Episode 24: Redemption (Part III)
Title: Redemption (Part III)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info,
warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: swordofmymouth and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: ~29,000
Warnings: language, violence, sexuality, references to noncon, scenes that some may perceive as dubcon
Betas: dotfic and murron
Art: Chapter banner by zatnikatel; digital paintings by celectis, usarechan, and guusana, which you can also find here, here, and here (NB: art contains spoilers for the episode)
Summary: "This world turns like a knife in our wounds…"
Running, always running, while he hurts, and coughs, and heaves for breath, and tastes blood in the back of his mouth.
He aims for economy rather than style. Short, quick steps mean his feet spend less time in contact with the ground, and that matters because he's running on third-degree burns through fields of fire, after something that he wants to forget exists in the same dimension as him stole his boots one night while he huddled in his hiding place and let it have the damn things rather than have him, even if he knew his skin would melt without them. Three steps per second it is then, slap-slap-slap, through the corpses and carnage of this wild frontier, eyes narrowed to slits by fierce and scorching headwinds and billowing dust storms. He does it along to Enter Sandman over and over in his head, and it's so damn appropriate because he's back in Never-Never Land and sleeping with one eye open when he can slip into the shadows and find a safe crack in the earth.
But it never rests, and it has a long stride and keen senses. And so they go, endlessly, because journeys of a thousand, million, billion miles start with a single step, and he took that step when he bound himself to it.
He drifts off sometimes, remembers his brother when he was soulless; how Sam loped along like a wolf, strides eating up the ground, breath steady and not even a bead of sweat on his brow. Castiel runs like that too, but that memory and loss, loss of closeness, of whispering in the night and the feeling that nothing else mattered, is too much to bear so he tries not to think of it. Except when he does, and he presses his hand to his shoulder then, even if it disrupts him and sends his rhythm skewing into an ungainly stumble that threatens to poleaxe him.
Sometimes when he does it, he thinks he feels something.
Dean…
This dream is more real than most of them have been; there is skin pressed against his, a hand on his cheek.
He speaks, something he pulled out of his memory to comfort himself with right after he found himself lost here, something that still echoes in that small part of him that hasn't been charred to black by Hell's fire, that small part of him that is still a poet at heart, although he knows his heart is turning colder and harder with each eternity that passes here. He twists his head when he says the words, so that his own mouth ghosts over the scar he wears. "Ego dilecto meo…et dilectus meus mihi…" he murmurs. "I love you. I miss you…so damn much, Cas. And I want you so badly."
And then there are soft lips moving against his, a faint reply eked out over long seconds because Castiel is still in that languid sleep-wake state Dean remembers, that loose sprawl of limbs that Dean would drape himself over and kiss his way along and across, up and down, until his lover sighed and shuddered his way to alert and needy.
"Te…amabo…in aeternum"
"I dreamed that I saw you…that you reached for me," Dean mumbles back, through a lazy smile. "I wish you were real."
There is a drowsy huff of air then, and the rumbled-out voice he will never hear again outside of his mind.
"'M real. Open your eyes."
But fuck, no, Dean doesn't want to and isn't going to, isn't going to let go of this fraction of a second of peace and rest any sooner than he has to, because he will have to and then he'll be on the move again. "Just talk to me," he whispers through his exhaustion.
A thumb moves back and forth under his eye, slow and gentle, and the lips are nuzzling and pulling at his now, warm, insistent but careful.
"I did reach for you."
The dream-Castiel hums then, and after a moment Dean hears his breathing level off to an authentic, deep in-out that signals slumber.
This feels real.
It's so warm where they are, a good warm, not the inferno he has been subsisting in, counting down the long seconds until he finally slips and falters.
He's lying on something soft, covered by something soft.
Castiel is long, and sleek, and right there, and Dean pats out a hand, finds that Castiel's thigh feels as real under his palm as the rest of this dream, finds that when he runs his hand slowly up Castiel's back, the skin there is as smooth as it always was, and that when he mouths his way along Castiel's jaw the stubble is as scratchy as he remembers it. He inhales sweat, the faint scent of soap and antiseptic, because this dream-Castiel even smells real as he wraps his arm around Dean and curls into him, fitting his leg in between Dean's.
This feels real.
There is no scent of brimstone, no dust in his throat, no snap-crackle-pop of flames, no din of suffering and no screeching soundtrack of demons mocking him as he stumbles past.
The fatigue feels real, the deep, dull ache in his bones feels real, the pull of strained, overused muscles feels real.
There is a tickling sensation on his cheeks, liquid that tastes of salt when it meanders its way down to his lips, and it feels real, as if Castiel is there and weeping in his arms.
Real, this feels real-real-real, but it can't be.
"Are you real?" Dean whispers anyway, but there is just that steady inhale and exhale, and the rise and fall of Castiel's ribcage under his hand.
"He's real."
It's another voice Dean never expected to hear again, the words choked out and strained.
"Open your eyes, Dean. He's real. This is real."
Dean doesn't open his eyes. He pulls his hand up and out from under the covers, paddling it blindly in thin air until it is caught and held.
And then he looks, and sees, and the tears he can taste are his own, not Castiel's at all, because Castiel is out of it, lashes snug-tight on his cheeks, mouth a little open. And his brother is there, sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed and leaning forward, white-faced with strain, his eyes red.
"This is real, Dean," Sam whispers. "You're safe."
Sam is gripping Dean's hand tight, and Dean grips back.
Restoration takes time and there is a sense that they are all running out of it. Yet, some things have to take their course, and healing is one of these things.
According to Bobby's calendar, it's ten days since Sam hauled Dean out of his grave. All Dean can remember of the first few is sheer dissonance: snapshot flashbacks of talons flaying his chest open wide and a fiery tentacle melting his flesh, so that he screamed himself awake scrabbling at his skin even though he knew his wounds were gone. Then there were the long hours of mute trauma when he just lay there in the bed and stared at Castiel lying there next to him, while Castiel stared back and they held onto each other like they might never let go.
They mend slowly, an arduous slog of nightmares, nausea and neediness, shaking hands and weak legs, hearts sent leaping into throats by loud noises. But even so, this second week has been better, the aftermath and fallout interspersed with periods of testy fuck-you-all normality during which the Sam-and-Bobby pincer-movement mother-hen act has driven Dean crazy, and he has wanted nothing more than to crank his baby into gear and sweep out through the gate of the lot to gank some soulless sonofabitch as viciously as he can. And he knows there are plenty of them out there, even if he has only half-focused as Bobby tells him again, slowly and patiently, about how Hell came to earth, how this new world works and what lives in it. Who has died in it too, and Dean couldn't find anything to say to that. He had pushed up silently and snagged the bottle of Jack from the pantry on his way back up to the bedroom, where he downed a third of the liquor while tears streamed down his cheeks and he cursed the irony of grieving a woman and child who died not even remembering who he was.
Castiel had found him there, had slid down the wall to sit next to him. "I think Amelia and Claire are dead too," he had said quietly. "Bobby told me they're fine, but he isn't a very good liar. I know it isn't the same. But."
Dean hadn't really known if it was the same or not, but he had listed and rested his head on Castiel's shoulder anyway. "This is my fault," he had whispered. "I didn't kill that thing when I should have." And Castiel had turned into him, wrapped him in his arms and hushed him, gripping him hard, as if Dean was the only solid thing in his world.
Dean has shrugged helplessly when Bobby asks him what the hell happened?
"Cas came for me," he has replied, and every time Bobby's face has fallen into a sort of harrowed bemusement.
"But he can't have," the old man has insisted, drifting off a little into his own doubt. "There was no gas in the car. It never moved, not one inch. The dogs started hollering five minutes after I walked past him to go milk the cow."
Sam believes it though, showed Dean the blood spattered page in Castiel's journal with a sort of reverence after Dean came around properly, pointing to the words and phrases that formed each step in the equation.
Then he had unfolded a small slip of paper that was as creased as Dean's own fortune had been, and read it aloud. "The trick to finding things you've lost is to look where you last saw them."
Beside Dean, Castiel had cleared his throat. "No, the trick is finding your faith," he had offered softly, and he had smiled at Sam's quizzical expression. "You had faith in me," he had elaborated in a tired murmur. "And faith in your brother. And faith in yourself. If you hadn't…"
Dean doesn't want to think about that, wants to push the vague recall of horrified scraping on wood and airless claustrophobia down as far as it will go and pour concrete on it to seal it there. And he has given up trying to work out the logistics of any of it; he only knows that Castiel came for him like he did before, and it makes him cling to his friend even more tightly in the dark, tying them both together in a twisting, looped double knot of arms and legs.
When he snaps awake on a stifled cry, he rouses Castiel and kisses him bruisingly hard, biting at his lips, sobs out incoherent bullshit as he rubs them together, because the desperate, feverish heat of sex, the trifecta of skin, sweat and semen, grounds him in reality even if it's uncoordinated and exhausted, and it peeters away into holding on for dear life, breathing his friend in.
"Prove you're really here," he pleads out harshly. "Prove that I'm alive."
And he hangs on Castiel's voice as Castiel tells him, I'm here, Dean, I'm really here, and you're alive, you're alive, on a continuous loop, until his throat is so raw the words are a hoarse scratch in Dean's ears.
He's really here.
He's alive.
No, healing can't be hurried.
And they all are healing, so Dean tries to be patient when Sam hovers at his elbow to prop him up when he isn't even wobbling, or falls asleep slumped on the chair in the corner of the bedroom because he stumbled in there at midnight, roused by screaming, and never made it back to his bed. And he tries to be patient when Bobby chides him for not eating enough and drinking far too much, and when the old man snaps at Castiel for every little thing even though he produces platefuls of baked zucchini for Castiel afterwards and his hands are as gentle as Dean has ever seen them when he tends to the angel's burns.
Auto work is another thing that can't be rushed, and Dean always has found a leisurely escape in drinking in some old junker, seeing what she once was and could be again in his mind's eye. And now he does it with even more of a quickening in his heart, as he walks around the scarred remains of the Impala, his hands stuffed deep into his hip pockets. The chill cuts through him like a blade, but he welcomes its sharp edge as he stands in the lot in the early dawn gray, because Hell was never cold, and the frigid air grounds him as much as his family does. He glances up at the window, smiles at the thought of Castiel still burrowed under the quilts, his hair a black tuft poking out from underneath the layers. He knows that if his friend or any of the others saw him out here shivering, they would have something suitably cutting to say about how he skulked out of bed before sunup and didn't fire up the stove and put the coffee on before he braced himself against the abrupt winter.
And now here he stands, gazing at his car. He has only seen her from a distance before this, has put off making this pilgrimage. Up close, her burned-out, trashed hulk looks like a monument from a bygone era, or maybe from the future. Dean doesn't know if it counts as a memory if it's something that hasn't happened and never will, but the words slip out of him almost unconsciously, before he can swallow them back.
"Oh no…baby, what did they do to you?"
He thinks he sees an arc of winter sunray hit the plane of the side panel, and there is a bright flare of light out of conjunction with physics, something that should not be. It vanishes in a line of pearlescence that gives Dean a trembling feeling inside, and he closes his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He wants to growl and snarl at it, and it takes everything he can summon to stop himself from dropping to his knees, into a predatory crouch. Something of that Hell will always be with him; it has the persistence of a splinter that will not be prised from the skin. But repression keeps him intact like it always has, and he shoves the splinter down deep, buries it where it will not catch on anything, or recall him to pain.
He distracts himself by jotting down a mental list of auto parts that he will have to pilfer from the cars stacked in Bobby's salvage yard, as he surveys the damage. The door is missing from the driver's side, and in places the metal panels are burned through to nothing. She's on her rims, her tires in shreds, and her windows are all blown out. He suspects the ignition won't even cough if he turns the key.
"What happened to treating my baby right?" he grouches out loud to Bobby's dog, where it stands a few feet away. As if to answer the question, the mutt strolls up and cocks its leg, delivering a spatter of rank, steaming piss onto the back left rim, before it flops down and contorts itself into a suitable position for licking its balls, which it does with gusto. "Fuckin' charming," Dean tells it, and it grins toothily at him.
He slants his eyes over towards the auto shop, sighs as he thinks of the saber saw, the plasma cutter, the welder, the paint gun. Without power running out to the shop, he's doing this the hard way, and maybe not even at all. He lays a hand across the bubbled paint of the trunk, and he can feel in the way the cover bounces beneath his fingers that the lock is broken. When he withdraws his hand, the trunk opens up like a mouth, and he blinks, has to shake his head at the split-second flash of yawning jaws gaping wide to swallow him.
No.
No.
The ground is frozen hard beneath his boots, and the air is icy, and his family is here and this is the world, the world. "This is not the Pit," Dean croaks, and when he feels Cheney's wet nose poke into his hand he pats the dog almost frantically as it leans into him and nuzzles his leg.
He breathes it down, even counts backwards from twenty like Sam sometimes still does, lips silently forming the numbers while his fingers close around the shape of the amulet his brother returned to him again with the wry comment that it better be the last time we do this. It works for now, and Dean turns his attention back to the trunk. It looks like a munitions factory vomited into it; the ordnance he inherited from his father and has steadily added to over the years is in disarray, a haphazard pile of revolvers, shotguns, knives of all sizes, silver swords scavenged from dead angels, shells, grenades, boxes of ammo. The disorganization bothers the military training ingrained in him, a mark of John's legacy.
But what really stands out are the flat metal plates piled toward the back, and Dean leans over to snag one for a closer look. In the darkness at the rear of the trunk it looks like silver, but somehow he knows it's more than silver, and there's a strange glow he can't place when his fingers brush the burnished finish-
"Dean."
Dean startles with a cry, and hits his head on the trunk lid. His heart ping-pongs in his chest like a cheap arcade game and he slams the trunk closed as he whirls, sitting on it to keep it closed against the broken lock. The metal paints a stripe of frozen cold that seeps through his jeans to his ass.
Castiel is standing there with a mug of coffee in either hand, and a drape of dark fabric hanging over the crook of his arm. Dean waits for the scolding and the quiet you shouldn't be out here, not by yourself, but Castiel offers him nothing more than gentle eyes as Dean rubs at the sore spot on the back of his head and takes the cup his friend is holding out to him.
It's too hot.
Dean should have realized, because Hell is like a deep tissue burn and you can feel it afterwards, the steady throb beneath the skin. It makes hot objects hotter, and his fingers scorch through to the bone. He drops the cup, and they both watch without a sound as it falls to the frozen ice underfoot and shatters in several pieces, dashing hot liquid across Cheney's leg, forcing a yelp and a flinch from the mutt. Dean knows how it feels.
After a moment of staring at the coffee as it melts the ice into a brown puddle, Castiel offers Dean his cup instead, holding it out into the empty space like the broken mug is nothing in this landscape of broken things and he will always hold out something whole and perfect for Dean to fuck up, over and over. Dean doesn't want it but he takes it anyway, and this time he does it smart, gripping it by the top until Castiel lets go of the handle.
"Thank you," Dean croaks. He isn't talking about the coffee.
They stand in silence then, as the dawn starts creeping over the horizon and the snow goes from blue to pink, until Cheney breaks the quiet, licking the cold coffee off the ice with a thick lapping sound. The screen door bangs in the distance at almost the same time, and Dean glances towards the house to see Meg stretching out her morning kinks, oblivious to them lurking behind the car, before she cups her hand to her face and foggy gray wisps start wreathing up.
Dean can smell the acrid stench of the cigarette already. "The house stinks of smoke," he sidetracks morosely. "It burns my eyes."
He finds he's shivering, hugging himself, and without saying anything Castiel tugs the fabric from his arm and holds it out to him. Dean recognizes it even though he has never seen it before: an olive drab M-65 military field jacket. He knows it because it was the field jacket of choice during the Vietnam war, and he saw his old man wear one just like it enough times to remember.
He also recognizes it from 2014.
With a weak smile, he manages a joke about it. "Hey, future-me wore one of those." He jerks his head at the wreck that was once his car. "Had one of these rusting out in his lot too."
Castiel looks at him, his eyes liquid. "It was hanging on the hallstand," he says. "I assumed it was Bobby's. It'll keep you warm."
It might well be the old man's even if Dean can't recall ever seeing Bobby wear it: after all he was in-country too. And Dean knows his friend is right; the henley he's wearing is useless for insulating him against the cold. No point in being superstitious; he relents with a grudging huff, pulls on the extra layer. There are thousands of jackets like this still in circulation, and in the end, it doesn't mean anything. It fits right through the shoulders, and it's still warm where Castiel kept it close, but for all that, Dean can't seem to stop shivering even with the inner zip pulled up and all the buttons fastened. He wraps his arms around his chest again and remains poised there, one boot on the ice beneath the car and the other kicked up on the bumper while he eases on the car's backside and tries to focus on what he was doing before Castiel said his name. "Hey, when you came back…did you bring your armor with you?"
Castiel frowns. "No. I left it with Balthazar. At least I think I did." He sighs then. "I'm afraid my recall is a little murky still. I wish I could remember more."
Dean feels a twinge and a tug at the base of his skull, like a ghost poking a finger into his brain matter. It awakens his own foggy memories, memories viewed through a veil of brimstone that turns the winter world around them surreal and hazy with light and endless white drifts of ash. When Dean blinks, it becomes brighter still and he hears voices penetrate from another world-
-"Will he be alright?"
When Dean turns to look, Castiel is backlit by hellfire that casts his armor fiery orange and renders him a strange mixture of terrifying and glorious, so that Dean wonders what it might have been like to look up and see him leading legions of Heaven's warriors as they dove into the fray. He is staring right at Dean, his eyes like methane, as Vassago, his teeth exposed through his cheek in a relentless grin that he has no control over, unbuckles his breastplate.
As Vassago collects Castiel's armor from him, Dean returns the angel's gaze, looking on Castiel's face with only a dim understanding of what it means to him. He feels base instincts of possession, and want, and need; looking at Castiel fills him with a thousand sensations, and they all make him feel undeserving and smaller than he should be, so he switches to stare behind Castiel, at Balthazar.
The other angel's eyes are bright and elated even though his face is lit with cuts that leak silvery grace. He's talking in Enochian, and twice Dean hears his name as he blinks in his stupor. And then Balthazar and Castiel are embracing, chest to chest and hands slapping against their backs, as Vassago nods approvingly.
Dean can feel the twisting burn mark the beast lashed him with curl up and down his torso like a living snake that nips at his skin. He's uncomfortable and hurting, shock is setting in, and he can feel the tremors start to rock his frame as-
-"You're shivering, Dean," Castiel cuts in.
Dean startles as he wakens to himself through spliced-in memories occurring in Hell-time; and this is how it has been these past ten days - pieces of a shadow life coming back to him in dribs and drabs. He spills hot coffee on his hand, and it burns more than it should. He bites his lower lip and he can't stop shaking even after he can no longer hear Balthazar and Castiel, or hear the clink of them shedding their armor. He knows Balthazar said something about returning to Heaven, made some sardonic quip about his dictatorship being a benevolent one, but he can't seem to remember where Gabriel ended up, or when exactly he disappeared without explanation.
"Oh," Castiel realizes. "It happened again?"
He reaches forward and plucks the coffee cup out of Dean's hand. Dean lets him without asking why, and Castiel sets it on the ground, where Cheney rams his snout into it eagerly until he knocks it over and begins to lick that spillage up as well.
"You're still cold," Castiel adds, and then he tilts his head the way he used to, that unspoken angel-language of his, softened now by the humanity in his eyes. "Are you alright, Dean?"
Dean's teeth are chattering, but, "I'm good," he evades. "It just comes and goes. I'm like a woman with menopause, y'know? Hot one minute, cold the next. Go ahead, make fun of it."
"That wasn't my intention," Castiel replies, and he puts a hand on the trunk, leaning into Dean. There can be no mistaking his intention now, it's clear in the way his eyes have lit up with a sudden, unexpected gleam.
Dean feels his throat grow tight and warm, flush with new blood; the excitement of Castiel bending over him and capturing him against the rough surface of the destroyed Impala is both predatory and intense and he doesn't want Castiel to know just yet that he has no real physical need for his warmth. "What are you going to do about it?" he challenges instead.
Castiel wastes no time, and his boots crunch on the ice as he moves in to nudge against Dean's legs, bold now. The tentative lover is gone; this is the angel-soldier come to claim the spoils of his war, like he did on Tu'ugamau Island, and he grips Dean by one knee to open him up and invade his personal space so they are interlocked like puzzle pieces. A sharp wind whips around the corner of the house almost at the same moment, and it's like being slapped against the back of the neck. Dean shivers for real, and Castiel smiles as he leans in closer.
"Keep you warm is what I'm going to do about it," Castiel answers finally, and even if his voice is flat enough to make Dean wonder if he's serious, the rough gravel undercurrent to it might mean that he's insinuating more. Well, he has to be, thinks Dean. There's no way a guy gets between your legs because he's being literal about trading body heat. But that's the thing with Castiel, he acknowledges inwardly. Sometimes, he is that literal.
"Well," Dean prompts, "maybe it's not as easy as you think."
"It's my understanding that persistent shivering indicates a low-level stage of hypothermia," Castiel responds smoothly. "As do fumbling hands. Your shivering mechanism is your body's own attempt to reheat your core. In extreme instances, if this fails to work, simple body-to-body rewarming may yield a faster recovery."
Dean swallows. "Oh yeah?"
He slides a hand up to the top button of the M-65, and this is going to be cold and he will regret it later, but there is something tantalizingly forbidden about doing it out here, in the early dawn. He knows Meg can't see them, knows they have maybe a half-hour before Bobby drags his ass out of bed. Everything is silent and still, and sleeping, and no one, no one will know about this except them. The privacy in the ice and the snow is what does it, this quiet wasteland that is just theirs, somewhere only they know, just like the waterfall cave they made love in. He thinks suddenly that he has craved that somewhere inside him for years, since Castiel walked in his dreams and found him alone and fishing.
He unfastens one button after the other and Castiel's eyes find the motion and lock in on it. A little breath of steam escapes the angel's lips as they part slightly, and it puffs into the air and dissipates. And then Dean is raking his hand over the frigid buttons faster, so they make a sound like tearing, and when he reaches for the zipper of the military drab, Castiel reacts blindingly fast, shoving him further up onto the trunk and knocking his hands out of the way to get to the tab and yank it down.
"I don't think stripping me naked is going to cure my hypothermia," Dean points out, and he wants to smirk and be sarcastic but the situation goes explosive in the space of seconds. This has always been the nature of their animal heat, like exposed fuel just waiting to combust and igniting from the dimmest spark, and Dean feels the kneejerk flash of desire snap through him so hard his abdomen tightens and those steadily heating muscles in his groin clench.
He helps to heave himself further onto the car, and Castiel is already chasing him up the slope of the vehicle's back-end, bracing one knee on the trunk to climb up after him. The struts are long-gone, and the Impala dips and bounces with the added weight, like a seesaw. Castiel's eyes are starving for this now, and Dean suddenly feels like he is nothing more than prey, being hunted by a whole pack of wolves, and that this is the split-second before the alpha-male leaps and fastens its jaws around his throat to pin him down.
"But stripping you naked means I can apply heat directly to your core…"
Even Castiel's answer is a breathy growl he cannot fit in the parameters of jest, and when he yanks the jacket zipper all the way open he doesn't stop there, but continues down a natural line of descent to the next zipper available, at the fly of Dean's jeans. It all happens in a quick succession, leaving Dean reeling with the change in temperature as the gaping jacket opens his torso up to a bitter breeze made even colder by the fact all his blood is presently flowing south, straight to the hard heaviness of his straining cock. It nips eagerly at the underside of the zipper until Castiel lets it burst free as if it's spring-loaded.
"Jeez, Cas-"
Castiel still doesn't wait, and all the while Dean is thinking not really, you know, out here, dude, where anyone can just come out onto the porch and see them like this. But if Dean's newly discovered concern is at all important, Castiel doesn't share it, because he's slapping a hand over Dean's mouth, and the next thing Dean feels is the hot warmth of the angel's lips closing in over the head of his cock.
The next sounds Dean makes aren't words, as he leans back and feels the violent tug of his jeans down his hips to make room for Castiel as he eats his way through Dean's flesh with no decorum, a satisfied hum vibrating at the back of his throat as he takes Dean's length along his tongue. When Dean vaguely hears the sound of the screen door slam up at the house he retains enough presence of mind to hope it's Meg abandoning her half-finished cigarette in favor of the relative warmth of the house, but part of him doesn't care. The rhythm of Castiel's tongue on his cock is sending him into a lull and all the building anxiety of the flashbacks that visit him in unexpected moments is gone now. He is lost in Castiel's mouth, and the way the angel looks with his eyes closed and his hair wild, and his face buried in Dean, nose to Dean's belly and lips slicking him to the root as he reaches to hold Dean there with a hand clamped around his thigh and the other slapping frantically at the Impala for purchase.
A flash of light erupts and pops beneath Castiel's fingers like a firecracker.
Castiel cries out, flinches and bucks so violently Dean thinks his friend is damn lucky he just happened to be gripping the collar of his shirt in his fist already, or Castiel would have cracked his skull open on the ice as he falls back, dragging Dean with him until they crash to the ground in an ungainly tangle. Dean is left cold and unfinished, his bare ass sliding on ice, but even as he hisses and flexes up onto his knees to tug his shorts and jeans back up, his main concern is Castiel's sudden reaction and how he holds his hand in a fist, as though he just touched the surface of a hot stove.
"Is it Hell?" Dean asks, because he knows Hell; Hell is something he can understand and offer comfort for. But Castiel doesn't answer, and now he is the one shivering and staring at nothing, his sudden catatonia in utter contrast to his lust-blown pupils and lips swollen from blowing Dean with abandon seconds before.
Dean shakes his friend by the shoulders to snap him out of it. "Cas. What is it? Talk to me, goddammit. You've gone all T-2000 on me."
Castiel breathes hard, and then one hand comes up to grip Dean's, but he doesn't look at Dean; he looks past him, at the Impala, as though he fears she will rev and roar into life and run them down until her wheel rims track their blood over the ice.
"It's grace," Castiel breathes. "Dean…she has grace in her. I thought I imagined it, that I was going mad."
Castiel shakes Dean off, frowning as he rises, Dean pushing up beside him until they're standing together, shoulder to shoulder. Dean zips his jeans and tries not to think about the uncomfortable bulge down there, but Castiel just stares at the car for a moment before stepping forward, studying her a little dubiously as he circles around her to her front. He holds out a hand, hesitates before he takes the plunge and sets his fingers over the destroyed finish of her hood.
"Of course," he whispers, his eyes going wide. "Michael. Michael, he…"
Abruptly, Castiel brings a fist across the sheet metal and cries out again with his head bowed and his other hand streaking up to slam over his head. Dean skids on the ice in his sheer fright, grabs his friend by the sleeve, turning him around and pulling him in close. The wind is cold and each time Dean breathes in it hurts from the inside out, but he doles out reassurance interspersed with questions. "It's okay. Cas. It's okay. What is this? I got you, buddy, I'm here. But what are you talking about Michael for? He's down in the Cage weaving baskets with Lucy."
"No, this was before the Cage," Castiel breathes, his features creased in some mix of awe and agony. "I lay here, right here on this car, and…" He pauses a beat, as realization seeps into his expression. "It was when we went back to stop Anna. Michael must have wiped my memory clean. I only have - glimpses. Impressions. But I knew there was something there. There's no way she could have made it through the Lake of Fire, not without some measure of angelic, divine assistance."
Dean blanches. "Are you telling me my baby is hopped on angel-juice?"
Castiel's mouth moves a moment as though he is scrambling through discordant thoughts, giving organization to chaos, and his eyes light up fierce, cobalt. "A measure of my grace," he marvels. "Michael exorcised me…or he started to. Right here, and I remember clinging to the metal, remember my grace melting into it. It must have been here all along, sleeping. Of course, you wouldn't have known it. But the influence was there…you would have noticed it, in small ways. Maybe narrowly missing an accident, or having an accident in which the harmful effect was lessened-"
"There was that time one of Yellow Eyes' drones plowed a truck into us," Dean cuts in, and he's caught for a moment in the between, the memory of wandering hospital hallways with a reaper on his tail, trying to communicate with his brother. His dad's deal too, and his voice is a little dry when he goes on. "We all got banged up bad."
Castiel's reply is soft, like he knows where Dean's recall ended up. "Without the angel-juice, as you so delicately put it, perhaps none of you would have made it."
Dean can't help his amazed huff. "Christ, you mean all these years, every time we took the car out for a spin, it was like - watching out for us?"
"Not quite," Castiel corrects him. "More like a lucky rabbit's foot."
That's a whole different story, and the tangent makes Dean scowl. "Dude, those aren't so lucky. This one time-"
Castiel sighs. "No, not like that lucky rabbit's foot. Like a talisman, a sacred relic. She has been imbued with angelic grace all this time, and exerting a powerful influence."
"Huh. Maybe that's why it keeps such great MPG for being an old clunker."
Castiel ignores this last and studies his hand, opening and closing his fingers where he touched the car. "We were connected, for a moment. Fragments of the memory came back, but…"
"What?" Dean prods.
"I'm just thinking about what will happen when I lose all the grace I have left," Castiel murmurs. "Anael tore hers out and chose a tree to harbor it, but what's left of mine seeps away like dregs into the soil." He laughs and it's tinged with a hint of hysteria. "Maybe this car is as good a memorial as any other." He winces again, his face draining of any remaining color as he scrunches his eyes closed and rubs at his temple. "My head," he whispers. "It's extremely painful."
Dean finds he's reaching out to snag Castiel by the sleeve and start him moving. "Bobby's got stuff for that," he soothes. "Stuff that'll nuke it out of existence, help you sleep too."
He thinks that when they get into the house he'll scour the cabinets. He's got a hiding spot in the pantry where he likes to keep a tin of Hershey's cocoa, and he'll make a mug for Castiel if Bobby didn't find his stash in the months they were gone. But as they head back in, past the charred butts Meg left behind in a clump of dirty snow, Dean glances back at the ramshackle remains of the Impala and thinks her corpse looks eerily like the one he found dumped and overgrown by the tall grass in 2014.
Episode 24: Redemption (part III continued)
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info,
warnings, and disclaimer)
Authors: swordofmymouth and zatnikatel
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: ~29,000
Warnings: language, violence, sexuality, references to noncon, scenes that some may perceive as dubcon
Betas: dotfic and murron
Art: Chapter banner by zatnikatel; digital paintings by celectis, usarechan, and guusana, which you can also find here, here, and here (NB: art contains spoilers for the episode)
Summary: "This world turns like a knife in our wounds…"
Running, always running, while he hurts, and coughs, and heaves for breath, and tastes blood in the back of his mouth.
He aims for economy rather than style. Short, quick steps mean his feet spend less time in contact with the ground, and that matters because he's running on third-degree burns through fields of fire, after something that he wants to forget exists in the same dimension as him stole his boots one night while he huddled in his hiding place and let it have the damn things rather than have him, even if he knew his skin would melt without them. Three steps per second it is then, slap-slap-slap, through the corpses and carnage of this wild frontier, eyes narrowed to slits by fierce and scorching headwinds and billowing dust storms. He does it along to Enter Sandman over and over in his head, and it's so damn appropriate because he's back in Never-Never Land and sleeping with one eye open when he can slip into the shadows and find a safe crack in the earth.
But it never rests, and it has a long stride and keen senses. And so they go, endlessly, because journeys of a thousand, million, billion miles start with a single step, and he took that step when he bound himself to it.
He drifts off sometimes, remembers his brother when he was soulless; how Sam loped along like a wolf, strides eating up the ground, breath steady and not even a bead of sweat on his brow. Castiel runs like that too, but that memory and loss, loss of closeness, of whispering in the night and the feeling that nothing else mattered, is too much to bear so he tries not to think of it. Except when he does, and he presses his hand to his shoulder then, even if it disrupts him and sends his rhythm skewing into an ungainly stumble that threatens to poleaxe him.
Sometimes when he does it, he thinks he feels something.
Dean…
This dream is more real than most of them have been; there is skin pressed against his, a hand on his cheek.
He speaks, something he pulled out of his memory to comfort himself with right after he found himself lost here, something that still echoes in that small part of him that hasn't been charred to black by Hell's fire, that small part of him that is still a poet at heart, although he knows his heart is turning colder and harder with each eternity that passes here. He twists his head when he says the words, so that his own mouth ghosts over the scar he wears. "Ego dilecto meo…et dilectus meus mihi…" he murmurs. "I love you. I miss you…so damn much, Cas. And I want you so badly."
And then there are soft lips moving against his, a faint reply eked out over long seconds because Castiel is still in that languid sleep-wake state Dean remembers, that loose sprawl of limbs that Dean would drape himself over and kiss his way along and across, up and down, until his lover sighed and shuddered his way to alert and needy.
"Te…amabo…in aeternum"
"I dreamed that I saw you…that you reached for me," Dean mumbles back, through a lazy smile. "I wish you were real."
There is a drowsy huff of air then, and the rumbled-out voice he will never hear again outside of his mind.
"'M real. Open your eyes."
But fuck, no, Dean doesn't want to and isn't going to, isn't going to let go of this fraction of a second of peace and rest any sooner than he has to, because he will have to and then he'll be on the move again. "Just talk to me," he whispers through his exhaustion.
A thumb moves back and forth under his eye, slow and gentle, and the lips are nuzzling and pulling at his now, warm, insistent but careful.
"I did reach for you."
The dream-Castiel hums then, and after a moment Dean hears his breathing level off to an authentic, deep in-out that signals slumber.
This feels real.
It's so warm where they are, a good warm, not the inferno he has been subsisting in, counting down the long seconds until he finally slips and falters.
He's lying on something soft, covered by something soft.
Castiel is long, and sleek, and right there, and Dean pats out a hand, finds that Castiel's thigh feels as real under his palm as the rest of this dream, finds that when he runs his hand slowly up Castiel's back, the skin there is as smooth as it always was, and that when he mouths his way along Castiel's jaw the stubble is as scratchy as he remembers it. He inhales sweat, the faint scent of soap and antiseptic, because this dream-Castiel even smells real as he wraps his arm around Dean and curls into him, fitting his leg in between Dean's.
This feels real.
There is no scent of brimstone, no dust in his throat, no snap-crackle-pop of flames, no din of suffering and no screeching soundtrack of demons mocking him as he stumbles past.
The fatigue feels real, the deep, dull ache in his bones feels real, the pull of strained, overused muscles feels real.
There is a tickling sensation on his cheeks, liquid that tastes of salt when it meanders its way down to his lips, and it feels real, as if Castiel is there and weeping in his arms.
Real, this feels real-real-real, but it can't be.
"Are you real?" Dean whispers anyway, but there is just that steady inhale and exhale, and the rise and fall of Castiel's ribcage under his hand.
"He's real."
It's another voice Dean never expected to hear again, the words choked out and strained.
"Open your eyes, Dean. He's real. This is real."
Dean doesn't open his eyes. He pulls his hand up and out from under the covers, paddling it blindly in thin air until it is caught and held.
And then he looks, and sees, and the tears he can taste are his own, not Castiel's at all, because Castiel is out of it, lashes snug-tight on his cheeks, mouth a little open. And his brother is there, sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed and leaning forward, white-faced with strain, his eyes red.
"This is real, Dean," Sam whispers. "You're safe."
Sam is gripping Dean's hand tight, and Dean grips back.
Restoration takes time and there is a sense that they are all running out of it. Yet, some things have to take their course, and healing is one of these things.
According to Bobby's calendar, it's ten days since Sam hauled Dean out of his grave. All Dean can remember of the first few is sheer dissonance: snapshot flashbacks of talons flaying his chest open wide and a fiery tentacle melting his flesh, so that he screamed himself awake scrabbling at his skin even though he knew his wounds were gone. Then there were the long hours of mute trauma when he just lay there in the bed and stared at Castiel lying there next to him, while Castiel stared back and they held onto each other like they might never let go.
They mend slowly, an arduous slog of nightmares, nausea and neediness, shaking hands and weak legs, hearts sent leaping into throats by loud noises. But even so, this second week has been better, the aftermath and fallout interspersed with periods of testy fuck-you-all normality during which the Sam-and-Bobby pincer-movement mother-hen act has driven Dean crazy, and he has wanted nothing more than to crank his baby into gear and sweep out through the gate of the lot to gank some soulless sonofabitch as viciously as he can. And he knows there are plenty of them out there, even if he has only half-focused as Bobby tells him again, slowly and patiently, about how Hell came to earth, how this new world works and what lives in it. Who has died in it too, and Dean couldn't find anything to say to that. He had pushed up silently and snagged the bottle of Jack from the pantry on his way back up to the bedroom, where he downed a third of the liquor while tears streamed down his cheeks and he cursed the irony of grieving a woman and child who died not even remembering who he was.
Castiel had found him there, had slid down the wall to sit next to him. "I think Amelia and Claire are dead too," he had said quietly. "Bobby told me they're fine, but he isn't a very good liar. I know it isn't the same. But."
Dean hadn't really known if it was the same or not, but he had listed and rested his head on Castiel's shoulder anyway. "This is my fault," he had whispered. "I didn't kill that thing when I should have." And Castiel had turned into him, wrapped him in his arms and hushed him, gripping him hard, as if Dean was the only solid thing in his world.
Dean has shrugged helplessly when Bobby asks him what the hell happened?
"Cas came for me," he has replied, and every time Bobby's face has fallen into a sort of harrowed bemusement.
"But he can't have," the old man has insisted, drifting off a little into his own doubt. "There was no gas in the car. It never moved, not one inch. The dogs started hollering five minutes after I walked past him to go milk the cow."
Sam believes it though, showed Dean the blood spattered page in Castiel's journal with a sort of reverence after Dean came around properly, pointing to the words and phrases that formed each step in the equation.
Then he had unfolded a small slip of paper that was as creased as Dean's own fortune had been, and read it aloud. "The trick to finding things you've lost is to look where you last saw them."
Beside Dean, Castiel had cleared his throat. "No, the trick is finding your faith," he had offered softly, and he had smiled at Sam's quizzical expression. "You had faith in me," he had elaborated in a tired murmur. "And faith in your brother. And faith in yourself. If you hadn't…"
Dean doesn't want to think about that, wants to push the vague recall of horrified scraping on wood and airless claustrophobia down as far as it will go and pour concrete on it to seal it there. And he has given up trying to work out the logistics of any of it; he only knows that Castiel came for him like he did before, and it makes him cling to his friend even more tightly in the dark, tying them both together in a twisting, looped double knot of arms and legs.
When he snaps awake on a stifled cry, he rouses Castiel and kisses him bruisingly hard, biting at his lips, sobs out incoherent bullshit as he rubs them together, because the desperate, feverish heat of sex, the trifecta of skin, sweat and semen, grounds him in reality even if it's uncoordinated and exhausted, and it peeters away into holding on for dear life, breathing his friend in.
"Prove you're really here," he pleads out harshly. "Prove that I'm alive."
And he hangs on Castiel's voice as Castiel tells him, I'm here, Dean, I'm really here, and you're alive, you're alive, on a continuous loop, until his throat is so raw the words are a hoarse scratch in Dean's ears.
He's really here.
He's alive.
No, healing can't be hurried.
And they all are healing, so Dean tries to be patient when Sam hovers at his elbow to prop him up when he isn't even wobbling, or falls asleep slumped on the chair in the corner of the bedroom because he stumbled in there at midnight, roused by screaming, and never made it back to his bed. And he tries to be patient when Bobby chides him for not eating enough and drinking far too much, and when the old man snaps at Castiel for every little thing even though he produces platefuls of baked zucchini for Castiel afterwards and his hands are as gentle as Dean has ever seen them when he tends to the angel's burns.
Auto work is another thing that can't be rushed, and Dean always has found a leisurely escape in drinking in some old junker, seeing what she once was and could be again in his mind's eye. And now he does it with even more of a quickening in his heart, as he walks around the scarred remains of the Impala, his hands stuffed deep into his hip pockets. The chill cuts through him like a blade, but he welcomes its sharp edge as he stands in the lot in the early dawn gray, because Hell was never cold, and the frigid air grounds him as much as his family does. He glances up at the window, smiles at the thought of Castiel still burrowed under the quilts, his hair a black tuft poking out from underneath the layers. He knows that if his friend or any of the others saw him out here shivering, they would have something suitably cutting to say about how he skulked out of bed before sunup and didn't fire up the stove and put the coffee on before he braced himself against the abrupt winter.
And now here he stands, gazing at his car. He has only seen her from a distance before this, has put off making this pilgrimage. Up close, her burned-out, trashed hulk looks like a monument from a bygone era, or maybe from the future. Dean doesn't know if it counts as a memory if it's something that hasn't happened and never will, but the words slip out of him almost unconsciously, before he can swallow them back.
"Oh no…baby, what did they do to you?"
He thinks he sees an arc of winter sunray hit the plane of the side panel, and there is a bright flare of light out of conjunction with physics, something that should not be. It vanishes in a line of pearlescence that gives Dean a trembling feeling inside, and he closes his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He wants to growl and snarl at it, and it takes everything he can summon to stop himself from dropping to his knees, into a predatory crouch. Something of that Hell will always be with him; it has the persistence of a splinter that will not be prised from the skin. But repression keeps him intact like it always has, and he shoves the splinter down deep, buries it where it will not catch on anything, or recall him to pain.
He distracts himself by jotting down a mental list of auto parts that he will have to pilfer from the cars stacked in Bobby's salvage yard, as he surveys the damage. The door is missing from the driver's side, and in places the metal panels are burned through to nothing. She's on her rims, her tires in shreds, and her windows are all blown out. He suspects the ignition won't even cough if he turns the key.
"What happened to treating my baby right?" he grouches out loud to Bobby's dog, where it stands a few feet away. As if to answer the question, the mutt strolls up and cocks its leg, delivering a spatter of rank, steaming piss onto the back left rim, before it flops down and contorts itself into a suitable position for licking its balls, which it does with gusto. "Fuckin' charming," Dean tells it, and it grins toothily at him.
He slants his eyes over towards the auto shop, sighs as he thinks of the saber saw, the plasma cutter, the welder, the paint gun. Without power running out to the shop, he's doing this the hard way, and maybe not even at all. He lays a hand across the bubbled paint of the trunk, and he can feel in the way the cover bounces beneath his fingers that the lock is broken. When he withdraws his hand, the trunk opens up like a mouth, and he blinks, has to shake his head at the split-second flash of yawning jaws gaping wide to swallow him.
No.
No.
The ground is frozen hard beneath his boots, and the air is icy, and his family is here and this is the world, the world. "This is not the Pit," Dean croaks, and when he feels Cheney's wet nose poke into his hand he pats the dog almost frantically as it leans into him and nuzzles his leg.
He breathes it down, even counts backwards from twenty like Sam sometimes still does, lips silently forming the numbers while his fingers close around the shape of the amulet his brother returned to him again with the wry comment that it better be the last time we do this. It works for now, and Dean turns his attention back to the trunk. It looks like a munitions factory vomited into it; the ordnance he inherited from his father and has steadily added to over the years is in disarray, a haphazard pile of revolvers, shotguns, knives of all sizes, silver swords scavenged from dead angels, shells, grenades, boxes of ammo. The disorganization bothers the military training ingrained in him, a mark of John's legacy.
But what really stands out are the flat metal plates piled toward the back, and Dean leans over to snag one for a closer look. In the darkness at the rear of the trunk it looks like silver, but somehow he knows it's more than silver, and there's a strange glow he can't place when his fingers brush the burnished finish-
"Dean."
Dean startles with a cry, and hits his head on the trunk lid. His heart ping-pongs in his chest like a cheap arcade game and he slams the trunk closed as he whirls, sitting on it to keep it closed against the broken lock. The metal paints a stripe of frozen cold that seeps through his jeans to his ass.
Castiel is standing there with a mug of coffee in either hand, and a drape of dark fabric hanging over the crook of his arm. Dean waits for the scolding and the quiet you shouldn't be out here, not by yourself, but Castiel offers him nothing more than gentle eyes as Dean rubs at the sore spot on the back of his head and takes the cup his friend is holding out to him.
It's too hot.
Dean should have realized, because Hell is like a deep tissue burn and you can feel it afterwards, the steady throb beneath the skin. It makes hot objects hotter, and his fingers scorch through to the bone. He drops the cup, and they both watch without a sound as it falls to the frozen ice underfoot and shatters in several pieces, dashing hot liquid across Cheney's leg, forcing a yelp and a flinch from the mutt. Dean knows how it feels.
After a moment of staring at the coffee as it melts the ice into a brown puddle, Castiel offers Dean his cup instead, holding it out into the empty space like the broken mug is nothing in this landscape of broken things and he will always hold out something whole and perfect for Dean to fuck up, over and over. Dean doesn't want it but he takes it anyway, and this time he does it smart, gripping it by the top until Castiel lets go of the handle.
"Thank you," Dean croaks. He isn't talking about the coffee.
They stand in silence then, as the dawn starts creeping over the horizon and the snow goes from blue to pink, until Cheney breaks the quiet, licking the cold coffee off the ice with a thick lapping sound. The screen door bangs in the distance at almost the same time, and Dean glances towards the house to see Meg stretching out her morning kinks, oblivious to them lurking behind the car, before she cups her hand to her face and foggy gray wisps start wreathing up.
Dean can smell the acrid stench of the cigarette already. "The house stinks of smoke," he sidetracks morosely. "It burns my eyes."
He finds he's shivering, hugging himself, and without saying anything Castiel tugs the fabric from his arm and holds it out to him. Dean recognizes it even though he has never seen it before: an olive drab M-65 military field jacket. He knows it because it was the field jacket of choice during the Vietnam war, and he saw his old man wear one just like it enough times to remember.
He also recognizes it from 2014.
With a weak smile, he manages a joke about it. "Hey, future-me wore one of those." He jerks his head at the wreck that was once his car. "Had one of these rusting out in his lot too."
Castiel looks at him, his eyes liquid. "It was hanging on the hallstand," he says. "I assumed it was Bobby's. It'll keep you warm."
It might well be the old man's even if Dean can't recall ever seeing Bobby wear it: after all he was in-country too. And Dean knows his friend is right; the henley he's wearing is useless for insulating him against the cold. No point in being superstitious; he relents with a grudging huff, pulls on the extra layer. There are thousands of jackets like this still in circulation, and in the end, it doesn't mean anything. It fits right through the shoulders, and it's still warm where Castiel kept it close, but for all that, Dean can't seem to stop shivering even with the inner zip pulled up and all the buttons fastened. He wraps his arms around his chest again and remains poised there, one boot on the ice beneath the car and the other kicked up on the bumper while he eases on the car's backside and tries to focus on what he was doing before Castiel said his name. "Hey, when you came back…did you bring your armor with you?"
Castiel frowns. "No. I left it with Balthazar. At least I think I did." He sighs then. "I'm afraid my recall is a little murky still. I wish I could remember more."
Dean feels a twinge and a tug at the base of his skull, like a ghost poking a finger into his brain matter. It awakens his own foggy memories, memories viewed through a veil of brimstone that turns the winter world around them surreal and hazy with light and endless white drifts of ash. When Dean blinks, it becomes brighter still and he hears voices penetrate from another world-
-"Will he be alright?"
When Dean turns to look, Castiel is backlit by hellfire that casts his armor fiery orange and renders him a strange mixture of terrifying and glorious, so that Dean wonders what it might have been like to look up and see him leading legions of Heaven's warriors as they dove into the fray. He is staring right at Dean, his eyes like methane, as Vassago, his teeth exposed through his cheek in a relentless grin that he has no control over, unbuckles his breastplate.
As Vassago collects Castiel's armor from him, Dean returns the angel's gaze, looking on Castiel's face with only a dim understanding of what it means to him. He feels base instincts of possession, and want, and need; looking at Castiel fills him with a thousand sensations, and they all make him feel undeserving and smaller than he should be, so he switches to stare behind Castiel, at Balthazar.
The other angel's eyes are bright and elated even though his face is lit with cuts that leak silvery grace. He's talking in Enochian, and twice Dean hears his name as he blinks in his stupor. And then Balthazar and Castiel are embracing, chest to chest and hands slapping against their backs, as Vassago nods approvingly.
Dean can feel the twisting burn mark the beast lashed him with curl up and down his torso like a living snake that nips at his skin. He's uncomfortable and hurting, shock is setting in, and he can feel the tremors start to rock his frame as-
-"You're shivering, Dean," Castiel cuts in.
Dean startles as he wakens to himself through spliced-in memories occurring in Hell-time; and this is how it has been these past ten days - pieces of a shadow life coming back to him in dribs and drabs. He spills hot coffee on his hand, and it burns more than it should. He bites his lower lip and he can't stop shaking even after he can no longer hear Balthazar and Castiel, or hear the clink of them shedding their armor. He knows Balthazar said something about returning to Heaven, made some sardonic quip about his dictatorship being a benevolent one, but he can't seem to remember where Gabriel ended up, or when exactly he disappeared without explanation.
"Oh," Castiel realizes. "It happened again?"
He reaches forward and plucks the coffee cup out of Dean's hand. Dean lets him without asking why, and Castiel sets it on the ground, where Cheney rams his snout into it eagerly until he knocks it over and begins to lick that spillage up as well.
"You're still cold," Castiel adds, and then he tilts his head the way he used to, that unspoken angel-language of his, softened now by the humanity in his eyes. "Are you alright, Dean?"
Dean's teeth are chattering, but, "I'm good," he evades. "It just comes and goes. I'm like a woman with menopause, y'know? Hot one minute, cold the next. Go ahead, make fun of it."
"That wasn't my intention," Castiel replies, and he puts a hand on the trunk, leaning into Dean. There can be no mistaking his intention now, it's clear in the way his eyes have lit up with a sudden, unexpected gleam.
Dean feels his throat grow tight and warm, flush with new blood; the excitement of Castiel bending over him and capturing him against the rough surface of the destroyed Impala is both predatory and intense and he doesn't want Castiel to know just yet that he has no real physical need for his warmth. "What are you going to do about it?" he challenges instead.
Castiel wastes no time, and his boots crunch on the ice as he moves in to nudge against Dean's legs, bold now. The tentative lover is gone; this is the angel-soldier come to claim the spoils of his war, like he did on Tu'ugamau Island, and he grips Dean by one knee to open him up and invade his personal space so they are interlocked like puzzle pieces. A sharp wind whips around the corner of the house almost at the same moment, and it's like being slapped against the back of the neck. Dean shivers for real, and Castiel smiles as he leans in closer.
"Keep you warm is what I'm going to do about it," Castiel answers finally, and even if his voice is flat enough to make Dean wonder if he's serious, the rough gravel undercurrent to it might mean that he's insinuating more. Well, he has to be, thinks Dean. There's no way a guy gets between your legs because he's being literal about trading body heat. But that's the thing with Castiel, he acknowledges inwardly. Sometimes, he is that literal.
"Well," Dean prompts, "maybe it's not as easy as you think."
"It's my understanding that persistent shivering indicates a low-level stage of hypothermia," Castiel responds smoothly. "As do fumbling hands. Your shivering mechanism is your body's own attempt to reheat your core. In extreme instances, if this fails to work, simple body-to-body rewarming may yield a faster recovery."
Dean swallows. "Oh yeah?"
He slides a hand up to the top button of the M-65, and this is going to be cold and he will regret it later, but there is something tantalizingly forbidden about doing it out here, in the early dawn. He knows Meg can't see them, knows they have maybe a half-hour before Bobby drags his ass out of bed. Everything is silent and still, and sleeping, and no one, no one will know about this except them. The privacy in the ice and the snow is what does it, this quiet wasteland that is just theirs, somewhere only they know, just like the waterfall cave they made love in. He thinks suddenly that he has craved that somewhere inside him for years, since Castiel walked in his dreams and found him alone and fishing.
He unfastens one button after the other and Castiel's eyes find the motion and lock in on it. A little breath of steam escapes the angel's lips as they part slightly, and it puffs into the air and dissipates. And then Dean is raking his hand over the frigid buttons faster, so they make a sound like tearing, and when he reaches for the zipper of the military drab, Castiel reacts blindingly fast, shoving him further up onto the trunk and knocking his hands out of the way to get to the tab and yank it down.
"I don't think stripping me naked is going to cure my hypothermia," Dean points out, and he wants to smirk and be sarcastic but the situation goes explosive in the space of seconds. This has always been the nature of their animal heat, like exposed fuel just waiting to combust and igniting from the dimmest spark, and Dean feels the kneejerk flash of desire snap through him so hard his abdomen tightens and those steadily heating muscles in his groin clench.
He helps to heave himself further onto the car, and Castiel is already chasing him up the slope of the vehicle's back-end, bracing one knee on the trunk to climb up after him. The struts are long-gone, and the Impala dips and bounces with the added weight, like a seesaw. Castiel's eyes are starving for this now, and Dean suddenly feels like he is nothing more than prey, being hunted by a whole pack of wolves, and that this is the split-second before the alpha-male leaps and fastens its jaws around his throat to pin him down.
"But stripping you naked means I can apply heat directly to your core…"
Even Castiel's answer is a breathy growl he cannot fit in the parameters of jest, and when he yanks the jacket zipper all the way open he doesn't stop there, but continues down a natural line of descent to the next zipper available, at the fly of Dean's jeans. It all happens in a quick succession, leaving Dean reeling with the change in temperature as the gaping jacket opens his torso up to a bitter breeze made even colder by the fact all his blood is presently flowing south, straight to the hard heaviness of his straining cock. It nips eagerly at the underside of the zipper until Castiel lets it burst free as if it's spring-loaded.
"Jeez, Cas-"
Castiel still doesn't wait, and all the while Dean is thinking not really, you know, out here, dude, where anyone can just come out onto the porch and see them like this. But if Dean's newly discovered concern is at all important, Castiel doesn't share it, because he's slapping a hand over Dean's mouth, and the next thing Dean feels is the hot warmth of the angel's lips closing in over the head of his cock.
The next sounds Dean makes aren't words, as he leans back and feels the violent tug of his jeans down his hips to make room for Castiel as he eats his way through Dean's flesh with no decorum, a satisfied hum vibrating at the back of his throat as he takes Dean's length along his tongue. When Dean vaguely hears the sound of the screen door slam up at the house he retains enough presence of mind to hope it's Meg abandoning her half-finished cigarette in favor of the relative warmth of the house, but part of him doesn't care. The rhythm of Castiel's tongue on his cock is sending him into a lull and all the building anxiety of the flashbacks that visit him in unexpected moments is gone now. He is lost in Castiel's mouth, and the way the angel looks with his eyes closed and his hair wild, and his face buried in Dean, nose to Dean's belly and lips slicking him to the root as he reaches to hold Dean there with a hand clamped around his thigh and the other slapping frantically at the Impala for purchase.
A flash of light erupts and pops beneath Castiel's fingers like a firecracker.
Castiel cries out, flinches and bucks so violently Dean thinks his friend is damn lucky he just happened to be gripping the collar of his shirt in his fist already, or Castiel would have cracked his skull open on the ice as he falls back, dragging Dean with him until they crash to the ground in an ungainly tangle. Dean is left cold and unfinished, his bare ass sliding on ice, but even as he hisses and flexes up onto his knees to tug his shorts and jeans back up, his main concern is Castiel's sudden reaction and how he holds his hand in a fist, as though he just touched the surface of a hot stove.
"Is it Hell?" Dean asks, because he knows Hell; Hell is something he can understand and offer comfort for. But Castiel doesn't answer, and now he is the one shivering and staring at nothing, his sudden catatonia in utter contrast to his lust-blown pupils and lips swollen from blowing Dean with abandon seconds before.
Dean shakes his friend by the shoulders to snap him out of it. "Cas. What is it? Talk to me, goddammit. You've gone all T-2000 on me."
Castiel breathes hard, and then one hand comes up to grip Dean's, but he doesn't look at Dean; he looks past him, at the Impala, as though he fears she will rev and roar into life and run them down until her wheel rims track their blood over the ice.
"It's grace," Castiel breathes. "Dean…she has grace in her. I thought I imagined it, that I was going mad."
Castiel shakes Dean off, frowning as he rises, Dean pushing up beside him until they're standing together, shoulder to shoulder. Dean zips his jeans and tries not to think about the uncomfortable bulge down there, but Castiel just stares at the car for a moment before stepping forward, studying her a little dubiously as he circles around her to her front. He holds out a hand, hesitates before he takes the plunge and sets his fingers over the destroyed finish of her hood.
"Of course," he whispers, his eyes going wide. "Michael. Michael, he…"
Abruptly, Castiel brings a fist across the sheet metal and cries out again with his head bowed and his other hand streaking up to slam over his head. Dean skids on the ice in his sheer fright, grabs his friend by the sleeve, turning him around and pulling him in close. The wind is cold and each time Dean breathes in it hurts from the inside out, but he doles out reassurance interspersed with questions. "It's okay. Cas. It's okay. What is this? I got you, buddy, I'm here. But what are you talking about Michael for? He's down in the Cage weaving baskets with Lucy."
"No, this was before the Cage," Castiel breathes, his features creased in some mix of awe and agony. "I lay here, right here on this car, and…" He pauses a beat, as realization seeps into his expression. "It was when we went back to stop Anna. Michael must have wiped my memory clean. I only have - glimpses. Impressions. But I knew there was something there. There's no way she could have made it through the Lake of Fire, not without some measure of angelic, divine assistance."
Dean blanches. "Are you telling me my baby is hopped on angel-juice?"
Castiel's mouth moves a moment as though he is scrambling through discordant thoughts, giving organization to chaos, and his eyes light up fierce, cobalt. "A measure of my grace," he marvels. "Michael exorcised me…or he started to. Right here, and I remember clinging to the metal, remember my grace melting into it. It must have been here all along, sleeping. Of course, you wouldn't have known it. But the influence was there…you would have noticed it, in small ways. Maybe narrowly missing an accident, or having an accident in which the harmful effect was lessened-"
"There was that time one of Yellow Eyes' drones plowed a truck into us," Dean cuts in, and he's caught for a moment in the between, the memory of wandering hospital hallways with a reaper on his tail, trying to communicate with his brother. His dad's deal too, and his voice is a little dry when he goes on. "We all got banged up bad."
Castiel's reply is soft, like he knows where Dean's recall ended up. "Without the angel-juice, as you so delicately put it, perhaps none of you would have made it."
Dean can't help his amazed huff. "Christ, you mean all these years, every time we took the car out for a spin, it was like - watching out for us?"
"Not quite," Castiel corrects him. "More like a lucky rabbit's foot."
That's a whole different story, and the tangent makes Dean scowl. "Dude, those aren't so lucky. This one time-"
Castiel sighs. "No, not like that lucky rabbit's foot. Like a talisman, a sacred relic. She has been imbued with angelic grace all this time, and exerting a powerful influence."
"Huh. Maybe that's why it keeps such great MPG for being an old clunker."
Castiel ignores this last and studies his hand, opening and closing his fingers where he touched the car. "We were connected, for a moment. Fragments of the memory came back, but…"
"What?" Dean prods.
"I'm just thinking about what will happen when I lose all the grace I have left," Castiel murmurs. "Anael tore hers out and chose a tree to harbor it, but what's left of mine seeps away like dregs into the soil." He laughs and it's tinged with a hint of hysteria. "Maybe this car is as good a memorial as any other." He winces again, his face draining of any remaining color as he scrunches his eyes closed and rubs at his temple. "My head," he whispers. "It's extremely painful."
Dean finds he's reaching out to snag Castiel by the sleeve and start him moving. "Bobby's got stuff for that," he soothes. "Stuff that'll nuke it out of existence, help you sleep too."
He thinks that when they get into the house he'll scour the cabinets. He's got a hiding spot in the pantry where he likes to keep a tin of Hershey's cocoa, and he'll make a mug for Castiel if Bobby didn't find his stash in the months they were gone. But as they head back in, past the charred butts Meg left behind in a clump of dirty snow, Dean glances back at the ramshackle remains of the Impala and thinks her corpse looks eerily like the one he found dumped and overgrown by the tall grass in 2014.
Episode 24: Redemption (part III continued)