[Fic] Untranslatable (NC-17) for spacefragments
Gift type: Fanfic
Title: Untranslatable
Author: trinityofone
Recipient: spacefragments
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: None
Spoilers: General S5
Summary: I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. -Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Author notes: spacefragments asked for Castiel getting used to a physical body. I hope you enjoy this take on that! Many thanks to my mysterious beta for all her help.
Untranslatable
Cas is still disturbed by the process of waking up. For thousands of years he just was, and what he was was ever-vigillant. But now there exist moments where he lives in a sort of in-between place, drifting from unconsciousness to awareness, and it’s still a shock, still an unpleasant reminder. Less of who he is now than what he was, briefly: that odd space of time between his death and the moment when he was reborn.
When the disorientation passes, though, waking is good. Cas can spend a moment lying still, reacquainting himself with his body. Lying there, warm beneath the covers, he stretches his fingers, wiggles his toes. He can still remember vividly what it felt like when the skin seemed confining and tight, not his own; he can remember what it is to be a creature of infinite energy and light, trapped in a prison of flesh and blood and bone. The muscles that are now his carry the memory of holding themselves so stiffly, and that is part of the reason it feels so good to roll them loosely now, to lazily stroke a hand down his bare chest, feel the sensitive pads of his fingers spark against the fine hairs growing out of his skin. There is its own electricity to this. Cas feels it, curling warm and content at the center of his belly.
He sighs to himself, happily. It is a simple happiness, the happiness of an animal: of a cat lying in the sun, of a dog having its belly rubbed. Part of Cas’ brain, the part that he realizes will always and ever be the removed and disconnected observer, has to question it: does it not frighten him, a creature who remembers being an angel, to succumb to such base emotions? No, Cas tells that part of himself-the scientist, the scholar hastily scribbling notes. He’s pretty cool with it, actually.
And there is not a part of him that doesn’t find that fascinating.
Some parts find the issue currently less pressing, however. Those parts, the majority of Cas, roll over gently in bed. As he’d begun to expect from the sound of his breathing-Cas is still observant if not quite so deep-seeing-Dean is awake, curled on his side and watching Cas, much as Castiel used to watch him. Their eyes meet and Dean smiles. “Hey,” he says. “How’re you feeling?”
Cas thinks for a moment. “Slothful,” he pronounces.
Dean’s grin grows wider. “That’s a good sin.”
Cas shifts his hand between the sheets. “I know a better one.”
Cas still cannot fully process...this. His analytical brain wants to dissect and pick apart every feeling and nuance, the impossible wealth of physical sensation. But what he continues to arrive back at is simply this: Cas wants Dean with the whole of his body. Dean can make Cas’ breath shorten, his heart speed up, his toes curl. When Cas reaches out and slides his hand up the arc of Dean’s neck, he feels himself shiver and the fine hairs on his arms stand to attention. Between his legs, that wonderful, ridiculous organ fills with blood and he aches physically for Dean, throbs for him. It is primal.
It’s so good.
Dean shifts his legs, pressing them closer together. It’s a bit too warm beneath the covers now; their thighs are sheened pleasantly with sweat. “Mmm, Cas,” Dean says, gently rocking his hips. “So much better than a clock radio...”
“You used to do this with your clock radio?” Cas asks. He’d be a study in innocence were he not staring at Dean’s mouth so intently, were he not lazily fucking his cock against Dean’s, stroking his hand up Dean’s hairy thigh and over the curve of his ass.
Dean grunts; it sounds like it may have been a laugh that got distracted by what other parts of them were doing. “That’s right, no AM/FM combo was safe from me.”
“Hm,” says Cas. He’d continue along a wittier vein, but he wants to kiss Dean. He likes kissing. It’s one of his favorite things about having a mouth.
Time passes slip-slide around them; Cas can no longer mark the minutes with the precision he once possessed. Instead he surfs on the rise and fall of Dean’s panting breaths, his sweet sighs. He shudders under Dean’s touch and when he comes apart, lays his head down in the crook of Dean’s shoulder. He can feel Dean’s soft laughter ruffling his hair and when he looks up the laugh lines at the corners of Dean’s eyes seem to crinkle and dance.
“That was nice,” he says.
“Nice?” says Dean, taking mock-offense.
He nods, his muscles loose, his body warm and sated and good. “Nice is underrated, I think.”
Dean stretches his tanned shoulders and lies back against the pillow; in a few minutes, Cas knows, this is all going to stop feeling so nice and move on to unpleasantly sticky. “I’ve always been more of an expert on naughty, myself.”
Almost as if he heard him, Sam chooses this moment to pound on the connecting door. “Are you guys decent?”
“When am I ever-” Dean starts, belaboring the point somewhat.
Sam cuts him off. “Yeah, yeah. Hurry up, okay? I think I’ve got a lead.”
Dean has yet to adjust to the fact that he and his brother tend not to actually share the same small motel room space anymore; Cas knows from experience that he will continue indefinitely to yell through the wall as if it were not there. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, Sammy!” he starts, and Cas decides to put a stop to this before Dean decides to launch into his Jack Nicholson impression at top volume. He slides out of bed and stands, skin tingling, at its foot. He is naked and so very far from ashamed, toes curling into the carpet, the muscles in his back flexing-contained and yet alight with so many points of sensation. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him, the steady heat of his gaze, and he plays to it, running a hand lazily over the swell of his stomach, the sharp jut of his hip bone, all the places where he is soft and hard. “I’m going to take a shower,” he says pointedly.
“Sure, Sam, give us a few,” he hears Dean hurriedly declare as he pushes open the bathroom door. A hand catches it before it can fully close, and then Dean is there, pushing into Cas’ space. Cas laughs, hot against Dean’s mouth, and he fumbles without looking for the faucet. The water comes on with a hiss, and somehow they stumble under it, a tangle of slippery limbs. Cas stares at the drops of water beading on Dean’s eyelashes. He feels his chest swell, and for a moment he is frozen, unable to believe that he once looked at the man in front of him without feeling this-this affection, lust, joy, love. For a moment it is difficult to reconcile the two halves of himself, his wealth of history and memory and knowledge and everything that he was with what he is now. He can’t seem to draw a clean line between the moment he blazed out of Heaven to liberate Dean Winchester’s tattered soul from Hell, and the seconds now ticking past: the warm water beating on his back and Dean’s arms around his waist. Easier to imagine a clean break: Castiel died, and when he came back, he was something else, someone new-someone who could allow himself to melt into this warm flesh, to wear it proudly, to eat and sleep and fight and fuck in it. Were he to ask any of his (former) brothers, he knows that’s what he’d say.
But it isn’t true. Cas knows himself, perhaps better than ever now that he has an honest self to know.
“Hey,” says Dean, pinching him somewhere delicate. “Don’t go all vacant-eyed on me. I’m naked here.”
“You are indeed a sight,” Cas says, grinning. He ducks his head and presses his lips to Dean’s slick skin, skirting over his shoulder and the raised, puckered flesh that is Cas’ handiwork. He grips Dean tightly by the wrist and licks slowly but firmly around the edges of the scar. Dean bucks against him, his throat issuing a desperate little whine. Cas himself emits a quiet pleased hum, nipping and sucking at the raised pink skin until Dean’s knees go weak and he shudders against Cas, bracing himself against the tile to prevent them both from tumbling to the shower floor in a heap.
“Man,” Dean says, as soon as he can speak, “that’s so wrong.”
“I like that I can do that to you,” Cas says. He really does.
“What you do to me...” Dean starts, and Cas could easily echo the sentiment: even just Dean’s voice goes straight through him. Then Dean starts to sink to his knees and Cas has to summon all his resolve to catch him by the chin and coax him back up. “Sam,” he says.
“Uh, try again,” Dean says, all wet rumbled hair and sardonically lifted eyebrow.
“He’s waiting,” Cas says, and there, you see, is proof that what he is now could only be an extension of what he has always been: only after thousands of years of existence could one hone this magnificent degree of patience and restraint.
Dean looks for a second like he’s going to protest, but then his mouth curves into a grin and he chuckles. “Oh, you’re going to regret this later.”
“Am I?”
Dean tilts his head to the side in a move he’s probably subconsciously acquired from Cas. “We both know that you two nerds are going to buckle down with your books and I’ll get bored with nothing to distract me.” He pushes into Cas’ personal space. “Except for you. Your legs folded under the table, your arms with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows splayed out next to the laptop, this place, right here, at the back of your neck...” The hot water and Dean’s hot breath make Cas’ skin flush pink. He finds Dean’s eyes and they stare at one another. “What am I gonna find to entertain myself with?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Cas promises.
After that they manage to put the shower to something like its original use. Later they stand, mostly clothed and mostly dry, before the foggy mirror. Dean is brushing his teeth, showing off his impressive gargling skills, while Cas fusses with his hair. It used to effortlessly do this thing that Cas now realizes takes a mere mortal a considerable amount of effort to replicate, and Cas wouldn’t mind, except...
“I think I have become vain,” he says.
Dean spits, finally. “Hard not to be, two guys as handsome as we are,” he says with a grin. There’s toothpaste spackled at the corner of his mouth.
“Perhaps,” says Cas.
“Hey.” Dean’s eyes meet his in the mirror. “You’re getting that faraway look again.”
“You’re not naked,” Cas points out.
“That can be easily fixed,” Dean says, but he doesn’t raise his shirt farther than halfway up his chest before letting it drop back down again. “Cas,” he says. “You’re... I mean, you’d tell me if you weren’t...”
“I am very happy, Dean,” Cas says, wondering at the perversity of human emotion: that the more sincerely he should mean the thing, the more it nevertheless makes his chest contract, makes moisture prick at the corners of his eyes.
Dean seems to be having a similar problem. His hand grips the edge of the sink, and Cas reaches out and curls his own hand-his very own hand-around it. “Fucking weird, isn’t it?” Dean says, and Cas nods.
They stand there for a long moment, and then together they drop their hands. “Okay,” Dean says, “let’s go kill something.”
Cas gives him a look.
“Let’s go research how to kill something,” Dean amends with an eyeroll.
“You have toothpaste on your mouth,” says Cas.
“Your hair is getting to be almost as ridiculous as Sam’s,” Dean retorts.
“It’s not,” says Cas, petulantly, prodding at it until Dean pulls his fingers free.
“I take it back, you’re still the prettiest princess,” Dean laughs. He drops Cas’ hand and returns impulsively to the mirror. It’s fogged over again, and Dean uses one finger to scrawl ‘Cas is a pretty pretty princess’ in the mist.
“And just what does that say about your preferences?” Cas asks him.
“Bad things,” says Dean, nodding proud and solemn.
Cas grins at him, but then his gaze catches on something behind Dean’s head. Most of what Dean had scrawled across the glass has faded away; only one word remains, the lines of the letters crisp and indelible.
CASTIEL
Cas wants to cry out in alarm, but he doesn’t let himself. Instead he gives the mirror one long, steady look before deliberately turning away. “Let’s go,” he says.
“Fine,” Dean says, with a mostly manufactured sigh. “But don’t expect to get anything done. I have one mission in life, and that’s to distract you.”
Cas flexes his fingers, licks his lips.
“I’m counting on it,” he says.
Title: Untranslatable
Author: trinityofone
Recipient: spacefragments
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: None
Spoilers: General S5
Summary: I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. -Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Author notes: spacefragments asked for Castiel getting used to a physical body. I hope you enjoy this take on that! Many thanks to my mysterious beta for all her help.
Untranslatable
Cas is still disturbed by the process of waking up. For thousands of years he just was, and what he was was ever-vigillant. But now there exist moments where he lives in a sort of in-between place, drifting from unconsciousness to awareness, and it’s still a shock, still an unpleasant reminder. Less of who he is now than what he was, briefly: that odd space of time between his death and the moment when he was reborn.
When the disorientation passes, though, waking is good. Cas can spend a moment lying still, reacquainting himself with his body. Lying there, warm beneath the covers, he stretches his fingers, wiggles his toes. He can still remember vividly what it felt like when the skin seemed confining and tight, not his own; he can remember what it is to be a creature of infinite energy and light, trapped in a prison of flesh and blood and bone. The muscles that are now his carry the memory of holding themselves so stiffly, and that is part of the reason it feels so good to roll them loosely now, to lazily stroke a hand down his bare chest, feel the sensitive pads of his fingers spark against the fine hairs growing out of his skin. There is its own electricity to this. Cas feels it, curling warm and content at the center of his belly.
He sighs to himself, happily. It is a simple happiness, the happiness of an animal: of a cat lying in the sun, of a dog having its belly rubbed. Part of Cas’ brain, the part that he realizes will always and ever be the removed and disconnected observer, has to question it: does it not frighten him, a creature who remembers being an angel, to succumb to such base emotions? No, Cas tells that part of himself-the scientist, the scholar hastily scribbling notes. He’s pretty cool with it, actually.
And there is not a part of him that doesn’t find that fascinating.
Some parts find the issue currently less pressing, however. Those parts, the majority of Cas, roll over gently in bed. As he’d begun to expect from the sound of his breathing-Cas is still observant if not quite so deep-seeing-Dean is awake, curled on his side and watching Cas, much as Castiel used to watch him. Their eyes meet and Dean smiles. “Hey,” he says. “How’re you feeling?”
Cas thinks for a moment. “Slothful,” he pronounces.
Dean’s grin grows wider. “That’s a good sin.”
Cas shifts his hand between the sheets. “I know a better one.”
Cas still cannot fully process...this. His analytical brain wants to dissect and pick apart every feeling and nuance, the impossible wealth of physical sensation. But what he continues to arrive back at is simply this: Cas wants Dean with the whole of his body. Dean can make Cas’ breath shorten, his heart speed up, his toes curl. When Cas reaches out and slides his hand up the arc of Dean’s neck, he feels himself shiver and the fine hairs on his arms stand to attention. Between his legs, that wonderful, ridiculous organ fills with blood and he aches physically for Dean, throbs for him. It is primal.
It’s so good.
Dean shifts his legs, pressing them closer together. It’s a bit too warm beneath the covers now; their thighs are sheened pleasantly with sweat. “Mmm, Cas,” Dean says, gently rocking his hips. “So much better than a clock radio...”
“You used to do this with your clock radio?” Cas asks. He’d be a study in innocence were he not staring at Dean’s mouth so intently, were he not lazily fucking his cock against Dean’s, stroking his hand up Dean’s hairy thigh and over the curve of his ass.
Dean grunts; it sounds like it may have been a laugh that got distracted by what other parts of them were doing. “That’s right, no AM/FM combo was safe from me.”
“Hm,” says Cas. He’d continue along a wittier vein, but he wants to kiss Dean. He likes kissing. It’s one of his favorite things about having a mouth.
Time passes slip-slide around them; Cas can no longer mark the minutes with the precision he once possessed. Instead he surfs on the rise and fall of Dean’s panting breaths, his sweet sighs. He shudders under Dean’s touch and when he comes apart, lays his head down in the crook of Dean’s shoulder. He can feel Dean’s soft laughter ruffling his hair and when he looks up the laugh lines at the corners of Dean’s eyes seem to crinkle and dance.
“That was nice,” he says.
“Nice?” says Dean, taking mock-offense.
He nods, his muscles loose, his body warm and sated and good. “Nice is underrated, I think.”
Dean stretches his tanned shoulders and lies back against the pillow; in a few minutes, Cas knows, this is all going to stop feeling so nice and move on to unpleasantly sticky. “I’ve always been more of an expert on naughty, myself.”
Almost as if he heard him, Sam chooses this moment to pound on the connecting door. “Are you guys decent?”
“When am I ever-” Dean starts, belaboring the point somewhat.
Sam cuts him off. “Yeah, yeah. Hurry up, okay? I think I’ve got a lead.”
Dean has yet to adjust to the fact that he and his brother tend not to actually share the same small motel room space anymore; Cas knows from experience that he will continue indefinitely to yell through the wall as if it were not there. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, Sammy!” he starts, and Cas decides to put a stop to this before Dean decides to launch into his Jack Nicholson impression at top volume. He slides out of bed and stands, skin tingling, at its foot. He is naked and so very far from ashamed, toes curling into the carpet, the muscles in his back flexing-contained and yet alight with so many points of sensation. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him, the steady heat of his gaze, and he plays to it, running a hand lazily over the swell of his stomach, the sharp jut of his hip bone, all the places where he is soft and hard. “I’m going to take a shower,” he says pointedly.
“Sure, Sam, give us a few,” he hears Dean hurriedly declare as he pushes open the bathroom door. A hand catches it before it can fully close, and then Dean is there, pushing into Cas’ space. Cas laughs, hot against Dean’s mouth, and he fumbles without looking for the faucet. The water comes on with a hiss, and somehow they stumble under it, a tangle of slippery limbs. Cas stares at the drops of water beading on Dean’s eyelashes. He feels his chest swell, and for a moment he is frozen, unable to believe that he once looked at the man in front of him without feeling this-this affection, lust, joy, love. For a moment it is difficult to reconcile the two halves of himself, his wealth of history and memory and knowledge and everything that he was with what he is now. He can’t seem to draw a clean line between the moment he blazed out of Heaven to liberate Dean Winchester’s tattered soul from Hell, and the seconds now ticking past: the warm water beating on his back and Dean’s arms around his waist. Easier to imagine a clean break: Castiel died, and when he came back, he was something else, someone new-someone who could allow himself to melt into this warm flesh, to wear it proudly, to eat and sleep and fight and fuck in it. Were he to ask any of his (former) brothers, he knows that’s what he’d say.
But it isn’t true. Cas knows himself, perhaps better than ever now that he has an honest self to know.
“Hey,” says Dean, pinching him somewhere delicate. “Don’t go all vacant-eyed on me. I’m naked here.”
“You are indeed a sight,” Cas says, grinning. He ducks his head and presses his lips to Dean’s slick skin, skirting over his shoulder and the raised, puckered flesh that is Cas’ handiwork. He grips Dean tightly by the wrist and licks slowly but firmly around the edges of the scar. Dean bucks against him, his throat issuing a desperate little whine. Cas himself emits a quiet pleased hum, nipping and sucking at the raised pink skin until Dean’s knees go weak and he shudders against Cas, bracing himself against the tile to prevent them both from tumbling to the shower floor in a heap.
“Man,” Dean says, as soon as he can speak, “that’s so wrong.”
“I like that I can do that to you,” Cas says. He really does.
“What you do to me...” Dean starts, and Cas could easily echo the sentiment: even just Dean’s voice goes straight through him. Then Dean starts to sink to his knees and Cas has to summon all his resolve to catch him by the chin and coax him back up. “Sam,” he says.
“Uh, try again,” Dean says, all wet rumbled hair and sardonically lifted eyebrow.
“He’s waiting,” Cas says, and there, you see, is proof that what he is now could only be an extension of what he has always been: only after thousands of years of existence could one hone this magnificent degree of patience and restraint.
Dean looks for a second like he’s going to protest, but then his mouth curves into a grin and he chuckles. “Oh, you’re going to regret this later.”
“Am I?”
Dean tilts his head to the side in a move he’s probably subconsciously acquired from Cas. “We both know that you two nerds are going to buckle down with your books and I’ll get bored with nothing to distract me.” He pushes into Cas’ personal space. “Except for you. Your legs folded under the table, your arms with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows splayed out next to the laptop, this place, right here, at the back of your neck...” The hot water and Dean’s hot breath make Cas’ skin flush pink. He finds Dean’s eyes and they stare at one another. “What am I gonna find to entertain myself with?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Cas promises.
After that they manage to put the shower to something like its original use. Later they stand, mostly clothed and mostly dry, before the foggy mirror. Dean is brushing his teeth, showing off his impressive gargling skills, while Cas fusses with his hair. It used to effortlessly do this thing that Cas now realizes takes a mere mortal a considerable amount of effort to replicate, and Cas wouldn’t mind, except...
“I think I have become vain,” he says.
Dean spits, finally. “Hard not to be, two guys as handsome as we are,” he says with a grin. There’s toothpaste spackled at the corner of his mouth.
“Perhaps,” says Cas.
“Hey.” Dean’s eyes meet his in the mirror. “You’re getting that faraway look again.”
“You’re not naked,” Cas points out.
“That can be easily fixed,” Dean says, but he doesn’t raise his shirt farther than halfway up his chest before letting it drop back down again. “Cas,” he says. “You’re... I mean, you’d tell me if you weren’t...”
“I am very happy, Dean,” Cas says, wondering at the perversity of human emotion: that the more sincerely he should mean the thing, the more it nevertheless makes his chest contract, makes moisture prick at the corners of his eyes.
Dean seems to be having a similar problem. His hand grips the edge of the sink, and Cas reaches out and curls his own hand-his very own hand-around it. “Fucking weird, isn’t it?” Dean says, and Cas nods.
They stand there for a long moment, and then together they drop their hands. “Okay,” Dean says, “let’s go kill something.”
Cas gives him a look.
“Let’s go research how to kill something,” Dean amends with an eyeroll.
“You have toothpaste on your mouth,” says Cas.
“Your hair is getting to be almost as ridiculous as Sam’s,” Dean retorts.
“It’s not,” says Cas, petulantly, prodding at it until Dean pulls his fingers free.
“I take it back, you’re still the prettiest princess,” Dean laughs. He drops Cas’ hand and returns impulsively to the mirror. It’s fogged over again, and Dean uses one finger to scrawl ‘Cas is a pretty pretty princess’ in the mist.
“And just what does that say about your preferences?” Cas asks him.
“Bad things,” says Dean, nodding proud and solemn.
Cas grins at him, but then his gaze catches on something behind Dean’s head. Most of what Dean had scrawled across the glass has faded away; only one word remains, the lines of the letters crisp and indelible.
CASTIEL
Cas wants to cry out in alarm, but he doesn’t let himself. Instead he gives the mirror one long, steady look before deliberately turning away. “Let’s go,” he says.
“Fine,” Dean says, with a mostly manufactured sigh. “But don’t expect to get anything done. I have one mission in life, and that’s to distract you.”
Cas flexes his fingers, licks his lips.
“I’m counting on it,” he says.