saving people, hunting things
Look ma, a fic not named with song lyrics!
One Good Turn
Gen-ish, PG-13. Written both for my hc_bingo "fighting" square and for this prompt at deancaskink: Castiel is injured in a fight and can't heal himself right away, so Dean tries to patch him up the best he can. He's never had to do first aid on wings, though..., except with more profound-bondedness and S6 foreshadowing. Set somewhere in mid-Season 5 after "The Song Remains The Same".
*
Dean feels his t-shirt rip, invisible teeth dragging gashes across his hip, and then there’s a flash of silver and a yelp and the hellhound falls away, Cas’s sword embedded somewhere painful judging by the whimpering and the way the sword’s quivering a foot or so off the ground. Dean would feel sorry for the thing, except no.
There’s another snarl though, way too close for comfort, and then Cas is there and shoving him down, crouching over him and holding him still even as something huge slams into him and almost bowls him over, the breath punched out of him on a grunt of pain. Held as helpless under Cas’s hands as if he was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, Dean can only watch as Cas rights himself and grits his teeth, shuddering against whatever the creatures are doing to him, their growls muffled now and blood spattering down onto the floor at Cas’s back.
Sam is like a freaking avenging angel when he appears, the sword in one hand and Ruby’s knife in the other; a bit of wild slashing later and there’s the twin thuds of heavy bodies hitting the floor. Sam looks warily around the room, but it’s all quiet now, and after a moment of nothing happening he relaxes enough to lower both weapons.
“Okay, I think we’re clear.”
Cas’s hold on Dean loosens and he brings one hand up - Dean sees him grab for Sam’s wrist - and then they’re in Bobby’s front room and Cas is panting like he’s just run a mile, both hands dropping to support him as he falls forward.
“Cas?” Dean says, echoed by Sam, and Dean lifts a hand to touch Cas’s shoulder, concerned.
Cas flinches away with a rasping “Don’t!” and Dean snatches his hand like it’s been burned.
“Dude, what happened? What’d they do to you?” he asks, rolling up onto his knees and ducking his head, trying to get Cas to look at him.
“Whatever it is, we’ll fix it, it’s okay,” Sam adds, coming round next to Dean and crouching down, and Cas finally lifts his head like it’s the heaviest thing in the world. He’s gone white as paper, eyes bright unearthly blue in contrast and stubble standing out against his cheeks.
“It was instinctive, I didn’t think...Dean was in danger, so I shielded him with my wings.”
“You-” Dean repeats. “...What? So they, they got your-?”
“Wings,” Sam confirms softly. “I mean, I saw the blood, but it didn’t look that-”
“What blood?” Dean says sharply, and Sam nods at Cas’s back. Dean shuffles sideways, restraining the urge to just grab Cas by the shoulder and spin him round, and is greeted by the sight of the tan of the trenchcoat marred by flecks and rivulets of crimson, speckles of it dotting the floor. Sam’s right though - there’s not nearly enough here to explain Cas’s current state, so it must be something else.
“So, how do we help?” Sam is saying, and Cas shakes his head. “No Cas, c’mon, there must be a way-”
“This not an injury you can heal with improvised surgical thread and some band-aids!” Cas snaps, now trembling a little. “My wings are tied to my grace, which was already diminished and is now bleeding away at a frankly alarming rate! There are no dressings for such a wound!”
“Well there must be something we can do!” Dean retorts. “Is there some kind of, of spell or something that’ll keep the rest of your grace...y’know, in?”
Cas huffs like their determination to help is irritating him. “No. Were I still a member of the Host it would be a simple matter of replenishing my grace and restoring myself, but as I’m not I believe the most accurate assessment would be that I’m ‘fucked’.”
“But you’re not gonna die, right?” Dean demands, glaring at him and half-tempted to shake him. “You’re just gonna get the fast-track to becoming human, right? It’s really not that bad!”
“I don’t know,” Cas admits, now full-on shaking so hard his arm are threatening to give out and avoiding their eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Fuck,” Dean hisses, and Sam stares at Cas helplessly.
“Well, at least let us move you, man,” he says finally, and Cas doesn’t answer, too busy gasping for breath. “We’re gonna lift you up now, okay?” Sam murmurs, poised to pull Cas up by the arm with Dean on the other side, and Cas manages a nod. He’s burning up; even through all the layers he’s wearing he’s running hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold up for too long. He all but faceplants into the couch once they get him over there, so they let him go as carefully as they can and make sure his head’s turned to the side so he doesn’t smother himself on top of everything else.
“Dean,” Cas slurs as they step back, hand closing with surprising strength around Dean’s wrist and hauling him down, and Dean has no choice but to comply, folding down to his knees at Cas’s side.
“Cas? What is it?” he starts, but then Cas’s eyes snap open, blazing bright, and his hand clamps down unerringly on top of the burn on Dean’s shoulder. It hurts, like raw skin exposed to direct sunlight, and all of Cas is flaring up now like a spotlight, but then, like a magic picture coming focus, there are wings. They’re straggly and unkempt, and Dean gets the impression not all of that’s from the fight, but they’re also savagely ripped and torn and leaking liquid light, blueish and glimmering like the vial of Anna’s grace around Uriel’s neck.
“Dean?” he can hear Sam saying, dull and slow like he’s underwater, but he waves a hand to let him know he’s okay and tentatively reaches out, stopping just short of touching. Every dark feather catches the light differently, gold and purple and blue and red, but there’s also something...off about them that tells him that being able to see them and touch them are two different things. If he can’t touch them though he doesn’t see what else he can do, especially as he hasn’t even got the first clue how the hell you deal with injured wings and might even accidentally make it worse, but it’s kind of heartbreaking to look at the grace bleeding out of the gash under his hand and be unable to do anything, even though he can see just how to close it up, if he just had some kind of thread-
Wait.
There’s a tiny thin golden-white filament stretching across the near edge of the wound, right where he was just thinking... He leans in closer; it’s so thin it’s barely visible, but it’s there. He traces his finger through the air above the wound, miming the next stitch, and the thread follows him. Cool. Okay then. He zigzags the length of the cut and it neatly sews it shut; when he pinches his fingers together it draws the edges together, sealing it, and then the gash disappears like it was never there, and the thread runs together and dissolves into the feathers. Huh. Okay, that’s good.
He doesn’t know how long it takes him to work over both of Cas’s wings with his magic psychic sewing kit, but at some point he discovers he doesn’t even need his finger, he can do it with his mind, which is pretty freakin’ cool. The leaking grace also vanishes with the wounds, hopefully back into Cas’s internal gas tank or whatever, and the feathers all kind of smooth out as Dean goes over them, leaving them neat and glossy and sleek.
However-long later Dean carefully pulls the edges of the last gash together and watches the patch of golden light sink down into the feathers, then sits back to crick his neck and feels Cas’s hand slip away. It’s like everything suddenly comes back into focus, like he’s been wearing sunglasses and just come inside out of the sun, and he blinks against it, a wave of exhaustion washing through him like a tsunami and leaving him feeling just as battered, so he has to grab for the edge of the couch and rest his forehead against the cushion, inches from Cas’s chest.
There’s a hand on his shoulder, the vague awareness of another body bending over him, Sam’s voice echoing weirdly in his ears. “’M alright, Sammy,” he says, or hopes he says, and then there’s nothing.
*
He wakes up in - well, on - Bobby’s bed, which feels weird enough that he rolls over and tries to get up, except it’s hard to move when it feels like all his bones have been replaced with lead.
“Evenin’, sunshine,” Bobby says from over behind the desk, where he doing whatever it is he does, paper scattered all over and several ancient books piled haphazardly in the corners. “Not gonna have another faintin’ fit are ya?”
Dean groans and wrestles his arm up to flip him the bird. “Very funny. Where’s Sam?”
“Gone to get some food, cause otherwise you boys’ll eat me outta house and home.”
“Cas?” Dean asks, squinting over at the couch. All he can see is the top of Cas’s messy head, but he doesn’t seem to have moved. His arm is even still hanging off the side where he grabbed Dean for his weird psychic stitch-up session.
“Still out.”
“Sam fill you in?”
“Yep,” Bobby says, setting aside the book he was working on and eyeing Dean speculatively. “So, what exactly’d he get you to do? Sam said you were in some sort of trance, and you look like you look like you haven’t slept for a week.”
“Feel like it,” Dean mutters. “I don’t know, Bobby, I just- he let me see his wings, and they were all torn up so I...fixed ‘em.”
“You fixed them?” Bobby repeats incredulously, staring at him. “How?”
Dean shrugs as much as he can lying down. “I dunno, there was this... I was thinking how I’d stitch ‘em up if they were actually, y’know, real, and then this...thread just sort of appeared and did it.” Bobby’s eyebrows are threatening to disappear under his hat. “What?”
“Well I don’t know, do you even know what you did? Because think about it, boy - he used that handprint on your shoulder, which we know is a powerful connection between you two cause Pamela used to to contact him that first time, and then suddenly you can see his wings and patch him up when even he seems to think he’s dying...and then you come out of it lookin’ like you did the psychic equivalent of gettin’ mauled by a bear-”
“Hey!” Dean objects, pushing himself on uncooperative arms, “I am fine, okay, just a little tired.”
“You’ve been asleep for ten hours,” Bobby says flatly. “Sam says you never sleep that long undisturbed anymore, and never in the middle of the day.”
Dean tries not to think about what ‘undisturbed’ means - he knows he has nightmares, and sometimes he wakes up with his face wet or the sheets twisted around him or his mouth open, unsure whether his screams were real or just in the dream, and once he maybe fell out of bed trying to away from- trying to get away, but Sam has no business telling on him like that. Great, now he’ll have Bobby making mother-hen faces at him too, just great.
“So what, what are you saying I did, or he did to me?” he demands, and Bobby shrugs and holds up the book he was reading - one of those soft-coloured medieval paintings covers one page, a vacant looking kid with his hands clasped and wings sprouting from his shoulders, a halo around his head.
“I dunno, that’s what I’m tryin’ to find out. Course, there’s next to crap about angels doing anythin’ other than smiting or delivering messages to people, and even less about them getting hurt.”
“Yeah well, they’re meant to be infallible or whatever aren’t they,” Dean says around a jaw-cracking yawn, suddenly too tired to even keep his eyes open, and the last thing he hears is the mattress springs squeaking as he flops back down onto the bed.
*
The next time he wakes the desk is empty but there are low voices coming from the kitchen. That means Sam’s back with food, which is good because he feels like his stomach is shriveling up and eating itself in protest. He hauls his ass off the bed, wincing at the squeal of springs, and heads for the kitchen; there’s an empty pizza box open on the table, along with a bowl with a couple of green leaves stuck to the inside, because god forbid Sam get fast food and actually eat it, and another closed box on the counter. The pizza inside is six-eighths there and still pretty warm, and Dean falls on it like a starved wolf.
“I see you’re up,” Sam says, amused and looking a little prissily at the way Dean’s practically inhaling the pizza.
“Congratulations, Sherlock,” Dean says around a mouthful of dough and melted cheese, and Bobby snorts.
Dean actually licks his fingers when he’s finished, making Sam look like he despairs of the human race, then wanders back out into the main room with the vague idea of checking on Cas. Before he’s got very far though Cas stirs, and that familiar intent gaze fixes onto him.
“Dean,” Cas says softly, quiet and fond, and Dean comes to kneel next to him, trying not to read too much into the almost reverent note in Cas’s voice.
“Feelin’ better?” he asks gruffly, and Cas nods, hair rustling against the material of the couch.
“Much, thank you.”
“Still an angel?” Bobby asks from the doorway, and Cas smiles, eyes flicking to Dean like he should be in on the joke.
“Yes.”
“So, what was with the magic handprint routine?” Dean asks, waving a hand at his shoulder, and Cas blinks at him.
“Dean, don’t you know what you did?” he asks, kind of deflating and looking at him like a disappointed teacher, and Dean frowns down at him.
“Oh crap,” he hears Sam murmur behind him.
“Patched you up? Pretty damn well, if I say so myself.”
Cas pushes himself up to sitting, and Dean rocks back up onto his feet. “Yes, you healed me,” Cas says slowly, like he’s choosing his words carefully, “but do you not understand how you were able to do so?”
“Cause we have some kind of...connection?” Dean guesses, gesturing to his shoulder again, and Cas actually purses his lips, like Dean’s fifth grade teacher in Wisconsin that one time he’d tried to explain that he couldn’t hand in his homework because his dog had eaten it (okay fine, it was a werewolf, and it had been more interested in eating him, but either way, the homework had not survived).
“Yes, but that is the reason you were able to heal me, not the method. You truly don’t understand-?”
“No, okay, I don’t, so quit bitchin’ and tell me,” Dean snaps, and Cas does a good impression of Sam’s bitchface.
“You mended the damage to my grace with the light of your own soul,” he says sharply, and they all kind of gape at him.
“Told ya,” Bobby says, shaking his head. “Damn angels.”
“No offence,” Sam adds quickly, and Cas gives him a look.
“I what?” Dean breaks in, and Cas almost looks apologetic. “You couldn’t have, I don’t know, told me about this?”
“At what point?” Cas inquires tightly. “While I was losing grace like blood from a fatal wound? While I was protecting you from being ripped apart? When I barely had enough power left to enable you to help me at all? I assumed you would understand when my wings became visible to you, since I had already told you they were tied to my grace.”
“That’s puttin’ way too much faith in my reasoning abilities when you were busy saying you were probably dying,” Dean mutters. “So what, now you’ve got a little bit of my soul in there?”
Cas shakes his head. “No Dean, you gave me some of your soul’s energy, a little of your...life force, which eased my injuries and replaced some of what I had lost. It will replenish itself.”
“Oh, well that’s good to know,” Dean says, letting himself relax a little. “And what about you?”
“What about me?” Cas asks, puzzled, and Dean rolls his eyes.
“Are you okay? Can you still mojo around and everything? Don’t tell me you popped my soul cherry for nothing.”
“I am still capable of...transporting myself wherever you need me,” Cas confirms, clearly still trying to figure out where fruit factors into the equation, and Dean claps a hand to his shoulder and leaves him to think it over.
One Good Turn
Gen-ish, PG-13. Written both for my hc_bingo "fighting" square and for this prompt at deancaskink: Castiel is injured in a fight and can't heal himself right away, so Dean tries to patch him up the best he can. He's never had to do first aid on wings, though..., except with more profound-bondedness and S6 foreshadowing. Set somewhere in mid-Season 5 after "The Song Remains The Same".
*
Dean feels his t-shirt rip, invisible teeth dragging gashes across his hip, and then there’s a flash of silver and a yelp and the hellhound falls away, Cas’s sword embedded somewhere painful judging by the whimpering and the way the sword’s quivering a foot or so off the ground. Dean would feel sorry for the thing, except no.
There’s another snarl though, way too close for comfort, and then Cas is there and shoving him down, crouching over him and holding him still even as something huge slams into him and almost bowls him over, the breath punched out of him on a grunt of pain. Held as helpless under Cas’s hands as if he was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, Dean can only watch as Cas rights himself and grits his teeth, shuddering against whatever the creatures are doing to him, their growls muffled now and blood spattering down onto the floor at Cas’s back.
Sam is like a freaking avenging angel when he appears, the sword in one hand and Ruby’s knife in the other; a bit of wild slashing later and there’s the twin thuds of heavy bodies hitting the floor. Sam looks warily around the room, but it’s all quiet now, and after a moment of nothing happening he relaxes enough to lower both weapons.
“Okay, I think we’re clear.”
Cas’s hold on Dean loosens and he brings one hand up - Dean sees him grab for Sam’s wrist - and then they’re in Bobby’s front room and Cas is panting like he’s just run a mile, both hands dropping to support him as he falls forward.
“Cas?” Dean says, echoed by Sam, and Dean lifts a hand to touch Cas’s shoulder, concerned.
Cas flinches away with a rasping “Don’t!” and Dean snatches his hand like it’s been burned.
“Dude, what happened? What’d they do to you?” he asks, rolling up onto his knees and ducking his head, trying to get Cas to look at him.
“Whatever it is, we’ll fix it, it’s okay,” Sam adds, coming round next to Dean and crouching down, and Cas finally lifts his head like it’s the heaviest thing in the world. He’s gone white as paper, eyes bright unearthly blue in contrast and stubble standing out against his cheeks.
“It was instinctive, I didn’t think...Dean was in danger, so I shielded him with my wings.”
“You-” Dean repeats. “...What? So they, they got your-?”
“Wings,” Sam confirms softly. “I mean, I saw the blood, but it didn’t look that-”
“What blood?” Dean says sharply, and Sam nods at Cas’s back. Dean shuffles sideways, restraining the urge to just grab Cas by the shoulder and spin him round, and is greeted by the sight of the tan of the trenchcoat marred by flecks and rivulets of crimson, speckles of it dotting the floor. Sam’s right though - there’s not nearly enough here to explain Cas’s current state, so it must be something else.
“So, how do we help?” Sam is saying, and Cas shakes his head. “No Cas, c’mon, there must be a way-”
“This not an injury you can heal with improvised surgical thread and some band-aids!” Cas snaps, now trembling a little. “My wings are tied to my grace, which was already diminished and is now bleeding away at a frankly alarming rate! There are no dressings for such a wound!”
“Well there must be something we can do!” Dean retorts. “Is there some kind of, of spell or something that’ll keep the rest of your grace...y’know, in?”
Cas huffs like their determination to help is irritating him. “No. Were I still a member of the Host it would be a simple matter of replenishing my grace and restoring myself, but as I’m not I believe the most accurate assessment would be that I’m ‘fucked’.”
“But you’re not gonna die, right?” Dean demands, glaring at him and half-tempted to shake him. “You’re just gonna get the fast-track to becoming human, right? It’s really not that bad!”
“I don’t know,” Cas admits, now full-on shaking so hard his arm are threatening to give out and avoiding their eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Fuck,” Dean hisses, and Sam stares at Cas helplessly.
“Well, at least let us move you, man,” he says finally, and Cas doesn’t answer, too busy gasping for breath. “We’re gonna lift you up now, okay?” Sam murmurs, poised to pull Cas up by the arm with Dean on the other side, and Cas manages a nod. He’s burning up; even through all the layers he’s wearing he’s running hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold up for too long. He all but faceplants into the couch once they get him over there, so they let him go as carefully as they can and make sure his head’s turned to the side so he doesn’t smother himself on top of everything else.
“Dean,” Cas slurs as they step back, hand closing with surprising strength around Dean’s wrist and hauling him down, and Dean has no choice but to comply, folding down to his knees at Cas’s side.
“Cas? What is it?” he starts, but then Cas’s eyes snap open, blazing bright, and his hand clamps down unerringly on top of the burn on Dean’s shoulder. It hurts, like raw skin exposed to direct sunlight, and all of Cas is flaring up now like a spotlight, but then, like a magic picture coming focus, there are wings. They’re straggly and unkempt, and Dean gets the impression not all of that’s from the fight, but they’re also savagely ripped and torn and leaking liquid light, blueish and glimmering like the vial of Anna’s grace around Uriel’s neck.
“Dean?” he can hear Sam saying, dull and slow like he’s underwater, but he waves a hand to let him know he’s okay and tentatively reaches out, stopping just short of touching. Every dark feather catches the light differently, gold and purple and blue and red, but there’s also something...off about them that tells him that being able to see them and touch them are two different things. If he can’t touch them though he doesn’t see what else he can do, especially as he hasn’t even got the first clue how the hell you deal with injured wings and might even accidentally make it worse, but it’s kind of heartbreaking to look at the grace bleeding out of the gash under his hand and be unable to do anything, even though he can see just how to close it up, if he just had some kind of thread-
Wait.
There’s a tiny thin golden-white filament stretching across the near edge of the wound, right where he was just thinking... He leans in closer; it’s so thin it’s barely visible, but it’s there. He traces his finger through the air above the wound, miming the next stitch, and the thread follows him. Cool. Okay then. He zigzags the length of the cut and it neatly sews it shut; when he pinches his fingers together it draws the edges together, sealing it, and then the gash disappears like it was never there, and the thread runs together and dissolves into the feathers. Huh. Okay, that’s good.
He doesn’t know how long it takes him to work over both of Cas’s wings with his magic psychic sewing kit, but at some point he discovers he doesn’t even need his finger, he can do it with his mind, which is pretty freakin’ cool. The leaking grace also vanishes with the wounds, hopefully back into Cas’s internal gas tank or whatever, and the feathers all kind of smooth out as Dean goes over them, leaving them neat and glossy and sleek.
However-long later Dean carefully pulls the edges of the last gash together and watches the patch of golden light sink down into the feathers, then sits back to crick his neck and feels Cas’s hand slip away. It’s like everything suddenly comes back into focus, like he’s been wearing sunglasses and just come inside out of the sun, and he blinks against it, a wave of exhaustion washing through him like a tsunami and leaving him feeling just as battered, so he has to grab for the edge of the couch and rest his forehead against the cushion, inches from Cas’s chest.
There’s a hand on his shoulder, the vague awareness of another body bending over him, Sam’s voice echoing weirdly in his ears. “’M alright, Sammy,” he says, or hopes he says, and then there’s nothing.
*
He wakes up in - well, on - Bobby’s bed, which feels weird enough that he rolls over and tries to get up, except it’s hard to move when it feels like all his bones have been replaced with lead.
“Evenin’, sunshine,” Bobby says from over behind the desk, where he doing whatever it is he does, paper scattered all over and several ancient books piled haphazardly in the corners. “Not gonna have another faintin’ fit are ya?”
Dean groans and wrestles his arm up to flip him the bird. “Very funny. Where’s Sam?”
“Gone to get some food, cause otherwise you boys’ll eat me outta house and home.”
“Cas?” Dean asks, squinting over at the couch. All he can see is the top of Cas’s messy head, but he doesn’t seem to have moved. His arm is even still hanging off the side where he grabbed Dean for his weird psychic stitch-up session.
“Still out.”
“Sam fill you in?”
“Yep,” Bobby says, setting aside the book he was working on and eyeing Dean speculatively. “So, what exactly’d he get you to do? Sam said you were in some sort of trance, and you look like you look like you haven’t slept for a week.”
“Feel like it,” Dean mutters. “I don’t know, Bobby, I just- he let me see his wings, and they were all torn up so I...fixed ‘em.”
“You fixed them?” Bobby repeats incredulously, staring at him. “How?”
Dean shrugs as much as he can lying down. “I dunno, there was this... I was thinking how I’d stitch ‘em up if they were actually, y’know, real, and then this...thread just sort of appeared and did it.” Bobby’s eyebrows are threatening to disappear under his hat. “What?”
“Well I don’t know, do you even know what you did? Because think about it, boy - he used that handprint on your shoulder, which we know is a powerful connection between you two cause Pamela used to to contact him that first time, and then suddenly you can see his wings and patch him up when even he seems to think he’s dying...and then you come out of it lookin’ like you did the psychic equivalent of gettin’ mauled by a bear-”
“Hey!” Dean objects, pushing himself on uncooperative arms, “I am fine, okay, just a little tired.”
“You’ve been asleep for ten hours,” Bobby says flatly. “Sam says you never sleep that long undisturbed anymore, and never in the middle of the day.”
Dean tries not to think about what ‘undisturbed’ means - he knows he has nightmares, and sometimes he wakes up with his face wet or the sheets twisted around him or his mouth open, unsure whether his screams were real or just in the dream, and once he maybe fell out of bed trying to away from- trying to get away, but Sam has no business telling on him like that. Great, now he’ll have Bobby making mother-hen faces at him too, just great.
“So what, what are you saying I did, or he did to me?” he demands, and Bobby shrugs and holds up the book he was reading - one of those soft-coloured medieval paintings covers one page, a vacant looking kid with his hands clasped and wings sprouting from his shoulders, a halo around his head.
“I dunno, that’s what I’m tryin’ to find out. Course, there’s next to crap about angels doing anythin’ other than smiting or delivering messages to people, and even less about them getting hurt.”
“Yeah well, they’re meant to be infallible or whatever aren’t they,” Dean says around a jaw-cracking yawn, suddenly too tired to even keep his eyes open, and the last thing he hears is the mattress springs squeaking as he flops back down onto the bed.
*
The next time he wakes the desk is empty but there are low voices coming from the kitchen. That means Sam’s back with food, which is good because he feels like his stomach is shriveling up and eating itself in protest. He hauls his ass off the bed, wincing at the squeal of springs, and heads for the kitchen; there’s an empty pizza box open on the table, along with a bowl with a couple of green leaves stuck to the inside, because god forbid Sam get fast food and actually eat it, and another closed box on the counter. The pizza inside is six-eighths there and still pretty warm, and Dean falls on it like a starved wolf.
“I see you’re up,” Sam says, amused and looking a little prissily at the way Dean’s practically inhaling the pizza.
“Congratulations, Sherlock,” Dean says around a mouthful of dough and melted cheese, and Bobby snorts.
Dean actually licks his fingers when he’s finished, making Sam look like he despairs of the human race, then wanders back out into the main room with the vague idea of checking on Cas. Before he’s got very far though Cas stirs, and that familiar intent gaze fixes onto him.
“Dean,” Cas says softly, quiet and fond, and Dean comes to kneel next to him, trying not to read too much into the almost reverent note in Cas’s voice.
“Feelin’ better?” he asks gruffly, and Cas nods, hair rustling against the material of the couch.
“Much, thank you.”
“Still an angel?” Bobby asks from the doorway, and Cas smiles, eyes flicking to Dean like he should be in on the joke.
“Yes.”
“So, what was with the magic handprint routine?” Dean asks, waving a hand at his shoulder, and Cas blinks at him.
“Dean, don’t you know what you did?” he asks, kind of deflating and looking at him like a disappointed teacher, and Dean frowns down at him.
“Oh crap,” he hears Sam murmur behind him.
“Patched you up? Pretty damn well, if I say so myself.”
Cas pushes himself up to sitting, and Dean rocks back up onto his feet. “Yes, you healed me,” Cas says slowly, like he’s choosing his words carefully, “but do you not understand how you were able to do so?”
“Cause we have some kind of...connection?” Dean guesses, gesturing to his shoulder again, and Cas actually purses his lips, like Dean’s fifth grade teacher in Wisconsin that one time he’d tried to explain that he couldn’t hand in his homework because his dog had eaten it (okay fine, it was a werewolf, and it had been more interested in eating him, but either way, the homework had not survived).
“Yes, but that is the reason you were able to heal me, not the method. You truly don’t understand-?”
“No, okay, I don’t, so quit bitchin’ and tell me,” Dean snaps, and Cas does a good impression of Sam’s bitchface.
“You mended the damage to my grace with the light of your own soul,” he says sharply, and they all kind of gape at him.
“Told ya,” Bobby says, shaking his head. “Damn angels.”
“No offence,” Sam adds quickly, and Cas gives him a look.
“I what?” Dean breaks in, and Cas almost looks apologetic. “You couldn’t have, I don’t know, told me about this?”
“At what point?” Cas inquires tightly. “While I was losing grace like blood from a fatal wound? While I was protecting you from being ripped apart? When I barely had enough power left to enable you to help me at all? I assumed you would understand when my wings became visible to you, since I had already told you they were tied to my grace.”
“That’s puttin’ way too much faith in my reasoning abilities when you were busy saying you were probably dying,” Dean mutters. “So what, now you’ve got a little bit of my soul in there?”
Cas shakes his head. “No Dean, you gave me some of your soul’s energy, a little of your...life force, which eased my injuries and replaced some of what I had lost. It will replenish itself.”
“Oh, well that’s good to know,” Dean says, letting himself relax a little. “And what about you?”
“What about me?” Cas asks, puzzled, and Dean rolls his eyes.
“Are you okay? Can you still mojo around and everything? Don’t tell me you popped my soul cherry for nothing.”
“I am still capable of...transporting myself wherever you need me,” Cas confirms, clearly still trying to figure out where fruit factors into the equation, and Dean claps a hand to his shoulder and leaves him to think it over.