Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Something is crying out, a piercing long sustained scream like a mirror shattered, all around him. A voice like knives, a voice in pain, a voice ancient and unknowable.

Loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud make it stop. The mirror-voice splinters and refracts around him, fragments in pain, into pain, more pain, more mirror, more pain.

If he had a soul, it would be beaten about like ash in a tumult of wind and rain. Like a ship in a storm, driven about, no use the rudder or the anchor: he’s made into something small contained by something large, and angry, he’s sure. Is he sure? Is he sure of anything? He can only hear echoes and the battering assault of a voice in pain and… and the tracing and retracing of each moment of failure and regret. His mind turns on a pin, kaleidoscopic with mirrors of shame and shortfalling reeling about him. If this is sleep, it is fitful; if this is wake, it’s nightmarish.

Loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud he made it loud and now the other has made it loud—

It turns into a screeching like the jagged grey sound of splintered metal against stone, a scraping, screaming, reeling. Cas’s mind reels with bluegray sharp metallic sound, his head and heart are stabbed, splintered into mirror fragments by it. It could be aeons, he can’t tell.

Loud loud loud and it won’t stop I can’t make him stop.

He, who has watched dust collect into planets sent hurtling round bursts and flares of lit gas in million-tonnes so innumerable they can be called star; he, who watched cells split for the first time, walls riven in mitosis so that in their mirroring, life might expand beyond its own cell walls; he, who watched the chains of matter lain out like bricks to complete houses of reality; he loses time at its very conception and is himself lost beyond its grip.

Reams of mistakes, flitted through like reels of film, like the material fact of the movies Dean would make Castiel watch, and Dean, Dean, over and over again. Every time Cas let him down. Every wrong word. Every jaw clench, every flicker of resentment, every mistake, every seed of regret to grow into shame. And the shouting, ringing in his ears, a silverblue pierce to the skull, if he has one, here, the shouting continues and keeps him strung up like an inhale before a moment of impending terror, never able to settle into the sorrows of his griefs and never able to snap out of them, either. The liminal space of a tortured mind, cosmic or not. What little remains of his grace snagged like a coat on a hanger, hung by vague threads which, in their stretch and tension, leave him in agony. Neither burnt out nor burgeoning, barely being. Afforded neither perspective nor catharsis, vexed between the extremities of seeing and acknowledging, and forgetting—given the reliefs of none of these.

The noise and echo continues, beyond the constraints and limits of time, beyond its walls and borders.

And then it stops. It stops suddenly.

It stops sudden and sharp as a vacuum and Cas’s ears, or what’s left of them in a place which is itself the very definition of absence, ring.

And then, like being pulled out from beneath stormy waves, he gasps for air in a bright blunt light.

He blinks, perhaps for minutes. Perhaps for hours. Light moults light around him.

His vision blurs with waters, waves, then clarifies, adjusting the haze of light and knives of form which have suddenly bombarded it after—how much absence? Waves crashing into waves of it, or so it has felt, the waves never ceasing because the water cannot be destroyed.

But now Castiel has been pulled from its murky depths.

Jack sits in front of him.

He smiles benignly.

Castiel blinks.

“What’s—what—”

What new trick from the Empty, or his own mind, each bent on torturing him for eternity, is this? His heart is pierced with pale amber pain.

“Hello,” Jack smiles. He looks different. Castiel frowns.

“What’s—what—”

They sit in a vast whitesilvery expanse. Like in the Empty, there is nothing to differentiate ground from sky, earth from air. Everything is one, is composite, is the seed from which something might grow, swell, and blossom into an object, many objects, other than the raw definition of being, might instead be the logical extension of it. If here is being, and the Empty was not being, then Castiel is—

He blinks again.

“Jack—” he says, stammers, as Jack continues his smile which is, for whatever reason, nettling Cas’s heart with discomfort.

“Hello,” Jack says, again. He holds up his hand in greeting and Cas’s chest is twisted dandelion yellow.

Cross-legged, they face each other.

“What—what happened? Where—”

“We won,” Jack smiles.

“You…” Castiel frowns. The silverwhite of being, not yet made, shimmers around them. Cross-legged at what feels like the beginning of all things, or rather new things, Castiel watches his son uneasily. His mind is still sluggish from the dredges of absence he was immersed in, still shredded from the knife-pain of its screams.

“Won,” Jack answers. “And I’m—well,” he frowns down at his hands, which rest neatly in his lap, “whatever Chuck was? I’m that, now. Me and Amara.”

“You’re—” Cas fumbles, forehead a knot, thoughts a knot, “you’re three years old—”

“I know,” Jack blinks. He doesn’t understand, of course, Castiel’s point.

“You should be—you should be down on earth, learning about—not—” Cas realises he’s not exactly the expert here, on living a good and full life, when his has been so mottled and cracked by tangles of right and wrong. Perpetual internal interrogations of good and bad and a crack in his chassis apparently broad enough to split open the sky, or wrench God’s plans from his hands—this doesn’t seem like the source of good advice on what normal is. And yet—he might not be the expert, but he knows what he wanted—he wanted Jack safe, and happy, and Dean, too—

“Dean and Sam are safe,” Jack smiles, perhaps catching a shift in Castiel’s countenance as his thoughts drift.

“How—how long have I—how long was I—”

Cas’s heart is a call ringing across a vast desert white-bright with sun and dust. Or rather, the promise, potential, of it.

How old will Dean be, now? Will the lines have tightened around his slipping features, skin have grown softer, more translucent, with the curious tracking of time over his ephemeral frame? Castiel never knew the beauty of the impermanent, until he fell in love with Dean: who is, in his moods, his thoughts, his worries, the very definition of the mutable, of changeability. A silver pang of sorrow lurches through him at the thought: he’s missed it, already—the stretching of sandy hairs into gray, the creeping of radial lines to cluster round Dean’s ever shimmering, scintillating eyes, to make them more like two bright suns than ever, the joyous chaos of his soul dancing and twining with years until, slowly, it is called home.

What stretches of Dean’s life has Cas missed? Always, always, he was beyond content, to sit and orbit the gravity of Dean Winchester, to rejoice in the smudged gold glimmers of his soul, to find in Dean a new object of praise, of hope, of faith. Faith is a light burden to bear. It’s barely a burden at all. Especially when it’s faith in Dean.

Of course he succeeded. Cas’s chest tightens. Dean, who was so afraid, who was cracking at the seams of sanity and fear, Dean did it, anyway. He tremors with a pride like spilling emeralds.

“I have a lot to catch you up on,” Jack admits. He blinks, sighing. “Well, we defeated Chuck. Maybe that’s what you should know, first.”

“How did you—”

“It was your brother, Michael,” Jack smiles, “and me, a little, I suppose,” he admits, modestly. Castiel swallows, chest stabbing. “And now Chuck is—well, Dean didn’t kill him. He had the chance, but he decided to let him live. So now Chuck is on earth. Living in the story he wrote, but not—not controlling it. Not anymore.”

“And you are?” Cas asks, concerned. Jack licks his lips, thoughts ticking.

“No,” he admits, “I decided, with Amara, not to be like that. But—I thought,” Jack smiles, “you could help me figure out other stuff.”

“Other stuff?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“Like what to do with heaven. What to do with earth. What to do with the things in purgatory, that don’t deserve to be there. What to do about the people in hell, who deserved better.”

“Well, I think you just answered you own questions,” Cas answers, earnest. Jack looks steadily at him.

“I also thought, because you know him better than anyone, you should be the one to design heaven, ready for Dean. I thought you’d want that.”

“Is Dean,” Cas frowns, heart flickering, “is Dean going to need heaven, any time, soon?”

“No,” Jack answers, “but—like you said to me, once—Dean feels intensely. More intensely than anyone. If you could model a heaven for anyone, surely it’d be for the most human human around. Dean’s heaven would be a kind of…”

“One size fits all?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“That’s what I was hoping, anyway.”

Cas sighs, runs a hand through his hair.

“How long have I been… How long have I been out for?” He asks.

“In earth time?” Jack asks. “Not long at all. About a week.”

“That’s,” Castiel blinks, thinking of the crashing waves of what felt like eternity, ad infinitum, which tugged and battered his mind in the Empty, a stormy sea against jagged rocks, “nothing. How—”

“It wasn’t so hard,” Jack shrugs, “I’m basically God now. And with Amara, and after I’d kind of exploded in the Empty, something must have weakened. You were easy to find—not so easy to recover, but then when I pointed out how much quieter it’d be with you gone—”

“Yes, why was it so loud?” Cas frowns.

“I don’t know,” Jack shrugs. “I can assume…” He trails off a moment. “Dean,” he smiles, and looks at Cas purposefully. “There was some kind of fissure, after the explosion. My explosion. And he must’ve been praying—a lot—to you. It must have hurt—all that prayer, all that noise and pain, getting channelled straight to—”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Cas falters, shaking his head. Jack pauses.

“What doesn’t sound right?”

“Dean praying,” Cas answers. “Why would he?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Jack frowns. “Anyway, his prayers were more powerful than anyone’s—they must have been.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why do you think?” Jack asks. “Something about feeling, I don’t know, or connection. Haven’t you and Dean always had—what were your own words—a more—”

“How do you know I said that?”

“I know almost everything, now. Past, present, what is, what is to come. It’s all one, to me. Especially here.”

“And… and where is ‘here’?” Castiel asks.

Jack smiles again, quiet with excitement.

“The seed,” he says, “of a new heaven.”

“Oh…” Castiel looks about. A quiet, ethereal-electric hum does seem to resound around them.

“The point is,” Jack continues, “you made it hell for the Empty just by being there. In the end, I managed to get you and Michael out.”

“Michael?” Cas repeats, turning back to the child. “Where is he?”

“Oh, with Adam, somewhere,” Jack shrugs. “They’re going to stay in heaven. But they’re visiting earth, before they do. But what do you want to do, once you’ve finished helping me out?” Jack asks, with a smile.

Castiel shakes his head, hopeless.

“What is there?” He asks. He can’t return to earth. The last of the Big Bads defeated, what is there left for him, down there? Not Dean, surely, who will have outworn his use for the angel—and barely angel, now—even by the minute, Castiel’s grace dwindles like a dying flame, a fire bereft of fuel, tugging about the nerves of sinews of Castiel in spindly tension.

“Well, earth,” Jack shrugs. “Don’t you want to see it again?”

“We should fix it up, for Sam and Dean,” Castiel says, instead of answering. “There are still—there are still cases to work, down there?”

“Yes,” Jack says.

“Dean wanted to retire,” Cas states. “But he won’t be likely to let himself. Not if there’s still work to do.”

“That’s true.”

“So we should work, to clean up the earth.”

“Not everything supernatural is going to be bad,” Jack states.

“No,” Castiel admits. “But—how did Chuck introduce it, in the first place? He was, in the end, the one controlling the supernatural—the good and the bad of it. Can you control it, now?”

“That isn’t how I want to do things.”

“But you can let them wane? Not sustain them—the big bads?”

A line grows between Jack’s features.

“I suppose.”

“There’s a lot that needs fixing.”

“Yes,” Jack admits. “But I can’t think of anyone I would rather fix things with.”

Castiel sighs, heart a blossoming yellow, like dandelions pushed up by summer.

He thinks this will be the close of the conversation, that now, it will either be logistics, or rest. He’s wrong.

“So the Empty took you,” Jack says.

“Yes,” Castiel twitches a frown.

“You said it would take you, when you experienced a moment, just a moment, of happiness.”

Castiel looks down at his hands. He fiddles with them cautiously.

“Um…”

“What was the moment?”

“Just…” Cas says, heart a tremor, cheeks heated in the unified light of a new heaven—or heaven at least, at its conception. “Honesty. Being honest. There’s a lot of power in that.”

“I’m sure…” Jack frowns softly and intentionally at him.

“I thought you said you knew everything?” Castiel says suddenly, looking up with an accusing frown. “So why do I need to say?”

“You just said there was power in honesty,” Jack points out.

Castiel deflates. He did.

“I told him the truth,” he says, and is comforted at least by the thought Jack won’t understand what he has to say, in its entirety. New God, or not. “How I felt, how much I cared for him. Getting to tell him, I suppose it set me free. That was the happiness. Being free from the shackles of denial.”

Jack frowns. He doesn’t understand. It’s a relief.

“You couldn’t hear him at all in there?”

Oh. Okay, maybe it’s this that he doesn’t understand.

Castiel shakes his head, heart panging. Yes, he heard a lot from Dean, in the simmering and constant embers of his own regrets with the human. Each prayer unanswered, each word bitten out, each angry thought he caught the fringes of. But no, Dean never spoke to him, not from earth, to the Empty. It was always in his own mind, and always memory, re-memory, the circled ridges of regret, spiralling, ever, a coil caught in the chest and head.

He never thought he would have to live, conscious of his loss. He thought speaking and being would be his last: after that, no more speaking, no more being. Perhaps it was cowardly. Now, all he can do, is build, build well with Jack, a place worthy of Dean Winchester.

So this is what he does, with Amara, Michael, and Jack. Riddled with a doubt like bullet holes in the fragile ribbon of a human’s skin, that Dean would ever pray for his return as Jack described. Perhaps the child was trying to bolster him, before their great task.

Well, whether it bolsters him or not, they succeed. Busy at work, distracting himself, Castiel barely notices, or pretends not to notice, the waning of his grace. Jack has shut the lines of prayer to heaven, reinforced the boundaries between each reality: nobody may cross, or slip through the cracks, now. Each remains where they are meant, where they are needed.

Castiel spends the time he isn’t working on heaven with Jack, in the relocated Roadhouse, with old friends. He shares drinks with Ellen and Jo, sits and talks in green lawns with a beaming Charlie, red hair shining beneath a new and brighter sun.

It’s happy, and simple, if Castiel forces up the walls in his mind of maintained, sustained, wilful ignorance. He doesn’t think of his past, he tries hard not to think of his many, many mistakes. He tries not to think of Dean, and when he does, when he cannot help it, when the walls of stubborn refusal cave for brief flashes, he tries not to let it hurt him. The mind is a strange and cavernous place. He never knew doubt, nor self-doubt, until Dean tore up the rule book of his life.

Heaven grows. Opens, as if it has petals to unfold, to lay out against the yawn of the sky. A new and swelling reality, universe, of its own. And good. Good, at last. Something to be proud of. Jack has given Castiel something to be proud of. And the opportunity to write a love letter to Dean—and this is what it becomes: he builds a new heaven as a love letter to Dean.

It will not have an answer. He can live with that. He remembers the clamp of Dean’s jaw at his confession. He remembers the look of fear in his eyes.

A wordless love letter for a love which can never be answered. It seems fitting.

He spans out his time in heaven by the ticking of the earth below.

Jack doesn’t bring it up, too much, though it obviously frustrates him that Castiel will neither visit nor speak of the Winchesters. Earth months unfold; Castiel wonders what Dean’s life looks like, now. Perhaps he visited that beach. Sand beneath his feet, sun beating like a pulse of honey on the air, like he always wanted.

Castiel hopes so.

He thinks of the smile, he thinks of the freckles, he thinks of the eyelashes. He thinks of the dance and glimmer of a soul like a candle held beneath a soft breeze, uncertain but good and warm: Castiel was happy to warm himself by its light for years. He would be, for many more.

He thinks of the anger borne of pain, the sorrow borne of fear, the love everlasting, brimming like a cup which could not run dry though it could, and did, grow rusted.

But, six earth months into their work on the new heaven, Jack brings it up, again. They’re sat on a verdant lawn which Castiel planted, and grew, and sustained, himself. Not by heavenly hand but by the soft tendering of almost-human ones: the necessary dedication of a quieter love.

Cas sidesteps Jack’s confrontation neatly:

“If we’re going to talk about people who should be living on earth, and not running things in heaven, I’d like to add you to the list.”

“That isn’t what we’re talking about,”  Jack frowns softly, indignant.

“It should be. You’re three.”

“Nobody gets to choose their lot—”

“You literally can?” Cas raises his eyebrows, frustrated. “You’re God.”

Jack frowns at the word, swallowing awkwardly.

“You’re too young, Jack,” Castiel sighs. “Too young by far. Even an adult shouldn’t have your role.”

“A human adult,” Jack says, “but I’m not human. Not entirely.”

“You’re human enough.”

Jack blinks, looking down. He folds his hands.

“I’m needed here.”

“You can come back to it,” Cas shakes his head. “You deserve a life. You, as well as Sam and Dean. You deserve it, too.”

“Well, so do you.”

“We’re talking about you,” Castiel frowns.

“No we’re not,” Jack laughs, “you just steered the conversation that way.”

“They miss you, I’m sure,” Castiel ignores him. “They’re probably worrying, in fact—”

“Worrying about me?” Jack raises his eyebrows. Always, constantly, his words remain even and measured. He never raises his voice: this new benign, gentle, child-God. That’s what makes all of this so frustrating. Castiel misses the engagement of an angry God. A new God who barely understands himself and what he needs, and so never thinks of it, is more heartbreaking by far than a God who plays author and director for the need of entertainment in a yawning eternity. “They know where I am, what I’m doing. They must miss you. They must be worried sick about you.”

“They’re living,” Castiel shakes his head, “which is all I wanted from them. They’re probably fine. I was…” But he can’t finish this sentence, a lump lodges in the column of his throat. “You don’t deserve this burden,” he says, instead. “Imagine,” he smiles, reaching out to Jack’s hands. “You could go to school. You could find friends, watch movies, scrape your knees, worry about your grades, change your mind about things, know the power and creativity that comes with being limited, instead of limitless—”

“Why don’t you want any of those things for yourself?” Jack asks, brows twined.

“I’m too old to go to school,” Castiel stiffens, withdrawing, sitting back. The grass is a pillow beneath him, is like the lope of strewn, thick blankets, all around.

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You could do all those things,” Castiel presses, “and then return to heaven, which would be waiting for you, which wouldn’t be going anywhere. You’d be more equipped—”

“I know almost everything—”

“Not—not in an entrenched way. You have a birds’ eye. Not a human knowledge. Maybe you should live down, on the ground. On the soil. Real soil. Among the trees.”

Jack sighs.

“Amara and Michael would be happy to take care of this place.”

“Yes,” Jack admits reluctantly.

“You think they’d do a bad job?”

“No…”

“It’d be like no time, for them, anyway. They’d be fine. Happy. And Sam and Dean, seeing you—getting to raise you—”

“You say that, but they’d want to see you, too,” Jack says, earnest. “How do you think they’d feel, knowing that I’d come back, but that you’d refused to?”

“They’d be fine.”

“That’s not true. They’d want answers.”

Cas thinks about the word answers. He thinks about a tidal wave of consequence. He almost shakes his head and shudders.

“I mean it,” Castiel says. “This might be the heaven you built, you might have built it well, but it shouldn’t be the heaven you burden.”

“Don’t you miss them?” Jack asks. “Don’t you miss him?”

Cas can no longer look at the child.

“Of… I…” He shakes his head. “Of course…”

“You’re barely acting like it.”

“Well, he taught me a thing or two about repression.”

“But you do miss him.”

Castiel laughs sadly. His brows slope. His mood dips into a velvet and hopeless gray. He thinks of all the angels in heaven, the pulsing of light from the fragments of his own form, the worried look he set in each of his siblings’ countenances: a strange beast he was, a strange beast he would forever remain—strange and unintentionally unruly, unable to control the refractory grace resounding off the cracked walls of frame. Is there a word for an involuntary rebel?

He thinks about the first breaths he took on earth. And the last. He thinks of the intrigue and ridged fear he felt at the touch of a human’s mind, the sight of a human soul. All that uncontained chaos, a storm without boundary. He thinks of how he felt, watching them: humans, at once disarray and sterility. Their thoughts were both flat and tempestuous. But Dean’s were… the beauty and tragedy of a forest on fire.

“He was my lens to the world,” Castiel says, which is honest, but not honesty in its full, terrifying breadth and depth. A lens to an unfriendly world, warmth in the cold, motion in stasis. No rigidity to Dean’s stubborn mind, or heart. Only fierceness. Not ferocity. But a wild love, a wild heart. Dean was a fire Castiel would happily watch burn and dance and glint, all through the night. He cannot say with certainty when it began, only that it did. That he began to stand in wonder at the flames, and couldn’t stop. Sitting in his warmth was enough, was blessing enough. But Castiel cannot sit in it. Not any longer.

“Yes,” Castiel admits. “I miss him. I… I couldn’t not.”

He thinks of the equations which mapped out reality, the building blocks slotted together to provide the stars with shine, the spheres their tuning, mist its rise above the earth, trees their thirst, and eyes with sight to appreciate these.

He thinks of life with Dean, how it changed his value and his values and how now, he is an equation which cannot add up, not without Dean as its conclusion. Something in the mathematics of his core has warped.

He gets up, swallowing thickly.

He thinks that’ll be the end of it, at least for a little while.

He’s wrong.

Jack returns, later, when Castiel is busy distracting the tug of his thoughts with planting down.

“You need to go see him.”

Castiel is shifting soil through his hands, bent over heavenly earth. Over the past few months he, in his state of waning grace, has grown fascinated by the steady-sure growth of plants, a power different to the whiteblue flares which burst life and destruction forth: buds peeping up from soil are at once more delicate and more sturdy than the cosmic. Air cradling leaves which circle the eternal motions of life: growth, decay, death, decay, birth, growth, over and over. Not the suffocation of stasis. Yellowgreen springing through green, seams of light hiding in plain sight, like the memory of eyes he tries to rinse from his mind. His last few weeks in heaven, he has spent time gardening. Jack said to build well. Castiel chose to grow well. Already, he remembers with pain and love the lack of immediacy on earth: dreams were planted with hope and left, in the hands of time, to grow. The power Castiel was raised with is impatience. He misses the quietness of hope.

He looks up to Jack, turning the earth over this small, hopeful seedling.

“I have work, here.”

Jack gives him a look. A look which knows and sees the waning grace skittering about Castiel’s frame, a look which knows the quiet and minute work Castiel has performed up here in heaven, now that its corners are propped up neatly and its people are happy. There’s little left: it ticks over like the hands of time, grows and flourishes like a permanent spring. Even if Castiel had grace to spare, there’d be little use for it, here.

“You need to go see him,” Jack repeats, earnest.

“It’d be a burden,” Castiel replies. He stands, turns to face his son. “I’m not any use to him—not any more.”

“You’re more than just—” Jack’s brows slope, sorrowful, “the use someone can get out of you—”

Castiel’s limbs tighten around the burdened, broken vault of his chassis.

“I could say the same to you,” he points out. “You’re a child,” he says, “you don’t owe the universe the affliction of being God. You deserve to live.”

Jack’s eyes turn like planets.

“I know,” he says, and Castiel, ready for an argument back, stops short.

“What?”

“I know,” Jack repeats earnestly. “I agree. That’s why I’m going back to earth.”

“What?”

“You seem surprised,” Jack frowns, “but you were the one who kept asking me to.”

“I just…” Castiel’s words stumble, “I wasn’t convinced you’d ever actually listen.”

And if Jack listens, what will there be left for Castiel to do?

“Well, I’ve been listening,” Jack says, and in response to Castiel’s quizzical frown, continues, “I reopened the line to heaven. I listened to what Sam and Dean were saying.”

“What were they saying?” Castiel asks, perhaps too quickly, a flash of self-conscious—though not self-conscious enough—concern.

“Of course, I’m not sure that they’ll want to take me in,” Jack shakes his head, a little to melancholic. Castiel flickers.

“Of course they will,” he disagrees. “Why wouldn’t—”

“So I’ll need someone down there, to take care of me,” he says. Castiel’s frown grows.

“Jack…”

“I don’t want to go on my own,” Jack says, and says it earnestly. “I don’t want to go without you.”

Castiel looks down at the ground. Verdant grass springs around their feet, rolls back, lazy, easy, happy. When he grew it, when he first grew it, he thought of Dean: imagined Dean getting to lie back in it, hands knotted loose behind his head, smiling up at the vault of the sky. The thought had tightened strings around Castiel’s heart, in something like an embrace, in something like a goodbye. Sometimes he’d let himself imagine himself lying there, beside Dean. Even just as a friend, only ever as a friend. He’d still be a companion, and that itself, would be a privilege. The easy ebb and flow of human conversation. Dean’s lips lifted in affection.

It’s easier to hide.

Jack is asking for vulnerability, which is itself strength, and which requires a great deal of strength.

“I…” He barely has the words. “When?” He asks. “When will you be going?”

“As soon as I tell Michael and Amara.”

“Are they—are they happy with this?”

Jack shrugs.

“They’re adults. They’ll handle it.”

Yes, Castiel supposes, they’re as ‘adult’ as beings as old as creation can be.

And now Jack has learnt to weaponize the word against Castiel, he recognises the leverage his own childhood represents to Castiel.

But at least the child seems excited by the prospect of life on earth. Like a door now opened, he talks of it in founts. He promises to join Castiel soon after his arrival on earth—there are a few more things that ought to be set in order before Jack leaves his post for the reasonable span of a human lifetime.

So Castiel returns, finds his heart forced into returning. But in returning, the last few ounces of heaven left in him are burnt out, some too small tincture of fuel for the journey, a journey made too long by the weight of his own heart and his own fears.

He burns through the sky like a comet.

And thrown through the atmosphere, he thinks of Dean. Of course. Always, he thinks of Dean. He thinks with fear, he thinks of no places to hide, he thinks of Dean’s face as he sees Castiel at the bunker door—probably all parts fear and embarrassment, and how will they recover what Castiel has inevitably lost from their relationship, burnt out like too little grace trying to make the journey from heaven to earth?

He thinks of when he first met Dean: there was no fear, then. His mind ticked and chirruped in a way now unfamiliar because over twelve years Castiel has changed beyond his own comprehension: yes, he was intrigued, perplexed, fascinated by the human he had pieced together from a broken soul caught in the depths of hell and self-hatred. No, he didn’t understand, then—perhaps he couldn’t. He understands, now. If one can ever understand the fascination which comes on a borderline religious adoration. When heaven failed, Dean was a new altar of worship. A man who didn’t believe in angels, nor in himself. Castiel proved Dean should believe in angels. He hopes he proved that Dean should believe in himself.

It’s these thoughts: thoughts of the wonder of creation which did not strike, but pierced Castiel, when he first laid eyes on him, when life was breathed into Dean’s lungs and electric surges of neuron began, once again, their rapid and intense firing, when blood swilled and filled the extremities of Dean’s limbs and paper-thin layers of his skin. It’s these thoughts: the barn, when Dean’s knife pierced him like the wonder in Castiel’s heart, a silver shard which, long after the knife was withdrawn, could never be removed. Castiel would have burned heaven from the face of the sky for the hands which held that knife, for the cause of all that wonder. He very nearly did, and several times.

Thoughts singed not with regret but nostalgia which drag Castiel’s mind from the contrition of the present to the sparking beauty of the past, thoughts which, singed with so much longing, must drag Castiel’s flight from the bunker all the way to the barn. His mind drifted that way—why shouldn’t his body follow?

He lands at the barn. It smells faintly of rot, that sweetsour scent caught on the air like a note of music played and held to the point of an oranged thrumming.

He looks up at its great mass, a portrait against a receding skyline, a setting sun brushing amber and coral against the clouds. He remembers entering, those years ago. A breath in the life of heaven. A new lifetime, to Castiel. He remembers delivering his message. He remembers Dean.

Part warrior, part messenger. But the war is fought, and won, and who is there left to be a mouthpiece for? We have work for you, he’d said, to Dean, like a promise. But now, what work could there be for Castiel?

Well, his heart dips, he needs to return to the bunker, if nothing else. Jack will arrive and have no idea where he is. But how can he get there? The last of his grace has seared and smoked into ash, into ether. Some vague mist of it might shimmer around him, but this is it, the final chapter in his life as some kind of being eternal. Now, he is nothing but vulnerability: no money, little knowledge, no weapons. A baby in a trenchcoat. Gray shame crawls at his features. No food. No means of travel—could he walk it, to the bunker? Is that even possible?

Well, he has no other option. He can’t leave Jack.

And, he sighs to himself, Jack knew exactly what he was doing when he said he was going back to earth.

There’s nothing else to do. He starts the long journey home—if home is what he can call it.

Somewhere along the road, he manages to hail down a car, and is given a ride for some of the way, until their paths split. Further along, a pickup truck pulls over—in the front, there are no seats, and in the back sit a handful of people under rough blankets in the dark. He sits with them. They drive beyond the stretch of dawn.

Until then, the stars sweep above his head in a sky like a canvas: deep, inky blue spilled across it, and through the blue, more blue, and black, and silvery clouds, white mists, muting the blanket-view of night. The dark swims around them, the people speak a little, voices like bubbles in a quiet stream in a forest thick with trees and silence, they share their blankets with Castiel, smile at him with eyes glittering in the night.

Finally, Castiel gets off. He thanks the driver, who shrugs, and doesn’t complain when he again apologises that he has no money to offer as gratitude. He was lucky—but maybe there’s some guiding hand, here, keeping him safe. He walks, continues walking, until the midday sun slips into evening, and the sunset is smothered by grim, unpromising clouds. Still beautiful, though. Always beautiful.

And he’s close.

Each step is an inch for his heart to sink lower into his gut; his hands are cold but not only from the storm-promise chill in the air, also from nerves. If nothing else, he has Jack, in this life, and caring for Jack is enough, of course it is enough—but being made to leave, again, a thought which lodges thick sharp rocks in his throat, that is too much.

The sky crackles above him. He breathes in deep: petrichor: the aggravation of dust, bacteria, small particles of rock, before a storm. Once, Castiel had been able to make out each of these particles, riding the air like sand in whipping winds. Not any longer—but the memory is there, like a phantom limb.

The clouds cluster. Heaven’s vault is crumpled like paper. All around him sings, reverberates, with the earthdeep promise of rain.

Well, he was lucky, so far, on his journey. It’s only right that he should be drenched for the last portion of it. Castiel presses forward, mind reeling with possibilities, excuses, to say to Dean, when they see each other. But Dean doesn’t deserve lies. He deserves the truth, deserved the truth, when Castiel was taken by the Empty, just as much as Castiel deserved to speak it. At last, at last, at long last.

The rain falls. The rain falls like prayers. Prayers answered, or unheard? Castiel presses forward, until he is indistinguishable from the downpour, until in the distance, in the dark, the great looming figure of the bunker is just in sight.

The cold extends knives of ice through his lungs. He needs sleep, he knows—and food, it’s been over a day, and his head is fuzzy, the only thing anchoring him to the dampened dust of the road beneath him is the cold. And the rain, rain like cold and liquid metal, pebbles down. Pinpricks are raised along Castiel’s arms.

He’ll leave Dean’s life, if that’s what he needs. If it hurts Dean too much, to have Castiel around, he’ll leave. Like a planet thrown off from the orbit of some bright star, Castiel will leave, if it’s what Dean needs. He’ll do whatever Dean needs.

Down the road, through the rain, surrendering to the vulnerability his last words have left him in: I love you. Goodbye, Dean. He’ll have to face them. There was comfort in thinking he wouldn’t. But he’ll have to face them. Turn toward them, and Dean, as the earth turns toward the sun each morning. Or away from it, each night.

The air, the cold, the rain.

Rain like a human heartbeat.

Rain like the tug of the tide.

Rain like the birth of the universe. Creation falling all around.

Perhaps he and Dean will stay friends. Perhaps Castiel will live in a little house with a garden. Jack will grow and learn and have a life, and live it, be able to live it. Cas will see his friends and be thankful for the opportunity to be, to find, to practice and create his own happiness. Whatever it might look like now. Castiel is lucky, so lucky, to be in the world, a world of such broken beauty. This is the world, he is in it, it is beautiful. The rain comes shivering down, silver against the inked blueblack of the sky. It thrums at the ground like fingertips on the skin of a drum.

Maybe this is atonement, to have rebuilt a heaven Castiel betrayed, destroyed, was rejected by, only to return to the earth, the man, he loved—with no hope or knowledge of what he might be met by, what his answer might be. Castiel’s love was a resounding dream within a dream. But maybe this is walking with hope.

Maybe this is atonement, for it all: the air, the cold, the rain—and thoughts of Dean.

And Dean.

Perhaps it’s exhaustion, or hunger, or hope, or desperation—or some seductive cocktail of all of these: but he almost stops short. His footsteps seem louder but his treads are light with disbelief. It’s his shape, his outline, and Dean, or Castiel’s vision of Dean, has stopped short, stares through the darkness which shimmers with falling waters.

If this is a dream, it’s purer than any he’s had. It sounds like the kind of question theologians or children alike might ask each other: do angels dream? Castiel could answer it for them: yes, but never this sweetly.

But surely this is—

Surely—

But it is Dean, Dean, who starts forward, a step all fear which jolts fear through Castiel, too—but Dean has the look he had, that night in the barn, minus the distrust, this time only disbelief; minus the anger, this time only awe. Awe at Castiel? He understood the awe then: he was an angel, and the first Dean had seen and comprehended—but now? He’s human, and hurt, and sodden.

Dean’s voice is like the shell of some small creature caught in the restless movements of a wave.

“Ca—Cas?”

Castiel’s being dissolves.

Dean, Dean Winchester, eyes bleeding sunlight in the rain

Castiel is used to hearing prayers. Dean’s words ring with the same music.

“Cas,” Dean says, voice rough in the soft sleet of rain. Adoration makes intricate work of the strings of Cas’s heart, weaves hope in with belief. “Cas,” Dean repeats, stepping forward once, twice, a stumble of footfalls, rainfalls, against the path. “Cas,” again, in a tone to mirror the disbelief in Castiel’s heart that Dean would sound joyful, riddled with disbelief, with a knot of hope, at the sight of him.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel answers, chest trilling. He can barely speak the words.

Castiel is used to hearing prayers. He isn’t used to offering them.

Dean answers with a gasping noise, and staggers, and staggers forward, saying, “Cas—it’s—it’s really you—” a silly and strange statement, Castiel thinks, but can only think it for a moment, because arms, desperate, hot in the cold of the rain, are thrown around Castiel’s frame, tug him close with something fierce as a forest on fire. Castiel, with yellowed fear, moves to hug Dean back. Dean’s chest is still against Cas’s, as though filled with the same trepidation which douses Cas’s insides. Dean’s barely breathing.

“It’s really me,” Castiel confirms, and Dean shivers against him, limbs tightening in redwarm force around Cas’s frame.

“God,” Dean chokes. Castiel’s heart tremors pale blue. What’s Dean thinking? What’s he doing? He hasn’t let go—still. Normally, by now, he would’ve let go.

“No,” Castiel shakes his head, “just me.”

It’s all he can do. The awkward rumbling of his jokes always either made Dean smirk affectionately to himself, or roll his eyes—but either way, Castiel was glad to be noticed, glad to evoke any kind of response. Except now, with Dean pressed against him, he cannot make it out. But Dean stutters a laugh into the rain soaked air.

“You’re—you’re—”

“Back,” Castiel answers for him. Dean still holds on tight. Why? What cause is there, for this, and his insistent disbelief? Dean startles Castiel, startles him further, by turning his face into Cas’s neck and inhaling, a deep-drawn breath like a great weight is being retrieved from his chest.

“You’re back. Asshole, asshole—”

Castiel frowns.

“What?”

“Where were you?” Dean asks, hard and rough. He doesn’t release his grip, but he does pull back, so that he can look at Castiel’s face as he asks this. Cas wants to duck his gaze; not for the first time he struggles to meet the scintillation of Dean’s eyes; they move like deep waters, old, but new with life.

“Where was I?” Castiel repeats, indignant. “In heaven—”

“No,” Dean chokes—still, still, his arms are caught around Cas’s body, “Jack’s been back for over a day, where were you—”

“Something must’ve happened,” Castiel answers, vaguely embarrassed because he suspects what the something was. The call of his own melancholic memory, and melancholic with love. “I landed—if landed is the word—” crashed, others might say, “some way away.”

“Where?” Dean asks. His brows are twined, his question his firm and abrupt as the face of a wall.

“The—”  Castiel fumbles, embarrassment and worry growing, “where we first met.” Dean’s lips are parted. “The barn.”

No longer able to see Dean’s soul, like a phantom limb, he still thinks he can make out the itch and shimmer of its ghost.

But Castiel has barely gotten the sentence out: Dean plants his face in Cas’s shoulder, again, and laughs in the rain. His body shudders, probably with the chill in the air, but the rain against Castiel’s skin starts feeling soft, caressing, not cold. Dean shifts his weight back and forth so that their bodies both rock, together, to the heartbeat of the sky.

Castiel is more lost than ever.

“Is that—funny?” He asks, uncertain, uncertain as ever, as he ever was with Dean, a man who always meant riddle as much as he has meant hearth.

“Yeah,” Dean nods, face still curled in, inward, against Castiel’s frame. Why won’t he move? Cas’s heart is an anxious caged bird. Dean’s voice is the crunch of gravel in the rain. “I—Cas, I was—I was headed there, now.”

This can’t be true. This one can’t be true.

The other things—Dean’s disbelief, perhaps even his worry, his concern for Castiel—might be true. But not this. Not this.

Love is a returning, constantly, a departure and return to old sites, old rituals, a creation of traditions to form a sacred, unholy liturgy. Each love is a new religion. When Castiel realised he had fallen, that not all the might and muscle and panic of flared wings could still his descent, he realised that he marked these circles, these orbits of his life, around Dean. New observances, new hymns: sipping drinks only because they were Dean’s favourites, a new kind of communion wine, picking up Dean’s small idioms like dropped coins—even loving, even loving was a ritual learned from Dean.

“Oh…” Castiel replies. He can’t quash the flowering in his chest, reticent as it is. Which drives him to his next question. “…Why?”

“Why do you think?” Dean asks, as though the question is ridiculous, and not fundamental as the nuclei of atoms. “Or—I don’t know, I—I felt like something was calling to me.” There’s a silence, unbroken as Castiel’s love, unrequited, unmutual. But then Dean breaks it. “Maybe it was you,” he says, and Castiel’s breath is snagged, a feather caught on the wind. “Maybe it was you.”

Don’t do this, Cas. That’s what he’d said. That’s what he’d said, and then, Castiel hadn’t minded. Had found happiness anyway. But that was then. This is now.

Don’t do this, Cas. But don’t do what? And why not?

His hands drift—he can barely still them, or think to do so—from Dean’s back, up to his sodden hair. Drops of rain, caught in those water-darkened tufts, track down the backs of his hands.

Don’t do what?

“Oh…”

Dean pulls back marginally, to gesture to the bunker beyond them.

“Jack’s in there,” he says, words almost suffocated. The look in his eyes—the look in his eyes. Dimmed by the fall of rain but so—

Castiel cannot think. The colours of his thoughts bleed.

“He—he told us everything,” Dean states, “about—about how—"

“And he told me everything,” Castiel says, reminded that he hasn’t yet told Dean that he’s proud, so proud, of all that Dean did: he swells with it, in fact, lungs blossoming in the damp air like flowers opening into bloom. “about how you defeated Chuck, how you wouldn’t kill him—Dean, I’m so proud of you—”

Dean brows slope, his shoulders slump, like an exhale, like a silent exhale, like the thump of waves of sand, washing at shells and stones and pain. And doubt. And doubt.

“It’s only ‘cause of you,” Dean answers, and yes, exhales these words. A release of doubt, a letting go. “And we only made it, ‘cause of you. You have to know.”—Castiel doesn’t, Castiel can’t—“You—you impossible—you selfless, impossible son-of-a-bitch—”

This seems unfair. Castiel frowns.

“This is a funny kind of thank you—”

“You’re gonna let me process, dammit,” Dean interrupts him, frustrated, amused, breathless. “You never fuckin’ let me process.”

“Well, then,” Castiel says, breathing in. “Take as much time as you need.”

Dean doesn’t answer. He just looks. And the way he looks…

The way he looks.

Dean, saying and looking and seeming to mean so much—and seeming to mean it. Sound of mind and sound of spirit, and the very sound of spirit singing in his gaze, Dean is looking and speaking, or nearly speaking, in a way Castiel for years had never let himself long for. Can he let himself, now?

Tears, and rain, make tracks down his cheeks. If Castiel leant in, he could count the freckles spattering them. Endlessly fascinating, endless fuel to the hearth lodged in Castiel’s chest, flames licking, gratefully, everything Dean does, says, is. The rain around them sounds like the watery strings of a harp.

Dean shakes his head, robbed of speech, of sound. His mouth hangs open. Castiel is wrenched with hurt, a pierce like the pierce of Dean’s knife, when they first met, clean through his chest. But this time, this time the pierce hurts, this time he registers it with more than intrigue, but with longing, too.

“I didn’t know that it would hurt you, like this,” Castiel says, sorry. Not like this. Never like this. How could he have known? Jack—was Jack right? Dean shakes his head, blinks, steadies himself for speech.

“Losing you, Cas—I died with your death—every one of them.”

This stops him short. Don’t do this, Cas, he’d said—but had he meant, not like this?

“Dean…” he falters out, falters out the name that has been, for the past twelve years, the start to his most sacred prayers, to a recipient who could never hear them. But he hears them now.

“You saved me,” Dean states, body, words, shuddering like the sky.

“You deserved it.” It comes out simple and easy because it is, the truth, at the end of all things, is.

Dean’s hands are tight on Castiel’s arms. Firm and hungry as faith.

“You really think it was worth it,” Dean says, and in spite of the hunger in his hands, his voice is still riddled with doubt. “You really think I could be worth that? You were happy spending eternity in the Empty, for me—”

“I’d do it again.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“But I do.”

With every ounce of him.

“You—you had no hope of reward—”

“No,” and this one is almost funny. Dean living—that was reward enough. It always would be. And love is with hope, always with hope, if it is to be a joyful love. But not of reward.

“Take me,” Dean pleads. “Am I enough? Could I be enough for you?”

The words are hammers, each, to Castiel’s chest.

“Always,” he answers. Dean doesn’t reply: instead he buries his face in Cas’s neck. “Always,” Castiel says again, heart trilling, turning his face in toward Dean. “Always.”

“An eternity,” Dean shakes his head against him. “You could’ve—you thought you would spend—”

“But I didn’t,” Castiel answers softly, sensing the panic and flurry of thoughts of unworthiness in Dean’s words, a blizzard in his head.

“Cas—”

“Dean.”

No answer, or not one with words. Instead, robbing him of breath, a ribbon of kisses, laced up Castiel’s neck like the pattern of snowflakes. Castiel is stunned, a planet robbed from the cloud of stars. His thoughts disappear. All thoughts disappear.

They recentre on one subject, one subject, who pulls back to look, watch, Castiel’s response.

But Castiel cannot respond, or at least, not with speech. He stares, eyes wide, stung with tears like rain hanging heavy in clouds. The sky’s mantle of clouds continues to fall slowly all around them. A fall from heaven to earth, to land in the vicinity of Dean: Castiel is familiar with this.

“So you’re back,” Dean stammers. His eyes are wide, too. His mouth trembles, too.

Well, obviously.

“Right…” Cas confirms. His heart has not ceased its frightened singing. Their next words seem weighted, ready to pull them off the face of something and into some great, new, uncharted depth.

“For good?” Dean asks—and if Castiel didn’t know any better, he’d think this was a request.

“If… if you’ll have me,” he confirms, slow and fearful.

No place has ever had him, before. Would this place, this person, have him now?

“Forever,” Dean answers, and Castiel is lost with the word. “Don’t—please don’t—all I want, is,” Dean fumbles, “wait,” he falters. Castiel has loved, and longed, with the expression Dean wears: frown twinging his features, ticking with the music of a thought. “Don’t you—won’t you have to, I don’t know, do your angel business, help out in the new heaven?”

Nerves flutter through him.

“Well—working with Jack meant… meant that much of the grace I had—it burnt out. By the time I landed in the barn, called down by—” is he going to say it? He nearly did. Called down by your prayers, apparently. The weight of all your longing pulled me, if I am to believe what Jack has told me. Still, still, they hold tight to one another in the rain, as though each of them are compasses, as though each of them is the other’s true north. “What I mean is,” Castiel huffs, nervous, rain drifting cool down his warmed, now human, skin. “It cured me,” he nearly laughs with the thought: now human. “Of my angelic weakness.”

He’s now tethered to this body: what had once been a creature wrought of light and sound is anchored into flesh it struggled, for years, to understand—and was taught to only by Dean. Grace tangled in a knot at his neck, now, bereft of grace, Castiel is the neck, is only the immediate and no longer the sprawling metaphysical. No longer useful, could he still be worthy?

“What?”

Dean looks hurt. Dean looks scared.

The shame which Castiel could hear ringing like rainfall in Dean’s voice, for so many years, returns.

“I’m human, now,” Castiel supplies. “Completely.”

Dean’s eyes are veiled by some great regret. It twists the strings of Castiel’s heart—that Dean should find some offense in Castiel’s newfound humanity—is it that he’ll no longer be any use? The first time Cas found himself in this position, Dean forced him out the bunker, out of his proximity. It had been a wound then, a great and hopeless wound—and now, now that the years have grown Castiel’s love like the banks of a river swelling in flood, now what will it be?

“No,” Dean shakes his head.

“You seem disappointed,” Castiel states, trying to remove himself from the embrace which has lasted, now, too long. But Dean won’t let him. Castiel frowns.

“It’s because of me,” he says, crushed, desperate. “It wouldn’t have burnt out, if you hadn’t come down, and you only came down, ‘cause—”

Raindrops mingle with Dean’s freckles.

“What does it matter?” Castiel asks, earnest, serious.

“It matters to me,” Dean presses, but barely seems able to say the words to Castiel. “You can’t just give it up because of me.”

This shouldn’t be a surprising sentiment, not from Dean’s lips. Castiel knows his thoughts of unworthiness, constant as the dawn, which rise perpetually in Dean’s head.

But he has thoughts of unworthiness, of his own.

“I think you more than worthy,” he answers, and means it, and means it, with each and every fibre of himself.

“I’m not,” Dean says, voice, being, broken.

It’s such a strange thing to see. It always has been. To Castiel, it makes as much sense as the base units of the universe, threads of formulae to compose matter—those he watched as they were laid out to create the chains of chemicals which became those fundamental building blocks of life—that Dean is worthy, constantly worthy, innately worthy.

Nothing could compare. Not all of forever. When Castiel had watched those threads of formulae laid out, the mathematics behind the veil of reality, the primordial waters shot with electric currents to spark life into matter, he hadn’t known what he was waiting for. He was waiting for this. All those millennia. It was worth it, for this: Dean, beautiful in the rain.

And not turning Castiel away, like he’d always feared.

“How many seconds do you think there are?” Castiel asks. “How many seconds in eternity?”

Dean still looks distressed, but now confused, too.

“Cas, I don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Castiel explains. “They stop mattering. That’s the point, that’s the thing. It all becomes meaningless. But not my time with you. Not one second, when it’s with you.”

“You meant everything you said,” Dean says slowly, voice a breath on the darkened air. “Down there, in the bunker,” he clarifies, in response to Cas’s quizzical expression. “Just before the Empty took you. You meant everything you said.”

The cords of Castiel’s heart are plucked nervously.

“Of… course…” he answers, puzzled.

“I barely—” Dean fumbles, “I barely got the chance to reply,” he shakes his head. Tears gleam bright at his eyes, turn them into waters shimmering in starlight.

“You don’t—”

“I want to,” Dean glares, eyes bright with something fierce and sad, a full force of feeling. Dean was always a full force of feeling. “I want to say it. I wanna tell you. You have to let me,” he shakes his head. He’s firm with determination: his words, his frame, are hard and sure with it. “Yes I love you,”—Castiel’s skull, chest, all of him, tightens with this. “Yes I love you,” Dean repeats, says the words fast and hard as the crush of an avalanche. “I will love you until the last, the end—I never wanted to but I did, I thought you were too good to be loved by someone, something like me—to hear you talk about—as though you were someone unworthy,” Dean shudders out, blinks, tears and rain like waters from a baptism tracing his cheeks, “Cas… you’re somethin’ damn impossible.”

Castiel speaks every language there is. Every language there has been. If, instead of the remote barn, he’d landed in the remote village in Russia named Archib, he would have been able to ask for food and shelter in a language spoken by fewer than two thousand. If, instead of Lebanon, Kansas, he had found himself in Tyre, Lebanon, he would have been able read the road signs, ask for directions in Levantine Arabic, talk politics and family and literature. But still, he can barely understand Dean’s words. They knot and tangle in his ears and were it not for Dean’s insistent repetition of them, Castiel would be sure he had misheard.

He licks his lips. You’re something damn impossible. Dean can talk. Faithless man whose religion is love. Faithless man who taught Castiel true belief. Faithless man, constant as the strewn birth of stars.

“That’s what I would have said,” Dean shivers, says the words like they’re the epilogue to some great tome. “That I thought I didn’t deserve you. All that time. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d been braver.”

This seems unfair to Dean.

“You’ve been brave, now…”

“You taught me a lot,” he smiles out. Castiel’s heart cramps with longing.

No words. What now? The heartbeat of the universe. It was always pumping the blood onward, ever, toward this moment.

“So…” Castiel says.

“So,” Dean repeats, inhaling shakily. His head tips forward, rests it against Castiel’s. This moment. Only this moment. Great, somnolent waters wash around them.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Castiel asks. “It’s cold, and I’m tired—”

“I got somethin’ I wanna do, first,” Dean says, voice soft. His eyes are two green fires.

“And what’s that?”

Dean, still staring, intent, intense, bumps his nose against Cas’s, and looks as though the motion thrills him. This says nothing of what it does to Castiel’s heart and stomach. Perhaps he’s so bereft of sleep and food he’s passed out on the road, and this is a dream, an all-too-human hallucination he’s conjured up. If it is, he’ll let himself have it.

“Take a wild guess.”

Dean laughs the words out. He always was frustrating, infuriating, perfect. Castiel laughs, too. He’s in love. There’s no hope for him, not now. When he first laid a hand on Dean in hell, he was lost. Now he’s only further into the wilderness. He cannot turn back. He couldn’t want to.

“I’ve not been human for very long,” he replies. Teasing, to answer Dean’s teasing. He’s learnt this footwork, after twelve years. Thrillingly soft. “Perhaps you should just show me.”

Dean laughs again. He seems—it shoots through Castiel like a bolt of joy’s very essence—unburdened, young, again. Maybe for the first time. Castiel got to bring it about. This is a thought which will leave him dying happy.

And now, perhaps—it seems he might even die happy with Dean. With Dean.

This is the thought: the thought that the two of them might be driving toward some new and beautiful destination, together, that the ending to their story might not just be happy, but good, and happy together. This is the thought: Castiel’s last thought, before he and Dean are kissing. The moment he longed for but never let himself dream of. A moment like quicksilver in a storm and pale moonlight. A moment—a moment, perfect with Dean.

And what next?

The thought is pure, raw, joy.

They’re kissing.

Perhaps it is a dream. Bodies tangled, soaked, tentative with disbelief at first but then… but then… but then a religious fervour, the ecstasy of the devout. Shuddering with joy. With all the wonder of heaven on earth.

Which, coincidentally, is how Castiel loves Dean. Heaven on earth.

Dean pulls back, lashes fluttering with it: the witnessing of a miracle. Binding disbelief with awe. Castiel feels it, too. Feels it, and more.

“Welcome home, Cas,” he exhales. His fingers are in Castiel’s hair. They squeeze, softly, ringing out water. He repeats it, as if to answer the fear Castiel has always carried, of not belonging, of never belonging. “Welcome home.”

They shiver in the rain. They kiss again.

And again.

And then Dean hugs him tight, face in Cas’s shoulder. In a downpour, like a thousand souls falling to earth, Dean holds Castiel tight.

“Come inside,” he says, after a stretch of minutes vast as the sky.

“I mean, finally.”

“Shut up,” a laugh, breathless, another kiss to Castiel’s cheek, which leaves him breathless. “Shut up.”

“What if I pass out? I’m human, now, I’ve been travelling for over a day, I haven’t eaten—”

Dean pulls back.

“You haven’t eaten?”

“I think that’s what I said.”

But Dean doesn’t seem to hear his teasing. His eyes are wide with worry. Worry for Cas.

Perhaps it’s a mark of Castiel’s exhaustion and hunger that the thought leaves him so giddy.

“Why wouldn’t you eat?” Dean frets.

“I didn’t choose not to—”

But Dean is tugging him back toward the bunker, back inside.

“You need to eat, Cas, you’re human.”

Their feet crunch at the wet ground.

“You know, it’s funny,” Castiel frowns, “after observing humanity for the entirety of its existence, I’d never noticed that you needed to eat. Surprising I missed it—it’s such a big detail—”

Dean stops. He turns. He squints. Then he smiles.

“Most sarcastic angel in the garrison,” he says. His hand moves, nervous, to Castiel’s cheek. Castiel’s heart spikes. Dean’s seems to, as well.

“Not angel, anymore,” Castiel points out. Dean’s lips twitch. His thumb grazes the ridge of Castiel’s cheekbone a moment, before he removes his hand.

“No,” he admits. “Human, now. And here.”

“And here,” Castiel smiles.

Dean tugs his hand again. His grip is tight with the ecstasy of disbelief in the face of truth. They head inside, and down the stairs.

His hand slips from Castiel’s when Sam exclaims, and bolts toward them to hug Cas fiercely, at the sight of him. Sam doesn’t seem to have noticed the new physical proximity between Dean and Castiel.

“Dude,” Sam laughs, as Cas awkwardly pats his back with stiff arms. “You’re okay.”

“Not for long, if you keep bone-crushing him, dude,” Dean glares, pushing at Sam. “And he hasn’t eaten—”

“Well, that’s fine, isn’t it?” Sam asks with a frown, not releasing his grip.

“No, he’s human, now.”

“He’s what?”

Sam pulls back, finally, hands gripping tight at either of Cas’s arms. Ouch. Too tight. Eileen has reached them, having walked where Sam bounded over, and hugs Castiel in greeting. Finally Sam lets go completely.

“Human,” Cas answers. “The last of my grace burnt out.”

“And he hasn’t eaten, or slept,” Dean glares, “so—”

“So go make him some food,” Sam rolls his eyes. “There’s your solution.” Dean offers his brother an obscene gesture. Castiel jolts when something wet touches his hand. He jumps again when he looks down and realises his hand is getting licked by a dog.

“That’s Miracle,” Dean says, still by Cas’s side, and Castiel can practically hear the pinkness in his cheeks. “He’s—uh—he’s my dog.”

“You got a dog?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Dean rubs the back of his neck. “He—uh—he’s really good,” he smiles, “you’ll love him—”

Castiel glances down at the mess of dog at his feet. Barely a dog. More like a haybale. It pants and stares expectantly up at him, eyes bright and big and black, tail wagging. Something in its countenance is expectant.

“Dude, you have to say hello to him,” Dean almost laughs, and Castiel offers him a frown, before looking back down at the dog.

“Hello,” he says.

Dean does laugh, now, and loudly.

“Not like that, ass,” he rolls his eyes, and takes Castiel’s hand, and guides it onto the dog’s head. “Like this.”

The dog seems very pleased at the touch. It bows, before jumping up again, nosing at Castiel’s leg for more attention.

“Dean, aren’t you gonna get Cas some food?” Sam asks. “Go on,” he rolls his eyes, and tugs Castiel toward the tables in the library, away from the dog begging for attention, who follows after him, body swaying with the force of its wagging tail. Dean glares, but leaves toward the galley. “Cas, sit down—tell us—where did you land? What happened?”

Cas does as he’s instructed just as Jack wanders in.

“Oh, hello,” he smiles, raising his hand in greeting. “You made it.”

“I did,” Castiel confirms, standing, ready to hug Jack in greeting, but Sam pushes him back down.

“You need to rest,” Sam says, and no, Castiel doesn’t appreciate the nagging tone, in spite of the inevitably caring place it comes from. Being patronised by a being under a century old? He never thought he’d end up here.

“I need to stop being manhandled,” he frowns. But Sam ignores him, with something like a small smile at his lips, and repeats his earlier question.

So Cas tells them, speaking over the grumble of his stomach, hands shaking a little from low blood sugar as he signs, tells them about the truck that picked him up, the people he met, how he watched the dawn flare at the horizon. Eileen, Sam, and Jack, sit at the table with him. Finally Dean comes in, with a plate of food.

“You’ve got two burgers, here,” Dean grins, “handmade patties and everything. I remember when we—” but he blushes, and stops. “And fries,” he says, and sets the plate down in front of Castiel. “You need a drink? I’ll get you some water,” Dean says, before Castiel can even answer, “and a beer.”

“—Thank you,” Castiel looks up at Dean. He smiles down, his hand grazing Cas’s shoulder a moment before he goes. Something in his manner is nervous and taut, now that they’re in the presence of the others. Neither Dean, nor Castiel, seem to know how to act around each other. Castiel begins to eat, but it’s hard to balance eating, talking, and signing. His head is reeling, anyway, heart caught in his tightened throat in the face of everything that happened, out in the rain—plus Miracle, whose head comes to rest on Castiel’s knee, wordlessly asking for a share of the food. Castiel feels guilty that he doesn’t share—but can dogs even eat burger? Anyway, he’s hungry. Sam is pretty insistent on asking him questions, until Eileen rolls her eyes and tells him to leave Cas alone and give him a chance to eat at least a mouthful.

Dean returns with a jug of water and a glass in this time, and a blanket to wrap around Castiel’s wet shoulders, before making a second trip to pick up a beer for each of them. His hands, smoothing the thick material of the blanket over Cas’s body with so much intentional care, steal his breath.

Eileen smiles her bright and glittering smile and clinks the neck of her beer against Sam’s when Dean returns.

He pulls up a chair, glancing at Jack, who’s sat in the space next to Castiel.

He sits in silence for a while, eyes dancing. Occasionally, he’ll look up to Castiel and smile, nervous, in such a way that Cas’s insides trill blue and green.

Eventually, Sam and Eileen retire, both hugging Castiel tight and wishing him a good night’s sleep, telling him how good it is to have him back. He smiles shyly. Dean gets up and moves to the record player, and puts on some music.

When he sits back down, Jack begins yawning.

“Maybe you should get some sleep, buddy,” Dean says, voice pressed with intention.

“I’m not that tired—”

“I think you should get some sleep,” Dean says, seriously.

“Well, so should Castiel—”

“Cas is fine,” Dean frowns, defensive. Then, catching himself, “I’ll make sure he gets enough sleep. But go on. Head to bed, kiddo.”

Eventually, Jack acquiesces.

Dean glances at Castiel, and laughs nervously, when Jack leaves.

“So—I totally get it, if you wanna just, pass out, now—”

“We can stay up and talk, for a little,” Castiel smiles gently. Dean seeps with some visible—it’s not relief, it’s too bright for that, some thrumming, glowing yellow and twisty thing—

“Do you—did you—” Dean gestures, nervously, down to Cas’s empty plate, “did you like it? Are you still hungry? I could cook—I could make you something else—”

“I’m good, Dean. And thank you. It was delicious.”

“Right,” Dean nods, flutters an anxious smile. “Good.”

Silence.

Dean gets up.

He hovers over Castiel, like he doesn’t know what to do, before taking Jack’s seat and sitting down.

“So what did you do, in heaven?” He asks, awkwardly. Cas rolls his eyes.

“I’ve spent all evening talking about that,” he sighs. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing, on earth?”

Dean looks down, rubs his hands together nervously.

“Mainly just…” He looks anxious and sad. “Gettin’ by, I guess… Without you.” He looks up, obviously embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t sound like much—but—it was a big deal to me. I…”

“Surviving is nothing small,” Castiel reassures, but is choked that Dean found it hard to survive without him. “I’m sorry I was gone so long… I suppose I was scared. I didn’t know, didn’t realise, how much you—”

“I guess I never gave you a reason to realise,” Dean laughs nervously, cheeks stained pink. Castiel wants to run the pad of his thumb over them, to draw out the heat, to soften the prickle at Dean’s skin. “I’m sorry—” Dean stammers at the gesture. “—I guess I was scared, too.”

“And how do you feel, now?” Castiel asks.

Dean’s cheeks darken further.

“I’m—still scared,” he answers, as if this wasn’t made obvious by the tightening of his muscles within his seat, or the colouring of his features. “I guess that’s—I guess that isn’t any kind of reassuring for you, huh?” He looks up at Castiel, nervous and self-depreciating.

“I understand,” Castiel answers. He peers earnestly at Dean. “I hid out in heaven, for six of your earth months.” Dean laughs at this, blinking. “I understand,” he repeats.

“Well, I also got a dog,” Dean supplies, when Miracle comes over and noses at his hands. Dean fusses at the dog’s ears, bends to press a kiss to the top of its head. He glances back up at Cas. “You’ll love him,” he says, and Castiel can’t tell if it’s an instruction, or a promise. He smiles.

“If you love him, then inevitably, I’ll follow suit.”

As with all things.

Dean sits up again, eyes suddenly glassy.

“Right,” he blinks, mouth twitching. He draws in a stuttering breath. He smiles at Castiel, blinking, lashes fluttering, blinking more. “Right,” he repeats. He rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “I got a job, too,” he says, as though he tries to distract himself with the words.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Castiel smiles. “So you’re not hunting, anymore?”

Dean shifts.

“No,” he says, “I’m still hunting.”

“Why?”

“Why does it matter?” He frowns.

“Because I want you safe,” Castiel answers, brows twined. Dean’s lips part. It makes Cas’s insides clamp up.

“Yeah?” Dean asks, all breathless hope. It makes Castiel laugh; the absurdity, at this point, of asking, of needing it confirmed.

“Of course,” he says. “And what’s the new job?”

“I’m—” Dean answers, with a loose smile, and pink cheeks, “I’m gonna be a firefighter. Like I wanted to be, when I was a kid.”

“Saving people,” Castiel says, heart warm, heart so warm it could be sat next to the sun. Which—well. He’s sat with Dean. It makes sense.

“Yeah,” Dean confirms. “Just more conventionally than… what I’m used to.”

“I’m proud of you,” Castiel says, and cannot, and would not, for all the world, stop looking at Dean.

“Shut up,” Dean laughs, breathless, but he leans forward and tangles his hand in Castiel’s. Both of them seem surprised by it. “So,” Dean says, obviously startled by his own gesture, though he doesn’t let go of Castiel’s hand, “you… you’ll probably want to get a job, too.”

“Are you going to start charging me rent?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“No,” Dean leans back with a grin, rolling his eyes. His wooden chair creaks. Still, their hands are tangled.

“I saved your life.”

“What, so now I have to spend the rest of forever, financially supporting you?” Dean asks, laughing. “You lazy son-of-a—”

“What do you think I should do?” Castiel asks. “I, uh, don’t have much in the way of experience…”

“Whatever you do, we’ll make it work,” Dean shakes his head. His thumb grazes Castiel’s knuckles. The touch could send him to sleep.

“Make it work?” Castiel repeats. Drowsiness steeps his insides. He blinks.

“Yeah,” Dean confirms with a laugh. “Like, whatever you do, we’ll—y’know—figure out a way to make ends meet.”

“We,” Castiel repeats, looking at Dean.

“Unless you,” Dean flushes, “I don’t know—wanted to do it on your own…”

“No,” he shakes his head. “With you. Everything. It’s all better, with you.”

The moment is still and soft and quiet.

“You… you too.”

Silence, and only their hands entwined. Dean licks his lips nervously, with a smile. He squeezes Cas’s hand. The record spins lazily, the side they were listening to has long finished. Dean gets up and lifts the needle, flicking through his collection before replacing the current record with something new. He turns to Castiel.

“You know how to dance?” He asks, turning.

“What?”

“D’you know how to dance?” Dean repeats. He steps away from the record player, back towards where Castiel sits.

“I—”

Dean holds out a hand to him. Cas looks up at him, nervous.

“After this, you can go to sleep,” he promises. “But humour me, for now.”

Castiel takes a steadying breath, then takes a hold of Dean’s hand. He discards the blanket Dean had wrapped around him, on his chair.

“Alright,” he acquiesces, standing. Dean pulls him close, Castiel’s chest is bound tight with ropes half hope, half fear. Dean laughs breathlessly, his nose close to grazing Cas’s cheek. “I suppose I’ll count it as—induction, some kind of training, now that I’m—”

“Human,” Dean smiles, finishing off for him. “Staying here.”

Castiel pulls back a fraction, only a fraction, to look at Dean.

“Staying here?” He repeats. “Here?”

Dean’s heart starts flittering nervously. Castiel can feel it against his own chest.

“If… If you want that,” Dean says. He guides Castiel’s hand to his waist. Both of them look up at each other, at the same moment.

“I—” he stammers. “It’d be—a dream, a dream of a dream—”

“A shared dream, then,” Dean says, with a breathless laugh. He slips his free hand onto Castiel’s shoulder.

“Shared,” Castiel repeats.

“And real,” Dean says. “Not just…” Their faces are close. Time, all of time, glimmers around them. “Not just a dream, anymore.”

“Strange…” Castiel murmurs.

“Right?” Dean asks, and his eyes are dancing. And both of them are dancing. And they dance around the fringes of something great, and new, and beautiful and terrifying as the start of all things, the birth of the universe—and in a way, this is a birth of the universe, a beginning of some new story, which both of them have the chance to write themselves, for themselves. And they dance at the end of the first chapter. What will press them over the edge, that terrifying edge, the breathless edge of something new?

Dean looks down at their hands, their entwined hands, looks so softly and so sweetly at their fingers knotted gently together that it robs all the air from Castiel’s lungs, sends his mind sprawling in gorgeous green and gold multicolour. When Dean looks back up, he tips his forehead forward, to press it against Castiel’s.

“You scared?” He asks, voice quiet. Castiel can feel the syllables against his lips.

“Yes,” he admits. Dean’s soft eyes crease up at their corners. His brows slope.

“Me too.”

“I suppose there’s… something reassuring in that…”

“Bein’ scared together,” Dean says, and lets out a gentle laugh.

“It’s a comfort.”

“But I’ve never been scared like this, before,” Dean confesses.

“No?”

“It’s the way people must feel, before they reach the pearly gates.”

Castiel laughs.

“So I’m your pearly gates?”

Dean blinks once, gaze intense.

“Looks like it, huh?”

Castiel tries to breathe, but his chest is bound up tight; nothing comes in or out but stammers of air like a bullet-spray of punctuation. In a matter of hours, the foundations of his earth have tilted and realigned: Dean has moved from resenting him to—to loving him, wanting him here, not turning him away but asking him, inexplicably, to stay.

“A religious fear, then,” Castiel comments. Dean laughs.

“Moses at the burning bush.”

“The Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea.”

“The feedin’ of the five thousand.”

“I see you’ve been reading up on your Biblical theology.”

“Just trying to impress my angel boyfriend,” Dean quirks a smile. His jade eyes flash with a teasing warmth. But Cas’s insides clamp up at the word.

“Boyfriend?” He repeats.

Dean’s cheeks are brushed pink.

“Or—or just best friend, if you’d prefer—”

“I like both,” Cas says. “Is it possible to be both?”

Dean laughs nervously, and his thumb begins to graze back and forth across Castiel’s shoulder, the touch a splash of gold against him. Dean seems distracted by the gesture. Castiel waits.

“I guess—I guess we’ll find out,” Dean smiles, glancing back to meet Cas’s gaze. “I mean… I hope so.” He glances back down at Castiel’s shoulder. “And your clothes are all wet.”

“Standing out in the rain while somebody delivers a speech which could just as easily have taken place inside will do that to a pers—”

Dean is kissing him. His hands have moved to frame Cas’s jaw. His thumbs are on the ridges of Castiel’s cheekbones and they graze, back and forth. It’s as strange and bright as a supernova. Dean is kissing him.

Castiel kisses back. His heart is a delighted, startled tremor.

As his hand skims up the curved muscle of Dean’s neck, his thumb catches on a raise of skin. He pulls back, frowning, eyes blinking open.

“What’s this?” He asks, fingers grazing the mark on Dean’s neck—a wound, not yet fresh, not yet healed. His heart twists.

“Um,” Dean swallows, cheeks pinking, “it’s… it’s from a hunt. Gettin’ careless, I guess—”

“Getting what?” Castiel glares. A muscle in Dean’s jaw works.

“Careless,” he repeats, uneasy.

“Why are you getting careless?”

“Why have I been,” Dean corrects. Castiel frowns and Dean’s sidestepping. Dean sighs at the expression. “I don’t—listen, you know why, man, don’t make me—”

“I don’t know why,” Castiel contends. “And what do you mean by careless? What does that mean, here?”

“That…” Dean fumbles, looking guilty and hopeless. “I don’t know, Cas. I guess… I guess—what do you want? What do you want me to say?”

His question comes out ridden with frustration and a flash of red defensiveness.

“The truth,” Castiel answers, evenly. Dean’s temple twitches.

“I don’t know,” Dean sighs again, brow sloping. “I guess I—I guess since you died—or,” he corrects himself, “got taken, I started… throwin’ myself around more. Caring less.”

“Why?” Castiel asks, twisting with worry and concern. Dean looks up. His gaze on Castiel’s—it’s a suffocation.

“’Cause you were gone,” Dean answers, simply, and looks more sorrowful, and ridden in shame, than ever. “And I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do. You were gone, so what did it matter?” He flushes with guilt. “I didn’t think that. But I did think it. Felt it. Does that make sense?”

Castiel blinks, heart heavy.

“I died so you could live,” he says. “It was my gift to you.” Dean looks down with shame. Castiel presses a finger under his chin to draw Dean’s gaze back up. “It was a gift,” he says. “You keep those.”

Dean blinks, eyes shining, before he presses his face into Castiel’s neck.

“I’m not good at this kind of thing, Cas,” he confesses into Cas’s skin. “This—I won’t blame you, if you get impatient—”

“Twelve years I loved you,” Castiel reminds, “and lived for millennia before that. You and I have very different ideas of what taking your time means.”

Dean laughs tremblingly.

The record spins lazily.

“Explains why you’re so patient and stubborn.”

Castiel wants to frown. But something is lit in the hearth of his frame and fanned to flame by the outline of Dean’s curious smile at his neck.

“Half a year I’m gone,” he says, “and I come back for you to insult me.”

“You’ve gotten a few compliments, too,” Dean murmurs against his skin.

“If I have, I can’t remember them.”

Dean laughs again, presses a kiss beneath Cas’s jaw, before pulling back.

“I’m bad at this,” Dean says again, suddenly serious. “I know you know that. I know you’ve seen it—and been—been victim of it. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“This part of me,” Dean answers. “It’s—it’s love, but it’s shame, too. And I could never—it’s maybe why I lashed out, so much. To you. All those years. Or part of why. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Cas says, voice soft, but Dean frowns.

“No, it’s not. I—I don’t know if angels have it—but maybe—I mean, your love for us—humans, I mean—made your people reject you. So you get it, too. Right?” Dean looks at him, pleading.

“When you speak of shame,” Castiel says, slowly, “this is in reference to your sexuality?”

Dean flushes.

“Sure—sure,” he answers, obviously uneasy. Castiel’s hand slides up to his face. Dean’s frame stammers, before he leans into the touch.

“That can take some unpicking.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Dean laughs sadly.

“Again, there’s no rush.”

“But you don’t deserve waiting—or—I don’t know, having to play shrink and boyf—whatever,” Dean’s brow is twisted.

“Shrink?” Castiel repeats.

“Right, it means, like, psychia—”

“I know what it means,” Castiel rolls his eyes. “I just think it’s strange that you think I’d have to be paid to care about you. After everything, I’d have thought at least my concern for you has been proven.”

“You don’t deserve to have to put me back together—not again—”

“There’s no putting back together,” Castiel frowns. “You’re whole. You’re you. Battered about by a cruel life, perhaps, but still you, still here. Not something to be fixed. Just healed. But you’re already headed that way. You’re okay,” Castiel says. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay—"

Dean is crying.

And kissing Castiel again, hungry and desperate, a starving man, a man searching for faith in an old abandoned chapel, on his knees beside a splintered altar—does that make Castiel the altar? Or his lips the altar?

Kisses planted like seeds on his lips. Kisses pressed like the clasp of hands in prayer. Dean is hungry as the sun and draws flowers from Castiel’s mouth like rain in spring. His breath is hard and stabbing against Castiel’s mouth.

Eventually he pulls back and they rock gently to the roll of the sweeping music, sounds soaring and twisting around them, Dean’s jaw clamped shut, eyes shining like mist in moonlight. Castiel’s heart tremors as he laces a hand through Dean’s hair. He’s longed to touch, like this. Even amid this sorrow, this sadness that he feels because Dean feels it, he’s longed to touch and hold, like this. In moments where Dean lashed out in anger, threw objects and insults, Castiel wished his touch would be enough to soothe and steady Dean.

It turns out it is.

This is a thought of wonder.

A thought of wonder, as with any thought of Dean.

The record drifts lazily and the music finishes. Dean curls against Castiel’s frame and sighs.

“First dance lesson finished, I guess.”

“It seemed to be mostly swaying,” Castiel comments, a little confused, and Dean chuckles.

“Yeah, it usually is.”

“And kissing.”

“Yeah,” Dean hums, and his smile presses against Castiel’s neck a moment, before he pulls back. “The best dancing? Usually ends up being kissing.”

“I’ve never heard that, before.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“Clearly.”

Dean smiles.

“C’mon, man,” he says, and tugs Castiel’s hand. “You must be tired. I’ve kept you up long enough. Let’s get you to bed.”

Dean takes the needle off the record before tugging Castiel out of the library. His hand stays tangled with Castiel’s down the corridor. Castiel’s heart is the thundering of horsehooves. Dean’s footsteps are slow and cautious. He stops, nervously, outside his room, turning to Castiel.

“So you could, uh,” Dean fumbles, “if you want—I mean—obviously, you don’t have to, and obviously, there aren’t any expectations, just—if you wanted to stay, and talk, or just—even just sleep—I mean it’s been six months, but obviously I don’t want you to get sick of me, so—”

“I’m not about to get sick of you.”

Dean’s shoulders unclench. His hand takes a hold of Castiel’s shirt. He tugs him in.

They move to sit on Dean’s bed, Castiel cross-legged on Dean’s sheets. Dean smiles, closed-mouthed, at Cas’s hands, folded on his lap.

Miracle jumps up and sits beside them. Dean strokes the dog softly while they speak. His expression grows lighter within the confines of the room.

They make a new language. Dean talks more and more brightly, like a star at its birth, expanding, opening. All Castiel can do is watch, overwhelmed by love.

Eventually, Dean falters, and looks guilty.

“You’re exhausted,” he observes, brows knitted with worry.

“I’ll sleep eventually,” Castiel shrugs, but Dean shakes his head, lips pressed stubbornly together.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” He grumbles, and turns to rummage in one of his drawers, tossing Castiel a bundle of battered, warm clothing. “Pyjamas,” he says, in answer to Cas’s raised eyebrows. “And you—you probably want a shower? I—”

“I smell that bad?”

“Shut up,” Dean rolls his eyes, and crawls back toward Castiel on the bed to twine his hand in Cas’s hair, pressing Cas’s head forward. His lips meet Castiel’s forehead. Castiel’s heart trills. “There,” Dean pulls back, “would I do that, if you smelt that bad?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says, “would you?”

“Shut up,” Dean laughs again, getting up to grab Castiel a towel. Not content with the first two he finds, Dean finally passes something very white and fluffy to Castiel. “Here,” he says, and runs a hand through Cas’s hair, rough with affection. “Now go on. Get cleaned up. You’re probably caked in dirt, after all that travel. You’ll sleep way better, too. I always do after a hot shower.” Dean smiles, as Castiel stands up. “Little things, man,” he says. “You’ve got all these tiny things, to look forward to.”

“Big things, too,” Castiel finds himself saying, looking at Dean. “And you can look forward to them, too.”

Dean twitches a startled, pure smile.

“I guess so,” he nods. Castiel leaves to clean himself up.

In the shower, Castiel’s head seems to grow at once more and more heavy, and more and more disconnected from his body. The steam does nothing to help this, it feels like heavy smoke in his lungs, and he thinks he might pass out from exhaustion. He’s relieved when he can step out, hot water twirling off his skin. He wipes down the mirror and scruffs at his hair with the towel before wrapping it back around himself and heading back toward Dean’s bedroom.

Dean is changed into pyjamas when Castiel enters. He glances up and smiles, and, when Castiel approaches the bed to pick up the tee and sweats Dean gave him to wear for the night, Dean leans over and sniffs at Castiel’s shoulder.

“Yeah, way better,” he confirms. Castiel rolls his eyes.

“Some people might say, you could stand to wash, too.”

“They’d be real bitter people, though,” Dean answers with a grin. Castiel huffs. Dean presses a kiss to his bare shoulder. Castiel’s heart clenches.

This is raw, vulnerable. More so than it has been, so far. Castiel looks up. Dean does, too.

“Too much?” He asks, voice soft but ribboned with nerves.

“No,” Castiel answers, shaking his head. Dean licks his lips, cups Castiel’s cheek before his hand slips through Cas’s hair.

“I like it when it’s all scruffy like this,” Dean says, smile clinging loose and distracted at his features.

“Well, I’ll, uh, be sure to avoid brushing it, in future…”

Dean rumbles a laugh, kisses Castiel on the forehead again. His lips are nervous against Castiel’s skin, like a bird learning how to fly. The hand in Cas’s hair slips back down to his cheek again, and Castiel catches sight of something on Dean’s wrist—the raised, abraded line of a scar which must have once been a deep and red and angry wound, and above it, a scrawl of ink.

He takes a hold of Dean’s wrist and pulls it down to take a closer look. Dean shifts, as though one part embarrassed, and another part tempted to wrench his forearm out of Castiel’s grip.

“What’s this?” Castiel asks, frowning down to the scar, and to the scrawl. He traces his forefinger along the messy lines, and then the angry one.

“It’s, uh,” Dean tugs his arm, but Cas’s grip is tight. “It’s a stick n’ poke, just a—”

Knowing you has changed me.

“What’s that?” Castiel asks, gesturing to the words.

Dean’s cheeks bloom.

“Uh…” But Castiel already knows. He remembers. “You… um…” Dean flushes. He licks his lips, and Castiel grazes each of his fingertips against the lines on Dean’s skin, filled with pain and love and disbelief, which is, he thinks, what it is to adore somebody in a broken world. “You said it to me,” Dean answers. “That night when it all,” he pulls his arm out of Castiel’s grip, but in return takes a step closer, “that night it all fell apart.”

“I remember,” Castiel looks up, from Dean’s wrist, to Dean’s eyes. Both sing, somehow, of pain, and of paradise. “I could never… never forget.”

“Me neither,” Dean laughs, breathless. He swallows. Castiel watches, like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff. Or on a gold-fringed cloud. “Nobody,” Dean swallows, brows twisting with nerves and hurt and something else, too, Castiel watches, chest clenched, “nobody has ever… ever said somethin’ like that, to me, Cas,” Dean confesses. “Not ever.”

“You deserved to hear it,” Castiel shakes his head, “from all of them. Everyone you’ve known. It’s true.”

“Nobody’s ever—” Dean balls his fists anxiously by his sides, “ever made—made love something free. Or so—so—”

“Unconditional?”

“Or kind,” Dean answers, chest stammering. “It was—you were, are, so kind—”

“I learnt from the best.”

“Shut up,” Dean blinks, eyes seared with tears. Castiel watches sadly. “Shut up, you didn’t. I don’t know where you learnt it, where you got it from—or how you thought I could be worth it—”

“Perhaps I should’ve given you longer than six months, to process what I said,” Castiel states, and Dean laughs sadly.

“You had some pretty nice timing, actually, Cas.”

“And what about the scar?” Castiel asks. Dean swallows.

“That was—me tryin’ to summon the Empty—to bring—bring you back to me.”

“The spell wouldn’t have called for that much blood,” Castiel frowns, heart twisting, troubled. He already knows the answer to this, or fears he does.

“I guess I was… desperate. Not thinking straight.” Dean’s cheeks are pink. He looks guilty. “It didn’t even work, anyway,” he laughs, self-deprecating. “Didn’t get you back—couldn’t, turns out—and only made Sam and Eileen mad, and worried.”

Castiel sighs sadly. He tips his head forward, presses it softly against Dean’s.

“Because they care about you,” he says, simply.

“It was a dick move, of me,” Dean says. “Must’ve… must’ve been terrifying, for them…”

“Because they care about you,” Castiel repeats. Dean sighs. Pulls Cas’s mouth gently toward his.

“And what about you, man?” Dean asks, pulling back.

“What about me?”

“Would you believe it, if somebody said all that crap to you, that you said to me?”

Castiel blinks.

Dean laughs.

“’Cause you should. It’s how I feel, too.”

“I didn’t teach you how to love,” Castiel says, and Dean sighs, amused.

“No,” he admits. “But you taught me how to be loved.”

Castiel swallows.

“I did?”

“I’ve never been loved like that,” Dean says, again. “Not the way you described.” He looks down, eyes shining. “I always wanted it, though. Was always afraid of it. Love and shame—which is fear, in the end, right? Just a kind of fear. Is that—” he glances back up. “Is that weird?”

“It’s human,” Castiel answers, voice cracking in his chest. “The most human—you were always the most human—”

“From a celestial being, that feels like an insult.”

“Ex-celestial being.”

“Ex-celestial being,” Dean rolls his eyes.

“It’s not,” Castiel says. Dean presses his lips together, an unsteady, unconvinced line. Castiel could laugh. “I adored humanity,” he says. “But I loved you.”

Dean flushes.

“Okay, asshole,” he pulls himself softly out of Castiel’s arms, “get changed. You’re tired.”

“Yes,” Castiel admits, turning toward the bed and picking up the sweats Dean gave him to wear. “I nearly passed out in the shower, I think.”

“You what?”

“I said, I nearly passed out in the shower, I think,” Castiel repeats.

“I know—” Dean sighs, and steps closer, “are you okay?”

“I think it was exhaustion,” Castiel shrugs. “I’m fine, now.”

“What if you’d hit your head?” He runs a worried hand through his hair.

“Well, I didn’t.”

Dean sighs again, unappeased. Castiel smiles to himself.

Dean shifts awkwardly when Castiel drops his towel and steps into the sweatpants. “Sorry,” Castiel falters. “Should I change elsewhere?”

“No—” Dean fumbles, “—you’re fine—”

His cheeks are very red. Castiel says so, frowning. Dean flushes deeper. Castiel twitches a frown, then turns back to the bed to pick up the tee Dean gave him to wear for the night. As he does, Dean steps closer behind him. Castiel is about to turn, but Dean’s fingers press softly at his back, stopping him.

“Your wings…” He says, quietly, and Castiel swallows, knowing what Dean is asking. What has become of them?

“They will have—have mostly—”

Dean’s hand grazes, frightened, up the rope of Castiel’s spine.

“Have mostly burnt off,” Castiel finishes, and Dean lets out a broken little sigh, something like a sob, behind him.

“Can you—can you still show them to me? Or—”

Castiel turns. Perhaps there are yet some strange wisps of grace left floating about his system. He can no longer tell: whenever he sees Dean, all he sees is soul, or the memory of it. The perpetual dance of light shining through. Like a phantom limb.

He looks at Dean. Dean looks that religion of self-abasement, mix of fear and guilt, that religion he has followed all his life. No more. Castiel wants to make an apostate, a heretic, of him.

Castiel stretches what little he can feel of his wings behind him. Rickety uneven bone, the flaking away of final feathers. The light in Dean’s room flickers and Dean watches the stretching shadows behind Castiel with an unending sadness and shame echoing in his eyes.

Castiel’s grace singes and is left as smoke.

There is the last of it.

And all to show Dean the trembling final flex of his wings.

And it was worth it.

But Dean is saddened. Deeply and resoundingly.

“You look upset.”

“All of this is my fault,” Dean shakes his head, eyes at once shining and hollow. Castiel shakes his head.

“It was always going to happen,” Castiel shakes his head. “I was seduced by the earth, the visage of free will—”

“—In the end, you invented it,” Dean laughs, though it’s a hollow laugh. Castiel is the one to flush, this time.

“Perhaps,” he admits. “But this was always—not fated, perhaps, but. Like the call of gravity. I was called to fall.  It was only a matter of where, and when.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dean asks.

“I don’t know,” Cas confesses, “but… perhaps there was a reason, my grace was always fading, and fading, the longer I loved you. Like the pull of the tide, out to sea. Perhaps part of me… Part of me wanted to have to stay. So I could stay with you.”

Dean, tear-tracked Dean, is kissing him again.

He wrenches back and swallows thickly.

“Cas I don’t deserve—”

“It must be a hard thing to accept,” Castiel admits, and Dean looks confused. “Love,” he clarifies. “When so much of you is doubt, and the rest of you is shame.”

“Cas,” Dean frowns, indignant and perhaps a little hurt, but Castiel hasn’t finished the equation. He steps closer. His nose is an inch from Dean’s.

“If loving has been shame and fear, to you, perhaps being loved… being loved… now that will be a surrender.”

Dean’s lips quirk.

“That what you wanna hear, Cas?” He asks, voice roughened gold. “That I surrender?”

“Only if it’s true.”

“Well. I’m flyin’ my white flag, buddy. Do angels have a history of accepting truces?”

“No,” Castiel shakes his head. “Ex-angels, however…”

Dean laughs, and tips his head forwards. His hands, softly, cradle the points of Castiel’s skin his wings ought to spring out from.

“If it looks like I’m having trouble surrendering,” Dean says softly, to the small and cradled space in-between their lips, “be patient with me,” he asks, and it’s a gentle plea. “Remember I’m a stubborn bastard.”

Castiel’s chest unties. All of it. Loving Dean is an unravelling. A cracking open of a clay jar to find what light it is that lies within. And this light is heavenly. Heaven on earth.

A heaven which is not rejecting Castiel, but saying he can stay, asking him to stay, asking him to sleep in this bed, in this room, in this bunker. In these arms.

“I’m very old,” Castiel reminds, voice quiet with the awe of a faithless man made breathless at the sudden inexplicable purity of stained glass. “And with it, very patient.”

“Now, that isn’t true,” Dean quirks a smile. Castiel squints, and bumps his nose against Dean’s. In response, Dean only tugs Castiel down into the bed. “C’mon, grumpy ex-angel. You need sleep.”

“Do you nag all humans this much?”

“Only the recent converts,” Dean answers, and Castiel laughs in spite of himself, though Dean is distracted with pulling his comforter over Castiel’s shoulders. He smoothes a hand up Cas’s neck, smiling, satisfied, when he’s finished. “There,” he says. “You gonna be warm enough?”

“I’ll kick you, if I’m not.”

Dean snorts, and leans forward to kiss him.

“You’re human, now, buddy,” he says, voice curled by his smile against Castiel’s lips. “If we wrestled, I’d win.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s very true,” Dean pulls back, and grins. “Don’t believe me? C’mon, try and fight me, now.”

“Five minutes ago, you were berating yourself for not considering the fact I apparently came close to passing out and dying in the shower,” Castiel frowns.

Dean’s chest stammers with a silent laugh.

“Maybe,” he admits. “So you’re sayin’ I’d win?”

Cas rolls his eyes. But Dean drags his fingers through Castiel’s hair. A frown pinches his features.

“This is still wet,” he huffs, and Castiel squints.

“You seem surprised,” he blinks. “You did tell me to shower—”

Dean pushes a hand through Castiel’s hair, a little more roughly, and gets up, off the bed, picking up a towel and sitting on the bed, beside Castiel. He tugs him up, into sitting, and roughs up Cas’s hair with the towel, laughing, rich and warm. Cas wrinkles his nose but can’t feel angry or even frustrated: his heart is swelling with golden light. When Dean dips his head beneath the towel to meet Castiel’s gaze, he grins, expression bright like Castiel would only catch glimmers of, for twelve years of friendship. It makes his heart swell all the more.

Dean starts drying Castiel’s hair, more gently, now. He pulls the towel back from Cas’s face, so that it no longer covers his vision. A fixed yet absent smile sits at Dean’s lips. Castiel watches him, cannot stop. Could, for twelve years, never stop. And now he has no call to.

When Dean seems satisfied, he tosses the towel onto the seat of a chair, then turns back to Castiel, and cups the back of his head and pulls him close, kissing him, breath hot against Castiel’s skin, like Castiel cannot believe, he never knew breath could be this heated or this hungry. Dean pulls back to press his lips to Castiel’s forehead. He sighs, and does nothing, for a moment. Then he climbs back under the covers, beside Castiel. Cas lies back down and turns, a little nervous, to face him. Dean’s gaze is soft as summer grass.

“What are you thinking?” Castiel asks.

“That this isn’t real,” Dean confesses with a laugh. “That this is a dream, and a good dream—the best dream—and I can’t even resent it for being a dream. Because it’s the best dream.”

“If anyone has call to believe it’s a dream, it’s me,” Castiel answers. “The Empty would taunt me with visions of you, while I was there.” Dean looks sad at this, but Castiel reaches out across the small space of the bed to drag the pad of his thumb across Dean’s lip. “But I’m not afraid that it’s a vision, a trick, not real. Not anymore.”

“Why?” Dean asks, face twisted, soft and beautiful, with a frown.

“I could never have dreamt, flattered myself, that it’d be as perfect as this. That I could be as happy as this.”

“And you are?” Dean asks, eyes shining. An ocean of sorrow and hope. “You are happy?”

Castiel’s chest is a twisted rope pulled tight.

“I can barely speak it,” he says, and Dean laughs, nearly rocking back.

“I spent so long—terrified,” he says, “not just that you wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel the same. Would hate me for feeling. But I was so scared, that what I was feeling was a trick. Just another of Chuck’s tricks. That it wasn’t real—and one of the best, and purest, and most painful things in my life—loving you—was just—just him, pushing my heart into it. I couldn’t tell if it was real. Turns out… turns out it was the only thing. The only real thing. You—you ever think about how insane that is?”

“Apparently, my entire existence has been the insanity of rebellion from God’s planned story.”

“Right,” Dean smiles. The look—the look he’s giving Castiel. Is this tide of warmth something Dean was dimming, whenever he looked at Castiel, for all these years? How long has Dean stemmed its flow? “When they made you, they really broke the mold, huh?”

“Chassis,” Castiel corrects. Dean snorts, and plants his face into the curve of Castiel’s neck.

“Ridiculous,” he huffs, and draws back. He looks bittersweet. “So you dreamt of it too, huh?” He asks voice nearing a tremor of hope. “Having and—and holding. You wished you could kiss me,” he says, and blushes, “and touch. Be with me. You dreamt of it, too?”

“I did,” Castiel confesses. It should hardly be a confession, at this point. “Constantly.”

Dean’s mouth trembles. He presses his lips up into a smile.

“I was so afraid,” he says. “Of all of it. Of loving you, and not being worthy of you. Of losing you, before I could say so. Of you not feeling the same way. Of the feelings—them being wrong. For whatever reason. Of it just being Chuck, again. But all of that—all of that was fake. It was just fear.”

“Just fear,” Castiel repeats.

“Not real.”

“Exactly.”

“Not like you,” Dean smiles. “You’re the realest thing. In all my life, it turns out.”

“And what about all of this is real?” Cas asks, eyes soft with love. “This, and this, and this.” At each phrase, he presses a kiss to Dean’s palm, Dean’s knuckle, Dean’s lips.

Dean’s eyes shine.

“Are you alright?” Castiel asks. Dean nods, the gesture small.

“It’s weird,” he answers. “Chuck’s show is over. But the story’s carryin’ on.”

Castiel smiles.

“It looks like it.”

Dean gazes at him. Silence, for a stretch of minutes. Castiel’s eyelids are heavy.

“And you look like you’re about to pass out,” Dean observes, voice soft.

“I’m fine.”

“Right,” Dean says, the word curled with amusement, and Castiel realises his eyes have slipped closed. He startles them open, blinking.

“I’m fine,” he repeats, and Dean snorts. “What?” Castiel scowls.

“This is a dream,” Dean tips his head back, laughs, breathless, lungs sweeping into vacuum with the motion, “and it’s real.”

This earns a smile.

“Seems real.”

“To you,” Dean laughs. “I still can’t,” he rolls onto his back, shaking his head. He stares up at the ceiling. “I still can’t believe you could ever… for me…”

“Faithless man,” Castiel sighs, and perhaps the words slip past his lips on account of his exhaustion, but Dean’s expression flickers, part offense, part amusement. “You don’t think you deserve to be loved…”

Dean’s jaw clenches at this. He looks away.

“I’m not faithless…” Dean protests weakly. Castiel’s lips twitch. “I just… don’t have much to have faith in.”

“But you do have some faith?” Castiel asks. Dean turns on his side again.

“I love you, faithfully,” he answers. A vice closes over Castiel’s heart. He swallows. His chest shakes.

“Oh,” he says.

“You seem surprised,” Dean laughs.

“No more than you were, when I told you.”

“Maybe,” Dean admits.

“Maybe you should learn a little about prayer.”

“Huh?”

“Every prayer. What do you—” Castiel sighs, and remembers Dean’s prayers to him. Stubbornly unconventional, a letter which isn’t signed off. “What are you meant to finish prayers with?”

Dean flickers a frown.

“Uh—”

“Amen,” Castiel says. “Amen. It’s Hebrew. A wishing, a confirmation, or a wishing of a confirmation. Amen: may it be. But also Believe. It means believe it. Speak it and so believe it. Well. I’ve said I love you. You’ve now said, acknowledged, that I love you. Believe it.”

Dean swallows.

“Amen,” he repeats, and Castiel cannot tell if it’s to question it, or confirm it. “What do you mean, believe it?”

“The spirit of it: amen—to speak into being. I spoke, in the armoury, and spoke my happiness into being. Now I speak it to you—will it bring forth happiness, for you? I hope it can. I love you.”

Dean sighs. His eyes are washed with sad-happiness.

“Okay. No more reassuring me.” He turns and glances to the clock on his nightstand. “Damn. It’s 3am,” he sighs, mostly to himself, obviously frustrated at the fact he’s kept Castiel up so long. But Castiel wouldn’t change it. He doesn’t want to fall asleep. He wants to stay here in the lingering twitch and stretch of moments that began the moment Dean laced kisses up Castiel’s neck, when they were standing out in the rain. “You need to sleep.”

“So do you,” Castiel points out, stifling a yawn.

“Less than you,” Dean says. “Way less than you.”

Castiel tries to roll his eyes, but they flicker closed. Dean says something.

“Huh?” He murmurs, stirring, and Dean laughs.

“I said, you look like you’re dropping off.”

There are fingertips grazing the hair at his temples. Or, it feels like it. Softer than the fall of snow. Cas’s eyes have drifted closed again.

“I’m not,” he says, trying to stir, but Dean laughs again. The sound is like the curl of a cradling, expanding universe. Castiel would know. And now, he knows the cradle of an ever expanding love, and curl of a lover’s arms. A gift he never thought he’d find himself recipient of. The Israelites, fed in the desert. Job, with his family restored to him, tenfold.

“Sleep, Cas,” Dean replies, soft but certain. His voice is the lapping of waves on sand. His voice is the sun, steady, on the horizon. His voice is a hymn caught in the vaulted ceiling of an ancient church. “I’ll watch over you.”