Living
Title: Living
Summary: Loving Sam Winchester isn't always easy. Castiel and Jess are about to get a crash course
Warnings/Spoilers: R for language, Spoilers through S5
Author's Note: Aftermath-verse. That's right, it still exists!
Author's Note 2: Ships? There's no need to decide!
Castiel wears mortality uncomfortably, uncertainly, like too-small shoes. Which he’s apparently been wearing for years.
It’s Jess who notices, watching him cross the kitchen to deposit his plate in the sink. “Do your feet hurt?” she asks.
He has to think about it for a minute. The word “hurt” isn’t new, of course, he’s familiar with the concept, but he’s used to accompanying visuals - Dean’s hand pressed over blood and skin, Sam clutching at a towel, uneven breathing and unsteady limbs.
“You’re walking funny,” Jess presses him. “Come here.” She drops to her knees on the kitchen floor and pushes her thumbs into the toes of his shoes. “Your feet are all curled up in there.”
Dean looks up from the newspaper. “Seriously?”
“He needs bigger shoes,” Jess says. She’s already untying them. Sam reaches over and tugs him into the empty chair, and Jess removes the shoes. He flexes his feet experimentally. It does feel better.
He’s given a pair of Dean’s shoes, which fit pretty well, and a pair of Sam’s that slide off his feet with every step and send Jess into hysterics, but Castiel decides he likes bare feet. He walks around the house for the rest of the day, experimenting, enjoying the feel of cool tile in the bathroom, warm wood in the kitchen, and soft carpet that gives way underneath him. He lies on his back and walks his feet slowly up the white plaster of the wall, which doesn’t give but feels oddly soft. He goes out into the yard and walks through the grass and is overwhelmed by sensation, cool and caressing and prickly all at once.
Early in the evening, as the sun’s starting to go down, Dean comes to him and takes his arm. He guides Castiel into the bathroom, sits him down and rolls up the cuffs of his pants, eases his feet so gently into a tub of hot water. It feels so good Castiel has trouble breathing for a moment.
Dean glances up. “Dude, are you crying?”
He’s hot and confused and overwhelmed and afraid, suddenly.
Dean’s face twists into an expression Castiel doesn’t know (it’s so upsetting not knowing what’s in Dean’s head, sometimes) and he picks up a sponge. “Just relax, okay? Deep breaths.”
This is something Dean says to Sam.
Dean moves the sponge over Castiel’s foot again and again, gently but firmly, not looking up from his work, and after a moment breathing comes easier and fear recedes. It’s nice. Dean is - Dean is a good friend.
It’s the first time he’s thought of his charge in those terms.
***
Jess meets Sam Winchester at a freshman mixer her first week of college. It’s billed as an ice cream social, but it turns out to be emphasis on the social and not in a good way. The first thing they do is pair everyone off and tell them to learn each other’s hometowns.
She pushes her hair out of her eyes and recites “San Francisco” because it’s easier than saying she’s from Hayward and getting twenty questions about where Hayward is and how big a town it is and how close is it to the city. She doesn’t want to play where-I-grew-up. She wants to eat ice cream and meet new people in an unstructured way. Coming to a mixer was probably a stupid idea.
The kid she’s paired with scuffs his foot on the carpet and says, “Don’t you think these things are stupid?” She decides she likes him.
They pull away from the group and hide in the reference section, sitting between rows of encyclopedias, sharing tiny cups of ice cream. “I’m Jess,” she tells him. “I’m not really from San Francisco.”
He doesn’t ask for clarification. “I’m Sam. I’m from everywhere.”
“Military family?” she guesses.
He shrugs noncommittally.
“I’m a design major,” she says.
He raises his eyebrows. “You want to play what’s-your-major?”
She laughs out loud. “No.”
Sam reaches over and steals a bite of her ice cream. “What’s the lamest thing you brought to college with you?”
Easy. “Both my copies of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
“Both your copies?”
“It’s the best one! I’ll wear one of them out!”
“Order of the Phoenix is the best one,” he says, laughing a little.
“You’re just saying that because it’s the newest.”
“No, because it’s the best.”
They stay hidden in the library for hours, arguing about books and movies and what belongs on a salad - “If it has meat on it, it’s not a salad!” - and eventually talking about their families, and eventually talking about themselves. She learns he is starting school a year late against the wishes of his father, that he’s on scholarship (he says this with a sort of modest embarrassment, ducking his head so his hair falls into his eyes), that he wants to become a lawyer.
She kisses him, hesitantly, eyes open.
***
“Please,” Sam sobs. “Please - please -“
His breathing is labored. He isn’t supposed to be crying, but Castiel has come to understand that sometimes he just can’t help it.
Dean perches on the bed beside him, fingers tangled in his brother’s t-shirt like he’s afraid they’ll be swept apart. “Breathe, Sam, match me.” He draws a deep breath, but Sam just cries harder. Castiel hands Dean the mouthpiece of Sam’s nebulizer.
“I need to,” Sam gasps. “I need -“
“Shh.” Dean rubs slow circles on Sam’s back. “Get some air, then we’ll talk about it, okay?”
Sam huddles miserably around the nebulizer, arms wrapped tightly across his skinny frame, shaking. The nightmares are getting worse. This is happening too often. Castiel doesn’t need to know Dean’s thoughts tonight. Anguish is written all over his face.
Jess pokes her head in the doorway. “Is everything all right?”
It seems like a strange question. They ask Sam this all the time, both Jess and Dean, and Castiel wonders why. Sam is a tearful mess in the middle of the night. Sam is a silent presence at the dinner table. Sam is barely breathing. Is anything all right? But Dean nods in response and beckons her into the room. “He had a nightmare. He…he wants to go to church.”
She looks confused. “Now?”
“In the morning, I assume.” Sam nods confirmation.
“Why?”
Dean shrugs helplessly and Sam doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not taking him to a church,” she says, as if the idea is offensive. “Not after - after what you told me.”
Even this is more blunt than they usually are about the things that have happened to Sam, and it earns her a glare from Dean, but the hostility is short-lived. “I don’t think it’s a good idea either,” Dean says.
It makes sense. After everything they’ve both been through, a church is not a sanctuary to Dean. It’s a threat. It’s not a safe place for his scarred little brother.
He understands, but Dean is wrong.
“I’ll take you, Sam,” he offers.
Sam looks up at him through his tears, hope and disbelief pulsing through him so strongly that for a moment, Castiel can actually feel it.
Dean frowns. “Cas, you don’t have to -“
“I want to,” Castiel interrupts, his eyes locking onto Sam’s, I’m your friend, let me help you, let me do this for you.
Sam is quiet for a minute, and then he reaches out a hand to Castiel. His fingers are cold, his grip is weak, but he hangs on.
***
He walks her to classes and carries her books for her like a gentleman, and so she carries his books for him, because chivalry goes both ways, thanks very much. He kisses her outside under trees on the quad where people can see them and then raises his eyes at the people, as if to say - got a problem? He makes her laugh.
He’s got an uncanny knack for locating obscure pieces of information. He sits beside her in the library and thumbs through reference books and marks up the pages with post-it flags. He drinks Dr. Pepper from a straw and huffs quietly on an inhaler and watches her without embarrassment, and she blushes and doesn’t get any work done.
He takes her to the beach and they eat potato salad and talk about politics and religion. He runs into the surf and scares away seagulls, laughing and kicking up waves, hair wild in the wind. When he takes her home and goes to kiss her goodnight, she smells salt and sun on his skin and pulls him inside.
And so the weeks pass.
About a month and a half after they meet, after they’ve fallen asleep tangled together and happy, she’s jolted away by a hand gripping her arm. Sam’s staring at her with wide and terrified eyes, hands gripping his chest frantically. The fear on his face is something out of a horror film, and she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing.
And then, suddenly, she does.
In the car on the way to the hospital, she watches Sam in the passenger seat clawing at the upholstery, body writhing as though if he finds the right angle he’ll be able to draw in the air he so desperately needs. She’s going ninety miles an hour down the expressway with one eye on the road and the other on Sam’s rigid shoulders, blue skin, panicked face, and her mind is beating out I love you, I love you, which they’ve never said to each other. She should have said it to him before they fell asleep. She should have said it at the beach. She should have said it in the library. She can’t say it now, not when he’s like this, not when he can’t think about anything but where the next breath of air is coming from. What difference can I love you make now?
They’re shown right to the front of the line in the ER, no waiting, Sam can’t fucking breathe, and as they’re wheeling him away to god-only-knows-where he shoves his phone at her.
When she tears her gaze away from the doors where he disappeared, when she glances down at the phone in her hand, she sees that he’s highlighted an entry on his list of contacts. A single letter. D.
She pushes call.
***
Sam stares nervously up at the church. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” Castiel frowns. “Sure of what?”
“This - should I be in there?” He shifts uncomfortably, pressing close to Castiel in an unfamiliar way, like he’s huddling or trying to hide.
This is something Sam does with Dean.
“It’s only a building, Sam. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Right.” Sam breathes and swallows. “Okay. Right.”
It’s only a building, but it’s dark and quiet and creaky and the air is thick with reverence, and Sam seems to collapse in on himself as they cross the threshold. Castiel deliberately chooses a pew at the back and guides Sam to sit next to the aisle. He looks small and uncertain, eyes darting again and again to the enormous wooden cross hanging at the front of the church.
“What’s wrong?” Castiel asks him, instinctively keeping his voice low to match the murmurs around him.
Sam’s trembling a little. “I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here.”
“Do you want to go?”
Sam’s answer is lost in a burst of organ music. He squirms a little and picks up a hymnal and pages through it like he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. Castiel watches him, concerned. He reaches out and places a hand on top of the book to steady Sam, and Sam grips his wrist like a lifeline.
A man takes the pulpit and begins to speak. He tells a story of evil on earth, of an ancient person possessed by demons - “full of demons,” he says, “wild and uncontrollable” - and Sam stiffens and his fingers dig into Castiel’s arm. His face is white, eyes wide.
“Sam?”
He shakes his head, vigorously.
Wild and uncontrolled.
“Obviously, the man was psychotic,” the pastor expounds.
“Psychotic?” Sam’s hiss is audible to the people in front of them. One man turns around and shoots a glare over his shoulder, and Castiel moves a hand to the back of Sam’s neck to try to anchor him. Maybe they should go.
“Evil destroys us,” the man concludes solemnly, and Sam shudders so hard Castiel is afraid he’s going to fall off the pew. “Sin puts us in terrible bondage, and Satan becomes our master.”
Castiel understands the effect these words are going to have a split second before Sam turns to him with naked horror etched into his features, and he reaches out to hold the young man, but he’s too late. Sam jumps up and runs out of the church. The speaker goes quiet for a moment, and Castiel gets to his feet and follows.
He steps out of the church just in time to see Sam, sprinting away, trip over his own feet and tumble down the stone steps out into the street.
***
“Hello?”
The voice is gruff and grumpy and sounds annoyed to be disturbed in the middle of the night, but she doesn’t care. Sam wanted this person called. “Is this, um, D?”
“Who the hell is this?”
She finds her way into an uncomfortable chair, clutching at the phone with both hands. “I’m - I’m Sam’s - I’m with Sam. Winchester.”
There’s a lot of throat clearing on the other end, as if D is struggling to wake up. “Sammy? He okay?”
It’s hard to speak. “He - we - hospital - he asked me to - I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened…”
“Whoa, okay, okay.” The voice is more awake now, some of the gruffness gone, and she’s surprised to realize she’s talking to someone near her own age. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Jess-” She swallows a sob. “Jessica Moore. Jess.”
“Jess, I’m Dean.” He’s calm. He heard the word hospital, and he’s taking it in stride. He’s fine. She tries to match him. “I’m Sam’s brother. Did he tell you to call me?”
She nods ineffectually and sniffles.
He responds as if he saw her gesture. “Can you tell me what happened?”
As she describes the events of the past half hour, Dean listens and makes sympathetic noises and doesn’t panic. He reassures her, explains the things the doctors have been shouting at each other, asks questions about Sam’s coloring that make it seem as if he knows what he’s talking about. He even chuckles when she mentions Sam struggling against the IV (“He hates the damn things”) and she feels herself relaxing. She likes him. He’s confident and comforting.
“It’s okay,” he tells her, gently, bracingly. “This happens with him sometimes. He’ll be fine.”
“Really? This - he wasn’t breathing.”
“He hasn’t talked to you about his asthma?” Dean pauses. “How long have you been together?”
“I know he has asthma!” Belatedly, she realizes she’s not the one being reprimanded. “About five weeks.”
“Sounds like a bad attack,” Dean says.
“How - how often does this happen?”
He sounds so sad when he answers. “Three or four times a year.”
Vertigo grips Jess, and she feels sick to her stomach. That often. A race to the hospital, a wave of panic, a moment of certainty that this boy she’s coming to love will die. Three or four times every year. Her mind runs multiplication tables and she stares down the rest of her life.
“How do you do this?” She whispers.
“I love the kid,” Dean says helplessly. “How do I not?”
***
Sam crawls out of the road to perch on the curb. He sits hunched over on himself, shoulders shaking. Castiel approaches him hesitantly. “Sam?”
Sam doesn’t turn, doesn’t look up, and Castiel sinks to his knees beside him. “Sam, does it - does it hurt?”
Sam turns to face him. His clothing is torn in several places, and so is his skin, blood seeping out and mixing with dirt. A dark bruise is rising on his cheek. He holds one arm tenderly across his torso, as if cradling his ribs.
“Let me see that.” Castiel eases the arm away and slips his fingers under the hem of Sam’s shirt. Sam cries out a little as he pulls it up, and Castiel swallows a gasp. The entire right side of his body is discolored. “Oh, Sam.”
“S-sorry,” Sam stutters out. He’s shaking, he needs help, and Castiel doesn’t remember how Dean gives comfort, doesn’t remember how to be what Sam needs right now. “I fell -“
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sam’s eyes are wide and panicked. “I thought if I came here…I thought if I came and…but I fell, Cas, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll never -“ He trails off, out of words, out of breath, wheezing and clinging to the sleeve’s of Castiel’s overcoat.
“Sam, it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
“My accident.” Sam shudders. “Never meant to.”
Castiel regards him quietly and wonders if maybe what Sam needs more than anything is absolution. “Can you stand?”
Sam struggles to his feet, wincing, gasping a little as his left leg is forced to take weight. Castiel looks down and sees that the extra pressure has increased the bleeding from a particularly bad scrape. “Sam, let me help you.”
Sam looks at him doubtfully.
“I’m your friend,” he says, holding Sam’s gaze, trying to convey all the complex and unfamiliar things in his heart. “Let me help you.”
Sam reaches out an arm and allows Castiel to support him, and as the weight of his friend settles against him, Cas instinctively wraps his other arm around the young man and feels him sink into the embrace, feels him accept Castiel’s acceptance.
This is what Dean does for Sam.
This is what Cas does for Dean.
This is something they do for each other.
***
They let her in to see Sam an hour later.
He’s exhausted and intubated, tear tracks on his cheeks, but he’s got color in his face again and his chest rises and falls evenly, reassuringly. His eyes track her as she pulls a chair close to his bed. “Hi, Sam.”
His eyebrows scrunch together. A tear wells up and she catches it on the pad of her thumb.
She settles into the chair, draws her knees up to her chest, and leans over to rest her head on the mattress beside Sam’s thigh. “So, that was scary.”
His fingers find hers and grip tightly.
“Are you okay?”
The answering blink is sleepy and slow.
She turns their hands until his is palm up and rubs a finger over the inside of his wrist.
“Oh, Sam,” she murmurs. “I love you.”
He squeezes her and hand and his eyes slip closed.
***
Jess is outside on the porch swing when he finds her. She looks up from her book. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” Never mind the two stitches Dean put into his shin while he clutched at Castiel’s hand and tried not to cry, not to aggravate his asthma. Never mind the fact that they had to carry him to bed, because after ten blocks home from church even the idea of standing was too painful for him. He’s safe, he’s breathing, so he’s fine.
Does this ever get easier?
This must get easier.
The expression on Dean’s face when he saw his brother, the way his hands flew to Sam’s head and neck to rule out debilitating injuries - these are things that will stay with Castiel for a long time. These are things that will dog his thoughts. These will be his nightmares.
A sudden fall. A fragile human.
Lives end, just like this. They were lucky this time.
“He’s fine,” Castiel says again. Really, he just needs to hear it.
He finds her that night by Sam’s bed, chin on her knees, fingers threaded through his.
Summary: Loving Sam Winchester isn't always easy. Castiel and Jess are about to get a crash course
Warnings/Spoilers: R for language, Spoilers through S5
Author's Note: Aftermath-verse. That's right, it still exists!
Author's Note 2: Ships? There's no need to decide!
Castiel wears mortality uncomfortably, uncertainly, like too-small shoes. Which he’s apparently been wearing for years.
It’s Jess who notices, watching him cross the kitchen to deposit his plate in the sink. “Do your feet hurt?” she asks.
He has to think about it for a minute. The word “hurt” isn’t new, of course, he’s familiar with the concept, but he’s used to accompanying visuals - Dean’s hand pressed over blood and skin, Sam clutching at a towel, uneven breathing and unsteady limbs.
“You’re walking funny,” Jess presses him. “Come here.” She drops to her knees on the kitchen floor and pushes her thumbs into the toes of his shoes. “Your feet are all curled up in there.”
Dean looks up from the newspaper. “Seriously?”
“He needs bigger shoes,” Jess says. She’s already untying them. Sam reaches over and tugs him into the empty chair, and Jess removes the shoes. He flexes his feet experimentally. It does feel better.
He’s given a pair of Dean’s shoes, which fit pretty well, and a pair of Sam’s that slide off his feet with every step and send Jess into hysterics, but Castiel decides he likes bare feet. He walks around the house for the rest of the day, experimenting, enjoying the feel of cool tile in the bathroom, warm wood in the kitchen, and soft carpet that gives way underneath him. He lies on his back and walks his feet slowly up the white plaster of the wall, which doesn’t give but feels oddly soft. He goes out into the yard and walks through the grass and is overwhelmed by sensation, cool and caressing and prickly all at once.
Early in the evening, as the sun’s starting to go down, Dean comes to him and takes his arm. He guides Castiel into the bathroom, sits him down and rolls up the cuffs of his pants, eases his feet so gently into a tub of hot water. It feels so good Castiel has trouble breathing for a moment.
Dean glances up. “Dude, are you crying?”
He’s hot and confused and overwhelmed and afraid, suddenly.
Dean’s face twists into an expression Castiel doesn’t know (it’s so upsetting not knowing what’s in Dean’s head, sometimes) and he picks up a sponge. “Just relax, okay? Deep breaths.”
This is something Dean says to Sam.
Dean moves the sponge over Castiel’s foot again and again, gently but firmly, not looking up from his work, and after a moment breathing comes easier and fear recedes. It’s nice. Dean is - Dean is a good friend.
It’s the first time he’s thought of his charge in those terms.
***
Jess meets Sam Winchester at a freshman mixer her first week of college. It’s billed as an ice cream social, but it turns out to be emphasis on the social and not in a good way. The first thing they do is pair everyone off and tell them to learn each other’s hometowns.
She pushes her hair out of her eyes and recites “San Francisco” because it’s easier than saying she’s from Hayward and getting twenty questions about where Hayward is and how big a town it is and how close is it to the city. She doesn’t want to play where-I-grew-up. She wants to eat ice cream and meet new people in an unstructured way. Coming to a mixer was probably a stupid idea.
The kid she’s paired with scuffs his foot on the carpet and says, “Don’t you think these things are stupid?” She decides she likes him.
They pull away from the group and hide in the reference section, sitting between rows of encyclopedias, sharing tiny cups of ice cream. “I’m Jess,” she tells him. “I’m not really from San Francisco.”
He doesn’t ask for clarification. “I’m Sam. I’m from everywhere.”
“Military family?” she guesses.
He shrugs noncommittally.
“I’m a design major,” she says.
He raises his eyebrows. “You want to play what’s-your-major?”
She laughs out loud. “No.”
Sam reaches over and steals a bite of her ice cream. “What’s the lamest thing you brought to college with you?”
Easy. “Both my copies of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
“Both your copies?”
“It’s the best one! I’ll wear one of them out!”
“Order of the Phoenix is the best one,” he says, laughing a little.
“You’re just saying that because it’s the newest.”
“No, because it’s the best.”
They stay hidden in the library for hours, arguing about books and movies and what belongs on a salad - “If it has meat on it, it’s not a salad!” - and eventually talking about their families, and eventually talking about themselves. She learns he is starting school a year late against the wishes of his father, that he’s on scholarship (he says this with a sort of modest embarrassment, ducking his head so his hair falls into his eyes), that he wants to become a lawyer.
She kisses him, hesitantly, eyes open.
***
“Please,” Sam sobs. “Please - please -“
His breathing is labored. He isn’t supposed to be crying, but Castiel has come to understand that sometimes he just can’t help it.
Dean perches on the bed beside him, fingers tangled in his brother’s t-shirt like he’s afraid they’ll be swept apart. “Breathe, Sam, match me.” He draws a deep breath, but Sam just cries harder. Castiel hands Dean the mouthpiece of Sam’s nebulizer.
“I need to,” Sam gasps. “I need -“
“Shh.” Dean rubs slow circles on Sam’s back. “Get some air, then we’ll talk about it, okay?”
Sam huddles miserably around the nebulizer, arms wrapped tightly across his skinny frame, shaking. The nightmares are getting worse. This is happening too often. Castiel doesn’t need to know Dean’s thoughts tonight. Anguish is written all over his face.
Jess pokes her head in the doorway. “Is everything all right?”
It seems like a strange question. They ask Sam this all the time, both Jess and Dean, and Castiel wonders why. Sam is a tearful mess in the middle of the night. Sam is a silent presence at the dinner table. Sam is barely breathing. Is anything all right? But Dean nods in response and beckons her into the room. “He had a nightmare. He…he wants to go to church.”
She looks confused. “Now?”
“In the morning, I assume.” Sam nods confirmation.
“Why?”
Dean shrugs helplessly and Sam doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not taking him to a church,” she says, as if the idea is offensive. “Not after - after what you told me.”
Even this is more blunt than they usually are about the things that have happened to Sam, and it earns her a glare from Dean, but the hostility is short-lived. “I don’t think it’s a good idea either,” Dean says.
It makes sense. After everything they’ve both been through, a church is not a sanctuary to Dean. It’s a threat. It’s not a safe place for his scarred little brother.
He understands, but Dean is wrong.
“I’ll take you, Sam,” he offers.
Sam looks up at him through his tears, hope and disbelief pulsing through him so strongly that for a moment, Castiel can actually feel it.
Dean frowns. “Cas, you don’t have to -“
“I want to,” Castiel interrupts, his eyes locking onto Sam’s, I’m your friend, let me help you, let me do this for you.
Sam is quiet for a minute, and then he reaches out a hand to Castiel. His fingers are cold, his grip is weak, but he hangs on.
***
He walks her to classes and carries her books for her like a gentleman, and so she carries his books for him, because chivalry goes both ways, thanks very much. He kisses her outside under trees on the quad where people can see them and then raises his eyes at the people, as if to say - got a problem? He makes her laugh.
He’s got an uncanny knack for locating obscure pieces of information. He sits beside her in the library and thumbs through reference books and marks up the pages with post-it flags. He drinks Dr. Pepper from a straw and huffs quietly on an inhaler and watches her without embarrassment, and she blushes and doesn’t get any work done.
He takes her to the beach and they eat potato salad and talk about politics and religion. He runs into the surf and scares away seagulls, laughing and kicking up waves, hair wild in the wind. When he takes her home and goes to kiss her goodnight, she smells salt and sun on his skin and pulls him inside.
And so the weeks pass.
About a month and a half after they meet, after they’ve fallen asleep tangled together and happy, she’s jolted away by a hand gripping her arm. Sam’s staring at her with wide and terrified eyes, hands gripping his chest frantically. The fear on his face is something out of a horror film, and she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing.
And then, suddenly, she does.
In the car on the way to the hospital, she watches Sam in the passenger seat clawing at the upholstery, body writhing as though if he finds the right angle he’ll be able to draw in the air he so desperately needs. She’s going ninety miles an hour down the expressway with one eye on the road and the other on Sam’s rigid shoulders, blue skin, panicked face, and her mind is beating out I love you, I love you, which they’ve never said to each other. She should have said it to him before they fell asleep. She should have said it at the beach. She should have said it in the library. She can’t say it now, not when he’s like this, not when he can’t think about anything but where the next breath of air is coming from. What difference can I love you make now?
They’re shown right to the front of the line in the ER, no waiting, Sam can’t fucking breathe, and as they’re wheeling him away to god-only-knows-where he shoves his phone at her.
When she tears her gaze away from the doors where he disappeared, when she glances down at the phone in her hand, she sees that he’s highlighted an entry on his list of contacts. A single letter. D.
She pushes call.
***
Sam stares nervously up at the church. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” Castiel frowns. “Sure of what?”
“This - should I be in there?” He shifts uncomfortably, pressing close to Castiel in an unfamiliar way, like he’s huddling or trying to hide.
This is something Sam does with Dean.
“It’s only a building, Sam. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Right.” Sam breathes and swallows. “Okay. Right.”
It’s only a building, but it’s dark and quiet and creaky and the air is thick with reverence, and Sam seems to collapse in on himself as they cross the threshold. Castiel deliberately chooses a pew at the back and guides Sam to sit next to the aisle. He looks small and uncertain, eyes darting again and again to the enormous wooden cross hanging at the front of the church.
“What’s wrong?” Castiel asks him, instinctively keeping his voice low to match the murmurs around him.
Sam’s trembling a little. “I shouldn’t be here. I don’t belong here.”
“Do you want to go?”
Sam’s answer is lost in a burst of organ music. He squirms a little and picks up a hymnal and pages through it like he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. Castiel watches him, concerned. He reaches out and places a hand on top of the book to steady Sam, and Sam grips his wrist like a lifeline.
A man takes the pulpit and begins to speak. He tells a story of evil on earth, of an ancient person possessed by demons - “full of demons,” he says, “wild and uncontrollable” - and Sam stiffens and his fingers dig into Castiel’s arm. His face is white, eyes wide.
“Sam?”
He shakes his head, vigorously.
Wild and uncontrolled.
“Obviously, the man was psychotic,” the pastor expounds.
“Psychotic?” Sam’s hiss is audible to the people in front of them. One man turns around and shoots a glare over his shoulder, and Castiel moves a hand to the back of Sam’s neck to try to anchor him. Maybe they should go.
“Evil destroys us,” the man concludes solemnly, and Sam shudders so hard Castiel is afraid he’s going to fall off the pew. “Sin puts us in terrible bondage, and Satan becomes our master.”
Castiel understands the effect these words are going to have a split second before Sam turns to him with naked horror etched into his features, and he reaches out to hold the young man, but he’s too late. Sam jumps up and runs out of the church. The speaker goes quiet for a moment, and Castiel gets to his feet and follows.
He steps out of the church just in time to see Sam, sprinting away, trip over his own feet and tumble down the stone steps out into the street.
***
“Hello?”
The voice is gruff and grumpy and sounds annoyed to be disturbed in the middle of the night, but she doesn’t care. Sam wanted this person called. “Is this, um, D?”
“Who the hell is this?”
She finds her way into an uncomfortable chair, clutching at the phone with both hands. “I’m - I’m Sam’s - I’m with Sam. Winchester.”
There’s a lot of throat clearing on the other end, as if D is struggling to wake up. “Sammy? He okay?”
It’s hard to speak. “He - we - hospital - he asked me to - I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened…”
“Whoa, okay, okay.” The voice is more awake now, some of the gruffness gone, and she’s surprised to realize she’s talking to someone near her own age. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Jess-” She swallows a sob. “Jessica Moore. Jess.”
“Jess, I’m Dean.” He’s calm. He heard the word hospital, and he’s taking it in stride. He’s fine. She tries to match him. “I’m Sam’s brother. Did he tell you to call me?”
She nods ineffectually and sniffles.
He responds as if he saw her gesture. “Can you tell me what happened?”
As she describes the events of the past half hour, Dean listens and makes sympathetic noises and doesn’t panic. He reassures her, explains the things the doctors have been shouting at each other, asks questions about Sam’s coloring that make it seem as if he knows what he’s talking about. He even chuckles when she mentions Sam struggling against the IV (“He hates the damn things”) and she feels herself relaxing. She likes him. He’s confident and comforting.
“It’s okay,” he tells her, gently, bracingly. “This happens with him sometimes. He’ll be fine.”
“Really? This - he wasn’t breathing.”
“He hasn’t talked to you about his asthma?” Dean pauses. “How long have you been together?”
“I know he has asthma!” Belatedly, she realizes she’s not the one being reprimanded. “About five weeks.”
“Sounds like a bad attack,” Dean says.
“How - how often does this happen?”
He sounds so sad when he answers. “Three or four times a year.”
Vertigo grips Jess, and she feels sick to her stomach. That often. A race to the hospital, a wave of panic, a moment of certainty that this boy she’s coming to love will die. Three or four times every year. Her mind runs multiplication tables and she stares down the rest of her life.
“How do you do this?” She whispers.
“I love the kid,” Dean says helplessly. “How do I not?”
***
Sam crawls out of the road to perch on the curb. He sits hunched over on himself, shoulders shaking. Castiel approaches him hesitantly. “Sam?”
Sam doesn’t turn, doesn’t look up, and Castiel sinks to his knees beside him. “Sam, does it - does it hurt?”
Sam turns to face him. His clothing is torn in several places, and so is his skin, blood seeping out and mixing with dirt. A dark bruise is rising on his cheek. He holds one arm tenderly across his torso, as if cradling his ribs.
“Let me see that.” Castiel eases the arm away and slips his fingers under the hem of Sam’s shirt. Sam cries out a little as he pulls it up, and Castiel swallows a gasp. The entire right side of his body is discolored. “Oh, Sam.”
“S-sorry,” Sam stutters out. He’s shaking, he needs help, and Castiel doesn’t remember how Dean gives comfort, doesn’t remember how to be what Sam needs right now. “I fell -“
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Sam’s eyes are wide and panicked. “I thought if I came here…I thought if I came and…but I fell, Cas, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll never -“ He trails off, out of words, out of breath, wheezing and clinging to the sleeve’s of Castiel’s overcoat.
“Sam, it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
“My accident.” Sam shudders. “Never meant to.”
Castiel regards him quietly and wonders if maybe what Sam needs more than anything is absolution. “Can you stand?”
Sam struggles to his feet, wincing, gasping a little as his left leg is forced to take weight. Castiel looks down and sees that the extra pressure has increased the bleeding from a particularly bad scrape. “Sam, let me help you.”
Sam looks at him doubtfully.
“I’m your friend,” he says, holding Sam’s gaze, trying to convey all the complex and unfamiliar things in his heart. “Let me help you.”
Sam reaches out an arm and allows Castiel to support him, and as the weight of his friend settles against him, Cas instinctively wraps his other arm around the young man and feels him sink into the embrace, feels him accept Castiel’s acceptance.
This is what Dean does for Sam.
This is what Cas does for Dean.
This is something they do for each other.
***
They let her in to see Sam an hour later.
He’s exhausted and intubated, tear tracks on his cheeks, but he’s got color in his face again and his chest rises and falls evenly, reassuringly. His eyes track her as she pulls a chair close to his bed. “Hi, Sam.”
His eyebrows scrunch together. A tear wells up and she catches it on the pad of her thumb.
She settles into the chair, draws her knees up to her chest, and leans over to rest her head on the mattress beside Sam’s thigh. “So, that was scary.”
His fingers find hers and grip tightly.
“Are you okay?”
The answering blink is sleepy and slow.
She turns their hands until his is palm up and rubs a finger over the inside of his wrist.
“Oh, Sam,” she murmurs. “I love you.”
He squeezes her and hand and his eyes slip closed.
***
Jess is outside on the porch swing when he finds her. She looks up from her book. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” Never mind the two stitches Dean put into his shin while he clutched at Castiel’s hand and tried not to cry, not to aggravate his asthma. Never mind the fact that they had to carry him to bed, because after ten blocks home from church even the idea of standing was too painful for him. He’s safe, he’s breathing, so he’s fine.
Does this ever get easier?
This must get easier.
The expression on Dean’s face when he saw his brother, the way his hands flew to Sam’s head and neck to rule out debilitating injuries - these are things that will stay with Castiel for a long time. These are things that will dog his thoughts. These will be his nightmares.
A sudden fall. A fragile human.
Lives end, just like this. They were lucky this time.
“He’s fine,” Castiel says again. Really, he just needs to hear it.
He finds her that night by Sam’s bed, chin on her knees, fingers threaded through his.