Chapter Text
A/N - Been a crazy year and I've had to devote every second to writing science papers to try to land a new job. I now have the new job, but the resulting cross-country move & now a teaching fellowship in Brazil continued to suck up every second! I gave my last palestra (public lecture) in Brazil yesterday, woke up sick today on my first real day off in months, but at last I have a speck of time for writing.
This is just a short ficlet, my attempt at trying to understand — and resolve — the heartbreaking tension between Castiel and Dean. I am trying to let the characters speak for themselves, in a way that feels true to their canon selves, and as a result they have both taken the fic in a slightly different direction than I originally planned. The fic is totally written (been chipping away at it at nights, since 15x03) and will be approx 20K words, but I'm still polishing the last chapters so I will post it one chapter at a time. I'm in Rio at the moment on a Saturday night and am planning to post at least one chapter a day throughout the mini Thanksgiving hiatus from the canon show. Chapters may be short, but more will come very soon.
It was just nine-thirty in the morning, and Dean had only gotten halfway through his current task (cleaning the ivory-handled pistol) but already he'd become too distracted to continue.
“Distracted” was one word for it. “Depressed” might be another. Whatever he called it, it had been happening more and more often. One moment he'd be washing the Impala, or cleaning the guns, or trying to remember the right ratio of water to coffee — or, more and more now, doing nothing at all but lying around in his room eating junk and marathoning old cartoons — and the next moment he'd be lost in thought, the cartoons unseen, while he stared off into space and thought about....
Nothing. Everything.
Right now he had ended up sitting at the little corner table in his room, the half-disassembled pistol on the table, gazing sightlessly across the room at the whiskey bottle and the ever-present shot glass on his bookshelf. Dean flipped the pistol's empty magazine around and around in his hand, and his glance slid idly to the FBI phone. He'd taken to keeping it in his room, always plugged into its charger, but it had never rung again after that one time.
Sam had started using words like “moping” and “wallowing” for all this, and he'd even started dropping some totally unjustified comments about “driving people away." Eileen had restricted herself to her trademark Bambi-eyed sympathetic look — though she'd said a totally weird thing the other day about Dean having gone through a "recent breakup." (Dean had started to get the unsettling feeling that she might have witnessed a lot more than she was letting on, during the weeks when she'd been ghosting around the bunker trying to make herself seen.) Eileen had now taken off temporarily to try to collect some of her old possessions, but Sam was still giving Dean the side-eye about all the cartoon marathons. But really, Dean was behaving perfectly rationally (according to Dean, that is). Especially given the circumstances.
Right now, for example, he wasn't "wallowing" at all. He was only thinking about a few things, in a very rational way.
What he was thinking was: Maybe it was all going to stay this way for good.
Days had passed, and weeks, and then, somehow, months had gone by since that awful ghostpocalypse week. Things seemed to have settled down. Yet everything still felt just terrible. Mom was still dead. Jack was still dead. Not to mention all the rest of them: Rowena, Charlie, Bobby, Kevin... all of them, still dead. Eileen had been a win, of course, a big win... though Dean somehow kept thinking of that as Sam having had the win, not Dean. That's great that Sam's got Eileen back kept crossing his mind, as if Dean had been denied some kind of equivalent win of his own.
And then there was Chuck, obviously, who seemed to be fully in control again, the damned "Equalizer" nothing but a puddle of slag.
And Cas, meanwhile, had stayed gone. That short tense conversation over the FBI phone had been the only contact in weeks. There'd been nothing since. Dean had even traced the call, pinning down Cas's location to a small lakeshore town in Grand Teton National Park, of all places. A few inquiries revealed there'd been a pretty weird case going on there, which seemed to have been fully resolved. Apparently Cas had solved it. Apparently Cas was doing just fine on his own. Apparently Cas had moved on and was again somewhere unknown.
Dean lined up a few bullets in a neat little row on his table by the pistol, not really seeing them.
For the first few weeks after Cas walked away, Dean had been royally pissed at him for leaving. He'd known perfectly well that this was irrational; he'd been pissed anyway. Later he'd gotten pissed all over at Cas for not answering his phone, and, later still, pissed at him for blowing off Sam's messages. How dare Cas just take off like this? His role, his job really, was to stick around and help the Winchesters. His job was to stay close, so that... so that... well, really so that Dean could order him around, and rip into him now and then about one or two of Cas's million past mistakes, and needle him now and then about one or two of the millions of critical things that Cas had continually hid from Dean over the years (never mind that Dean had hidden an equal number of equally critical things. Dean's choices were totally justified. It was Cas's choices that were on trial here). Cas was supposed to always be around, or at least no more than a quick call away... and he was supposed to answer his frickin' phone. Dean was supposed to be able to snap at him whenever the mood struck, at random intervals, about all the things Cas had been doing wrong. Just to... to drive home... Something. To... teach him a lesson. About something. To... keep him on his toes. About something. Really Dean just felt he needed to keep a suspicious eye on him, because Cas... because Cas might... because what if Cas might be....
Dean shut down this line of thought before it progressed any further, grabbing the pistol magazine and finally loading it from his little line of bullets. He'd found it was best to cut that particular line of Castiel-thoughts off at the pass, before it became too clear in his head, before he had a chance to dwell too much on a certain specific horrible possibility that had been haunting him for months. The strategy all along had been to continually needle Cas without really thinking too deeply about why.
This "strategy," such as it was, had not included any possibility of Cas actually reacting to all this, or taking any kind of action. So when Cas had suddenly just up and left, the whole strategy had kind of crumbled.
Dean was uncomfortably aware he had probably been treating Cas a little unfairly. Maybe a lot unfairly. And he was also aware, deeper down, that a part of him, a rather confused part, had always wanted to do something quite different with Castiel. In fact a totally different strategy sometimes floated up in his mind... and in certain of his dreams....
But, bizarre dreams aside, for whatever reason a seed of doubt had emerged about Castiel, and that seed had rooted, and recently it had flowered. There seemed to be no stuffing that particular cat into that bag.
Cas couldn't be trusted, that was the essence of it.
So all in all it was really pretty annoying how Cas was always on Dean's mind even after he'd up and left. Surely this must somehow be Cas's fault too. In fact it had gotten rather comforting knowing that everything was always Cas's fault. Cas was supposed to always be here to take the blame, to be the handy scapegoat: the one who let Jack in, the one who let Mom die, the one who didn't tell Dean about that stupid snake, the one who screwed up every plan and let Rowena die. Everything was supposed to always be Cas's fault. It was easier that way.
Because otherwise it's my fault, Dean thought. He seemed to now be pouring out a few fingers of the whiskey into the shot-glass, without having really decided to do so, and he faltered in mid-pour as the thought sank in.
It's my fault.
Dean's fault for agreeing to take in Jack, when he'd known all along how dangerous a nephilim would be.
Dean's fault for getting suckered into Jack's bright-eyed innocent-son act. Dean's fault for getting attached. Dean's fault for letting Jack cloud his judgment.
And ultimately Dean's fault, it therefore followed, for letting Mom die.
If it wasn't Cas's fault, then it had to be Dean's.
All of which was irrelevant now anyway because Mom was still dead and Jack was still dead and Cas was just plain fucking gone.
Dean heard steps approaching down the hallway; Sam was coming. Grabbing the glass, Dean slugged down the shot of whiskey in a single swallow, and shoved the cork stopper back in the bottle. By the time Sam showed up in the doorway, laptop in hand, Dean was again calmly checking the ammo in his pistol.
Though Dean had forgotten to put the empty shot glass away. Or the bottle back on the shelf. Both were still sitting right there on the table next to Dean, the glass still with some telltale drops of whiskey in the bottom. Drinking whiskey at nine-thirty in the morning, and throughout the day actually, really wasn't a big deal, and in fact it really ought to be considered normal, shouldn't it? Every day it seemed to be getting harder to remember why most people didn't start drinking the very moment they woke up.
Sam did look at the bottle, and his gaze lingered for a moment on the shot glass, and Dean braced himself for potential comments. But Sam said nothing but, "Got a possible case."
Dean glanced up at him. Sam tilted his laptop toward Dean. It was displaying a news article from some small-town Oregon rag, an article titled "Concerns Mount About Continued Bridge Suicides."
Sam explained, "People keep drowning in this little mountain town. Jumping off a bridge into a river. Except, a few survivors say they didn't jump; they insist they were pushed. Same bridge, just before Thanksgiving every year, and Thanksgiving's coming up--"
"Let's go," said Dean. He grabbed the magazine, the ammo, and the pistol (and, well, the bottle of whiskey too, of course) and stood to toss them all in his bag at the foot of the bed.
Sam blinked. "It's in Oregon," he said. "Real deep woods, up in the hills. Bit of a drive. We've still got a couple days; we could head out in the morning. And besides, don't you want to hear some details first? See if it's really worth checking out?"
"Nah, let's get the show on the road," said Dean. He zipped his bag closed. "Wouldn't want to keep our audience waiting, would we?" Sam winced at the reference to Chuck, but Dean said nothing more; he walked straight past Sam, and out the bedroom door, and directly to the Impala in the garage.
Cases were good, he’d realized. Cases required focus. Cases needed concentration. Cases kept Dean from thinking too much about anything else. Like how angels looked when they cried; like how friends looked when they turned away forever; like how they sounded on the phone afterwards, bitter and cold, and how the bunker door sounded when it closed, booming, echoing, when somebody walked away for the very last time.
A/N - More soon. If you are liking this, please leave a comment - I love to hear from you.
Thank you for reading my story!