Chapter Text
Castiel comes home from the Empty on a Thursday.
He’s not there and then suddenly he is and Jack is all bright smiles in dropping him back off at the bunker, brimming with the story about negotiating with the Empty, and Dean’s chest is wrenched into fucking pieces as Cas stands there in their damn kitchen, in his trench coat, and they hugged and Dean was gonna say something, but then Sam was there pulling him into a floppy-haired bear hug, and then they steamrolled past the moment. Dean cooked up a big pot of chilli because he didn’t know what else to do with this joy-relief-wonder and Jack led the retelling of taking down God, all round the table, laughing as if it was all full of easy-triumph rather than lined with pain and jagged wounds over this big family dinner. He let Jack have a single beer while Cas gave this look that was part disapproval, part bemusement at him corrupting a three-year-old-God and then Jack left and it all, almost, went back to normal.
For two whole days.
Except then Sam -- fucking traitor that he is -- ducks out of the war room to call Eileen and they are suddenly, disastrously, alone .
Sam takes all the air out of the room when he leaves. The conversation stutters and dies, till they’re both just sat there and Dean doesn’t know what to do.
Castiel looks at him. He looks good. This resurrection merry-go-round seems to have sat better with him this time than the last, or maybe that’s because this time he was spat out after all the action. There’s no looming big bad, right now. There’s just some small fry hunts, regular salt-n-burn evil, and a toddler in charge of the universe and Cas looked some measure of relaxed before their six foot three buffer walked out. It’s the same old trench coat and blue tie, but the tie’s more comfortably loose than haphazard: it’s ‘I just got home from work and wanted to breathe’ rather than ‘I got mugged on the way home’ and it suits him. He had been smiling for most of the evening. He’d been wearing that proud Dad look that crinkles round the corner of his eyes and softens him into something that looks achingly human, till Dean can’t really believe the guy is a walking talking moonbeam who could total him with two fingers to the forehead. Now he’s wearing a look that Dean would call wary in virtue of knowing him so well. If he didn’t, he’d call it impassive. Neutral.
He just looks like Cas. His best friend. His best friend, who --
Who ---
“You have a dog now,” Cas says, his voice attempting some brand of levity that Cas has never been able to pull off. It’s a weak fucking start. They covered introducing Cas to Miracle ten minutes after his arrival, when Miracle bounded in to find out what all the commotion was all about. He climbed up on Cas’ knees and licked his face while Dean was making chilli and he bark-demanded a walk before they all went to bed, so Dean took him for a quick walk as his first method of avoiding them being alone. Dean’s already heard Cas having a genuine, serious conversation with the damn dog. There’s not really anything else to say on the topic.
Dean stares at him. He doesn’t mean to, exactly, but Cas is here. Back from the dead, again. No longer being sucked into this black goo, right after ---
Cas’ shoulders drop. He looks down at his hands.
“Dean.”
“Don’t.” Dean says. It’s a knee-jerk. He doesn’t really know what he’s asking Cas not to do. He doesn’t goddamn know he just…
He didn’t even attempt to deal with it. Dean knows himself well enough to know that it wasn’t the kind of thing he’d ever recover from, so he couldn’t think of a damn reason to look at it too hard. It is this looming black-hole of something in his chest that he had every single intention of drinking past, thinking past, skirting around, because he can’t. He just --- he can’t.
“Dean,” Cas says again. He sounds tired now. Resigned. Dean’s not looking at him anymore, because he’s busy staring at his knees and trying to talk his lungs into functioning like regular goddamn lungs, feeling the tension ratchet up in his muscles, half-way paralysed. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable,” Dean repeats. The word tastes like stomach acid. “You didn’t mean to make me uncomfortable.”
“I don’t want or expect anything from you.”
“Okay,” Dean says. Nods. He doesn’t know why he’s nodding. He doesn’t know why he’s saying ‘okay’ when nothing about this is okay. Nothing here is a-oh-kay.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“When?” Dean asks, everything clenched, with the word scrapping out of his throat. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn't want to know when it happened. He doesn’t… he doesn’t want to know anything about it. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but it’s like some fucking horrorshow that he can’t look away from him --- except, it should be noted, he hasn’t looked at Cas since he first said his name, great big coward that he is -- and Dean’s this coiled spring of tension staring at the floor. “When did you...?”
“Fall in love with you?” Cas asks, moving around the table in the war room and sitting down heavily. It’s worse, out loud. It feels more real thrown out, casually. Before, it was… the words were weaponised. They had cosmic goddamn consequences that were nothing to do with Dean. They were a means to an end. They were these fucking beautiful sentiments strung together with emotion and grit and consequences. He was saying all these things, the walls shuddering around them, earnest, face split open with emotion, and —-
You're the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know.
“I don’t know.” Cas says. He sounds pained. It sounds like he’s dredging the words up from somewhere deep inside him and that is fucking crazy because he never goddamn knows what’s going on in Cas’ head, inside the depths of him, because Castiel has never, ever made any goddamn sense to Dean Winchester.
“Okay.” Dean nods. He doesn’t know why he keeps nodding. He doesn’t know why he’s mining for more information when he can’t… he can’t handle it. He can’t handle pressing the bruise too hard, but that answer is so underwhelming, so-nothing that Dean’s stomach clenches. Revolts.
“A long time ago.” Cas continues. “Years.”
Years.
Castiel has been in love with him for years.
“It doesn’t feel like you love me,” Dean says, the words coming out more like a rasp than anything else. He’s still hunched over himself, achingly aware that Cas is sitting dizzyingly close, as Dean resolutely stares at a spot on the floor. “I’m not —— I’m not trying to undermine your, your feelings, or whatever, but —- I. I don’t feel it.”
He doesn’t blame Cas for not taking the bait and running with the conversation that Dean doesn’t really know why he’s starting. He wouldn’t. He’d probably just sit there, completely silent, not even breathing, but then again Dean would never have said anything in the first place.
“You’re always in such a damn rush to get away from me, you never stick around, Cas. You don’t even answer your damn phone, you don’t listen —- you do all this stupid shit — and then, and then at the eleventh hour you pull out some grand gesture and, okay, I see it in the big stuff. I can see that now I’m… now I’m looking for it, but I don’t feel it, in the grind of the everyday.”
“You don’t feel it,” Cas repeats, his gaze hot and thick on the side of Dean’s face. “...Do you want to ?”
“Sure as hell beats feeling like you don’t give a damn, at all.”
Cas moves, then, standing up and suddenly in front of him, carrying that ozone-intensity and thunder in the line of his shoulders. He demands attention like this. He’s power and raw emotion and Dean can’t look away, even though he really does not want to look at him, because —
You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell... Knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam, I cared about Jack... I cared about the whole world because of you.
“Dean, the things I have done for you —”
“Yeah, right,” Dean says, the words ugly at the back of his throat as he looks up at him. Cas. This freaking miracle of a man, walking-and-talking. His fierce trench coat wearing best friend. Alive and in the flesh. “Giving up heaven, until they call with any stupid problem, then you’re straight back to being their little lapdog. Giving up an army that you didn’t fucking tell me about in the first place. Died for me. Dying is cheap, Cas . You want a list of people who’ve done that? My Dad died for me. Benny. Charlie. I am sick to fucking death of people dying for me, Cas , I want —- I want someone to be prepared to goddamn live with me, and it’s — even Mom wouldn’t, and I —sure, she’d have died for me, cause that’s a damn lot easier than looking me in the eye and accepting what her actions and choices did to me, for dealing with who I am , but… no one ever does that. So yeah, Cas, you got your big heroic moment. You got to die for me and you got to have your happiness in the being, because you knew you wouldn’t have to deal with what happened next. You wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath . With me. You’re a coward.”
“Yes, I am,” Cas says, tension creased into the centre of his forehead. His arms are hanging helplessly by his side in a way that seems so appallingly human and he can’t… Dean can’t. He can’t do this.
You changed me, Dean.
Dean presses his fingertips into his skull to rub away the throbbing in his head. Drinks in a lungful of air. Drops his gaze back to a spot above Castiel’s shoulder. Tries to regroup.
He is trying not to be so angry all the time.
He’s seen the way the kid looks at him when he’s like this, all hard edges and twisted worlds, sinking into the raging fire in his chest, and he didn’t… he didn’t want to be like this. An angry man. Castiel, apparently, doesn’t think of him like that and Dean doesn’t want to be the one to prove him wrong. He doesn’t want to be the reason Cas takes it all back. He doesn’t want to be spitting barbed words at his best friend who, who—-
“That’s —- never really how it’s worked for me. Happiness in the being.” Dean says, the words dragged out from his chest, excavated with effort and pain. He’s burned out of anger for now but every muscle in him is poised, on edge, ready for a fight, just like always.
Cas sits, heavily, on the edge of the table.
“How has it been?”
“Uh, crap, mostly,” Dean says, stares out across the war room with his fingernails digging into his thigh. The pressure of it helps to ground him. Keep talking. “They leave. They can’t handle it, or there’s something more important, and they take off. Supernatural memory loss.” Dean says. Some ghost of Lisa flits across his head. The muscle memory of being held in the morning; desperately grasping at this feeling of safety. He hasn’t thought about it for years. “Or they get dead,” Dean says and then, through his lungs screaming in protest, he wrenches the words out. “Then sometimes, if I play my cards right, I get all three.”
He can’t even breathe through it -- this sudden knife-sharp stab of grief the glugs out of this pit in his chest, robbing his oxygen and prickling at his eyes because, oh god, Cas is … he’s here, this tangible, real life person, and he’s breathing and solid, and he wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t.
He wasn’t.
“Cas,” Dean says, his voice splintering on the word. “ You can’t do that to me again. You can’t die. I’m --- I’m glad it was good for you, but you can’t, I can’t --- ”
“Dean,” Cas says again, the word packed full and packaged with something that’s deep and rich and gritty. Maybe half-plea and half consolation and then he steps forward into Dean’s sphere -- close enough that Dean can feel his damn body heat radiating off him -- then he stops, he always goddamn stops, and Dean’s the one that folds forward. His forehead collides somewhere between Cas’ chest and his stomach, pressed up against this wall of Cas, flesh and blood and grace and love wrapped up in a trench coat, breathing-and-talking-and-loving, and Dean doesn’t know how to unclench his fists to reach out for him. He doesn’t even know how to bridge the gap into a hug because his throat is clogged up with rage and grief and confusion, so he just stays like that: head pressed against Castiel’s shirt, inhaling his ozone-and-lightning scent, hands balled into fists, trying to remember how to fucking breathe. “Dean, I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.” Dean says, the words wet with grief. “But you keep —-“
Cas doesn’t reach out for him. He doesn’t lift his hand and rest it on his shoulders, or smooth through his hair, he just fucking stands there, immovable, stagnant, as Dean’s insides turn inside out.
“I didn’t feel I had a choice.”
“You always feels like that,” Dean says, whines, and he still can’t unknot his hands out of fists, his useless hands carved for violence and death. “You were just gone.”
“I’m back, now.”
“Yeah, cause your son is a godamn superhero, not by your design.” Dean says, dangerously fucking close to spilling out something terrible, like you still meant to leave me, and he just ——
He is so goddamn unprepared for this conversation.
“I made the deal to save Jack,” Cas says, and the words vibrate through his chest. This deep grumble that seeps through his skin. “And I cashed it to save you. I consider both of those things to be worth it, regardless of the price tag.”
And, fuck, Cas is in love with him. This dumb self-effacing, reckless kind of love that has somehow blinded him into this belief that Dean is a good man. He still, more than a decade on, believes that Dean deserves saving.
“You didn’t give me a chance to say anything.”
“If it helps, I didn’t intend to tell you at all.”
Dean lets out a wet laugh, the bitter kind, and starts to pull back. Away. Retreat. He needs a goddamn universe of space between them, right now. A universe of space and a drink.
“It doesn’t.” Dean says, rubbing his face with his hands, as if the rough heels of his palms can rub away all the dark, twisted things he feels about this.
“I thought it would make you uncomfortable.”
“The delivery didn’t help with that, buddy,” Dean says, scraping out of his throat as if he’s been sobbing for hours even though he hasn’t. He hasn’t cried since he peeled himself off the basement floor. “Though I don’t think I’d have used the word uncomfortable. Wrecked, maybe.”
“Dean.”
Dean looks at him again. He definitely doesn’t look relaxed anymore. With Sam in the room, Cas looked at ease and happy in this addictive way that made it almost easy to believe that every ounce of pain has been worth it. They fought for this ending with bloodied nails and screaming muscles. They lost people. They pushed themselves so far beyond what they were cut out to deal with it. They did it so that, one day, Cas could be radiating this warm-pleasure over a family meal with Sam and Jack.
He doesn’t look happy now. He has tension etched into the crease between his eyes. He looks older. A little haunted, in that hunter way that smacks of pain and loss and horror. Cas looks at Dean like he’s a slow, oncoming, ruinous natural disaster that he can’t do anything to stop, so he just stands there, transfixed, to watch the destruction.
Dean curls his hands back into fists and pockets them.
“Bad idea, being in love with me.”
He’s got no idea where he’s getting the courage to keep saying it out loud.
“It wasn’t a choice,” Cas says, all deep gravel and power. The words tighten something in Dean’s chest till it's painful and, yeah, that tracks. It sticks in the back of his throat. He blinks. “Although I would have chosen to anyway.“
His fists unfurl on instinct, blindly grappling forward to grab hold of the lapels of Cas’ trench coat and clutching at them.
They aren’t touching, really, but Dean can feel the electricity radiating off him, and he’s providing some meagre barrier to stop Cas from stepping back and away that feels like it gives him the upper hand. The guy could’ve built canyons without breaking a sweat, but he stays caught in Dean’s pathetic trap willingly.
He doesn’t move closer. He never gets any goddamn closer.
“I don’t believe you,” Dean says. The words sound a little hysterical to his own ears. They’re irreverent and inappropriate and, fuck, Sam would kick his ass for it if he ever knew about it. If Dean had ever prized open his chest and told him any of it, instead of burying, compartmentalizing and fucking ignoring it.
Castiel frowns at him.
“But you…. want to?”
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I want, Cas.” Dean says, throat thick. He does not let go of Cas’ trench coat. He’s not really sure if he could if someone asked him too. His hands are welded into place, desperately gripped around these fistfuls of his damn coat. “Never really works out the way.”
“It’s finished now, Dean. Chuck. The end of the world.”
Dean squares his jaw and almost-nods. Let's it sit in the air because he doesn’t know what to say about it. They’ve been here before. Not a lot of times, maybe, because there was always something else on the horizon, but they have had these brief, calm moments of feeling the world isn’t about to capsize into terror and unwinnable choices again. This time is bigger and more final and he should feel the sagging relief of it all.
He thought he was putting on a decent enough show of it: wearing these too-wide smiles, laughing too loudly, trying to get this right balance of not jumping at the chance of the few, scant hunts that are coming up because he just fucking needs to tear something apart with his bare hands, and not turning them down when they come up because he can’t face the blood and the gore of it. He’s probably doing a sucky job of it, though, because Sam’s been giving him more of those looks by the day. He emerged from his own grief, then his Eileen induced happy place, and now he’s started watching Dean like a goddamn hawk. So, maybe he’s bad at pretending that it feels like a victory, but it is still true. They took down God. The universe has mellowed out. The world is not ending.
“But you were still dead.” Dean scrapes out and, God, he’s pathetic and he didn’t —- he didn’t mean to say that. He hasn’t meant to say any of it. He hasn’t really got to a place where he’d even thought about what he meant to say, and it’s just … he —
He didn’t think he’d get to have this conversation.
“Dean,” Cas begins, again, like half the words out of his mouth so far haven’t been Dean’s name, in that earnest, commanding way that he says it, but then there’s footsteps and Sam’s suddenly back, and Cas stops talking.
Dean lets go of Castiel’s coat. He’s got no idea what it looks like, with Cas standing in front of him while Dean helplessly holds onto this goddamn fabric like Dean has any power to keep Cas there, at all, but Sam — bless Sam — doesn’t say anything or do anything particular with his face. Dean's hands fall lamely down his thighs. Strings cut. And, fuck, he’s being an asshole and a pathetic, needy one at that, and he needs —-
He needs to not be in this room.
“Good talk, buddy.” Dean says, standing up and, god help him, clapping Cas on the shoulder in this faux-causal gesture that opens up in the pit of his stomach. It always seems like Castiel should feel like a force of nature to touch, given this inherent power that he has and the way he seems to shift the centre of gravity, but he always feels pretty much human under that trench coat. Solid, breakable and warm. He doesn’t linger. It’s one, brief second of contact before he brushes past him, gaze set on the exit.
He doesn’t make it all the way.
Cas halts him with a ‘Dean’ and this look on his face that totally fucking gives the game away that they haven’t, actually, been having a good talk. Dean wants to glance back at Sam and see what the hell he’s making of all this, but he can’t look away from the blue-fire-gaze, and his heart in his throat.
He never knows what Cas is going to say.
“I heard what you were saying and I appreciate your position.” Cas says, whatever the fuck that means, and Dean just nods curtly before he finishes walking out.
He’s freaking out by the time he’s barricaded himself in his room, because he doesn’t goddamn know what he was saying, or what he wants Cas to have heard, or if he wanted him to hear anything out of the whole clusterfuck. He doesn’t appreciate his own fucking position and he doesn’t really know what they were even talking about. He just knows that his stomach is this whirlwind of dread and anger and something that might be nerves and his head is fried and he just wants to fucking breathe.
Miracle finds him when he’s finally brave enough to venture out of a drink (his under-the-bed scotch reserves having been taken off the bench the night before) and he follows him back into his bedroom. In the end, Miracle climbs on his lap the second Dean sits on the edge of his bed and something creaks and breaks in Dean’s battered chest, so he abandons trying to block out the pit of something in his stomach with hard liquor, and settles with his face buried in the soft fur of his damn dog for a long time, trying to work out what the hell he’s doing.