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There’s an incubus on the prowl at a goddamn gay club in Wichita.
Even though demons have been locked away tight in Hell ever since the Apocalypse Again business, a few low rankers have slipped through the cracks. A good old exorcism is usually all it takes to send them back home to Rowena — but not this one. Several of Sam’s hunter network have tried, to no avail. It’s been running rampant for a few weeks now, having drained the life out of four separate guys who were all just out for a night of fun and instead of a simple hookup met their end.
Dean and Cas are on their way to interview a friend of one of them now: one Leo Garza, twenty-five, living in a downtown walk-up. Heavy rain beats against Baby’s windshield, her wipers doing their best to part the unrelenting sheet of the downpour so that Dean can see where he’s going.
Next to him, Cas is silent.
***
Dean is four drinks of whiskey deep. Four two-finger pours. Any less and he wouldn’t have opened his mouth. But he does.
“Cas told me he loved me before the Empty took him,” he says. In the vast space of the Bunker’s library, his voice is quiet.
From where he’s folded over some thirteenth-century manuscript, Sam’s head flies up. His eyes, bloodshot from their string of all-nighters, come bugging out of his skull.
“What?” he utters.
He looks like Dean kicked his chair out from under him.
“He told me he loved me,” Dean repeats. “And then he died.”
Sam keeps staring. They’ve been looking for a way to get Cas out for nearly five months, and Dean wouldn’t say he’s unravelling, because he unravelled a long time ago. Probably while he sat in a heap in the cold, drafty dungeon and sobbed his brains out. He’s just dragging his own dead weight forward, now.
He’s so tired.
Unbidden, sudden, tears spring to his eyes, and he blinks hard to keep them from spilling over. “And I don’t want him to spend the rest of forever thinking that I’m not even trying to get him back. That I—”
Sam’s still not fucking saying anything, as always unable to provide substantial comfort, and anger builds in Dean, acrid like funeral pyre smoke being blown his way by changing wind; he doesn’t want to sit around and wait for Sam to eke out a platitude he doesn’t really mean, because Sam has a way of pulling the mask of empathy on over his face but not feeling what he says, and he’s got his own unique brand of fucked up, the way every Winchester seems to, but he deals with it by jogging and eating his dumbass kale salads and by not dealing with it, and Dean can’t stand that pitying look that Sam gets on his face; it’s either pity or vitriol, with Sam, the latter when he throws Dean’s most torturesome agonies back in his face to remind him that he’s weak and pathetic.
“He told you he loved you,” Sam finally says, very slowly. “Romantically?”
This time, the tears do fall, stinging and hot down Dean’s cheeks, and he slams his fist down on the table between them. Sam flinches away from him, ever so slightly, but Dean sees it, and he’s so goddamn exhausted — he’s had his fill of Sam, and of himself, and of everything, and he just wants it all to fucking stop.
“Yes!” he screams. “And I couldn’t even fucking—”
He pushes off from the table. His chair screeches against the hardwood floor, then falls with a crash like a car backfire that echoes off the library’s ridiculously high ceilings. He throws back the dregs of whiskey in his glass, grabs the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam by the neck. Retreats to his room, leaving Sam gaping over the books that should’ve had Cas home weeks ago.
***
As they drive to Leo Garza’s, Sam romancing the lore back at the motel, Cas sits with his hands folded in his lap. He has a new coat these days: brushed wool, chocolate-colored, nicer than any item of clothing Dean has ever and will ever own. Cas got it at some garage sale, Dean thinks; wandering around Lebanon on one of his solitary walks, he stumbled upon a woman emptying out her late father’s house. He bought the coat and some books. First-edition The Great Gatsby among them, yellowed and fragrant.
“Did you know that in French,” Cas says, cracking the stillness of the car’s interior in two, “ontology and hauntology are homonyms? It’s compelling.” He pauses. Looks out through the windshield at the red traffic light blurred by the rain. “A study of what does and doesn’t exist.”
And isn’t that the crux of it? The Schrödinger’s cat of what hangs between them, because Dean loves him, loves him so much that he can hardly stand it, but it’s November again, and it’s been over three months since Cas came back, and with every day that passes, it’s harder and harder to even entertain the possibility of telling him. It’s supremely dumb, probably, to back himself into a corner like this, to let his bullshit keep caging him in, make him into a captive animal chewing on its own leg. But who’s to say Cas even wants him still? So Dean keeps them suspended in this goddamn quantum mechanics thought experiment. Maybe the cat’s already croaked and they’re both waiting for a carcass to meow.
Cas isn’t looking at him. That’s commonplace, lately.
He hasn’t been living in the Bunker full-time. It’s more of a crash pad for him, a nest to land in out of necessity between whatever globetrotter trips it is he takes. Sam and Dean have been hunting less and less, just tying up loose ends, and still, in the time that Cas has been earthside, Dean can count the instances he’s actually seen and spoken to him on his fingers and not run out of digits.
He feels like one of those polar bears on National Geographic: stuck on an ice floe, helpless and drifting away from all that he knows.
He steers Baby into the last free parking space in front of Leo Garza’s apartment building. It’s a red brick rectangle, sort of New York-looking if not for the lack of winding fire escapes and the general dreary air of the place.
They climb up to the fourth floor, straighten out their coats, and ring the doorbell for 4B.
Leo Garza cracks the door open just enough to stick his face out through the gap, the security chain still latched. He’s clean-shaven, his hair shorn into a crew cut, and he looks at them with wide, expectant dark eyes.
“Agents Woodward and Bernstein,” Dean says, flashing his stupid fake badge. “We’re investigating the death of Nate Patterson.”
“Wow.” Leo Garza blinks, stunned. “Don’t know if it’s good that they’re involving the G-men in this. Probably not, right?”
“May we come in?” Cas says.
“Sure. Sorry.”
Leo Garza unlocks the chain and swings the door open to let them inside. It’s a big-ish apartment, with white walls, lit well by large windows. There are multiple pairs of shoes on the rack in the entryway, some of them women’s; the guy must have roommates.
“Do you want some water or something?” Leo Garza asks. “Coffee? I was about to put a pot on anyway.”
He’s got a little gold hoop in his right ear that Dean can’t take his eyes off of.
The gay ear, he hears someone supply in his head. It might be his own voice.
He’s back in time — in a muggy California night somewhere around 2003, after he’d chickened out of surprising Sam at Stanford and swerved back into his lane halfway through the turn-off onto Palo Alto. US 101 had taken him to LA, and having parked Baby in the safest-looking corner of a public lot, Dean wandered. He passed throngs of drunk, sweaty, happy people: it was the weekend, or maybe he was just in a party neighborhood. It’s been eighteen years. He has no idea. But a girl came up to him, flanked by her friends, all of them already kind of in the bag, and when she grabbed his hand and flashed him a bright West Coast smile, he went. He slammed shots of tequila in the club they took him to, licked the salt off the back of his hand before and bit into the lemon wedge after, and when they all crashed at the girl’s place, he did the line she cut for him. The world was hazy, pink, swaying in time with the bead curtain in the doorway to the girl’s bedroom, and when one of her friends kissed him, Dean closed his eyes and kissed him right back. The guy was East Asian; Korean, maybe, with a sharp jawline and an equally sharp look in his eye. Dean didn’t protest when the girl brought out a needle packed in sterile foil and pierced his right ear, fitting him with a small silver hoop she’d dropped into boiling water. Manipulated by friendly hands, Dean felt like a doll, and he let himself slump into it.
He took the earring out on the road the next day, prior to meeting up with his father in New Mexico. It healed into nothing, not even leaving a scar.
“No, thank you,” Cas’ voice brings Dean back.
Clearing his throat, Dean takes his spiral memo pad out of his pocket and pretends to consult it for notes, actually only reading through last week’s grocery list.
“So. You were Mr. Patterson’s boyfriend?” he says, voice unintentionally coarse.
Leo Garza shrugs, staring down at his socked feet. “He wasn’t really my boyfriend. We had sort of an open thing.”
“But you were involved,” Cas says.
“Yeah.”
“And you were with him the night that he died?” Dean asks.
“At The Judy. Yeah. It was—” He breaks off as if someone has made him stop; he looks up from his feet, out of the window, and his eyes gleam wetly. Dean sees in him all the people, all the strangers who have made up the pattern of his life: each person whose loss was earth-shattering for them but which for Dean was just his daily bread.
“Take your time,” he says.
Leo Garza tells them everything they ask. It was a Saturday night. Full house. He and Nate had gone in after pregaming at a bar, danced together for an hour, and when Nate let him know he was going home with someone else, Leo Garza wished him fun, then found a guy of his own. The fundamental things apply. When Nate didn’t check in the next morning, then didn’t answer any of Leo Garza’s increasingly panicked calls spaced out over the afternoon, Leo Garza went to the cops. Wichita PD found Nate dead in his own bed. No signs of foul play, except he was the last in a four-piece line-up of the exact same scenario.
Dean and Cas have already been to the morgue: every victim’s internal organs were shrivelled down to prunes. Textbook incubus.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” Cas says to Leo Garza on their way out the door.
“Please just find the guy,” pleads Leo Garza.
Dean wants to promise him they will. He doesn’t. Promises don’t go over well in this business.
***
In the end, it takes them eight months, two weeks, and six days to get Cas back. Dean counts every wretched second of it — he does, he does, of course he fucking does, each moment without Cas like working his finger into a bullet wound, and when he finally looks into those eyes again, the blue of living veins… It grabs his heart, squeezes the slippery muscle hammering away in his chest, and he can’t open his mouth. His old childhood wordlessness swells in his throat, grows big until he feels like he’s choking on it. Cas is looking at him, looking, waiting, hoping for Dean to say it, and Dean can’t. His vocal cords tremble with the anticipatory effort of producing speech that never comes; panic seizes him, cold sweat breaking out over the back of his neck in the late July heat.
“Welcome back,” Sam says.
Cas’ eyes leave Dean’s.
“Thank you,” he replies quietly, staring down at his feet.
Dean doesn’t say anything.
***
The Judy, they find out that night, is a household name. It’s the last minutes of Friday, and the place is packed to the gills. It’s mostly people in their twenties, which isn’t surprising but still makes Dean feel fucking ancient as he maneuvers through the scantily dressed, perfumed mass gyrating to some sort of bouncy pop and hip-hop fusion, its heavy bassline vibrating in the bones of his ribcage.
“I’ll cover the bar,” Cas shouts to Dean and Sam over the din. Dean gives a nod, and Cas retreats.
Dean can’t help himself in following him with his eyes, in staring after Cas in one of Dean’s value pack black t-shirts that he borrowed to “blend in” with the clubbing crowd. It clings to him in all the places it doesn’t quite do so on Dean: his sturdy chest, the broad spread of his upper back, the biceps that strain the cheap seams, and looking at him this way makes something beyond Dean’s diaphragm squeeze and pull, an intramural itch that won’t abate. Wanting for the forbidden fruit, except the forbidden fruit has been explicitly offered out to him; he has been told he can take bite after bite, devour it whole, and still, he keeps himself starved of it. One must imagine Sisyphus hungry, hungry, hungry.
Sam goes to scope out the basement level of the club and returns with two Heinekens. Sipping idly away, they stand propping up a wall, scanning back and forth over the colorful drove; the incubus changes bodies for every victim, so they’re left having to look out for a flash of anything vaguely suspicious. There’s plenty of that in the mundane sense — people exchanging cash for pills, passing baggies around — but nothing interesting to them so far.
Until there is. To Dean, anyway. Across the club floor, where Cas is sitting with one elbow on the mirrored bar and his other hand closed around a beer, there’s a blur of motion, and Cas isn’t alone anymore. On the stool next to his, there’s now a guy. Smiling. Young. And yeah, sure, fucking great-looking: dark-skinned, tall, wearing a tight tank top that displays the kind of lean body Dean had when he himself was in his early twenties. He says something to Cas, and Cas blinks, surprised. Then he replies, and the twink laughs. Dean knows that goddamn laugh. The please fuck me laugh. All of the world narrows down to that laugh.
He observes the two of them talking like a crazed fucking sniper watching someone through his rifle scope. Cas smiles at something the twink said. The twink shifts closer. Cas takes a pull of his beer.
The twink lays a hand on Cas’ bicep, and Dean sees red.
“Hey!” he barks, already halfway through the crowd. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Huh?” the twink startles, his head whipping in Dean’s direction. In his meticulously styled buzzcut, which curls into tiny ringlets despite how short it is, there’s fine glitter.
“I said, what do you think you’re doing?” Dean yells out over the deafening music.
Cas’ gaze has snapped to him, dark and intense and searching like it’s always been, and Dean feels himself going hot in the face, but the pink and purple LED lights of the club surely conceal it, so he doesn’t back off.
Not that he often does.
“I was, uh—“ the twink fumbles. Nervously, he messes with the thin string of pearls around his neck. John Winchester would’ve chewed the absolute living shit out of Dean for wearing something like that; maybe lost his temper and slapped him across the face for good measure. It’s not as if that’s never happened.
“Well, he’s fucking taken,” Dean takes mercy on the twink.
Immediately, the guy’s expression morphs to that of someone whose physical wellbeing has been threatened with a firearm.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” he shouts, scrambling to his feet.
“Yeah, whatever,” Dean spits. “Beat it, kid.”
The twink scampers off, sending the barstool skittering and nearly crashing to the floor before Cas’ hand shoots out and rights it just in time.
He hasn’t looked away from Dean, his eyebrows furrowed to create that dome-shaped groove that has reproached Dean for thirteen years.
Cas’ mouth, wide, with that absurd Cupid’s bow. The skin of his exposed neck. Dean has nothing to say.
He nods curtly and walks away from the bar, back to Sam.
They stand in silence for a few minutes until Sam clears his throat.
“You know,” he starts, “you should probably chill out a little. It’s not the Bush administration anymore, man.”
Dean turns his head to stare at him. “What?”
Sam won’t meet his eye. “I’m just saying. If Cas likes guys, then, you know.” He shrugs jerkily. “You should let him… you know.”
Dean has to take a second to comprehend what’s being communicated to him.
“Dude,” he says slowly. “I have no fucking problem with gay people.”
“I’m not saying you do,” Sam returns, lightning-fast. He’s still facing away from Dean, studiously fixated on the people dancing in front of them. “It’s just. Same-sex marriage is legal in all states and everything. You’ve got to get with the times.”
It’s so patently ludicrous that all Dean can do is let out a half-scoff, half-laugh. Once again, Sam is lecturing him. Sam, with his Ivy League complex, always wanting to come out on top in the nonexistent intellectual-moral two-person race that only he is participating in. Advertising himself as a good liberal to anyone who will listen.
And neither of them can even fucking vote.
Dean is so goddamn over being preached to.
“I’ve been sucking dick for longer than you could legally drive,” he snaps. “Get your head outta my ass and into the game."
Sam shuts up faster than he ever has in his entire life.
It’s not long till there’s actually something of note. Across from Cas at the circular bar, two dudes are evidently in the last stages of establishing whose place to evacuate to, no sliver of space between them, and normally Dean would force his eyes to slide away, but this time, he looks on.
One of the men meets his gaze. His sclerae click to black, and he winks.
As the incubus grabs its newest mark by the hand and steers him towards the exit, Dean lunges after them. It’s a goddamn live obstacle course, wasted idiots blocking his way in every direction; he utilizes the divine gift of elbows, clearing his path with forceful jabs that he has no time to apologize for. The demon is weaving in and out of his sight, ahead by maybe twenty feet, reaching the exit now, its prey trailing obliviously behind him, and Dean gets more aggressive, shoving some stoned moron aside and not even getting a reaction. Sam and Cas are right at his back, he knows, and finally, they burst outside just as the incubus turns a corner, the air like a frigid wall after The Judy’s thick heat. They barrel through clusters of smokers and follow the incubus into an alleyway, the bass of the music a muffled drum behind them, their boots pounding against the pavement.
“Bro, what the fuck?” says the mark, a blond in leather and black eyeliner, when he spins on his heel to stare them down in the otherwise empty alley.
“I’m telling you in good faith to get the hell out of here,” Dean says.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Go!” Cas orders.
For a tense second, no one moves.
“Man, whatever,” the mark mutters and hurries past, back to the club, shooting them a singular rearward glance.
They’re left with the demon. It’s kind of short: five-nine at most, with a few days’ growth of stubble and a mouth like a mean gash in its face.
“So you’re the vermin,” says Sam.
The incubus grins. “In the flesh. Literally.”
“Why d’you let us catch you so easy?” Dean challenges.
“Hey, now. You ain’t caught me quite yet.”
The thing has a slight Southern drawl, as though it’s even possible for a demon to be from Texas.
Sam slips the good old demon blade out the back of his waistband. “That can be changed fast.”
“Oh yeah?” the incubus leers, rocking back on its heels as it spreads its arms invitingly. “Go on, then. Ain’t nobody else in here. Delivered fresh to the morgue this morning. Multiple rapist. Less ethical quandary, if that even matters to you.”
Sam steps forward, the knife held aloft. The incubus puts up a solitary index finger.
“Hold your horses,” it says. “I changed my mind. I want him to do it.” And it points the finger at Cas.
Cas squints. Not sparing Sam a glance, he takes the knife Sam offers out to him handle-first.
“Do you think I consider myself too holy to slaughter you like you deserve to be slaughtered?” he asks, perfectly even like the surface of a forest lake. “Because I don’t.”
Clearly, this wasn’t what the incubus expected to hear. Fear flashes in its face, but before it can unhinge its jaw and flee from the body it’s occupying, Cas claps a hand over its mouth and plunges the demon blade right in its solar plexus, aiming upwards and pushing until something gives a sickening crunch and the body slumps to the ground, its eyes fixed in gaping terror. The wound sparks, then dims to a cauterized glimpse into slick viscera.
There’s a silence in which they all stare down at it.
“Well, that was fast,” Dean says. “Late-night tacos, anyone?”
Sam gives him the stink eye to rule them all.
They transport the corpse to a large vacant lot, where they dump it into an empty oil drum possibly abandoned by an encampment of homeless folks. Dean pours some gasoline down, throws in a match, waits until the body has properly caught flame, and then they all haul ass.
They actually do get the tacos, at a twenty-four-hour Mexican joint lit by harsh white fluorescents. A small stereo that stands on the counter spits out fritzy Spanish-language pop interspersed with the chatting of a radio DJ who sounds way too cheerful for how late it is. Despite his earlier prissiness, Sam puts away four shrimp tacos before he taps out, cilantro stuck to the corner of his lip; Cas doesn’t eat, instead placidly observing as Dean demolishes his portion, not letting a single piece of carne asada go to waste.
To Dean’s right, a table of plastered sorority girls is inhaling quesadillas and margaritas like there’s no tomorrow. As he’s reclining in his seat with his plate wiped clean, one of them, hand fisted around the stem of her glass, eyes half-lidded with alcohol, bends surreptitiously towards him. On instinct, he leans in, her long blond hair brushing his shoulder.
“You’re, like, really hot,” she almost shouts, counteracting her conspiratorial posture and making him twitch away in surprise.
“Uh. Thanks,” he says. She tips her pink, fuzz-trimmed cowboy hat to him and turns back to her friends.
Before they leave, Dean polishes away the last taco remaining on Sam’s plate.
***
They get back to the motel past three AM. Made stale by their twenty-two-hour day, Dean heads in for a shower in the room he's sharing with Cas, Sam nice and cozy in his single across the lot.
Few rooms left this week, the lady in the office had said. Holiday season approaching.
The water pressure is mediocre at best, but after moving between second-rate motels his whole life, Dean can only tell now because he's been spoiled by the Bunker. The complimentary soap is cheap, off-brand, probably bought in bulk, but it suds up fine. Twenty years ago, the sandalwood and rosemary bodywash he's got back home would've gotten him reprimanded for wasting money. The cheapest laundry detergent in the dollar store and throwing his shoes at roaches scurrying across the wall, the pillars of Dean's continuance.
Back home. Ain't that a thing, still.
He brushes his teeth and comes out of the bathroom in sweatpants and his most threadbare t-shirt.
Cas is sitting on the edge of his mattress, fingers tangled loosely in the space between his splayed knees. He's still fully dressed: black shirt, black slacks, those black Chelsea boots. He's looking at Dean, and the whites of his eyes glint in the low light of the solitary table lamp between the two twin beds.
“Hi,” Dean says.
“Why did you do that?” Cas asks.
Dean blinks.
“Why did I do what?”
“Why did you tell the man at the club that I was taken?”
Like a switch has been flipped, Dean can't move, rooted to the floor. That's Cas — a punch to the face. But if Dean is not one for confrontation, he doesn’t even know what Cas is; a champion avoidant, someone who will cling to keeping his mouth shut until it kills him. Which. Well.
The skin of Dean's palms has gone damp with flop sweat.
If he dares admit to what he wants, the world will stomp him into the ground, again and again and again. It's been his personal rule of thumb since before puberty, since his fifth birthday wish to have his mom back, since Christmas 1989 when he asked for just one festive dinner and John told him to grow up. Since the stakes sky-rocketed and nearly everyone Dean has ever loved has been torn away from him. So it goes.
He doesn't even know what there is to lose this time. Still, it takes all the effort he's got to swallow the ball in his throat.
“You know why,” he says.
Cas' face becomes hard, the set of his jaw turning to stone. Dean knows this expression, the mulish anger that's directed at him half the time it makes an appearance.
“No,” Cas says. “I don't.”
Dean he has no idea whether that's true or if Cas just wants Dean to finally choke it out. Cross the Rubicon.
He probably watched Caesar do it, too.
“Cas, I—”
Dean's windpipe is a bottleneck. His whole life is a weight stoppering his voicebox. He feels so fucking old and like he's four again, both at the same time.
“Me too,” is what claws its way out of him. “The— Me too. I feel the same way. I always have. Please tell me you get that.”
For a long while, Cas only looks.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” he says when Dean is about ready to scream.
You’re one to talk wants to rip itself out of Dean’s mouth, but he stops it.
“I thought that maybe you’d… changed your mind," he says.
Cas is quiet.
“I mean, who’d want to be saddled with this, right?” Dean adds when the silence has stretched too thin, motioning loosely to himself. He aims for joking, nonchalant, but it comes out way too vulnerable, his voice gruff the way it gets when he’s skimming the top of his emotions too closely, knife over bone. He drops his eyes to the motel carpet.
It’s been thirteen fucking years, and Dean doesn’t have any more cards left to play, but he still feels like he’s pulling the wool over Cas’ eyes somehow. That one day, Cas will peel back the last of the wallpaper and reveal all of the black mold that is Dean, and finally realize that he’s involved himself in a real crapshoot with him. Dean’s a freak, and an asshole, and he gets so mad, so fast, and he’s weird about sex, and so many other things that all amount to him being FUBAR, and yeah, Cas is a goddamn bastard in his own right, but he doesn’t deserve this. The hopeless tangle of Dean’s wires, stripped of insulation and poised to kick.
“Dean,” Cas says softly. “I could never change my mind about you.”
And Dean’s always been an easy crier, but somehow, it still takes him by surprise when the first tear burns a track down his skin. It strikes him like a kick in the gut; he hides his face in his hands, his lungs spasming as he gasps out a pitiful, hitching sob.
He doesn’t know why he’s crying. This is good. This is the best moment of his wretched fucking existence. He has just set free what he’s been keeping compressed in his chest for over a decade, has gotten reassured that he’s still wanted despite the twisted, corrosive wreck of his personhood, and yet he’s weeping like a child, his cheeks abruptly wet under his palms.
“I’m sorry,” he says through clenched teeth. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me—”
The bedsprings creak as Cas stands up. He crosses the room. With one hand on the nape of Dean's neck and the other in the middle of his back, he tucks Dean into himself. Sagging like he's been sedated, Dean lets himself go to pieces.
He tires himself out eventually. Somewhere in the meantime, he has dropped his hands from his face and curled them into fists against Cas' pectorals. He looks at them there, at his scarred fingers against the backdrop of Cas' shirt, his skin itchy from drying salt.
He breathes.
There's no noise in the room aside from the distant whisper of I-135.
“I fucking hate that you left me like that,” Dean mutters. “I hate that you did that to me.”
Cas, erstwhile strategist of Heaven, turning what they had into a bargaining chip. It's nothing new to Dean, love being turned into a weapon; still, the pain of it remains as blinding as it was in that dungeon.
Cas didn't even consider Dean's share in the game. The fact that Dean would drink himself into vomiting blood over losing him again.
"I'm sorry," Cas murmurs. So subdued, his voice is the purr of a cheetah.
Dean tips his chin up. Looks right into Cas' eyes. Nebulae; peacock feathers. Cas' weary face: Dean's North Star.
He lets himself lean in that last fraction of an inch between them. Puts his lips to Cas', and the tiny sound Cas makes is the loudest thing in the universe.
Cas holds him close as Dean opens his mouth against his, the quietest of gasps loosening itself from Cas when he follows suit. He lets Dean in, welcomes the first tentative swipe of his tongue by pulling Dean tighter into himself. Dean allows his hands to slide up from Cas' chest to bracket his neck, his thumbs on Cas' stubble-coarse jaw.
Cas kisses him so sweetly, clutching on to Dean's scuffed, mangled body as though he's scared this will get taken away from him any second. Dean falls further into him; shows him that he can take, take, take, and Cas gets the memo, licks in deep. Dean can't help but keen, Cas shivering in response.
Cas is in his lungs like water in a drowning man's but instead of pin-sharp pain, it's music. Plucking Dean's veins like guitar strings, drumming in his nerve endings. His bones the piano, his muscles the bass.
I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for you.
Given permission, Cas is fierce, kissing the way he fights. It makes Dean's mouth buzz, the back of his neck tingle where Cas is still cupping it. They're touching all the way down to their knees, one solid line; a kiss like blood loss, dizzying.
Against his hip, Dean can feel that Cas is hard, but fuck, so is he, the realization of it a starburst below his navel, blazing. For a moment, fear slithers and pools in him: fear of going from nothing to everything so fast, vertigo, a violent change of pressure that makes eardrums burst, but he dismisses it quick. He wants to gorge himself on this. He moans into Cas’ mouth, swirls his tongue over his, gasps as he falls away from Cas’ lips, the hot ache between his legs making him eke out, “Cas, please… I need—” His hand drops to Cas’ belt, fumbles over the buckle, Cas nodding frantically, both of them with their eyes still closed.
Dean pushes Cas onto the bed, lies down between his legs on his stomach, shoulders Cas’ thighs apart; he yanks and tugs on Cas’ belt, the button of his pants, the zipper, draws the folds of the slacks out of the way. He reaches into his boxers, Cas’ head falling back against the headboard with a thump when Dean wraps his hand around him.
“Dean—” Cas produces, and Dean doesn’t wait for more. He pulls Cas’ cock out of his underwear; groans as he closes his mouth around the head slick with precome. Cas’ hand flies up to Dean’s hair, hips twitching up as Dean kisses the tip sloppily, suckles at it, then goes slow all the way down to the root, opening his throat up easy. He grasps Cas’ strong thighs with both his hands, feeling his muscles tense and flutter. Cas is big, thick, but Dean’s a pro at this — made his living on it for a not insignificant time, fucking loves doing it. His mind has always quieted when he had a dick in his mouth, the singular focus blanking his brain out to nothing, but now, with Cas, there’s no nauseating shame to go along with it: it’s complete peace washing over him, the only things in the world that matter being Cas’ aborted gasps, his groans, the helpless grip he has on Dean’s hair.
Repeatedly, Dean swallows around the head of Cas’ cock whenever it nudges the back of his throat; it’s wet, messy, his drool trailing down over Cas’ dick, his balls, soaking into the cotton of his boxers. Dean bobs up and down, up and down, Cas moaning loud and shocked, the simple pleasure of being sucked off overwhelming him to his bones. Dean’s angel, Dean’s man, always so fucking cruel to himself, not knowing how to deal with earthly ecstasy, with the orgasm Dean knows is already right around the corner by the way Cas’s hips jerk up into his mouth, reflexive, plaintive. He keeps up the rhythm, feels Cas’ frantic heartbeat in the vein along the underside of his dick. It’s just a couple of minutes before Cas’ fingers go impossibly tighter in Dean’s hair, and yeah, that’s it, that’s it, Cas’ back arching, a high, desperate sound escaping him in an incendiary rush.
“Dean—” he sobs out, and he locks up under Dean, throbs in his mouth, his come salty-sweet, Dean’s throat flexing around him, working Cas until he’s spent and panting heavy, cradling Dean’s skull.
“Come here,” tumbles out of Cas, hoarse and low, said with considerable effort. “Come here.”
Dean goes, will go anywhere Cas tells him to; lifts himself up over him and melts into it when Cas pulls him down by the nape, kissing him deep, filthy. His other hand undoes the drawstrings of Dean’s sweatpants, slips under the waistband, and Dean chokes back a whine as Cas strokes him.
“Ah,” he breathes, bucking into Cas’ broad, hot palm and long fingers, “fuck—”
Cas doesn’t waver, jerking him off tight and steady, and maybe Dean should be embarrassed, downright humiliated, but the compact heat starts building in his belly almost right away. He drops his forehead, thrusts into Cas’ grip, chases the thrum that mounts and mounts in him, and it only takes a few more even motions of Cas’ hand for Dean to come hard, whimpering into the space between them, shuddering through the bursting pleasure until it’s all over and he goes limp, collapsing on top of Cas, raw and fragile like a soap bubble.
“I love you,” he exhales into Cas’ pec. “So much. D’you understand?”
Cas’ arms circle him, wrap him up in their warm safety as his chest lurches underneath Dean’s cheek with a single tremulous breath.
“I do,” he says.
Everything is good.