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Dean is twenty-three, and he is alone.
He stands the collar of his jacket up tall against the dark, hefts his bag on his shoulder and his gun salt-laden in his hand, and listens for anything beyond the echo of his boots on the spongy, rotting steps. He doesn’t know how long he’s been climbing them.
And whatever walked there, walked alone.
Dean doesn’t know why that line stuck with him— why some old book plays in his head now when he hasn’t thought about it since ninth grade lit. There’s no fiction to this place.
Something has simply been here for too long.
Still, the staircase feels like it could crumble under his feet any second. Rotted teeth splitting open and gulping him down into the black underbelly of this old place, liquid and seething. He shivers. Steps a little more lightly.
(Stupid. The house isn’t the haunting. The ghost is the haunting. Get a grip, Winchester.)
He looks over the snapped railing, hoping for the reassuring glint of his father’s maglite, but it’s dark and motionless down there. Devoid. It gnaws at him.
Wasn’t Dad here?
(Of course not, stupid. You’ve been alone, probably for weeks now, haven’t you? Dad’s an occasional string of coordinates. And Sam’s been out for… How long, now? Yesterday? Tomorrow feels as possible as last year. )
Dean’s alone. Simple as that.
He knows that in his belly, a lead weight down to the soles of his boots.
Craning finally onto the upstairs landing, something crunches under his boots. It’s dark, and under the no moon light he can still see it: salt, scattered everywhere. Circles and lines and spirals all winding on scuffed black lacquer. Right where he left it.
(Where he left it…?)
He thought Sam was closer. Palo Alto. Wasn’t this haunting near the water? He can hear it sloshing, anyway. Smell the briny dead-fish funk of it.
As if summoned, it fills his nostrils. He gags on it. Drags the collar of his shirt up over his mouth as his eyes water He whips around, gun raised, and searches the shadows as it washes past—
but they’re empty.
His heart is ticking up in his chest. He follows it deeper into the black.
Something has been here for far too long.
And it’s no ghost.
In about ten paces, something will see him.
He’ll hit the wall hard enough to see starbursts go off like fireworks. His pain will be the first mortal sound in all this dark for a very, very long time.
Dean is thirty-five, and he is never alone. The Mark makes sure of that.
(even in his sleep he hears it, teeth gnashing at the edge of his senses, acidic, unintelligible, ancient syllables simmering on a furious loop)
He keeps a fervent pace.
(It wants him as much as he wants it. It’s at home in him. Always has been.)
There’s blood on his hands. The First Blade’s teeth drip with it, leaving a spattered trail that soaks the black dirt in his wake. The Mark is an open red mouth, panting against the back of his neck.
If Dean lets it, it’ll consume him entirely.
He wishes that sounded worse.
The forest around him is lost to the dark, but the salt still spills out ahead of him, slashing across the floor. Crooked spirals. Broken rings.
When he sees the mess he knows he had been afraid— but of what?
(he can’t drum up much to be afraid of, these days.)
There is something here.
His grip tightens on the ancient blade. (It’s worn so perfect to his hand. Skin to bone to skin again).
He works his grip on it until the fear is eclipsed by the hunger.
There is something here.
Dean is forty-three. He is alone.
He wonders if that’s why he’s here.
The bunker is dark around him. No hum or whir of life, no distant shuffle of (Sam? That name sounds right—) Sam, or whoever else has come by to check Dean's pulse the last few years.
That pulse is all he can hear, now. His own footsteps don't even echo on the concrete— but his own presence isn't what he's looking for.
(Is it?)
The halls don't twist right. The air is blank and tissue paper thin. The shadows are too deep.
He keeps hunting.
Dean is—
— the unwitting and unwilling linchpin of a prophecy he never asked to get buried for. The angels watch him, always. Hell is something he carries in his veins. Sometimes, his hands shake— but he’s found if he imagines a scalpel in them, bone white diamond sharp, they steady out.
This terrifies him.
He’s alone, so he lets them shake.
He retreats to the very center of the hospital bed circled by a jagged salt ring, and the iodine-sterile air abruptly goes rancid around him.
The drop ceiling spins so high above it fades to black. He spills another ring around himself on the sheets, making an unsteady mess of it. It hurts to breathe, throat bruised black and blue as the rest of him. His teeth chatter. The paper-thin clothes spill his body heat like he has more to spare.
He’s bleeding, he realizes slowly. Fresh stitches ripped. He can still feel the cannula feeding cold air into his nostrils, and blanches when he realizes it’s the source of all that sour stink. His stomach churns abruptly and he scrabbles to tear it off, flinging it aside like a living thing. It skids limply over a chair at his bedside. The chair is empty.
He’s alone.
(That’s good. It’s not safe, being around him.)
—in the midst of a haunting. He is no longer hunting.
He is hunted.
Doors clang and slam in the dark after him. Even at a dead run, the hall still yawns ahead. Shutters snap his heels bloody.
A tall window shatters to his right, glass bursting meteor bright. A taller door lies just past. He arrows towards it, hand thrown up too late to protect his face. Hopes his bootsoles aren’t too worn as he sprints over shards. Blood stings down his neck. He can’t afford to stop. If he stops, the thing in the dark will— he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t want to find out.
The hall finally bursts open into a round room, stitched with rotting doors all lined raggedly with
salt.
Dean fumbles to a halt. Doesn’t breathe. Not until his lungs claw for it.
The salt.
He had been running. from
From—
Dean twists back towards the double doors he just slammed through, shaking out another hasty line of salt right along the rest.
He scrambles back as the waterlogged wood swells with a horrible thudding sound and heaves inward. The hinges squeal and groan. It strains to get in. To get at him. Around him, the windows reverberate high with the howling wind, harmonizing with its fury. He lines them with salt, too.
And then he salts himself into the deepest circle,
where he is most alone.
Cradles his shotgun in his lap with both hands. He’s more tired than he’s ever felt, spark drained out of his marrow until his teeth start to chatter. His ribs ache in time with his pounding heart.
but why is he alone?
he’s not supposed to be alone. not anymore. wasn’t that the deal??
Isn’t that why he’s here?
His head is throbbing in slow full time with his fractured ribs. The wind dulls suddenly. Lapses into dead-zone silence. The walls breathe him in.
Dean cocks the sawed-off, raising it up. His hands are steady as the scalpel as the bone shaves away like fine marrow-fat filet under it
(--Marrow? Scalpels?? Jesus—)
His teeth are chattering. Something oily and vile and savory fills his nose. He swallows convulsively, straining to keep it all down.
“S-show yourself,” he forces out.
“Oh, are you hurt?” a voice croons from the dark, “Understandable, you know. You’re not supposed to be here.”
Salt sprays under Dean’s feet as he hurtles Blade-first toward the voice, ancient bone slashing for the feast but the shadows are thin and empty.
He spins on his heel, searching and searching. His pulse thrums. (All he would have to do is let it. It would be so easy. The Mark will bear him easy on the river and his soul will be ever undimmed, bright as a dire and dooming light to the most distant stars, terror and omen. He’ll blink once or twice or a handful of times in that red twilight and by then, he will be walking the decaying earth.
It would be so easy.)
and he wouldn’t be alone. someone said they would be there, didn’t they? they said they would be there—
The path glitters, mirrors cascading around him in a single lightning-like flash. Illuminated for a fierce and brief instant.
And out of every crooked one his own face looks back at him, and his eyes are sallow black pits.
Fear coils sick in his belly.
“Show yourself!” He bellows again, a ripple of bass booming raggedly under it, fury and hunger and ever forward (the Mark and the Blade are one and separate, full-blooded fraternal twins, but what they agree upon is singular, eternal unison: forward. Feet on the path, blade into flesh, ill fury the black star behind it all and, endlessly, devouring—)
Everyone but him.
Dean can’t conjure his face but his presence— stalwart, watching, despairing.
Grieving.
For as long as Dean’s feet left their bloody marks on the earth.
It stays Dean’s hand. (he thinks it has before.)
His fingers shake around the Blade, and one by one, he forces them open. The sharpened bone clatters and drowns in the black lacquer.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he snarls.
“And you plan to kill me, yes?” The voice tsks, “You know, somehow, you’re so much worse than he pictured you.” He can feel it, circling. He turns slowly to follow. “But here, you’re merely a gnat, clinging desperately to the last tiny crumbs of its mortal coil. Now, neither of us are going to enjoy this little in-between you’re trying to build— so you might as well get out.”
Something in him revolts at the idea.
He can’t dredge up why. He laughs anyway.
“You’d like that, right?”
“I would, yes,” The thing agrees shortly. “You are going to vastly prefer it. You do feel it, yes? Your brittle mortal stuff, all… shearing off? Gnats like you are not made for this place, Dean Winchester.”
….Who?
And this time, he comes up emptyhanded, no name at all on his tongue.
No him beyond the Mark.
And the Mark’s hand is empty, but he knows his Blade by heart and he is never alone. And deep down he knows that to the end of all things, his footsteps will always be dogged by—
by—
— 20-something and hell-bound, glimpsing past the veil. the simmering, undulating black under all those everyday faces. they turn to watch him go in unblinking unison.
he doesn’t know why.
— His ears ring, bass thudding through him as the amps whine. But there are no musicians in sight, no battered stage or press of the crowd. Just close-crowded walls, plastered with a blurred riot of posters. All he tastes is cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, but he doesn’t feel right— drifting at the edges. A beat behind, too loose, too warm, too slow. He doesn’t think he’s drunk. He blinks, and a whole song drains past. Someone’s supposed to be here by now— he can still smell it, the familiar leather draping like a shield over his shoulders, a heavy hand on the back of his neck— guiding him firmly out to cool night air that still stinks like sardine-packed city. He blinks, and a whole song drains past.
But no one comes.
He blinks, and a whole song drains past, and he sinks down onto the grimy floor, curling tight over his knees. Salt crunches under him. He blinks, and a whole song drains past and his stomach rolls. He covers his ears, trying to drain out the dizziness and the pounding noise of it all reverberating through him, tries stay focused on naming that broad blank figure (but his mind keeps straying off, keeps losing track, losing sharpness)--
“What’s with all the molecules, anyway?”
For a split second he almost recognizes the voice, scrambling to his feet so fast he sways— but that same something in him goes icy in warning just as quick. He freezes just inside the line of the salt circle, stumbling back.
Whoever it is, they aren’t here to save him.
The thing steps forward enough that it has a shape against the haze.
“The hell are you?” he mumbles, syllables tilting into each other.
It only tilts its head, in a way he knows in his belly— a way that makes his chest ache, even through the blur.
(isn’t that why he’s here?) (he’s not supposed to be alone)
(that was the deal!)
The thing stops at the outermost ring of salt. Toes it with audible disdain.
“You do realize it’s not really salt,” it says, almost conversationally. When it crouches down, he yanks his arms and legs little tighter into the salt ring anyway. The thing just tracks his movement. “Everything here— it’s me. A distortion of me. A mimic. Scaffolding, propping up your puny mind.”
— the old house creaks and howls around them, storm or something darker rattling old glass windows. The roof sways and bellows overhead, threatening to rip free entirely. Nails shriek loose.
He stiffens, jaw tightening painfully taut as it tilts in closer. Closer. The thing just barely stops at the edge of the salt. He fights the urge to cringe back.
“...Anyway,” it says, waving a hand-shaped shadow, “You can go now.”
And the salt ring rises around him. Slow, and then whipping off the floor in a spark, every scattered grain following after in a magnetic, whirling rush. He shouts, throwing up a hand as it stings and scrapes against his skin, crowding the air so thick around him that the dark goes blinding pale (like it’s going to bury him in it—) and all he can hear is sifting snow-crunch sound of it filling his ears, muting even his heart’s pounding—
And it all shoots upwards, bristling. It snaps together in a glittering white rectangle.
A doorway.
he comes briefly and entirely unmoored.
the salt was important. (wasn’t it important?)
(It had felt so important—)
his hands are empty.
and his head—
he draws nothing but blanks.
the doorway looms overhead, impossible and glaring against the depthless black behind it. It stutters minutely, like every grain is quivering on some subatomic level, fighting to stay in place.
Or fighting to stay out of place.
The missing in him is waiting, out there. He can feel the invisible yanking threads of it.
(but it’s not everything, is it?)
He isn’t all that’s missing.
(this wasn’t supposed to be the deal!)
And he came here for a reason.
“Nah.”
“Nah,” It echoes flatly. It doesn’t have eyes, but he can feel them on him either way.
The thing scoffs, sharp and bristling.
And the hospital bed he doesn’t know how he ended up in vanishes out from under him, dull linoleum floor giving way with a catastrophic, soundless rip. He’s weightless for a stomach-dropping second before he falls, cords twisting around him and snapping loose as he tilts back into the dark.
He slams flat onto his back on something hard, the rest of his stitches busting with a snap, wind knocked sheer out of him. His body catches up in sluggish bursts, radiating the new ache atop the old right through him in a dull pulsing way he’s going to feel later.
He takes a second just to breathe.
“...Dick,” he scrapes out hoarsely, dragging the bruise of himself onto his side and then onto all fours, gasping with the effort.
“Ouch, hm? Lucky for you, you don’t have far to crawl,” the thing says dismissively. “Go.”
True to its word, the doorway abruptly looms closer, right there in reach. It’s almost too bright to look at; he shies back from the glare even as it calls to the blank spaces in him.
The thing sounds pissed.
He doesn’t have to know anything to know that’s good.
It even riles up enough of a spark in him to force himself up to his knees.
“You want me gone that bad? Drag me out yourself,” He rasps, thumbing blood off his lower lip. Flicks it aside, leaving careless pinpricks of bright red on the glistening lacquer.
He locks eyes with the thing.
“Unless you can’t.”
“You’re right, of course. Clever is as clever does, doesn’t it? Can’t even figure out what meager chunk of you you are, and still.”
It smiles, black stretched over black teeth.
“You think because you’ve assigned a quaint little illusion of north and south, left and right, that you’ve imposed order on a place like this? On me? That your meat has any say in me?” It looms closer, studying him. Tilts its head again in the way that gives him a chill. “You really think that’s oxygen you’re breathing?”
A chill twists through him, breath jamming in his throat for a second before he has to inhale again, and then—
And it’s like he can taste that voice on his tongue. Like his veins contract under his skin, the air suddenly weighing down on him, pressing, not just from the outside in. A thousand draping hands, bubbling microscopic in his blood and swimming through his system, grazing the soft fleshy quilting of his lungs inside out, filling him— probing the back of his throat— skimming behind his eyelids— threading around his heart. His navel. The pit of his belly, spiraling down low and heavy and intimate, inside-outed and infiltrated now, permeating empty reverberating empty—
he’s inundated in the dark. filled with it. he tries to remember to breathe. it’s already in him. his throat. his veins. the soft jelly of his eyeballs. he just has to breathe anyway. he just has to breathe—
he just has to breathe.
He forces himself, staggering, to his feet. His bootsoles slip in the blood on the floor. It drips down his palms. He wipes them, shaking, on his thighs, and straightens back up.
And all that dark inside him, it all tightens, all at once. He cries out, hacking blood, body cracking and twisting from the inside. His left arm fractures first under the pressure, firing down a five year old faultline.
He collapses back to his knees, hitting the floor hard.
he can’t dredge up his own name but he can still gather up a red, wheezing grin.
“I ain’t leaving,”
His body tumbles abruptly, skidding hard across the black floor.
Not until—
Until…
He drags himself back up. It doesn’t last long.
“Can’t kill me either, huh? Man, must really…. must really suck to be you, buddy,” he slurs, and can’t help the laugh that rocks him.
The thing just— hisses at him, edges of it scrambling loose in time with the wavering haze of its temper, like it dissolves in and out, and it’s just too much for him to manage, his laugh taking on a slightly hysterical note that the thing doesn’t seem to like.
He cuts off with a wheeze, coughing so hard it bends him in half (and he’s pretty sure he’s staying still but the world’s still spinning like liquid around him, shallow vision swimming in it). His palm’s spattered red. He blinks down at it loosely. It hurts, he thinks, but it’s faint and muddled in a way he can’t make sense of. His lower lip wavers hard, suddenly; he bites it down.
He can’t remember why he doesn’t want to breathe.
The shadow he half-forgot about crouches over him suddenly. He jolts back.
“You really are just a crude little hammer, aren’t you,” it spits out. “No subtlety, no volume control— just pounding and pounding and pounding—”
“— Killing is mortal by nature. There’s nothing mortal here. Can’t you feel it? Under all the delusions you’re feeding yourself, gravity and direction and nerve endings? You’re already breaking down. Atom by atom. Dissolving all your glue,” It flicks him in the forehead as if in punctuation, and that first real touch sends his nerves ringing all the way down, buzzing uncomfortably down to his boots. It scatters him.
The thing cranes back up to its feet with a sudden snap. Taps against the last remaining wall of the haunted house, standing old and rotted in the black.
(And whatever walked there, walked alone)
“You feel it in there, under all your pretty yellow wallpapering? Hm?” It says, tersely.
His skin is still buzzing. (if it’s his skin— is it skin?) (can he feel it?) (is it all there?) he clutches at his head, nails digging into his scalp.
(if he could just reach into his own skull— dig his nails in— rip out the reason that’s he here)
“—Why do you keep giving me an out, then? If I'm just gonna— if I'm just gonna disintegrate or whatever,” he manages.
The thing scowls, and dips back down to his level. Its fingers coil icy and buzzing in his hair, dragging his head back up to look him in the eye.
“Because,” it enunciates, “it’ll be a bitch getting the taste of you out of my void, you understand? Is that plain enough?”
He chokes out a startled laugh. It only annoys the thing more. It drops him with an exasperated shove.
“There is no point to you being here. You’re dissolving to nothing— does that not register? You won’t even be dead with him! There is no possible rest here for you—”
It keeps going even as he freezes.
Him.
He hangs onto that thought tooth and nail, even as it tries to float away. he wraps himself around it tight.
The thing is still talking, washing over him. washing him away
“Tell me where he is.”
“There is a door for you. Take it!”
there’s nothing around them but it whips up like a storm anyway.
he holds on by a thread— and that thread is that thought. he holds it close in the core of himself, flame guttering in the wind, burning himself to keep it alight. he can feel pieces melting away from him, but he doesn’t care, not as long as that thread stays bright.
Him.
“Tell me where he is,” he gasps.
he is beginning to come apart. but it’s important, isn’t it? he burns, and it’s the only part of him that feels real. he feels it like a hook, piercing a line through all his hearts until they pound as one (and they drum) (and they drum)
and oh it hurts. parts peeling away— ripping deeper and deeper, leaving him in tatters. he doesn’t know if he has a body. he is a small core, and he will let the fire in him consume him to stay alive. (he can’t feel a body how does it hurt this much this deep)
“Yes, yes, be quiet already, little gnat. Oh, you love him so,” it mocks, “He chose this, you know.” (and even like this he can hear the ugly in it, the jealousy), “He’s mine.”
he’s mine
and his blank chest bursts open. The flame erupts; it burns him whole.
All the scattered pieces of him, layers muddled and torn apart, lift a hand. They lay it, carefully, high on their arm, seeking out the indelible mark there, backwards and forwards in time from that first blazing moment, soul deep. they touch him where he touched him—
And they all snap into focus, electricity sparking through the threads of him that are left. Everything spins, racing around them.
“He chose this!” the thing shrieks. “He chose me—”
but all he can see is a face. A face he knows. a heart he knows. a voice he knows—
washing over with viscous black.
(and if he’s quiet— if he listens past the oily ranting of the faceless thing— he can hear something. a thin, nearly invisible hum, like a broken fluorescent. the only gentle sound in the whole damn place)
he lifts his arm. there’s a shotgun at home in his hand. he raises it— and aims up, above the thing.
at the looming door.
he pulls the trigger. it all shatters apart, salt raining down on them as it all dissolves away: the doorway. the floor he stands on. north and south and left and right. the idea of dimension. the gun is gone. his body is gone. all that’s left is that face— the only face he remembers, cradled right in the center of him and blazing bright.
this time, he doesn’t run from the thing.
he just lets himself be pulled toward the blaze of that fluorescent hum.
And the Empty is endless and vast, unfillable— but it isn’t so big, not once you realize it’s nowhere and nothing all at once. the shortest path from a to b is a straight line
the shortest path from (him?) to him is a straight line.
It’s quiet. pitch dark.
He only remembers that he has a mouth when he speaks. Feet, when he takes a step closer.
“Castiel,” he whispers, voice like he hasn’t spoken in a hundred years, rasping.
But that’s not right, is it?
He is nothing, a body, a purpose. An ambulatory motive with no past or present or future staining him.
But this, he knows.
“Cas,” he says, instead. It fits like a glass slipper.
And in front of him, like a string pulling taut, Castiel opens his eyes.
“Dean…?”
He has a mouth. It cracks apart into a brilliant, rusted smile. There is blood between his teeth.
Dean limps forward.
He is forty-three, and grieving for what feels like a lifetime.
And all the rest of him follows right behind in a dizzying reel.
He doesn’t so much fling himself at Cas as much as Cas is there and he is there and for a blinding moment they’re one and the same, all twined up together on a cosmic scale even as every stutter-frame of Dean throws his arms around Castiel’s shoulders and kisses him so hard their teeth would clack on any other plane but here they just—
come closer.
atoms all coiling into each other’s small soft spaces.
“Dean,” Castiel repeats, nakedly.
And it all comes flooding back.
Dean. Dean— that’s him. (and he’s not supposed to be alone anymore) (that was supposed to be the deal) (how can he be saved if he’s alone)
Castiel curls around him and through him and in him from here in the Empty all the way back to a small blue two-story in Lawrence—
And all the way forward, Dean realizes— to the spell circle Dean had left behind in the bunker to get here, buried in a bed of salt and ritual.
Dean realizes that he can taste that salt on his tongue. He can feel it, digging in his palm.
And he remembers the way home.
He finds Castiel’s hand and tangles their fingers tight, holds onto that biting thing until it’s blindingly bright, burning into both of their palms. Sensation becomes force becomes heavy, heavy enough that Dean almost can’t hold onto it but Cas is there to take the weight, Cas is here and it’s so simple, suddenly: all they have to do is
not
let
go.
The Empty howls, furious and tidal as it slams into them, reaching and grabbing in a many-handed hurricane but it’s too late.
they drop through the floor of it all like lead.
slamming through the black, both of them and all of them tangled one and the same—and then vibrating apart, spinning loose and spiraling until they crash back together, atoms shaking and jittering in place until hitting real air rips them apart.
The mess of them snaps back into their shapes like rubberbands and they land, together, in a tub of rough flaked salt.
Dean is—
Well, he’s just Dean, and he groans under Castiel’s solid weight as his ribs creak.
They’re lying together in the remnants of Dean’s last ritual, Cas cradled close on top of Dean. Candles still flicker fresh-lit along the rim of the bath, first beads of wax still melting like no time at all had passed (there is no plane for time, not in the empty, not in the dark)
The tub itself is full of coarse Himalayan rock salt and Dean is buried in it up to his eyelashes, just as he had been before when he closed his eyes a split second ago.
It digs into Dean’s back and it stings at brand new cuts and bruises, and there’s salt in his mouth and a terrible sharp ache under his skin in so many places, and he doesn’t care.
Because now, Cas is here.
He chokes out a giddy laugh; his hand shakes as he frees it from the salt, catching Castiel’s very real, very corporeal jaw. His atoms push back against Dean’s own. His weight digs Dean further down against the tiny little daggers of salt pitting his skin. His body heat suffuses him.
Castiel’s gaze snaps to him, bewildered and wide. He takes in the room. Dean. The ritual markings.
“What did you do??” He grates out, sharp and ragged, and there’s dread there. Dean just beams up at him, bloody and breathless, because it’s all he can do with Cas right here like this, and—
Castiel’s mouth crumples up agonizingly tight.
“Don’t tell me you—”
“No deals,” Dean scrabbles out quickly, coughing up a fleck of salt and backtracking. “Swear to— swear to— whatever’s left, I guess? No deals, I promise.” He laughs again; it sounds a little crazy even to his own ears, but he can’t help it. He thumbs across Castiel’s cheekbone, the five-hour stubble there, just like—
the moment it took him.
(the moment he left)
And God if he can’t help the way his eyes well up hot, either, even if the kneejerk anger’s a distant memory. He hasn’t felt anything that strong in… he’s not sure he’s felt much of anything, really. Since then. Time's been a label, useless, tickertape on a blurring reel.
He swallows hard, blinking quickly. Salt flakes off his eyelashes.
And Castiel lifts a hand, brushing it away before it can sting at his eyes. (the gentle touch turns dean’s chest tight like a vise and peels him open all at once, visceral and exposed. he tries to choke it down.)
“...You were there,” Castiel says, slowly, and there’s a faint wonder to it. “All of you, you—”
He trails off with a frown, looking at Dean more closely; he catches Dean’s jaw in his fingertips, angling him here and there in a way no one else would dare to, a way no one’s touched him in ages. He studies him. Probing his face, his jaw, his neck where it sinks into the salt between them. It hurts in places, stings like a bitch same as breathing a little too deep does— as having Castiel’s warm living weight on him does— but he’ll take that a thousand times over the last couple years.
(and the thing about Cas is he sees it— he sees Dean, he sees the hurt, he sees the jagged things in him and curls close anyway—)
Castiel just shakes his head after a moment. He thumbs gently over an open slash on Dean’s cheekbone.
“How,” Castiel asks, quietly, gaze finally returning to Dean’s.
Dean just smiles. Pulls out the one-two punch smirk with a matching drawl.
“Well, hi, I’m Dean Winchester— I don’t know if we’ve met?”
Castiel does not look impressed.
(Dean’s missed the way he quirks his brow.)
“...It was foolish of you,” Castiel says, softly. “I don’t think you realize, but your…” he hums for a moment the way he does when he’s boiling something way too complicated down, “layers, they’re coming… unstitched. That place—”
“Lemme guess: it dissolved some of my glue?” Dean just grins, shrugging dismissively. “You can patch me up, right?”
“In time, yes, but—”
“We’ve got that,” Dean says, as if that settles the matter (as far as he cares, it does). He reaches up impulsively, dragging Castiel down against him. He buries his face against his neck and just breathes in. The salt shifts like sand around them as Castiel pulls back, instead.
Dean frowns questioningly as Castiel cups his face, staring down at Dean so intently. Dean should feel naked but instead he feels like the sun’s finally come out; he tilts his head back, shoulders loosening. (Maybe he is coming undone. Is this what undone feels like—)
“You kissed me,” Castiel says after watching Dean for a small, careful eon.
It sounds like doubt. Like the hundred million things Dean’s already had months to drown in.
(and Cas can have his months if he wants, but Dean hasn’t breathed in a year and change)
(and he’s a melting pot of Dean, all of him blurring and overlaying, slipping in and out of time and place)
(and all they’re saying is Cas) (and all they want to breathe is Cas)
When he draws Castiel down to him, they’re all in agreement.
And when they finally kiss, it tastes like salt.