Something There
Title: Something There
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Summary: Cas and Sam are alone for the first time since the Cage. It doesn't go how they expected.
Word Count: 4,826
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Rape talk, language.
Author's Note: This is the very beginning of Sam/Cas, a couple of weeks after Dean and Sam are settled in their house. This comes shortly before Lost. in case you were wondering how Sam and Cas got there. Here you are.
Possibly the biggest secret Sam and Dean ever kept from John was that Sam was once Belle for Halloween.
Hunters aren't supposed to do Halloween, and they definitely aren't supposed to dress up like princesses, but three-year-old Sam wanted it so fucking much, he whispered to his big brother, so after John was asleep Dean draped him in a yellow washcloth and a yellow sweatshirt and a t-shirt that had gone yellow in the wash and he guided his little brother by the hand out to the sidewalk outside the motel room. He picked up Sam's hand and twirled him, slowly, silently, then said, "Sammy, do you want to dance?"
Sam felt his smile all the way to the bottoms of his tip-toed feet. He still remembers. "I would love to dance," he said.
**
There is a medicine schedule taped to Sam's headboard, just like there used to be when he was about three. Asthma meds are second nature now. Sam's heard Dean mumble copay's really high for xopenex in his sleep, as if some part of him always wanted that to be his biggest problem, amidst demons and dead fathers and fucking Lucifer, as if some part of him always knew they'd end up here. That they'd someday actually have copays.
Sam still isn't quite sure what a copay is. He doesn't need to know. Dean takes care of it. He probably knew at Stanford, but that was a very long time ago.
He takes xopdnex, fluticasone, fexofenadine.
He takes clonazapan, lorazepam, diazepam, alpraxolam. These are the new ones. It's a little song. He sings it to himself and knows that he could remember it on his own, but Dean tapes the schedule there anyway because Dean looks after things and Dean looks after him, which is why it does not make any sense, any sense at all, that Dean is leaving him, and Sam forgets his little song and balls up in bed and cries for hours before he realizes that Dean hasn't left yet.
"Just one last favor for Bobby, buddy," he says, erasing Sam's trembling little hope that he'd left and come back already (Sam has trouble with time).
"It goes in circles," Sam says.
"No, this is just one. And then I'm all yours, okay? Straight home. Good as new."
Home. This place is straight lines and sharp corners and sometimes Sam thinks the couch has teeth. He doesn't like it. He hasn't told anyone that yet. It's good to have secrets. Secrets keep you safe.
He thinks these things and he knows, he knows, they're wrong.
"Cas is gonna take such good care of you," he says.
Cas is wings and soft jokes and eyes Sam that feel like crying (wings).
"It won't follow me home," Dean says. "I'll take care of this, I'll rip it to shreds, it's done. You don't have to have any part of it, okay? Not ever again."
Like this is what he wants, to be a lump in bed, to be a song of prescriptions, to be stuck in this costume of pajamas and straight lines and white sheets for the rest of his life. He feels like he is always, always in a hospital.
"I would love to dance," he says, but Dean's already gone.
**
Sam is irrationally angry when Cas shows up and immediately does all the right things, because he knows it's just because Dean told him too and that makes him feel bizarrely and inexplicably unloved.
Cas is cooking, making a reasonable amount of noise, setting down and picking up utensils unnecessarily, whistling. Nothing has ever sounded as unnatural as Castiel whistling, and that makes him smile, so okay.
He wanders out to the kitchen and climbs up on the counter. Cas raises an eyebrow at him. "I think you're supposed to be in bed."
Sam closes his eyes and leans his head against the cabinet. "Not sick."
"You should get into some real clothes, then."
There is absolutely no way that was on the list of instructions Dean left. Or has all this time Dean wanted him to get out of sweatpants and this was his way of telling him? Or has he told Sam a hundred times and he hasn't listened? Or has he listened? What if these aren't his sweatpants? What if this isn't--
There's a handful of dry spaghetti in his fist, suddenly. He squeezes it and watches the noodles break.
"Better?" Cas says.
Sam nods a little.
"I didn't mean to scare you. I'm sorry."
"You didn't scare me. I'm big and strong." He holds his free hand up like a bear paw, growls.
Cas raises his hand and echoes him, hesitantly.
Sam feels his smile all the way to the bottoms of his socked, hundred-year-old feet.
"Let's cook this," he says, holding out the spaghetti.
"Yes. Let's."
**
He's wheezy by the time dinner's up. Castiel is fluttering around--not literally, but literally enough to make Sam dizzy--and Sam rests his head on the table and listens to Cas clear the table, run the dishwasher, worry about him.
He doesn't have to help clean up. He saved the world. He was raped for a hundred years. He doesn't have to clean up anymore. These are things he knows.
"How bad?" Cas says.
"Mm. Help?"
Cas's hand is on his forehead, and he blinks and opens his eyes in bed. It's the kind of thing Dean worries will disorient him. Sam never trusts where he is anyway. Things like this don't matter.
Cas sets up the nebulizer seriously, quickly, and Sam takes it and thanks him and tugs Cas's wrist until he takes the hint and lies down with him. Sam gets very, very cold now.
They don't touch, really, just lie on his bed and stare up at the ceiling. Dean spends a lot of nights here with him. Sam doesn't like that they have separate rooms and doesn't know why they do and doesn't know why Dean apparently didn't think it was something that needed discussing.
Or maybe they did discuss it, and he doesn't remember.
Maybe this isn't--
"Shhh," Cas says. "You're all right."
Sam takes a pull from the mouthpiece and lets it dangle in his hand. "They criss-crossed like this," Sam says. He drops the mouthpiece and holds up his arms and tries to form the sharp, gaping mouths of the bars at the top of the cage. The gaps were wide enough for him to slip through. It was so aggravating that he couldn't. He should have been able to. They were big enough. He was small enough.
Dean listens quietly when Sam talks about the cage, as if he was never there, as if it's Sam's world to determine (as if it's Sam's home) but Cas says, "Mmm, no, it was like this," and adjusts Sam's hands.
Something clicks into place in Sam's chest and he breathes. "Yes."
**
Cas sleeps in Dean's room, so Sam sleeps with Michael and Lucifer. There's no need to be dramatic about it. It's just the way it is. It's better than Cas sleeping on the couch that can bite.
He wakes up from a nightmare so gentle it shouldn't count and gets up and takes the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and dumps them in the sink and washes them over and over and over.
Then he cuts the fuck out of his arms with the side of the kitchen counter because he is determined and the knives are hidden. He wants bandages, but he doesn't want to bother Cas, so he goes and he sits on the couch for the rest of the night. It doesn't bite him this time, and when he hears Cas stirring he goes back to his bed and fold up the corner of his med schedule where he has a secret stash of tally marks and crosses another set of four. That is now twenty-five nights the couch has failed to bite him. He has a bad feeling about twenty-six, though.
He smooths the corner back down and scratches stress-hives on his wrists.
**
Cas ties the bandages in bows. "I have to tell Dean, okay?"
Sam nods and cries heavy, slow tears.
"Shhh, hey. It's not a punishment."
"I'm so fucking stupid."
"You're sick."
"Not."
Cas tugs on his knee. "Then why still no real clothes?" It's gentle, he's teasing, and Sam wants to play but instead he's just going to cry, seems like.
"It's too hard," he says. "My jeans are too big and I have to put on a belt and it's too hard today."
"What wouldn't be too hard today, do you think?"
He does not think, he just talks. "Scrabble. Oranges. Gears that grind fingers down and....oh."
"How about Scrabble?" Cas says, gently.
Sam nods.
When he takes too long to make a word, Cas writes ORANGES on the bottom of Sam's food, slowly, tickling at his heel, and Sam's face feels warm.
What the hell.
**
"Cas says breathing's been bad," Dean's saying. Dean is on the phone. Sam doesn't know if he called Dean or Dean called him.
"It has?"
"Yeah, you don't sound good now either. Taking your meds?"
"I think so. You should ask Cas."
"I will. God, kid..."
"I'm sorry..."
"Hey, hey. No."
"Safe?"
"Yeah, it's going fine. This hunt's boring as fuck. I've done nothing but graph traffic patters for two days. Motherfucking traffic patterns."
"You could do that from home."
"Buddy, if I'd known it would have been this much of a slog, trust me, I'd be doing it on your bed with a six pack and a Deadliest Catch marathon. I think we're finally getting out there today."
"Safe?"
"Hey, yeah. I'll be fine."
Sam digs his heels into the carpet and forces a breath from the bottoms of his lungs.
"God, is that you? Get on a neb, Sammy. I want you to call me tonight, okay?"
"Love you."
"Hey. You. Let Cas fuss."
**
"Am I invisible?" he says. He's just making sure.
Cas is sweeping the kitchen. "No." He pauses, wipes his forehead on his sleeve, looks him over head to toe. "All here."
"If I had a third arm....from here."
"That would be invisible right now, then. If that were the case."
"So you don't see a third arm."
"No."
"You wouldn't try to make me one or anything, would you?"
"Wouldn't ever. Come help."
Sam shrugs one shoulder. "Wheezing."
Cas nods. "I'm worried, it's been rough. If you want, I can try to help your lungs relax--"
The next thing Sam knows he is curled up in under one of the kitchen chairs crying so hard his throat hurts, and Cas, not touching, so fucking far away, is saying, "I didn't...I'm so sorry, Sam, I wasn't thinking, I wouldn't ever touch them, I'm sorry, shit."
Cas says shit.
Michael and Lucifer would (grab his lungs crack them like spaghetti) never, ever say shit.
The next thing Sam knows he's pressed into Cas's chest and begging him to help him breathe.
**
"I read all about asthma," Cas says. He is sitting cross-legged on Sam's pillow while Sam lies on his back, holding Sam's hands and stretching his arms up and over his head. "It means that your airways are sensitive and overreact to stimulus in the air or your breathing patterns."
"Like my brain."
"A little, yes."
"And my skin, now." He shivers all the time.
"Maybe your whole body has asthma."
Sam closes his eyes. "That wouldn't be so bad."
There's a kiss on his forehead. Soft this time.
"What am I doing..." Cas says, quietly, but not like he doesn't mean for Sam to hear.
"Don't go away."
"You are sensitive," Cas says, gently tugging him so he sits up. "Sensitive and...reactive."
"Overreactive."
He hears air rush out of Cas's lungs. "Not...not in this instance, Sam."
He is not imagining it.
Sam didn't know that he could feel relief anymore.
Cas's hand rubs a quick circle on Sam's back, then squeezes his shoulder, then takes his hand away. "I need to be more careful with you."
Sam shakes his head.
"Sleep, Sam, okay? I'l going to make you some lunch."
Sam wants him to stay. Sam wants it so so much and he doesn't know how to tell him, so he says something very honest instead.
"I think the couch has teeth."
He's hot and cold and won't look up. He shivers.
Cas's hand cups his chin, cradles his cheek. "Okay. I'll take care of it."
**
Sam sleeps well and sits up and waits for Cas to come visit, and instead spends two hours alone sitting up in bed and jittering his heels when Cas's footsteps get closer to his door. But they never get close enough, and Cas doesn't come to see him, and Sam is having none of this, thank you, so he climbs out his window and goes outside. He comes in through the kitchen door and hears Cas on the phone in the living room--clearly with Dean, he's alternating between comments on asthma meds and comments on ritual sacrifice--so he fills a glass of water and arranges the flowers he picked. Or, he realizes now, the clumps of grass and dirt and dandelion he thought were flowers. Being crazy gets so exhausting.
He sits hopefully in the kitchen until Cas comes in. He startles a little at Sam but then frowns at the muddy glass on the table.
"Is that a beverage?" he says.
"No."
"Were you...drinking it anyway?"
"No."
Cas drops his shoulders. He was worried.
"They're flowers," Sam says. "Sort of."
"You're allergic to flowers..."
"They're only sort of flowers. And they're not for me."
"Oh. Oh."
He's half an inch off the floor. He's hovering.
**
"No. No no no." Cas holds the remote up over his head, laughing in this deep way that Sam can see right at the base of his stomach. "Dean said bed at midnight and it's almost one."
"But they still haven't figured out they switched the babies!"
"I don't think they will in the next episode, either, and there is only so much All My Children one angel can take."
Sam holds his watch in his face. "They've been teasing it for the past six hours."
"I'm beginning to realize that's the way with these things."
Sam flops down in his lap. "Do you like me?"
"Every bit of you."
"I'm not talking to you." He prods Cas's stomach. Where the laugh came from. "You. Do you like me?"
There's quiet for a minute, then two hands gently cradling the back of Sam's head.
"These are his hands," he says. "And he's very stubborn."
"Like me."
"Like you. He doesn't do things he doesn't want to."
Suddenly everything is shaking. "Not like me."
"Someday," Cas says. One of his hands is around his temple. "Someday you won't do anything but what you want." He pauses. "I think you have a fever."
"That's why I'm wearing sweatpants."
Cas chuckles--Sam feels it, now, lying in his lap--and pulls the blanket down over him. "He loves you," he says. "You make him...well. You make him thankful."
"For what?"
"Me."
Sam nods, a little.
"You can stop if you want to," Sam whispers, eyes sliding shut. "If you don't want to, Jimmy, you can stop..."
"Jimmy is saying 'you fucking fool, don't you let this boy go.'"
Sam laughs into Cas's knee.
"And...and Castiel is saying..." Cas's fingers grip Sam's sleeve. "Castiel is saying this can't really be happening."
"What can't be, exactly?"
"That's the problem..."
Sam nuzzles his hand. "Sam is saying 'gears that grind down fingers, tinsel and onions, black lung.'"
"Poor Sam."
"Crazy motherfucker."
"I don't want to hurt you..."
"Everything hurts me. I don't mind."
"One more episode."
**
They're big enough for him to slip through. He's small enough.
It's a matter of getting himself up there. It's a matter of finding the door. He needs to get to the flat corner of the cage and climb up from there. That's the easiest climb. He'll hit the biggest gaps the quickest that way. He needs to do it while they're still asleep (are they really asleep? are they faking? he hasn't been down here very long, he doesn't know).
Maybe he's been here for twenty-six days. He has a bad feeling about twenty-seven.
He just needs to get to the flat edge and then start to climb.
Oh--
"Okay, shh shh shhh." There's something touching his forehead, oh, something hurts. Everything hurts.
"Wh-what--"
"You fell, I think, hit your head. I found you by the front door."
"H-hurt myself?'
"Not on purpose. It's okay." It's Cas who's touching him, that's what this is. He has a washcloth and he's dabbing above Sam's eyebrow. "This is so much blood."
Sam swallows and winces at his throat. "Head wounds bleed a lot. Doesn't mean they're bad."
"Promise?"
"Mmmhmm."
"Just a cut, I think...Banged your nose all up too, look at you. Headache?"
"Y-yeah."
Arms circle all the way around him. "I shouldn't have left you."
"You were sleeping?"
He feels Cas nod. "I didn't used to have to..."
His face is starting to throb. He rests it on Cas's shoulder.
"Do you sleepwalk often lately?" Cas says. He's rubbing circles on Sam's back, like he does when Sam can't breathe.
"Just with fevers."
"You're shivering..."
"Nose hurts," he says, and he sneezes and winces.
And that, of all things, seems to push Cas over a little. He draws in this breath that shakes a little and says, "Shit, it hurts you..." and whispers "Bless you bless you bless you" in Sam's hair.
**
His head's still hurting the next day, and Cas looks up concussions online and says he has to stay in bed and sleep as much as possible. But he's dizzy and still hanging on to that fever, so sleep is hard to come by and he spends an embarrassing amount of time crying and shaking into his pillow. Cas makes quiet jokes that make him snort between sobs and plays tic tac toe on his back. He just learned yesterday.
"How am I supposed to feel safe?" Sam says at one point, voice shaking. "How do I know what's going to come next?"
"You have to have faith," Cas says.
Sam thinks this is another joke. "In what?"
Cas answers like it's obvious. "In you."
**
The headache hits hard but isn't unbearable (because 'unbearable' doesn't mean anything, it's not even a real word) but after a few hours of it Cas is so on-edge that he feels angry and scary to Sam, who pulls the covers up over his head and shakes and no angel no angel please can Dean come home now?
Cas curls up in the chair in the corner and calls Christa, Sam's doctor/therapist/everything, and she's really big on drugs always and tells Cas absolutely give Sam something for the pain, but Sam guesses she didn't mean whatever the fuck Cas found in the medicine cabinet and gave him because this feels way too floaty and trembly and amazing for aspirin. He tugs on Cas's tie until he lies back down on the bed and nuzzles his face into his arm. "We are never vertical."
"Apparently you fall down when you're vertical," Cas says.
"Shut up."
He laughs. "How's your head?"
"It's all better. Woosh."
"That's good. In four hours you can have another."
"In four hours I am gonna be asleep."
"Good. Stay still."
Sam stretches. "You should stay and watch me. Mmhmm." He rests his cheek against Cas's ribs and imagines how the wings would feel on his cheek. He's felt it a hundred times before, dirty rotten wings while they press into him, so it's a stupid thing to think about, but right now all these cage thoughts are coming at him without any real meaning. Spiders? Dog bones instead of real bones? Pelvis snapped? Who cares. This bed is warm.
"If I had just had a bed down there it would have improved things immeasurably."
"No. They would have ruined beds for you."
"Nobody can ruin beds. Beds are the king. Heh. King bed."
"You're high."
"You're high. When we fly. Can we go flying?"
Cas rests his cheek against the top of Sam's head. Sam doesn't know if he's being so careful, so hesitant, because of the head injury or because of...well.
Cas is not exactly the best at this...whatever they're doing. Whatever Sam is trying to do very much, please.
"When the fever's down," Cas says. "And your head's better."
"You know what's good for sick heads?"
"Tell me. Anything."
"Kiss."
There's this pause that makes Sam's stomach hurt. "Sam..."
Sam rolls over, embarrassed, ugly, rotten. "Never mind."
A minute later, there's a kiss behind his ear, fluttering. He feels Cas's eyelids.
"Shut up, you," Cas says. "I can see inside that head."
"Ringing like a damn bell. Mmmm, kiss."
"Sam, what you're...feeling."
He balls up. "Yeah."
"I can see it."
"I'm sorry."
"No, I just...don't worry, okay? Just don't worry."
"You'll take care of it?"
"I'll cradle it, Sam."
**
They fall asleep there, and Sam wakes up however many hours later, more than four, and his head is throbbing so hard and he's so dizzy and he tries to sit up and he can't move and there's a fucking angel in his bed.
No no no no no no no.
**
Hot hands on his thighs, how do they get so hot, how does anything get hot down there when he can't get warm. He doesn't adjust to it. He thought at some point he would stop shivering. He always thought that at some point he would stop shivering. Time didn't mean anything but shivering. Pain didn't mean anything but shivering.
He's hot and cold with fever and he is just not getting out of bed today. It's not going to happen.
**
He hears Cas on the phone with Dean, quiet, panicked, "I fucked up, I fucked up, I couldn't help it I love him and I don't know I just love him and I don't know."
Please go further away, Cas, please don't stand by the door, please don't make Sam feel so horribly bad for doing this to you but there are hot hands on the insides of his thighs now and soon there will be burning twisting fucking and the fever is going up, he knows it is, and he cannot stop shivering.
**
It settles in his lungs, invariably. He coughs and coughs and runs ridiculous fevers and Cas has to come in and hold cold washcloths to him. Sam doesn't mind. It's just shivering. It's just love. It doesn't mean anything.
Everything swims in and out because he's a hundred and six and that's what happens here. Dean says hospital would be worse than dying and Christa comes by and sits with him and rubs his back and he talks to her about rape and lets her hold him because they're miles past boundaries at this point. It feels good, touch. He knows she loves him and he loves her so much. She saved him. She gets on the phone with Dean and tries to convince him to come home and Sam grabs the phone and hangs it up and hates her.
He tries looking Jess up on Facebook and is confused.
He's not going to get out of bed today. He saved the world. He has pneumonia. He is an angel today with high-pitched angel breathing and he locks his ears with his hands and can't keep the scratching at bay. He shivers.
"Don't ever be ashamed," Cas says.
Don't ever let go Sam thinks, but he doesn't know what that means. He jumped. He wanted this. He deserves this.
He romanticizes, fantasizes, being tied up and locks his arms behind his head and feels beautiful and new. He believes in ghosts and that is not noteworthy. He believes in ghosts that live inside his bones and the couch and bite and make him shiver.
He wakes up one time to Cas offering him a cool cloth, but he is too much fever to move. So he coughs.
Cas lays it carefully on Sam's forehead and doesn't touch him.
Sam loves him so much, is the thing.
**
He can't breathe.
It's not a figure of speech.He can't pull air through his chest. He can't get it down his throat. He's choking on it like it's something liquid and it's being forced down, and this needs to stop because they took sticks and shoved them down into his stomach and crushed them and filled his mouth and he feels full of cotton and sickness and the worst part is that he is on the couch and it i biting him. Day thirty-three, should be a lucky day, three three three three three three three three three three three and the couch is biting him and he cannot pull in air so he cannot tell Cas.
Cas is on the phone and Sam can't tell if it's for Dean or 911, he just arches his back and tries to pull away from the couch but he can't, everything is wavery, if he lets it slip away he will be pulled back down and he has to stay awake he has to but the lines are folding and slipping away and they aren't straight and he cannot breathe and maybe it's because he's allergic to the couch maybe it like bees and it is stinging him but that's not it because it is biting him.
The next thing he knows there are wings all around him and he is safe and warm and then everything swims and he is in a room with straight lines and a white bed and there is something over his face and he is lying straight and flat on his back like he has to when he has pneumonia and he'd forgotten that he has pneumonia and Castiel, Castiel, Castiel, Sam wants his full name with its three syllables today, is resting by his head, pseudo-casual, arms folded on the bed, elbows straight out, following the lines of the bed, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. Dean used to watch him like this and Sam thinks that maybe Dean told Castiel to do it now.
Castiel plays with his hair, whispering, "You're back with me."
He can breathe, a little. It hurts so much. The air sits in his chest for too long. He'd like it to stop. He'd like everything to stop.
"I know," Castiel says. "I know."
Sam closes his eyes and cries and there's a shifting next to him and he feels something hot and wet and full of person rest on his shoulder.
"A-are you crying?" he chokes out, eventually.
"No," Castiel says. He's sobbing. "I can't cry."
"Okay. Shh shh shh." Sam sits up.
"No, you have to--"
Sam takes the oxygen mask off and kisses him.
**
Predictably, it takes him a long time to get well. There are spikes of fever and drug hives and many, many phone calls to Dean. Castiel takes them all with Sam propped up against him so he can hear Dean's voice rumbling from the phone and Castiel's breathing where his temple is against his throat.
Castiel kisses the top of Sam's head, carefully, slowly, as he sets the phone down.
"Going home today," he says.
Sam nods, stretches a little.
"C'mere, you. There we go." He stretches Sam forwards, leaning him over his knees, to help him breathe. He works his hands methodically around Sam's back and the sides of his ribs and it tickles and Sam laughs and Castiel does not know what tickling is and it is all so warm.
**
It should be harder than it is. If Sam has learned anything, it's that the things that should not be hard--cracking an egg, turning a doorknob, sleeping--are, and things that should be--holding Dean through withdrawal after withdrawal, asthma attacks, living--that are not. Those are things that Sam's body automatically wants to do. Sam's body wants to breathe, touch, love.
Sam's body wants to be with Castiel's.
They lay stretched on his bed, making shapes on the ceiling with their hands in the moonlight.
"Your hands are bigger than mine," Castiel says.
Sam laughs. It's low and comfortable. "Is that so surprising?"
"Yes." Castiel burrows his hand between both of Sam's, and Sam feels it between his fingers--small, breakable, human.
Yes. It is.
Sam takes his hands back and makes an angel on the ceiling. Underneath them, Castiel's wings flutter,
"I'm glad you're getting well," Castiel says.
"You better not leave now."
Cas, with his hands, makes a heart next to Sam's angel.
"So big," he says, softly.
Author:shangrilada (Kira)
Summary: Cas and Sam are alone for the first time since the Cage. It doesn't go how they expected.
Word Count: 4,826
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Rape talk, language.
Author's Note: This is the very beginning of Sam/Cas, a couple of weeks after Dean and Sam are settled in their house. This comes shortly before Lost. in case you were wondering how Sam and Cas got there. Here you are.
Possibly the biggest secret Sam and Dean ever kept from John was that Sam was once Belle for Halloween.
Hunters aren't supposed to do Halloween, and they definitely aren't supposed to dress up like princesses, but three-year-old Sam wanted it so fucking much, he whispered to his big brother, so after John was asleep Dean draped him in a yellow washcloth and a yellow sweatshirt and a t-shirt that had gone yellow in the wash and he guided his little brother by the hand out to the sidewalk outside the motel room. He picked up Sam's hand and twirled him, slowly, silently, then said, "Sammy, do you want to dance?"
Sam felt his smile all the way to the bottoms of his tip-toed feet. He still remembers. "I would love to dance," he said.
**
There is a medicine schedule taped to Sam's headboard, just like there used to be when he was about three. Asthma meds are second nature now. Sam's heard Dean mumble copay's really high for xopenex in his sleep, as if some part of him always wanted that to be his biggest problem, amidst demons and dead fathers and fucking Lucifer, as if some part of him always knew they'd end up here. That they'd someday actually have copays.
Sam still isn't quite sure what a copay is. He doesn't need to know. Dean takes care of it. He probably knew at Stanford, but that was a very long time ago.
He takes xopdnex, fluticasone, fexofenadine.
He takes clonazapan, lorazepam, diazepam, alpraxolam. These are the new ones. It's a little song. He sings it to himself and knows that he could remember it on his own, but Dean tapes the schedule there anyway because Dean looks after things and Dean looks after him, which is why it does not make any sense, any sense at all, that Dean is leaving him, and Sam forgets his little song and balls up in bed and cries for hours before he realizes that Dean hasn't left yet.
"Just one last favor for Bobby, buddy," he says, erasing Sam's trembling little hope that he'd left and come back already (Sam has trouble with time).
"It goes in circles," Sam says.
"No, this is just one. And then I'm all yours, okay? Straight home. Good as new."
Home. This place is straight lines and sharp corners and sometimes Sam thinks the couch has teeth. He doesn't like it. He hasn't told anyone that yet. It's good to have secrets. Secrets keep you safe.
He thinks these things and he knows, he knows, they're wrong.
"Cas is gonna take such good care of you," he says.
Cas is wings and soft jokes and eyes Sam that feel like crying (wings).
"It won't follow me home," Dean says. "I'll take care of this, I'll rip it to shreds, it's done. You don't have to have any part of it, okay? Not ever again."
Like this is what he wants, to be a lump in bed, to be a song of prescriptions, to be stuck in this costume of pajamas and straight lines and white sheets for the rest of his life. He feels like he is always, always in a hospital.
"I would love to dance," he says, but Dean's already gone.
**
Sam is irrationally angry when Cas shows up and immediately does all the right things, because he knows it's just because Dean told him too and that makes him feel bizarrely and inexplicably unloved.
Cas is cooking, making a reasonable amount of noise, setting down and picking up utensils unnecessarily, whistling. Nothing has ever sounded as unnatural as Castiel whistling, and that makes him smile, so okay.
He wanders out to the kitchen and climbs up on the counter. Cas raises an eyebrow at him. "I think you're supposed to be in bed."
Sam closes his eyes and leans his head against the cabinet. "Not sick."
"You should get into some real clothes, then."
There is absolutely no way that was on the list of instructions Dean left. Or has all this time Dean wanted him to get out of sweatpants and this was his way of telling him? Or has he told Sam a hundred times and he hasn't listened? Or has he listened? What if these aren't his sweatpants? What if this isn't--
There's a handful of dry spaghetti in his fist, suddenly. He squeezes it and watches the noodles break.
"Better?" Cas says.
Sam nods a little.
"I didn't mean to scare you. I'm sorry."
"You didn't scare me. I'm big and strong." He holds his free hand up like a bear paw, growls.
Cas raises his hand and echoes him, hesitantly.
Sam feels his smile all the way to the bottoms of his socked, hundred-year-old feet.
"Let's cook this," he says, holding out the spaghetti.
"Yes. Let's."
**
He's wheezy by the time dinner's up. Castiel is fluttering around--not literally, but literally enough to make Sam dizzy--and Sam rests his head on the table and listens to Cas clear the table, run the dishwasher, worry about him.
He doesn't have to help clean up. He saved the world. He was raped for a hundred years. He doesn't have to clean up anymore. These are things he knows.
"How bad?" Cas says.
"Mm. Help?"
Cas's hand is on his forehead, and he blinks and opens his eyes in bed. It's the kind of thing Dean worries will disorient him. Sam never trusts where he is anyway. Things like this don't matter.
Cas sets up the nebulizer seriously, quickly, and Sam takes it and thanks him and tugs Cas's wrist until he takes the hint and lies down with him. Sam gets very, very cold now.
They don't touch, really, just lie on his bed and stare up at the ceiling. Dean spends a lot of nights here with him. Sam doesn't like that they have separate rooms and doesn't know why they do and doesn't know why Dean apparently didn't think it was something that needed discussing.
Or maybe they did discuss it, and he doesn't remember.
Maybe this isn't--
"Shhh," Cas says. "You're all right."
Sam takes a pull from the mouthpiece and lets it dangle in his hand. "They criss-crossed like this," Sam says. He drops the mouthpiece and holds up his arms and tries to form the sharp, gaping mouths of the bars at the top of the cage. The gaps were wide enough for him to slip through. It was so aggravating that he couldn't. He should have been able to. They were big enough. He was small enough.
Dean listens quietly when Sam talks about the cage, as if he was never there, as if it's Sam's world to determine (as if it's Sam's home) but Cas says, "Mmm, no, it was like this," and adjusts Sam's hands.
Something clicks into place in Sam's chest and he breathes. "Yes."
**
Cas sleeps in Dean's room, so Sam sleeps with Michael and Lucifer. There's no need to be dramatic about it. It's just the way it is. It's better than Cas sleeping on the couch that can bite.
He wakes up from a nightmare so gentle it shouldn't count and gets up and takes the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and dumps them in the sink and washes them over and over and over.
Then he cuts the fuck out of his arms with the side of the kitchen counter because he is determined and the knives are hidden. He wants bandages, but he doesn't want to bother Cas, so he goes and he sits on the couch for the rest of the night. It doesn't bite him this time, and when he hears Cas stirring he goes back to his bed and fold up the corner of his med schedule where he has a secret stash of tally marks and crosses another set of four. That is now twenty-five nights the couch has failed to bite him. He has a bad feeling about twenty-six, though.
He smooths the corner back down and scratches stress-hives on his wrists.
**
Cas ties the bandages in bows. "I have to tell Dean, okay?"
Sam nods and cries heavy, slow tears.
"Shhh, hey. It's not a punishment."
"I'm so fucking stupid."
"You're sick."
"Not."
Cas tugs on his knee. "Then why still no real clothes?" It's gentle, he's teasing, and Sam wants to play but instead he's just going to cry, seems like.
"It's too hard," he says. "My jeans are too big and I have to put on a belt and it's too hard today."
"What wouldn't be too hard today, do you think?"
He does not think, he just talks. "Scrabble. Oranges. Gears that grind fingers down and....oh."
"How about Scrabble?" Cas says, gently.
Sam nods.
When he takes too long to make a word, Cas writes ORANGES on the bottom of Sam's food, slowly, tickling at his heel, and Sam's face feels warm.
What the hell.
**
"Cas says breathing's been bad," Dean's saying. Dean is on the phone. Sam doesn't know if he called Dean or Dean called him.
"It has?"
"Yeah, you don't sound good now either. Taking your meds?"
"I think so. You should ask Cas."
"I will. God, kid..."
"I'm sorry..."
"Hey, hey. No."
"Safe?"
"Yeah, it's going fine. This hunt's boring as fuck. I've done nothing but graph traffic patters for two days. Motherfucking traffic patterns."
"You could do that from home."
"Buddy, if I'd known it would have been this much of a slog, trust me, I'd be doing it on your bed with a six pack and a Deadliest Catch marathon. I think we're finally getting out there today."
"Safe?"
"Hey, yeah. I'll be fine."
Sam digs his heels into the carpet and forces a breath from the bottoms of his lungs.
"God, is that you? Get on a neb, Sammy. I want you to call me tonight, okay?"
"Love you."
"Hey. You. Let Cas fuss."
**
"Am I invisible?" he says. He's just making sure.
Cas is sweeping the kitchen. "No." He pauses, wipes his forehead on his sleeve, looks him over head to toe. "All here."
"If I had a third arm....from here."
"That would be invisible right now, then. If that were the case."
"So you don't see a third arm."
"No."
"You wouldn't try to make me one or anything, would you?"
"Wouldn't ever. Come help."
Sam shrugs one shoulder. "Wheezing."
Cas nods. "I'm worried, it's been rough. If you want, I can try to help your lungs relax--"
The next thing Sam knows he is curled up in under one of the kitchen chairs crying so hard his throat hurts, and Cas, not touching, so fucking far away, is saying, "I didn't...I'm so sorry, Sam, I wasn't thinking, I wouldn't ever touch them, I'm sorry, shit."
Cas says shit.
Michael and Lucifer would (grab his lungs crack them like spaghetti) never, ever say shit.
The next thing Sam knows he's pressed into Cas's chest and begging him to help him breathe.
**
"I read all about asthma," Cas says. He is sitting cross-legged on Sam's pillow while Sam lies on his back, holding Sam's hands and stretching his arms up and over his head. "It means that your airways are sensitive and overreact to stimulus in the air or your breathing patterns."
"Like my brain."
"A little, yes."
"And my skin, now." He shivers all the time.
"Maybe your whole body has asthma."
Sam closes his eyes. "That wouldn't be so bad."
There's a kiss on his forehead. Soft this time.
"What am I doing..." Cas says, quietly, but not like he doesn't mean for Sam to hear.
"Don't go away."
"You are sensitive," Cas says, gently tugging him so he sits up. "Sensitive and...reactive."
"Overreactive."
He hears air rush out of Cas's lungs. "Not...not in this instance, Sam."
He is not imagining it.
Sam didn't know that he could feel relief anymore.
Cas's hand rubs a quick circle on Sam's back, then squeezes his shoulder, then takes his hand away. "I need to be more careful with you."
Sam shakes his head.
"Sleep, Sam, okay? I'l going to make you some lunch."
Sam wants him to stay. Sam wants it so so much and he doesn't know how to tell him, so he says something very honest instead.
"I think the couch has teeth."
He's hot and cold and won't look up. He shivers.
Cas's hand cups his chin, cradles his cheek. "Okay. I'll take care of it."
**
Sam sleeps well and sits up and waits for Cas to come visit, and instead spends two hours alone sitting up in bed and jittering his heels when Cas's footsteps get closer to his door. But they never get close enough, and Cas doesn't come to see him, and Sam is having none of this, thank you, so he climbs out his window and goes outside. He comes in through the kitchen door and hears Cas on the phone in the living room--clearly with Dean, he's alternating between comments on asthma meds and comments on ritual sacrifice--so he fills a glass of water and arranges the flowers he picked. Or, he realizes now, the clumps of grass and dirt and dandelion he thought were flowers. Being crazy gets so exhausting.
He sits hopefully in the kitchen until Cas comes in. He startles a little at Sam but then frowns at the muddy glass on the table.
"Is that a beverage?" he says.
"No."
"Were you...drinking it anyway?"
"No."
Cas drops his shoulders. He was worried.
"They're flowers," Sam says. "Sort of."
"You're allergic to flowers..."
"They're only sort of flowers. And they're not for me."
"Oh. Oh."
He's half an inch off the floor. He's hovering.
**
"No. No no no." Cas holds the remote up over his head, laughing in this deep way that Sam can see right at the base of his stomach. "Dean said bed at midnight and it's almost one."
"But they still haven't figured out they switched the babies!"
"I don't think they will in the next episode, either, and there is only so much All My Children one angel can take."
Sam holds his watch in his face. "They've been teasing it for the past six hours."
"I'm beginning to realize that's the way with these things."
Sam flops down in his lap. "Do you like me?"
"Every bit of you."
"I'm not talking to you." He prods Cas's stomach. Where the laugh came from. "You. Do you like me?"
There's quiet for a minute, then two hands gently cradling the back of Sam's head.
"These are his hands," he says. "And he's very stubborn."
"Like me."
"Like you. He doesn't do things he doesn't want to."
Suddenly everything is shaking. "Not like me."
"Someday," Cas says. One of his hands is around his temple. "Someday you won't do anything but what you want." He pauses. "I think you have a fever."
"That's why I'm wearing sweatpants."
Cas chuckles--Sam feels it, now, lying in his lap--and pulls the blanket down over him. "He loves you," he says. "You make him...well. You make him thankful."
"For what?"
"Me."
Sam nods, a little.
"You can stop if you want to," Sam whispers, eyes sliding shut. "If you don't want to, Jimmy, you can stop..."
"Jimmy is saying 'you fucking fool, don't you let this boy go.'"
Sam laughs into Cas's knee.
"And...and Castiel is saying..." Cas's fingers grip Sam's sleeve. "Castiel is saying this can't really be happening."
"What can't be, exactly?"
"That's the problem..."
Sam nuzzles his hand. "Sam is saying 'gears that grind down fingers, tinsel and onions, black lung.'"
"Poor Sam."
"Crazy motherfucker."
"I don't want to hurt you..."
"Everything hurts me. I don't mind."
"One more episode."
**
They're big enough for him to slip through. He's small enough.
It's a matter of getting himself up there. It's a matter of finding the door. He needs to get to the flat corner of the cage and climb up from there. That's the easiest climb. He'll hit the biggest gaps the quickest that way. He needs to do it while they're still asleep (are they really asleep? are they faking? he hasn't been down here very long, he doesn't know).
Maybe he's been here for twenty-six days. He has a bad feeling about twenty-seven.
He just needs to get to the flat edge and then start to climb.
Oh--
"Okay, shh shh shhh." There's something touching his forehead, oh, something hurts. Everything hurts.
"Wh-what--"
"You fell, I think, hit your head. I found you by the front door."
"H-hurt myself?'
"Not on purpose. It's okay." It's Cas who's touching him, that's what this is. He has a washcloth and he's dabbing above Sam's eyebrow. "This is so much blood."
Sam swallows and winces at his throat. "Head wounds bleed a lot. Doesn't mean they're bad."
"Promise?"
"Mmmhmm."
"Just a cut, I think...Banged your nose all up too, look at you. Headache?"
"Y-yeah."
Arms circle all the way around him. "I shouldn't have left you."
"You were sleeping?"
He feels Cas nod. "I didn't used to have to..."
His face is starting to throb. He rests it on Cas's shoulder.
"Do you sleepwalk often lately?" Cas says. He's rubbing circles on Sam's back, like he does when Sam can't breathe.
"Just with fevers."
"You're shivering..."
"Nose hurts," he says, and he sneezes and winces.
And that, of all things, seems to push Cas over a little. He draws in this breath that shakes a little and says, "Shit, it hurts you..." and whispers "Bless you bless you bless you" in Sam's hair.
**
His head's still hurting the next day, and Cas looks up concussions online and says he has to stay in bed and sleep as much as possible. But he's dizzy and still hanging on to that fever, so sleep is hard to come by and he spends an embarrassing amount of time crying and shaking into his pillow. Cas makes quiet jokes that make him snort between sobs and plays tic tac toe on his back. He just learned yesterday.
"How am I supposed to feel safe?" Sam says at one point, voice shaking. "How do I know what's going to come next?"
"You have to have faith," Cas says.
Sam thinks this is another joke. "In what?"
Cas answers like it's obvious. "In you."
**
The headache hits hard but isn't unbearable (because 'unbearable' doesn't mean anything, it's not even a real word) but after a few hours of it Cas is so on-edge that he feels angry and scary to Sam, who pulls the covers up over his head and shakes and no angel no angel please can Dean come home now?
Cas curls up in the chair in the corner and calls Christa, Sam's doctor/therapist/everything, and she's really big on drugs always and tells Cas absolutely give Sam something for the pain, but Sam guesses she didn't mean whatever the fuck Cas found in the medicine cabinet and gave him because this feels way too floaty and trembly and amazing for aspirin. He tugs on Cas's tie until he lies back down on the bed and nuzzles his face into his arm. "We are never vertical."
"Apparently you fall down when you're vertical," Cas says.
"Shut up."
He laughs. "How's your head?"
"It's all better. Woosh."
"That's good. In four hours you can have another."
"In four hours I am gonna be asleep."
"Good. Stay still."
Sam stretches. "You should stay and watch me. Mmhmm." He rests his cheek against Cas's ribs and imagines how the wings would feel on his cheek. He's felt it a hundred times before, dirty rotten wings while they press into him, so it's a stupid thing to think about, but right now all these cage thoughts are coming at him without any real meaning. Spiders? Dog bones instead of real bones? Pelvis snapped? Who cares. This bed is warm.
"If I had just had a bed down there it would have improved things immeasurably."
"No. They would have ruined beds for you."
"Nobody can ruin beds. Beds are the king. Heh. King bed."
"You're high."
"You're high. When we fly. Can we go flying?"
Cas rests his cheek against the top of Sam's head. Sam doesn't know if he's being so careful, so hesitant, because of the head injury or because of...well.
Cas is not exactly the best at this...whatever they're doing. Whatever Sam is trying to do very much, please.
"When the fever's down," Cas says. "And your head's better."
"You know what's good for sick heads?"
"Tell me. Anything."
"Kiss."
There's this pause that makes Sam's stomach hurt. "Sam..."
Sam rolls over, embarrassed, ugly, rotten. "Never mind."
A minute later, there's a kiss behind his ear, fluttering. He feels Cas's eyelids.
"Shut up, you," Cas says. "I can see inside that head."
"Ringing like a damn bell. Mmmm, kiss."
"Sam, what you're...feeling."
He balls up. "Yeah."
"I can see it."
"I'm sorry."
"No, I just...don't worry, okay? Just don't worry."
"You'll take care of it?"
"I'll cradle it, Sam."
**
They fall asleep there, and Sam wakes up however many hours later, more than four, and his head is throbbing so hard and he's so dizzy and he tries to sit up and he can't move and there's a fucking angel in his bed.
No no no no no no no.
**
Hot hands on his thighs, how do they get so hot, how does anything get hot down there when he can't get warm. He doesn't adjust to it. He thought at some point he would stop shivering. He always thought that at some point he would stop shivering. Time didn't mean anything but shivering. Pain didn't mean anything but shivering.
He's hot and cold with fever and he is just not getting out of bed today. It's not going to happen.
**
He hears Cas on the phone with Dean, quiet, panicked, "I fucked up, I fucked up, I couldn't help it I love him and I don't know I just love him and I don't know."
Please go further away, Cas, please don't stand by the door, please don't make Sam feel so horribly bad for doing this to you but there are hot hands on the insides of his thighs now and soon there will be burning twisting fucking and the fever is going up, he knows it is, and he cannot stop shivering.
**
It settles in his lungs, invariably. He coughs and coughs and runs ridiculous fevers and Cas has to come in and hold cold washcloths to him. Sam doesn't mind. It's just shivering. It's just love. It doesn't mean anything.
Everything swims in and out because he's a hundred and six and that's what happens here. Dean says hospital would be worse than dying and Christa comes by and sits with him and rubs his back and he talks to her about rape and lets her hold him because they're miles past boundaries at this point. It feels good, touch. He knows she loves him and he loves her so much. She saved him. She gets on the phone with Dean and tries to convince him to come home and Sam grabs the phone and hangs it up and hates her.
He tries looking Jess up on Facebook and is confused.
He's not going to get out of bed today. He saved the world. He has pneumonia. He is an angel today with high-pitched angel breathing and he locks his ears with his hands and can't keep the scratching at bay. He shivers.
"Don't ever be ashamed," Cas says.
Don't ever let go Sam thinks, but he doesn't know what that means. He jumped. He wanted this. He deserves this.
He romanticizes, fantasizes, being tied up and locks his arms behind his head and feels beautiful and new. He believes in ghosts and that is not noteworthy. He believes in ghosts that live inside his bones and the couch and bite and make him shiver.
He wakes up one time to Cas offering him a cool cloth, but he is too much fever to move. So he coughs.
Cas lays it carefully on Sam's forehead and doesn't touch him.
Sam loves him so much, is the thing.
**
He can't breathe.
It's not a figure of speech.He can't pull air through his chest. He can't get it down his throat. He's choking on it like it's something liquid and it's being forced down, and this needs to stop because they took sticks and shoved them down into his stomach and crushed them and filled his mouth and he feels full of cotton and sickness and the worst part is that he is on the couch and it i biting him. Day thirty-three, should be a lucky day, three three three three three three three three three three three and the couch is biting him and he cannot pull in air so he cannot tell Cas.
Cas is on the phone and Sam can't tell if it's for Dean or 911, he just arches his back and tries to pull away from the couch but he can't, everything is wavery, if he lets it slip away he will be pulled back down and he has to stay awake he has to but the lines are folding and slipping away and they aren't straight and he cannot breathe and maybe it's because he's allergic to the couch maybe it like bees and it is stinging him but that's not it because it is biting him.
The next thing he knows there are wings all around him and he is safe and warm and then everything swims and he is in a room with straight lines and a white bed and there is something over his face and he is lying straight and flat on his back like he has to when he has pneumonia and he'd forgotten that he has pneumonia and Castiel, Castiel, Castiel, Sam wants his full name with its three syllables today, is resting by his head, pseudo-casual, arms folded on the bed, elbows straight out, following the lines of the bed, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. Dean used to watch him like this and Sam thinks that maybe Dean told Castiel to do it now.
Castiel plays with his hair, whispering, "You're back with me."
He can breathe, a little. It hurts so much. The air sits in his chest for too long. He'd like it to stop. He'd like everything to stop.
"I know," Castiel says. "I know."
Sam closes his eyes and cries and there's a shifting next to him and he feels something hot and wet and full of person rest on his shoulder.
"A-are you crying?" he chokes out, eventually.
"No," Castiel says. He's sobbing. "I can't cry."
"Okay. Shh shh shh." Sam sits up.
"No, you have to--"
Sam takes the oxygen mask off and kisses him.
**
Predictably, it takes him a long time to get well. There are spikes of fever and drug hives and many, many phone calls to Dean. Castiel takes them all with Sam propped up against him so he can hear Dean's voice rumbling from the phone and Castiel's breathing where his temple is against his throat.
Castiel kisses the top of Sam's head, carefully, slowly, as he sets the phone down.
"Going home today," he says.
Sam nods, stretches a little.
"C'mere, you. There we go." He stretches Sam forwards, leaning him over his knees, to help him breathe. He works his hands methodically around Sam's back and the sides of his ribs and it tickles and Sam laughs and Castiel does not know what tickling is and it is all so warm.
**
It should be harder than it is. If Sam has learned anything, it's that the things that should not be hard--cracking an egg, turning a doorknob, sleeping--are, and things that should be--holding Dean through withdrawal after withdrawal, asthma attacks, living--that are not. Those are things that Sam's body automatically wants to do. Sam's body wants to breathe, touch, love.
Sam's body wants to be with Castiel's.
They lay stretched on his bed, making shapes on the ceiling with their hands in the moonlight.
"Your hands are bigger than mine," Castiel says.
Sam laughs. It's low and comfortable. "Is that so surprising?"
"Yes." Castiel burrows his hand between both of Sam's, and Sam feels it between his fingers--small, breakable, human.
Yes. It is.
Sam takes his hands back and makes an angel on the ceiling. Underneath them, Castiel's wings flutter,
"I'm glad you're getting well," Castiel says.
"You better not leave now."
Cas, with his hands, makes a heart next to Sam's angel.
"So big," he says, softly.