Chapter Text
In his head, he’s formulated the question ‘where are you going?’ but it mostly comes out a sleep-drunk grunt. Castiel seems to get it, anyway, because he pauses like he’s just been caught out for solid second. Then Cas just frowns at him through the gloom. Dean’s cold. He’d been warm and comfortable and down right content and then it had been cold and he’s pretty certain Cas making an attempt to houdini out of bed is the cause. Even in his hazy state he’s worked out that Cas is the one doing a runner this time.
“To save you,” Cas says, his own voice low, rough, the best damn thing Dean’s ever heard in the few seconds after waking up. It’s also Cas all over. No one but a frigging angel of the Lord would be so damn righteous right when Dean's barely conscious and only Cas would get that uppity about saving him in the middle of the damn night.
"Huh?"
"I need to speak to Rowena."
Goddamnit.
"The mark can wait till morning, Cas," Dean mutters, stretching his left arm and trying to burry himself into the mattress. Cas’ eyes track the movement a little too closely. Memorising it. It’s awesome and wonderful and makes Dean feel like he might just be able to walk into a bar with Cas and not freak out about what everyone’s gonna think because moments like this have gotta be worth it.
"I have no requirement of sleep."
"I know,"Dean mutters, reaching forward to bring their foreheads together and to half smile at him. It’s dark and soft and kind of brilliant. He wants it so goddamn badly. "Stay,"
Cas looks conflicted for moment before he delivers his reply, with absolute conviction.
“No.”
“You don't want to?" Dean asks, shifting onto his side to look at him better. They're not tangled together anymore. Cas has separated them out. Untangled them. A little of his contented sleepiness slips away because this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Yeah, it’s gotta be pretty boring to watch Dean sleep but Cas has done it before and he didn’t find it boring then. There's a reason he's pulling a Dean, here.
“This isn’t real.”
“Feels pretty real, Cas.”
“It might be real in an alternative reality with your door locked, but it is not real,” Cas says and, crap, he’s getting out of bed now. His shirt and tie and trench coat are on in an instant, which means Cas aint even hovering around long enough to do things the human way, which he’s been doing more and more often.
“Cas,” Dean says, wakefulness hitting him like a freight train, because shit. He's screwed up already. He’s fucked up already and he’s been awake for two frigging minutes. Dean sits up, scrambles for the light, "That's not..."
"Sleep," Cas says, reaching towards his forehead. And Dean's gonna bust him for it later, because that's a totally not cool use of grace in the middle of a damn discussion (not that Dean really gets to win on frigging etiquette with this thing so far), but the second Cas' fingers touch his forehead he knows he's lost this battle.
He wakes up alone.
*
“The apple?” Dea is asking when Dean makes it down to the kitchen after half an hour of trying to deal with the screwed up content of his own head. Cas’ sleep-whammied him pretty hard but he doesn’t feel exactly rested. His mind is still clogged up. “The apple. Adam and Eve, beginning of everything bad in the world, apple,”
“Why do these things still surprise you?” Female-Castiel says, tilting an affectionate smile that seems a lot softer than male-Cas has ever worn. It’s probably because they haven’t worked through their fifteen shades of bullcrap yet. Dean kind of hopes one day they’ll get there. “Yeah, beats me,” Dea says, rolling her eyes and then leaning a little closer.
“So, you’re turning to health foods,” Dean says by way of announcing his presence, raising his eyebrows. “The apple.”
“Something made by God, but forbidden to man.”
“Well that clears that up.”
“First part of the spell to remove the mark,” Male Sam puts in, “Hey, Dean,”
“Awesome. That shouldn’t be difficult to locate,” Dean says, “Let’s just head down to wallmart,”
“Have some coffee,” Castiel says, narrowing his eyes in her direction. “You need some,”
“Gee, thanks Cas,”
“You two are hilarious, you know that?” Dea asks.
“Okay, Chuckles, let’s move this along. So we need the frigging forbidden fruit from the garden of frigging Eden. What else?”
“That’s pretty much where the conversation was going before you barged in,”
“Something made by man but forbidden by God,” Male Castiel says.
“And this is all Rowena gave us? Some cryptic crap,”
“Most ancient spells are cryptic,”
“Where is she anyway?”
“The dungeon,”
“Cas, you’re awesome,” Dean beams at him. Castiel actually meets his eye for a split second and almost smiles back, before he’s back to laying out his spell related crap on the kitchen table like they’ve got a hope in hell of getting together all the stuff to put in the damn bowl.
“And you’re okay with this?” Sam asks, “This whole… removing the mark, teleporting home plan.”
“No,” Dean says, “I am the exact opposite of okay with this, Sam, but I got outvoted and there’s not a lot else I can do, here.”
“The life of the thing the spell’s caster loves most,” Castiel finishes, glancing between them both. It’s probably for the best that they keep this conversation steamrolling forward because he and Sam need to talk about sixteen different things and they probably need to do it alone. This conversation has enough content without packing in the rest of their crap.
“We gotta reality jump Crowley too?”
“I have the blood we need,” Castiel says, looking up at Dea.
“How?”
“I sourced it.”
“Huh,” Dean says, “Guess you can get a lot of crap done if you don’t sleep. Okay, retrieval plan for the other two items. Cas, we gonna be able to help you?”
“Unlikely,”
“We had a thought about that,” Dea says, glancing at her Cas. She’s looking for confirmation and her Cas nods, just a fraction, before her frown tilts upwards a little. Dea stands up and heads for the coffee pot. “If shit’s about to rain down on us, would be good to have all weapons fully loaded before we invited the party in. You know where Metatron stashed my Cas’ go-go juice?”
“I can take you there,”
“You sure about this?” Dean asks.
“Okay, yeah, it’s not as cutsie as the character building road trip we had planned, but sometimes you just gotta chuck out the romanticism and think about practicalities.”
“Cas?”
“It doesn’t have to be permanent,”
“You would fall by choice?” Castiel asks, fixing his counterpart with a serious stare. Cas is staring right back and there’s way too much electricity in the room with both of them digging into each other’s heads. Dean is pretty interested by that question, too, but he thinks he’s more interested by Cas’ question and what that implies. That the original Cas wouldn’t. That’s there’s nothing he can conceive of that he’d give his grace up for.
Dean needs a hell of a lot more than coffee to deal with this morning.
“The plan,” Sam - male Sam - says, as everyone’s eyes dart back to him, “Cas, you take, uh, the other Cas and Dea to Cas’ grace. Then you split and take an ingredient each.”
“And we sit here with our thumbs up our asses?”
“Hey, what you like to do in your spare time’s your business, Dean,” Dea throws out. It shouldn’t wind him up as much as he does, but he’s got the memory of falling asleep in the warmth of Cas’ body head, of how un-sexual it was, how fucking perfect it was, rushing round his head. He flushes and then instantly hates himself for it. Sam is right fucking there.
He’s gonna screw the whole thing to hell if he can’t sort his head out.
“Dea,” Cas - female Cas, says, narrowing her eyes.
“Okay, okay,” Dea says, “I’ll suit up. You coming?”
“Sam,” Cas says, “Could you research the forbidden fruit? I believe it to be in the middle east.”
“Sure,” Sam says, “Dean, are you -”
“Cas, can we talk?” Dean interjects, before Sam can corner him into having a conversation about frigging anything. He needs to shake off the crappiness of the later part of this morning before he launches into the talk with Sam and he’s got no idea how the hell they can have a conversation and ignore it. Sam’s been stood in a room with the version of themselves where he and Cas are together. There’s not a whole lot of salvaging that can be done on that. It’s out. He’s out. He just… doesn’t want to talk about it when Cas is mad and disillusioned and avoiding his eyes.
“Can it wait?” Cas asks, not looking up from his map, or his stupid goddamn spell. He’s running a finger down the spine of the damn book of the damned like he can actually read the damn thing, when it took Rowena and a dead Charlie for them to decipher a single word.
“Uh, nope,” Dean says, then glances at Sam. “Alone.” Dean adds, nodding towards the door. Cas levels a glare at him.
“You're not going to talk me out this,”
“That's not the deal here. You're all gung ho about saving my ass, I get it.”
Cas sets down the bowl and follows him into the bunker corridor, down to one of the indented doorways that lead to nothing-room that never gets used. Empty storage, Dean’s pretty sure.
For a second every dumb thing Dean wanted to say has fallen out of his head. He winds up just looking at the guy with his chest tightening and too many fucking feelings. In the end, he reaches out for him. Cas is utterly unmovable, so Dean closes the distance instead and kisses him like that was the point of this. He gets nothing back and Dean’s about to retreat and regroup and probably do something stupid, then suddenly Cas is all in, like he's the one thinking there's a time limit for all of this.
Or maybe cause there in the middle of the damn corridor where anyone could walk past, and that's a smudge more real than behind a locked door. Dean doesn’t know, but he know’s that there’s a desperate edge to the way that Cas is kissing him that he doesn’t like. Given Cas drew their first-last-night out, it’s just…. It’s just they really, really need to talk about this. If they keep bulldozing forward they’re gonna ruin all of it.
“I'm gonna talk to Sam,” Dean blurts out, pulling back, holding tight onto Cas' trench coat. “I'll talk to him when you're gone. Today.”
“Okay,” Cas says, drawing Dean back in. Dean takes a step back and puts himself out of reach again.
“And... and if this doesn't work. The mark. If we get back and I'm still hulking out then, uh, I'm gonna try. It was pretty unrecoverable but I've had a time out and there's...there's you, but, if it doesn't work... give the first blade to Rowena and get her to take me out.”
Cas stills and frowns.
“The first blade is very powerful. Combined with the book of the damned -”
“- you're frigging very powerful. Enough to take her out. Enough to take me out, you just can't. You never could 'cause you're in love with me and I'm... yeah. I couldn't either. Never. The fact that I nearly -”
“Dean,” Cas says, still all close and serious, “Thank you.”
“Don't do that. If I wasn't such a -”
Cas kisses him again, hot and insistent.
“- And I fucking swear, Cas, you pull the two finger sleeping pill shit on me again I’m gonna -”
Cas cuts him off, again, and it’s not like Dean has a leg to stand on really, so he lets Cas drag him in.
It’s female Sam that interrupts them necking with a shit-eating grin that Dean’s been seeing his whole frigging life. She doesn't even say anything. Dean flips her off before heading to the shower in the best mood he’s been in for years.