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Darkness surrounded him.
Darkness, pressing against his skin. Darkness, thick in the air stretching out to an infinite horizon. Darkness, above and around and underneath him; darkness inside him, filling up his lungs, oozing through his veins. The darkness suffocated him, and lulled him to a gentle sleep.
The darkness had always been there. Hadn’t it? He couldn’t remember. Couldn’t understand why he was abruptly aware of it, after so long. He was a part of the darkness, and the darkness was a part of him.
And then there was something else. Something more.
The bright light of reality pierced the nothingness, and Castiel remembered himself, remembered that there was more to existence than this eternal blackness, remembered what he’d done in what should have been his last moments. Remembered who he’d done it for.
No, he thought. I wasn’t supposed to come back this time. But—someone wanted him to. Sam and Dean, or maybe Jack. He couldn’t disappoint them.
Gathering up the pieces of his identity and pulling them inside himself, he stepped towards the hole ripped in the void.
Castiel stumbled into the artificial lighting of the bunker’s library, his vessel—his body—feeling oddly heavy after his time in the Empty. Blinking against the sudden brightness, he caught his balance and took in the sight in front of him.
His eyes fell first on Sam, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of an engraved silver bowl, a thick, leather-bound book lying open in front of him. Next to Sam stood Dean. Both brothers were staring at him with strange expressions that Castiel couldn’t quite interpret
For several long seconds, Castiel drank in the sight. Dean was alive, uninjured and to all appearances healthy, save for the dark bags under his eyes. His lips were parted slightly as he stared at Castiel. Castiel had resigned himself to never seeing Dean again, but here he stood, as beautiful in body and soul as he had ever been.
“Dude,” Dean blurted, breaking the silence. “What the fuck?”
"Whoa," said Sam, sounding similarly surprised.
Ah. So Sam and Dean hadn’t been the ones to resurrect him. That was understandable, Castiel told himself. He certainly hadn’t expected them to. He could only hope that Dean would realize that his return was unplanned, that Castiel had never meant to make him uncomfortable by so much as existing on the same plane after telling him the truth about his feelings. He opened his mouth to explain that his resurrection must have been arranged by Jack, somehow, and then realized: Dean wasn’t staring at him, and neither was Sam. Both brothers were staring over his shoulders.
Castiel whipped his head around, his angel blade dropping into his hand as he prepared to face whatever might have followed him out of the void. An icy chill ran through him as he caught a glimpse of a dark shape, of blackness, so close behind him that it was practically touching him. The Empty, refusing to let go of its prize, ready to reclaim him—
Castiel squinted. The dark shape wasn’t oily, or oozing, or reaching for him. And it wasn’t so close that it was “practically” touching him—it was attached to him. An appendage. Two of them, in fact.
And they were covered with feathers.
‘What the fuck’, indeed.
Castiel retracted his blade. “It seems that the Empty caused me to manifest part of my true form as I was pulled out,” he reported, turning back to face Dean.
“Yeah, no freaking kidding.” Dean was still staring, as was Sam, rising to his feet next to his brother. “Why?”
“I don’t know, Dean,” Castiel told him. “I didn’t stop to ask it.” He craned his head to look over his shoulder again. The wings were still there, connected to his vessel and not just his true form. When he reached awkwardly behind him with his human arm, he could feel slits in his coat allowing them to sprout through his clothing.
“Right.” Dean cleared his throat. “Well, anyway, it’s good to have you back, man.” And then he closed the distance between them, wrapping his arms around Castiel’s shoulders and slipping his hands underneath Castiel’s wings to pull him into a tight embrace. For a moment, Castiel stood stock-still, gripped by an uncertainty he hadn’t felt in years. Was he allowed to hug back, now that he couldn’t pretend to be seeking a purely brotherly comfort? But clearly, whatever damage his confession might have done to their friendship, he hadn’t ruined it entirely. Carefully, he brought his hands up to rest against Dean’s back.
Dean didn’t push him away, even though the hug had already lingered for several seconds beyond the point Dean usually would have been clapping Castiel’s back and retreating—if anything, his arms crushed Castiel to his chest more tightly than he had a moment before. “Dean,” Castiel breathed, and clung back, his fingers clenching in Dean’s shirt, his face turning to press into the warm skin of Dean’s neck. He could spend an eternity like that, he thought: being held, being welcome, in the warmth of Dean’s solid embrace. How could he have ever thought staying in the Empty would be preferable to this?
“Dammit, Cas.” Dean’s hand swept up and down Castiel’s back, brushing the underside of his wings. “Don’t ever freaking do that again, okay?” He pulled back, though not entirely, his hands sliding down Castiel’s arms to grip his wrists, as he caught Castiel’s gaze and held it. “No more freaking deals, and no more freaking sacrifices, you hear me?”
“Don’t put yourself in danger,” Castiel responded firmly, “and I won’t have to.”
Dean barked a laugh, and finally let go, swiping his sleeve across his eyes. “Yeah, we’ll see about that.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck as Sam stepped forward to take his place.
“Hey, Cas,” Sam said, arms opening, and Castiel warmed at the fondness in his voice, familiar and uncomplicated. Sam first attempted to wrap his arms over the top of Castiel’s folded wings, which proved to be too large for even Sam’s long limbs to encircle. Then he tried to slip his hands underneath, as Dean had done, but his hand brushed over the joint of Castiel’s left wing, causing it to partially extend in an instinctive reflex that surprised both of them, and then Dean was laughing at them, and then Sam and Castiel were laughing too, and Castiel thought that he had never been this happy in all of his existence.
“Is it weird, having ‘em like that?” Dean asked an hour later. He and Sam had filled Castiel in on the months he had missed: Chuck was no longer a threat. Jack had become God, and was generally avoiding interference on Earth, though he apparently had decided that so long as he didn’t use his powers, it was acceptable to appear in the bunker for dinner once every couple of weeks. And Sam and Dean had been the ones to resurrect Castiel, after all. Eventually, Sam had asked for some quiet in the library while he researched whether the spell he’d used could have caused Castiel’s wings to manifest. He’d given Dean a long look as he’d said it, and then they had traded a series of facial expressions Castiel had been unable to interpret.
“Yes,” Castiel responded. He was sitting next to Dean, on Dean’s bed. He’d been in Dean’s bedroom many times before, so it made little sense that his stomach should be fluttering with anxiety this time, simply because Dean knew of his feelings. It was obvious even to Castiel that Dean wasn't angry with him; if anything, his willingness to continue their usual pattern of interactions should have been reassuring. But Castiel had long since learned that emotions were rarely sensible.
“Good weird or bad weird?” Dean brushed his fingers along the length of a feather near the tip of Castiel’s wing, the light touch sending a shiver through Castiel’s body.
“Good.” Castiel willed his body not to respond inappropriately to Dean’s touch. “My wings were…damaged,” he elaborated, forcing himself to focus on the conversation. “Having them restored is a great gift.” An understatement. “I never thought to be able to bring them into the physical plane as anything more than a shadow, so this situation is…unusual. Unprecedented." Experimentation had revealed that Castiel couldn’t shift his wings to the celestial plane, or make them invisible to human perception without making the rest of his vessel invisible. Adapting to moving his wings in the physical realm was also taking some adjustment; typically, his wings would have been unencumbered by the presence of walls, or tables, or humans. He had to keep them partially folded to prevent them from whacking into the concrete walls of the bunker, and at one point, turning to talk to Dean, he had accidentally given Sam a faceful of feathers. "But I’m just glad that they’re whole again," he concluded. Another understatement, especially as he had been given the chance to show them to Dean, a part of himself that was truly him and not the visage he’d stolen from Jimmy Novak. It was an opportunity he'd never thought to have, and he would have been shamed for Dean to see his wings so broken and ragged.
“Right,” Dean said. “Hey, uh, why don’t you lie down so I can take a proper look at them?”
Castiel went still. For him to lie on Dean’s bed was not part of their usual pattern of interactions, and he wasn’t certain why being horizontal would help Dean’s examination of his wings. But Dean surely knew more about what was appropriate behavior between two male friends than he did, and if he didn’t think Castiel’s confession precluded the invitation, then Castiel wasn’t going to make him uncomfortable by reminding him of it.
He lay down on his stomach, extending his wings slowly until the tips brushed the floor on either side of the bed. The mattress shifted as Dean sat down next to him, settling close enough that Castiel could feel him where their bodies were touching through several layers of clothing along Castiel’s hip and upper thigh.
Dean’s hand ran down the length of his wing, fingers carding through the feathers. “These are amazing.” And then, so quietly that Castiel wasn’t certain he was meant to hear, Dean added: “Freaking beautiful, that’s what they are.”
Castiel breathed into the fabric of Dean’s bedcovers and tried to understand what was happening. Dean’s words. The warmth in his voice. His hands, stroking Castiel’s wings, leaving heat and shocky tingles of electricity in their wake. The puzzle pieces didn’t quite fit together—couldn’t possibly fit together, because they suggested a picture so vast and incomprehensible he couldn’t bear to look upon it.
Dean’s touch was firmer now as he raked his fingers through Castiel’s wings, each touch setting Castiel’s nerves alight. “Look, Cas,” he began, and then trailed off. “Fuck, I’m bad at this. Sorry.” One of his hands came to rest, not on Castiel's wings but on the small of his back, the warmth seeping through his coat and shirt to the skin below.
Castiel struggled to keep his voice even. “At what?” With no small amount of horror, he realized that he was aroused—and while his erection was currently hidden against Dean’s mattress, it would certainly be noticeable if Dean asked him to sit up.
Dean cleared his throat. “Look,” he said again. “Uh, just to be absolutely clear, the thing you said before you kicked the bucket...you didn’t mean like a brother, right?”
The confusion disappeared. So did the fear, and the sensation of being overwhelmed, all pushed aside by the sound of a sentence which was, quite, possibly, the stupidest thing that Castiel had ever heard.
Mindless of his erection, Castiel pushed himself up to a sitting position, turning to face Dean. “No,” he said, irritated. “I didn’t mean it ‘like a brother’. I meant that I am in love with you, and I understand if you aren’t comfortable with that, but don’t downplay—”
“Yeah, okay, just checking,” Dean said, and kissed him.