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Cas fucks Dean with his eyes closed.
He can feel the easy slide of his cock inside the heat of Dean’s ass, Dean’s fingers biting into bone as Cas’ hips stutter forward. The small room smells of sweat and sex, metal and musk, sultry air oppressive and almost too much. Dean is growling Cas’ name with each snap forward, gasping around the syllable. It’s painful and aggressive and not at all like sex between them ought to be. Not after everything they’ve shared. There’s no care, no love; just animal need, want, the desperation to feel something, anything, beyond numbness or fear.
Dean removes one of his hands from Cas’ hip, moving it to the dark strands of hair that curl with sweat down Cas's neck, and tugs; Cas’ spine arcs over Dean as he groans. Dean bites at his mouth, almost drawing blood. Cas rakes his nails up Dean’s chest. Then there are large palms pressed against his waist, fingertips curling into his ribcage, and he’s moving his own fingers to Dean’s cock, grasping with both hands, maintaining the staccato rhythm with his hips, eyelids held together so tightly all he sees is white. Dean moans as Cas strokes, matching his thrusts. Hearing Dean come undone beneath him is almost enough to push Cas over the edge.
“Jesus fuck.”
Cas doesn’t admonish Dean for his use of the name in conjunction with the expletive, like he might have done a long time ago. Instead he grits his teeth, hips pushing forward, grappling for control over his feelings as Dean screams below him. They’re primal and rough, these exchanges that occur between the sheets. Dean fights and fucks the same way; often it's as much about control as it is about pleasure or release. Who comes out on top, however, is not always as clear.
“Cas,” Dean groans; Cas fights his orgasm away. He’s got the angle right, now, and Dean is a sweaty, trembling mess caught in the cage of his limbs. Another push, another moan. Cas leans down to where he thinks Dean’s lips are and sucks one into his mouth. Dean whimpers. “I’m –“ he gasps, shuddering, and then they’re both coming, Dean sobbing and spurting sticky and white between them, Cas crying out into Dean’s mouth. His eyes remain closed, glued shut, because this is the moment he is most vulnerable. The moment Dean may actually realise that, for Cas, this is more than an easy fuck with someone he once cared about. That this is everything he loves and loathes, these wrestling matches between the sheets. What he lives and hates himself for. Because Dean has always been everything Cas always wanted but could never have, and now he does have him, it’s bittersweet agony. He’s always been everything. Cas loves Dean irrevocably and uncontrollably with a fervour that scares even him: an ex-angel of the lord who was created to love. But Cas can’t make Dean return that sentiment.
They lie entwined for a few minutes, breathing into each other, a snarl of body and sheet and skin caught against the cracked silhouette of dying time - the End of Days – until muscles begin to cramp. Cas eases out of Dean and extracts himself from the bed; Dean immediately stands to retrieve a cloth, uneasy on his legs. He doesn’t look at Cas as he cleans himself up, instead choosing to stare at his own reflection in the mirror. Cas uses his shirt to wipe his lower abdomen. Condoms are pointless these days – they’re all going to die well before an STI can become an issue, so what the fuck's the point, really.
Dean continues to ignore Cas, refusing to look at him. Cas understands this; Dean is no longer a hunter, and Cas is no longer an angel. He is a civilian. He is weak - powerless and disgusting. Broken, like a bird with damaged wings. A racehorse with a lame leg. Most days he can barely look at his own reflection himself (it’s no longer Jimmy’s face, with the scars and age lines and empty, hollow eyes). Sex and substance abuse are the only things that make life bearable. He knows Dean begrudges him that, too – the ease in which he shirks his duties, choosing escapism over functionality. The only time Cas isn’t high or drunk is when he’s fucking Dean. Cas sees these nights as a way to be physically close to Dean, a way to pretend that one-day, everything might be all right. Dean sees these nights almost like a business arrangement, a duty. Something to use to forget, not pretend. A reprieve from feeling.
Dean doesn’t love Cas. Cas knows this. Although sometimes, in his weaker moments, he prays to a God he knows doesn't exist that something might be there, his hope like a candle that won’t quite flicker and die. Dean did love him – perhaps – once, a long time ago. Now Cas is drug-fucked and constantly strung out on opiates, screwing his way through half the camp with no abandon, and Dean is the ‘fearless leader’, detached and mechanical, focussed only on the end goal and how it can be achieved. If he were to compare him to anyone, Cas thinks that he would say Dean is like Che Guevara: ruthless, perpetually fighting for the underdog with little regard for the collateral, but still trying to keep his heart in the right place. A guerrilla war machine who approaches killing a civilian – a friend - with the same sort of cold, calm collectedness he reserves for talking to children and giving orders to troops. It makes Cas' very human stomach roll with nausea.
Dean eventually walks over to the door to turn the light off before returning to the bed. Cas scuttles over, trying to make himself as small and unobtrusive as possible.
“You staying?” Dean says, looming over him.
“Yes,” Cas replies. Dean grunts in assent and slides back under the sheets, resting hands behind his head.
“This was the last time, okay?”
It’s always the last time, Cas thinks. Whether it’s because Dean feels guilty for using Cas, or because the next day they’re leaving the camp and one likely won’t come back alive – well. How Dean poses the statement depends on his mood. Tonight, it’s gruff, not sweet and considerate – a statement of fact as opposed to a persuasive plea. Guilt, then. They might live to see one more day.
Sometimes, he swears Dean sees him like one of the johns Dean served in his youth.
“Whatever you say, boss,” Cas returns sardonically, voice betraying none of his sentiment. He rolls over until his face is pressed into Dean’s pectoral, the scent of him – whiskey and leather and gunpowder – overwhelming Cas in a way that the sex never could. Dean gently drapes an arm around Cas’ shoulder. Cas hums. They lie in silence for a few moments, Cas tucked against Dean’s side, his breaths small humid puffs across Dean’s nipple. When Dean clears his throat, however, Cas knows something big is coming. He’s known Dean way too intimately for far too long; can read his thoughts in the lines fanning from his eyes, his mood from the set of his jaw. Is fluent in the grain of his skin, and could draw where each freckle lies dusted over the bridge of Dean’s nose, if asked. Some days, each breath Dean takes that isn’t for him feels like a sharpened blade pressed against his jugular. His love for the man is all-consuming.
“Cas, I know you… um…” Dean begins, and Cas immediately understands that the discussion is going to become a Confrontation About Feelings. If he were still and Angel of the Lord – if he still had wings – he would have been out of here ten heartbeats ago in a flutter of feathers.
“Dean, you - you really don’t need to do this.”
“I know you think that, Cas, but I really do.” He starts tracing patterns against the skin of Cas’ back, absentminded lines swirling from the spot Cas’ left wing once grew from, and Cas thinks he might cry. “I owe it to you.”
More silence; Cas doesn’t breathe. His lungs ache.
“I’ve had suspicions for a while that you... I mean, once I moved past the ‘denial’ phase, I understood… yeah.”
“Why?” Cas whispers, voice reedy and thin and rasping.
“Because… because I want you to know I would. If I could.”
Dean pulls him closer, resting his chin on Cas’ hair. It’s a comforting weight. Cas closes his eyes, moisture leaking from behind the lids.
“But you can’t.” Cas’ voice is thick with emotion.
“I… no.” Dean touches Cas’ face with the hand that isn’t caressing his back, dragging his fingertips through the tears, down his cheeks until they brush Cas’ lips. He tastes salt and dust.
“I love you,” he chokes out. Crying is still a new sensation to Cas – he never cried, as an angel. Almost did, on occasion, but he never quite got there. Now there’s a crushing weight in his chest and water won’t stop seeping from his eyes and the sensation is strangling him. He's drowning, he thinks. Surely this what drowning feels like.
‘I know,” Dean says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry sounds so goddamn easy. Sorry feels so fucking inadequate. But Cas knows that Dean can’t love him. He tries to accept it, even though it fucking hurts worse than being killed by an archangel or falling from heaven or losing contact with all one’s family and being so frighteningly alone.
This is the kindest Dean’s been to him in as long as Cas can remember, allowing him these moments to break under the pressure of everything that has happened in the past few years; to even have someone pretend they care is more than Cas has been afforded since before he fell. Maybe it’s more than he deserves. Cas has lost everything to free will, to the man beside him, but he is just one of the many casualties of this war, of Dean. An ex-angel whose existence will be scrubbed out of biblical texts as he is slowly forgotten, his name no longer leaving the lips of humans or angels. He is finite.
Dean is crying now, too, tears finding their way into Cas’ hair, his tiny, controlled breaths shaking with repressed emotion. Cas reaches out to lace their fingers together.
“Thank you,” he eventually murmurs wetly against Dean’s neck. Dean presses a gentle kiss to his forehead; Cas closes his eyes. He’ll allow himself one night to believe that the man pressed against his side returns his sentiment. One night of deluded peace. One night to rest easy. Tomorrow, when the morning light filters through the windows and sweeps away the cobwebs created by sleep, Cas will act like nothing has changed. He’ll go back to his cabin and shoot up the last of his heroin. Then he'll leave with the day's patrol, perhaps more a liability than a help, but at least the narcotics will stop him from feeling like an open wound. He’ll serve Dean up until the end, regardless, Dean's own personal Guardian Angel. Dean will lead; he will follow, offering everything to Dean, because love is nothing if not compromise.
But for now, he’ll lie here and close his eyes so he won’t see the love Dean doesn’t feel. Now, and for the next few hours, Dean loves him, and he loves Dean.
The world is not ending.
He is dying star, falling alone through space. Falling in love and fallen from grace.
Now if that isn't fucking poetic. He wants a goddamn cigarette.