FIC: Like Motes of Dust
TITLE: Like Motes of Dust
RATING: PG-13 (swearing)
CHAR: Dean, Cas
GENRE: H/C, Angst
PAIRING: Gen/Profound Bond
WORDS: 2096
SPOILERS: Coda to 9.09, "Holy Terror"
SUMMARY: Dean falls apart, and Cas helps hold him together.
Like Motes of Dust
Dean Winchester is bullets. He is knives. A bolt of lightning. He is a lake you drown in. A grenade that goes off in your hand. It’s only a matter of time. The destruction he inflicts does not discriminate. It doesn’t care if you are young or old, if you are a stranger or if you are someone he calls “family”. Everything he is, everything he defines himself by, will claim the innocent in its wake. The good hearted. The trusting.
Kevin. His name squeezes through Dean’s guts like tar, filling him with thick despair. He sits there on the cold tiles staring at Kevin’s burned-out eyes. He wishes he could scream out, ask why. But he knows why. Kevin is dead because Dean made a choice. He chose to put his brother’s life before everything else.
At some point, that was supposed to mean something good. It was supposed to give him purpose. Direction. But this is what it’s given him, this kid who lost everything, sacrificed everything to help them, who believed in Dean and trusted him. His friend, gone in a white hot flash and he didn’t even know what the hell was going on because Dean didn’t tell him. He’s just gone, gone, gone. Lights out. Like nothing. Like a streetlamp. Dean walks under streetlamps and they just…
There is no direction now. There is nothing left inside of him to tell him where to go, or what to do. How can he know? After all of this, how can he possibly know?
Kevin is Dead. He’s gone, and Sam could be gone too, because Dean had direction.
How can he ever move again? It seems crazy to even think about it. He can’t move. He doesn’t. Not for a long time.
He sits on the floor and stares into Kevin’s burned out eyes like they’re deep black holes in the universe that, if Dean looks at them long enough, will suck him in and transform him into nothingness. He waits for this to happen, or for the world to end, or for the thing that has taken over his brother’s body to come back and finish him off.
But instead, there is Castiel. Cas, who materializes on the other side of Kevin’s body. Who towers over the both of them like a monolith. And Dean realizes, this is what grace does. It’s a presence that hums and vibrates.
Cas looks down at Kevin and closes his eyes, disappointed that whatever he was expecting to find… is exactly what he’s found. He kneels, and for a nearly imperceptible moment, Dean prays that Cas can fix him. But when Cas lays his hand on Kevin’s body, nothing happens. He only sighs and looks up at Dean.
“Dean, what happened here? What did this? Where’s Sam?”
Cas doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know how horribly Dean’s fucked up.
There was a snowstorm in Minnesota in 1996. A patch of black ice on the highway. And the Impala sliding sideways, and Dean wrestling with the steering wheel and expecting to steer. Pressing the brakes and expecting to stop. Instead the world just spun faster and all he could do was hang on.
It’s that feeling, magnified a million times, because it’s not just a car and a road, it’s his whole life up to this point and every single person he ever gave a shit about. And there’s no steering wheel to hang onto anymore. There’s not a goddamn thing.
When he tried to save Sam he thought he was in control, but instead he’s had less and less of it every day.
“Dean, look at me. Talk to me.”
He can’t.
Cas moves closer to him, grips his shoulders and Dean’s back presses against the bookshelf behind him. “Dean, are you hurt? Say something.”
He wants to ask Cas to finish it, to do to him what’s been done to Kevin. He wants to be nothing. Weightless. Undefined. If you are weightless and undefined, you don’t need direction. You can just hover like a mote of dust in the sunlight.
“Dean… please,” Cas says quietly, desperately. This is when Dean makes the mistake of looking into his eyes; as he touches Dean’s chest to steady him, as he searches Dean’s face for that connection that has tethered them to each other since the day Cas took all the scattered cells of his body and made him whole again, saved him.
“It was me,” Dean croaks, tears welling up in his eyes over the old ones.
“That doesn’t make sense. Dean, you need to tell me.”
“I can’t, Cas. Please. I just…” He just wants Cas to care about him for a little while longer. He just wants him to see someone good when he looks at him, someone worthy of his friendship. He just wants something to hang onto. Just for a little while.
Because once he tells him, he’ll loose Cas too.
“It’s alright, Dean,” Cas says. He sits cross-legged on the floor right next to him as if in solidarity, and somehow this is the last thing Dean expects. He expects to be told to snap out of it, to get his shit together, to move, move, move. Because that’s what he’s always been told. And isn’t it the only reason he’s survived this long? Except maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe it’s the reason he’s fucked everything up so badly. Because he never stops. He never stops to just think about how much collateral damage he’s going to inflict with his blitzkrieg solutions.
He tries to hold back the sobs that are boiling up in his chest, but it makes it hard to breathe. Cas slides his arm behind Dean’s neck and draws Dean’s head to his shoulder. The palm of his hand presses against Dean’s temple, his fingers catch in Dean’s hair. He doesn’t deserve this kindness, but he needs it, God, he needs it so badly.
“It’s okay,” Cas says again. There are a lot of things that are very much not okay right now, but maybe him sitting here with Cas, breaking down because everything he’s tried to hold together is now rubble at his feet, is okay. For just a few more minutes, maybe it’s okay to press his face to Cas’s chest and cry. Maybe it’s okay to let Cas rub circles in his back and tell him to breathe, and just wait.
He wants so much for it to be okay. But it’s not.
So he pushes Cas away. He looks at Kevin, who doesn’t get to ask Dean why. Why Dean used him, why everything got so messed up, why Dean ever thought he could protect him in the first place. Kevin deserved to know all these things, but Dean waited. He waited until it was too late.
There is no more waiting. He swipes his hot, sticky eyes and cheeks with his shirtsleeves aggressively and takes a handful of deep breaths. And he tells Cas everything. He tells him how he was duped, how he misled Sam. How he lied to everyone and fucked everything up. And when he’s through, he almost says he’s sorry, but then it would sound like he’s asking for forgiveness.
Cas blinks at him. The way he used to when he was a strange creature Dean didn’t believe existed standing in Bobby’s kitchen.
“We should take care of Kevin,” Dean says, dragging himself to his feet. He’s not ready to hear what Cas has to say.
---
Dean finds a clearing in the woods behind the old power plant and builds a pyre. It’s cold and damp, and he doesn’t feel the axe handle blister his hands because they’re too numb. Under the trees, where the afternoon sun can’t reach, there are patches of snow. The rest of the ground is wet and brown.
He and Cas stand in silence over the burning body for a long time, and Dean thinks about Dad and Bobby, Ellen and Jo, about everyone he’s burned like this and has left a hole inside of him that has never been filled. And he wonders how a person can still survive when there are more holes than spaces in between.
Then, when there is no telling the ashes of their friend from the ashes of the branches he burned on, Cas turns and says, “Dean. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?”
Dean kicks at a clump of dead leaves and shakes his head. It seems so obvious to him. “I couldn’t do that. I mean, I knew. I knew from the start that it was wrong. I was worried you might… that you might…”
Cas nods. “Tell Sam,” he says.
Dean squints up at him, jaw clenched tight. “Hate me.”
“Hate you?” Cas asks, his head tilted in that frustratingly endearing way that feels so out of place in this moment. “Dean. What you did? It was wrong. But not unforgiveable.”
Maybe Cas didn’t understand. Maybe there’s something he’s missing. Maybe he’s just fucking blind.
“How can you say that?” Dean asks, the words scraping through his teeth like cracked cement. He points to what’s left of Kevin’s funeral pyre and yells, “Do you see what we just had to do? Look! That ain’t forgivable. None of this is!”
He spins on his feet, and starts back, thinking for a moment that he might just leave Cas there to think about how wrong he is, but there’s too much built up inside of him, so instead he pounds his fist into a big oak tree.
“Damn it!”
And then he pounds it again. The pain rides up his arm in white hot waves.
“Dean, stop!” Cas takes him by the shoulders and presses him up against the trunk of the tree. “Listen to me!” With his powers back, there’s no point in Dean struggling against him. So he holds his injured hand to his chest and stares into Cas’s eyes.
“Listen,” he says, softer now, his face so close that Dean’s sure he can feel his breath. “Your brother was dying. That… that angel posing as Ezekiel, it took advantage of you. It knew you were in a vulnerable state. It preyed on your weaknesses.” He’s insistent, frustrated. And angry, but maybe not at Dean. And Dean hates it. He hates what Cas is saying, hates that it reminds him of how helpless he felt back in that hospital room. How weak. He was so fucking weak.
He looks at his hand instead of Cas, at the bloody gashes on his knuckles.
“I’m not saying you were right to let him in,” Cas says. “Or that you were right to lie to us about it. I’m saying that it wasn’t you who took advantage of a desperate, exhausted man. You didn’t lie to that man about who you were and your intentions. You didn’t hold his brother hostage, Dean. And you didn’t do this to Kevin.”
It hurts so much to hear that, and Dean isn’t quite sure why. His breaths come out all crooked and tears fall from his eyes and into the blood on his hand.
“I shoulda known, Cas,” he insists, shaking his head.
“Dean. You saw what you wanted to see. Like a man in the desert who has visions of water. How can you blame yourself for running towards it?” Cas asks, swiping a tear off his cheek with his thumb. “How could you think I wouldn’t understand?”
“Fuck.”
“Does it hurt?” Cas asks, and takes Dean’s hand into his own, holding it like a little bird fallen from a tree. Dean knows what he’s about to do.
“Don’t do it,” he says.
“Dean…”
“I shoulda been stronger.”
Cas doesn’t heal him, but he doesn’t let go of Dean’s hand either.
“We all have such moments. I still struggle with everything I’ve done. And believe me, I understand if you can’t forgive yourself right now. But know that I do. I forgive you.”
Dean doesn’t get it. He really doesn’t. But he’s more grateful than he could ever express with words. If they do get him back, he won’t expect the same from his brother. He doesn’t deserve it.
“Sam…”
“We’ll find him. We’ll figure this out. Together. Alright?”
It’s not alright though. “Cas, I don’t… I don’t trust myself anymore.”
Cas grips the back of his neck, looks him in the eye, determined, focused. “Then you’ll just have to trust me. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Dean says.
“Thank you.”
fin
RATING: PG-13 (swearing)
CHAR: Dean, Cas
GENRE: H/C, Angst
PAIRING: Gen/Profound Bond
WORDS: 2096
SPOILERS: Coda to 9.09, "Holy Terror"
SUMMARY: Dean falls apart, and Cas helps hold him together.
Like Motes of Dust
Dean Winchester is bullets. He is knives. A bolt of lightning. He is a lake you drown in. A grenade that goes off in your hand. It’s only a matter of time. The destruction he inflicts does not discriminate. It doesn’t care if you are young or old, if you are a stranger or if you are someone he calls “family”. Everything he is, everything he defines himself by, will claim the innocent in its wake. The good hearted. The trusting.
Kevin. His name squeezes through Dean’s guts like tar, filling him with thick despair. He sits there on the cold tiles staring at Kevin’s burned-out eyes. He wishes he could scream out, ask why. But he knows why. Kevin is dead because Dean made a choice. He chose to put his brother’s life before everything else.
At some point, that was supposed to mean something good. It was supposed to give him purpose. Direction. But this is what it’s given him, this kid who lost everything, sacrificed everything to help them, who believed in Dean and trusted him. His friend, gone in a white hot flash and he didn’t even know what the hell was going on because Dean didn’t tell him. He’s just gone, gone, gone. Lights out. Like nothing. Like a streetlamp. Dean walks under streetlamps and they just…
There is no direction now. There is nothing left inside of him to tell him where to go, or what to do. How can he know? After all of this, how can he possibly know?
Kevin is Dead. He’s gone, and Sam could be gone too, because Dean had direction.
How can he ever move again? It seems crazy to even think about it. He can’t move. He doesn’t. Not for a long time.
He sits on the floor and stares into Kevin’s burned out eyes like they’re deep black holes in the universe that, if Dean looks at them long enough, will suck him in and transform him into nothingness. He waits for this to happen, or for the world to end, or for the thing that has taken over his brother’s body to come back and finish him off.
But instead, there is Castiel. Cas, who materializes on the other side of Kevin’s body. Who towers over the both of them like a monolith. And Dean realizes, this is what grace does. It’s a presence that hums and vibrates.
Cas looks down at Kevin and closes his eyes, disappointed that whatever he was expecting to find… is exactly what he’s found. He kneels, and for a nearly imperceptible moment, Dean prays that Cas can fix him. But when Cas lays his hand on Kevin’s body, nothing happens. He only sighs and looks up at Dean.
“Dean, what happened here? What did this? Where’s Sam?”
Cas doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know how horribly Dean’s fucked up.
There was a snowstorm in Minnesota in 1996. A patch of black ice on the highway. And the Impala sliding sideways, and Dean wrestling with the steering wheel and expecting to steer. Pressing the brakes and expecting to stop. Instead the world just spun faster and all he could do was hang on.
It’s that feeling, magnified a million times, because it’s not just a car and a road, it’s his whole life up to this point and every single person he ever gave a shit about. And there’s no steering wheel to hang onto anymore. There’s not a goddamn thing.
When he tried to save Sam he thought he was in control, but instead he’s had less and less of it every day.
“Dean, look at me. Talk to me.”
He can’t.
Cas moves closer to him, grips his shoulders and Dean’s back presses against the bookshelf behind him. “Dean, are you hurt? Say something.”
He wants to ask Cas to finish it, to do to him what’s been done to Kevin. He wants to be nothing. Weightless. Undefined. If you are weightless and undefined, you don’t need direction. You can just hover like a mote of dust in the sunlight.
“Dean… please,” Cas says quietly, desperately. This is when Dean makes the mistake of looking into his eyes; as he touches Dean’s chest to steady him, as he searches Dean’s face for that connection that has tethered them to each other since the day Cas took all the scattered cells of his body and made him whole again, saved him.
“It was me,” Dean croaks, tears welling up in his eyes over the old ones.
“That doesn’t make sense. Dean, you need to tell me.”
“I can’t, Cas. Please. I just…” He just wants Cas to care about him for a little while longer. He just wants him to see someone good when he looks at him, someone worthy of his friendship. He just wants something to hang onto. Just for a little while.
Because once he tells him, he’ll loose Cas too.
“It’s alright, Dean,” Cas says. He sits cross-legged on the floor right next to him as if in solidarity, and somehow this is the last thing Dean expects. He expects to be told to snap out of it, to get his shit together, to move, move, move. Because that’s what he’s always been told. And isn’t it the only reason he’s survived this long? Except maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe it’s the reason he’s fucked everything up so badly. Because he never stops. He never stops to just think about how much collateral damage he’s going to inflict with his blitzkrieg solutions.
He tries to hold back the sobs that are boiling up in his chest, but it makes it hard to breathe. Cas slides his arm behind Dean’s neck and draws Dean’s head to his shoulder. The palm of his hand presses against Dean’s temple, his fingers catch in Dean’s hair. He doesn’t deserve this kindness, but he needs it, God, he needs it so badly.
“It’s okay,” Cas says again. There are a lot of things that are very much not okay right now, but maybe him sitting here with Cas, breaking down because everything he’s tried to hold together is now rubble at his feet, is okay. For just a few more minutes, maybe it’s okay to press his face to Cas’s chest and cry. Maybe it’s okay to let Cas rub circles in his back and tell him to breathe, and just wait.
He wants so much for it to be okay. But it’s not.
So he pushes Cas away. He looks at Kevin, who doesn’t get to ask Dean why. Why Dean used him, why everything got so messed up, why Dean ever thought he could protect him in the first place. Kevin deserved to know all these things, but Dean waited. He waited until it was too late.
There is no more waiting. He swipes his hot, sticky eyes and cheeks with his shirtsleeves aggressively and takes a handful of deep breaths. And he tells Cas everything. He tells him how he was duped, how he misled Sam. How he lied to everyone and fucked everything up. And when he’s through, he almost says he’s sorry, but then it would sound like he’s asking for forgiveness.
Cas blinks at him. The way he used to when he was a strange creature Dean didn’t believe existed standing in Bobby’s kitchen.
“We should take care of Kevin,” Dean says, dragging himself to his feet. He’s not ready to hear what Cas has to say.
---
Dean finds a clearing in the woods behind the old power plant and builds a pyre. It’s cold and damp, and he doesn’t feel the axe handle blister his hands because they’re too numb. Under the trees, where the afternoon sun can’t reach, there are patches of snow. The rest of the ground is wet and brown.
He and Cas stand in silence over the burning body for a long time, and Dean thinks about Dad and Bobby, Ellen and Jo, about everyone he’s burned like this and has left a hole inside of him that has never been filled. And he wonders how a person can still survive when there are more holes than spaces in between.
Then, when there is no telling the ashes of their friend from the ashes of the branches he burned on, Cas turns and says, “Dean. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?”
Dean kicks at a clump of dead leaves and shakes his head. It seems so obvious to him. “I couldn’t do that. I mean, I knew. I knew from the start that it was wrong. I was worried you might… that you might…”
Cas nods. “Tell Sam,” he says.
Dean squints up at him, jaw clenched tight. “Hate me.”
“Hate you?” Cas asks, his head tilted in that frustratingly endearing way that feels so out of place in this moment. “Dean. What you did? It was wrong. But not unforgiveable.”
Maybe Cas didn’t understand. Maybe there’s something he’s missing. Maybe he’s just fucking blind.
“How can you say that?” Dean asks, the words scraping through his teeth like cracked cement. He points to what’s left of Kevin’s funeral pyre and yells, “Do you see what we just had to do? Look! That ain’t forgivable. None of this is!”
He spins on his feet, and starts back, thinking for a moment that he might just leave Cas there to think about how wrong he is, but there’s too much built up inside of him, so instead he pounds his fist into a big oak tree.
“Damn it!”
And then he pounds it again. The pain rides up his arm in white hot waves.
“Dean, stop!” Cas takes him by the shoulders and presses him up against the trunk of the tree. “Listen to me!” With his powers back, there’s no point in Dean struggling against him. So he holds his injured hand to his chest and stares into Cas’s eyes.
“Listen,” he says, softer now, his face so close that Dean’s sure he can feel his breath. “Your brother was dying. That… that angel posing as Ezekiel, it took advantage of you. It knew you were in a vulnerable state. It preyed on your weaknesses.” He’s insistent, frustrated. And angry, but maybe not at Dean. And Dean hates it. He hates what Cas is saying, hates that it reminds him of how helpless he felt back in that hospital room. How weak. He was so fucking weak.
He looks at his hand instead of Cas, at the bloody gashes on his knuckles.
“I’m not saying you were right to let him in,” Cas says. “Or that you were right to lie to us about it. I’m saying that it wasn’t you who took advantage of a desperate, exhausted man. You didn’t lie to that man about who you were and your intentions. You didn’t hold his brother hostage, Dean. And you didn’t do this to Kevin.”
It hurts so much to hear that, and Dean isn’t quite sure why. His breaths come out all crooked and tears fall from his eyes and into the blood on his hand.
“I shoulda known, Cas,” he insists, shaking his head.
“Dean. You saw what you wanted to see. Like a man in the desert who has visions of water. How can you blame yourself for running towards it?” Cas asks, swiping a tear off his cheek with his thumb. “How could you think I wouldn’t understand?”
“Fuck.”
“Does it hurt?” Cas asks, and takes Dean’s hand into his own, holding it like a little bird fallen from a tree. Dean knows what he’s about to do.
“Don’t do it,” he says.
“Dean…”
“I shoulda been stronger.”
Cas doesn’t heal him, but he doesn’t let go of Dean’s hand either.
“We all have such moments. I still struggle with everything I’ve done. And believe me, I understand if you can’t forgive yourself right now. But know that I do. I forgive you.”
Dean doesn’t get it. He really doesn’t. But he’s more grateful than he could ever express with words. If they do get him back, he won’t expect the same from his brother. He doesn’t deserve it.
“Sam…”
“We’ll find him. We’ll figure this out. Together. Alright?”
It’s not alright though. “Cas, I don’t… I don’t trust myself anymore.”
Cas grips the back of his neck, looks him in the eye, determined, focused. “Then you’ll just have to trust me. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Dean says.
“Thank you.”
fin