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2015-11-12
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if this is salvation

Summary:

"You’ve earned about fifty years of bumming around on the couch watching the trashiest shit you can find on the air. I wanted to let you keep that.”

“Well.” Castiel’s mouth lifts in a smile. He wishes Dean would look up and see it. “That wouldn’t make for a compelling arc, would it? I had to get my hands dirty sometime.” (11.06 coda.)

Notes:

WHAT A CONSPICUOUS MISSING SCENE THOUGH. I wish we had seen it ourselves, but hey, at least I get to fill that shit in for myself.

Title from "Fin." by Anberlin. I'm on Tumblr at sunbeamdean.

Work Text:

“Once more,” Dean says, “with feeling: you. Let Metatron—”

Castiel doesn’t intend to touch Dean. They are, perhaps, freer with physical contact lately, but the atmosphere between the two of them is charged right now, hot with irritation and something else prickly, in the wake of Sam’s departure, and he had meant to let Dean cool off.

Instead, he reaches across the war room table and touches two fingertips to Dean’s wrist. It’s a stretch, but he manages it. Dean shuts up instantly.

Castiel licks his lips. They’re dry, chapped. Small human symptoms like that still plague him, drag him down into perpetual exhaustion.

Dean swallows, and the war room has gone so silent that the workings of his throat are audible.

“Please don’t,” Castiel says. Every part of him feels bruised, even the parts that are well beyond the physical. “He wanted me to kill him.”

Tentative, his hand flattening under the weight of Castiel’s palm, Dean cocks his head to one side. Just a little. “Okay,” he says slowly.

Castiel wants Dean to understand. He wants it desperately and suddenly, the onset of desire so rapid that he’s grateful for the expanse of the table between them, its solidity. “I couldn’t—” He puffs out a harsh little exhale. “He’s manipulated me enough.”

“Yeah.” Dean’s gaze drops. Their hands still touch, Castiel’s thumb making a home for itself in the dips between Dean’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. Honestly, man, it’s not you.”

“Amara,” Castiel offers.

Dean huffs a breath too weak to earn the word laugh. “She’s just some dumb kid.”

“No.” Castiel would lean closer if he could. Instead, the edge of the table digs into his hips, uncomfortably cold. “That’s not all she is, and you know it.”

“No,” Dean echoes. “Shit.”

“Hey.” Castiel’s grace stirs, tattered and weak as it is. It’s always done this around Dean, yearned to heal his aches and soothe his worries. There’s nothing tangible to heal this time, but here he is nonetheless, wanting. He’s perfected the art of wanting things when Dean is around. “Hey,” he says again, and draws the pad of his thumb across the tops of Dean’s fingers where they’re splayed against the tabletop. “You’re stronger than she is.”

Dean chuckles, but it’s a low sound, harsh and humorless. “Nah. You saw what I did when she—it—whatever that was, it was in me. And I was its freaking puppet.”

Without warning, Castiel’s heart thumps in his chest. Unruly. “You fought,” he says, meaning it.

“Yeah,” Dean says, “and I lost. You were there. Shit, I’m—”

Castiel squeezes Dean’s hand. Improbably, his back aches from leaning across the table, but he can’t bring himself to move. “Please, Dean. Let me help you.”

“Cas, come on. Not when I’ve done such a crappy job of helping you.”

Their standoff is almost enough to make Castiel laugh at their twin stubbornness. Dean’s face is open, his eyes wide and as unguarded as Castiel has seen them in weeks or even years. He’s tired, too; it’s only that he’s better at managing it. Years of practice, he would tell Castiel with a dismissive laugh.

An unidentifiable sound punches its way out of Dean’s chest, through his throat. His head drops and his fingers twitch against the tabletop. “I didn’t.” He sucks in a long, shuddering breath. “I didn’t even wanna call you.”

Castiel frowns. “I’m always happy to speak with you.”

“No, I just…” Dean’s shoulders draw in towards his spine. “I don’t care how gross your taste in TV is. You’ve earned about fifty years of bumming around on the couch watching the trashiest shit you can find on the air. I wanted to let you keep that.”

“Well.” Castiel’s mouth lifts in a smile. He wishes Dean would look up and see it. “That wouldn’t make for a compelling arc, would it? I had to get my hands dirty sometime.”

“God.” There it is, Dean’s ghost of a laugh. “How much did you watch?”

Castiel considers while Dean’s pulse beats dimly at the edges of his awareness. He listens to it anytime they’re physically together, finds its steadiness reassuring. “Several seasons of several shows,” he concludes at last. “I believe it really is a golden age for television.”

“Jesus,” Dean says, but if Castiel isn’t mistaken, his tone contains a smile. “You’re a dork.”

“Yeah,” Castiel says. “And I believe you’re the pot calling the kettle black.”

It’s impossible to prepare for the abrupt radiance of Dean smiling at him. Castiel’s blood vessels shiver and so does his grace and he’s drawn across the table before he can consider logistics or how absurd he might look, crawling toward Dean as a man lost in the desert crawls toward an oasis.

He’d missed the simple beauty of Dean’s unblemished soul so, so badly.

“Whoa,” Dean says, and he stops Castiel with a hand at his collar. Startled, not disgusted.

“Hi.” Castiel tips his chin up. He wonders for the first time whether the exaggerated bags under his eyes are off-putting, amazed that Dean’s scrutiny makes him care about his appearance this much.

“Hey.” Dean’s fingers curl against the side of Castiel’s neck. “No offense, buddy, but what’cha doing?”

“I, ah.” Without an immediate answer, Castiel shifts closer. His knees slide awkwardly against the wood, but Dean stoops forward to catch him, free hand under his elbow. Their mouths are inches apart.

Dean’s eyes dart toward the liquor cabinet, yards away, and then back to Castiel. “Cas?”

“Thank you,” Castiel tells him. When he lets their foreheads touch, Dean doesn’t pull away. “For this. For letting me rest. For wanting to let me keep resting. I’ve been… very tired.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, a tremulous crack in his voice. “Been there. I think.”

“We’ll work this out.” Those are the words the Winchesters say time and time again, a mantra of determination to which Castiel has clung throughout his tumultuous existence on Earth. “We’ll figure out how to handle Amara.”

With his grace back, Castiel shouldn’t be prone to surprises. He ought to have sensed the neurons firing in Dean’s brain, the action potentials streaking across the synapses; he’s all-knowing, or so they used to tell him when he was one of many among the powerful ranks of Heaven.

But when Dean lunges across the war room table and kisses him, Castiel’s whole body goes stiff with shock.

Dean’s mouth is warm, his hands rough where they rise to cup Castiel’s face. He’s seeking something, fingertips digging into Castiel’s skin, scraping against the slight roughness of emerging stubble.

Do something, Castiel urges himself. Anything, anything to capture this, not to let this lovely and uncomfortable human moment, the one he’s hoped for and ached for and wondered about for years, pass him by.

He drags Dean’s whole body onto the table with the force he uses to kiss him back.

“Holy fuck,” Dean gasps, but Castiel has remembered the whirlwind force of his own wanting, and he can’t be stopped. He’s fitting their mouths together, thrilling at the taste of Dean’s tongue and teeth and determined to kiss him until the taste of alcohol fades entirely into nothing. He’s tugging at Dean’s shirts, swallowing each muffled noise that Dean makes into the barely-there space between them.

For what feels like eons, Castiel has fit strangely into this body. He’s been drained, battered, used and manipulated. He’s fought and capitulated by turns. He’s waited for the moment that it would settle, that this manufactured skin would feel like his own.

This isn’t quite it, but it’s a start. It’s Dean whining into Castiel’s open mouth, sucking on his tongue, pushing Castiel’s coat off his shoulders until it slides toward and pools on the floor. It’s Dean’s hands broad and callused as they bear Castiel down, as the two of them slot themselves together atop the too-hard surface of the war room table.

Castiel moans and tucks his face into the side of Dean’s neck. There’s electricity winding its way up and down his spinal cord, improbable, anatomically ridiculous, but there nonetheless.

“Is this,” Dean says, and he kisses the side of Castiel’s face, his teeth grazing the angle of Castiel’s jaw, his hands everywhere all at once. “Is this okay,” he manages, too breathless to count as a question.

“Dean.” Castiel’s sloppy. Utterly without finesse as he pulls Dean’s hips against his own and thrills at the almost-perfect grind of Dean’s half-erection against his thigh. “Dean,” he says again, panting now, hearing the desperate edge to his own voice, “I have wanted this for—”

“God, don’t,” Dean says, “don’t—” He yanks Castiel into another searching kiss.

Castiel has spent most of his existence watching. Watching Earth from afar; watching and observing his siblings as they trained for battle after battle; watching as the apocalypse nearly began. Watching the small, charming shifts of Dean’s facial expressions and watching the way Dean’s hands fold over each other as he prays, Castiel who art in Heaven. Watching television, even, of late, and waiting with bated breath for Dean to call.

He’s not watching anymore. He’s doing. Fisting his hands in Dean’s shirts, pulling him close and close and closer, biting every fresh moan into the freckled expanse of Dean’s throat where the collar of his shirt is pulled aside. Castiel is alive in this, in the slow grind of their cocks against each other, the way Dean sobs Cas when Castiel bucks his hips up and presses his fingernails into the bare skin just to the side of Dean’s spine.

They’re as they are when they started. Dean, human, fated for something larger, terrified. Castiel, his grace thrumming with purpose, ready to guide Dean and to keep him safe at any cost.

It’s only that everything has changed. Dean hides a smile against Castiel’s chest as they move together, and Castiel strokes his fingers through Dean’s hair, and he thinks how little he had known when he told Dean, We’ve been through much together, you and I.

Now, maybe, it’s true. Dean groans and sucks a bruise right under Castiel’s left ear and says Cas, come on, come on, wanna feel you, babe, come on, and it’s only a stupid human endearment. It’s nothing, only a word, barely English. But Castiel throws his head back and lets orgasm thunder through him, wiping his consciousness clean of anything but pleasure and Dean’s breath ruffling his hair and the way Dean keeps kissing the side of his face, temples and cheekbones and the corners of his mouth. When Dean comes, the wash of uncomplicated happiness resonates in Castiel’s grace, as heady and good as the first time he touched Dean’s soul with his defenses destroyed.

They hold hands as they come down. Both hands, fingers sweaty and slipping. They’ve knocked more than one pile of books off the table, and it’s entirely possible Sam has heard the whole thing. Castiel doesn’t know, and he could find out, but he won’t.

“I could use a drink,” Dean murmurs.

Castiel sighs, drawing his fingertips up below the back of Dean’s shirt and collecting fresh sweat in the whorls of Jimmy Novak’s fingerprints. “Be still,” he says, asking Dean for one more thing.

Dean drops his face to Castiel’s shoulder, squeezes his hands, and complies.