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The first time it happens they're standing on a high terrace in New New York, staring down at sparkling streets, both with their hands in their coat pockets and shoulder-to-shoulder. Castiel is watching the Duke's procession below—the sound of trumpets carries up to them, slightly muffled by the wind and distance—and the Doctor is watching the people, and him.
Castiel notices, after a moment (more through the Doctor's telepathic resonance than because he's seen him looking, the Doctor suspects) and turns to look back at him.
They stand that way for a moment, unmoving, and then the Doctor slips elegant fingers under Castiel's chin and tilts his face upward, thoughtful.
Castiel stares at him, and the Doctor stares back. To the outside world, that's all their gazes meeting is.
Underneath, their minds brush each other, grace and time lord telepathy reaching out—far less tentative than their physical movements—binding and melding and opening to each other.
The angel's grace feels—vast, the Doctor thinks, exhilarating. Like another time lord's mind might feel were it expanded, built to contain the base code of the universe, billions of years worth of observations and memory. He dives into it, breathes it in, envelops himself in the overwhelming sensation of finding such contact with the song of the spheres: the movement of planets and the bursting of stars rings through him, burns hot and cold and intimate.
What Castiel feels he doesn't know, but he feels the soft exhale just above his wrist, a gasp in reverse, and clearly the angel gets something out of this exchange.
They stay this way for a long time, motionless, and then Castiel's eyes fall closed and he moves, just slightly.
He presses a chaste kiss to the Doctor's mouth, nothing more than barely parted lips and gentle pressure.
The Doctor's eyebrows climb, and slowly, slowly, he withdraws from the link, reluctance making him drag his feet.
He doesn't pull back, though, stays still just in front of Castiel, his hand lowered so that his fingers rest open against the angel's collar. "What was that?" he asks, curious but not accusatory; just one strange creature wondering at another.
"What burns in you," Castiel says, slowly, like it's hard to put what he's feeling into words. His eyes flick open again, and their gazes lock once more, unabashed. "What I felt—here," and the angel raises a hand, touches his fingers to where the Doctor's hearts beat steadily in tandem, "towards all that is—here." The fingers move to the Doctor's forehead, brush aside an unruly strand of hair.
"Oh," the Doctor says.
Castiel doesn't know how to feel, and the Doctor doesn't know what it is to carry the universe; linked, they can do both, a closed loop of sensation and knowing.
"Thank you," Castiel says, quiet, and the Doctor pulls out of his awe, gives him a bright grin.
"You, too," he says, and leans to his side to loop his arm around Cas's elbow and press a careless kiss to his temple, because it's easy, with the two of them. They're both too ancient to know being flustered, and too linked by their telepathy to mistake such gestures for something as pithy as human romance. "How about I show you the rest of this planet, eh? We can meet the Earl of Jersey."
"I'd like that," Castiel says, and allows himself to be drawn along as the Doctor knits their fingers together and leads them down from the viewing ledge.
They touch often as time goes on, casual. There's a connection between the two of them that has nothing at all to do with the sexual, and everything to do with the way their minds meet each other in the space in between: when they're close it's easier, more immediate. The nuances are clearer, then, felt more deeply.
So they'll touch, without thinking, without desire. Shoulders against each other, when the Doctor works the TARDIS controls and Castiel looks on; hands wound together when the Doctor takes them on adventures across faraway planets. On the long journeys, they'll sit with their backs pressed together or their knees touching, the TARDIS engines humming below them as they converse.
They've kissed again since New New York, never deeply; affectionate but not wanting, because neither of them want that, want anything more than the knowledge of being close and unalone.
("I'm asexual," the Doctor had explained once, after a conversation regarding one of his earlier companions lead to a query from Castiel regarding the Doctor's relationship with her. The Doctor had explained what it meant, then, given Castiel the definition and passed along the feeling. Castiel had thought about it for a moment, turning both over in his mind, and offered, "Me, too," and that had been that.)
And it makes both of them smile, and that's reason enough, the Doctor thinks.
Mostly what passes between the two of them is conversation, urged on by telepathy, a layered form of communication that is as much passing sensations and memories as it is words. The Doctor had missed this, intensely, the ability to speak in a way beyond the vocal: having the opportunity again feels like coming home.
Castiel speaks often of the Winchesters, and the Doctor trades him stories of Rose and Martha and Donna and Susan and Ace, and the rest.
And the angel's voice may be far more expressionless than the Doctor's, but when he speaks of Dean Winchester the longing and loss and loneliness that pang through their link are agonizingly familiar: it's what the Doctor feels aching inside him every time he mentions Rose, or thinks of the way that she'd smile or the things that she'd say.
Castiel is in love with Dean Winchester, and the Doctor is still (hopelessly, stupidly, because of course they could never have been the way either of them wanted; because he knows she's better off with his half-human counterpart) in love with Rose Tyler. Lost causes, both of them; finding some solace in sharing their pain, because they hurt less in parts than when whole.
Perhaps it's worse, in the angel; worse because it's the first time he's felt such heartache, for all his years, worse still because the man he loves doesn't even know. The longing with which he speaks of Dean makes the Doctor's heart break for him, but he smiles at the love that's evident in Castiel's meticulous descriptions.
"You make me half in love with the man, myself," the Doctor offers, once, and Castiel smiles at him with one of his quiet, barely-there smiles, and gives him a kiss as though he's giving thanks.
(Deep down, the Doctor riles that this Dean Winchester is so oblivious, so unaware that Castiel's sad blue eyes are only for him; if they ever meet, the Doctor thinks, he's going to make him stop, make him look more closely at the eternal being that follows him with such unconditional loyalty.)
They touch, angel and time lord, and the Doctor knows that their desperate wish for such contact comes from the fact that no one else will touch them like that.