FIC: Falling (Castiel/Dean Winchester) [4/6]
Title: Falling [Part 4/6 of Bunker!Verse]
Author: todisturbtheuni
Rating: PG-13.
Genre and/or Pairing: Angst, Hurt/Comfort; Castiel/Dean Winchester
Spoilers: Up to 8x13.
Warnings: Cursing.
Word Count: 1946
Summary: Twenty-four hours after his crash landing, Cas still hasn’t healed fully. Maybe he never will.
Also available on AO3 | Part I: Faith | Part II: We're Okay | Part III: Let 'Em
Dean tries--half-heartedly, without any actual effort--to give Cas his own room. Gives him the grand tour of their underground, super-secret bunker, gives him his pick of spaces. But Cas looks at every room with the same gaunt stare, sits on every bed and lies very unconvincingly about how comfortable it is, and Dean, who wasn’t very enthusiastic about letting Cas further than twenty feet away to begin with, gives up.
“Why don’t you just stay with me,” he says, leaning against the last doorframe. He means to make it a question, but it doesn’t come out that way. “Probably better,” he adds, and thinks about the half of his room that’s still empty, the side with the chair in the corner turned toward the bed.
Cas’s features twitch toward relief, and then lock with pain; he presses a surprised hand to his chest and flinches. He’s been too pale since his touchdown, now a whole day ago--though, to Dean, it feels like much longer than that, like yesterday was before and today is after, a dividing line somewhere in between that changed everything.
“Yes,” he says, his voice grating. “I’d like that.”
Dean moves forward to help him back up, navigates the landscape of the wound that’s giving Cas the most grief and tries not to create any unnecessary pain. Cas leans heavily against him, his arm around Dean’s shoulders, Dean’s tucked firmly around Cas’s waist. He thinks that Cas half-loathes this, having to be helped, but then his body stops fighting and relaxes into Dean, accepting the support, and there’s something about holding Cas up that Dean kinda likes.
They bump into Sam in the hallway. “Find a good dead guy room?” he jokes, smiling a little too big, overcompensation for the worry he’s trying to mask. Dean knows his brother. The nerd’s giant brain it going to keep him up all night worrying--worrying about Cas, about what he knows, about their safety, about how Dean’s dealing with all this.
Cas squints up at Sam, perplexed. “There aren’t--”
“He’s kidding. No ghosts, no dead people. No,” Dean directs at Sam, and tries to sound completely normal when he says the next part. “He’s staying with me.”
Sam’s eyebrow only lifts a tick. He doesn’t blink; he isn’t surprised. Dean didn’t expect him to be. Sam probably knows him better than he knows himself.
“Oh,” he says, and clears his throat. “Right. Night, then.” And he backs away, shuffling down the hallway with as quick a speed he can get away with without it looking weird. Dean can’t help but smirk, just a little. Now his giant nerd brain will keep him up with more painful images. As if Sam realizes this, he shoots a last-minute glare over his shoulder before disappearing into his room and slamming the door behind him. Dean’s smirk fades.
Not that any of those images will come close to reality. Not tonight. Not now. Cas needs to heal, and they’ve waited--Dean wonders how long he’s been waiting, when the vague haze of emotion surrounding Castiel clarified into something knife-sharp and deep. He thinks it’s been years, but it’s hard to know.
“Come on,” Dean mutters, because Cas is giving him a curious look through a little frown of pain, and they make their way slowly back to his room. He turns off lights as they go, casting the whole place into half-shadow. Cas puts his hand to his chest again, and Dean feels him shudder.
“You okay?” he asks, letting the angel down at the edge of the bed. His blue eyes are dark, the gaze far away. “Looked pretty healed up when I took the stitches out.”
Cas’s hand tremors as he reaches up and pulls down the collar of his shirt, exposing the edge of the new scar. “It’s healed,” he agrees.
But Dean leans forward, frowning, and tugs down the shirt a little more. “Yeah, but it hasn’t changed any since this afternoon,” he says, a cold kind of dread creeping into him. “The way you heal, you shouldn’t even have a scar by now. Should you?”
“No,” Cas says, quiet, and looks down at his hands.
Dean sits down next to him. “What’s going on?” he asks, even though he already knows.
“I’m Falling,” Cas answers, the words brittle. “My Grace, it’s...receding much faster, this time. Much faster than before. I don’t think I’ll be an angel anymore, in the morning.”
Dean swallows, because he knows this can’t be good; his mouth and throat are dry with fear and he doesn’t want to ask, but he does. “Why?”
“I’ve been cut off from Heaven,” Cas answers, gaze turning to the wall of Dean’s room that’s still empty. “And there are no longer garrisons stationed on Earth; there aren’t enough angels to spare. Isn’t that...” Cas pauses, looks away again. “Isn’t that what I said, when you saw me in 2014? That I lost the last of my Grace when the angels left Earth?”
Dean frowns. “I never told you what I saw.”
“You dream of it,” Cas says, sounding mildly embarrassed. “Sometimes.”
“Personal space,” Dean mutters, mutinous, but he lifts a hand to Cas’s shoulder anyway. “Human by morning, huh?”
“It’s better this way,” Cas says, and it’s sincere but forlorn. “I’ll be outside of her control. I won’t be able to hurt anyone. I won’t be able to hurt you.”
“Was that the plan?” Dean asks, and the knife in his stomach twists deeper, because that would--if the mysterious she wanted to destroy Castiel, Angel of the Lord, destroy him utterly, that’s the way to do it, and Dean knows it. He harbors no illusions about the depth of Cas’s devotion to him. It’s useless to deny when he’s traced Cas’s motivation for every action over the last few years, and the answer is always Dean.
Cas looks miserable when he looks up at Dean again. “I don’t know what her plans were,” he says. “I only know that when she laid them out, when she ordered me to follow them, I did. Rescuing--killing Samandriel...” His voice chokes, his shoulders hunch, his hands slide up into his hair, knot so tightly there that Dean’s afraid he’ll rip it out. “I didn’t want to,” he whispers. “Samandriel was good, and I...I killed him. He was trying to warn me. Trying to warn me about her, and she wouldn’t let him.”
Cas crumples, folds, and Dean wraps an arm around his shoulders, tries to draw him close, even though Cas fights him every inch of the way. He’s shaking and muttering and half’s in Enochian and Dean can’t understand him, can’t hear him over the roar of his own pulse, fierce with rage, in his ears. He’s blind with it, murderous with it, drenched in the purity of black and white and it’s like Purgatory, knowing exactly who the bad guys are, but he can’t get at them and it’s killing him.
“I shouldn’t,” Cas says, wild, even as Dean wraps him up, coaxes him to give in. “I shouldn’t be here, she’ll find me, and I’ll hurt you, I always hurt you, I’m cursed, I’m cursed--”
“Shut up,” Dean says, too harsh, because his head is pounding and he needs a face to imagine so he can dream of beating it to a pulp. “Shut up, Cas. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he mutters, shaking his head against Dean’s shoulder. “Don’t let me hurt you.”
The anger gets washed out by pain, blinding, unbearable pain, because Cas sounds so damn broken and Dean doesn’t know what to do to fix it, so he does the only thing that makes sense: he cups Cas’s chin in his palm and makes him look up, look at him, and the blue eyes torn by despair are the last things he sees before he’s kissing the angel, fierce and intent, trying to communicate all the things he doesn’t know how to say, things like it’s going to be okay and I won’t leave you, I won’t ever leave you and a dozen others, all the words stopped up in his chest by the years and mistakes that have stood between them.
And Cas, like he can’t help it, reacts; his hand curls around the back of Dean’s neck and drags him closer, and then he’s being pushed, forceful, down to the bed, and Cas follows him down, awkwardly arranges himself over Dean, presses into every inch of him until Dean swears he can feel the angel in his bones. Cas’s lips are still on his and it’s softer now, his hands wrapped loosely around the angel’s hips, their bodies molded together, until Cas finally flinches, a sharp hiss of pain.
“We can fix that,” Dean murmurs, and rolls Cas onto his back, eliminating the pressure from his new scar, then leans over him to turn out the light.
Cas trails shaking fingertips down his cheek, and in the dim glow from outside, Dean can still see his eyes, dark pools of blue that stare up at him with reverence, adoration.
“I think I’m broken,” Cas says, quieter than before, a little steadier.
“Just trust me,” Dean soothes, trails lips over Cas’s temple, letting his nose brush against soft dark hair. “I’m gonna take care of you. Okay? You’ve been doing all the work, buddy. Let me help.”
They don’t sleep. Cas’s Grace slips away, trickles faster every minute, and Dean doesn’t want to miss the beginning of his new life, wants to ease the passing in any way he can, so he introduces Cas to humanity with gentle hands: teaches him how good it feels to have his back rubbed, and he practically purrs, like a cat; swipes his tongue into the hollow at Cas’s throat and pulls out a sharp gasp from the Falling angel; curls fingers into his stomach and tests if Cas is ticklish, and it rewarded by a deep, sharp laugh, grin cut short by surprise; pulls Cas into him for long moments and runs hands over his hair, lulls him into peace with simple, repetitive touch; and when Cas lifts his head up, eyes half-lidded and sleepy, to look at Dean, Dean kisses his slack lips and the wrinkles at the corners of the blue, runs his tongue through the perpetual stubble that’s edged just that much closer to Purgatory, and Cas smiles, hesitant but incapable of subduing it, and when he finally falls asleep against Dean’s shoulder Dean lays awake a lot longer, fighting the burn in his sinuses, holding onto his angel long after his arm’s fallen asleep.
Go on... Part V: Settling.
Author: todisturbtheuni
Rating: PG-13.
Genre and/or Pairing: Angst, Hurt/Comfort; Castiel/Dean Winchester
Spoilers: Up to 8x13.
Warnings: Cursing.
Word Count: 1946
Summary: Twenty-four hours after his crash landing, Cas still hasn’t healed fully. Maybe he never will.
Also available on AO3 | Part I: Faith | Part II: We're Okay | Part III: Let 'Em
Dean tries--half-heartedly, without any actual effort--to give Cas his own room. Gives him the grand tour of their underground, super-secret bunker, gives him his pick of spaces. But Cas looks at every room with the same gaunt stare, sits on every bed and lies very unconvincingly about how comfortable it is, and Dean, who wasn’t very enthusiastic about letting Cas further than twenty feet away to begin with, gives up.
“Why don’t you just stay with me,” he says, leaning against the last doorframe. He means to make it a question, but it doesn’t come out that way. “Probably better,” he adds, and thinks about the half of his room that’s still empty, the side with the chair in the corner turned toward the bed.
Cas’s features twitch toward relief, and then lock with pain; he presses a surprised hand to his chest and flinches. He’s been too pale since his touchdown, now a whole day ago--though, to Dean, it feels like much longer than that, like yesterday was before and today is after, a dividing line somewhere in between that changed everything.
“Yes,” he says, his voice grating. “I’d like that.”
Dean moves forward to help him back up, navigates the landscape of the wound that’s giving Cas the most grief and tries not to create any unnecessary pain. Cas leans heavily against him, his arm around Dean’s shoulders, Dean’s tucked firmly around Cas’s waist. He thinks that Cas half-loathes this, having to be helped, but then his body stops fighting and relaxes into Dean, accepting the support, and there’s something about holding Cas up that Dean kinda likes.
They bump into Sam in the hallway. “Find a good dead guy room?” he jokes, smiling a little too big, overcompensation for the worry he’s trying to mask. Dean knows his brother. The nerd’s giant brain it going to keep him up all night worrying--worrying about Cas, about what he knows, about their safety, about how Dean’s dealing with all this.
Cas squints up at Sam, perplexed. “There aren’t--”
“He’s kidding. No ghosts, no dead people. No,” Dean directs at Sam, and tries to sound completely normal when he says the next part. “He’s staying with me.”
Sam’s eyebrow only lifts a tick. He doesn’t blink; he isn’t surprised. Dean didn’t expect him to be. Sam probably knows him better than he knows himself.
“Oh,” he says, and clears his throat. “Right. Night, then.” And he backs away, shuffling down the hallway with as quick a speed he can get away with without it looking weird. Dean can’t help but smirk, just a little. Now his giant nerd brain will keep him up with more painful images. As if Sam realizes this, he shoots a last-minute glare over his shoulder before disappearing into his room and slamming the door behind him. Dean’s smirk fades.
Not that any of those images will come close to reality. Not tonight. Not now. Cas needs to heal, and they’ve waited--Dean wonders how long he’s been waiting, when the vague haze of emotion surrounding Castiel clarified into something knife-sharp and deep. He thinks it’s been years, but it’s hard to know.
“Come on,” Dean mutters, because Cas is giving him a curious look through a little frown of pain, and they make their way slowly back to his room. He turns off lights as they go, casting the whole place into half-shadow. Cas puts his hand to his chest again, and Dean feels him shudder.
“You okay?” he asks, letting the angel down at the edge of the bed. His blue eyes are dark, the gaze far away. “Looked pretty healed up when I took the stitches out.”
Cas’s hand tremors as he reaches up and pulls down the collar of his shirt, exposing the edge of the new scar. “It’s healed,” he agrees.
But Dean leans forward, frowning, and tugs down the shirt a little more. “Yeah, but it hasn’t changed any since this afternoon,” he says, a cold kind of dread creeping into him. “The way you heal, you shouldn’t even have a scar by now. Should you?”
“No,” Cas says, quiet, and looks down at his hands.
Dean sits down next to him. “What’s going on?” he asks, even though he already knows.
“I’m Falling,” Cas answers, the words brittle. “My Grace, it’s...receding much faster, this time. Much faster than before. I don’t think I’ll be an angel anymore, in the morning.”
Dean swallows, because he knows this can’t be good; his mouth and throat are dry with fear and he doesn’t want to ask, but he does. “Why?”
“I’ve been cut off from Heaven,” Cas answers, gaze turning to the wall of Dean’s room that’s still empty. “And there are no longer garrisons stationed on Earth; there aren’t enough angels to spare. Isn’t that...” Cas pauses, looks away again. “Isn’t that what I said, when you saw me in 2014? That I lost the last of my Grace when the angels left Earth?”
Dean frowns. “I never told you what I saw.”
“You dream of it,” Cas says, sounding mildly embarrassed. “Sometimes.”
“Personal space,” Dean mutters, mutinous, but he lifts a hand to Cas’s shoulder anyway. “Human by morning, huh?”
“It’s better this way,” Cas says, and it’s sincere but forlorn. “I’ll be outside of her control. I won’t be able to hurt anyone. I won’t be able to hurt you.”
“Was that the plan?” Dean asks, and the knife in his stomach twists deeper, because that would--if the mysterious she wanted to destroy Castiel, Angel of the Lord, destroy him utterly, that’s the way to do it, and Dean knows it. He harbors no illusions about the depth of Cas’s devotion to him. It’s useless to deny when he’s traced Cas’s motivation for every action over the last few years, and the answer is always Dean.
Cas looks miserable when he looks up at Dean again. “I don’t know what her plans were,” he says. “I only know that when she laid them out, when she ordered me to follow them, I did. Rescuing--killing Samandriel...” His voice chokes, his shoulders hunch, his hands slide up into his hair, knot so tightly there that Dean’s afraid he’ll rip it out. “I didn’t want to,” he whispers. “Samandriel was good, and I...I killed him. He was trying to warn me. Trying to warn me about her, and she wouldn’t let him.”
Cas crumples, folds, and Dean wraps an arm around his shoulders, tries to draw him close, even though Cas fights him every inch of the way. He’s shaking and muttering and half’s in Enochian and Dean can’t understand him, can’t hear him over the roar of his own pulse, fierce with rage, in his ears. He’s blind with it, murderous with it, drenched in the purity of black and white and it’s like Purgatory, knowing exactly who the bad guys are, but he can’t get at them and it’s killing him.
“I shouldn’t,” Cas says, wild, even as Dean wraps him up, coaxes him to give in. “I shouldn’t be here, she’ll find me, and I’ll hurt you, I always hurt you, I’m cursed, I’m cursed--”
“Shut up,” Dean says, too harsh, because his head is pounding and he needs a face to imagine so he can dream of beating it to a pulp. “Shut up, Cas. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he mutters, shaking his head against Dean’s shoulder. “Don’t let me hurt you.”
The anger gets washed out by pain, blinding, unbearable pain, because Cas sounds so damn broken and Dean doesn’t know what to do to fix it, so he does the only thing that makes sense: he cups Cas’s chin in his palm and makes him look up, look at him, and the blue eyes torn by despair are the last things he sees before he’s kissing the angel, fierce and intent, trying to communicate all the things he doesn’t know how to say, things like it’s going to be okay and I won’t leave you, I won’t ever leave you and a dozen others, all the words stopped up in his chest by the years and mistakes that have stood between them.
And Cas, like he can’t help it, reacts; his hand curls around the back of Dean’s neck and drags him closer, and then he’s being pushed, forceful, down to the bed, and Cas follows him down, awkwardly arranges himself over Dean, presses into every inch of him until Dean swears he can feel the angel in his bones. Cas’s lips are still on his and it’s softer now, his hands wrapped loosely around the angel’s hips, their bodies molded together, until Cas finally flinches, a sharp hiss of pain.
“We can fix that,” Dean murmurs, and rolls Cas onto his back, eliminating the pressure from his new scar, then leans over him to turn out the light.
Cas trails shaking fingertips down his cheek, and in the dim glow from outside, Dean can still see his eyes, dark pools of blue that stare up at him with reverence, adoration.
“I think I’m broken,” Cas says, quieter than before, a little steadier.
“Just trust me,” Dean soothes, trails lips over Cas’s temple, letting his nose brush against soft dark hair. “I’m gonna take care of you. Okay? You’ve been doing all the work, buddy. Let me help.”
They don’t sleep. Cas’s Grace slips away, trickles faster every minute, and Dean doesn’t want to miss the beginning of his new life, wants to ease the passing in any way he can, so he introduces Cas to humanity with gentle hands: teaches him how good it feels to have his back rubbed, and he practically purrs, like a cat; swipes his tongue into the hollow at Cas’s throat and pulls out a sharp gasp from the Falling angel; curls fingers into his stomach and tests if Cas is ticklish, and it rewarded by a deep, sharp laugh, grin cut short by surprise; pulls Cas into him for long moments and runs hands over his hair, lulls him into peace with simple, repetitive touch; and when Cas lifts his head up, eyes half-lidded and sleepy, to look at Dean, Dean kisses his slack lips and the wrinkles at the corners of the blue, runs his tongue through the perpetual stubble that’s edged just that much closer to Purgatory, and Cas smiles, hesitant but incapable of subduing it, and when he finally falls asleep against Dean’s shoulder Dean lays awake a lot longer, fighting the burn in his sinuses, holding onto his angel long after his arm’s fallen asleep.
Go on... Part V: Settling.