Sam supposed he should thank him for that, but no words were making it out of his throat as yet. He kept his back to the body on the bed and walked into the other room, taking in the bottles of whiskey and bucket of chicken without really seeing them. Almost silently, Castiel followed after him.
'What, ah.' Sam cleared his throat and tried again. 'What do you want me to do?'
'Be strong in your Faith.'
From outside, the deep rumble of the Impala roaring to life drifted in to wrap around Sam and Castiel as they stood together, Sam's corpse faintly redolent from the room behind them. A hollow laugh spluttered up out of Sam's mouth. 'Oh, is that all? Well, that should be fucking easy…'
Castiel moved to stand before him, too close, his eyes full of compassion and something else that Sam couldn't fathom. 'You are beloved by a man who's been chosen by God. Doesn't that comfort you? Does that not make your resolve stronger?'
'You love him. Don't you?' The fact had barely occurred to Sam before now, but it suddenly presented itself to him as so obvious.
Castiel's gaze dropped to the floor momentarily, then rose again with fresh tenacity. 'I cannot love him enough for us both. God gave you the capacity for tidal waves of emotion, not us.'
A tiny smile caught at one side of Sam's mouth, barely more than an extended twitch. 'Say it. Please. Let me hear it from you.'
The deep blue of the angel's eyes darkened further as he frowned slightly. 'You want me to say… ?' Frown lines eased away as comprehension opened Castiel's expression. 'You want me to say it.' He nodded to himself, took a deep breath into his borrowed lungs. 'I love all my Father's creations.'
Sam felt his smile - both dimples, full-force - spread across his face. 'Try again.'
Castiel's head cocked to one side once more as he contemplated Sam. 'I lifted him from the Fires,' he said carefully. 'I gripped him unto me and healed him as we journeyed. The act… soldered us together.' He glanced down at his right hand briefly, as though expecting evidence there to back his claim. Sam's thoughts immediately flashed to the handprint branded onto his brother's shoulder. Soldered together? Sam felt his lip curl minutely at the thought of human and angelic flesh burning into one another, at the thought of the angel having to rend himself from Dean's body afterward. Did Castiel's true form, his true hand, carry a brand that matched Dean's own?
'And when I set him in the hole you dug for him,' Castiel was continuing, 'when I left him to crawl his own way back into the light and fulfil his destiny, I wept for the beauty my Father had created. As I have wept for you, Sam Winchester.'
'Me?'
'You have love such as that,' Castiel nodded his head shallowly, first in the direction of the room in which Dean had sat vigil over Sam's corpse, and then in the direction of outside, where the sound of the Impala's engine was now long gone. 'Love that is focussed solely upon you. And yet you push it away again and again. Yes, I weep for you.'
Sam looked down at his hands for a short while, not sure quite how to proceed. 'What we have isn't exactly healthy, you know,' was what he eventually came up with. He raised his eyes in time to catch the merest flicker of a possible smile curve Castiel's mouth.
'You have what you have. Be grateful for it.'
Sam shifted his weight from one leg to the other, suddenly impatient to see his brother again - though what he would say or do upon seeing Dean again after all this, he honestly had no fucking idea. 'You said you'd take me back now.'
Castiel nodded and leaned in even closer. 'Don't tell him I said I love him?' the angel asked haltingly, then touched two comfortingly cool fingers to Sam's forehead before he could reply.
It was long after Sam found himself back in the diner, alone, long after he paid for his breakfast and left to find his brother, that it occurred to him - Castiel hadn't expressly stated that he loved Dean.
'Sneaky,' Sam muttered to himself, a half-smile tilting his mouth in something akin to grudging respect.
~ fin ~
Author: a_carnal_mink
Pairing: non-explicit Castiel/Dean, even less explicit Sam/Dean if you wish to see it
Length: 3,075 words
Rating: R for language, fellatio, trick-turning
Disclaimer: Supernatural and its wonderful characters belong to Eric Kripke and his associates. Just playing in yer sandbox, dude.
Spoilers: s4
Summary: Castiel tries to make Sam see what he has.
Obituaries. Obituaries. Nothing useful, it seemed. Sam sighed softly and let the newspaper fall to the tabletop, starting with a shock when he was confronted with the angel, Castiel, sitting across from him in the small booth.
'Hello, Sam.' Blue eyes seared straight through to Sam's soul, or so it felt.
'Uh. You, er, you surprised me.' Nervous habit made Sam push his hair out of his eyes, his gaze flitting over his half-finished breakfast, the newspaper, his coffee. He glanced up again, only to be speared by the blue a second time, the angel's head cocked to one side as he regarded Sam with vague interest. Sam cleared his throat and leaned back a little. 'What're you doing here, Castiel? I thought you were supposed to be Dean's guardian angel?'
Castiel straightened his posture, put his clasped hands upon the table. If Sam wasn't mistaken, the angel's expression had a distinctly ticked-off look to it. 'I did not walk into Hell for the pleasure of it,' he told Sam in a low voice. 'I did not raise your brother up and make him whole again, only for you to break once more.'
'I - '
'He sacrificed everything for you, Samuel Winchester. Everything he has in this world AND the next. And how do you repay his sacrifice? How do you return that love?' There was absolutely no mistaking it at all - this definitely was one ticked-off angel. 'You lie,' Castiel answered his own question. 'You deceive. You disobey. You stab him in the back with his own belief in your goodness. I thought your brother was a man devoid of faith, but I was wrong. He believes in you. He has faith in you. What I wonder now is, are you worthy of such devotion?'
A sickly soup of anger and shame and indignant outrage welled up in Sam's throat, but he choked it back down. 'You don't know us,' is all he could come up with. 'You don't know anything about us. You don't know what it was like.'
Castiel stared at him silently for a few long seconds. When he unclasped his hands and reached toward Sam's face with his right, Sam actually flinched, feeling immediately stupid for doing so. Did angels take a swing at people? Uriel probably would, he figured. But Castiel, for all his talk of "warriors of God" and being a "soldier", had a gentleness to him that Sam had occasionally glimpsed, a softening of expression when the angel looked at Dean some times. No longer tensed for a hit to the jaw, Sam tried to remain calm and still while Castiel reached closer.
Index and second finger outstretched, Castiel murmured 'I will show you what it was like,' and touched the centre of Sam's forehead softly.
'Where - ?' Sam looked about him in confusion. 'Where are we?' He and Castiel were standing in a bleak kitchen, its furnishings meagre, its paintwork faded and damaged.
'The outskirts of Pittsburgh,' Castiel responded, leaning against a dented counter and crossing his arms over the front of his trenchcoat. 'But your more pertinent question may well be WHEN are we?'
As if on cue, the swing door banged open and two small boys trudged into the room. They completely ignored the two strange men standing in their kitchen, as though Sam and the angel weren't even there.
'I told ya, Sammy, I ate earlier while you were sleeping,' the taller boy was insisting, his voice sounding stressed and beyond tired.
'D-Dean?' Sam stuttered in disbelief, his gaze flicking quickly between Castiel and the oblivious boys. 'That's Dean?' he asked of the angel. 'And...' he looked properly at the smaller boy now, hardly recognising him at all. 'And me?'
Castiel gave half a tiny nod. 'This is 1992. I think you have recently turned nine years.'
A slow, comprehending smile was pulling at Sam's mouth now. 'Yeah. Pittsburgh, yeah. We spent most of that summer there. Dad was gone for long chunks of time…'
'Dean hadn't, by the way.'
Sam tore his gaze away from the children with some difficulty. 'What?'
Castiel's eyes narrowed slightly. 'He told you he'd eaten earlier. He hadn't.' Castiel let his gaze move sadly over the two brothers on the other side of the room. 'He hasn't eaten in two days at this point.'
Sam felt his eyes grow wide. He watched young-Dean scraping the last specks of peanut butter out of a spent jar and wiping it onto a piece of bread, the last slice of a loaf.
'I hate the end slices!' young-Sam was protesting.
Young-Dean's thin shoulders squared as he held the sorry offering out to his brother. 'Well, you'll just have to put up with it for once.' Noticing something on the bread, he pulled it back toward himself, picked off a tiny bloom of greenish mould, and thrust the rest into young-Sam's chubby hand. 'Ya gotta eat, Sammy. Gotta grow up big and strong.'
'Quit babying me,' young-Sam told him, taking the sandwich and marching out of the kitchen again.
Sam dragged his gaze all over his thirteen-year-old brother, taking in the purple bags under his tired eyes, the dirty fingernails, the thin legs that were beginning to bow with Dean's first big growth spurt. He watched Dean fill a large cup with water at the sink and drink it down, that one action making guilt churn in Sam's gut worse than anything else. He knew what Dean was doing; filling his stomach with water to give himself a feeling of being full. The urge to walk over and take this boy into his arms, just wrap him up tight and hold him was so strong, Sam got half a step across the cracked tile before he remembered that he and the angel were invisible here.
'Your instinct is to comfort him?' Castiel asked quietly at his side.
Sam nodded dumbly.
'And what would you say to this boy? That everything will be alright? That he will grow up strong and beautiful despite these deprivations?'
Sam blinked stubborn tears away. The angel was trying to make him feel guilty - and was succeeding - but he wouldn't let the bastard see if he could help it.
'Fine,' Sam sniffed. 'I get what you're trying to do, okay? I do. I understand that Dean's always put me before himself. That's hardly a newsflash, y'know. You can take me back now.'
'But I still have more to share with you, Sam.'
Two cool fingers touched to his forehead again and Sam staggered a little from the sudden change of place and time. They were in a nighttime alleyway now, the kind that criss-crossed behind the façades of every moderate-sized town in the country. Not full of crackheads or muggers like big city alleys, only garbage and rats and folk who needed just a couple of minutes hidden away for whatever reasons. Like the two men a few feet away from where Sam and Castiel now stood.
It was immediately obvious to Sam what was going on in the half-shadows. One guy leaning back against the brick wall, the other on his knees before him. Sam shot the angel a frowning glance and wondered what a supposedly holy being was doing showing him stuff of this nature. Of course it didn't take long for the answer to present itself in Sam's mind.
Oh god.
The hair, the jacket, the boots - of course Sam recognised him. He wasn't accustomed to seeing Dean on his knees though. And he certainly wasn't aware Dean ever did stuff like this.
'What year?' Sam managed to grind out, wanting to tear his gaze away from the sight before him, but apparently unable to do so. He was just marginally aware of Castiel stepping up close to his side, hovering by his shoulder as they both watched… what they were watching.
'Two-thousand,' came the soft reply. 'You are at home, studying for a test. Dean… Dean is earning the money that will buy a textbook you require for class.'
The man leaning against the wall suddenly grabbed at Dean's head and pushed himself further forward. Sam could hear the choking noise that Dean made, a flash of white-hot fury uncoiling in Sam's chest at the horrible sound.
'Fuck!' the stranger gasped out over Dean's head. 'Fuckin' smart pretty mouth - ' and his knees trembled. 'Yeah,' he exhaled heavily. 'Fuckyeah…' When he pulled his cock back, he was still coming, aiming the last couple of spurts right into Dean's face, smearing it across Dean's high cheekbones.
'Dirty fucker!' Dean spat at him, turning his head away and wiping his hands over and over his face.
'Sorry, man,' the stranger laughed over him, tucking his limp dick back into his pants. 'Those long eyelashes are just too pretty. Makes a guy wanna mess 'em up some. You know how it is.'
Dean stood up, still wiping at his face with one hand as he dusted off the knees of his jeans with the other. 'Pay up, asswipe.'
'You should keep a civil tongue in your head.'
Dean's cocky smirk was almost dazzling, even in the murk of this shady alley. 'Dude, please. Don't even waste the time trying to threaten me. I could kill ya with one hit. Now pay the fuck up.'
Shaking his head, the man dug his wallet out of his coat and thumbed out a fifty. 'Some mouth you've got on you, kid.'
Dean plucked the bill from the guy's hand and gave him a wink. 'So you said earlier.' Dean's phone started ringing in his pocket and he fished it out while the other man left, Dean not even giving him a glance or a word. Dean looked down at his phone's display, grinned and slid it open. 'Sammy! How's my favourite brainiac doin'?' He winced a bit as he got a whiff of his hand, the hand he'd wiped his face with earlier, and swiftly changed the phone to his other as he started to head for the top of the alley. 'Yeah, I'll be home soon. You want me to grab something on the way? Anything you want, bro - my treat.'
Sam watched his brother striding away, practically with a spring in his step, and then turned to Castiel. 'How often? I mean - was this a one-off or what?'
The angel pretended to be interested in the fabric of his tie for a moment, then slowly tilted his face up toward Sam, fine eyebrows arched just enough to imply a question. Did Sam really want to know?
'I think I've seen enough now,' Sam told him as evenly as possible.
Castiel looked him deep in the eye before raising fingers to his forehead once more. Sam found himself and the angel in a hovel, Dean sitting next to a worn bed upon which lay… Sam. It took Sam a second or two to realise that he wasn't sleeping on that stained mattress. He was - oh god, he was -
'I said I'd seen enough!' he railed on Castiel. 'Take me back to my own time now. Put me back in that diner where you found me!'
'Wouldn't you like to hear what Dean told you here? What he said when he had lost you?'
'No! No, I - '
'I just wanted you to be a kid,' Dean was saying. 'Just for a little while longer. I always tried to protect you. Keep you safe. And Dad didn't even need to tell me! It was just always my responsibility, y'know?'
Sam sucked in a ragged breath. He couldn't bring himself to look again at the still form on the bed, couldn't look at his own corpse even though it was constantly in the periphery of his vision, taunting him. But he concentrated on his brother, took in the slump of his broad shoulders, the red rims of those stunning eyes. Dean's chin trembled as he fought to keep himself together just a few moments more.
'It's like I had one job. One job…'
Sam's throat constricted as he heard Dean's voice getting thicker.
'And I screwed it up. I blew it.'
At the same time, tears began to roll down Dean's and Sam's cheeks. Almost in unison, they both lifted a hand to swipe them away.
'And for that, I am sorry.' Dean's voice broke and he wiped hard at his eyes, gathering a shaky breath into himself with a great effort. 'I guess that's what I do. I let down the people I love.'
Sam turned to Castiel, sniffing and wiping at his face. 'Please,' he begged quietly. 'Please don't make me watch this. Don't make me listen to him like this. What he's gonna do…'
'What am I supposed to do?' Dean demanded of his little brother's body. 'What am I SUPPOSED TO DO?!'
Sam jumped at the sudden yell, jumped again when Dean practically walked right through him as he leapt to his feet and began an agitated pacing of the dump of a room.
'I can fix this,' Dean was muttering to himself. 'You gotta let me fix you, Sammy.' Dean stopped by the bed and gazed down at Sam's form like he was staring into the abyss itself. 'Gotta put it right,' he whispered. He reached down and tenderly stroked Sam's hair back from his face, his fingers dancing over Sam's cold forehead as his hands shook. 'I can fix this,' he whispered again, then turned away abruptly and stormed out of the room, out of the shack itself.
'Dean.' Sam's voice was useless here - no one but Castiel could see him or hear him anyhow - but his throat was so raw with emotion by now that he doubted even the angel could hear him across the room. He wiped his sleeve across his cheeks a few times and looked over at Castiel, wondering what was in store for him next.
'I will take you back,' Castiel informed him. 'I'll… give you a moment to compose yourself first.'
Sam supposed he should thank him for that, but no words were making it out of his throat as yet. He kept his back to the body on the bed and walked into the other room, taking in the bottles of whiskey and bucket of chicken without really seeing them. Almost silently, Castiel followed after him.
'What, ah.' Sam cleared his throat and tried again. 'What do you want me to do?'
'Be strong in your Faith.'
From outside, the deep rumble of the Impala roaring to life drifted in to wrap around Sam and Castiel as they stood together, Sam's corpse faintly redolent from the room behind them. A hollow laugh spluttered up out of Sam's mouth. 'Oh, is that all? Well, that should be fucking easy…'
Castiel moved to stand before him, too close, his eyes full of compassion and something else that Sam couldn't fathom. 'You are beloved by a man who's been chosen by God. Doesn't that comfort you? Does that not make your resolve stronger?'
'You love him. Don't you?' The fact had barely occurred to Sam before now, but it suddenly presented itself to him as so obvious.
Castiel's gaze dropped to the floor momentarily, then rose again with fresh tenacity. 'I cannot love him enough for us both. God gave you the capacity for tidal waves of emotion, not us.'
A tiny smile caught at one side of Sam's mouth, barely more than an extended twitch. 'Say it. Please. Let me hear it from you.'
The deep blue of the angel's eyes darkened further as he frowned slightly. 'You want me to say… ?' Frown lines eased away as comprehension opened Castiel's expression. 'You want me to say it.' He nodded to himself, took a deep breath into his borrowed lungs. 'I love all my Father's creations.'
Sam felt his smile - both dimples, full-force - spread across his face. 'Try again.'
Castiel's head cocked to one side once more as he contemplated Sam. 'I lifted him from the Fires,' he said carefully. 'I gripped him unto me and healed him as we journeyed. The act… soldered us together.' He glanced down at his right hand briefly, as though expecting evidence there to back his claim. Sam's thoughts immediately flashed to the handprint branded onto his brother's shoulder. Soldered together? Sam felt his lip curl minutely at the thought of human and angelic flesh burning into one another, at the thought of the angel having to rend himself from Dean's body afterward. Did Castiel's true form, his true hand, carry a brand that matched Dean's own?
'And when I set him in the hole you dug for him,' Castiel was continuing, 'when I left him to crawl his own way back into the light and fulfil his destiny, I wept for the beauty my Father had created. As I have wept for you, Sam Winchester.'
'Me?'
'You have love such as that,' Castiel nodded his head shallowly, first in the direction of the room in which Dean had sat vigil over Sam's corpse, and then in the direction of outside, where the sound of the Impala's engine was now long gone. 'Love that is focussed solely upon you. And yet you push it away again and again. Yes, I weep for you.'
Sam looked down at his hands for a short while, not sure quite how to proceed. 'What we have isn't exactly healthy, you know,' was what he eventually came up with. He raised his eyes in time to catch the merest flicker of a possible smile curve Castiel's mouth.
'You have what you have. Be grateful for it.'
Sam shifted his weight from one leg to the other, suddenly impatient to see his brother again - though what he would say or do upon seeing Dean again after all this, he honestly had no fucking idea. 'You said you'd take me back now.'
Castiel nodded and leaned in even closer. 'Don't tell him I said I love him?' the angel asked haltingly, then touched two comfortingly cool fingers to Sam's forehead before he could reply.
It was long after Sam found himself back in the diner, alone, long after he paid for his breakfast and left to find his brother, that it occurred to him - Castiel hadn't expressly stated that he loved Dean.
'Sneaky,' Sam muttered to himself, a half-smile tilting his mouth in something akin to grudging respect.
~ fin ~