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“I need to have sex in the next half hour or I’m going to die.”
Dean stops reading the article about a decapitated body found by the side of the road in Ashville, Wisconsin, but he absolutely one hundred percent refuses to take his eyes off his phone screen. He focuses hard on the sentence he just read: “The body was hastily hidden under the guardrail, though the head remains to be found.” The head.
Dean blinks very slowly before raising his eyes to meet Cas’ across the library, where he’s just settling into a chair so that there’s a table between the two of them. Cas doesn’t look a whole lot different than usual, though Dean has always assumed Cas wouldn’t look a whole lot different than usual regardless of weather, mood, planetary alignment, or position of doomsday clock hands.
“Come again?” he says politely.
“Twenty eight minutes and thirty-five seconds,” Cas informs him, glancing at his phone. Maybe his voice is a bit huskier than usual. Not that Dean would notice. Not that Dean has been measuring his erections for the past couple years on a sliding scale of just how gravelly Cas’ voice is at any given time.
“Geez, Cas,” Dean says. He looks at his phone screen again: HEAD. “If you’re that desperate, flip on the nature channel and whip it out to some monkeys going at it or something.”
Cas’ eyebrows draw up like the curtain at the beginning of a show. “I can’t have sex with the television.”
“That’s why God gave you two hands. One for the remote, one for… you know.” Dean’s phone slips in his sweat-slick hand as he makes a half-hearted jerk-off gesture with the other. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He doesn’t want the erection that is slowly but surely inflating his dick like a bad Austin Powers joke.
“Masturbation won’t work,” Cas clarifies, and Dean makes a mental note to carve out the part of his brain that allows his auditory cortex to process hearing the word “masturbation” in that tenor ever again. “I have to have sex. With a human being.”
Dean licks his lips. His hand, of its own volition, curls into a loose fist against the table. Then—
“Wait. Die, like, die?”
“Yes.”
Unfortunate Pavlovian reaction this might end up morphing into aside, an icy-hot spike of fear shoots through Dean’s stomach. Adrenaline is U-turning all over the place in his system, trying to reroute from the south to the panic button further north, nestled somewhere behind the gridlocked ribcage. “What?”
Cas moves awkwardly in his seat, a boner-shifting move if Dean’s ever seen one, and he’s gonna pass out if his hemoglobin levels don’t balance out in the next hot second. “There’s an artifact in the storage room downstairs known colloquially as ‘The Hornbill’, and I…” his mouth flattens into a thin line. “… May have touched it.” Dean opens his mouth, probably more to cement his gobsmacked expression than actually say anything, and Cas continues, petulantly, “With my bare hands.”
Dean closes his mouth, then wrenches it open only enough to eek out a hoarse, “Explain.”
Cas clasps his hands together, then unfurls them and presses both palms to the table, fanning his dexterous fingers across the polished wood. Dean’s known him long enough to know this is less of a shame thing than it is a pride thing, because there’s nothing Cas hates more than admitting someone (usually himself, truth be told, because he’s a dumbass) got one over on him. “One of the early Men of Letters must have brought it back from a trip abroad, because the hornbill is found only in Africa, Asia, and Melanesia. Judging from the now very faded notes and my tragically human eyes, all I could make out was that the figure, carved to look like the bird itself, was supposed to help married couples, uh… ‘get their groove’ back, as it were. The hornbill is a monogamous species of bird that mate for life.”
Dean’s mouth goes very dry. “So when you say you have to fuck someone you mean…” Impending death isn’t really a good time to get awkward, but Dean apparently has delicate sensibilities.
“You have to fuck your wife,” he eventually surmises at the same time Cas says, “I have to have sex with my mate.”
They both look at each other. “… as it were,” Cas repeats.
Dean drums his fingers harder on the table. “So, we have about twenty minutes—”
“—Twenty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds—”
“To get you hitched.” Dean stops drumming his fingers all at once and raps his knuckles on the table. “To a girl.”
“We don’t have to be married,” Cas says. “Just bonded.”
“Bonded,” Dean says.
“Bonded,” Cas confirms. “Committed.” He’s got eyes on Dean like a spotlight, and Dean’s sweating the requisite amount. He tries to ignore the big flashing arrow above his head. He forces a laugh that feels like it was scraped out of his throat.
“If I didn’t know better, Cas,” he rasps, “I’d say you already had a plan in mind and you’re just too polite to say so.” His dick is fully back on board, prognosis be damned. God, his nipples might even be hard. He’s afraid to check.
“I didn’t want to be too forward,” Cas says to Dean’s mouth, “But, unfortunately, time is of the essence.”
Dean deliberately drums his fingers on the table again. Once. Twice. “I might have an idea,” he says.
“Okay.”
“We’re like, bonded or whatever, right? Committed.” Dean coughs, catching up with himself. “Friends, I mean. Like, friend-bonded. Friend-committed. In a friendly way. Mated, even, but like… How they’re mates in England or whatever. Pip pip…” He scratches the back of his neck. “…cheerio.” He clears his throat. “So there’s like. Those T’s dotted and I’s crossed.”
“I appreciate your sacrifice,” Cas says, shifting again.
Dean gingerly pats the back of Cas’ hand. “What are friends for if not taking one for the team, right?” His voice cracks on the last word and he prays to a God who does, in fact, exist, but is also a big fat jerk that his dick isn’t gonna start knocking on the underside of the table like an overzealous delivery boy.
“Twenty-one minutes and fifty-eight seconds.”
“Fuck. Okay. Uh, condoms?” Dean says. “You’re human now, are you carrying any venereal diseases I need to know about?”
Cas looks offended. “No. Are you?”
Dean is definitely offended. “No!” He takes a breath. “No, I’m clean.” This is basic stuff. Shop talk he can do. “I have, uh, lube. In my nightstand.” Before he can think it through, he adds, “For the girls, obviously.” They both know Dean’s never brought anyone home to the bunker, but Cas politely doesn’t mention it. He scuffs a hand over his jaw. “So, uh, how’s this gotta work? What’s going where?”
Cas raises an eyebrow. “I assumed you would be familiar with the concept of sex.”
Dean’s cheeks burn. “No. Wait—yes? Wait—” he refuses to meet Cas’ eye as he searches for the least incriminating answer. “I mean for the spell. Or, incantation or whatever the fuck it is.”
“Oh.” Cas blinks. “Not to my knowledge. I think the most important thing is the emotional connection, strengthened through physical manifestation.” Then, “Twenty minutes.”
“Shit.” Dean stands, then falters. Cas watches him mildly, waiting for Dean to get his ass in gear and actually save his best friend from imminent death. This is peanuts compared to most lifesaving missions and Dean’s still tripping over himself. Bad showing.
He takes a deep breath, then gestures towards the hallway that leads to his room. “Okay…” he says stiltedly. “We are going to go have sex now. Friendly sex. Saving-your-buddy’s-life sex.”
Cas stands up. “Okay.”
Dean gestures. “Oh, please,” he says, bowing, “After you.”
Cas leaves the room, and after firmly adjusting his pants, stumbling over his feet, and re-adjusting his pants, Dean follows quickly.
*
“Nineteen minutes and thirty—”
Dean closes the bedroom door behind him and strides towards Cas. He makes a show of wrinkling his nose for no one but himself, and kisses him. Cas rumbles between their tongues, and Dean’s fists stutter against the folds in Cas’ shirt.
Cas breaks the kiss. “Nineteen minutes,” he murmurs into Dean’s neck as his hands work at Dean’s belt. His knuckles graze over Dean’s dick through his jeans and Dean groans. Unfortunately, as he found out very quickly, not letting on that you have a raging erection during sex is a feat that’s reasonably difficult to pull off.
Dean works at the buttons of Cas’ ratty plaid with shaking fingers. “So you’re gonna fuck me, then?” he says, casually, he likes to think. His voice sounds like a dog’s squeak toy.
Cas sucks at the juncture where Dean’s shoulder and neck meet, a sweet stinging sensation that has Dean hissing. “If that’s what you want,” he says when he’s done, breath hot against Dean’s skin.
“That’s not—” Cas nips at Dean’s earlobe and he loses his train of thought for a second. “I mean—it might just be easiest because…”
“…Because?” Cas prompts when Dean doesn’t continue.
Dean changes direction. “Y’know,” he plasters on a grin as he finishes the last button. “Normally I’d tell you to slow down, take ‘er easy. Don’t wanna spook the horse and all that.” His belt clinks as it hits the ground, and both Cas’ hands press firmly to either side of Dean’s waist, fingertips teasing beneath the waistband of Dean’s boxer-briefs. He presses his lips to Dean’s Adam’s Apple, the skin there more sensitive than Dean expected. “But desperate times,” he chokes out.
Cas shrugs off the shirt Dean unbuttoned, revealing enough tanned torso that Dean briefly considers adding “fainting couch” to the grocery list that’s stuck to the fridge. He’s staring indelicately at Cas’ toned stomach, but the weight of Cas’ own stare is impossible to miss.
“It’s difficult to express myself when—” Cas falters, and Dean glances up. Cas’ eyes are wild and bright, not the stark blue-white of celestial power or the ferocity of the attack dog spell, but incendiary. He’s not physically moving, but he vibrates with a contained energy that’s leaking out at the seams in the way his fingertips slide to Dean’s hips, deliberately dimpling his skin. He exhales hard, twice, glancing down at where he’s touching Dean and then back up to Dean’s neck, mouth, eyes. “I appreciate what you’re doing for me,” he grits out. “I believe that after this I will…” He pulls Dean closer, their cocks brushing through layers of denim, and Dean hisses between his teeth. “Owe you one.”
It helps that Dean’s heartbeat is attempting to rupture his eardrums from the inside out, because then he doesn’t have to listen to himself say, voice rough, “I haven’t done anything yet.” He smooths his palms up Cas’ thick biceps in awe. Licks his lips. “For you,” he adds, without thinking.
*
“Sixteen minutes.”
From above him, Cas uncaps the lube bottle. Dean mashes his face further into his pillow, the tips of his ears burning. “Too bad penetration is mandatory,” he says. “Coulda saved us a lot of time.”
The unattractive sound of squeezing a plastic bottle full of a sticky substance stops. “It’s not,” Cas says.
“What?”
Cas straddles Dean’s lower back, shirtless and with the top button of his jeans popped open. Dean only saw that particular image once, briefly, and has no plans to reacquaint himself if he can help it. “You suggested…” Cas adjusts his position slightly, rocking back against Dean’s ass, and Dean clenches the sheets. “There are other ways if—”
Dean squeezes his eyes shut. “Do it.”
“Dean, I don’t want—”
“Do it.”
“—to make you more uncomfortable than I already have,” Cas finishes.
“Cas, buddy.” Dean lifts his head, but only speaks to the wall. “Discomfort is not what I’m feeling right now.”
“Oh.” There’s a moment of silence, more than they can spare, most likely, and then Cas is pulling Dean’s boxer-briefs off all the way. “Well, in that case.”
*
“Thirteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds,” Cas says with two fingers up Dean’s ass. He kisses one of the dimples on Dean’s lower back.
Dean realizes, panting and sweaty, keening back into Cas’ ministrations, that Cas is going to die.
“You’re going to die,” he says. His voice cracks.
Cas’ ministrations slow, but don’t stop. “I would hope not,” he says. He puts his free hand against Dean’s thigh, massaging the sensitive inner skin there. “That’s the whole point of this, is it not?” A third finger gently nudges in, and Dean grits his teeth. “Regardless,” The third finger bottoms out, and Dean groans. “There are certainly less pleasant ways to go.”
*
“Ten minutes.”
The lube bottle lands on the floor and the pillow under Dean’s face is wet and Cas pushes in. Dean’s gotten good at reining it in with one night stands over the years, but they’re going so fast everything outside the window is blurry and Dean asks, when Cas is buried deep inside him, “What if you hadn’t gotten whammied?” He doesn’t mean to keep distracting him.
“Then I wouldn’t be dying,” Cas says. Dean’s had so many foreign things inside him over the years; bullets, shrapnel, wraith venom, vampire blood, angel grace, demons, that he’s forgotten how good it can feel, too. How warm.
“You know what I mean.”
Cas pulls out and then presses back in. They both gasp, Dean wet against the pillow and Cas wet against Dean. “I don’t know,” Cas says. He fixes his grip on Dean’s hips. Dean hopes for bruises.
*
“Four minutes.”
Cas bites kisses into the back of Dean’s neck, one hand tight in his hair. He’s worked up a pretty good rhythm, and Dean alternates between fear of Cas dying and drooling into the sheets.
“How we doing back there,” Dean gasps. He’s doing great, physically. His heart is about to beat out of his chest and he’s covered in sweat and his knuckles are white where they clench the sheets so hard the fitted one has popped off the mattress. Emotionally, he’s strung out, trying to avoid sinking too deeply into the muck-possibility of their first time also being their last. Cas dying because he couldn’t fuck Dean fast enough would truly be the most pathetic culmination of over a decade of friendship that’s never been content to remain just that.
Cas rests his forehead on the back of Dean’s neck, panting. “Dean, if this goes badly, I want you to know—”
Dean shakes his head. “No. No. Cas, no. Don’t even think about it.”
Cas continues to fuck him. The heart curls in Dean’s stomach, the tension ratcheting up with Cas’ entire body pressing Dean into the bed. He moans, despite himself, despite the situation. He’s pushing back into Cas’ thrusts now, meeting him not-quite in the middle as much as he can. “I’m in love with you,” Cas says.
Dean comes.
His entire body tenses, pulses around Cas, who cups his jaw and kisses his temple and his cheek and the thin, bruised skin under his eyes. Dean’s cheek is plastered to the bed, he’s breathing hard, his tongue feels big and stupid in his mouth as he frantically wipes at his eyes, trying to regain consciousness.
“How long?’ He asks while his vision is still sparkling, limbs still full of popping candy.
“Three minutes,” Cas says, voice strained.
“What can I do?” Dean says, frantic.
“Turn over.”
Cas pulls out, and Dean does so. The second his back hits the mattress, Cas is fucking him again. Dean wraps his legs around Cas’ lower back, his fingers interlocked behind Cas’ neck, sliding one hand into his hair.
He’s deeply oversensitized, but it still feels so good to have Cas inside him. He scratches lightly at the back of Cas’ neck. “Cas,” he sighs out, “Castiel. C’mon, man. We can’t do this again if you die on me.” He pulls Cas down to him and kisses him deep.
When they come apart, Cas says, pupils blown, “Do it again?”
Down to the wire. No time for mincing words. “I sure fucking hope so.”
That’s when Cas’ hips start to stutter, his thrusts becoming more erratic. He kisses Dean again, sloppy and open mouthed, bringing a hand to Dean’s face, ghosting his knuckles across Dean’s cheekbone.
Dean turns his head to glance at the timer. A minute and a half. His stomach flips over.
He turns back to Cas, brushing a hand between his shoulder blades. He runs his hands up and down Cas’ biceps, resting his palms against his shoulders. Cas presses his lips to Dean’s neck, thrusting once, twice more, and then sighs heavily into the sweat-damp skin there, going limp.
There’s ten seconds left on the clock.
“Uh,” Dean says, running a hand through Cas’ hair. “Please tell me you didn’t just have a heart attack and render this whole thing moot.”
For a heartstopping second, Cas doesn’t say anything. Then, he lifts his head. “My limbs are very tired,” he says mildly, and proceeds to crack a huge grin. Dean groans, throwing his head back against the pillow in protest. He puts his palm directly on Cas’ face.
When the timer hits zero, they both go silent, waiting. After thirty seconds, Cas is still breathing.
“So… it worked?” Dean says.
Cas flexes his fingers, in and out. “I think so.”
“Huh,” Dean says. “Ah.” He’s smiling so big. He can’t help it. “Ahhhhhhh, shit, Cas. I love you.”
Cas rests his forearm on Dean’s chest and rests his chin on his forearm. “That was quite bold of you to hold back until after the sex-death spell lifted.”
Dean waves him off. “I knew you were gonna be fine. I’m a generous lover.”
“Generous?” Cas says, eyes filling with mirth. “My sore limbs seem to recall me doing all the work and you lying prone on the bed.”
“Uh, yeah,” Dean says. He gestures vaguely downward. “I gave you free rein of this.”
Cas narrows his eyes thoughtfully. “You make a salient point. I concede.”
Dean offers him a smug grin that quickly tapers off. He presses a palm to Cas’ cheek. “Thanks for not dying. Maybe next time, wear gloves. Always practice safe artifact handling.”
Cas sighs. “I didn’t think it would affect me. I didn’t forget that I’m human, exactly, but I did forget that I’m not an angel anymore. If that makes sense.”
“Not really,” Dean says. “But I get it.” He kisses Cas.
Cas watches him thoughtfully. “Not that I would’ve been unable to orgasm otherwise, but I have to say, your invitation to do this again really inspired me to keep on schedule.”
“Oh,” Dean says, “Keep talking dirty to me.”
“From one friend bonded to another, thank you for your help.”
“Nevermind.”
Cas moves so that he’s level with Dean again, wrapping a hand around his waist and resting his palm on Dean’s stomach. He nuzzles the hollow behind Dean’s ear and Dean melts into it. They stay like that for a while, Cas running his fingers up and down the sensitive skin of Dean’s hip. It’s only when Cas presses his lips to the back of Dean’s head that his eyes fly open.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “We still gotta go to Wisconsin.”