Chapter Text
There’s a ringing in Dean’s ears and an echo of light in his eyes when he wakes to a damp, heavy darkness pressing in on him. It smells like earth and rot and a sharp scent that reminds him of a thunderstorm. Every hair on his body is standing on end despite the stuffy warmth of the air.
He ascertains all of this within a fraction of a second, and that’s when his thoughts catch up to him. Where is he? He doesn’t think he’s in Hell. Not anymore. He feels physical, tangible in a way he hasn’t in… he doesn’t know how long. Decades, if memory serves. Not to mention the absence of agony. He’d forgotten what that felt like.
Fierce hope seizes his breath, but he crushes it instantly—a reflex, at this point. He needs to focus.
He digs his lighter out of the pocket of his jeans. It takes a few tries in the oxygen-depleted air of his coffin, but he finally manages to flick a flame to life.
His coffin. Because, yeah, the wooden boards inches from his face, framing his prone form—he’s lying in his grave.
Panic replaces hope, and a scream rises in his throat. It rasps out so dry and weak that he knows no one will be able to hear him under six feet of earth. He tries again anyway, desperation surging through him, paralyzing fear threatening to pull him under.
What kind of sick joke is this? To be brought back to life, only to be returned to his grave, and die there again? His heart sinks. Maybe he is still in Hell; maybe this is just a change of pace, a new form of torture.
But if there’s even a sliver of a chance, he has to try. He thinks of sunlight, fresh air, a blue sky above him. He thinks of his car. Bobby. Sam.
He summons all of the strength in his adrenaline-fueled body and shoves against the lid of his cage, showering his face with moist, dark dirt. A grunt rips out of his sandpaper-rough throat as he pushes.
The lid gives, and pounds of dirt come pouring down onto him. He chokes and spits, clawing his way through it, fighting to get his legs underneath him. His eyes and mouth are pinched shut, and he’s unable to breathe, seconds from suffocating.
And then his hand breaks through into the open air.
Unbeknownst to Dean, there’s a thing made of fire and fury waiting in the wings, watching him from its perch in the cloudless sky. At a frequency he can’t hear, in a voice like the music of a planet’s orbit around its star, it beams out a message:
Dean Winchester is saved.
______
Dean has dealt with the unbelievable almost his entire life. The day his childhood home burned down was the day any semblance of normalcy he might’ve had went up in smoke with it. He’s never had the privilege of not believing in the most vile, horrifying things in this world, because he has to face undeniable proof of their existence almost every day: the deaths they leave in their wake, the families they’ve torn apart, their lifeless corpses when he drives a bullet or a blade through them.
Despite all of that, and despite all the evidence right in front of him—the fact that he’s standing here with a body that’s been remade and a handprint seared into his shoulder, the great pair of wings printed on the barn wall in shadow and lightning, the creature that didn't flinch at the blast of a shotgun or a demon knife to the chest—he just can’t believe it. The thing staring ice-cold needles into his eyes isn’t an angel. There is no Heaven, no God. There can’t possibly be a counterweight to all the evil in this world, because Dean’s seen it, and not once has there been a spark of light amidst all that darkness that could be anything close to divine.
The creature standing in front of him, whatever it is, tilts its head, its eyes narrowing. Dean feels its gaze sharpen even more, so that it’s piercing right through him, pinning him in place like a butterfly behind a pane of glass.
“What’s the matter?” it asks in that droning voice, one that sounds like it comes from a place deeper, more centralized, than its throat. The electric-blue eyes clear, getting infinitesimally wider with dawning realization.
“You don’t think you deserve to be saved,” the thing—Castiel—breathes. He looks a little sad, almost like he pities him.
Dean clenches his jaw. He can’t escape the cold current shooting up his spine, raking its nails across his shoulderblades, or the feeling that Castiel isn’t just looking at him, but seeing him. Seeing far more than anyone ever has, or ever should.
“Why’d you do it?” Dean forces the words out as steady as he can manage.
Castiel’s expression shifts, and now he’s all detached holy righteousness.
“Because God commanded it,” he says, and there’s that word again. God. It’s too big for Dean to comprehend in the abstract, let alone as an actual, physical entity that has a direct impact on his life.
“Because we have work for you.”
Yeah, well. That part sounds about right.
______
He hates the look that lights up Sam’s face when he tells him. It looks like awe, and hope, and faith, which is apparently something Dean lacks.
“Oh my God,” Sam says, voice hushed with wonder. “This is—this is great.”
“Really?” he sighs, rubbing his eyes. He didn't get a wink last night. “How is this great?”
Sam huffs a disbelieving laugh. “It’s angels, Dean! How could it not be?”
Dean raises his eyebrows. “You're telling me you actually believe this thing?” he asks. “Come on, Sammy.”
“You don't believe him?” Sam shoots back.
“Hell no, I don't!”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Dean echoes incredulously. “With what we do, Sam? What we’ve been through? How could I believe it?”
Now Sam looks like he pities him. Like Dean’s some poor, godless bastard that refuses to open his eyes and see the burning bush, or the writing on the wall, or whatever other miracle is supposed to have him on his knees with his arms stretched skyward, singing hymns to the high heavens.
He and Sam continue to argue until Bobby breaks it up to show them a book he found. And there it is, in the years-yellowed pages: a medieval-looking rendition of an angel with a gold halo pulling a man from a pit of fire.
Dean blankly stares down at it. At the red flame licking at the man’s heels that’s clearly meant to represent Hell. At the angel with an extended hand and a serene expression.
Then Bobby’s telling him that there’s nothing else, in all the shelves and stacks of lore shoved into the nooks of his house, that could’ve done it. Well, shit. Bobby’s not one to miss things like that.
Sam’s got this satisfied smirk on his face, and Dean can’t stand it. Can’t stand the fact that it’s so easy for him to believe in something like this. Because, sure, it’d be nice to think that there’s something looking out for them, that there’s a force of good pushing back against all this bad. It’d be nice to fold his hands together and talk to the sky and think that there’s someone up there listening. He doesn’t know why it feels impossible for him—even when, as Sam points out, the proof starts piling up.
But, okay. Sure. Maybe angels, and God, do exist. It’s just that after this, he really doubts their judgment, because how could they look at him and see something worthy of divine intervention? And more than that, how can they stand to see all the evil in the world and just turn a blind eye?
Maybe God exists, Dean concedes. But that doesn’t mean he has to believe in him.
______
He’s in the middle of leafing through his third book on angelic lore when he finds it. He suddenly understands why their opening line is ‘Be not afraid.’
The other books had depicted them as men in billowing robes with fluffy white wings. And, sure, that’s the usual picture, isn’t it? Dean supposes it isn’t too far off from what he saw in the barn last night: just a regular-looking human with some extra appendages.
But this. This is… something else.
He’s flipped to a page full of lore-accurate angel depictions, and they are weird. One drawing is of a creature with four heads, each a different animal, and four wings. Another is a series of criss-crossed, concentric rings dotted with eyeballs.
The last one catches and holds Dean’s eye. It’s a humanoid figure that has one pair of wings wrapped around its head and another around its legs, so that the only visible parts of its body are its arms and abdomen. Its third pair of wings is spread wide, as if in flight, and it’s armed with a sword, raised high for battle. To top it all off, the whole thing is blazing with fire, from head to toe to wing-tip.
Dean puts his pen down on his notebook, where he'd been jotting down any details that might be important. He doesn't know why, but he can't tear his eyes away.
Maybe he's trying to reconcile the image of the creature he met last night, which looked like a normal guy who just got off his nine-to-five, with this. Castiel did say he was in a vessel. This could be what's underneath the meatsuit.
Or maybe, a small part of him says, he's wondering how in the hell something like this could have deigned to touch him. To have gripped him by the shoulder in the midst of…
No. He’s not letting himself think about what he did down there. He can't go down that road.
He blinks himself back to focus, shaking his head and flipping to the next page. He tries to read, but a few minutes go by, and he realizes that his eyes are tracing the words on the page without actually absorbing any of them. The image of the angel with the sword is burned into his mind, its wingspan touching the corners of his field of vision.
He sighs and flips back to the page with the pictures, then gets up and goes over to the couch. He digs through his duffle until he finds what he’s looking for: a black charcoal pencil. He brings it back to his spot at the kitchen table, opens his notebook to a fresh page, and starts to draw.
______
Dean doesn’t have much left of his mother. He was so young when she died, just barely old enough to have started forming memories that he could take with him to adulthood. The ones he does have, he’s kept a white-knuckle grip on, running them in his head over and over again until he knows them by heart.
They’ve faded considerably, after forty years in Hell.
But there’s one detail that he’s never forgotten. One that he told Sam about, once; not as a fond reminiscence, but as a cruel piece of irony. It’s even more ironic now.
His mom used to tell him, every night when she’d tuck Dean in for bed, that angels were watching over him.
Dean knows what she’d meant; she was soothing a child who was afraid of the dark, afraid of spending the night away from his mother, by telling him that there were benevolent creatures looking out for him. Protecting him. Smiling down on him as he slept.
As it turns out, she was right. Just not in the way she’d imagined.
Because the only angel Dean’s ever met is exactly the opposite of all that. When he’s in Castiel’s presence, Dean doesn’t feel safe, or protected, or peaceful—he doesn’t feel a warm light glowing in his chest, which is what he might’ve imagined meeting an angel would feel like. He’s washed cold and colorless with fear. He feels watched, and not like he’s being watched over, but like he’s being tracked.
Castiel isn’t what he would’ve expected, if he’d allowed himself to think for a second that angels might be real. He’s definitely not what Mary Winchester expected.
Castiel is an electric storm of sparks and lightning. He’s a glass-shattering, ear-splitting, eye-burning bodysnatcher. He’s a shadow sketched in charcoal and moonlight telling Dean to ‘read the Bible.’ Telling him that the devil is real.
Then he’s stepping up close to Dean, getting right in his face, the air around him humming with furious energy, making Dean shrink back and avert his eyes like a cowering dog, and telling him to show him some respect. That he dragged Dean out of Hell, and that he can throw him back in.
As Dean holds his breath, pressed under the thumb of Castiel’s holy wrath, he helplessly, hopelessly wishes that his mother had been wrong.
______
“Our angel pal paid me a visit last night.”
Sam perks up, like that’s something to be excited about. Like the angel in question didn’t deliver some astronomically bad news and proceed to threaten Dean’s life.
“Really? What’d he say?” he asks eagerly.
Dean takes a deep breath through his nose. It’s hard not to feel a little bitter. He knows Sam’s all about this stuff—has been for basically his whole life—but he doesn’t get it. It’s easy to see all this Heaven bullshit as a good thing when you’re not the one with angels breathing down your neck.
“He’s not what you think, Sam,” he warns. “No harp, no halo. He’s actually kind of a dick.”
Sam’s brow pulls down stubbornly, his face going all stony. “What did he say?”
Dean sighs. He explains the sixty-six seals, how what they went through yesterday was one, and that the angels are fighting to keep more from breaking.
Then comes the million-dollar question:
“What happens when the last one breaks?”
Dean leans back against the couch cushion, sinking into it, but it does little to comfort him. As if the angel on his shoulder wasn’t bad enough, now they have the devil to contend with, too.
“Lucifer pops out of Hell.”
Sam looks at him like he’s waiting for Dean to laugh and say he's kidding. When he doesn't, his eyes get round. “Like… Satan?”
Dean shrugs flippantly. “That’s what Cas said.”
Sam frowns. “‘Cas?’”
Dean blinks. Huh. It feels irreverent, disrespectful, to give a nickname to an angel. He gets a childish sort of satisfaction from it.
“Yeah, Cas. Castiel’s kind of a mouthful, don’t you think?”
Sam gives him a weird look, then shakes his head. “Well, look, Dean. The way I see it, if all the angels are fighting against this, and God’s at the helm, we have nothing to worry about. They’re not going to let Lucifer out.”
Dean stares at him for a second. Then he scoffs and pushes himself up off of the couch. He can't stand to look at Sam’s trusting expression any longer.
It must be nice, he thinks, to be so sure. To have so much faith.
______
Dean has dreamt of Hell every night since he’s been back. Every night, that is, except for when Castiel visited him in Bobby’s kitchen, when he’d been sent back to the couch in a dreamless slumber.
He doesn't usually remember the nightmare when he wakes up. He thinks his brain is still catching up to holding all of those memories, forty years of torture and being tortured, so the details are usually pretty fuzzy. But he always wakes with a racing heart and an acrid feeling pumping through his veins, whether it be terror or anguish or sadistic pleasure. His mouth always fills with bile, and most times, he has to stumble through the dark to the bathroom to puke his guts out.
He’s grateful when Castiel plucks him out of one such nightmare, even if he does scare the shit out of him. He’s far less grateful for everything that follows.
Throughout the whole time travel catastrophe, he finds himself wondering if all angels are this exasperatingly vague, or if it's just Cas. He wakes him up in the middle of the night to send him on a Back to the Future style mission, only Dean has no idea what the mission is, and his DeLorean isn't talking.
And then Dean finally realizes what it is he's supposed to be stopping, so he does everything in his power to save his family from the cosmically shitty hand they've been dealt, and he can't do it. He can't change a damn thing. He has to stand there and watch his mom make the deal that sets every bad thing that’s ever happened to him in motion.
When a gentle hand lands on his shoulder, the last thing he expects to see when he turns around is Cas’ sympathetic expression. If Dean didn't know any better, he’d think he was actually sorry.
He thought Cas’ hand would've been ice-cold, or buzzing with electricity. Instead, it just feels like a warm, steady weight on his shoulder.
In that moment, Cas becomes a little bit less of a thing and a little bit more of a person, and the name Dean gave him becomes less of a snide joke. What it becomes more of, he’s not sure.
______
He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised. It’s all so typical that it’s almost perfect.
But he is. He’s shocked to find Sam with blood dripping from his nose and a demon on his arm. He’s disappointed beyond belief to see him using his freaky telekinetic exorcism powers when he swore to Dean that he wouldn’t. He’s a little bit heartbroken that Sam lied to his face about it. Like he said, it was basically Dean’s dying wish.
He guesses dying wishes don’t mean much when you just keep coming back.
______
Dean’s been out of Hell for almost a month now, and he hasn’t had sex.
It’s far from the longest dry spell he’s had, but he feels it more distinctly now than he ever has before. Because this time, he’s not held back by the fact that he’s too busy, or that he doesn’t have the opportunity; it’s the feeling of wrongness at the idea of baring his body for another person, and someone else baring themselves in turn. The vulnerability, the nakedness, the touching—it’s too familiar, too fresh. And it terrifies him.
He hates it. He’s never felt this way about sex before. It’s always been one of the few simple pleasures of his life; an easy way he could feel good about himself, at least for the night, before he had to slip out of the sheets and skip town in the morning. And now that’s been taken from him, like so many other pieces of himself.
But he needs a distraction. From the angels, and the seals, and fighting with Sam. Most of all, from the nightmares. Booze hasn’t been cutting it. If anything, it might just make his dreams more vivid. So he decides to nut up, find himself a girl, and get over it.
They roll into town for a vamp hunt, and it seems perfect—Oktoberfest, beer and pretzels, girls in little dirndls and knee-high socks. So Dean spouts some bravado to Sam about losing his virginity all over again, and he chats up the pretty blonde bartender who just so happens to also be one of their witnesses.
His heart’s not really in it, but whatever. Once he gets through this, he’ll be back on track. Back to normal.
Then he and Sam save the day. He gets the girl, and she invites him to come over to her apartment after they’ve gotten cleaned up at the motel. He grins at Sam and tells him not to wait up, earning an eyeroll and a pointed ‘See you at eight o’clock tomorrow, Dean.’ It’s a routine they’ve run ad nauseum. So why does it feel like he’s just playing his part? Like he’s fighting against his roiling stomach and the anxiety bubbling in his blood?
The girl—Jamie—is nice. She’s cool, and she’s witty, not to mention the fact that she’s beautiful. They talk over drinks for a while in the living room of her apartment, and Dean can feel his nerves dimming. But then she moves closer on the couch and slides a suggestive hand onto the rough blue denim of his upper thigh, and the contact sends cold dread skittering over his skin. His heart drops like a stone.
Jamie frowns, probably about to ask him if he’s alright, but he cuts her off with an open-mouthed kiss. He just needs to do this. He just needs to get it over with.
They stumble to her bedroom, and every step feels like he’s drawing closer to the gallows. Stripping out of his clothing feels like he’s being flayed alive. Every skim of skin against skin burns like acid. Still, he keeps going.
Dean quickly learns to keep his eyes open, because otherwise, the images behind his eyelids threaten to tear him apart. He talks a lot more than usual, things like You like that? and Is that good?, because he needs to remind himself that the sounds he’s hearing are a product of pleasure rather than pain. He focuses his efforts on Jamie, since that’s easier than letting her touch him, keeping his hands and mouth gentle and soft. He keeps himself balancing on the knife’s edge between paralyzing panic and mindless motion.
Then, all at once, he’s back in his body, lying next to Jamie under the sheets, her body a warm line of contact against his side. She turns her head with a rustle of the pillowcase and smiles up at him.
“Hey,” she says.
He paints his face with a smile of his own. “Hey.”
She scooches forward so that her head is resting on Dean’s chest. It’s weighing his lungs down, suffocating him. He doesn’t ask her to move.
“Y’know, you’re not what I expected,” she comments.
His blood goes cold. Did he weird her out? Was he that obvious?
“How so?” he manages.
She smooths a hand over his sternum. “You’re very… careful.” Her grin spreads wider across her face. “And generous. I mean, you saved my life, and I barely got a chance to show my gratitude.”
His worry fades, replaced by dim discomfort. He forces a laugh. “Trust me, I’m all good.”
She hums, ghosting her fingers over his chest. Dean blinks, and her fingernails are razor blades, slicing through his skin so Alastair can tear out his still-beating heart.
“So, you’re just a giver, then? Is that it?” she asks playfully.
Dean takes a deep breath, fighting the urge to push her hand away, to get up and put his clothes back on, to leave and go back to the motel and drink until he’s so far gone that he’ll pass out cold.
“Yeah,” he says. He turns away from her, eyes wide-open and glazed over, pointed at the popcorn ceiling. “Something like that.”
______
Dean started smoking in his sophomore year of high school. He was never really one to care what the other kids thought of him, not when he’d be gone in a few weeks anyway, but when the guy he’d skipped gym with to sit under the bleachers offered him one, it seemed right. He figured it fit with the whole outlaw, cowboy, popped-collar-leather-jacket thing he had going. He’d seen his dad smoke them from time to time, outside their motel room or in the driver’s seat of the Impala with the windows rolled down. Plus, what was he gonna do, pussy out and say no?
So, he and that guy—Sean or Shane or something like that—smoked together every day for the two weeks Dean’s family stayed in town. One day, when Dean came back to the motel reeking, his dad had looked him in the eye and asked if he'd been smoking. Dean panicked and sputtered out a ‘No, sir,’ unable to hold his dad’s gaze.
John had just smirked and shaken his head. And that was all the approval Dean needed.
Bobby always hated it. When Dean was a teenager, he’d swat at his shoulder when he caught a whiff of smoke on him, telling him that he’s killing himself, that he’s being reckless and stupid. He’d chew John out for letting him get away with it. But when Dean hit nineteen or twenty, he started keeping his grievances to himself, limited to a grumbled remark or a sharp look of disapproval whenever he lit one up.
He quit when he was twenty-four, after his dad sent him off in the Impala to hunt solo. It was too expensive a habit to keep up when he barely had enough money for food, gas, and motel lodging. Plus, he runs from monsters for a living, so he wanted to keep his lungs in good shape.
One night, after a bad nightmare, he staggers away from the motel waste bin that he’d just finished puking in (quietly enough not to wake Sam), throws on his boots and jacket, and takes refuge in the safety of the Impala. He doesn’t even know where he’s driving until he winds up there, at a gas station that pours sickly gray-green light onto the pavement. He doesn’t know why he goes inside until he sees the rows of Marlboros behind the counter. He walks out with three packs of Reds and a six pack of beer.
He sits on the curb in front of the building, facing the vacant rows of gas pumps and the empty road beyond, the sharp October air seeping through the pores in his jeans and biting at his ears and nose. He clumsily tears open the box of cigarettes with numb fingers, feeling a little rush of excitement at the prospect of a fresh pack that he hasn’t felt in years, then selects a cigarette. He fishes his lighter out of his pocket and tries not to think about the empty pine box that’s still buried in a field in Illinois, then lights up and takes a deep drag.
He’s missed it. Hasn’t had much of an opportunity to realize it, with all that’s gone down recently, but he has. The burn down his throat, the warmth that fills his lungs, the smell, the taste. Plus, it reminds him of easier times. When his dad was around. Or, maybe not around, but alive, at least.
He holds the cigarette between his teeth as he slides a bottle of beer out of the cardboard holder and pops off the cap with his ring. He plucks the cigarette out of his mouth and takes a sip, which turns into a gulp, and before he knows it, he’s downed half the bottle.
In the back of his mind, he knows this is a bad idea. He has to drive back to the motel. He tells himself that he won’t get smashed, that he just needs to take the edge off, that the roads are empty anyway. He’ll keep it under control.
Six beers and half a pack later, Dean’s sliding behind the wheel of the Impala, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He’s definitely over the legal limit. But he has to get back to the hotel before Sam wakes up, and he doesn’t have enough time to walk, and he figures he’s a professional drunk at this point, so he’ll be fine.
No sooner has he turned the key in the ignition than the air pressure changes and the hairs on the back of his neck prickle in alarm.
“Hello, Dean,” Castiel says from the passenger seat.
Dean’s reflexes are so slow that he doesn’t even flinch. He groans, lacking the energy and the patience (and maybe the sobriety) to school his reaction.
“What is it this time?” he grumbles petulantly.
Cas squints at him. “I came to let you know that we saved a seal tonight. I would’ve waited until morning, but I sensed you were awake.” His eyes scan their surroundings, his head swiveling robotically, then latch onto Dean. “What are you doing here?”
If he didn’t already know Castiel wasn’t human, his eyes would be a dead giveaway. They’re too bright, too sharp, like they can see colors that Dean can’t even dream up. His gaze feels tangible in a way that a normal person’s doesn’t, like it’s pressing cold fingertips against Dean’s skin wherever it falls.
He tears his own eyes away, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Needed some smokes.”
He watches Cas watch him out of the corner of his eye. He feels like he needs to keep him in his line of sight, even though he knows by now that he’s not a threat. Well, sometimes he’s not entirely convinced, but he’s reasonably sure he’s not a threat. Still, though, it’s like the wiring in his brain won’t let him turn his back on him; like something in him recognizes what Castiel is. What he can do.
He resents feeling like the inferior creature he knows he is. Indignation burns red-hot like a coal in the pit of his stomach. He swings his head to his right, belligerently meeting Cas’ eye again.
“Why’d you need to tell me about the seal anyway? You gonna report to me every time you manage to do your job?”
Castiel’s face freezes over. It feels like the temperature drops a few degrees in the cabin of the car.
“You don’t trust us,” he says icily. “You don’t think we’re helping in the fight for the seals.” His voice somehow manages to drop even lower, rumbling out deep and dangerous like a distant roll of thunder. “I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong.”
He looks even more alien than usual with the faint green-tinged light painted over the high points of his face, with the harsh line of his jaw and the hollows of his eyes carved in shadow. He’s sitting unnaturally still—no rise and fall of his chest, no blinking, no twitching or shifting. Everything about him appears human until you look a little closer, and then your gut grows heavy with the uncanny feeling of something being off, both in what’s visible and what’s not.
Dean’s shoulders tighten, pulling forward on instinct. The creeping sense of caution crawling up the knobs of his spine isn’t enough to make him submit, though.
“It’s gonna take a lot more than one saved seal for me to cozy up to you guys,” he says, narrowing his eyes, letting his own voice fall into a growl.
Castiel stays frozen in time, his eyes still boring into Dean’s. Then he lets out a barely audible breath through his nose, his mouth tightening at the corners.
“We don’t need your trust,” he says, his eyes flitting over Dean’s face once again. Dean tries not to betray anything but insolence in the set of his mouth, the draw of his brow. “But it would simplify things.”
Dean scoffs. “Yeah, well, I’m not really one to make things simple.”
“I’ve gathered that.”
Dean’s eyebrows hike up a little.
“It would also simplify things if you didn’t die in a car crash,” Cas says, and then his hand is reaching out. Dean tries to pull back, but he’s too slow, and two fingertips make contact with his forehead before he has a split-second to think. All at once, his vision sharpens, his head clears, and he’s stone-cold sober. He blinks in surprise.
“Damn,” he says, immediately feeling stripped raw by the discomforting harshness of sobriety. He glares at Cas. “I worked hard on that buzz.”
Cas folds his hands in his lap. He has a disdainful glint in his eye.
“You need to be more careful,” he says. “You have an important role to play here.”
Ire rises like bile in Dean’s throat. He laughs bitterly, stamping his foot on the break and throwing the car into reverse, turning his attention to getting back to the motel.
“Yeah, I’m well aware. That’s all I’ve been hearing about these days.”
“Then why were you out drinking at four in the morning?”
Dean bristles, pulling the car out onto the road. He doesn’t know why Cas doesn’t just leave him alone. He delivered his message. His business here should be done.
“What’s it to you?”
Cas doesn’t respond. He just keeps staring at the side of Dean’s face as he drives. It doesn’t seem like he’s leaving until he spills.
Dean lays his frustration into the gas petal, soaring down the deserted two-lane road at twenty over the speed limit. He holds out for a few more moments, the air growing taut with tension, before he finally snaps.
“Sleep doesn’t exactly come easy these days, alright?”
Cas is dead silent for a beat. “Your nightmares,” he deduces.
“Yeah, my fuckin’ nightmares,” he spits. “Hell will do that to you.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Cas finally look away, turning toward the passenger side window to watch the forest line slip by.
“It is… a terrible place,” he says quietly.
Suddenly, it dawns on Dean that Cas saw him there. He knows what he did—caught red-handed, literally. His grip tightens on the wheel.
“Yeah, no shit. It’s Hell,” he says, voice full of acid.
Cas doesn’t reply. He just keeps on looking out the window.
They drive the rest of the way to the motel in silence. Dean keeps expecting him to fly off, or pick up the thread of conversation, but Cas sits like a wax figure in the passenger seat, the occasional streetlamp illuminating his immobile form in yellow-gold before it passes, dropping them into darkness once again.
Dean pulls into the spot outside of his room and shifts into park, opening his mouth to ask if Cas is planning on following him inside to have a slumber party, but he cuts him off before he can speak.
“Goodnight, Dean,” he murmurs, and before Dean knows it, two fingers are tapping against his skull once again.
______
“Dean. Dean.”
He pushes his face deeper into the comfort of his pillow in an attempt to drown out all the light and sound nagging at him. “Hmm,” he grumbles.
A hand shoves against his shoulder. “Wake up, Dean. It’s almost ten. We have to check out.”
That catches his attention. “Ten?” he asks in hoarse disbelief, pushing himself onto his elbows.
Sam snorts. “Yeah, dude. Better pack up quick, because I am not paying for late checkout.”
“Cheapskate,” Dean mutters, rubbing his eyes with both fists.
Sam ignores him. “I’m gonna start packing up the car,” he says, lugging the weapons duffel over his shoulder. Then he’s out the door, leaving Dean lying on top of the sheets feeling well-rested and disoriented.
He rolls over and looks down at himself, and then around the room at large. He’s in the same T-shirt and jeans as last night, but his boots and jacket are placed neatly over by his duffel. It takes him a second to recall how he got here. Cas.
He abruptly realizes that he didn’t have any nightmares after Cas sent him off to bed. Just like the last time, he didn’t dream at all. He’s overcome by an overwhelming wave of relief at having finally had a good night of sleep, free of torment.
He’s about to send a silent thanks Cas’ way before he catches himself. He doesn’t pray. And he definitely doesn't pray to pompous, self-righteous assholes who think they can order him around under the guise of a holy mission. This was probably just another tactic to earn his appreciation so that he’ll be more compliant.
He can’t believe he almost fooled himself into thinking that Cas actually cares. He knows better than that. He knows monsters, and Castiel’s just another one of them.