March-Stalkers Mighty: 18/22
Passus IX: Pes dexter.
“Choose your words very carefully,” Gabriel advised, sweet as arsenic in the sugar bowl.
Shortly before the coming of the English into the island [Ireland] a cow from a man’s intercourse with her - a particular vice of that people - gave birth to a man-calf in the mountains around Glendalough. From this you may believe that once again a man that was half an ox, and an ox that was half a man was produced.
It spent nearly a year with the other calves following its mother and feeding on her milk, and then, because it had more of the man than the beast, was transferred to the society of men.
The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambriensis), 1185, trans. John O’Meara 1951.
Castiel wasn’t in the Roadhouse.
He wasn’t in the square either, or anywhere around the feed sheds, or the kennels, or Bobby’s house, or the pens where they’d been tagging lambs yesterday and should be again today, or anywhere else he and Dean had been together. Rachel hadn’t seen him. And Dean shouldn’t be fretting, because he could take care of himself (right?) and wasn’t stupid enough to get himself caught in a situation where he’d have to fight, but...
What if this was what Rachel had meant, with that weird sideways little warning of hers? That if Castiel thought Dean wanted something he’d twist himself inside out to give him that? And Dean had... reacted badly, and now Castiel thought that he’d made a freak of himself and Dean didn’t want it, or was disgusted by it, or whatever.
Dean tried the archives, Jody’s domain. Castiel had been fascinated by them (like everything else), had looked happy to poke and potter around for hours in the dry air and the smell of old paper and older parchment and glue and inks caustic and carbon-based, asking question after uncomprehending question about the stories people told about themselves and how they wrote them down.
No Castiel.
Ash, who was lounging at the gate post looking bored, said he’d left early in the morning and not come back.
“I don’t know, man. Important angel business or something, I’m not asking questions about that shit.”
Dean threw himself into wrestling leggy half-grown lambs into submission, all afternoon. It was exhausting work, under the hot sun, and when he flopped onto his (empty) bed late in the evening he dropped off pretty much immediately.
He also dropped straight into an archangelic ambush.
It came in the form of a hand around his throat and his back shoved up against some dream wall and a protest from the back of his skull as it whacked against what sure as hell felt like stone, right where it still ached from doing the same freaking thing for real that morning. Dean yelped, strangled and breathless, and kicked out on instinct even before he saw who it was, but Gabriel was doing that shielding thing Castiel had been doing this week whenever he wasn’t safely inside, all defences up and skin hard as marble where Dean’s fingers scrabbled against his arm.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Gabriel snarled, all up in his space and furious.
“Nothing! Fuck!” Dean rasped around the fingers digging into his windpipe like a clamp, then whacked his own head back against the wall again in frustration. “Why does everyone say that? Where is he? And who the hell said you could come strolling through my sleep?”
Gabriel stared at him narrowly, eyes glinting honey-yellow and dangerous. “Okay then. What does he think he did to you?”
“I don’t know, he -” Dean started, then swore again, hemmed-in and guilty and stupidly useless. “Gabriel, I - hell.”
If there was anyone he didn’t want to be talking to about this, it was Gabriel. Only if there was anyone who’d be able to explain it, that was Gabriel too.
“We were - I freaked out, and I thought he would too but he didn’t, then he did, only I have no freaking clue what for - then he was looking at me like - and he walked out and I can’t find him, so back the hell off and, shit, is he okay?”
The grip on his neck loosened, finger by finger, like everything he’d said had been in some foreign language and Gabriel was trying to work it out one syllable at a time and also backwards.
“My little brother’s spent most of the day holed up in my wagon apparently convinced he’s some kind of super-persuasive rapist,” Gabriel said, with the sort of calm that sounded like knives. “So you tell me, Winchester, and speak very clearly because I’m having a hard time hearing you over the sound of how staggeringly incompetent you are, what in the name of tiny blue cockroach toes did you say to him to make him go from being all lovey-dovey and soulful to that?”
“He what? He -” Dean gulped for air, though Gabriel’s fingers were barely touching him. “No. Hell no, I’m the one who - who -”
“Choose your words very carefully,” Gabriel advised, sweet as arsenic in the sugar bowl.
“I didn’t, okay?” Dean growled, and shoved at his chest, for all the good that did. For all the good any goddamn effort of Dean’s had done. “I didn’t touch him like that, I was so freaking careful not to let him know I was...”
“Horny?” Gabriel supplied helpfully, when Dean’s words ran out.
“Shut the fuck up. No. Yes. Wanting to - wanting. Only he was too, and…”
The significance of that struck Dean like a mallet. “… Shit.”
Castiel wanted? If he had - he had been hard too, and he’d been - he’d assumed Dean knew that.
He’d assumed Dean was okay with that.
Gabriel squinted at him, then whistled low. “Wow. Really? I figured you two had been boinking like bunnies since we got back.”
Dean barely even heard. His brain had stuttered to a panicked halt again, the traitor.
“Gabriel. He. How could he...” And if it came out as a plea that was no one’s business but Dean’s. “I mean, did I - did I break him?”
He’d been relaxed, warm. He’d been comfortable, before Dean had freaked out. And he’d been... breathing hard, like Dean, making all those noises...
Mouthing at Dean’s skin like he couldn’t get enough.
“Oh, for pineapple’s sake,” Gabriel spat out, and dropped him unceremoniously. “Wait for Anna. Don’t try to talk to him.” Then he vanished with a puff of sparks, like a log had dropped in the fire.
Show-off.
The dream scattered in his wake, and Dean was left staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.
He banged his head against the pillow, even though it wasn’t the wall that he probably deserved.
All along. All along.
And what the hell was Pineapple?
Dean didn’t wait for Anna. He had an angel to find. And now he knew Castiel had been out all day yesterday but was probably back by now, and that he was seeking out family to mope around.
As soon as the sun was up, Dean headed for Charlie’s orchards.
Castiel was helping Charlie weed her vegetable garden. He was sitting back on his heels in the middle of the herb bed, soil pressing dusty patterns into his knees and brushing from his heels onto the seat of his pants, and he was giving the trowel an exasperated, pissy look of I am more powerful than you can possibly imagine and I have dragged angels out of civil war and I am really not in the mood and why will you not do as I tell you.
The trowel was unimpressed by it, on the whole.
Castiel also had a smear of dirt scrubbed across his nose and another across the shoulder of the too-small tunic he was wearing (one of Gabriel’s?) and was a bit of a sweaty mess. Dean wanted his smile so much it hurt.
When Castiel looked up, Dean got the tight face of this is going to be unpleasant instead. It wasn’t really a fair substitution.
“Hey guys!” he said breezily, like he’d just happened to wander all the way out here to see how the tomato patch was coming along. “How’s the guest house, Charlie? Any death matches over the bathroom yet?”
“Not yet,” Charlie called back optimistically, “but my bowl of thyme was a casualty of war. Apparently farmhouse bathrooms are too narrow for wings.”
“Dean,” Castiel acknowledged without looking up, digging stubborn as a scenthound for the roots of some grass-like thing. “I think it would be better if I left.”
Dean gaped down at the sun playing on the back of his neck, wrong-footed and determined to have misheard that. “What?”
“I can almost fly now,” Castiel said, brisk and brittle like he had everything all planned out, “and with me outside the walls there will be less - less pressure on you. On all of you.”
Dean felt his shoulders tighten and hunched forward, indignant and looming, ready for a fight. “Okay, you know what? Screw that. What the hell, Cas?” It made no sense, none of it, and if Castiel wanted and wanted to want, why would he leave?
Castiel didn’t look up, and his voice was tight with something Dean didn’t like. “I had guessed that you had little or no experience in these matters. But I had assumed you had knowledge, at least enough to make a choice.” The last word was almost spat out, like it tasted bitter, but Castiel’s hands kept right on at their dogged little task in the dirt. “I apologise. For my... persuasion.”
And there it was again. That terrifying little note under everything in Castiel’s I-can-do-anything attitude that burnt straight through the bullshit to set Dean’s big-brother instincts ablaze. Just like the one that had been there when he’d spoken of compromises, and after the nightmare when he’d feared becoming that thing, whatever it was. And if Dean still had no idea what to say or do or what was going through Castiel’s head, he couldn’t get away from that ugly word Gabriel had used an hour ago, so he forced down his temper and his knees and knelt in the garden beside Castiel, slid one hand over the nearest of his, pinned it to the dirt.
“Cas. You child. I made a choice. Same as I did first time Dad put Sammy in my arms. It’s you, all you, okay? Any way I can have you.”
Any way you’ll have me, he wanted to add, but it caught embarrassingly in his throat, and he wasn’t used to this sort of declaration, and he was crap at it.
There was a flash of startled blue for a moment as Castiel looked up; then he remembered himself, or whatever, and dropped his head again, jaw all stubborn.
“Except that every... kiss. Every time. You did not mean it.” Bitter, like he was revisiting each memory and bleaching all the richness out of it.
“No!” It came out a bit too loud, and Dean jumped, hand skittering off Castiel’s, and looked over to where Charlie digging away at the roots of a tussock and humming to herself, too far away to hear. Probably. “Hell, no, Cas,” he hissed more softly, trying to make it come out gentle even though it sounded sort of ferocious. “I meant it, every time. I mean it, okay?”
“But you did not understand,” Castiel argued, jabbing viciously at a soursod. The movement made his knee slip a little in the dirt, so it was almost touching Dean’s. “Meaning such a thing without understanding is... meaningless,” and there was a flash of irritation there at the corner of his mouth, impatience at his own inability to bend words to his will.
Fuck. This was the trouble with wanting someone stubborn as Castiel. Dean was crap at this, crap at understanding and explaining, and everything in him ached to just kiss it away. But that would leave Cas still thinking he’d taken advantage or whatever, like Dean was some chick who didn’t know why the creepy guy kept handing her drinks then wanted to coax her out behind the woolshed.
“Don’t you go there, Cas,” he growled, because that was the most important thing. Then his knuckles bumped gently against Castiel’s and he muttered, low and quick and fervent, “Look, I’m gonna say this again and try to make it better because seems like I can’t say anything right today, which is probably your fault because I never got any coffee this morning or yesterday because I was trying to find you. I understood, okay? I understood just fine. Eventually. I mean, okay, I was a bit confused, but I got there.”
Castiel’s hand was very still against his. Listening.
“I just figured it wasn’t... you know, that it wasn’t possible... that we weren’t ever gonna...”
And there he had to trail off, because he still couldn’t find words to actually think that, to imagine Castiel’s body hot and willing against his.
Castiel pulled back, apparently just so he could pin Dean with a very, very flat stare.
“Oh, come on, man,” Dean huffed. Why was everyone looking at him like he was an idiot? This wasn’t simple, and right up until yesterday morning it had been absolutely freaking impossible. “How the hell was I supposed to guess that you’d want something like that too?”
“How?” Castiel’s eyes went narrow, wary, almost angry, like he couldn’t believe Dean wasn’t trying to put one over on him here. The wrist of his wing lifted and tapped bruisingly firm against the tender spot on Dean’s throat from Castiel’s own mouth, barely twenty-four hours old. “I was kissing you back, Dean,” he hissed, like Dean might have missed that simple fact, like that would explain everything.
Dean snorted, and caught Castiel’s hand before he could pull away. “Because it’s that simple.”
“Isn’t it?” Castiel asked, frustration struggling with an awkward gentle sort of hurt; and Dean found suddenly, again, like always, that he had no freaking clue how to fix it.
The hand caught in Dean’s was tense, fingers half curled, strong enough to pull right away at once if Castiel had really wanted it back. Dean just rubbed his thumb sort of apologetically along the side of the palm, and let it go.
He slumped down beside the rosemary bush, and dug his fingers deep into the earth under the tussock Castiel was theoretically digging up, searching for the tap root.
“I just figured I was... you know... messed up in the head,” he muttered, tugged the tussock out and flung it onto the path, trailing dirt. “Again.”
Castiel let out a small, wounded breath. “So very obscene, then,” he asked quietly. “That I made you desire an angel.”
Dean blinked at him. “What? What’s that got to do with anything?” But Castiel was staring at him, expectant and puzzled and like he really didn’t see any other problem here than the whole species difference, so the angels weren’t the only ones caught explaining the obvious today.
“I don’t know if you noticed, dude,” he said carefully, “but, dude, we’re both dudes!”
Castiel blinked back. “I don’t care.”
Like it even made any sense. Stark and simple as anything.
“How can you not -”
Dean flailed a bit, inside his own head (mostly). Because. The physicality of it - yes, okay, so he knew he wanted to run his hands over Castiel’s flanks and thighs and taste his belly and the skin of each finger, but that wasn’t actually sex, and how could you not care about wanting to have sex with someone you actually physically couldn’t have sex with? And then, and then, all the rest of it, how could you be a husband to another guy, when everything about the word husband meant has a wife? The idea didn’t even fit in his head - it was like trying to... to weld steel to bread dough, or something.
Breathe.
He scrubbed a hand down over his face, and got dirt all over it. Brilliant.
Castiel watched the movement, eyes dark and that little annoyed crinkle in the middle of his forehead, like he was trying very hard not to reach out and brush the dirt away.
Dean leaned forward, because sure, the two of them were crap at words, but Castiel’s eyes... those he could hold. Those, he got.
“I figured,” he tried, and tried to say everything he meant underneath just with looking, just with mirroring the light in those eyes back on them and setting it burning. “Figured you couldn’t mean that, because it made no sense. Must have meant something else that I was too much of a screw-up to get. But it looked like it made you so happy, man. Hell, the way you smile...” he breathed, and found his fingers curling just beside the rough curve of Castiel’s cheek, hovering at the corner of his mouth. And just for a moment it felt like they were breathing together, something unnameable and tender reaching out in the air between them like anything might happen.
Then Castiel’s eyes shuttered and he dropped his head, and Dean saw the shift: the movement, the bunch of his shoulders like he was thinking about testing his wings, the gathering of muscles in his thighs ready to stand. The drawing away inside.
“Don’t you walk on me again,” he pleaded. “That’s not cool, man.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” Castiel gritted out, and pulled himself to his feet in jerky little movements that looked as helpless as Dean felt.
Dean stared up at him, at the hard curve of his jaw and the harried line of the hackle-feathers along the back of the wings’ shoulders. He wanted to fight for this prickly awesome guy, wanted to keep him, but he had no map.
“What do you want to say?” Dean offered, kind of uselessly.
Which apparently was a surprising question, because it made Castiel look down, look away at the trees, then look back to Dean with his eyes raw and helpless and so fucking blue.
“I want to shake you,” he confessed at last in this deep rough voice that kicked right into Dean’s gut and set his blood racing. “I want to beg.”
Dean drew a long unsteady breath. Because he had no idea what to do with that, what it was about those words that set him yearning to drag Castiel down into the dirt, kiss him, mess him up, get at the skin under all that loose linen.
“I am... really all kinds of okay with that.”
Castiel’s eyes stayed locked on his, wide and so uncertain. Dean didn’t stand up, because he actually kind of liked looking up the length of his body like this, but he didn’t break eye contact as he stretched out a hand to touch Castiel’s knee. Just a brush, at first, just fingertips. Then he slid his fingers around it, flattened the palm warm and wide over the bone, and smiled.
“Ask anything,” he said, rough and clueless but really really tempted to slide his hand up just a little higher, to feel the bunch and tense of muscle in his thigh. “Not gonna say no.”
Castiel’s throat jumped, and he tore his eyes away, and Dean silently cursed the loose cut of the pants Castiel was wearing, because he really wanted to see if he was reading him right here, if that little flush and the speed of his breath meant what Dean wanted them to mean.
“That’s why I can’t, Dean. You dreamt me as a siren. And Lucifer was the lord of persuasion.”
Then, before Dean could get control of his jaw again and work out just how to rage at Castiel to demand what the hell that meant, what some dead archangel had to do with anything, Anna loomed up beside Castiel and held out a parcel to Dean.
“Gabriel’s compliments, and he regrets that he can’t whack you around the head with it.”
Dean yelped, in a very manly fashion, jumped backwards away from where he definitely had not just been groping Anna’s cousin’s thigh, and caught himself before he fell into the rosemary bush. Then he snatched up the parcel (which felt suspiciously like a book), and scowled.
“Oh, screw him, he’s not the archangel of me.”
“He’s not really an archangel anymore,” Anna said, wry and a little sad and not in the least like she had a clue what was going on here, so Dean didn’t have to be horribly mortified.
Castiel turned to her, and he wasn’t Dean’s Castiel anymore: his face held that mixture of diffidence and fixed calm that Dean was coming to associate with him talking to other angels. “Anna. We must discuss the failsafe for this afternoon.”
Dean got to his feet, brushing thyme off his pants and trying not to scowl, because they hadn’t fixed this yet. “Hey, Cas, hold on.”
Castiel shot Dean a look, eyes wide with dismay, like Anna turning up was the perfect exit strategy and Dean was ruining his escape. It stung, and Dean faltered.
He couldn’t just brazen his way through this. He didn’t know what he wanted, or what to argue, or what Castiel’s deal was. He was flailing in the dark here, and the trouble with flailing was that you usually ended up decking someone by accident. And Castiel already looked kind of bruised and sensitive.
Charlie slid her arm through Anna’s and dropped a kiss on the angel’s cheek. “What’s the hurry, guys? Anna and I were going to make pancakes, and there’s plenty of batter.”
Anna’s eyes flickered from Dean to Castiel, sort of grave, then landed more warmly on Charlie. Even beside Charlie, she looked deceptively tiny and fragile, like the rich velvety reds and purples of the wings folded down her back must surely belong to someone else, all that power and strength.
“I’ll be with you in an hour,” was all she said, and Charlie shrugged it off philosophically and tipped her wide smile towards Dean.
“You coming?”
Dean shook his head, and tucked Gabriel’s parcel under his arm. “Think I’ve got some reading to do.”
It was a book. Or rather, it was a book, plus a note.
The note read:
Book. Read. Guys can fall in love with guys, guys can have sex with guys, guys can marry guys unless they’re living somewhere people are going to be dicks about it, and you’re a clueless insulated moron with the most incredible powers of denial I’ve ever come across.
The book was... um.
So, Dean had kind of known that Gabriel (like most pedlars) carried books with Certain Kinds of Woodcuts. This... wasn’t quite like them. For one thing, it was a book - sixteen quires of twelve leaves each, and proper binding with a solid cover - not a slim unbound pamphlet of the sort intended to be slipped into the cover of another book, or slyly bound right into the middle of some boring treatise by some rich guy who employed his own binders to keep his library looking tidy and uniform. For another... well, there were no women to be seen.
The book was called De Corporibus Masculis, and it was terrifying. Especially the woodcuts.
Then it was fascinating. Then it was hilarious, and hot.
Apparently sex was possible. Very possible. In many interesting ways.
So that was okay then.
There was another difference between this book and those, though. The pamphlets Dean had seen were pretty much all woodcuts, with a few titillating captions or paragraphs here and there. This one was mostly text, and it was written like it was meant to teach, not to get people off.
... That woodcut on page nineteen was still really freaking tempting. And Dean had had blue balls for weeks.
“Um. Dean?”
“Shit!” Dean yiped, and slammed the book shut.
Sam blinked at him, blinked at the title on the spine of the book, then gulped and went very red.
Dean groaned, and let his head fall back against the sofa so that he could stare despairingly at the ceiling. “What, Sam?”
Sam fidgeted. “Um. Nothing. Just, y’know. Wondering where you were.”
Dean eyed him. “Out with it.”
“Cas,” Sam blurted, and Dean considered digging himself a nice big hole in the most desolate part of the marshes and hiding in it until he drowned. “You and he - I mean, I kind of figured, y’know, there was something up there - and now Gabriel says...”
“Gabriel’s a dick,” Dean observed. “And also a fucking stickybeak.”
“Okay,” Sam agreed cautiously, like he thought Dean might pitch a hissy fit over his honour or something if that point wasn’t conceded. “I just wanted to say. When we went and met all the other angels, before Gabriel and Gwen and Anna and I went off to get me, y’know, undogged. Some of the angels we met were married, and... well, it wasn’t always just one man and one woman. And it seemed like it worked for them, so... yeah.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and squared his shoulders self-consciously. “That was it. Just, y’know.” That was the fourth “y’know” in under a minute. Score one for making Sam squirm. “Still seems kinda weird to me, but if it makes you guys happy... I got your back.”
“Thanks, Sammy, that was beautiful,” Dean smirked, and batted his eyelashes, because his stomach was lurching uncertainly.
The corner of Sam’s mouth quirked up a bit. “Screw you, jerk. I’m trying to be all supportive here.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean made a face and settled back into the cushions. Not that he’d ever really thought Sam would call him a freak. And screw him if he had, he’d just have had to get over it. “Cas is flinging his curds out of the vat because he thinks I don’t know jack about...” The woodcut on page thirty-four flashed helpfully before his eyes, and he cringed a bit. “... about that sort of thing, so.” He gestured vaguely at the book, casual as he could. “Apparently people write books about it. Who knew, huh?”
“Really?” Sam perked up, and he bounced across the room like a freaking oversized puppy. “Is that really - wow! Can I see?”
“Fuck off,” Dean told him, and snatched the book out of his reach, because seriously, was there anything Sam couldn’t geek out over? “Later. Maybe.”
Sam made the bitchface of thwarted research, and flopped down over far more than his half of the sofa with one foot propped up on Dean’s knee. “So are you two, like, courting?”
Dean shoved ineffectually at the foot. “God, you seriously are a teenage girl, aren’t you?”
Under big earnest brown eyes the dimples came out, sneaky little harbingers of evil Sammy. “Dean. Deeeean. Does he bring you flowers?”
“I will burn you.”
“Who’s gonna wear flowers to the wedding, huh?”
“Next time you go four-footed you’re waking up bald with all your hair stuffing pillows.”
“Can I help with the embroidery for the trousseau?”
“Right, that’s it.”
The next eight minutes were spent tumbling around vigorously on the floor trying to get Sam in a headlock, avoiding getting pinned with a knee in the back, and yelling polite little conversational gambits like “Eat carpet!” and “Get the hell off me, you freaking carthorse!”.
It was mostly a draw. Mostly, because Sam might have stopped growing upwards (which was good because Dean wasn’t sure there was that much air to breathe way up there), but he was still bulking out and heavier by the week, which clearly wasn’t fair, so it didn’t count if he managed by some fluke to get Dean pinned, just for a moment. And also Dean was older and more cunning, which was fair, so he’d just been biding his time until Sam started crowing and wriggling his little victory dance to slug him in the stomach and shove his head into the sofa.
When they were both sprawled out panting over the floor - the table had got shoved aside, mostly accidentally, somewhere around the thirty-second mark - Dean cleared his throat, swallowed his pride, and addressed the ceiling completely nonchalantly.
“How did. Uhm. How d’you figure a house like that would work, anyway? I mean, if it’s just two guys - or, huh, two girls - I mean, who’s the husband?”
“Maybe you could take turns?” Sam offered innocently.
“Screw you,” Dean muttered, and slung an arm over his face.
Sam smirked. Then he rolled onto his stomach and leaned up eagerly on his elbows. “See, I’ve been thinking about this.”
“Course you have. Geek.”
“Dork. The way I figure it is, well, there’s never been a woman in this house, right? Not since I was six months old, anyway, and we’ve managed just fine. I mean, it’d’ve been nice to have had Mum, but we’ve never really missed having a woman around the place just for the sake of her being a woman, right?”
“I guess,” Dean conceded carefully, though it sounded a bit like logic-chopping to him.
“So you don’t need a woman in a household. I figure you two just look after each other like you and I do, only, y’know, with more making out, and everything else is just working out who does the dishes and all that shit.” Sam beamed his big bright everyone-bow-down-before-my-genius beam, and Dean considered smothering it with the cushion, but the sofa was all the way over there and that sounded like effort.
“Deep, Merlin,” he said instead, all dry and maybe a bit indulgent.
“Yeah, well, you’re thinking about this too much. Don’t argue. I can tell. You’ve got your thinky face on. It’s the same as your constipation face. And you need to get your boots on and saddle up - it’s almost time to go meet Gabriel.”
Lo! A poll, re. potential extras/timestamps for this verse!
“Choose your words very carefully,” Gabriel advised, sweet as arsenic in the sugar bowl.
Shortly before the coming of the English into the island [Ireland] a cow from a man’s intercourse with her - a particular vice of that people - gave birth to a man-calf in the mountains around Glendalough. From this you may believe that once again a man that was half an ox, and an ox that was half a man was produced.
It spent nearly a year with the other calves following its mother and feeding on her milk, and then, because it had more of the man than the beast, was transferred to the society of men.
The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambriensis), 1185, trans. John O’Meara 1951.
Castiel wasn’t in the Roadhouse.
He wasn’t in the square either, or anywhere around the feed sheds, or the kennels, or Bobby’s house, or the pens where they’d been tagging lambs yesterday and should be again today, or anywhere else he and Dean had been together. Rachel hadn’t seen him. And Dean shouldn’t be fretting, because he could take care of himself (right?) and wasn’t stupid enough to get himself caught in a situation where he’d have to fight, but...
What if this was what Rachel had meant, with that weird sideways little warning of hers? That if Castiel thought Dean wanted something he’d twist himself inside out to give him that? And Dean had... reacted badly, and now Castiel thought that he’d made a freak of himself and Dean didn’t want it, or was disgusted by it, or whatever.
Dean tried the archives, Jody’s domain. Castiel had been fascinated by them (like everything else), had looked happy to poke and potter around for hours in the dry air and the smell of old paper and older parchment and glue and inks caustic and carbon-based, asking question after uncomprehending question about the stories people told about themselves and how they wrote them down.
No Castiel.
Ash, who was lounging at the gate post looking bored, said he’d left early in the morning and not come back.
“I don’t know, man. Important angel business or something, I’m not asking questions about that shit.”
Dean threw himself into wrestling leggy half-grown lambs into submission, all afternoon. It was exhausting work, under the hot sun, and when he flopped onto his (empty) bed late in the evening he dropped off pretty much immediately.
He also dropped straight into an archangelic ambush.
It came in the form of a hand around his throat and his back shoved up against some dream wall and a protest from the back of his skull as it whacked against what sure as hell felt like stone, right where it still ached from doing the same freaking thing for real that morning. Dean yelped, strangled and breathless, and kicked out on instinct even before he saw who it was, but Gabriel was doing that shielding thing Castiel had been doing this week whenever he wasn’t safely inside, all defences up and skin hard as marble where Dean’s fingers scrabbled against his arm.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Gabriel snarled, all up in his space and furious.
“Nothing! Fuck!” Dean rasped around the fingers digging into his windpipe like a clamp, then whacked his own head back against the wall again in frustration. “Why does everyone say that? Where is he? And who the hell said you could come strolling through my sleep?”
Gabriel stared at him narrowly, eyes glinting honey-yellow and dangerous. “Okay then. What does he think he did to you?”
“I don’t know, he -” Dean started, then swore again, hemmed-in and guilty and stupidly useless. “Gabriel, I - hell.”
If there was anyone he didn’t want to be talking to about this, it was Gabriel. Only if there was anyone who’d be able to explain it, that was Gabriel too.
“We were - I freaked out, and I thought he would too but he didn’t, then he did, only I have no freaking clue what for - then he was looking at me like - and he walked out and I can’t find him, so back the hell off and, shit, is he okay?”
The grip on his neck loosened, finger by finger, like everything he’d said had been in some foreign language and Gabriel was trying to work it out one syllable at a time and also backwards.
“My little brother’s spent most of the day holed up in my wagon apparently convinced he’s some kind of super-persuasive rapist,” Gabriel said, with the sort of calm that sounded like knives. “So you tell me, Winchester, and speak very clearly because I’m having a hard time hearing you over the sound of how staggeringly incompetent you are, what in the name of tiny blue cockroach toes did you say to him to make him go from being all lovey-dovey and soulful to that?”
“He what? He -” Dean gulped for air, though Gabriel’s fingers were barely touching him. “No. Hell no, I’m the one who - who -”
“Choose your words very carefully,” Gabriel advised, sweet as arsenic in the sugar bowl.
“I didn’t, okay?” Dean growled, and shoved at his chest, for all the good that did. For all the good any goddamn effort of Dean’s had done. “I didn’t touch him like that, I was so freaking careful not to let him know I was...”
“Horny?” Gabriel supplied helpfully, when Dean’s words ran out.
“Shut the fuck up. No. Yes. Wanting to - wanting. Only he was too, and…”
The significance of that struck Dean like a mallet. “… Shit.”
Castiel wanted? If he had - he had been hard too, and he’d been - he’d assumed Dean knew that.
He’d assumed Dean was okay with that.
Gabriel squinted at him, then whistled low. “Wow. Really? I figured you two had been boinking like bunnies since we got back.”
Dean barely even heard. His brain had stuttered to a panicked halt again, the traitor.
“Gabriel. He. How could he...” And if it came out as a plea that was no one’s business but Dean’s. “I mean, did I - did I break him?”
He’d been relaxed, warm. He’d been comfortable, before Dean had freaked out. And he’d been... breathing hard, like Dean, making all those noises...
Mouthing at Dean’s skin like he couldn’t get enough.
“Oh, for pineapple’s sake,” Gabriel spat out, and dropped him unceremoniously. “Wait for Anna. Don’t try to talk to him.” Then he vanished with a puff of sparks, like a log had dropped in the fire.
Show-off.
The dream scattered in his wake, and Dean was left staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.
He banged his head against the pillow, even though it wasn’t the wall that he probably deserved.
All along. All along.
And what the hell was Pineapple?
Dean didn’t wait for Anna. He had an angel to find. And now he knew Castiel had been out all day yesterday but was probably back by now, and that he was seeking out family to mope around.
As soon as the sun was up, Dean headed for Charlie’s orchards.
Castiel was helping Charlie weed her vegetable garden. He was sitting back on his heels in the middle of the herb bed, soil pressing dusty patterns into his knees and brushing from his heels onto the seat of his pants, and he was giving the trowel an exasperated, pissy look of I am more powerful than you can possibly imagine and I have dragged angels out of civil war and I am really not in the mood and why will you not do as I tell you.
The trowel was unimpressed by it, on the whole.
Castiel also had a smear of dirt scrubbed across his nose and another across the shoulder of the too-small tunic he was wearing (one of Gabriel’s?) and was a bit of a sweaty mess. Dean wanted his smile so much it hurt.
When Castiel looked up, Dean got the tight face of this is going to be unpleasant instead. It wasn’t really a fair substitution.
“Hey guys!” he said breezily, like he’d just happened to wander all the way out here to see how the tomato patch was coming along. “How’s the guest house, Charlie? Any death matches over the bathroom yet?”
“Not yet,” Charlie called back optimistically, “but my bowl of thyme was a casualty of war. Apparently farmhouse bathrooms are too narrow for wings.”
“Dean,” Castiel acknowledged without looking up, digging stubborn as a scenthound for the roots of some grass-like thing. “I think it would be better if I left.”
Dean gaped down at the sun playing on the back of his neck, wrong-footed and determined to have misheard that. “What?”
“I can almost fly now,” Castiel said, brisk and brittle like he had everything all planned out, “and with me outside the walls there will be less - less pressure on you. On all of you.”
Dean felt his shoulders tighten and hunched forward, indignant and looming, ready for a fight. “Okay, you know what? Screw that. What the hell, Cas?” It made no sense, none of it, and if Castiel wanted and wanted to want, why would he leave?
Castiel didn’t look up, and his voice was tight with something Dean didn’t like. “I had guessed that you had little or no experience in these matters. But I had assumed you had knowledge, at least enough to make a choice.” The last word was almost spat out, like it tasted bitter, but Castiel’s hands kept right on at their dogged little task in the dirt. “I apologise. For my... persuasion.”
And there it was again. That terrifying little note under everything in Castiel’s I-can-do-anything attitude that burnt straight through the bullshit to set Dean’s big-brother instincts ablaze. Just like the one that had been there when he’d spoken of compromises, and after the nightmare when he’d feared becoming that thing, whatever it was. And if Dean still had no idea what to say or do or what was going through Castiel’s head, he couldn’t get away from that ugly word Gabriel had used an hour ago, so he forced down his temper and his knees and knelt in the garden beside Castiel, slid one hand over the nearest of his, pinned it to the dirt.
“Cas. You child. I made a choice. Same as I did first time Dad put Sammy in my arms. It’s you, all you, okay? Any way I can have you.”
Any way you’ll have me, he wanted to add, but it caught embarrassingly in his throat, and he wasn’t used to this sort of declaration, and he was crap at it.
There was a flash of startled blue for a moment as Castiel looked up; then he remembered himself, or whatever, and dropped his head again, jaw all stubborn.
“Except that every... kiss. Every time. You did not mean it.” Bitter, like he was revisiting each memory and bleaching all the richness out of it.
“No!” It came out a bit too loud, and Dean jumped, hand skittering off Castiel’s, and looked over to where Charlie digging away at the roots of a tussock and humming to herself, too far away to hear. Probably. “Hell, no, Cas,” he hissed more softly, trying to make it come out gentle even though it sounded sort of ferocious. “I meant it, every time. I mean it, okay?”
“But you did not understand,” Castiel argued, jabbing viciously at a soursod. The movement made his knee slip a little in the dirt, so it was almost touching Dean’s. “Meaning such a thing without understanding is... meaningless,” and there was a flash of irritation there at the corner of his mouth, impatience at his own inability to bend words to his will.
Fuck. This was the trouble with wanting someone stubborn as Castiel. Dean was crap at this, crap at understanding and explaining, and everything in him ached to just kiss it away. But that would leave Cas still thinking he’d taken advantage or whatever, like Dean was some chick who didn’t know why the creepy guy kept handing her drinks then wanted to coax her out behind the woolshed.
“Don’t you go there, Cas,” he growled, because that was the most important thing. Then his knuckles bumped gently against Castiel’s and he muttered, low and quick and fervent, “Look, I’m gonna say this again and try to make it better because seems like I can’t say anything right today, which is probably your fault because I never got any coffee this morning or yesterday because I was trying to find you. I understood, okay? I understood just fine. Eventually. I mean, okay, I was a bit confused, but I got there.”
Castiel’s hand was very still against his. Listening.
“I just figured it wasn’t... you know, that it wasn’t possible... that we weren’t ever gonna...”
And there he had to trail off, because he still couldn’t find words to actually think that, to imagine Castiel’s body hot and willing against his.
Castiel pulled back, apparently just so he could pin Dean with a very, very flat stare.
“Oh, come on, man,” Dean huffed. Why was everyone looking at him like he was an idiot? This wasn’t simple, and right up until yesterday morning it had been absolutely freaking impossible. “How the hell was I supposed to guess that you’d want something like that too?”
“How?” Castiel’s eyes went narrow, wary, almost angry, like he couldn’t believe Dean wasn’t trying to put one over on him here. The wrist of his wing lifted and tapped bruisingly firm against the tender spot on Dean’s throat from Castiel’s own mouth, barely twenty-four hours old. “I was kissing you back, Dean,” he hissed, like Dean might have missed that simple fact, like that would explain everything.
Dean snorted, and caught Castiel’s hand before he could pull away. “Because it’s that simple.”
“Isn’t it?” Castiel asked, frustration struggling with an awkward gentle sort of hurt; and Dean found suddenly, again, like always, that he had no freaking clue how to fix it.
The hand caught in Dean’s was tense, fingers half curled, strong enough to pull right away at once if Castiel had really wanted it back. Dean just rubbed his thumb sort of apologetically along the side of the palm, and let it go.
He slumped down beside the rosemary bush, and dug his fingers deep into the earth under the tussock Castiel was theoretically digging up, searching for the tap root.
“I just figured I was... you know... messed up in the head,” he muttered, tugged the tussock out and flung it onto the path, trailing dirt. “Again.”
Castiel let out a small, wounded breath. “So very obscene, then,” he asked quietly. “That I made you desire an angel.”
Dean blinked at him. “What? What’s that got to do with anything?” But Castiel was staring at him, expectant and puzzled and like he really didn’t see any other problem here than the whole species difference, so the angels weren’t the only ones caught explaining the obvious today.
“I don’t know if you noticed, dude,” he said carefully, “but, dude, we’re both dudes!”
Castiel blinked back. “I don’t care.”
Like it even made any sense. Stark and simple as anything.
“How can you not -”
Dean flailed a bit, inside his own head (mostly). Because. The physicality of it - yes, okay, so he knew he wanted to run his hands over Castiel’s flanks and thighs and taste his belly and the skin of each finger, but that wasn’t actually sex, and how could you not care about wanting to have sex with someone you actually physically couldn’t have sex with? And then, and then, all the rest of it, how could you be a husband to another guy, when everything about the word husband meant has a wife? The idea didn’t even fit in his head - it was like trying to... to weld steel to bread dough, or something.
Breathe.
He scrubbed a hand down over his face, and got dirt all over it. Brilliant.
Castiel watched the movement, eyes dark and that little annoyed crinkle in the middle of his forehead, like he was trying very hard not to reach out and brush the dirt away.
Dean leaned forward, because sure, the two of them were crap at words, but Castiel’s eyes... those he could hold. Those, he got.
“I figured,” he tried, and tried to say everything he meant underneath just with looking, just with mirroring the light in those eyes back on them and setting it burning. “Figured you couldn’t mean that, because it made no sense. Must have meant something else that I was too much of a screw-up to get. But it looked like it made you so happy, man. Hell, the way you smile...” he breathed, and found his fingers curling just beside the rough curve of Castiel’s cheek, hovering at the corner of his mouth. And just for a moment it felt like they were breathing together, something unnameable and tender reaching out in the air between them like anything might happen.
Then Castiel’s eyes shuttered and he dropped his head, and Dean saw the shift: the movement, the bunch of his shoulders like he was thinking about testing his wings, the gathering of muscles in his thighs ready to stand. The drawing away inside.
“Don’t you walk on me again,” he pleaded. “That’s not cool, man.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” Castiel gritted out, and pulled himself to his feet in jerky little movements that looked as helpless as Dean felt.
Dean stared up at him, at the hard curve of his jaw and the harried line of the hackle-feathers along the back of the wings’ shoulders. He wanted to fight for this prickly awesome guy, wanted to keep him, but he had no map.
“What do you want to say?” Dean offered, kind of uselessly.
Which apparently was a surprising question, because it made Castiel look down, look away at the trees, then look back to Dean with his eyes raw and helpless and so fucking blue.
“I want to shake you,” he confessed at last in this deep rough voice that kicked right into Dean’s gut and set his blood racing. “I want to beg.”
Dean drew a long unsteady breath. Because he had no idea what to do with that, what it was about those words that set him yearning to drag Castiel down into the dirt, kiss him, mess him up, get at the skin under all that loose linen.
“I am... really all kinds of okay with that.”
Castiel’s eyes stayed locked on his, wide and so uncertain. Dean didn’t stand up, because he actually kind of liked looking up the length of his body like this, but he didn’t break eye contact as he stretched out a hand to touch Castiel’s knee. Just a brush, at first, just fingertips. Then he slid his fingers around it, flattened the palm warm and wide over the bone, and smiled.
“Ask anything,” he said, rough and clueless but really really tempted to slide his hand up just a little higher, to feel the bunch and tense of muscle in his thigh. “Not gonna say no.”
Castiel’s throat jumped, and he tore his eyes away, and Dean silently cursed the loose cut of the pants Castiel was wearing, because he really wanted to see if he was reading him right here, if that little flush and the speed of his breath meant what Dean wanted them to mean.
“That’s why I can’t, Dean. You dreamt me as a siren. And Lucifer was the lord of persuasion.”
Then, before Dean could get control of his jaw again and work out just how to rage at Castiel to demand what the hell that meant, what some dead archangel had to do with anything, Anna loomed up beside Castiel and held out a parcel to Dean.
“Gabriel’s compliments, and he regrets that he can’t whack you around the head with it.”
Dean yelped, in a very manly fashion, jumped backwards away from where he definitely had not just been groping Anna’s cousin’s thigh, and caught himself before he fell into the rosemary bush. Then he snatched up the parcel (which felt suspiciously like a book), and scowled.
“Oh, screw him, he’s not the archangel of me.”
“He’s not really an archangel anymore,” Anna said, wry and a little sad and not in the least like she had a clue what was going on here, so Dean didn’t have to be horribly mortified.
Castiel turned to her, and he wasn’t Dean’s Castiel anymore: his face held that mixture of diffidence and fixed calm that Dean was coming to associate with him talking to other angels. “Anna. We must discuss the failsafe for this afternoon.”
Dean got to his feet, brushing thyme off his pants and trying not to scowl, because they hadn’t fixed this yet. “Hey, Cas, hold on.”
Castiel shot Dean a look, eyes wide with dismay, like Anna turning up was the perfect exit strategy and Dean was ruining his escape. It stung, and Dean faltered.
He couldn’t just brazen his way through this. He didn’t know what he wanted, or what to argue, or what Castiel’s deal was. He was flailing in the dark here, and the trouble with flailing was that you usually ended up decking someone by accident. And Castiel already looked kind of bruised and sensitive.
Charlie slid her arm through Anna’s and dropped a kiss on the angel’s cheek. “What’s the hurry, guys? Anna and I were going to make pancakes, and there’s plenty of batter.”
Anna’s eyes flickered from Dean to Castiel, sort of grave, then landed more warmly on Charlie. Even beside Charlie, she looked deceptively tiny and fragile, like the rich velvety reds and purples of the wings folded down her back must surely belong to someone else, all that power and strength.
“I’ll be with you in an hour,” was all she said, and Charlie shrugged it off philosophically and tipped her wide smile towards Dean.
“You coming?”
Dean shook his head, and tucked Gabriel’s parcel under his arm. “Think I’ve got some reading to do.”
It was a book. Or rather, it was a book, plus a note.
The note read:
Book. Read. Guys can fall in love with guys, guys can have sex with guys, guys can marry guys unless they’re living somewhere people are going to be dicks about it, and you’re a clueless insulated moron with the most incredible powers of denial I’ve ever come across.
The book was... um.
So, Dean had kind of known that Gabriel (like most pedlars) carried books with Certain Kinds of Woodcuts. This... wasn’t quite like them. For one thing, it was a book - sixteen quires of twelve leaves each, and proper binding with a solid cover - not a slim unbound pamphlet of the sort intended to be slipped into the cover of another book, or slyly bound right into the middle of some boring treatise by some rich guy who employed his own binders to keep his library looking tidy and uniform. For another... well, there were no women to be seen.
The book was called De Corporibus Masculis, and it was terrifying. Especially the woodcuts.
Then it was fascinating. Then it was hilarious, and hot.
Apparently sex was possible. Very possible. In many interesting ways.
So that was okay then.
There was another difference between this book and those, though. The pamphlets Dean had seen were pretty much all woodcuts, with a few titillating captions or paragraphs here and there. This one was mostly text, and it was written like it was meant to teach, not to get people off.
... That woodcut on page nineteen was still really freaking tempting. And Dean had had blue balls for weeks.
“Um. Dean?”
“Shit!” Dean yiped, and slammed the book shut.
Sam blinked at him, blinked at the title on the spine of the book, then gulped and went very red.
Dean groaned, and let his head fall back against the sofa so that he could stare despairingly at the ceiling. “What, Sam?”
Sam fidgeted. “Um. Nothing. Just, y’know. Wondering where you were.”
Dean eyed him. “Out with it.”
“Cas,” Sam blurted, and Dean considered digging himself a nice big hole in the most desolate part of the marshes and hiding in it until he drowned. “You and he - I mean, I kind of figured, y’know, there was something up there - and now Gabriel says...”
“Gabriel’s a dick,” Dean observed. “And also a fucking stickybeak.”
“Okay,” Sam agreed cautiously, like he thought Dean might pitch a hissy fit over his honour or something if that point wasn’t conceded. “I just wanted to say. When we went and met all the other angels, before Gabriel and Gwen and Anna and I went off to get me, y’know, undogged. Some of the angels we met were married, and... well, it wasn’t always just one man and one woman. And it seemed like it worked for them, so... yeah.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and squared his shoulders self-consciously. “That was it. Just, y’know.” That was the fourth “y’know” in under a minute. Score one for making Sam squirm. “Still seems kinda weird to me, but if it makes you guys happy... I got your back.”
“Thanks, Sammy, that was beautiful,” Dean smirked, and batted his eyelashes, because his stomach was lurching uncertainly.
The corner of Sam’s mouth quirked up a bit. “Screw you, jerk. I’m trying to be all supportive here.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean made a face and settled back into the cushions. Not that he’d ever really thought Sam would call him a freak. And screw him if he had, he’d just have had to get over it. “Cas is flinging his curds out of the vat because he thinks I don’t know jack about...” The woodcut on page thirty-four flashed helpfully before his eyes, and he cringed a bit. “... about that sort of thing, so.” He gestured vaguely at the book, casual as he could. “Apparently people write books about it. Who knew, huh?”
“Really?” Sam perked up, and he bounced across the room like a freaking oversized puppy. “Is that really - wow! Can I see?”
“Fuck off,” Dean told him, and snatched the book out of his reach, because seriously, was there anything Sam couldn’t geek out over? “Later. Maybe.”
Sam made the bitchface of thwarted research, and flopped down over far more than his half of the sofa with one foot propped up on Dean’s knee. “So are you two, like, courting?”
Dean shoved ineffectually at the foot. “God, you seriously are a teenage girl, aren’t you?”
Under big earnest brown eyes the dimples came out, sneaky little harbingers of evil Sammy. “Dean. Deeeean. Does he bring you flowers?”
“I will burn you.”
“Who’s gonna wear flowers to the wedding, huh?”
“Next time you go four-footed you’re waking up bald with all your hair stuffing pillows.”
“Can I help with the embroidery for the trousseau?”
“Right, that’s it.”
The next eight minutes were spent tumbling around vigorously on the floor trying to get Sam in a headlock, avoiding getting pinned with a knee in the back, and yelling polite little conversational gambits like “Eat carpet!” and “Get the hell off me, you freaking carthorse!”.
It was mostly a draw. Mostly, because Sam might have stopped growing upwards (which was good because Dean wasn’t sure there was that much air to breathe way up there), but he was still bulking out and heavier by the week, which clearly wasn’t fair, so it didn’t count if he managed by some fluke to get Dean pinned, just for a moment. And also Dean was older and more cunning, which was fair, so he’d just been biding his time until Sam started crowing and wriggling his little victory dance to slug him in the stomach and shove his head into the sofa.
When they were both sprawled out panting over the floor - the table had got shoved aside, mostly accidentally, somewhere around the thirty-second mark - Dean cleared his throat, swallowed his pride, and addressed the ceiling completely nonchalantly.
“How did. Uhm. How d’you figure a house like that would work, anyway? I mean, if it’s just two guys - or, huh, two girls - I mean, who’s the husband?”
“Maybe you could take turns?” Sam offered innocently.
“Screw you,” Dean muttered, and slung an arm over his face.
Sam smirked. Then he rolled onto his stomach and leaned up eagerly on his elbows. “See, I’ve been thinking about this.”
“Course you have. Geek.”
“Dork. The way I figure it is, well, there’s never been a woman in this house, right? Not since I was six months old, anyway, and we’ve managed just fine. I mean, it’d’ve been nice to have had Mum, but we’ve never really missed having a woman around the place just for the sake of her being a woman, right?”
“I guess,” Dean conceded carefully, though it sounded a bit like logic-chopping to him.
“So you don’t need a woman in a household. I figure you two just look after each other like you and I do, only, y’know, with more making out, and everything else is just working out who does the dishes and all that shit.” Sam beamed his big bright everyone-bow-down-before-my-genius beam, and Dean considered smothering it with the cushion, but the sofa was all the way over there and that sounded like effort.
“Deep, Merlin,” he said instead, all dry and maybe a bit indulgent.
“Yeah, well, you’re thinking about this too much. Don’t argue. I can tell. You’ve got your thinky face on. It’s the same as your constipation face. And you need to get your boots on and saddle up - it’s almost time to go meet Gabriel.”
Lo! A poll, re. potential extras/timestamps for this verse!