FIC: They're Just Playing With Legos (SPN, Dean/Castiel)
They're Just Playing With Legos
by Isos Arei
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Slash (Dean/Castiel)
Rating: R
Spoilers: for Season 4
Notes: Compatible, if desired, with the story And No Sacred Place
Summary: No one actually plays with any Legos.
***
For about two weeks during the autumn when he was six years old, Dean Winchester attended Three Points Elementary School in Pontiac, Illinois. Nearly twenty-five years later, Dean would not remember many of the details -- not how Sammy had fussed in the back seat of the Impala on the way to the red-bricked building on Dean's first day; not how exhausted (but happy) John Winchester had looked after Dean turned back to say "bye!" before racing up the school's cobbled entrance; not even how John had driven the three of them fifteen hundred miles in two and a half days, found through sheer force of will a modest but comfortable little house for them to rent, and insisted to the principal that Dean be registered for the first grade even though Dean didn't really have any health records and that was highly irregular. But those two weeks were the closest thing to a normal childhood that Dean had experienced in two years, maybe the best thing, and that was even taking into account the bully in his classroom.
Dean's instant nemesis, not that he would remember all that well almost twenty-five years later, was a tow-headed boy named Brad who took to tormenting him on the playground on the very first day. Brad was not a mutant, not a whole foot taller or anything like that. It was just that Dean, at age six, was of average height, and towering over other people and/or being able to beat the shit out of them would have to come later. And so, on a cold but sunny day in the middle of his first week at Three Points Elementary School, Dean had his beloved Lego Star Wars TIE fighter toy unceremoniously ripped from his hands right in the middle of recess.
"Give it, Brad!" Dean said, making a swipe for the toy and connecting with nothing but air.
"Give it," mocked Brad, his voice an unpleasant whine as he kept the TIE fighter just out of Dean's reach.
"Come on, my dad gave me that!" said Dean, and neither then, nor twenty-five years later, would he be able to fully articulate why that was so important, but that didn't stop the sudden swell of helplessness and desperation that was all out of proportion to the situation.
Nearby the second bell rang, signalling that the older kids were being released for recess as well.
Brad was scoffing. "Oooh, your dad gave it to you. So go get it!" he said, and threw the TIE fighter as hard as he could against the nearest tree. The little blocks split in all directions on impact, and the head of the miniature pilot flew off. Laughing, Brad ran off to join a group of children jumping on the merry-go-round.
Dean stared after him.
"I'm sorry about your toy," said an older boy, who was all pale skin and dark messy hair. Dean had seen this boy before and thought he was probably a fourth-grader, he was so tall. Without further comment, the boy bent down and began picking up wayward plastic blocks, and the autumn leaves made crunching noises under his own hands as Dean started doing the same.
In the end, they recovered enough pieces for only a single ion engine, not twin, and the miniature pilot's helmet was found, but not the head. The blocks looked so sad just piled up in the grass.
The other boy sat back and rummaged around in his backpack, finally producing a used sandwich bag filled with a few crumbs. He shook these out of the bag as much as possible, carefully put all the blocks in, and handed the bag of dead TIE fighter remnants to Dean. "Well, here you go," he said.
"Um, thanks," Dean said, remembering that he should be polite. But this reminded him of his mom, and this in turn suddenly made him feel like crying.
"Hold on a second." The older boy stuck his hand into his backpack again. "I made this," he said, bringing out a little Lego bluejay with tiny colorful wings, and putting it in Dean's surprised hands. "It's not as cool as Star Wars, though."
And Dean, almost twenty-five years later, would not remember how he'd turned pink with gratitude and said, "No, it's cooler!" Less than two weeks later they would have to leave in a hurry (Sammy crying in the back seat), and the erstwhile TIE fighter and the little bluejay would both be lost along the way, not the first collateral casualties of the family business, and certainly not the last.
But in the meantime the third bell was ringing and it was time to head back to class.
"I'm Dean Winchester!" he said, beaming up at the older boy.
"Jimmy Novak," said the boy as they hurried into the school building.
Overhead a brisk autumn wind passed through red and orange leaves with a sound like the rustle of feathers.
***
"Where are we going again?" said Sam beside him.
Dean finished switching lanes to pass the slowpoke driving the Honda, then turned to Sam with a giant grin. "Block Con, man, Block Con."
"Dude, stop jerking me around. That's, like, a Lego convention."
"It is not 'a Lego convention,' okay? It's the Lego convention."
"Oh, Jesus Christ, Dean."
Dean was starting to feel defensive. "Look, Cas told me something's going down at Block Con this weekend, something big."
"At Block Con."
"Yes, at Block Con."
Sam snorted. "All right, if Cas said so--"
Dean cut across three lanes to take the off-ramp. "I looked it up online, and they're having some big-head bodybuilder gathering in the same convention space this weekend. So you can go to that, and I'll handle this on my own."
"Oh, you got this, right?"
"Yeah, I got this one, Sam. Keep on laughing."
Sam kept laughing as they pulled into the drive-through at the Chick-fil-A.
***
Dean was dreaming.
He even knew he was dreaming, that he was actually sleeping in a very nice bed in a very nice room in the hotel adjoined to the Aerie Falls Convention Center. Yet there he was, in another rundown fucking warehouse (always with the warehouses), walking toward a room where he knew someone was strapped to a rack beside a table laid with rusty surgical instruments. And soon enough, he would be in the room, and the person on the rack would be the cute receptionist who'd checked them in that night (winking as Dean had turned back for another look), or John Winchester ("I raised you better than this, Dean"), or else some poor bastard whose face he couldn't even see (somehow that was the worst). Sometimes if he was really lucky, it would sort of cycle through a bunch of different people at once, five or twenty-five torture subjects for the price of one.
In the dream, Dean opened the door to the room, as there was never any point turning back, or staying in place, or closing his eyes, or anything else.
"Well, this is new," said Dean, with no mirth in his voice, as it was himself on the rack this time. "Sort of," he amended, since it was more accurate to say that this permutation of the dream hadn't occurred in a good while. "Fucking Freud."
Beside the rack was the expected table, laid with four scalpels, some drill bits, a pair of clamps, a lancet, and an oyster knife -- which was of course not a surgical instrument per se, but Dean had stopped trying to object on that point.
As Dean reached for the knife, he noticed a little plastic bluejay on an adjacent table.
And Castiel put his hand on Dean's, staying it in mid-reach. "I truly would give anything not to have you do this," he said.
In the hotel room, Sam was tossing in the other bed, talking rather loudly in his sleep about Ruby. But Dean, his dream forgotten and his hands relaxed upon the soft down comforter, slept soundly until the morning.
***
There was no other word for it: Block Con was fucking awesome. Hundreds and hundreds of people (some actually wearing costumes made of Legos) talking, milling about, pointing at hundred and hundreds of Lego models on display. And not just the usual skylines and Taj Mahals and hot air balloons, but submarines and the Enterprise and what looked like several different types of giant fruit pies. Someone had made an entire replica of Sea World of Texas in miniature (the way it had been when it first opened, too, none of that bastardized waterpark shit that came afterward), complete with a half-scale orca and full-size versions of an otter, a harbor seal, some penguins, and two dolphins. A few displays over was a monument to classic cars, and Dean's heart leapt a little at the sight of a small black Impala among the set.
After a while Dean wandered over to the play area, which took up an entire corner of the exhibition hall and was sprinkled with children climbing on colorful couch-sized foam blocks, this being the only space with seating and also a good view of the rest of the hall. He was wondering how Lego costumes actually stayed on (whether glue was involved, and whether that was cheating) when Castiel showed up sitting on the bench next to him.
If asked, Dean would not be able to say when these sudden appearances had stopped giving him a mild coronary; nor did he recognize that they instead filled him, like a whisper, with a fleeting moment of calm. "Cas, not that this isn't the best detail ever," he said, "but what exactly am I looking for here?"
"I am not sure." Castiel's expression was troubled as he regarded Dean. "I have told you what I know. That something will happen here soon, and that you should try to stop it if you can."
"I'll keep a look-out," Dean said, and Castiel nodded once. Then, whether it was because Dean could actually feel the air shift now, or merely because he was used to how this worked, he reached out without thinking to stop Castiel from leaving.
Castiel looked down at his arm where Dean's hand was, then turned an unreadable face to Dean. "I will return," he said, and disappeared.
Dean leaned back against the bench, determined to focus on watching the exhibition hall, and tried not to think too much about anything that didn't involve punching demons in the face.
***
Five chili dogs (plus a Coke) and two check-up phone calls from Sam later, the convention was ending for the day, and nothing out of the ordinary had yet to take place. But Castiel had said something would happen, so Dean had spent the last forty-five minutes crammed behind a shelf stacked with cans of fake cheese sauce in the kitchen area of the exhibition hall, waiting for the last of the convention staff to clear out. It was another half hour more while custodial services finished cleaning the hall.
Finally, when the ceiling lights shut down, and the small overnight lights lit up along the walls, Dean (with a godawful crick in his neck and no feeling at all in one leg) made his way back to the main exhibition area. Now that there was no one else around, he had a chance to look at some of the Lego models more closely, starting with the giant fruit pies.
He was making another pass by the classic car display, peering into the see-through plastic windows of the model Impala, when the demons attacked. Caught off guard, Dean still managed to dodge or deflect the swings of the first three demons, who had formed a tight semi-circle around him; but the fourth one barrelled into him at full speed and smashed the both of them (and the Impala) into the Sea World display, sending pieces of the miniature gateway flying. When fifth and sixth demons also began converging on his supine form, Dean thought an "Oh shit" was appropriate.
But Castiel appeared then, hand to the forehead of one of the demons, and that split-second's distraction was all Dean needed to grab his knife and dispatch the one who'd sent him crashing into Shamu Stadium. He sprang to his feet while Castiel burned through two more of the attackers.
The last two demons were more careful in evading his knife, but Dean thought they were still stupid: he alone could take them out, given a little more time, but it was pointless trying to avoid Castiel. And sure enough, even as Dean was completing this thought, Castiel vanished and reappeared directly between the two demons, and pushed one hard toward Dean just before pressing a firm hand on the other. Dean spun once into the path of the demon hurtling toward him-- Blade met throat, and it was over.
After a few moments during which all the hair on his neck stood at perpendicular angles to the skin, Dean knew that there were no more demons coming and began surveying the damage.
It seemed that most of the destruction (and he wouldn't look at the Impala) was confined to about five or six displays immediately surrounding them, but the Sea World display had definitely been hit the hardest. On top of the carnage befalling the main Sea World gateway and three nearby attractions, the Lego Shamu's tail had been smashed into thousands of black, white, and grey blocks, and a similar fate had befallen the dolphins. Meanwhile, the penguins and the Lego otter were somehow intact, but in the middle of the exhibition floor lay the harbor seal, broken almost perfectly in two.
Dean stared at the seal for five hard seconds, then turned to Castiel and said, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Castiel stared back. "The absurdity of this tableau does not escape me."
Since no eye-roll could possibly do justice to the moment, Dean settled for massaging the painful stitch developing in his side, though after a pause, he did say, "Cas, your sources suck." After another, longer pause, he wanted to say that this wasn't a half-bad way to spend the night, but Castiel, without further word, had already begun cleaning up the mess and mending the broken Lego displays one by one with a wave of the hand.
When everything had been restored to its previous state (except for Dean, who was slightly more bruised than he'd been that morning), Castiel said, "Thank you for your help, Dean. I'm going to have a word with my sources now." Then he disappeared, leaving Dean to climb out of the exhibition hall through a window.
***
Dean had just gotten back to the hotel room when Sam called to say he'd be hanging out late into the night. "Dude, are you okay?" said Sam when Dean made some non-committal noises of acknowledgment.
"Yeah, just a tiring day," said Dean, glad to hear Sam's voice.
"At Block Con."
"Shut up, Sammy."
Dean put the phone down, went to take a long hot shower, and slumped into bed without even turning off the lights.
***
Dean was back in the rundown warehouse. He could hear an industrial fan spinning somewhere, but the air around him was still damp and unmoving, and tinged with the scent of mildew. He opened the door to the room, eager to get it over with, and strode to the table with the surgical instruments without really paying attention. When he got there, he saw once more that the table had been laid with scalpels, drill bits, a knife, and so forth -- but next to these was a well-worn backpack, with red and orange maple leaves spilling from the unzipped opening. Dean, puzzled, looked up for the first time at the latest occupant of the rack, and saw that it was Castiel.
Or, he thought it was supposed to be Castiel. All the features were right, and composed in a serious expression even in sleep. The suit was right, too, slightly untidy and with the tie askew.
As Dean stood there, wondering what was off, Castiel opened his eyes and said from some deep place, "I'm sorry about this, Dean."
"Jesus, Cas--" said Dean, making at once to remove the shackles binding Castiel's wrists, but his fingers weren't working, and he had no key. When he looked down at his hands, he found the right one holding a wicked-looking lancet. "No," he said. "No."
"Dean, it's okay," Castiel was saying.
Dean thought he was going to be sick. With his left hand, he was loosening the tie, unfastening the buttons over Castiel's chest. With his right, he brought the lancet close to exposed skin, and he knew the double-edged blade would be effortless in the cut. "Can't you just get out, Cas?" he said. "Please."
But Castiel looked at him with fear, and that wasn't right.
"Cas-- Come on, just disappear yourself right now, okay?" Dean said, rising panic in his voice seeming to fill the room. He was pressing one edge of the lancet against fragile skin, and a drop of blood, so dark it was almost black, slid down Castiel's neck to make a small, neat stain on the white shirt.
Then the lancet was sinking repeatedly into flesh, blood was everywhere and wouldn't stop, and Castiel was screaming or maybe it was Dean because his throat hurt, and something was shaking him or his arm or the whole room or---
"Dean, wake up," said Castiel.
Dean sat bolt upright in the hotel bed to find Castiel standing beside him. He felt a chill from the air conditioning, and was aware that he was covered in a slight sheen of sweat. He also noticed at once that his eyes were wet.
"You have to stop doing this," Castiel said.
Dean wiped the back of his hand just a little too hard over his eyes, and a few spots of light danced painfully across his vision. "I know, I'm no good to your bosses like this."
"That's not what I meant." Castiel's voice softened even if his expression did not. "You have to stop punishing yourself."
Dean realized, with a rush of anger, and fresh shame, and loss: Castiel knew. Not just in the abstract, not like Sam. No, Castiel had seen everything, seen all that he'd done, through Dean's own memories and these godforsaken nightmares. "Do you think I like participating in Masterpiece Theater of Terror every night?" he said. It was very nearly a shout before he reined it in.
"No, of course not--"
"Cas, just--" Dean wanted to turn away, but forced himself not to. "Stay out of my head."
"But I'm not in your head, Dean. You're putting yourself in mine."
"Oh," said Dean. And: "Oh, Jesus."
"You are not unwelcome there, Dean," Castiel said, and his expression did soften then. "But I wish for your sake that you could leave some burdens behind when you sleep."
Dean didn't know how to parse the first statement, but the second one only made images flash through his mind of Castiel bound to the rack in the warehouse. He winced and said, "Sorry, Cas. The, the latest episode-- That was not what I wanted to broadcast. Uh, not that I wanted to broadcast any of them, but, you know, especially not that one."
"I know," said Castiel.
They looked at each other for a long time in the silence of the room.
When Castiel reached for Dean's face, Dean very nearly flinched, expecting pain and blinding shafts of light. But Castiel's fingers did not burn as they traced along his skin.
Dean became very aware of the sound of his own breathing.
Castiel said, quietly, "You think about this, don't you," and Dean could hear that it was not a question, but neither was it a judgment. Still, he didn't know what to say to that.
In the silence Dean shut his eyes for a moment. When he looked up again at Castiel all he said was, "Yes."
When Sam had first gone off to college, Dean spent a lot of time in a lot of bars with rather a lot of women. His memory of that time was mostly a series of blurs, and one of the vaguest was the time that he stumbled home, half-wasted, with a drinking buddy and the waitress who'd poured them shots of Don Julio Anejo all night. In the morning, because Dean didn't do regrets of that type, his main annoyance after the slight weirdness had been the fact that he couldn't even remember whether it had been any good.
But even if he could recall the logistics now, how could it possibly provide any useful frame of reference for... this? Assuming his mind hadn't snapped at last, and that this was what he thought it was.
Castiel only continued looking at him. Not in an uncertain way, but just-- paused. It gave him the impression that Castiel would stand there like that forever unless he said something else.
"You're waiting for something," Dean said finally. That seemed safe.
Castiel blinked, then said, "Your permission," in the same quiet voice as before.
So, not crazy, then. But: "You have to ask?"
Castiel smiled at this, but his eyes were full of rue when he said, "It would seem lately that you don't have enough say in your own life. I want to ask."
Dean definitely had no words for responding to that. So instead, he reached for Castiel's hand and brushed his lips across the back of the fingers. He heard Castiel exhaling.
Then Dean was pushing himself up on his knees on the edge of the bed, and Castiel was pressing forward and leaning close. Distantly he registered that Castiel was removing his own clothes as they kissed, but Dean at the moment was too distracted by how warm the inside of Castiel's mouth was.
When the coat and the shoes and the socks and the top parts of the suit were pooled on the floor, Castiel broke away for a moment. The dimmed lights of the hotel room threw beautiful shadows on his body, and Dean in an instant developed a fixation for the curve of abdominal muscles disappearing beneath a pair of low-slung pants.
"Now you're just staring, Dean," said Castiel.
"What--? Oh. I haven't done this before, okay. Not that I can remember. Well, I think, anyway." Dean knew he was rambling. "Also, you're one to talk."
"I don't know what you mean."
Dean's rejoinder was lost at the sight of low-slung pants being undone and joining the clothing pile. Furthermore, he had never before realized that regular boxer briefs were so fucking sexy. But he suddenly felt the need to get rid of his own as soon as possible, as they were too confining.
Castiel climbed onto the bed to join him, and there was only a little jostling as those last pieces of clothing were discarded. Heat rushed to Dean's face as he looked at Castiel before him. It was the return gaze, though, that made Dean nearly turn away: he'd gotten naked with a lot of people, but no one had ever looked back with eyes that laid bare everything about him. With a pang, Dean thought of how he'd held out as long as he could, against a Hell that had bent all its power toward breaking him, held out when he had no one and nothing to hold onto to keep his humanity intact. In the end it hadn't been enough.
"You shouldn't look away, Dean," said Castiel, who was taking Dean's hands in his, and pressing the palms against his chest. "Have you never thought that someone else might've given up the first day? The first hour?"
Dean concentrated on the feel and the warmth of Castiel's bare skin, on the steady heartbeat against his palms. He would not allow himself to ponder too deeply whether knowing Castiel earlier might have made a difference: the ache that shot through him, at even the suggestion, told him that the answer would have been yes.
"I wish I could see you, Cas," Dean said. "I mean, who you really are."
"I can show you."
Dean, startled, stopped tracing his hands over Castiel's body. "But I thought I couldn't--"
"I can show you who I was," Castiel said. "But you have to let me in your head."
Even as Dean nodded, a vision began forming in his mind. He saw--- vast plains dotted with a thousand campfires beneath a silver moon, riders on horseback with the wind rushing through their hair, young women who lifted their voices and hands to the wide sky. And there was a man who seemed to look like the other riders, only lit somehow with a fiercer spark of life. His hair was longer than it was now, and his face was a little younger, maybe wilder in a way, and less lined with concern, but he had the same earnest eyes, the same nose, the same half-smile. It was unmistakably Castiel.
Dean's eyes snapped open. "How--? I mean, I thought--"
"Story for another day, Dean," said Castiel, and his expression flitted opaque. But then his eyes focused on Dean again, and he said, "You're the only one who has seen me like that in a very long time."
Dean had no time to untangle curiosity from disappointment from a quiet, dizzying elation, as Castiel was pushing him backward, slowly but with an insistence like inertia, and he discovered that the feel of Castiel's weight pressing him down against the smooth sheets was a perfection of its own.
Then Castiel, whose skin was so warm everywhere, started moving. Sometimes his hot flesh brushed against Dean's thighs, and sometimes Dean brushed against his. Sometimes they brushed against each other, and Dean was so painfully hard that groaning didn't help at all.
"Can I be inside you?" said Castiel, and Dean's face flushed red with fever at the words.
"Please-- Yes," he said, and as Castiel slipped inside, filling him so utterly, he knew he had been right. There was no frame of reference for this, not at all.
Castiel began sliding inside and out, pushing slowly and withdrawing, an agonizing pace that made Dean's breathing erratic. But Castiel's breath was hitching as well, and his voice whenever he said Dean's name was deep like valleys and ragged with a surfeit of desire.
When Castiel spilled hot and hard inside him with a strangled cry, the feel and the sound of it struck Dean through with an intense feeling of satisfaction but also of loss. He said "Oh god, Cas--" in a desperate sort of whisper, and for several moments after that could manage nothing else.
But Castiel, recovering more quickly than anyone should have a right to, was moving down Dean's body already, and kneeling between his parted legs. Dean had long since gone beyond the realm of painfully hard into the land of painfully fucking hard, and he felt sure that the sensation of being down Castiel's throat in this state would lead to some horrible aneurysm at any moment. But even as he was deciding that it would be worth it, his hips strained up, and he came shuddering into Castiel, and the feeling was of fire searing, a trail of incendiary igniting at once inside him. And after this, Castiel climbed back next to him, and they lay pressed closely together long into the night.
When Dean fell asleep he dreamed only of the silver moon and the wide open sky.
***
The next morning Dean woke to find Sam and Castiel seated at the table in the hotel room.
"Look who's finally awake," said Sam, finishing the last of what looked like a bagel sandwich. "Good job, man."
Dean looked at Castiel, who looked back but said nothing. "Uh, what?"
Sam jabbed his thumb in Castiel's direction. "Cas was telling me about those demons you guys took out yesterday. Apparently if you hadn't gotten them then, they would have broken, like, a bazillion seals today."
Dean was still too groggy for this. "Are you fucking with me, Sammy?"
"It is the truth," Castiel said.
"Oh."
Sam crumpled the sandwich wrapper into a ball. "So can you go get dressed now?" he said to Dean. "I wanna get out of here whenever you're ready."
Dean wanted to look over at Castiel, but he said to Sam, "Yeah, I gotta take a shower first."
"All right, I'm gonna go exchange some numbers and say bye to the guys, then I'll go check out." Sam was already halfway out the door. "Meet you in like an hour."
When the door closed behind Sam, Dean turned to Castiel, and for one awful moment could not look him in the face, afraid that last night had not, in fact, actually happened.
Castiel reached inside his coat pocket, bringing out a small toy bird in blues and greys and whites. "This was at the gift stand in the exhibition hall. They were all out of the marine mammals." He shrugged. "Thought it could be... a token."
"Of last night?"
"If you wish, Dean," Castiel said, setting the bluejay on the table.
The air shifted, and Dean said, "Wait, Cas."
"Yes."
"Who you are, the story for another day-- I want to know."
"You already know, Dean," said Castiel. "I am needed elsewhere now, but I'll come to you and Sam again before long." His glance lingered a moment longer, and then he disappeared.
***
Dean showered and shaved, packed up what he had in the hotel room, and headed out to the Impala ten minutes early. After dropping his bag into the trunk, he slid into the driver's seat and reached into his jacket pocket for the little bluejay. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times, then put it carefully into the glove compartment and waited for Sam.