Unexpected Destinies Chapter 15
Title Unexpected Destinies
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: up to and including Exile on Main St., AU from the end of season 5
Warnings: AU, slash
Word Count: 2,103
Summary: Dean comes to a startling revelation about Castiel's feelings towards him.
PAST
Dean could only stare in shock and wonder as the new angel, Xarael apparently, bounced over towards where they were seated and he rose to his feet automatically. She was everything Castiel was not when it came to appearing to be comfortable in a vessel and how she moved in it. Though, he mused, it wasn't like he'd never met an angel who wasn't well suited to their vessel, Gabriel and Zachariah sprang straight to mind. He'd never really thought of that before, how easily they seemed to move, as if far more familiar with their vessels. Or perhaps, in Zachariah's case, because he'd taken vessels before? Gabriel he could understand, who knew how long the archangel had been in the poor guy, but Xarael? She was a mystery.
Then Dean could only respond in embarrassment as Xarael started talking to him. He was so used to dealing with either scorn or disgust when it came to angels other than Cas that this seeming enthusiasm and adulation caught him completely off-guard. He should have seen it coming, though, given that Castiel seemed to both like Xarael and spend a lot of time with her. Who knew what fictionalized accounts he'd told her?
Inevitably, Xarael's approach resulted in the invasion of his personal space and with her this close, Dean couldn't help a quick glance down her low cut top. Xarael's vessel really was very beautiful and well endowed. If she wasn't an angel, he'd definitely be flirting with her by now. Then, suddenly, Castiel was there, pulling her back a few paces to a more normal distance and informing her about how humans didn't like people standing quite so close to them. That they needed at least six inches of space.
What the hell?
Dean could only stare in shock and then quickly confirm Cas' words with a nod and accept Xarael's apology. Since when did Castiel care about personal space? The angel still stood far too close himself most of the time, so why was he so adamant that Xarael not do the same now? It didn't make any sense whatsoever, even for Castiel and that was saying a lot.
Although Dean forced himself to not only pay attention to the rest of the conversation, but to participate as well, part of him kept mulling over this bizarre contradiction. His concentration also wasn't helped by the fact that another part of him was preoccupied with trying to figure out what else about Xarael and Castiel's behavior was bothering him. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something about it was wrong, off somehow. It finally hit him that it wasn't so much something that they were both doing, as a glaring difference between what they were doing.
The realization hit him like a ton of bricks and Dean couldn't see how he hadn't spotted it immediately. Despite the fact that Xarael had all of the outward appearances of being more human when it came to how she moved, it was Castiel who had all of the true indicators of a more human disposition, namely the small ticks and more natural behaviors. Where Xarael stared him in the eyes from the moment she turned to him to the moment she looked back at her brother, Castiel would meet his eyes, but he'd also look down and he'd learned to glance away if Dean started to overtly fidget, not that he was doing that nearly as often as he would have done in the past.
In addition to that, Cas also turned towards him when he stepped closer to look at the book Xarael had brought whereas Xarael seemed to remain in more or less the same position once she'd stopped bouncing around. So it seemed like her movements were more natural when going from A to B but once she was there, she just froze up. Castiel, on the other hand, seemed to slowly be working his way towards him and he had no doubt that, earlier speech or not, the angel would end up in his personal space.
Now that he'd started thinking about the ways in which Castiel had slowly seemed to have become more human during his time on Earth, Dean found that he couldn't stop. Nor could he help but notice a few other things as well. And almost all of the instances that came to mind revolved around him. Not Sam, not Bobby, not really even Jo and Ellen who had done their damnest to get the angel drunk that one night, but him and him alone. Like the first time Dean had seen Castiel again after what they'd thought was the end of the Apocalypse. He'd just been coming out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel and the angel's eyes had definitely looked down at his naked chest for a moment. Just like he'd glanced down when he'd appeared in the shower with him all those months ago.
Something gave Dean the impression that he could be naked now and Xarael wouldn't even notice. For all of her supposed adoration, she seemed surprisingly little aware of him in some odd way. He almost wondered if all she could see was his soul, or perhaps that his soul was all she focused on, ignoring the rest as insignificant. It was possible, he mused and seemed similar to the way Castiel had treated him at first. It was only after spending time here on Earth, mingling with humans, that the angel had seemed to start gaining an appreciation for the less spiritual side of human life.
The thoughts strained towards another conclusion that seemed natural had the subject of his contemplation been human and Dean had to forcibly remind himself that this wasn't the case. Castiel was an angel, perhaps one with a far better understanding of humanity and the physical aspects of life than was normal, but an angel nonetheless, especially now that God had brought him back a second time and given him far greater powers than he'd had before. So he had to be wary of assigning too human an interpretation on his actions, but hadn't that been precisely what he'd been doing up to now?
He might not have been doing it consciously most of the time, but on some level he must have been filtering things out. Dean was normally very good at reading people based on their body language and he was a bit surprised at himself that he hadn't noticed this earlier. The only thing he could think of was that he'd been automatically writing off all the clues as being the result of Castiel not knowing what normal human behavior was like and thus not realizing how his actions could be misinterpreted. The fact that he'd disregarded personal space from the get go had gone a long way towards seeming to prove this theory. But now that he was confronted with another angel that seemed to have little or no experience in dealing with humans, the progress Cas had made became apparent and with it how unangelic, or rather different from before, some of his behaviors were.
A part of Dean was begging him to acknowledge what all of this could mean, but the rest of him was far too wary. Just because it looked like Castiel might like him in that way didn't mean that the angel really did. He was loath to trust his instincts in this particular case as he had a vested interest in the answer and thus might skew the evidence to see what he wanted to. Besides, there was also the whole different species thing. Who knew what angels did when they really liked someone? For all he knew, the behaviors Castiel was displaying now were merely a part of his ever growing awareness of how humans viewed and interacted with their environment and he was getting the brunt of that new attention simply by virtue of the fact that he was the human that Cas interacted with the most.
Still, Dean had to admit that he hadn't seen Castiel show similar attentions to Sam back when they'd still been together, or Bobby for that matter and the angel had known both of them well enough that he should have done so if a growing awareness was all that this was. So how to be certain without making a complete fool of himself? He supposed he could just put some of his theories to the test. Besides, now that he was thinking about it, he kept being able to find more and more things to back up what he now so desperately hoped to be true and who was he kidding? Any chance he'd had of not being hurt if the angel didn't feel the same way about him were long since gone.
Dean knew himself too well to even try and dispute that particular fact. His growing attraction to Castiel would have been enough on its own to hurt him if it turned out the angel was even merely indifferent on the issue. Now that he had what the less rational part of his mind viewed as proof that Cas did care about him in that way, there was absolutely no hope of coming out of this unscratched. It was just that the evidence seemed to be piling up.
On top of the shower incident and the post shower incident, Dean now remembered the way Castiel had held him and touched him that night he'd zapped into his room only to find him asleep in his clothes on the covers. His back and scalp still tingled when he thought about those gentle fingers running over his bare skin. Then there was the way he kept insisting that he didn't like to see him in pain and the way he'd been so insistent that he stop drinking. Not to mention the way Cas had been getting him food lately and sticking around when he didn't have to. It was as if he just liked to spend time with him and that was something Dean didn't have all that much experience with. Most people seemed to constantly be leaving him for one reason or another, Sam in particular couldn't seem to find enough ways and reasons to do so.
The thought of his brother pained Dean as always, but this time it also angered him at least as much as it hurt him. True, there had been anger before too, but it had almost always been the quick hot kind that burned itself out far too quickly. This, however, was the other kind, the one that burned lower but stayed, needing a reason, a justification, to go out. And he was finally starting to learn that the reason had to be a valid one, not just a generic 'I'm sorry, please forgive me' apology that was far too readily given and forgotten about as soon as something else came along.
/
"They were saying that they'd felt a ripple in the energy like something had changed."
"What do you mean 'like something had changed'?" Dean demanded, not liking the sound of that at all.
"It means that something has happened again," Castiel explained. "Do you remember how I mentioned before that I felt Sam's resurrection?"
"Yeah."
"That was because it caused a massive ripple in the energy field of life."
"That have anything to do with how the area around my gravesite looked like a bomb went off there?"
"Yes, precisely. That type of event requires a lot of energy as it means altering the very fabric of life by opening portals between Perdition and Earth."
"Okay, resurrection means a massive ripple felt by all angels, gotcha. What about this new one the Virties felt?"
Castiel briefly looked like he felt the very human urge to sigh and Dean couldn't help but pause at that before filing it away for later contemplation.
"From what they were saying, the Virtues didn't really know what to make of it. It had been a brief burst of energy that was gone almost as soon as it was generated," Xarael said. "No one else seems to have felt it."
"So not as important than," Dean ventured.
"It would appear so," Castiel agreed. "I shall endeavor to obtain more information from them when I return and let you know if it's anything of import."
Dean snorted. "Right now, I think everything is of import," he prefixed the last word with air quotation marks, "since we don't really seem to have the first clue about what's going on."
Chapter 16
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: up to and including Exile on Main St., AU from the end of season 5
Warnings: AU, slash
Word Count: 2,103
Summary: Dean comes to a startling revelation about Castiel's feelings towards him.
PAST
Dean could only stare in shock and wonder as the new angel, Xarael apparently, bounced over towards where they were seated and he rose to his feet automatically. She was everything Castiel was not when it came to appearing to be comfortable in a vessel and how she moved in it. Though, he mused, it wasn't like he'd never met an angel who wasn't well suited to their vessel, Gabriel and Zachariah sprang straight to mind. He'd never really thought of that before, how easily they seemed to move, as if far more familiar with their vessels. Or perhaps, in Zachariah's case, because he'd taken vessels before? Gabriel he could understand, who knew how long the archangel had been in the poor guy, but Xarael? She was a mystery.
Then Dean could only respond in embarrassment as Xarael started talking to him. He was so used to dealing with either scorn or disgust when it came to angels other than Cas that this seeming enthusiasm and adulation caught him completely off-guard. He should have seen it coming, though, given that Castiel seemed to both like Xarael and spend a lot of time with her. Who knew what fictionalized accounts he'd told her?
Inevitably, Xarael's approach resulted in the invasion of his personal space and with her this close, Dean couldn't help a quick glance down her low cut top. Xarael's vessel really was very beautiful and well endowed. If she wasn't an angel, he'd definitely be flirting with her by now. Then, suddenly, Castiel was there, pulling her back a few paces to a more normal distance and informing her about how humans didn't like people standing quite so close to them. That they needed at least six inches of space.
What the hell?
Dean could only stare in shock and then quickly confirm Cas' words with a nod and accept Xarael's apology. Since when did Castiel care about personal space? The angel still stood far too close himself most of the time, so why was he so adamant that Xarael not do the same now? It didn't make any sense whatsoever, even for Castiel and that was saying a lot.
Although Dean forced himself to not only pay attention to the rest of the conversation, but to participate as well, part of him kept mulling over this bizarre contradiction. His concentration also wasn't helped by the fact that another part of him was preoccupied with trying to figure out what else about Xarael and Castiel's behavior was bothering him. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something about it was wrong, off somehow. It finally hit him that it wasn't so much something that they were both doing, as a glaring difference between what they were doing.
The realization hit him like a ton of bricks and Dean couldn't see how he hadn't spotted it immediately. Despite the fact that Xarael had all of the outward appearances of being more human when it came to how she moved, it was Castiel who had all of the true indicators of a more human disposition, namely the small ticks and more natural behaviors. Where Xarael stared him in the eyes from the moment she turned to him to the moment she looked back at her brother, Castiel would meet his eyes, but he'd also look down and he'd learned to glance away if Dean started to overtly fidget, not that he was doing that nearly as often as he would have done in the past.
In addition to that, Cas also turned towards him when he stepped closer to look at the book Xarael had brought whereas Xarael seemed to remain in more or less the same position once she'd stopped bouncing around. So it seemed like her movements were more natural when going from A to B but once she was there, she just froze up. Castiel, on the other hand, seemed to slowly be working his way towards him and he had no doubt that, earlier speech or not, the angel would end up in his personal space.
Now that he'd started thinking about the ways in which Castiel had slowly seemed to have become more human during his time on Earth, Dean found that he couldn't stop. Nor could he help but notice a few other things as well. And almost all of the instances that came to mind revolved around him. Not Sam, not Bobby, not really even Jo and Ellen who had done their damnest to get the angel drunk that one night, but him and him alone. Like the first time Dean had seen Castiel again after what they'd thought was the end of the Apocalypse. He'd just been coming out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel and the angel's eyes had definitely looked down at his naked chest for a moment. Just like he'd glanced down when he'd appeared in the shower with him all those months ago.
Something gave Dean the impression that he could be naked now and Xarael wouldn't even notice. For all of her supposed adoration, she seemed surprisingly little aware of him in some odd way. He almost wondered if all she could see was his soul, or perhaps that his soul was all she focused on, ignoring the rest as insignificant. It was possible, he mused and seemed similar to the way Castiel had treated him at first. It was only after spending time here on Earth, mingling with humans, that the angel had seemed to start gaining an appreciation for the less spiritual side of human life.
The thoughts strained towards another conclusion that seemed natural had the subject of his contemplation been human and Dean had to forcibly remind himself that this wasn't the case. Castiel was an angel, perhaps one with a far better understanding of humanity and the physical aspects of life than was normal, but an angel nonetheless, especially now that God had brought him back a second time and given him far greater powers than he'd had before. So he had to be wary of assigning too human an interpretation on his actions, but hadn't that been precisely what he'd been doing up to now?
He might not have been doing it consciously most of the time, but on some level he must have been filtering things out. Dean was normally very good at reading people based on their body language and he was a bit surprised at himself that he hadn't noticed this earlier. The only thing he could think of was that he'd been automatically writing off all the clues as being the result of Castiel not knowing what normal human behavior was like and thus not realizing how his actions could be misinterpreted. The fact that he'd disregarded personal space from the get go had gone a long way towards seeming to prove this theory. But now that he was confronted with another angel that seemed to have little or no experience in dealing with humans, the progress Cas had made became apparent and with it how unangelic, or rather different from before, some of his behaviors were.
A part of Dean was begging him to acknowledge what all of this could mean, but the rest of him was far too wary. Just because it looked like Castiel might like him in that way didn't mean that the angel really did. He was loath to trust his instincts in this particular case as he had a vested interest in the answer and thus might skew the evidence to see what he wanted to. Besides, there was also the whole different species thing. Who knew what angels did when they really liked someone? For all he knew, the behaviors Castiel was displaying now were merely a part of his ever growing awareness of how humans viewed and interacted with their environment and he was getting the brunt of that new attention simply by virtue of the fact that he was the human that Cas interacted with the most.
Still, Dean had to admit that he hadn't seen Castiel show similar attentions to Sam back when they'd still been together, or Bobby for that matter and the angel had known both of them well enough that he should have done so if a growing awareness was all that this was. So how to be certain without making a complete fool of himself? He supposed he could just put some of his theories to the test. Besides, now that he was thinking about it, he kept being able to find more and more things to back up what he now so desperately hoped to be true and who was he kidding? Any chance he'd had of not being hurt if the angel didn't feel the same way about him were long since gone.
Dean knew himself too well to even try and dispute that particular fact. His growing attraction to Castiel would have been enough on its own to hurt him if it turned out the angel was even merely indifferent on the issue. Now that he had what the less rational part of his mind viewed as proof that Cas did care about him in that way, there was absolutely no hope of coming out of this unscratched. It was just that the evidence seemed to be piling up.
On top of the shower incident and the post shower incident, Dean now remembered the way Castiel had held him and touched him that night he'd zapped into his room only to find him asleep in his clothes on the covers. His back and scalp still tingled when he thought about those gentle fingers running over his bare skin. Then there was the way he kept insisting that he didn't like to see him in pain and the way he'd been so insistent that he stop drinking. Not to mention the way Cas had been getting him food lately and sticking around when he didn't have to. It was as if he just liked to spend time with him and that was something Dean didn't have all that much experience with. Most people seemed to constantly be leaving him for one reason or another, Sam in particular couldn't seem to find enough ways and reasons to do so.
The thought of his brother pained Dean as always, but this time it also angered him at least as much as it hurt him. True, there had been anger before too, but it had almost always been the quick hot kind that burned itself out far too quickly. This, however, was the other kind, the one that burned lower but stayed, needing a reason, a justification, to go out. And he was finally starting to learn that the reason had to be a valid one, not just a generic 'I'm sorry, please forgive me' apology that was far too readily given and forgotten about as soon as something else came along.
/
"They were saying that they'd felt a ripple in the energy like something had changed."
"What do you mean 'like something had changed'?" Dean demanded, not liking the sound of that at all.
"It means that something has happened again," Castiel explained. "Do you remember how I mentioned before that I felt Sam's resurrection?"
"Yeah."
"That was because it caused a massive ripple in the energy field of life."
"That have anything to do with how the area around my gravesite looked like a bomb went off there?"
"Yes, precisely. That type of event requires a lot of energy as it means altering the very fabric of life by opening portals between Perdition and Earth."
"Okay, resurrection means a massive ripple felt by all angels, gotcha. What about this new one the Virties felt?"
Castiel briefly looked like he felt the very human urge to sigh and Dean couldn't help but pause at that before filing it away for later contemplation.
"From what they were saying, the Virtues didn't really know what to make of it. It had been a brief burst of energy that was gone almost as soon as it was generated," Xarael said. "No one else seems to have felt it."
"So not as important than," Dean ventured.
"It would appear so," Castiel agreed. "I shall endeavor to obtain more information from them when I return and let you know if it's anything of import."
Dean snorted. "Right now, I think everything is of import," he prefixed the last word with air quotation marks, "since we don't really seem to have the first clue about what's going on."
Chapter 16