Recovering the Satellites
Title: Recovering the Satellites
Author: familybizness
Summary: Dean thought he could never forgive Cas. Somewhere along the way, things changed.
Word Count: 3426
Author's Note: The first scene of this story, a flashback, was written by shangrilada and is part of a longer story, which can be found here. You don't need to read that whole story to appreciate this one, but I recommend reading it because it's effing awesome. Fans of Sammyverse have probably read it already.
Hell makes Dean taste tendons and fluids and he soothes Sam into sleep while the monsters laugh and gnash their teeth and then one morning they drag him away from Sam and there is a rush of light and sound and confusion on Sam's face and Dean blinks and opens his eyes in a field.
With Cas.
"Hello, Dean."
He's scrambling up to his feet, throwing himself around him (the air is so cool and thin and there is water--water--on the grass and there are clouds) and whispering thank-yous and Cas gives him cautious pats on the back.
Dean pulls back. "Where's Sam?"
Cas says, "Dean, I..."
"He needs like all the fucking medicine, we have to...he..." He's fucking spinning around, looking.
Even after he's figured out the fucking punch line, he's looking.
And there's nothing.
Nothing.
No hole in the ground leading to the cage.
No wheezing.
No laughing.
No body to grab and shake and cry over.
No temper tantrums, no teasing, no head on his knee.
He swallows again and again. "Where's Sam?"
"Dean, I only had enough grace for one--"
"Then you chose the wrong fucking one!"
"Dean."
"How did you not choose Sam!"
And he's going to lose it, going to fucking lose it, because his sun his joy his heart is broken, broken and breaking a hundred miles and a hundred lifetimes underground alone afraid cold hurting and screaming you picked the wrong one you picked the wrong brother, Sam cannot be alone, Sam cannot be in Hell.
He moves to punch Cas but Cas anticipates it and the next thing he knows he's lying on the ground (wet grass, fucking alive) with his hands pinned and Cas growling in his ear, "Because I couldn't live without you, you useless son of a bitch."
***
Dean's been in bed for days, ever since Castiel dragged him through Bobby's front door. He screamed for hours, screamed himself silent, hands fisted in his hair. Now he's still, curled up into the smallest ball of human Castiel has ever seen. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t respond when Bobby crouches beside the bed and rests a hand on his shoulder, calls him son and says gentle things under his breath. He groans a little when Castiel says his name, and in his sleep his mouth moves - Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.
Bobby brings bottles of whiskey, and Dean clutches them with both hands, curls around them and drinks like it’s tying him to life. Castiel waits for him to slip into unconsciousness and takes the bottles away, leaves them on the nightstand because sometimes when he’s had enough to drink Dean’s soul stops shivering for a while.
Sometimes Castiel wonders if it was all a mistake.
In the middle of the third week Dean springs out of bed like he’s been thinking about it and marches down to the library. Castiel finds him in a pile of books, hand still wrapped around the bottle, turning pages.
“We’re going to save Sam,” he says, not looking up, not waiting to be asked.
“Dean…”
“Shut it, Cas. You got me out, we can get him out. Either help or go away.”
Castiel doesn’t owe anything to Dean Winchester anymore (he never owed anything to Sam). Recovering Sam will be next to impossible, if it can be done at all - this is probably going to end with Dean twice as miserable and completely hopeless - and if they do get Sam back, he is not going to be the sweet little brother Dean remembers. Castiel’s brothers are destroying him.
Dean clutches the bottle and drinks and shivers.
Why is it so hard to walk away from this man.
***
Dean can’t stop laughing. He’s half-hysterical, clapping his hands to his mouth to stifle it, but when no one objects he just fucking lets himself go. It’s not funny. No one is pretending it’s funny. It’s Sammy. He’s fucking shattered, and Dean is fucking shattered to see him like this, but it’s fine and he is so goddamn happy.
He can’t stop reaching out, even though Sam flinches away from his hands and presses himself into the corner so hard he might fuse with the fucking wall. He reaches, pulls back, reaches, and Sam shivers and cries and won’t fucking look at him, but it’s fine, it’s okay, nothing is ever going to hurt again because Sam is here and so what do the past fifteen (sixteen? A million?) months matter, really?
Sammy’s wrapped up in his own arms and pulling away from light, naked animal crouched on a sheet, whimpering, little brother is so fucking broken, but they got him back and they are going to get him back.
“Sammy.”
“Bliorax,” Sam breathes, and wheezes, and godfuckingdamn that wheeze, Dean could just wrap up in it and roll around and be happy for the rest of his life (and the rest of his life could be ten years or ten minutes, it doesn’t matter, everything’s just fine now).
He rests a hand on his brother’s foot.
“Gigipah!” Sam’s voice is a breathless scream, and he’s doubling over, hands clenched in his hair, wheezing so hard it sounds like shrieking (like hell). Dean jerks his hand back and immediately wants to fucking reach out again. The lack of Sam is painful.
“Sammy, calm down, please, gotta breathe, I got you. Right here. Look at me. Look at me, Sam.”
“Bliorax…bliorax…Dean?”
“He can’t breathe,” Cas’s voice comes from the kitchenette. He’s making sandwiches because they are the only thing he knows how to make, meat and lettuce and mustard the way Bobby taught him. “He’s asking for help. He can’t breathe.”
Is he kidding? “Cas, jesus, you…don’t you tell me what to do with him, you fucking did this to him.”
Cas appears in the doorway. “That’s not fair, Dean.”
“I’m sorry, am I not being fucking fair to you? You left him, Cas, how is that fair?” Sam whines a little behind him, hands clapped over his ears. “Sammy, shh, sorry…”
“I got him as soon as I could.” He lifts his hands helplessly, and for the first time Dean sees the scars cris-crossing his palms. It’s the first time he’s ever seen an injury on the angel that lasted more than about a minute.
Dean does not fucking care. “Get out,” he says. “Get the fuck out and don’t come back, Cas.”
"Dean..."
"Get out!"
Cas lowers his eyes and nods, and then he's gone and Dean does not fucking care, he doesn't.
He gets his arms around Sam and the nebulizer mouthpiece between Sam’s lips, wraps him all the way up in the cold, cold sheet and rocks him, cradles him. Sam is blue and shaking. Sam is screaming. Sam is here. Dean’s not going to think about the angel with the burned hands and haunted eyes, Sammy's here.
***
Sam’s breathing is still labored from the pneumonia, and his body is tired, so he’s sleeping twenty hours a day. When he’s awake, Dean is always with him, and Sam gives Castiel apologetic glances from under his brother’s arm and asks him to make some tea.
It’s during the third period of wakefulness - days and nights don’t mean anything right now, it’s all tied to when Sam is awake - that he hears Sam talking in his shaky little half-sentences about the things that happened while Dean was away, spaghetti and wings and kisses, kisses, kisses. It's a happy story and Sam is happy and hopeful, but Dean tightens like a spring as he listens, and in his low voice that makes its way into the wood of the house so Castiel can always hear it, says “it’s okay, Sammy. Don’t worry.”
He pretends not to have heard. He washes dishes, moving slowly because if a dish breaks it’ll scare Sam. He will learn everything that scares Sam and he will never do any of it. He will be perfect. He will make his human so happy.
Sam cough-cough-coughs and Castiel rubs his hand over a plate (too cold and too hard, he wants Sam) and whispers “shhhh.”
He doesn’t get Sam, not this time, because Sam falls asleep in Dean’s arms instead.
Dean comes out when the dishes are dry, when Sam’s asleep and Castiel is sitting at the table with a mug of the tea Sam never got to drink. He takes the dishes from the rack, drops them in the sink and scrubs at them furiously.
Castiel clears his throat, which is a learned behavior, something he does because it makes Sam smile. There’s not anything in his throat. “Dean.”
Dean doesn’t answer. He’s angry in the way that isn’t anger at all. He’s in pain.
“Dean, you'll wake him...”
Dean drops the dishes, spins around, shoulders heaving. “How dare you.”
“I…what?"
“Do you think we’re yours? We’re not yours. You’re not ours.”
“This isn’t about the dishes.”
“No, Cas, it’s not about the fucking dishes. How could you - I trusted you with him, how the fuck?”
“Dean.” He stands. “I didn’t - I’d never hurt him.”
“Everything fucking hurts him!”
“I love him,” Castiel whispers.
Dean’s across the room in two steps, fist clenched around Castiel’s collar, backing him into a wall. Castiel allows it. Sam would be destroyed if Dean was hurt.
There’s an ache in his stomach, suddenly. Dean.
Dean - fragile, forceful, fierce - is in his face, hot breath and animalistic, bared teeth, snarling, “You don’t fucking know what love is, Cas.”
Sam coughs in his sleep and Dean’s muscles tremble and Castiel is absolutely positive that isn’t true.
***
Christa is the only one who can take apart the blender - Cas doesn’t know how and Sam and Dean can’t show him because they just fucking can’t, okay? She sponges strawberry bits off the blades. “A grown man should know how to do this, Dean. What’s the problem?”
Dean can’t touch blades, is the problem. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated. You just pull here and it lifts right out!”
She’s a good therapist, but there are things she just won’t ever understand. It’s fucking miraculous she understands Sam as well as she does (better than Dean does, sometimes, and don’t think that doesn’t suck, his kid reaching for Christa, reaching for Cas, it’s not that he never wants Dean, it’s that he doesn’t want him always anymore).
But whatever. Sammy’s getting better. He’s not gonna complain, y’know? He’s gonna box up some of the muffins Sam made for her to take home.
Sammy’s getting so much better that he’s out in the garden naked with Cas, not caring who (Dean) sees. Christa sees them too, on the way to her car, and points and laughs, one part amused and two parts delighted, and there are things she won’t ever understand.
He fantasizes putting a stop to it, marching out there guns blazing (which is Bobby’s expression, guns don’t blaze and Dean wouldn’t point a real gun at Sammy or even Cas, really) and tearing the angel away from his brother the way he’s ached to every day since the cage. It doesn’t matter that he’s Cas. It doesn’t matter that Sam loves him.
There’s a small hand on his arm. “Dean.”
He shakes her off, not violently.
“Look at him.”
He looks. He can just see Sam’s head over the top of the raspberry bushes that surround the garden, eyes closed , mouth open in a breathless (no, it’s fine, it’s good, he’s happy and the word itself isn’t a fucking jinx) smile. He’s panting a little, but it doesn’t look like asthma (that smile), and then Cas lifts his head into view and falls backward onto Sam’s shoulder, burrowing his face into Sam’s neck. There’s sunlight on their faces, changing shapes as they move.
Dean feels weird and voyeuristic and get the fuck off his brother.
“He’s happy,” Christa says softly. “After everything. He can do this and be happy.”
“But with…”
She raises her eyebrows a little. “With a guy?”
With an angel. That’s the end of that sentence.
“He can’t help who he loves,” she says. “It’s fucking amazing that he can do it at all.”
He loved me the whole time, Dean thinks, and has no idea what he means by that.
***
After Sam’s asleep, Castiel takes his own pillow and goes quietly up the stairs and into the second floor bathroom.
Dean’s lying in a puddle of his own sweat, pale and shaking and muttering about demons, but he looks up when Castiel enters. “Cas?”
“It’s all right.” Castiel pulls the towel down from the rack and wipes Dean’s face, helps him out of his soaked shirt, wets a corner of the towel and cleans the sweat from his body. “You’re doing fine, Dean.”
“S-Sammy?”
“He’s fine. Misses you. He’d be up here himself if he could make it.”
“Sick…”
“I know you are. It’s okay.”
“Nnn. Sam.”
Sam’s on day four of an ugly asthma flare that has him gasping and clinging to his nebulizer with both hands, and Dean is usually so wrapped up in his brother that sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s on day three of withdrawal and has no idea how Sam is doing. “He’s under the weather,” Castiel says. It’s an expression he picked up from Christa, and it means something like the pollen is high, which is why weather.
Dean hauls himself up on trembling arms and hugs the toilet bowl, convulses once. Castiel touches his back hesitantly. Dean isn’t Sam. Dean doesn’t like this.
But in this moment, Dean doesn’t pull away. He groans and heaves and then falls backward like a rag doll, and Castiel catches him and cradles him.
Dean closes his eyes. He’s shivering so hard. “Y-you don’t have to do this.”
He gives Dean sips of water from the toothbrush cup (Dean bought Castiel his toothbrush, gray like his wings, growled take care of your fucking teeth if you’re going to eat food, dumbass), mops the sweat from his face. “It’s all right, Dean. You’re my - you’re my friend.”
***
Four hours into surgery, Christa’s sleeping and Kylie’s waking up and Dean’s tweaking on his seventeenth cup of coffee and he has to make it eighteen because eighteen is a three (it’s a good three, too, three times six and one plus eight is nine, three three three). Sammy loves threes and if Dean drinks the right amount of coffee it’ll be good luck, Sam’ll be okay.
Four hours into surgery, Cas has been crying for four hours straight.
Kylie wailed when they wheeled Sam away and fell asleep sniffling . Christa’s been dabbing at her eyes intermittently. Even Dean excused himself to the bathroom, not that he was crying, gripping the paper towel dispenser so hard it bends in your hand isn’t crying. But the point is, no one’s been exactly stoic about Sam being in surgery (Sam’s ribs are spread open and there are hands in his chest).
No one’s been stoic, but Cas has been crying nonstop, and there’s something particularly heartbreaking about it. It’s something to do with the way he acts normal - tries to act normal, anyway, it’s hard to pass off waterworks of this magnitude as normal - thanking Christa when she brings him tea, flipping through magazines, playing checkers with Kylie.
He doesn’t know he’s crying, Sam’s voice explains in his head (over snapping ribs, bloody hands, throbbing hearts).
Christa crouches down in front of them and gives them numbers that are sometimes reassuring and sometimes fucking scary, but they get better and better as time goes by. “His odds are great now,” she says, one hand on Dean’s knee, one on Cas’s arm. “The new heart’s in and working. The worst part’s over. Dean, honey, you hear me? He’s gonna be fine.”
Maybe he was supposed to answer. He doesn’t know. Sam is cut open and there are hands inside him and Dean’s heart is racing and their angel is crying.
Kylie climbs on the chair on Cas’s other side and hugs him, rocks him and kisses his cheek and says “don’t cry, Castiel, Sammy loves you,” and Cas nods and says thank you like this is helping, but he (can’t, won’t) doesn’t stop crying.
Dean doesn’t say anything, just leans sideways and drives his shoulder into Castiel’s arm almost hard enough to hurt.
Castiel leans into him, accepting, giving back.
They wait.
***
It’s Dean’s turn at the hospital.
Christa and Emmy were up all night, both of them crying, and so Dean was up all night too, even when Castiel finally coaxed Sam to sleep and whispered soft nonsense in his ear to paint his dreams pretty colors.
He stands behind his charge, both hands on his shoulders, and tries to give Dean peace, but he can’t remember how to do this for anyone but Sam. Sam is so open. Dean is a steel trap. Dean doesn’t want anything. (Dean wants everything, but he doesn’t know how to receive it, and Castiel isn’t an angel anymore.)
Now Dean’s asleep, his head resting on the back of his hand on top of the incubator. Inside, baby Jude waves a tiny fist in the air. His surgery is tomorrow morning. Dean’s head is a mess of fear and confusion and desperate shaking love. Dean’s head is saying Sammy, Sammy, Sammy and even though this baby isn’t Sam, Castiel thinks he understands.
Jude is hazel-eyed and blue-lipped like Sam, and he kicks his tiny baby feet at the top of incubator. Castiel reaches in through the hole and catches a foot in his hand. Tiny human.
“I’ll take care of you,” Castiel whispers. Jude waves a fist.
He pulls a chair up alongside the incubator and reaches his other hand in to play with the baby’s sparse hair while he wiggles his foot. “Your father loves you so much.”
Jude kicks.
“We all love you so much,” Castiel says, very quietly, feeling the truth and the weight of it.
Dean shifts a little, blinks himself awake. “Cas?” His voice is rough with sleep and worry.
Castiel reaches across the incubator and rests a hand on Dean’s arm. “It’s all right.” He moves his thumb slowly, the way he’s seen Dean do for Sam, rubbing across Dean’s wrist. “Everyone’s all right.”
Dean closes his eyes. A tear shakes loose. He turns his arm under Castiel’s hand and grips his wrist, and Castiel closes his fingers gently around Dean’s arm.
Between them, Jude closes his eyes, and Castiel watches pretty things chase each other through his head.
***
Officially the wedding was months ago, before any of the kids were born, but Kylie and Sam have been hectoring for a party, and Christa and Dean are terrible at saying no to their kids.
There was discussion of Castiel performing the ceremony (“you could be married by an actual angel, Dean!” Sam said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet) but Dean said no, so Matt got a special certificate online and Castiel is in a freshly pressed suit with a freshly tied bow tie, poking his head into Christa’s bedroom to let her know Dean’s ready.
She’s beautiful in gold and the girls are giddy, Kylie moving slowly with affected maturity and natural grace, the little ones in bubblegum pink and bare feet. Emmy throws origami flowers at him and Zoe kisses his knees.
“We’ll be down in a minute,” Christa tells him.
Castiel nods.
Downstairs, Sam and Dean are talking softly, their heads bowed together. Dean bites at his lip and it seems like maybe they need some space, but then Sam waves him over and pins an origami flower to his lapel.
“What’s this?”
“Best Men are supposed to wear flowers.” Sam touches his own. “It means you’re special.
They stand under the treehouse. Sam is to his brother’s right, Castiel to his left. Jude is solemn in front of them, the two wedding bands clutched tightly in his hand.
The door from the house opens, and Emmy and Zoe come sprinting out, laughing, throwing flowers, toes in the dirt. Zoe stumbles as she reaches them and Dean springs forward, scoops her into his arms. He kisses her nose and hands her to Castiel. Emmy wraps herself around Sam’s leg and takes Jude’s hand.
Kylie does pirouettes and pas de bourrees across the yard. Sam claps and whistles.
Then Christa’s there, coming towards them with the biggest grin Castiel’s ever seen on her face. He reaches out to rest a hand in the middle of Dean’s back and finds Sam already there. Their fingers link together. Sam rubs his thumb across Castiel’s ring and then moves his arm to Dean’s shoulders.
And Dean smiles.
Author: familybizness
Summary: Dean thought he could never forgive Cas. Somewhere along the way, things changed.
Word Count: 3426
Author's Note: The first scene of this story, a flashback, was written by shangrilada and is part of a longer story, which can be found here. You don't need to read that whole story to appreciate this one, but I recommend reading it because it's effing awesome. Fans of Sammyverse have probably read it already.
Hell makes Dean taste tendons and fluids and he soothes Sam into sleep while the monsters laugh and gnash their teeth and then one morning they drag him away from Sam and there is a rush of light and sound and confusion on Sam's face and Dean blinks and opens his eyes in a field.
With Cas.
"Hello, Dean."
He's scrambling up to his feet, throwing himself around him (the air is so cool and thin and there is water--water--on the grass and there are clouds) and whispering thank-yous and Cas gives him cautious pats on the back.
Dean pulls back. "Where's Sam?"
Cas says, "Dean, I..."
"He needs like all the fucking medicine, we have to...he..." He's fucking spinning around, looking.
Even after he's figured out the fucking punch line, he's looking.
And there's nothing.
Nothing.
No hole in the ground leading to the cage.
No wheezing.
No laughing.
No body to grab and shake and cry over.
No temper tantrums, no teasing, no head on his knee.
He swallows again and again. "Where's Sam?"
"Dean, I only had enough grace for one--"
"Then you chose the wrong fucking one!"
"Dean."
"How did you not choose Sam!"
And he's going to lose it, going to fucking lose it, because his sun his joy his heart is broken, broken and breaking a hundred miles and a hundred lifetimes underground alone afraid cold hurting and screaming you picked the wrong one you picked the wrong brother, Sam cannot be alone, Sam cannot be in Hell.
He moves to punch Cas but Cas anticipates it and the next thing he knows he's lying on the ground (wet grass, fucking alive) with his hands pinned and Cas growling in his ear, "Because I couldn't live without you, you useless son of a bitch."
***
Dean's been in bed for days, ever since Castiel dragged him through Bobby's front door. He screamed for hours, screamed himself silent, hands fisted in his hair. Now he's still, curled up into the smallest ball of human Castiel has ever seen. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t respond when Bobby crouches beside the bed and rests a hand on his shoulder, calls him son and says gentle things under his breath. He groans a little when Castiel says his name, and in his sleep his mouth moves - Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.
Bobby brings bottles of whiskey, and Dean clutches them with both hands, curls around them and drinks like it’s tying him to life. Castiel waits for him to slip into unconsciousness and takes the bottles away, leaves them on the nightstand because sometimes when he’s had enough to drink Dean’s soul stops shivering for a while.
Sometimes Castiel wonders if it was all a mistake.
In the middle of the third week Dean springs out of bed like he’s been thinking about it and marches down to the library. Castiel finds him in a pile of books, hand still wrapped around the bottle, turning pages.
“We’re going to save Sam,” he says, not looking up, not waiting to be asked.
“Dean…”
“Shut it, Cas. You got me out, we can get him out. Either help or go away.”
Castiel doesn’t owe anything to Dean Winchester anymore (he never owed anything to Sam). Recovering Sam will be next to impossible, if it can be done at all - this is probably going to end with Dean twice as miserable and completely hopeless - and if they do get Sam back, he is not going to be the sweet little brother Dean remembers. Castiel’s brothers are destroying him.
Dean clutches the bottle and drinks and shivers.
Why is it so hard to walk away from this man.
***
Dean can’t stop laughing. He’s half-hysterical, clapping his hands to his mouth to stifle it, but when no one objects he just fucking lets himself go. It’s not funny. No one is pretending it’s funny. It’s Sammy. He’s fucking shattered, and Dean is fucking shattered to see him like this, but it’s fine and he is so goddamn happy.
He can’t stop reaching out, even though Sam flinches away from his hands and presses himself into the corner so hard he might fuse with the fucking wall. He reaches, pulls back, reaches, and Sam shivers and cries and won’t fucking look at him, but it’s fine, it’s okay, nothing is ever going to hurt again because Sam is here and so what do the past fifteen (sixteen? A million?) months matter, really?
Sammy’s wrapped up in his own arms and pulling away from light, naked animal crouched on a sheet, whimpering, little brother is so fucking broken, but they got him back and they are going to get him back.
“Sammy.”
“Bliorax,” Sam breathes, and wheezes, and godfuckingdamn that wheeze, Dean could just wrap up in it and roll around and be happy for the rest of his life (and the rest of his life could be ten years or ten minutes, it doesn’t matter, everything’s just fine now).
He rests a hand on his brother’s foot.
“Gigipah!” Sam’s voice is a breathless scream, and he’s doubling over, hands clenched in his hair, wheezing so hard it sounds like shrieking (like hell). Dean jerks his hand back and immediately wants to fucking reach out again. The lack of Sam is painful.
“Sammy, calm down, please, gotta breathe, I got you. Right here. Look at me. Look at me, Sam.”
“Bliorax…bliorax…Dean?”
“He can’t breathe,” Cas’s voice comes from the kitchenette. He’s making sandwiches because they are the only thing he knows how to make, meat and lettuce and mustard the way Bobby taught him. “He’s asking for help. He can’t breathe.”
Is he kidding? “Cas, jesus, you…don’t you tell me what to do with him, you fucking did this to him.”
Cas appears in the doorway. “That’s not fair, Dean.”
“I’m sorry, am I not being fucking fair to you? You left him, Cas, how is that fair?” Sam whines a little behind him, hands clapped over his ears. “Sammy, shh, sorry…”
“I got him as soon as I could.” He lifts his hands helplessly, and for the first time Dean sees the scars cris-crossing his palms. It’s the first time he’s ever seen an injury on the angel that lasted more than about a minute.
Dean does not fucking care. “Get out,” he says. “Get the fuck out and don’t come back, Cas.”
"Dean..."
"Get out!"
Cas lowers his eyes and nods, and then he's gone and Dean does not fucking care, he doesn't.
He gets his arms around Sam and the nebulizer mouthpiece between Sam’s lips, wraps him all the way up in the cold, cold sheet and rocks him, cradles him. Sam is blue and shaking. Sam is screaming. Sam is here. Dean’s not going to think about the angel with the burned hands and haunted eyes, Sammy's here.
***
Sam’s breathing is still labored from the pneumonia, and his body is tired, so he’s sleeping twenty hours a day. When he’s awake, Dean is always with him, and Sam gives Castiel apologetic glances from under his brother’s arm and asks him to make some tea.
It’s during the third period of wakefulness - days and nights don’t mean anything right now, it’s all tied to when Sam is awake - that he hears Sam talking in his shaky little half-sentences about the things that happened while Dean was away, spaghetti and wings and kisses, kisses, kisses. It's a happy story and Sam is happy and hopeful, but Dean tightens like a spring as he listens, and in his low voice that makes its way into the wood of the house so Castiel can always hear it, says “it’s okay, Sammy. Don’t worry.”
He pretends not to have heard. He washes dishes, moving slowly because if a dish breaks it’ll scare Sam. He will learn everything that scares Sam and he will never do any of it. He will be perfect. He will make his human so happy.
Sam cough-cough-coughs and Castiel rubs his hand over a plate (too cold and too hard, he wants Sam) and whispers “shhhh.”
He doesn’t get Sam, not this time, because Sam falls asleep in Dean’s arms instead.
Dean comes out when the dishes are dry, when Sam’s asleep and Castiel is sitting at the table with a mug of the tea Sam never got to drink. He takes the dishes from the rack, drops them in the sink and scrubs at them furiously.
Castiel clears his throat, which is a learned behavior, something he does because it makes Sam smile. There’s not anything in his throat. “Dean.”
Dean doesn’t answer. He’s angry in the way that isn’t anger at all. He’s in pain.
“Dean, you'll wake him...”
Dean drops the dishes, spins around, shoulders heaving. “How dare you.”
“I…what?"
“Do you think we’re yours? We’re not yours. You’re not ours.”
“This isn’t about the dishes.”
“No, Cas, it’s not about the fucking dishes. How could you - I trusted you with him, how the fuck?”
“Dean.” He stands. “I didn’t - I’d never hurt him.”
“Everything fucking hurts him!”
“I love him,” Castiel whispers.
Dean’s across the room in two steps, fist clenched around Castiel’s collar, backing him into a wall. Castiel allows it. Sam would be destroyed if Dean was hurt.
There’s an ache in his stomach, suddenly. Dean.
Dean - fragile, forceful, fierce - is in his face, hot breath and animalistic, bared teeth, snarling, “You don’t fucking know what love is, Cas.”
Sam coughs in his sleep and Dean’s muscles tremble and Castiel is absolutely positive that isn’t true.
***
Christa is the only one who can take apart the blender - Cas doesn’t know how and Sam and Dean can’t show him because they just fucking can’t, okay? She sponges strawberry bits off the blades. “A grown man should know how to do this, Dean. What’s the problem?”
Dean can’t touch blades, is the problem. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated. You just pull here and it lifts right out!”
She’s a good therapist, but there are things she just won’t ever understand. It’s fucking miraculous she understands Sam as well as she does (better than Dean does, sometimes, and don’t think that doesn’t suck, his kid reaching for Christa, reaching for Cas, it’s not that he never wants Dean, it’s that he doesn’t want him always anymore).
But whatever. Sammy’s getting better. He’s not gonna complain, y’know? He’s gonna box up some of the muffins Sam made for her to take home.
Sammy’s getting so much better that he’s out in the garden naked with Cas, not caring who (Dean) sees. Christa sees them too, on the way to her car, and points and laughs, one part amused and two parts delighted, and there are things she won’t ever understand.
He fantasizes putting a stop to it, marching out there guns blazing (which is Bobby’s expression, guns don’t blaze and Dean wouldn’t point a real gun at Sammy or even Cas, really) and tearing the angel away from his brother the way he’s ached to every day since the cage. It doesn’t matter that he’s Cas. It doesn’t matter that Sam loves him.
There’s a small hand on his arm. “Dean.”
He shakes her off, not violently.
“Look at him.”
He looks. He can just see Sam’s head over the top of the raspberry bushes that surround the garden, eyes closed , mouth open in a breathless (no, it’s fine, it’s good, he’s happy and the word itself isn’t a fucking jinx) smile. He’s panting a little, but it doesn’t look like asthma (that smile), and then Cas lifts his head into view and falls backward onto Sam’s shoulder, burrowing his face into Sam’s neck. There’s sunlight on their faces, changing shapes as they move.
Dean feels weird and voyeuristic and get the fuck off his brother.
“He’s happy,” Christa says softly. “After everything. He can do this and be happy.”
“But with…”
She raises her eyebrows a little. “With a guy?”
With an angel. That’s the end of that sentence.
“He can’t help who he loves,” she says. “It’s fucking amazing that he can do it at all.”
He loved me the whole time, Dean thinks, and has no idea what he means by that.
***
After Sam’s asleep, Castiel takes his own pillow and goes quietly up the stairs and into the second floor bathroom.
Dean’s lying in a puddle of his own sweat, pale and shaking and muttering about demons, but he looks up when Castiel enters. “Cas?”
“It’s all right.” Castiel pulls the towel down from the rack and wipes Dean’s face, helps him out of his soaked shirt, wets a corner of the towel and cleans the sweat from his body. “You’re doing fine, Dean.”
“S-Sammy?”
“He’s fine. Misses you. He’d be up here himself if he could make it.”
“Sick…”
“I know you are. It’s okay.”
“Nnn. Sam.”
Sam’s on day four of an ugly asthma flare that has him gasping and clinging to his nebulizer with both hands, and Dean is usually so wrapped up in his brother that sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s on day three of withdrawal and has no idea how Sam is doing. “He’s under the weather,” Castiel says. It’s an expression he picked up from Christa, and it means something like the pollen is high, which is why weather.
Dean hauls himself up on trembling arms and hugs the toilet bowl, convulses once. Castiel touches his back hesitantly. Dean isn’t Sam. Dean doesn’t like this.
But in this moment, Dean doesn’t pull away. He groans and heaves and then falls backward like a rag doll, and Castiel catches him and cradles him.
Dean closes his eyes. He’s shivering so hard. “Y-you don’t have to do this.”
He gives Dean sips of water from the toothbrush cup (Dean bought Castiel his toothbrush, gray like his wings, growled take care of your fucking teeth if you’re going to eat food, dumbass), mops the sweat from his face. “It’s all right, Dean. You’re my - you’re my friend.”
***
Four hours into surgery, Christa’s sleeping and Kylie’s waking up and Dean’s tweaking on his seventeenth cup of coffee and he has to make it eighteen because eighteen is a three (it’s a good three, too, three times six and one plus eight is nine, three three three). Sammy loves threes and if Dean drinks the right amount of coffee it’ll be good luck, Sam’ll be okay.
Four hours into surgery, Cas has been crying for four hours straight.
Kylie wailed when they wheeled Sam away and fell asleep sniffling . Christa’s been dabbing at her eyes intermittently. Even Dean excused himself to the bathroom, not that he was crying, gripping the paper towel dispenser so hard it bends in your hand isn’t crying. But the point is, no one’s been exactly stoic about Sam being in surgery (Sam’s ribs are spread open and there are hands in his chest).
No one’s been stoic, but Cas has been crying nonstop, and there’s something particularly heartbreaking about it. It’s something to do with the way he acts normal - tries to act normal, anyway, it’s hard to pass off waterworks of this magnitude as normal - thanking Christa when she brings him tea, flipping through magazines, playing checkers with Kylie.
He doesn’t know he’s crying, Sam’s voice explains in his head (over snapping ribs, bloody hands, throbbing hearts).
Christa crouches down in front of them and gives them numbers that are sometimes reassuring and sometimes fucking scary, but they get better and better as time goes by. “His odds are great now,” she says, one hand on Dean’s knee, one on Cas’s arm. “The new heart’s in and working. The worst part’s over. Dean, honey, you hear me? He’s gonna be fine.”
Maybe he was supposed to answer. He doesn’t know. Sam is cut open and there are hands inside him and Dean’s heart is racing and their angel is crying.
Kylie climbs on the chair on Cas’s other side and hugs him, rocks him and kisses his cheek and says “don’t cry, Castiel, Sammy loves you,” and Cas nods and says thank you like this is helping, but he (can’t, won’t) doesn’t stop crying.
Dean doesn’t say anything, just leans sideways and drives his shoulder into Castiel’s arm almost hard enough to hurt.
Castiel leans into him, accepting, giving back.
They wait.
***
It’s Dean’s turn at the hospital.
Christa and Emmy were up all night, both of them crying, and so Dean was up all night too, even when Castiel finally coaxed Sam to sleep and whispered soft nonsense in his ear to paint his dreams pretty colors.
He stands behind his charge, both hands on his shoulders, and tries to give Dean peace, but he can’t remember how to do this for anyone but Sam. Sam is so open. Dean is a steel trap. Dean doesn’t want anything. (Dean wants everything, but he doesn’t know how to receive it, and Castiel isn’t an angel anymore.)
Now Dean’s asleep, his head resting on the back of his hand on top of the incubator. Inside, baby Jude waves a tiny fist in the air. His surgery is tomorrow morning. Dean’s head is a mess of fear and confusion and desperate shaking love. Dean’s head is saying Sammy, Sammy, Sammy and even though this baby isn’t Sam, Castiel thinks he understands.
Jude is hazel-eyed and blue-lipped like Sam, and he kicks his tiny baby feet at the top of incubator. Castiel reaches in through the hole and catches a foot in his hand. Tiny human.
“I’ll take care of you,” Castiel whispers. Jude waves a fist.
He pulls a chair up alongside the incubator and reaches his other hand in to play with the baby’s sparse hair while he wiggles his foot. “Your father loves you so much.”
Jude kicks.
“We all love you so much,” Castiel says, very quietly, feeling the truth and the weight of it.
Dean shifts a little, blinks himself awake. “Cas?” His voice is rough with sleep and worry.
Castiel reaches across the incubator and rests a hand on Dean’s arm. “It’s all right.” He moves his thumb slowly, the way he’s seen Dean do for Sam, rubbing across Dean’s wrist. “Everyone’s all right.”
Dean closes his eyes. A tear shakes loose. He turns his arm under Castiel’s hand and grips his wrist, and Castiel closes his fingers gently around Dean’s arm.
Between them, Jude closes his eyes, and Castiel watches pretty things chase each other through his head.
***
Officially the wedding was months ago, before any of the kids were born, but Kylie and Sam have been hectoring for a party, and Christa and Dean are terrible at saying no to their kids.
There was discussion of Castiel performing the ceremony (“you could be married by an actual angel, Dean!” Sam said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet) but Dean said no, so Matt got a special certificate online and Castiel is in a freshly pressed suit with a freshly tied bow tie, poking his head into Christa’s bedroom to let her know Dean’s ready.
She’s beautiful in gold and the girls are giddy, Kylie moving slowly with affected maturity and natural grace, the little ones in bubblegum pink and bare feet. Emmy throws origami flowers at him and Zoe kisses his knees.
“We’ll be down in a minute,” Christa tells him.
Castiel nods.
Downstairs, Sam and Dean are talking softly, their heads bowed together. Dean bites at his lip and it seems like maybe they need some space, but then Sam waves him over and pins an origami flower to his lapel.
“What’s this?”
“Best Men are supposed to wear flowers.” Sam touches his own. “It means you’re special.
They stand under the treehouse. Sam is to his brother’s right, Castiel to his left. Jude is solemn in front of them, the two wedding bands clutched tightly in his hand.
The door from the house opens, and Emmy and Zoe come sprinting out, laughing, throwing flowers, toes in the dirt. Zoe stumbles as she reaches them and Dean springs forward, scoops her into his arms. He kisses her nose and hands her to Castiel. Emmy wraps herself around Sam’s leg and takes Jude’s hand.
Kylie does pirouettes and pas de bourrees across the yard. Sam claps and whistles.
Then Christa’s there, coming towards them with the biggest grin Castiel’s ever seen on her face. He reaches out to rest a hand in the middle of Dean’s back and finds Sam already there. Their fingers link together. Sam rubs his thumb across Castiel’s ring and then moves his arm to Dean’s shoulders.
And Dean smiles.