Fic: Our Bleeding Hearts
SURPRISE FIC IS SURPRISING.
Title: Our Bleeding Hearts
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R...? For sexuality and taking creative liberties with scripture.
Genre: Good question. Character study meets philosophical discussion meets slight h/c meets even-more-slight porn?
Words: 2,412
Warnings/Spoilers: Takes place after 4x22. If you are easily offended by discussing Biblical "issues" of homosexuality, you probably shouldn't be reading this.
Summary: In the midst of a war between Heaven and Hell, it's the quiet moments that mean the most.
A/N: Title taken from this wonderful song by Great Northern, who is spectacular. Written as a response to the prompt Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind and a discussion with sister WRT the ridiculousness of said biblical hypocrisies. Free lap dances cookies to commenters! :D
[ETA:] Many thanks to ibroketuesday for pointing out my failure at typing. Error has now been fixed.
~ ~ ~
It works in a peculiar kind of way, the Apocalypse.
It isn’t one large dynamic battle, not lakes of blood or sparks glinting off clashing shields and swords. There’s no explosions of gunfire or primordial leviathans rearing up out of the gulfs. It’s more of a gradual thing - one town collapsing into itself like a coal mine gone bad while the one next door remains untouched. Things like landslides and tectonic shifts that don’t seem too abnormal to the waking world, but Dean knows better. He sees what it really is when the Earth shudders and another village in Chile buries beneath an avalanche of clay-tinted mud.
The world is eating itself.
The assurance of its slow destruction makes the quiet times more precious, times when everything that matters in the world is wedged into the carpeted confines of four sheetrock walls and a scratchy bedspread, 200-thread-count stained white sheets. Waking up to the warm blossom of Castiel’s lips, mouthing at his throat or slipping in a careful line along the curve of his hip, the slender stalks of his white fingers. Dean smiles against them and Castiel sighs out his name, coils their bodies tighter together. Sam is next door with his nose stuck in a book when Dean makes an offhand comment about how the kid’s eyes must be bleeding with how much he stares at that computer screen these days. He wonders out loud if he should go check on him but then Castiel pins his wrists, cages him down, a butterfly to a backboard, and those curved pink lips shape the word stay. And Dean does, because he’s never been able to say no to Castiel.
Forty-five minutes and his heart still going like a hammer, and when Castiel flips the TV on Dean flips it right back off. Castiel doesn’t ask why, because he already knows how much seeing the world slip out of its own sanity frightens Dean. He brought it up once when it was raining too hard to drive, somewhere off the interstate in Mississippi. Dean couldn’t really stomach the way Castiel was looking at him, so stripped-down and honest, and at that point he didn’t see much of a reason to hide anything anymore. So when Castiel had pulled it out of him that he was afraid, Dean shook his head and said, no, it didn’t frighten him. It scared the hell out of him.
And when the brush of Castiel’s lips found that one spot below the sweep of his jaw and his palm curved perfectly around Dean’s hipbone, when his breath bloomed warm and humid on the dramatic arch in the small of Dean’s back, broken open with promises like I’ll protect you and We will survive this, Dean wasn’t scared anymore.
Traveling becomes extraneous. It wears them all down to stumps, cramped up in the car with staticy radio broadcasts and heat-warped cassette tapes, teeth marks on their knees, on Dean’s knuckles. Knowledges like this is the end of the world blanketed over them in silence, the three of them - Dean, Castiel, and Sam. Sam’s demon blood problem hanging between them, heavy as a dust storm, souring like old milk. It reeks and none of them like it, the stink of old mud, bad yogurt. They’re not going to get used to it, and Dean knows it won’t go away but he refuses to acknowledge that certainty. It’s stained on all of their consciences, even if most of the time they act as if it’s not even there. None of them talk about it; they don’t put their feelings out there in cathartic heart-to-hearts or scream from rooftops or cry into clavicle dips. They just know it’s there, and that’s enough. It heaps into nauseous clumps on the dry, sweat-sticky days of summer, succulent as the unsympathetic sunrays that bleed a caramelized red into their flesh, burning their skin straight through their clothes.
And it’s just all so serendipitous that it almost hurts sometimes - the Renegade Angel in the back, the Boy King With the Demon Blood riding shotgun. And Dean himself, the Righteous Man No Longer So Righteous, barreling down bleary strips of tar-black road, not even knowing where they were going but just going. Just driving, because if he sat still and let any of this sink in too much, he’d chew his goddamn fingernails clean down to the bone.
Electricity crackles in the atmosphere every time he looks over and sees the passive lean of Sam’s head against the window. When he has to cut glistening crescents into his palm and wonder what the hell went wrong, what hard corner did they take to get here, and who is this person that stole away with his little brother, put something monstrous and disgusting in his place? Something he can hate but he can’t harm, because it still looks like Sammy. Still sounds like Sammy and smells like Sammy, and just, Jesus Christ, how did it come to this?
The leather sweats far too much and the wheel blisters Dean’s hands, so they find a motel with cheap rates and good air conditioning units - a place with a parking lot made for quick exits, sturdy doors, nice locks, thick curtains - and they hole up. Sam gets the room next door and keeps his distance. Dean feels the tension wring out of him like a sponge.
And the world might be ending outside, but here they are safely under the radar and he’s got this. He’s got Castiel, and with the twist of his body and how he kisses Dean like he’s air underwater, as if every time they touch it’s the first time, the Apocalypse diminishes into a distant concept. The inevitable degradation of his only surviving tie to the world, Sam’s inward curl of self-destruction, slows to a trickle.
Because nothing can matter as much as this.
The mornings that aren’t red. With the soft click, click of an overhead fan winding above the California king, turning the air just enough to drag a pleasant coolness along two bodies that don’t bother to wear clothes anymore. The scent of sex and dampness lying heavy in each breath. Conversations about faith and concepts like destiny, family, love, and existence. Details like the smog of Castiel’s eyes when he wakes up, or how his hair does that thing where it seems to defy gravity. The sideways quirk of his lips and the reverence in his voice when he’s got his hands fisted in the sheets and he’s saying things like yes and Dean and incoherent ahs and whimpers, small keening sounds that just push all of Dean’s buttons at once.
They’ve become what Dean lives for.
“Your bodies,” is what Dean wakes up to on the ninth Friday after the war began. There is the trace of Castiel’s fingertip ghosting along his ribcage, drawing goosebumps along its path, beckoned straight out of Dean’s core until he’s shivering on the outside almost as much as he’s shivering on the inside.
“They’re so complicated.”
Dean hums and nudges the back of his wrist against his eyes. "Cas..."
“How can you doubt God’s existence when you yourself are part of something so intricate?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that, so he comes up on his elbows and smothers Castiel’s questions with a kiss that bleeds everything else out of his brain.
The same topic comes up again when the sun is bowing out of the sky and they still have yet to move from the bed all day. There’s an electric guitar whining through the alarm clock radio on volume two as Castiel says, “You are a perfectly balanced equation, Dean.”
It’s getting dark enough that Dean can’t see Castiel’s face clearly, just a crescent-moon sliver of it cast in a pale glow the color of marigold. That’s something he can’t take, so Dean maneuvers around until the light breaks clean gold over Castiel’s face, the line of his neck, the shadowed dent of his collarbone. “Isn’t sex supposed to be the devil’s work or whatever?” he says because he’s never been very good at biting back things he shouldn’t say. “Especially, you know.” He makes jazz hands at the lack of words and lowers his voice. “This.”
That spectacular curve happens at the corners of Castiel’s lips and he says, “You mean thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind?”
It’s hard to breathe or function or think about anything besides all the things he wants to do to that mouth and all the places he wants it, but Dean manages to clear his throat and say, “Yeah, that.”
Castiel’s gaze subverts when he tugs on Dean’s hand, insistent until he’s got him just how he wants him. Back to chest, the warmth of his cheek settling against Dean’s shoulder. His hand shifts, lays flat, palm to chest.
“Dean, have you ever actually read the Bible?”
A year ago, six months, maybe less, Dean would have calculated a brilliant escape strategy, something to put space between himself and Castiel. Time was the one extravagance they didn’t have here at the end of the world, though, so it didn’t take long for Dean to grow accustomed to being held by someone just barely smaller than him, or the hard muscle of Castiel’s body with its graceful ridges of skeletal strength pressing against milk-pale flesh that probably shouldn’t be as soft as it is. The rasp of stubble along his jaw and how it hurts sometimes, when there’s bruises staining their lips long after the fact.
He grew used to Castiel’s body like he grew used to breathing.
“No,” he replies after a while, when the light blanches in its final laborious push, before it goes blue and peels back into nighttime. He feels strange, a little sacrilegious, but then he thinks that Castiel probably already knows his answer anyway, and this whole thing is just a ruse, just a means of amusement to make conversation. It’s a thought that pulls a smile onto his lips. “Not really.”
“The Bible that most people know,” Castiel begins, and Dean shivers because for all the world he sounds just the same as he did when Dean first met him all those months ago, all seriousness and doom, storming in through showers of sparks and fire, “Is not the true word of God. Time and... wicked men have distorted it over the centuries. Some things are just fabrications of religious patriarchs.”
Dean turns then, until the round of his shoulder stilts against the center of Castiel’s breastbone. They’re not wearing anything except the spin of sheets tangled around thighs and knees, mummifying ankles in twists of stark white; the smooth shift of skin against skin, shoulderblades against sternum, is a familiar one. “So you just let three-fourths of the world put their blind faith in something some old coot wrote down just ‘cause he thought that’s how things should go?”
“The basic message is still the same, Dean,” Castiel replies coolly, disintegrating all of Dean’s irritation as he so often does. A whisper or a touch, one word, just a glance - Dean’s given up on trying to maintain appearances, because Castiel chases all of it away, and he might be a good liar but he can’t bury anything deep enough where those eyes like knives won’t find it. Everything Dean thinks, everything he feels, Castiel digs it up and dissects it, maps it out and pins down the parts he likes, and Dean never fights his exploration because it makes him feel human and interesting again. Castiel’s endless fascination with him makes Dean forget about things like resistance or annoyance. Washes away his anger until he can see it disseminating from his body in a murky cloud, a dark blot on his soul like ink bled into fabric, bleached out by an understanding smile or the slant of a hand or the cut of a gasp when Castiel’s throat stretches out in a long white flash beneath him, burning his name into the air.
Because when Dean’s got that, got Castiel running through his fingers finer than sand, that’s when he’s lit up alive brighter than a bonfire, hot white heat like the sun and just as devastating.
“So, what, God never said anything about...” He shrugs his hands weakly again; Castiel huffs out one of those characteristic silent laughs, more of just an exhalation than anything.
“God rejoices in the happiness of His creations,” he explains smoothly. “Free will is God’s greatest gift to humanity. If choosing one path out of two meant damnation, do you really think He would have given humans - his greatest, most beloved creations - the choice at all? God does not dictate who we love; something as trivial as human gender doesn’t matter in the scheme of things.”
His hand fins along Dean’s chest, pulling pulses of warmth along its path. A breath hitches in Dean’s throat as the waves ride their course, coiling up in the floor of his hips. Castiel’s hand crawls up the subtle crests of his ribcage, a tarantula, silent and calculated and slow as a molasses pour, until his palm is sealed above the steady heightening thrum of Dean’s heartbeat, absorbing its shockwaves.
“What truly matters to God is here,” he half-whispers, and Dean turns to catch the words in his mouth. Castiel’s tongue slides around and slips inside, toys and tangles like a serpent or a wisp of smoke, and the kiss simmers half the breath out of Dean’s lungs and all the words off of Castiel’s tongue. The skin against Dean’s is a blur of fever, and Castiel sounds cracked like vinyl when he gasps underneath him.
The world trips up on its axis, spins backwards, doesn’t spin at all and holds stock still, doesn’t matter what it does even if it’s ending. Because Dean’s got this, got Castiel, and if it means Heaven crushing down and Hell boiling up to stamp out everything in between, if it means the wallpaper curling up, the curtains melting to the walls, the bed and the building turning to ashes around them, the city leveling, with the desperate streak of Castiel’s voice and how he scratches like an animal, purrs like something lithe and feline when they’re perfectly fused, so far inside one another it feels like drowning, like dying by inches, Dean can’t think of a better way for the world to end.
Title: Our Bleeding Hearts
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R...? For sexuality and taking creative liberties with scripture.
Genre: Good question. Character study meets philosophical discussion meets slight h/c meets even-more-slight porn?
Words: 2,412
Warnings/Spoilers: Takes place after 4x22. If you are easily offended by discussing Biblical "issues" of homosexuality, you probably shouldn't be reading this.
Summary: In the midst of a war between Heaven and Hell, it's the quiet moments that mean the most.
A/N: Title taken from this wonderful song by Great Northern, who is spectacular. Written as a response to the prompt Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind and a discussion with sister WRT the ridiculousness of said biblical hypocrisies. Free lap dances cookies to commenters! :D
[ETA:] Many thanks to ibroketuesday for pointing out my failure at typing. Error has now been fixed.
~ ~ ~
It works in a peculiar kind of way, the Apocalypse.
It isn’t one large dynamic battle, not lakes of blood or sparks glinting off clashing shields and swords. There’s no explosions of gunfire or primordial leviathans rearing up out of the gulfs. It’s more of a gradual thing - one town collapsing into itself like a coal mine gone bad while the one next door remains untouched. Things like landslides and tectonic shifts that don’t seem too abnormal to the waking world, but Dean knows better. He sees what it really is when the Earth shudders and another village in Chile buries beneath an avalanche of clay-tinted mud.
The world is eating itself.
The assurance of its slow destruction makes the quiet times more precious, times when everything that matters in the world is wedged into the carpeted confines of four sheetrock walls and a scratchy bedspread, 200-thread-count stained white sheets. Waking up to the warm blossom of Castiel’s lips, mouthing at his throat or slipping in a careful line along the curve of his hip, the slender stalks of his white fingers. Dean smiles against them and Castiel sighs out his name, coils their bodies tighter together. Sam is next door with his nose stuck in a book when Dean makes an offhand comment about how the kid’s eyes must be bleeding with how much he stares at that computer screen these days. He wonders out loud if he should go check on him but then Castiel pins his wrists, cages him down, a butterfly to a backboard, and those curved pink lips shape the word stay. And Dean does, because he’s never been able to say no to Castiel.
Forty-five minutes and his heart still going like a hammer, and when Castiel flips the TV on Dean flips it right back off. Castiel doesn’t ask why, because he already knows how much seeing the world slip out of its own sanity frightens Dean. He brought it up once when it was raining too hard to drive, somewhere off the interstate in Mississippi. Dean couldn’t really stomach the way Castiel was looking at him, so stripped-down and honest, and at that point he didn’t see much of a reason to hide anything anymore. So when Castiel had pulled it out of him that he was afraid, Dean shook his head and said, no, it didn’t frighten him. It scared the hell out of him.
And when the brush of Castiel’s lips found that one spot below the sweep of his jaw and his palm curved perfectly around Dean’s hipbone, when his breath bloomed warm and humid on the dramatic arch in the small of Dean’s back, broken open with promises like I’ll protect you and We will survive this, Dean wasn’t scared anymore.
Traveling becomes extraneous. It wears them all down to stumps, cramped up in the car with staticy radio broadcasts and heat-warped cassette tapes, teeth marks on their knees, on Dean’s knuckles. Knowledges like this is the end of the world blanketed over them in silence, the three of them - Dean, Castiel, and Sam. Sam’s demon blood problem hanging between them, heavy as a dust storm, souring like old milk. It reeks and none of them like it, the stink of old mud, bad yogurt. They’re not going to get used to it, and Dean knows it won’t go away but he refuses to acknowledge that certainty. It’s stained on all of their consciences, even if most of the time they act as if it’s not even there. None of them talk about it; they don’t put their feelings out there in cathartic heart-to-hearts or scream from rooftops or cry into clavicle dips. They just know it’s there, and that’s enough. It heaps into nauseous clumps on the dry, sweat-sticky days of summer, succulent as the unsympathetic sunrays that bleed a caramelized red into their flesh, burning their skin straight through their clothes.
And it’s just all so serendipitous that it almost hurts sometimes - the Renegade Angel in the back, the Boy King With the Demon Blood riding shotgun. And Dean himself, the Righteous Man No Longer So Righteous, barreling down bleary strips of tar-black road, not even knowing where they were going but just going. Just driving, because if he sat still and let any of this sink in too much, he’d chew his goddamn fingernails clean down to the bone.
Electricity crackles in the atmosphere every time he looks over and sees the passive lean of Sam’s head against the window. When he has to cut glistening crescents into his palm and wonder what the hell went wrong, what hard corner did they take to get here, and who is this person that stole away with his little brother, put something monstrous and disgusting in his place? Something he can hate but he can’t harm, because it still looks like Sammy. Still sounds like Sammy and smells like Sammy, and just, Jesus Christ, how did it come to this?
The leather sweats far too much and the wheel blisters Dean’s hands, so they find a motel with cheap rates and good air conditioning units - a place with a parking lot made for quick exits, sturdy doors, nice locks, thick curtains - and they hole up. Sam gets the room next door and keeps his distance. Dean feels the tension wring out of him like a sponge.
And the world might be ending outside, but here they are safely under the radar and he’s got this. He’s got Castiel, and with the twist of his body and how he kisses Dean like he’s air underwater, as if every time they touch it’s the first time, the Apocalypse diminishes into a distant concept. The inevitable degradation of his only surviving tie to the world, Sam’s inward curl of self-destruction, slows to a trickle.
Because nothing can matter as much as this.
The mornings that aren’t red. With the soft click, click of an overhead fan winding above the California king, turning the air just enough to drag a pleasant coolness along two bodies that don’t bother to wear clothes anymore. The scent of sex and dampness lying heavy in each breath. Conversations about faith and concepts like destiny, family, love, and existence. Details like the smog of Castiel’s eyes when he wakes up, or how his hair does that thing where it seems to defy gravity. The sideways quirk of his lips and the reverence in his voice when he’s got his hands fisted in the sheets and he’s saying things like yes and Dean and incoherent ahs and whimpers, small keening sounds that just push all of Dean’s buttons at once.
They’ve become what Dean lives for.
“Your bodies,” is what Dean wakes up to on the ninth Friday after the war began. There is the trace of Castiel’s fingertip ghosting along his ribcage, drawing goosebumps along its path, beckoned straight out of Dean’s core until he’s shivering on the outside almost as much as he’s shivering on the inside.
“They’re so complicated.”
Dean hums and nudges the back of his wrist against his eyes. "Cas..."
“How can you doubt God’s existence when you yourself are part of something so intricate?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that, so he comes up on his elbows and smothers Castiel’s questions with a kiss that bleeds everything else out of his brain.
The same topic comes up again when the sun is bowing out of the sky and they still have yet to move from the bed all day. There’s an electric guitar whining through the alarm clock radio on volume two as Castiel says, “You are a perfectly balanced equation, Dean.”
It’s getting dark enough that Dean can’t see Castiel’s face clearly, just a crescent-moon sliver of it cast in a pale glow the color of marigold. That’s something he can’t take, so Dean maneuvers around until the light breaks clean gold over Castiel’s face, the line of his neck, the shadowed dent of his collarbone. “Isn’t sex supposed to be the devil’s work or whatever?” he says because he’s never been very good at biting back things he shouldn’t say. “Especially, you know.” He makes jazz hands at the lack of words and lowers his voice. “This.”
That spectacular curve happens at the corners of Castiel’s lips and he says, “You mean thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind?”
It’s hard to breathe or function or think about anything besides all the things he wants to do to that mouth and all the places he wants it, but Dean manages to clear his throat and say, “Yeah, that.”
Castiel’s gaze subverts when he tugs on Dean’s hand, insistent until he’s got him just how he wants him. Back to chest, the warmth of his cheek settling against Dean’s shoulder. His hand shifts, lays flat, palm to chest.
“Dean, have you ever actually read the Bible?”
A year ago, six months, maybe less, Dean would have calculated a brilliant escape strategy, something to put space between himself and Castiel. Time was the one extravagance they didn’t have here at the end of the world, though, so it didn’t take long for Dean to grow accustomed to being held by someone just barely smaller than him, or the hard muscle of Castiel’s body with its graceful ridges of skeletal strength pressing against milk-pale flesh that probably shouldn’t be as soft as it is. The rasp of stubble along his jaw and how it hurts sometimes, when there’s bruises staining their lips long after the fact.
He grew used to Castiel’s body like he grew used to breathing.
“No,” he replies after a while, when the light blanches in its final laborious push, before it goes blue and peels back into nighttime. He feels strange, a little sacrilegious, but then he thinks that Castiel probably already knows his answer anyway, and this whole thing is just a ruse, just a means of amusement to make conversation. It’s a thought that pulls a smile onto his lips. “Not really.”
“The Bible that most people know,” Castiel begins, and Dean shivers because for all the world he sounds just the same as he did when Dean first met him all those months ago, all seriousness and doom, storming in through showers of sparks and fire, “Is not the true word of God. Time and... wicked men have distorted it over the centuries. Some things are just fabrications of religious patriarchs.”
Dean turns then, until the round of his shoulder stilts against the center of Castiel’s breastbone. They’re not wearing anything except the spin of sheets tangled around thighs and knees, mummifying ankles in twists of stark white; the smooth shift of skin against skin, shoulderblades against sternum, is a familiar one. “So you just let three-fourths of the world put their blind faith in something some old coot wrote down just ‘cause he thought that’s how things should go?”
“The basic message is still the same, Dean,” Castiel replies coolly, disintegrating all of Dean’s irritation as he so often does. A whisper or a touch, one word, just a glance - Dean’s given up on trying to maintain appearances, because Castiel chases all of it away, and he might be a good liar but he can’t bury anything deep enough where those eyes like knives won’t find it. Everything Dean thinks, everything he feels, Castiel digs it up and dissects it, maps it out and pins down the parts he likes, and Dean never fights his exploration because it makes him feel human and interesting again. Castiel’s endless fascination with him makes Dean forget about things like resistance or annoyance. Washes away his anger until he can see it disseminating from his body in a murky cloud, a dark blot on his soul like ink bled into fabric, bleached out by an understanding smile or the slant of a hand or the cut of a gasp when Castiel’s throat stretches out in a long white flash beneath him, burning his name into the air.
Because when Dean’s got that, got Castiel running through his fingers finer than sand, that’s when he’s lit up alive brighter than a bonfire, hot white heat like the sun and just as devastating.
“So, what, God never said anything about...” He shrugs his hands weakly again; Castiel huffs out one of those characteristic silent laughs, more of just an exhalation than anything.
“God rejoices in the happiness of His creations,” he explains smoothly. “Free will is God’s greatest gift to humanity. If choosing one path out of two meant damnation, do you really think He would have given humans - his greatest, most beloved creations - the choice at all? God does not dictate who we love; something as trivial as human gender doesn’t matter in the scheme of things.”
His hand fins along Dean’s chest, pulling pulses of warmth along its path. A breath hitches in Dean’s throat as the waves ride their course, coiling up in the floor of his hips. Castiel’s hand crawls up the subtle crests of his ribcage, a tarantula, silent and calculated and slow as a molasses pour, until his palm is sealed above the steady heightening thrum of Dean’s heartbeat, absorbing its shockwaves.
“What truly matters to God is here,” he half-whispers, and Dean turns to catch the words in his mouth. Castiel’s tongue slides around and slips inside, toys and tangles like a serpent or a wisp of smoke, and the kiss simmers half the breath out of Dean’s lungs and all the words off of Castiel’s tongue. The skin against Dean’s is a blur of fever, and Castiel sounds cracked like vinyl when he gasps underneath him.
The world trips up on its axis, spins backwards, doesn’t spin at all and holds stock still, doesn’t matter what it does even if it’s ending. Because Dean’s got this, got Castiel, and if it means Heaven crushing down and Hell boiling up to stamp out everything in between, if it means the wallpaper curling up, the curtains melting to the walls, the bed and the building turning to ashes around them, the city leveling, with the desperate streak of Castiel’s voice and how he scratches like an animal, purrs like something lithe and feline when they’re perfectly fused, so far inside one another it feels like drowning, like dying by inches, Dean can’t think of a better way for the world to end.