Chapter Text
Castiel doesn’t fall back to sleep again. He spends an hour listening to Dean breathe. When Dean stirs, he wonders for a moment if he should draw his arm back and put some space between them again. He decides against it. His hand is curled loosely at Dean’s stomach and he opens his hand and then closes it again, this time bunching a handful of the fabric of Dean’s shirt in his fist.
A moment later, one of Dean’s hands cover’s Cas’s, and gives an answering squeeze. But then Dean is rolling out from under Cas’s arm, and he’s standing up. “Gotta piss,” he says. The bedroom door opens, the crack of light spilling into the dark room once more, and Dean disappears.
He doesn’t come back, and after waiting long enough that he is sure that Dean won’t return, Cas turns on the bedside lamp and gets up as well.
There’s no sign of Dean in the main room of the bunker, or in the kitchen. The door to Dean’s own bedroom is open and the room is empty. He’s not in the bathroom or the library. Cas checks the garage to see if Dean has left the bunker altogether, but the Impala is still parked there.
As he’s walking back to the kitchen, intending to try to learn how to use the coffee maker, he sees a light coming out from under the door leading to a storage room that had sometimes served as a makeshift dungeon, with its devil’s trap and heavy wooden door.
When Cas pushes open the door, he is faced with a pile of overturned shelving units, their contents scattered across the floor. Dean is halfway across the room, kneeling and slowly gathering up a pile of metal boxes that, if Castiel remembers correctly, contain various bewitched talismans. He doesn’t seem to have noticed Castiel’s arrival.
Cas shuts the door behind him, and as he does so, he sees the remnants of the warding he had drawn in an effort to keep Billie out of the room. His own blood, long-ago dried to a rusty brown on the wood. On the floor he spots Dean’s knife, and he crouches down to pick it up and close it carefully. He had never known Dean to go without it, but it appeared that he had never collected it from this room in the three months that Cas had been gone.
Castiel walks over to where Dean is resolutely stacking items on the floor, and he kneels down beside him. Dean must have gone to his bedroom at some point between leaving Cas’s room and coming to the storage room because he is fully dressed, and Castiel tucks the knife into the pocket of Dean’s jacket. Dean doesn’t look at him, but he nods in acknowledgement.
Castiel helps Dean gather up the rest of the boxes, the two of them working quietly, side-by-side, until everything is stacked back on one of the few shelves that hadn’t collapsed to the floor. There are still plenty of other objects on the ground, and debris from broken shelving, but Dean brushes the dust off his hands in a way that indicates he has completed his intended task.
“Thanks,” Dean says, still not looking at Cas. “Meant to do that a while ago, but—” he shakes his head. “Hey, you want some breakfast? I’ll go make—” he moves to leave the room but Castiel holds out a hand to stop him.
“Dean,” Castiel asks, not sure he wants to know the answer to the question he is about to pose, “are you avoiding me?”
“What?” Dean asks, not meeting his eyes. “No. No, I— we just got you back. Why would I—?” he falters, and closes his eyes for a moment before opening them, this time to meet Cas’s gaze. His voice is flat and quiet when he continues. “Every time I look at you I see it, man. I see it taking you.” He shakes his head as if trying to rid himself of the memory. “Cas, I—” he begins, but falters once more before he can complete the sentence. Then he looks around the room and says, “I gotta get out of here.”
Castiel nods and follows Dean out the door and down the hallway. They end up in the main area of the bunker, and Dean sits down heavily on the bottom step of the stairway. Cas wishes he could coax Dean somewhere more comfortable, the library or the rec room, where there are soft chairs and cushions and their voices don’t echo in the wide open space, but he just leans against the table and waits to hear what Dean has to say.
It takes a long time for Dean to say anything, but just as Cas is about to attempt to break the silence with whatever small talk he can come up with — he doubts that becoming human will make him any more adept at this — Dean finally speaks.
“A couple days after you… I got a phone call,” Dean says quietly. “I thought it was from you. I thought you’d come back to m— that you’d come back. It was your voice. It was your name on the screen.” His voice is even softer when he continues. “But it wasn’t you.”
Cas leaves his spot by the table and joins Dean in sitting on the step. “In the Empty,” Castiel tells him, “I used to wake up in other worlds. Worlds it created. Worlds I was meant to believe were real. You would be there, and I was meant to believe that you were real. And sometimes I did want to believe it. It would have been preferable to believing that I would never be here again, here where you are. But here I am.” Castiel offers a small smile although he can sense that Dean is still looking straight ahead, not at him. “Thanks to you,” he adds.
“I thought that you said that the Empty makes you relive your regrets,” Dean says, sounding curious.
“It’s supposed to,” Castiel replies, “But I guess I don’t have any. Or, rather, I have many. But in the end, they brought me to be by your side in that room, to be able to protect you from Death. I can’t regret anything that led me to that moment.” He can hear sound and movement down the hallway, indicating that Sam has woken up, so Castiel stands and tells Dean that he is going to go into the kitchen to make them some coffee.
Just before he leaves the room, he turns back and adds, “What I said to you then, Dean, I don’t regret that either.” The words are carefully timed — Cas hadn’t expected to ever see Dean again, to ever have the opportunity to, possibly, get a response to his confession, one way or another. He wants Dean to know that, even in the cold light of day, he still means everything he said. But he’s still raw — new to this earth once more and now new to being human as well and feeling everything that much more keenly — and he is not ready for Dean’s reply.
He expects that Dean will let him down easy, but Castiel can live with that. He never expected more than he had, never expected to have even as much as he does now, back in the bunker with Sam and Dean and all three of them alive and safe and Jack somewhere out there, alive and safe as well. It’s enough. And it will be enough, and it has to be enough, but he’s not quite ready to hear it just yet.
Sam is in the kitchen when Cas arrives and, thankfully, he has already started the coffee maker. “Cas, hey!” he says cheerfully. “How’re you feeling? Starting to get your sea legs back?”
Castiel nods. He considers asking Sam if he has any insight into the nervous, unusual way that Dean had been acting since Cas’s return, but before he can figure out how to broach the topic Dean comes into the kitchen and makes a beeline for the coffee.
When Dean turns back, a full mug in hand, he addresses Sam. “Anything new?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Sam says, taking out his cell phone and scrolling through it. “Get this—”
Castiel listens as he describes an apparent haunting in a town near Amarillo, Texas. “You’re hunting,” he says, when Sam is finished. He doesn’t know why the news takes him by surprise. Even though, as Sam had explained at dinner the night before, Chuck was out of the picture and Jack had set everything back in its natural order, there were still creatures on the earth that needed hunters to continue their work.
“I’m hunting,” Sam corrects. “I meet up with Eileen sometimes.”
“And you?” Cas asks Dean.
Dean shakes his head. “Not lately,” he says gruffly. He sets his coffee mug down on the counter, walks over to the fridge, and begins taking out ingredients to cook breakfast.
“Can I help?” Cas offers. “I should learn how to cook, now that I have to eat.”
“You don’t have to,” Dean says, taking out a carton of eggs and setting them beside his coffee cup. “I’ll cook for you.” But eventually he does hand Cas a spatula and shows him how to scramble the eggs while he makes a plate of bacon and hash browns.
Cas leaves the eggs on the stove for too long, but they eat them anyway. “You know, Jack actually prefers them like this,” Dean says, choking down a mouthful. “So you’ll have one happy customer at least.” Castiel imagines his son sitting in the chair he currently occupies, eating rubbery scrambled eggs that Dean had deliberately overcooked to make him happy.
After breakfast Sam says that he is going to head down to Texas to meet Eileen for the hunt. He asks Dean and Castiel if they’re interested in joining him, but Dean shakes his head immediately and even Castiel can tell that it’s a rhetorical question. Sam departs half an hour later, duffle bag in tow, promising to ask if Eileen would like to come back to Lebanon for a few days to see Castiel after, leaving Dean and Cas alone in the bunker.
For lack of anything else to do, Cas goes into the library and pulls a book off the shelf, a diary of witchcraft in the Dark Ages that offers him no new information but which he imagines was quite revelatory to the Men of Letters when they had come across it in some spellcaster’s archives.
He isn’t in the library long before Dean trails in after him, taking a book off the shelves as well and sitting in the chair across the room. He opens the book, but Castiel knows he isn’t reading because every time he surreptitiously glances up from his own book Dean is staring directly at him. Even when he’s leafing through the pages, he can sense Dean’s eyes on him.
“Cas,” Dean says suddenly, after nearly an hour of silence. Cas looks up from his book again. But Dean doesn’t say anything further.
“Dean?” Cas prompts. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Dean says. He sets the book down on the table next to his armchair. “Just making sure you’re still there.”
Castiel smiles. “I’m still here, Dean.”
Dean nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Good to have you back, buddy.” But his smile doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Dean—” Castiel begins, questioning, but Dean is already standing up.
“I need a shower,” he complains, “Feel like I’ve still got Empty gunk on me.” Castiel doubts that there had been any substance in the Empty that could have attached itself to Dean like gum on the sole of his shoe, but he doesn’t say anything as Dean disappears down the hall in the direction of the bathroom.
Dean seems to not want Cas out of his sight and simultaneously, somehow, to not want to see him at all. He tries not to dwell on it. He assumes Dean must have felt some form of survivor’s guilt, and perhaps he was even angry with Castiel for what he did.
Cas decides to take a walk. He’s been out of the Empty for almost 24 hours and he still has yet to see the sun. He gets out of the bunker and realizes he’ll have to wait a bit longer for that — the day is overcast and gray. But there’s a light breeze, and the fresh air feels wonderful on his face after the dead nothingness of the Empty, the fake atmosphere of the false worlds.
Castiel walks down the road. There’s a patch of wildflowers growing between the pavement and a drainage ditch and he bends down to admire them. Some of the flowers are in full bloom, but others are wilting. He reaches to feel the ground and the soil is crumbly and dry. The handful he scoops up falls between his fingers.
He is wondering whether there is a watering can at the bunker when he hears Dean yelling his name. He straightens back up and turns back toward the bunker to see Dean coming towards him at what could reasonably be described as a sprint.
“Cas,” Dean shouts again. He skids on the loose gravel of the road and comes to a stop in front of Castiel. “What the hell are you doing?” he says angrily. His hair is still damp from the shower and his eyes are wide.
“What am I doing?” Castiel asks, confused. He looks down at the flowers on the roadside, then back up at Dean.
“Don’t,” Dean says, then takes a few quick, short, sharp breaths before he continues, “Don’t just wander off like that. You’re human now, man, remember? You could— you could get hit by a car or—” they both turn to look down the deserted road.
“I’ll look both ways before I cross the street,” Castiel promises. He intends to suggest that they go back into the bunker, but he senses that Dean might be in need of the fresh air as much as he is, so instead he says, “Why don’t we go for a drive?”
Dean always seems most comfortable when he’s behind the wheel of Baby, and Castiel sees him relax when he slides into the driver’s seat, especially when Cas settles into the passenger seat beside him.
“You got a destination in mind?” Dean asks. Cas shakes his head. Dean shrugs and starts the car. Before he drives off, he reaches across Cas to open the glove compartment and digs through a jumble of cassette tapes before he finds the one he wants. When he pushes it into the tape deck, the song that plays isn’t one that Castiel recognizes. When he comments on it, Dean shrugs again.
“Got it at Goodwill,” Dean says, “on accident, actually. It was in the wrong case, thought I was buying a Maiden tape. Someone with eclectic taste must’ve mixed them up when they were donating ‘em. Anyway,” he adds, “figured you might like it.”
They don’t speak again for the next hour, and the only movement in the car is Dean twisting the steering wheel and, at one point, reaching out to flip the Billy Joel tape over to side B. When it ends, Dean takes the tape out of the deck.
“You wanna pick something?” Dean asks, gesturing to the glove compartment without taking his eyes off the road.
Castiel reaches into the pocket of his coat. Amid a handful of crumpled up receipts and spare change and other trinkets and trash accumulated over the years, he finds a cassette tape. From the look Dean gives him a few minutes later, when the first track gives way to the second, he knows Dean must recognize it. Whatever number of Led Zeppelin tapes Dean has bought or made over the years, there must only be one with this combination of songs, in this order.
Cas still doesn’t know if they’re driving somewhere in particular, but it feels like the time to speak has passed again.
They’re midway through the second side of the tape when Dean suddenly pulls the Impala onto the shoulder. He ejects the tape and turns off the engine, leaving them in silence. He slaps a hand over his own mouth but Castiel can still hear him breathing, harsh and ragged, behind his palm.
“Dean,” Castiel begins, but Dean holds up his other hand to stop him from speaking. So Castiel waits. Time feels longer now that Cas is human. It used to be that any period of time could pass him by in an instant. What was a week, a year, in the face of the many millenia he had lived? Now the seconds of silence stretch long between them, even as he is acutely aware that their mortal time together is fleeting, no matter what happens in the years they have left on earth.
When Dean finally speaks, it’s in that flat monotone that Castiel recognizes as the one he adopts when he is full of too many emotions and tries to hide them, overcorrecting until his voice is devoid of feeling entirely. His hand is still in front of his mouth, so the words are muffled, but Castiel can hear them.
“When I came back from Hell, at first I dreamed about it every night,” Dean says, staring out the windshield. “Every time I’d close my eyes, I’d see hellfire behind them. It’s been the same, since you left, but instead of flames it’s that black sludge, and Billie pounding on the door.”
“And I figured it had to get easier, over time,” he continues. “I thought it would get easier” He reaches for the glove compartment again and this time he pulls out a flask. After taking a long sip he offers it to Cas, who tips it to his own mouth mainly to feel the warmth on the rim from Dean’s lips.
“Eventually I stopped dreaming about Hell,” Dean says. “Not completely, but at least it wasn’t every night. Sometimes I’d dream about other stuff. Fishing. That lake with the dock, remember? You visited that one once.” Castiel hands him back the flask and Dean drinks again. “But the first time I dreamed about something other than you dying, it was like that phone call all over again. I told you about the phone call— that was Lucifer, by the way, don’t think I mentioned that part.”
Dean continues, “I don’t know if angels dream, but in case you don’t and you don’t know, a lot of time when you’re in a dream it just starts in the middle, and it all makes sense, wherever you start. You don’t ask questions. So when I thought I had you back, I didn’t ask questions. I never knew I was dreaming until I woke up.” Dean offers a sad, resigned smile. “That was two months ago, probably. And most nights after. Sometimes I brought you back, sometimes Jack brought you back, sometimes you were just there. I never questioned it, I always believed it until I woke up and I was really just passed out at the map table with a bottle of whiskey or—” he shrugs. “And then yesterday when I went in there, to the Empty, when Jack powered me up with grace and then stuck an angel blade in my chest—”
Cas can’t help the involuntary, unhappy sound he makes at this. Even though Dean had basically already told him that Jack had to kill him to get him into the Empty, hearing it outright isn’t any easier.
Dean had been staring out the front window as he spoke, but now he turns in his seat and looks Cas in the eye. “Cas, look, I hate myself for it but when I saw you on the floor in that room, after the Empty tossed you out, the first thing I thought was ‘maybe I’m just dreaming.’ And I haven’t— I don’t think I’ve been able to shake that.”
It makes sense, Castiel thinks. Chuck had been calling the shots on Dean’s life for so long, it stood to reason that even now he might have trouble trusting the reality that had been presented to him, especially if it offered him something that he didn’t think he deserved.
But Cas doesn’t have time to examine this thought too closely before Dean is speaking again. “You said the Empty put you in other worlds. How did you know they weren’t real?”
“The Empty is lazy,” Cas replies, “The entity that oversees it is not creative. It didn’t really care if I believed. It just wanted to make me feel regret, or keep me out of the way. It wasn’t actually creating — I suspect those worlds exist, or existed, somewhere — I don’t think it bothered to make something entirely new.”
“Really?” Dean asks, concern taken over by curiosity. “Like what?”
Castiel gives him a brief outline of the universes that the Empty had dropped him into — the apocalyptic compound, the office building, the film set — although he doesn’t share many details. He doesn’t tell Dean what Dean Smith’s lips had tasted like, or what a downtrodden, hopeless Dean Winchester had felt like falling asleep in his arms.
“Yeah,” Dean says, when Cas is finished. “Those are real. Or were real. Or, I don’t know, supposed to be real. I don’t know if Chuck made them up or… either way, they’re gone now. But then—” he pauses, and when he asks the question, Cas knows he’s asking for both of them. “How do you know that this is real?”
Castiel thinks for a moment. Then he answers honestly: “You.”
“What?” Dean asks. “Cas—”
“Dean, I’ve held your soul in my hands. I pulled you out of Hell and put you back together. There has never been a being on Earth or in Heaven that I’ve known as well. Any version of you that the Empty created, or even if they were real in some other universe, there was always something that showed me it wasn’t this you. Sometimes it was obvious straight away; sometimes it was such a close facsimile that I think, if I had let myself, I could have believed. But in the end, I couldn’t have confused them with you.”
“I assume in some of those universes, if they were created by Chuck, I followed orders,” Castiel continues, “I did what I was told. And in others, you never went to Hell and I never had to raise you from it. And in some, I was never even an angel; I was always just a man. Just a man like you. And I think that’s what the Empty wanted to show me, how it wanted to make me regret.”
“How do you mean?” Dean asks. Castiel needs a minute to consider his answer so he gets out of the car. There’s a light rain falling, little more than a mist, and Cas tips his face to the sky to feel it on his skin. He hears the squeak of the driver’s side door opening, and Dean comes around the front of the car to stand beside him.
“Cas?” Dean says. His hand touches Cas’s shoulder, and then he is turning Cas toward him. They’re close, a proximity that would usually lead to Dean stepping back, rolling his eyes and saying something about ‘personal space’. But Dean doesn’t move away.
The first confession hadn’t been easy, but it had been simple. No matter what Castiel said, no matter what Dean’s response, the Empty was going to come and take him. There would be no follow-up, no future. Whatever Cas says now, he will have to live with.
“In those other worlds, our relationship was different.” He doesn’t think he has to elaborate for Dean to know what he means. “The Empty offered me… what I wanted. I think it knew I wouldn’t confuse it for reality, unless I chose to do so. It wouldn’t have wanted me to be happy, but complacent? Quiet? Good enough. Well, good enough for the Empty,” he clarifies. “Not good enough for me.”
“Cas,” Dean begins, but when Castiel pauses and waits to hear what Dean will say, Dean just swallows hard and nods for him to continue.
“I know you too well,” Castiel says, and he can’t bring himself to be sad about it. “The Empty couldn’t fool me unless I was willing to fool myself, and that’s not what I wanted. Above all, Dean, you are the best friend I have ever had. You’re my family. You’re my— my home. And I’d rather have that than have another you in another universe as anything more,” Cas says, and finishes with, “Those other worlds weren’t real. This is.”
He expects Dean to tell him that he’s glad to have Castiel back, as a friend, as well, or maybe even to say he wishes he could offer Cas what those other versions of himself had. In the worst case scenario, he thinks that Dean could suggest that Castiel might have been better off staying in one of those fictional universes where his feelings could have been reciprocated. It would be meant as a kindness, of course.
Instead, Dean gives him a look of disbelief and says, “Okay, and what if you’re wrong?” A hint of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth and Castiel doesn’t understand. For a second he wonders if he is wrong, if somehow the Empty actually has created a setup that he hadn’t been able to see through.
But no. “I’m not wrong,” Castiel says. “If this was the Empty, I would know. I would know that you aren’t really you.”
“Guess so,” Dean says, nodding. He’s fully grinning now, and Castiel still doesn’t understand. “So what if you’re wrong about something else?”
“Like what?” Castiel is beginning to feel frustrated. He knows that Dean is hurting, still trying to come to terms with his success in pulling Cas from the Empty and the knowledge that his presence is not simply a cruel hallucination or a trick of the light. But Castiel wasn’t patient as an angel and it feels like his patience has further decreased now that he is human, and Dean is being unusually evasive in saying what he means.
Dean’s hand is still on Cas’s shoulder, and he raises his other hand to his own face, scrubs it up through his hair and ducks his head, breaking eye contact. “Cas, you’re an idiot,” he says, but Castiel recognizes his tone as fond, not mocking. And when he looks up and meets Cas’s eyes again, the intensity of the look on his face is at odds with the lightness in his voice.
“You think those other universes are the only ones where I could want you like that?” Dean asks softly. “You don’t think I might love you in this one, too?”
Castiel feels Dean’s words as much as hears him, something warm and sweet unfurling deep in his chest. He stares at Dean, processing what he had said, until Dean raises his eyebrows with a hopeful look.
“Alright come on, man,” Dean says, a flush of pink running down the side of his neck, “Don’t leave me hanging. I’ve had a lot of practice saying that, in the dreams, the— the nightmares. Usually that’s when I’d wake up so, y’know, this is already an improvement, but you could say something too.”
“Dean, you already know that I love you,” Castiel says.
“Yeah,” Dean says, his voice barely more than a whisper, “but it’d be nice to hear when I don’t have to watch you die after.”
Castiel obliges. “I love you,” he says. “I’ve loved you since I understood what love was. I love— I loved those other versions of you, all of them, as briefly as I knew them. I would love any version of you. But not the way I love you.” Dean’s hand slips to the back of Cas’s neck and Cas lifts his own to touch the side of Dean’s face. Cas asks, “In those dreams, or nightmares, whatever they were, you woke up when you told me how you felt?”
Dean nods. “Sometimes I didn’t even get that far,” he says ruefully. “Just like real life.”
“So you never got to do this?” Castiel asks. His human heart already feels full to bursting, but he pushes it just a bit more, trusting in its strength, and he leans in to kiss Dean. He lets his thumb rest at the corner of Dean’s mouth until their lips are nearly touching and he has to pull it away to make room, sliding it up over Dean’s cheekbone and stroking it along the dark hollow beneath his eye.
Dean’s hand flexes at the back of Cas’s neck and the other finds Cas’s face, mirroring Cas’s own hand but gripping harder, the tips of his nails digging half-moons under Cas’s jaw as though he’s afraid that if he doesn’t hold on tight that Cas will disappear. As he slips his tongue between Dean’s parted lips, Castiel puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder.
Once, he had left a mark there— not deliberately, but he had no regrets when he saw that he had inadvertently made sure that anyone who saw it would know that he had been the one to raise the Righteous Man from Perdition, that he had laid a claim. The scar is long gone, and he no longer has the power to create it again, but it doesn’t matter. He knows that there is no question to whom Dean belongs.
Or who belongs to Dean. The hand on the back of Castiel’s neck falls to the small of his back, pulling him in until his torso is tight against Dean’s and then turning them both until Castiel is pressed up against the door of the Impala, Dean’s hand between Cas and the smooth, polished metal.
They kiss until a passing car honks its horn at them and startles them apart. Dean steps back, though not far enough for Cas to move from his position between Dean and the Impala, and Cas takes a good look at him. Dean’s hair is mussed from Castiel’s hands, and damp from the still lightly-falling rain. His cheeks are flushed and his expression is one of open, unencumbered happiness that Castiel is sure must be reflected in his own face.
Castiel has an archive tucked away in his mind, his memory still vast, near-limitless even without his grace, of those instances in which he had seen Dean looking truly happy, treasured due to their rarity, even more so when Cas had the privilege of being the reason for or the recipient of Dean’s happiness.
Looking at Dean now, Cas thinks that he might be lucky enough to see that happiness become a lot more frequent. He pulls Dean into another kiss. The rain begins to fall harder, soaking through Castiel’s clothes and reaching his skin. Cas shivers, and Dean runs a hand up and down his arm. Dean moves his head just enough that his lips leave Cas’s, and when he presses his mouth to Cas’s cheek Cas can feel the warmth of his breath.
Castiel reaches behind himself and opens the door to the Impala. If he had any questions left about whether Dean loved him, they would have been assuaged when Dean lets Castiel guide him into the passenger’s seat and then walk around to the driver’s side. By the time Castiel gets behind the wheel and shuts the door, Dean has recovered his cocky attitude.
“Oh what, so this whole little seduction of yours was just so you could drive my baby?” Dean asks.
“Just a bonus,” Cas replies, propping his arm up across the back of the seat so he can rest his fingertips against the back of Dean’s neck. “You can rest,” he says, “I’ll drive us back.”
At first Dean stays awake, tapping his fingers on the dashboard or Castiel’s thigh along with the cassette, Hendrix this time, that Castiel puts in the tape deck. Eventually his hand falls still on Cas’s leg and Cas looks over to see that Dean’s eyes are closed, his face slack and peaceful as he leans back against the seat. There are lines around the corners of his eyes; Castiel resolves to kiss each one when they get back to the bunker.
For now, Cas looks away from Dean, his world, to the road ahead, their world, and he brings them home.