Chapter Text
Here’s the thing about liking Dean: he does. And he tells himself that that’s what it is, that’s all it is, for years and years and years and years.
He tells himself Dean’s way of asking questions isn’t all that endearing, his smile isn’t all that captivating. His eyes aren’t all that soft, his interests aren’t all that interesting. His stubbornness is infuriating. And he isn’t all that smart, is he? Not all that funny or sweet or kind.
And he tells himself that because—because being left is hard enough when he doesn’t know about it beforehand, and he can’t, in good conscience, allow himself to be hurt like that if there’s something he can do to stop it. Because he’s not stupid.
So. He does his best to—like Dean. Just as much as he’s supposed to. But Dean has a way of pushing back—mentally, physically, to the point of self-detriment. Here’s the thing about Dean: he tries too hard. Loves too hard. Lives hard enough for three lifetimes when all he’s got in him is a quarter of one.
And here’s the thing about loving Dean: he does. He doesn’t want to. In all his life, it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.
And he’s pretty sure he’s been alive for a long, long time.
Dean’s dying.
He always thought there’d be more to it than that, but there isn’t. That’s just the way it is.
Dean’s dying.
They won’t let Castiel into the room, but he knows regardless. He knows standing outside the hospital. He knows from halfway down the road. He knows the way Anna told him he would—in an all-over sort of pain. A full-body numbness. A constant aching agony at the back of his head. A sympathetic heaviness in his chest. A sureness that comes pulsing back with every beat of his heart.
He’s dying. He’s dying. He’s dying.
He waits outside the hospital. He can almost—feel the rumbling approach of a big black car vibrating up through his feet. So he knows when it leaves the hospital, too. He can barely explain it, this rootedness he feels to the earth and all the things around him now, the way his consciousness seems to spread in concentric circles from the swimming hole. How he feels like he’s—in more than one place now. He’s here. He’s at the swimming hole. He’s on the blood-soaked patch of earth where his dad bled out. He’s beneath the ground where the burnt-out pattern of feathers, of angel’s wings, extends to the clay of the soil, an echo of a scream to the Earth’s very core.
And then, before he knows what he’s even done, he’s at Dean’s room. Even though he didn’t know where it was, and he never stopped to ask, and he’s certain he’s not allowed. And some part of him that’s still just inside his body, the part of him that still lives inside his brain, sort of thought that maybe this wouldn’t be the case, and he wouldn’t get here and see what he already knew:
Dean’s dying.
He remembers his grandmother in hospice, in another lifetime. Just like with her, there are monitors on him, and an IV, but there’s none of the pretense that they’re trying to do anything other that make him comfortable. His bed is tilted all the way up, so he’s sitting nearly vertical, which has always helped him breathe before when he was having troubles, but it’s clearly not helping now.
Each and every one of Dean’s hard-won breaths sounds like pure suffering. It’s instinct, at this point, pure and simple, his body’s last ditch efforts to keep from suffocating. He’s profoundly unconscious, and each sucking drag of breath sounds so useless, brings in so little air, that his poor tired body tries to pull in another sharp, gasping suck of it almost immediately. Breath after breath after breath, solid in his chest, visible effort in the sharp rise and fall of it, and working that hard just to breathe? He’s going to get very tired, very very quickly.
He can’t bring himself to step further into the room, especially not when he feels what must be Bobby’s feet treading heavily down the hallway. There’s a resigned weight to them, and he wants to be here just as little as Castiel does. So Castiel lays two fingers against his lips, casts the sentiment roughly into the room, and then, he leaves.
It’s hard to leave him. But if there’s one thing that can be said for Dean, for Dean’s short life, for Dean’s dying in a hospital bed at the tender age of seventeen, it’s that he always—did. He always acted. Even if it was just to act out like an idiot.
The path of least resistance is probably to sit by his hospital bed and cry until someone from Dean’s family kicked him out or Dean, inevitably, just stopped breathing—whichever came first. But Dean—Dean would want him to try every goddamn thing at his disposal, and there’s one—massive thing. One massive, terrifying thing that he knows he can do now. And it would be disingenuous not to do all he could.
It’s cold, still, at the swimming hole. Like it was yesterday, when he arrived to the same place, the same parking spot, with Dean driving. Only today, the chill isn’t so—profound. Doesn’t feel unnatural. It’s just the regular old incoming change of the season, the encroaching fall and all that comes with it. His—senior year of high school, he thinks, like he’s thinking in a foreign language, is supposed to be starting in less than a week. He thinks his mother might be waiting for him at home. He wrinkles his nose. Can hardly recognize all the disparate elements in his head. It’s not that he doesn’t know these parts of himself or recognize them as a part of himself, but sometimes he’ll blink his eyes, and it will feel just as long as these last seventeen years and—
His head’s all fucked up.
He unbuckles his seatbelt, wants to laugh at the notion of a seatbelt while Dean’s legal guardian probably signs his DNR at the hospital.
He tries not to think of Bobby’s face. Grim, tired, accepting. He wonders if he’ll cry.
Dean’s green Game Boy burns a hole in his pocket. He kept it, coming out, but he left everything else, which feels criminally irresponsible. Bobby just left a heap of weird mystical weapons on the beach, but then, it’s no secret that Bobby had other things on his mind the last time he was here.
Castiel descends the stairs with a straight back, surveys the curling, potent green of the swimming hole in burgeoning winter. In the dark of the overcast sky, he can see the brightness of the glow beneath the surf ramp up in intensity, degree by degree, the further he descends. That’s the—grace, he thinks, testing the word out in his head. It sounds wrong, but it comes along with another word in his head that makes the chittering voices absolutely sing.
He loses time. Whites out between stairs, between steps on the sand across the beach. Comes to with his hands trailing the steep canyon walls, with sand seeping into his shoes in the middle of the beach, with two booted feed in the water. He’s not sure if the little whites in his consciousness are him feeling everything or him feeling nothing. Because there’s an aching pit inside him that’s opened up, but at the same time, it’s filling up so fast he can’t stop it, with something he can’t control.
Standing in the shallows, fully clothed, he takes a deep breath through his nose and asks, “Okay. Now what?”
He doesn’t expect an answer. Not from anything human, anyway. He suspects that there’s something supernatural in the back of his head that’s struggling to give him an answer in a language he doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t expect that he’ll be able to understand.
Most of all, he doesn’t expect an answer to come from John Winchester, who has somehow managed to drive his muscle car to the edge of his canyon without him noticing, despite however aware he’s felt of the world around him.
“Now we do what I shoulda done the first time I saw you standing in a glowing pool of water.”
He—blinks. Turns from where he was facing the far edge of the swimming hole, where the water runs up against the steep cliff. Maybe the reason he didn’t see John coming is because he didn’t expect to see him come like this, with Sam by his side. Maybe it was because he just didn’t want to. Maybe he has a mile-wide blind spot for Winchester DNA.
Castiel hasn’t seen Sam in at least a year, and he’s barely recognizable. Castiel’s heart softens to see him grown so strong and healthy. He’s taller and broader than Dean, four years his elder, has ever been. He can feel the anxiety in him in the way his boots tremble in the sand. He’s posed like his father, but with his hand on some kind of holy book instead of a gun.
“Hello, Sam,” Castiel says warmly. “You’ve been to see him.”
He can tell it’s true from the way Sam’s face breaks. Sam’s eyes have always been expressive, and he can see in them exactly what Castiel felt and couldn’t speak aloud while he was looking in at his closest friend slowly suffocating to death on his own lungs.
Before Sam can agree, though, John puts a steadying hand on his shoulder, pulling him back with a firm grip.
“Don’t tell this monster shit, Sammy.”
Sam bites his lip.
He says, “Dad. I don’t—”
His hair is shaggy and ridiculous. Dean would make fun of him for it. He wonders if it’s only grown out in the summer since he left Dean here alone. He wants Dean to be able to see it. Run his hand through it and groan. He’ll hate it.
“Jesus Christ, Sam, have you really missed step number fuckin’ one? Try it out. Test ‘im. If I wasn’t here, would you just stand around engagin’ the monster in scintillating conversation?”
Sam shouts a half-hearted, “Christo.” across the space between them. He’d seen Dean do it before, and he gathers it’s supposed to elicit a response in demons. Castiel tilts his head and doesn’t flinch.
“See, Dad? I told you—I told you it wasn’t anything—Cas is a little weird but—”
“So he’s not a demon. So what. You heard what Bobby said. Found him with glowing eyes, standing over four bodies—one of which, need I remind you, was your brother.” Sam looks down at the ground. “Bobby let ‘im go because he’s a soft old fool, but you and me aren’t gonna.”
Castiel blinks in disbelief. The pool around him pulsates blue like an SOS, and John and Sam back even farther away from him, from where the water sweeps inward and outward agitated intensity.
“Now, hold on. I know what that looked like, but I—”
Castiel takes an abrupt step forward, the sand under his feet sucking at his shoes, and John Winchester responds by cocking the pistol in his hand and firing a warning shot into the water to his left. He watches the resulting sharp kick of water as if in a dream, and he finds himself amazed because it—hurts. Castiel knows he’s not imagining the sting of it. Like a BB pellet is ripping a hole in his soul. He gasps.
“Don’t you come any closer. This probably won’t kill you, but it’ll sure be a helluva bite.”
Castiel stops. He narrows his eyes. He waits for John to lower the gun, but when he doesn’t, Casiel speaks, slow and careful.
“He’s dying,” he says. “I’m upset too, but it’s not my fault.”
Sam looks absolutely crushed. He’s never been able to hide anything on that baby face of his, and despite however he looks now, there’s still a lot of the little boy Castiel knew left in him. John’s face, however, hardens until his features are so smooth, the emotion just falls right off of them. It’s clearly an art he’s practiced in; he doesn’t look like he’s just been told his eldest son is dying so much as he looks outraged to be spoken to out of turn.
“You shut your goddamn mouth.”
“I’m trying to help him!” He realizes that sounds like a stretch, given that he’s standing knee-deep in a glowing pool of water and generally not making himself useful. “I think I might be able to.”
“Yeah? Every time I seen you ‘help’ my boy, he ends up almost dead.”
Castiel doesn’t have a good answer for that.
“I know what it looks like, but I don’t want Dean to die.”
John ignores him.
“Alright, son,” John says. He’s speaking to Sam now, but he never takes his eyes off of Castiel. “I got a lesson for you, and the lesson is called, ‘sometimes you gotta empty a clip into a monster, even if that monster looks like someone you like.’” He uncocks the pistol in his hand and tries to pass it to Sam. Sam—doesn’t move to take it. Not even a tremor of a twitch.
“Dad, I don’t—”
“We talked about this bleeding heart shit when we first started this. He’s a monster. You’re a hunter. You wanna protect people like your brother? You shoot first and ask questions later. This shit ain’t fuckin’ rocket science.”
“He’s—my friend.”
John turns to Sam finally, waving the pistol butt-first in his face.
“He either looks like your friend or he killed your friend or he possessed your friend or your friend has always been a monster. Any which way you look at it, he’s still gotta go.”
“Dad, please, just—just listen—” he looks like he’s on the edge of tears, shaking his head violently back and forth.
“Jesus, Sam, this sort of sentimental nonsense is the reason your brother ended up dead, and I’ll be damned if I let my other son end up—”
Sam interrupts him to shout, “He’s not dead yet! He’s not—don’t say that, he’s not—Cas is trying to tell us something, and maybe instead of, instead of shooting first and asking questions later, we’d be better off seeing if he can help us with Dean. You want—you want another revenge plot like with M-Mom—”
“That’s enough, Sam.”
Sam’s crying now, big wet tears that fill his cheeks like they did as a baby. Castiel can’t just stand by watching anymore, because Sam is hurt, and it’s a hurt he knows. A hurt that’s living inside of him right now. He takes a few quick steps toward the shore, the blue glow shimmering around his feet.
“—’Cause it’s easy, ‘cause it’s easier than thinking about Dean dying in a hospital bed, or being with him while he’s sick, but you can’t avenge someone who isn’t even—”
There’s a sharp crack.
Castiel doesn’t recognize what it is for a moment—he thinks maybe Sam has gotten through to John, and the quiet from John means that he’s conceded the point. Until he sees the utter ruin on Sam’s face, sees Sam’s eyes fixed on Castiel’s chest, sees the smoking barrel of John Winchester’s gun pointed straight in his direction.
Cas looks down and is surprised to see a red stain spreading from a hole in his t-shirt. He staggers back, stricken, puts a hand over what he distantly recognizes as his heart at the first hard gush of blood.
“I—” he says. “I—”
Then the pain hits him, and he staggers back, like he’s only just felt the force of the blow.
“Cas!” Sam shouts, his voice wavering.
John, for all that it’s worth now, looks at him like he’s completely and utterly surprised, like Castiel bleeding red and dying when John shot him point-blank in the chest is the absolute last thing he could have imagined happening.
And if Castiel is honest, there’s a dissonance in this, in dying, when he really stops to think about it. And not just because someone just told him that he was some immortal angel, but because there was some part of him that was convinced, despite whatever his father said, that he was going to live forever.
He’s not afraid though. Not really. Not like he was. Dean’s done an excellent job of teaching him that there are worse things than this. Worse things than dying, young and nameless and—mortal. If nothing else, he likes to think that Dean would be proud he tried.
He falls into the welcoming embrace of the swimming hole and sees no more.
He doesn’t expect to wake up, but he does. He opens his eyes, blinks, and it takes him a moment of disoriented panic to realize where he is, and why it is he’s completely weightless.
He’s underwater. He’s falling. He wouldn’t know which way was up if it weren’t for knowing which way he was falling, because it’s just water all around him, the subtle, diffuse glow of it blanketing him like a warm embrace. His hand is stretched out in front of him, trailing, like he’s reaching out for something he can’t remember. His t-shirt billows with resistance. Even his shoelaces trail up after him as he descends.
He can’t see the sky anymore. He doesn’t see any bubbles, so he’s sure he isn’t breathing, but he is leaving a thick, distinctive trail of red from the injury in his chest. And looking up at it, seeing the way it swirls endlessly into the skyless abyss above him, he can just about figure that he’s lost every bit of blood in his body by now, even though he has no idea how long he’s been falling.
His heart isn’t beating, either, which is a strange thing to notice, but he does nonetheless. You never think about your heartbeat until it’s gone missing, he supposes, though most people don’t have the opportunity to be alive to know.
He’s falling. He’s falling. He falls. And that’s all there is.
He wonders if this is the afterlife. If this is heaven. If this is hell or purgatory or wherever it is that seventeen-year-old boys go when they’ve done their best but haven’t exactly managed it.
The water buffets around him, comforting in playful nudges and waves. Castiel thinks, maybe, as the horizon of the world around him fades, as his bubble of vision changes and the world beyond that goes indistinguishable, that maybe this is space, or maybe this is what space is like, or maybe this is some subtle brand of the universe’s twisted wish fulfillment before he heads into nothing.
Because this could be that—there are particulates all around him, swirling in eddies like galaxies. There are distant particulates like stars. The whole thing is lit cleanly and evenly in blue. Cold, but getting warming the closer he moves to whatever it is that’s giving this whole place light.
He thinks about everything, because he has nothing better to do.
About his parents. About who his parents are or may be or what that demon was lying about, if she was lying, how much she was. About his parents maybe being vessels for something greater than themselves when they left him behind, about the life-ruining ramifications of that. About whatever brand of crazy they might’ve been. About who they are to him, now that he knows what he is.
He thinks about Sam Winchester. How he’ll go on without Dean. How Bobby will go on without Dean. He has no doubt John Winchester will get along fine, because there’s something broken about him, and Castiel gets the feeling he’s maybe been treating Dean like he was already dead for a long time now.
Maybe he’s not so different from Castiel, then. He’s done much the same. But maybe that’s not fair, because Dean liked to live like he was already dead, too.
He thinks about Dean. He thinks about him, thinks about him. Tries not to think about him dead, struggling to breathe. He thinks about him living and sun-drenched and beautiful.
If it’s strange feeling your heart stop beating, it might be even stranger feeling the first fluttering beat of your heart in your chest after it’s been stopped for a long time. But he’s not imagining it, nor is he imagining the dawning warmth like a rising star. He’s been falling for such a long time, it’s difficult to parse what it is he’s feeling when his back hits something solid. He’s still not breathing, but he doesn’t seem to need to, somehow, miraculously. He notices that the red trail stopped about the time his heart started beating again. When he drags his hand slowly through the water to feel for the hole in his chest, it’s gone.
He makes his first attempt to move since he landed. It’s easy enough—swimming, he can do. Swimming, he is good at. He taught Dean how to swim.
The water parts around his hands like silk, bundles him in a comfortable, bubbling warmth. When he turns over, his overlong hair floating into his vision, he can see that he has landed against red rock, tiered and segmented and multi-toned like the swimming hole. And he remembers—maybe realizes for the first time—exactly where he is.
It’s the bottom. The bottom that everyone talked about, in school. The bottom so deep that no one could find. He turns again, and he sees—
Blue.
He’d be remiss to call it a light, because that’s what it shows up as above the water. Here it’s—one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen. It’s a mass that’s not solid and not light. Sitting at the bottom of the pool, but not touching the ground. The ground around it looks broken, shattered, crystallized, like something made impact there a long, long time ago.
Seventeen years, maybe. Give or take.
He swims toward it, and the light of it fills him. If being here, floating on the surface of the water, made him feel quiet and calm and at peace, then being here in the presence of this, he’s warm. Content. And—certain. Of himself, who he is, what he’s doing, what he wants.
He reaches for the mass of it, the closer he gets, and the caress of it feels like feathers, even under the water, on his outstretched hand. When he gets so close he feels he can almost touch it, he seems to hit the edge of a bubble, and suddenly, his outstretched hand is in middle of warm, dry air. He swims forward, and despite being underwater for who knows how long, he isn’t wet when he steps into its aura, and he doesn’t fall into it so much as he gently floats into its powerful embrace. He takes his first breath in that strange underwater air, and it doesn’t feel painful. It doesn’t feel as if he hasn’t been breathing, and the air around him is cool and soothing in his lungs.
There’s no sound inside the bubble except for the cascade of water around him, an endless waterfall. All there is is him and energy. And between them, there is only one entity here.
He knows, instinctively, that this is him. The demon in Meg’s body called it grace, and he likes that. He likes the quiet, powerful implications of a word like that. But Meg also called it an atom bomb, and to refer to this part of him that way means taking all the parts of Castiel out of the equation. Because it’s a part of him, and if it was ever an atom bomb, it was because he dropped it in the first place.
He reaches for it, decisive, and gets flashes of a former life. A big life. A long life, despite however separate it was from his conception of time now. His head can barely wrap around all of it; his eyes can barely see the things he saw then with any comprehension. And he knows, instinctively, that if he were to take this piece of himself back into his body—
He would be—he would be—
Flashes. Of Earth. Of creation, maybe. Creatures and people from different times and different places. Dinosaurs and Chinese dynasties and world wars. Flight. Space, nebulas, the creation and destruction of planets in front of his eyes. A million things he’s only studied, rapt, in history and science textbooks. And yet, perhaps the hardest thing to reconcile of his current life and his old one, in any of this, is how—aloof he was. How careless. How if he was an atom bomb, he didn’t care where it went off.
Another flash. There’s Dean, and here, the feelings become more familiar. More human. The skew of the lens more clear. Here’s a Dean he could have known, but never did—a Dean he would know, but never would. A Dean he saw from the moment he was conceived, a righteous, beautiful man with a hollow destiny, that would follow down a short and miserable path. Who would be sick and hurt and die alone, just a tool in the creation of the younger sibling. A stronger and more versatile Sam. He’s the Dean that Castiel saw before either of them was born, and he’s also the utterly unfamiliar Dean that never ever came to be, because—
He remembers falling. But that’s where the consciousness splits, because his grace remembers something separate from him. Castiel was born in a delivery room, young and weak and squalling, but his grace birthed all of this—a puncture in the Earth filled a precious font that sprang to life and lit the world when he let loose his very first cry.
He draws his hand back.
He’s Castiel.
If he were to take this piece of himself back into his body, he would be lost.
He would be immortal and powerful and free, a million things he’s craved since he can remember being human. But maybe those were just echoes of desires, cravings left over from when he was an entity who didn’t know how to do much more than observe. Take. Consume.
He reaches for the pocket of his jeans, taking the time to remember that he has a body, a soul within it, and he feels the Game Boy there. Green and perfect. It shouldn’t work after its long excursion underwater, but it does. Tinkling hero’s music filling the resonant little bubble of water and sound dramatically. He remembers how good Dean felt here. Above him, somewhere, splashing in the shallows. He knows he can’t just leave this here, a weapon waiting for the right hands to fall into, but he also knows that it doesn’t belong in him anymore, and it was him, but it’s not anymore. He’s just this. A little human who will live and love and die.
He knows from flashes what it is Dean was meant to do and be. But Castiel fell. Clearly, despite the fact that he only knows himself from scattered cuts of a million-year life, he gets the sense that he never was all that good at doing what he was supposed to.
He unfastens the lid to the battery pack and dumps the batteries right there on the shattered floor of the swimming hole.
He holds his human hand out to another piece of himself and says, “C’mon, then.”
He’s a seventeen-year-old boy with a glowing pocket, driving a heap of a car, and visiting hours have been over for a long time, but no one stops him when he walks, stiff-backed into the hospital. Maybe the grace shields him. Maybe it makes him look less like he’s about to collapse, buoys him upward.
After all, it pulled him up a mile-long drop to land safely on the dark, empty shore. It kept the greenery of the swimming hole lush and alive for years and years, through every season. So much so that he can see the plants there wilting almost as soon as he carries it out to the parking lot, to the waiting Continental. He wonders if the water level will drop and everything will die. He wonders if it will go back to being some useless quarry with a soggy layer of mud at the bottom. It’s a sting, bittersweet, but if this works the way he intends, it will be worth it, tenfold.
Bobby is in Dean’s room when he arrives, stroking Dean’s forehead with a wet rag, which is no great surprise. He’s the one who always has been. And Bobby manages to only look like he’s staring at a ghost for a few seconds before he blinks back into himself, crosses his arms, and says, “Cas.”
His eyes are wet. He’s been crying. Maybe for Castiel, because this is the face of a man who thinks that a bullet landed in his heart and a current swept him down to some unfathomable depths.
More probably, he’s crying for Dean, who really looks like a tragedy. Who is dying, soon, if the distance between his breaths is any indication. If the roving of his eyes in his sockets or the slowing of his heart is. Castiel realizes now that he’s seen a lot of people die, and it goes always goes something like this. Dean gasps and gasps and gasps.
It feels cruel.
“Bobby,” he says. “Is—John.”
“Don’t you worry about him none.” Bobby smiles a watery smile. He gets to his feet slow, his limbs crackling wearily. He walks around Dean’s bed, keeps his hand on Dean’s body like it’ll keep him comfortable. It probably will. Dean always did hate being alone.
“But Sam.”
“Hey,” he says, once he’s at Castiel’s said. “You worry about him even less. He’s home. Resting up. He’s a good boy. Dean made sure of that.” Bobby reaches out and pats Castiel’s face, smiles up into his eyes. He can’t ever remember getting taller than Bobby, but he must have, because he’s looking down on him now. On his kind eyes and his baseball cap. It feels earned. A long time in coming. Because the other piece of himself could be the size of the Chrysler building and used that vantage as an excuse to look down on everyone.
“I—I think I’ve figured it out. I know what it means now.”
“Yeah?”
“Who Castiel is.”
Bobby grins.
“Reckon I know too.” Castiel furrows his brow, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to ask how he could possibly know all that, Bobby manages a smile, just for him. “Reckon you’re just exactly who you need to be.” He turns back for a quick look at Dean, and he’s not smiling anymore. “I’ll give you two a minute alone.”
A minute is enough. More than enough. Because he gets the sense that if he doesn’t do what he needs to do now, he won’t get a chance.
Turns out, a Game Boy works just fine as a grace receptacle, in a pinch. The last thing he wanted was to touch it, to pull that power into himself, even just a little bit. He just had to make it halfway across town with it.
He pulls a glowing green Game Boy out of his pants pocket and sets it next to Dean’s outstretched hand. Then he mimics the motion he saw Bobby make when he first walked in, a calm, soothing hand over his forehead. Cool fingers threading through his hair. If Dean recognizes him, he can’t say it, because every single piece of his consciousness, his attention, seems to be committed to getting the next breath in. A wholly fruitless venture. But he does look at Cas through half-lidded eyes and hold his gaze. Stronger and more resilient than anyone has any right to be. Gracefully accepting death like the selfless prick he’s always been.
“Not today, you idiot.” Castiel smirks. “I’m not gonna let you off that easy.”
He puts the Game Boy on top of Dean’s gasping chest, facedown. He wonders, giddily, if his grace would power the game like a battery pack would, but instead, he opens the battery compartment, upends the thing, and dumps the glowing blue energy straight onto Dean’s chest, just over the top of his struggling lungs. Dean’s face, pale and sweating and underlit by the eerie blue glow, still manages to be beautiful, and Castiel thinks of him, of that, of how long he’s dreamed of a moment where he’s allowed to fix all this, when he holds his hands above the piece of himself and pushes in.
He whispers, “Goodbye,” because it feels right, even though it’s just a piece of himself and a phase of his life, and now it’s a piece of himself that will live on in every healthy breath Dean takes. It’s also the loss of a whole lot of potential. Things he thought he wanted. And he’s allowed to mourn that, maybe, despite however much more this means. He does. It hurts.
He doesn’t dwell.
When he encounters the barrier of Dean’s skin, there’s some resistance, so he pushes harder, hands working his grace, burning a bit, maybe, but healing, too. An endless cycle of pain and healing and pain and healing until eventually, it’s all the way in.
And then Castiel rests his hand on Dean’s chest and guides it.
He wants it to be consumed. He wants the last of its strength, the last of his strength, to permeate the sickness in every one of Dean’s cells, so he guides it. Lovingly. Through every artery and vessel. In every inch of bone, every foot of intestine, every piece of tissue. He moves with it through Dean’s ravaged body until he can see the intricate swell of blood vessels glowing blue like the water under the paper paleness of his skin. Even the miniscule veins in his eyes glow with it.
It’s an atom bomb’s worth of power, but he keeps it in, contained, as it rockets through and repairs everything. Every scar, every scrape. The cut from when he rode on Castiel’s bike. The surgical-straight scars that litter every inch of his chest. He thinks of—every issue. Takes stock of everything he knows about Dean, everything he knows about the human body, every ounce of power he can muster, and he feeds it into creating the body that was always meant to match Dean’s personality.
He’s seen his brothers and sisters die explosions like supernovas, in bursts of white so strong they make men go blind. But watching this part of him die inside his best friend is peaceful. Quiet. A trickle of power for a long enough time, a trail energy from the back end of a childhood Christmas gift. And when the last traces of it finally die out, under the sheets at his toes, at the sides of his bed in his fingertips, at the very crown of his head, it’s not a bang. Not a whimper. A sigh, maybe. Contented.
And then there’s only him and Dean.
For the first time in weeks, his head is well and truly quiet. Just his thoughts and his soul and his own heart, his own breathing.
Dean takes his time opening his eyes, but Castiel can hear the difference in the way air moves through him. Though he can’t feel it anymore, can’t feel the roots of people in the hospital around him. Can’t feel Bobby pacing the waiting room. Can’t feel the movement of the cars outside or the life in the swimming hole miles away.
But he can see this.
Dean looks at him, smiles, and takes a deep, deep, deep breath. So deep he pulls the useless cannula over his head when it gets in his way. His clumsy fingers stroke at the Game Boy still perched on his chest, the black scorches where more power than that of a nuclear generator had been stored inside a child’s toy.
Dean starts to say a hearty, full-lunged, “What the fuck—”
But Castiel, human and fragile and happy, leans down, plants his lips against Dean’s, and takes his breath away again.