Chapter Text
Castiel was born missing the sun.
He couldn’t remember loving it, or knowing it, but when he awoke there was a beacon missing from the sky and an ache in Castiel’s bones and he knew that whatever it was— he wished for it desperately.
It was somewhere between the smell of rain and the rush of adrenaline that the pain began.
Agonizing in every nerve, every shredded inch as he ripped himself apart just to come out the other side alive and breathing. Not swimming, not drowning in a sea of black but really, truly, breathing. He inhaled once, choked and desperate, and felt the air around him bend in motion, rippling as if pushed.
One second, Castiel was floating. Stoking through fire and light and feather-black blood— and in the next, he found himself thrown back on a patch of grass that cut fresh pain into his elbows. He spun through distortion, a river thrashing in his stomach. It felt like years until his vision finally stopped rattling, and he stared up at a sky that hadn’t known he was coming.
He knew it was the beginning, his surroundings unfamiliar, and yet he was aware that something was different. He was aware that this was Earth, and he was human, and that that, in itself, was a miracle.
He was also aware that he, unlike most, was born with a name. Castiel. He was human, and he was alive, and his name was Castiel. A name he couldn’t remember receiving, but felt right all the same.
Castiel.
Grown and full-bodied, existing with an identity that even he knew was muddled and trapped somewhere deep, deep down. Hidden as though it was alive and horribly afraid.
Castiel.
Human.
Cas.
A different human. One in particular. Stronger than himself and responsible for a weight in Castiel that had been dragged with him from somewhere else. As to where from, Castiel didn’t know.
He just knew that Cas, somehow, was also his name, and that the universe carried it towards him with a voice he didn’t recognize and a jaded pair of green eyes that looked strangely close to tears.
……
For what it’s worth, Sam did his best to act normal when he saw Dean finally make his way out of his bedroom for the first time in two days.
There was a great deal of relief that ended up showing on his face anyway, despite the effort. But he kept with it, barely even raising his voice to let out a clipped, “Morning.”
“Is it?” Dean squinted at his brother through the lowlights of the bunker’s library, disoriented. Somehow, he already had a beer in his hand.
“It’s almost noon actually,” Sam said, glancing at his watch. “So, just in time.”
Dean threw out a smile carelessly, nothing about it real or remotely what Sam wanted to see. It was demeaning more than anything, forced for Sam’s benefit, and there was nothing Sam hated more in the world than when his brother lied to his face.
“Alright, so,” Dean took a seat across from Sam, tapping his knuckles on the hardwood table. “What’s the word?”
Sam shrugged, hands hovering over the keys of his laptop. “I think there’s a possible case over in Ohio. A few people have gone missing—”
“What?” Dean asked sharply, suddenly all too willing to look Sam straight in the eye. “What are you—” He let out a scoff, licking his lips. “You’re not seriously thinking about us taking on a case right now.”
Sam let out a terse sigh, apprehension prickling. He slowly closed his laptop. He knew how this conversation was going to go. When Dean locked himself in his room for days, his only source of company being a six-pack and a pair of headphones, he only ever came out looking for a fight; anything to get his blood pumping with something other than grief.
And Sam didn’t want any part of it.
He knew Dean was breaking. Knew that Castiel had sacrificed himself, again, and the only reason Dean hadn’t collapsed on the spot the moment it happened was because they had had the world to save.
But now, left alone without a word from Jack or a single idea how to get Cas back, Dean’s vision was tunneling, and Sam didn’t even know where to begin.
“Dean,” Sam started, but he was stopped short by the sound of Dean laughing into the rim of his beer.
The air in the room dropped considerably, the tension suffocating.
“Man, I must be losing my mind, cause I know you’re not still thinking about it,” Dean dragged his eyes up to Sam’s. “I was talking about Jack, Sam. What’s the word on Jack?”
Sam stared back, gaze heavy where he lingered on the exhaustion blooming beneath Dean’s eyes in dark purple streaks. There was a tremor buzzing in his hand. His eyes wavered in their struggle to focus.
Dean was drunk. That much was obvious now.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Sam muttered painfully, brows knitted together. “Jack’s still off the radar.”
“Figures,” Dean muttered. “It’s just our luck to have our star player sitting the bench.”
“I don’t know what you expect him to do. I mean, you said it yourself, Cas was taken by the Empty. A place we happen to know nothing about, and a place Jack can’t even enter.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Dean demanded, hellbent and desperate. “He’s God. I’m sure he can figure it out.”
Sam swallowed down a lump of pain building in his throat, burning through his chest. Choked out, “He can’t just—”
“Why are you so fucking hopeless?” Dean asked in an instant rise, slamming his beer onto the table and cursing when it teetered over and spilled.
Sam watched tentatively as Dean swept his arm over the mess without care, soaking the sleeve of his shirt down to the skin.
He inhaled shakily. “Cut the self-pity crap, Sam. Get pissed! This is Cas we’re talking about, we’re— we’re not just gonna leave him there to rot.”
“We don’t know the first thing about that place, Dean!” Sam argued, no longer willing to indulge in the unreasonable.
There was a time when he would have. Some distant number of years ago before they had taken a few too many hits, suffered too much loss. But now hoping felt like lying and Sam couldn’t do either.
“We know Chuck could pull angel’s out of the Empty, but there’s no guarantee that Jack can do the same. We don’t know the extent of his powers, and without a sample of Cas’s blood there would be no way to summon him.”
Something in Dean’s features finally shifted, an outcry of yearning making his anger look trifling in comparison.
“Summon him? Like the spell Nick used to bring Lucifer back?” His voice rose with recognition as he spoke, already piecing the answer together himself. Dean leaned forward in his seat, “Fresh?”
“What?” Sam asked.
“The blood, Sam. Does it have to be fresh?”
“I— well I’d assume so,” He said slowly, suddenly rigid.
“I can’t do shit with assumptions man, come on!” Dean gritted. “Shouldn’t you have this down by now?”
It’s an attest to just how well Dean really knows his little brother that when Sam looked at him next, nothing but a sigh leaving his lungs and a slight heat stirring at the corners of his mouth, Dean already knew he’d made a wrong turn.
“It’s been weeks, Dean. What the hell do you think I’ve been doing?” Sam demanded, pained that Dean thought so little of him, frustrated that after everything, Dean didn’t see that he was trying to get his best friend back too. “While you were hiding out in your room, drinking yourself away— don’t you think I want Cas back as much as you do?”
“No cause’ I know you don’t,” Dean murmured, eyes glued to the table now. He had this far away look on his face, the skin around his eyes twisted and red. “Nobody wants him here more than I do.”
Sam didn’t say anything else, but he kept his eyes trained on Dean, waiting for something. Waiting for more now that there seemed to be some sort of dam breaking inside of him.
Nothing ever came.
“All we can do is wait. Jack will get back to us eventually, but for now, we’ve got nothing, Dean,” Sam sighed, laying his palms flat over the lid of his laptop. “Until then, we’ll keep looking for answers— of course we will. But I just figured, I don’t know. Why sit here when we could be out doing our job?”
The sudden rattle of Sam’s phone over the table was enough to make Dean raise his head. They both looked over as the phone continued to ring, the flash of Eileen’s name making Dean pull away just as Sam leaned forward.
They stared at one another. Sam awkwardly grabbed his phone.
“Thanks, but I’m good,” Dean finally answered, grabbing his beer by the neck and standing up.
Sam watched Dean slowly make his way out of the library with something similar to guilt wracking up his spine, twisting his insides into knots.
“You should eat something,” Sam called out weakly. “You know, before you go back to your room.”
Dean didn’t stop, but his footsteps got heavier, arms dragging behind him as he marched down the small flight of stairs into the war room.
“I’m fine, Sam,” He said, before turning over his shoulder bitterly to add, “don’t you need to answer that?”
And then he was gone, disappearing around the corner again with his shoulders tense and the stale smell of beer stuck to his back.
“Right,” Sam muttered, wistful. He answered the video call with a tap of his thumb, managing to smile just at the sight of her. “Hey, Eileen.”
……
Dean retreated back to his room and didn’t hold off on slamming the door behind him.
A couple of hangers in his closet rattled, along with a magazine that slid clean off the bedside table, but Dean didn’t pay either any mind. His eyes fell to the chair at the corner of his room instead, to the jacket that had been slung across it for days— now laying in a wrinkled heap on the floor, shaken from where Dean had neatly folded it the second he’d been able to breathe and shed the clothing like a second skin after everyone was brought back.
Everyone but the person who mattered most.
Dean didn’t even have time to think before he was scrambling forward on shaky knees, choking back tears. He picked up the overshirt with trembling hands. His thumb brushed over the patch of dry blood at the shoulder, the color distorted with age now, cemented into the stitching of the fabric almost like a brand.
A reminder. The last goodbye.
Goodbye, Dean.
Dean sunk to the ground in a watered down haze, eyes glowing red and white, heart splitting open. He pressed a hand over his mouth, forcing himself quiet as he leaned back against the edge of his bed.
Whimpers bled through his fingers anyway. Pain rattled cries of weakness that made Dean hold the shirt even tighter to his chest, burying his face in the sweaty musk of it, fingers curling into fabric and wishing it were skin.
“Cas,” His voice got caught somewhere along the way, crackling in his throat as he swallowed and breathed. He stared at a single patch of carpet in front of him. “I don’t know how this works anymore. I don’t even know if you can hear me but— if you can, you gotta know… I need you to know,” A breath, short and miserable, Dean’s features mangling into something raw. “Me too. Okay? Me too. Do you get it, man? Do you understand?”
There was a time when doing this— praying, falling to his knees with desperation dragging him to the floor— was less preferable than anything Dean could imagine.
He’d grown up right in the storm of it all, fighting for his life before he could even see through the peephole of the motels they stayed in. His childhood filled with hunger pains and nightmares and getting up before the sun just to ice bruises he didn’t want Sammy to see, and Dean had done all of it without a single prayer to the man upstairs, to anyone.
He had done it all by himself. No begging or praying for it to all go away, because praying meant there was hope. Praying meant Dean believed there was someone out there who gave a damn about how much he hurt, and he couldn’t bear to be let down by another father.
But with Cas it had almost become a comfort. Just as easy as breathing, as instinctual as popping in with a shitty joke that Cas would belittle him for the next time he saw him, as simple as closing his eyes and asking, how you doing, man? after weeks of radio silence, not expecting an answer but needing Cas to hear him anyway.
“God, Cas,” Dean spluttered, wetness seeping into his lungs. “Of course I— how could you not— how could I not…”
He needed him back. Dean needed Cas to come back, and it was more than just an ever-glowing thought, a never ending mantra of he’s gone and you’re here, he’s gone and you’re here— why are you still here? It was a constant feeling of wrong coaxed into his very blood, a hollowed out emptiness that stung the most in the moments when Dean would find himself listening for the bunker door to open, waiting for the sound of footsteps while his eyes bored into the name he’d carved into the bunker table when he’d been too drunk to even see straight.
This hurt was never going to go away. Not while Cas was still gone, not while Dean still had so much left to say.
The room took in a breath. Dean tried not to drown in it.
“Jack?” The silence became impossibly tighter, Dean’s voice only highlighting the vastness of it. He dropped his head, eyebrows pinching. “Kid, if there was ever a chance for you to fix things— and I mean really fix things, now is the time. No more house calls, no more gatekeeping Heaven and warming the bench— we need you here!” Dean shook through the outburst, eyes moving rapidly around the room. “I’m angry, alright? I am, I’m pissed. But all of that can go away if you— if you could just—” He let the silence resurface, coating him thinly. Dean looked down at the shirt clutched between his tear soaked hands, “Save him. I need you to save him.”
He listened for that familiar hum in the air. The same prickle in his skin that appeared every time Cas would fly in out of nowhere, filling the room with static and a flutter of wings.
Minutes passed, all of them filled only with the sound of Dean’s breathing.
“What do you say, Jack? Huh?” Dean asked tearily. He hadn’t expected an answer, but fuck if it didn’t still hurt, a bitterness spreading low in his gut. “Just bring him home.”
……
It took minutes for Castiel’s naked body to finally register the cold nipping at its rib cage, searing down its sides. But once it did, it was all he could focus on, and getting somewhere warm was the only thing that mattered.
Vaguely, he could recall never feeling this way before. Cold, freezing from the outside in, crippling, and he didn’t know what to make of it except that he was afraid.
Afraid of the way his hands felt like they were burning alive. Afraid of how little he knew but how old he felt, and how walking out into the middle of the road with bare feet and aching shoulder blades was the first memory he could even begin to place.
That and a vision of green eyes. There was something about green eyes.
Cas.
There was snow trapped between his toes, slicing through his skin, but it was the sudden appearance of lights from a distance that drew Castiel’s attention. He stopped in the middle of the road and turned, facing straight ahead at what looked like sunlight, felt like fear.
There was a screech in the distance, the sound of a horn and a scrape of rubber, but Castiel refused to move his eyes away even when his instincts screamed, heart rising to a deafening drum in his chest.
He trusted that this thing, whatever it was, would give him answers.
It would tell him all about his beginning, and why it felt like this was the thousandth one. It would tell him about the voices, and the pain, and the green eyes of a man who even as a stranger to his mind meant more to Castiel than his own life.
Why does this sound like a goodbye?
The lights rushed forward, closer still, and Castiel watched as they flickered and spun across a sea of ice and cold.
Don’t do this, Cas.
The two collided in the darkness, a spray of glass and blood that blew into the night and sent Castiel sliding across pavement, crying out in pain.
The lights didn’t give him answers. Not a single one, but they did give him something. A memory, a flash of before. The briefest taste of what used to be, and in the last moments before darkness came to swallow him once again, Castiel remembered home.
He remembered that home, however buried, was swept somewhere between leather seats and the silhouettes of two men beaming through the shadows.
……
Sam and Dean left for Minnesota the next day on the account of nothing but weather spikes and glowing bodies. A lead that was barely there and yet for some reason, caught Dean’s interest.
A body hadn’t even turned up, and Dean was bounding through the garage to load the car as if the world was on fire.
“What is with you?” Sam finally asked once they were on the road, the Impala’s heater running full blast. “Just the other day you were serious about laying low, and now there’s some lighting strikes and you... wanna just take off?”
“We’ve gone in on less haven’t we?” Dean shrugged, turning a half-assed glare at Sam from the driver’s seat, silently warning him to drop it.
Sam almost never did.
“Look, I’m glad you’re feeling up for a case now. I am, but that’s just it,” Sam frowned, lowering his voice slightly, “are you up for it?”
Dean lolled his head sideways, teeth gritting with annoyance before all too easily slipping into a sarcastic smile.
“I’m driving aren’t I?” He said, easy-going, but Sam could see the shakiness of it, the foundation weak and built too quickly.
His brother was hiding. Throwing himself into work like he always did, and Sam wasn’t going to pretend like he didn’t notice, or that he didn’t want to help.
He just wasn’t sure there was anything he could do.
…...
After speaking to the witnesses and coming up painfully short of anything useful, Sam and Dean straightened their ties and headed their way to the local station. There wasn’t much else they could investigate, especially without there being any actual killings, but Dean insisted that they still check all the boxes.
Whatever that meant.
Sam had managed to refrain himself from speaking up about the pointlessness of it all so far, but when Dean marched into the station fast enough to have the door rearing back and smacking him in the face, Sam couldn’t exactly swallow down his grunt of pain.
“Dude.”
Dean looked at him from over his shoulder, unfazed. “What?”
“You—” Sam reached up and stopped when he felt blood brush his fingertips, a faint trickle leaking from both nostrils. He fixed his brother with a glare and said, “What the hell, Dean?”
“Wipe your nose, man,” Dean grimaced, gesturing to Sam’s face with disdain. He patted at the inside breast pocket of his suit where his fake badge was. “We’re supposed to be professionals here.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam scoffed, rolling his eyes. He brushed past Dean to step up to the woman at the front desk, nose pinched between his thumb and forefinger as he smiled grimly. “Hi, do you happen to have—”
The woman plucked a tissue from somewhere behind the counter and handed it over without a word, mouth pinched. Sam took it graciously, bowing his head, but the second he turned around his eyes went wide with embarrassment.
Dean grinned. “You alright there, Rocky?”
“Shut up,” Sam snapped, holding the tissue under his nose. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Eager much?”
“No, actually.”
When Sam didn’t say anything else, Dean finally turned to face him fully, eyes drawn with suspicion. He straightened his shoulders and stuffed a hand in his pocket, suddenly serious.
“You know what— I’m tired of whatever this is,” Dean made a face and gestured to all of Sam. “Whatever’s going on with you? Cram it. We’ve got a case here.”
“What case, Dean?” Sam asked tiredly, giving in to that urge, that need to be honest with Dean in the hopes that it made it easier for him to be honest with himself. “We both know there’s nothing in this town that needs killing.”
Dean didn’t react for a moment. His face stuck in this breath between nonchalance and anger, unsure of which one to let take over.
“Tuesday night, 11:38 p.m,” Dean started, taking a prideful step forward as Sam’s eyes slipped to the floor. “The weather meter in Rosewood Park fell from thirty-four degrees to nine,” He drew his eyebrows high. “It’s fucking March, Sam.”
“In Minnesota!”
“Stop treating me like I’m an idiot!” Dean demanded, yelling through a shaky whisper. “It being Minnesota doesn’t explain why the temperature dropped out of nowhere, and it definitely doesn’t explain why multiple people saw some sort of glowing blue light.”
“It’s Cas, right?” Sam said without warning, leaving him to witness Dean’s expression soften unbearably, gaze wavering. His throat bobbed around a heavy swallow, lips parting to speak— but Sam beat him to it. “You think that somehow, this has something to do with Cas.”
“And?” Dean retorted.
“And,” Sam said, making a face as he balled up his bloody tissue and stuffed it away. “It could just be any other angel out there.”
“Or it could be Cas,” Dean shrugged, arms stretched wide. “We don’t know yet.”
“Cas is gone, Dean.”
It’s said with sympathy. With a pair of hazel eyes drowned in unwavering guilt, but that didn’t make it better. It didn’t stop Dean’s heart from rising to his throat, burning up his insides.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to say it.”
You don’t, Dean wanted to heave, an ocean swirling in his lungs. You don’t say it— you just don’t, because hope was the only thing keeping him from drifting away, uprooting his entire sanity. Hope, or stupidity, whatever you wanted to call it— was what had always gotten Cas back to him. That was the secret, the never-changing variable.
Even after the leviathans had obliterated Castiel’s vessel, ripped apart his grace, against all odds he had come back. He’d come to Dean to find his coat tucked into the trunk of some nameless car, forgiveness woven into the warmth of Dean’s eyes as he handed it over and said, “part of me always believed that you’d come back.”
Through Purgatory and humanity and Lucifer spearing him right through the heart— Cas had come back to him.
For years, it had worked.
Dean’s unwillingness to move on, his refusal to completely grieve in fear that acceptance was the final step in making Cas’s absence stick. But now his denial felt like naivety. His hope felt misguided, simply untrue, and Dean didn’t know if he could survive this. He didn’t know if he wanted to—
Sam was hugging him before he could pull away, loose and casual, trying not to make a big deal out of it, but Dean didn’t miss the severity behind it. They never hugged unless a Winchester death was waiting around the corner. That’s just the way it was, the way it had always been.
But this hug wasn’t like the ones they shared before diving into the fire, uncertain whether they’d ever see each other again. It wasn’t all pressure and warmth, reluctant to pull away, determined to leave an impression; but rather gentle in a way that proved to be unraveling Dean faster than anything.
The hand that came up to cradle the back of Dean’s head was what did him in, the comfort in it overwhelming.
He sniffled into his brother’s shoulder, eyes wet and unfocused at a spot across the room. His voice trembled when he dared to force it awake, “I can’t accept that.”
A figure appeared in front of them, shaking them apart.
“Agents,” They both pulled away to stare at the chief of police with wide eyes, his posture awkwardly stiff. The man smiled at them politely, looking a little sorry to be interrupting. “What brings you here? S’ there something I don’t know about?”
“No, sir,” Sam said, recovering with a short cough. “We’re just here looking into the…” He hesitated, lips twitching downward. He glanced at Dean nervously. “Strange blue light?”
The chief made a face before he could help it, eyes mirthful. “The FBI cares about some Ancient Aliens bullcrap?”
“We’re just wondering if there was anything found left at the scene. Anything that could explain what those people saw.”
“Like what?”
Sam and Dean exchanged a silent look, the pull of their eyebrows and the shape of their mouths enough of an indicator for them to understand what the other was thinking. Dean cleared his throat with a touchy smile, nothing from it reaching his eyes.
“Uh, like— like markings in the ground, or some sort of energy… thing,” He made a gesture with his hands, ears turning red. Finally, he coughed out, “Blood? Was there blood?”
The chief— Lundy, his name tag said, sighed deeply, hands falling to the belt around his waist.
“What are you boys chasing?” He asked slowly, finger tracing over his holster in a way that had Dean eyeing him silently.
“We’re looking for someone,” Sam explained, and if he noticed the way Dean turned to stare at him gratefully, he didn’t show it.
Chief Lundy hummed. “Dark-haired, sad lookin’ fella? Blue eyes?”
Something shifted in Dean’s chest. Fast and particular. Small but significant. Dangerous, no doubt, but good good good.
“What?” Dean blurted.
“We found this guy half-dead, naked as the day he was born passed out on the side of the road yesterday morning,” Lundy said, shrugging. “We figure he was probably the one making the light somehow. Fireworks maybe, but when we tried asking him he said he couldn’t remember. The boy seems to have more than a few screws loose.”
Sam whipped his head over to Dean, instantly concerned, but all Dean could focus on was blue eyes. He heard dark hair, blue eyes— alive, this man was alive, and Dean felt that light in his chest sizzle and gasp, bending around air, still burning on against all odds.
He didn’t care how small this was. How absurd of a chance. They needed a fucking win.
“This guy, where is he now? What’d you do with him?” Dean asked heatedly, much more urgent than he’d been before.
“He’s at the hospital as far as I know, being treated for some killer frostbite. There’s no telling how long he was out there, lying face first in the snow,” Lundy explained, giving both of them odd looks. He especially seemed to be studying Dean’s reactions, a crease in his forehead. “He was in too bad a shape for me and my boys to take him in immediately, so we’re having to wait til’ he gets discharged.”
Sam swallowed thickly. His tone was careful, “Dean.”
Dean ignored him. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the Chief expectantly, gaze sharp.
“Which hospital was it?”
……
Dean rolled the windows down the moment he was back behind Baby’s wheel, and they sped out of the parking lot fast enough to kick up loose gravel, the smell of tart smoke and frosted air making Dean’s eyes sting.
He took a few deep, slow breaths. In and out, calmer after the first, shakier after the second. He leaned further against the door, wanting some fresh air, but the force of it was brutally cold and he ended up wincing at the pain of it before quickly rolling the windows back up.
Sam pressed two fingers into the corners of his eyes, shoulders heavy. “I think we need to talk about the possibility that this might not be what you hope it is.”
Dean was quiet for a few restless minutes, gaze flicking back and forth between the road and the directions on his phone. The wind tore up beneath the Impala’s wheels as they sped on, fighting Dean’s grip.
I cared about the whole world, because of you.
“I don’t wanna hear it.”
Sam threw him a desperate look, close to begging. “Dean, please. I’m not trying to—”
You changed me, Dean.
Dean turned his blinker on and looked over his shoulder as he switched lanes, throat tightening in a single breath. The hole in his chest grew bigger, louder, everything inside of him screaming out all at once.
“I just can’t, Sammy.”
……
Room 29 was at the far East side of the hospital down a hallway that smelt like burnt plastic and cleaning supplies.
Dean was sweating through his suit by the time they reached the end of it, eyes wild and feverish, darting past Sam and around corners as though he expected the entire place to evaporate right in front of him.
Doubt was beginning to weigh on him now, the powerless impairment of it sinking into his bones, wringing him dry. Dean didn’t know what to expect. He could walk through that door and find Cas limbless and shaking, blinded and touch-dead, his face torn open and his mouth sealed shut. Cas could be dying, in more pain than Dean had ever seen him, or even worse— it could just not be Cas at all.
Dean didn’t know what he’d do if that was the case.
Sam rounded the hospital room door with suspicion, features pulled down in a way that told Dean he was trying very hard not to show what he was thinking. He peered through the tiny window at the top of the door, determined not to react, but it was impossible to miss the way his face bloomed with relief, eyes widening just a fraction.
“Sam?” Dean choked out.
It was the only thing he could do without actually moving to see for himself, his legs refusing to guide him.
“It’s him,” Sam smiled through a rush of awe, lips twitching as he blinked back tears. He turned to Dean, breath catching. “Holy shit, Dean. It’s actually—”
Sam staggered back as Dean passed through the door in one forceful push, turning the handle at the same time his shoulder powered him into the doorway. It was a loud entrance, Dean’s desperation clear as day, but Dean found that he didn’t care all that much once he was standing still and meeting eyes with Cas from across the room.
Castiel sat up in his hospital bed with a start, their arrival just violent enough to startle him. His fingers clutched at the bedding nervously, gaze uncertain as he gingerly pulled the comforter up to his chin.
Dean’s heart flipped carelessly in response.
“Hello,” He said, gruff and proper, his voice even deeper with disuse, and all Dean could think was that he looked just fine.
There were bandages down his arms, some sort of compress he was holding to his cheek, but other than that he was very much alive. Very much okay, and Dean didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved, his emotions threatening to string him up right there.
Was this Jack’s doing? Were they really in the clear?
Dean’s brow pinched together with pain the longer he stood there hovering, limbs aching, not knowing what to say. He figured he’d gotten it down by now: I love you too, Cas. Of course I do— you should have known that. But the words don’t come out like they should, not like Dean planned they would.
Somehow, even now, there was something holding him back. A soul threaded fear, mind numbing anguish. These things weren’t easy for Dean. They never would be.
“Can you give us a minute?”
Sam seemed to finally come back to himself at Dean’s request, blinking out of his stupor to look at Dean with years worth of understanding. A decade worth of approval that made Dean fluster up and turn away with something like relief shuttering through his next exhale, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides.
“Of course,” Sam said quickly, but he didn’t make a move to leave.
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Sam.”
“Right,” Sam stammered, shaking his head with a dazed smile. He breezed his way across the room and towards the door with a whip of his hair, movements awkward.
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
And then it was just Dean and Cas, an ocean of distance between them, and Dean lifted his eyes from the floor with harrowing trepidation. He figured Cas might talk first. He was always good at that; speaking through the silence, reaching out for Dean when he knew Dean couldn’t do it himself. But this was different.
Cas had already done his part, spoken his truth. It was Dean’s turn.
“Is it really you?” Dean couldn’t keep from asking, his hope too fragile, everything important hanging in the balance. He stepped closer to the bed, painfully slow, and gripped the metal frame at the foot of it. “You’re alive. I mean, you’re— you’re really... fuck, I—” Castiel tilted his head at him, lips parting around a silent question that fell away the second Dean whimpered out, “Cas, you idiot.”
The shake in his voice was telling enough to have Cas shutting up completely, eyes big and worry-filled even as his lips clamped together. He had a hard time meeting Dean’s gaze, every brief start of eye contact ending in the same hasty turn of his head and clench of his jaw.
He seemed uncomfortable. Freaked out even, and Dean took a hesitant step back, terrified he’d done something wrong.
Dean had half an instinct to just turn around and leave the same way he came, when Cas suddenly dropped the hand that had been pressed against his cheek, the entirety of his face coming into view.
The room went deathly quiet, the stillness of it jarring.
Dean wondered briefly if Cas still had his grace. Even just a sliver of it, buried somewhere deep. He wanted to know whether Cas could sense the way his heart broke just looking at him.
“Does it hurt?” Dean asked, and it was strange, pretending not to be falling apart as Castiel looked up at him with no sadness, no grief, just… subtle indifference.
Almost like he wasn’t upset that he’d managed to scrape the entire left side of his face off, the skin that was still there nothing but a festering mess of red blisters and peeling dark spots.
“It’s mostly numb now. Not much pain,” Castiel picked at the hospital blanket with his fingernails as he spoke, vacant with his words, not all there. Dean couldn’t tell whether it was the drugs or something else, something more. The thought terrified him. “But the doctor said he’s not sure whether I’ll get feeling back in that part of my face.”
Dean shook his head and inched forward, moving until he was sitting at the very end of Cas’s bed with his hands in his lap. He didn’t miss the way Cas stiffened. He just chose to ignore it.
“Don’t worry about that,” Dean said, sounding sincere, almost certain. He smiled at Cas and patted him lightly on the leg, not expecting the way his heart immediately settled at the touch. “We’ll figure it out, alright? Find some angel to patch you up, you’ll be good as new.”
Castiel’s confusion was obvious then. Upfront and glaring, flashing hazardously through his slitted eyes. He sat up further in bed and moved his leg away from Dean’s hand, jostling his IV in the process.
He winced. “I don’t understand. Why are you here? I already spoke with—”
“Damn right you don’t understand,” Dean scoffed, doing his best to swallow down a stab of annoyance. “You don’t understand half of it.”
What had Cas expected? Of course Dean was going to look for him, find him, come back to him. There was never a time where he hadn’t. And then, because Dean was already falling, already fumbling for Cas’s hand— he breathed in deep and said, “I fucking missed you.”
Cas didn’t move. All he did was blink at Dean as if he’d just said something impossible, improbable, simply untrue, and it was with that same bewildered gaze that Cas frowned at him and pulled their hands apart.
“I’m so sorry,” He whispered. “I— I don’t…” He hesitated, staring at Dean with uncertainty, a swell of guilt. Almost like he knew Dean’s heart was going to shrivel up and rust away the second he asked, “Do I know you?”