Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dean rubs his soulmark every morning.

It burns. It hurts.

He puts his fingers to the shoulder Cas laid his hand upon—twice, a decade apart. If he closes his eyes, he can still feel how hard Cas gripped him, the warmth of Cas’s long fingers, the pressure when he shoved Dean to safety. The marking probably wasn’t intentional—even though it was the same shoulder, this time stained in Cas’s blood and tears and sincerity.

That’s just how soulmarks work, after all. It’s not the first touch, it’s the second. It’s all about compatibility and getting to know each other and Fate and connection. Nursery rhyme bullshit like that.

The lines of Enochian that swirl around Dean’s shoulder throb like a bruise, but the pressure of having his palm on it seems to help. By a few minutes after he wakes up, the burn of it has settled to a low, achy, constant pulse. He rotates the joint, carefully. It just beats at him again, once.

Dean’s never asked about Sam’s first soulmark, because the fact is, he’s pretty sure that’d get him punched in the face. Even though Dean’s said a lot of insensitive bullshit in his life, he’d close his eyes and take that facer gladly.

Samuel Winchester is the only person that Dean knows who’s popped two soulmarks in his lifetime rather than just the one, because, well. After one soulmate goes, the other just… fades off. They die. Or they go off the rails, first. Hell, look at poor Amelia, after Jimmy.

Always. But Dean’s still here.

Maybe that says things about how sane Dean is, himself, these days. But he’s trying. Goddammit, he’s trying. He laughs, he eats; he hunts and he smiles. He teases Sam and Eileen. He listens to Jody talk about ‘her girls.’

He’s here. He’s present. He’s trying to be.

But Dean can’t imagine that Sam’s soulmark hurts like this. Sonofabitch, when Sam’s second one bloomed—impossibility twining around his ankle, of all places, like the giant girly freak that he is—Sam didn’t even find the delicate chain of Gaelic for a whole week. Not until he walked into the kitchen and Eileen was cooking up the turkey bacon that Sam had been literally dreaming about.

(Eileen had a great big belly laugh about that. She knew: figures that she’s more in touch with her own feelings and already worked out how to listen in on Sam’s. Sam complains that she could at least see her soulmark, since it’s on her forearm… and to be fair, Dean can’t remember the last time he examined his own ankles. Sam’s got even more distance to cover before he gets there.)

But somehow, Dean’s not even surprised that his own mark hurts.

Dean doesn’t look at it as he changes his clothes. He spent enough damned time doing that already, his throat clutching as he wonders how it’s going to start to fade. Is it going to go like his freckles when he doesn’t go out into the sun—dimmer and dimmer until it’s gone? Or is he just going to wake up someday and find his shoulder empty all over again?

The jagged words that he knows spiral out from his shoulder joint haven’t started to fade at all, though, not even a little: the edges of each letter are crisp and dark, with a tiny little flip at the end of each, because Cas is a dramatic sonofabitch.

Even though Cas is… gone.

No. Not ‘gone.’ Dean grits his teeth and stares up the cement ceiling of his bunker bedroom. He’s dead.

Dean stares at that truth, and like the abyss, it stares coldly back at him.

People aren’t supposed to survive their soulmates’ deaths, is the thing. The only reason Sam did the first time is because there was demon blood and apocalypse-level shit involved.

Maybe that’s true for Dean, too.

But in response, his shoulder flares bright and hot and painful. The pain feels like something living, in and of itself.

Maybe it’s always like this, when something goes wrong. Maybe this is a punishment for when someone’s stupid enough to let their soulmate go into the beyond without reaching out and grabbing back—without confirming the words appearing on their skin, too, braiding their souls and branding their bodies. Dean doesn’t know anyone who he could possibly fucking ask about it. He already knows he’s a freak; he doesn’t want to find out what strangers on the Interwebs theorize about his freakishness.

But maybe it’s just because it’s him and Cas, and they can’t do the most normal damned thing in the world in a normal way.

He has no idea if his soulmark would’ve worked the right way—if he and Cas could have flashed laughter and images and feelings across it to each other. They never had a chance to find out.

Soulmates are supposed to go to Heaven together. That’s the whole deal, and before Dean actually saw Heaven, he might’ve, in his secret heart of hearts, thought that was a… really nice idea.

But he closes his eyes, puts his hand on his shoulder and says, “We’re coming for you, buddy,” anyway.

The old, achy pain in Dean’s shoulder is terrible.

But all the same, it still tastes like hope.

*_*_*_*

Dean’s not sure whose heart breaks harder when Jack says, “I miss Castiel,” over his pancakes.

(They have a major creation power in their kitchen eating Dean’s homemade strawberry pancakes. Jack appeared in the Vault this morning, sitting cross-legged on the table and tracing the carved letters of his name. He brought a jug of bourbon maple syrup and a little pot of the best damned butter Dean’s ever tried. Apparently, they raised him right that way.)

It’s Sam’s fork that scrapes hard over the edge of his plate, though, with a goosebump-raising squeak. Dean grits his teeth, just waiting for his shoulder to flare up at the sound of Cas’s name, but it doesn’t.

His fucking soulmark makes no sense.

“I wish I had the chance to know him better,” Eileen agrees, quietly.

Dean can’t take much more of this. Just because he didn’t tell any of them about the spiral on his shoulder—he doesn’t think he could take the pity, the sympathy, without someone ending up with a fist to the face—doesn’t mean he wants to have a fucking conversation about everything they regret when it comes to Cas. He’s glad when Sam just shakes his head.

(If even Sam’s not sharing his feels, sure as fuck Dean’s not gonna have to.)

“I thought I could get him out!” Jack says, looking shaky and sad, but stubborn. So stubborn. Dean knows just where he got that from. “I know I can. I know it!”

Wait. What?

Dean sits up so fast he knocks his last piece of breakfast bacon right off the edge of his plate. He barely notices. “What?” he hisses. “Kid, why the hell didn’t you say so, what the fuck were you—”

“I can’t find him,” Jack says, sadly. He puts his fork down to sign at the same time, because he’s just polite that way. “I even opened a gate to the Empty! It’s asleep, now. It didn’t like Chuck, and I told it it could rest. If we’re quiet, it won’t get angry. It won, it doesn’t care! But I can’t…” His face is sad and pleading. “Dean, don’t you think I’ve been trying?”

Dean’s soulmark burns. “Does that mean…” Dean has to clear his throat to force the words out, because they taste too much like hope. “Does that mean he’s not in the Empty?”

But holy shit, if he’s not there, where is he? Jack’s already told them about how he’s been remodeling Heaven, knocking down the walls, and—to his own delight—finding angels who have been hiding away in the cracks, faking being human in human Heavens. They didn’t like what was happening, but didn’t want to be rebooted by the old administration either.

(Dean’ll reserve judgment: it’s nice that Jack is happy, and that he’s got some help putting Humpty Dumpty back together, but Dean’s not sure a cowardly angel is much better than an asshole angel. He’s sure as fuck that Cas isn’t hiding in Heaven.)

“I think… he is there. But our connection isn’t strong enough,” Jack says, lowering his chin. He draws a complicated, glowing symbol in a puddle of maple syrup. “And he, um. He won’t come when I call.” He raises his face and meets their eyes, one after the other, with a little bit of hopeful alarm. “I can’t call very loud, you understand, so maybe he just can’t hear me…” Jack’s shoulders curl inwards. “I know he’s not really my blood-father, but I thought—"

“Hey!” Eileen says, soothingly, patting between Jack’s shoulder blades. “Don’t do that! Not your fault, Jack. You’ve already done so much. No one else could even come close.”

Sam tries out a smile that makes it up the corners of his eyes, which is more than Dean thinks he’d be able to do himself. He points his fork at Jack. “Besides, Cas would kick your butt if he ever heard you say that he’s not your real father, you know that.”

Yeah. Jack was always Cas’s kid, always, even when Dean was so ugly about it he flinches at his own memory. If Jack can’t reach him in there…

Dean swallows. The back of his eyes prickle and burn. His shoulder tingles and aches all the way down to the bone. “You, uh. You need… a connection?”

Jack looks like he’s going to wilt like a flower again, but he sighs. “I… I think so. I hope so. I need something that’s his, that’s part of him, but Castiel…” when he looks up, his blue eyes are sad, swollen. “All he ever really had was… us.”

That’s what decides Dean, at the end—because it’s true. It’s so fucking true.

But when he pushes his sleeve up to bare the lower edge of his soulmark, the jagged spiral curve of Enochian that makes its way over his bicep to ring almost up to the edge of his collarbone, everyone pauses and stares.

“Uh… would this work?” Dean asks, hoarsely.

Sam drops his fork.

*_*_*_*

“Oh… that’s so pretty,” Jack murmurs, admiringly, once Dean has his shirt off. “I think it’s the prettiest soulmate mark I’ve ever seen.”

Fuck, Dean feels naked, and not just ‘cause his goddamned pie belly is visible for both Jack and Sam to stare at. (Eileen, because she’s a smart lady and maybe a little bit of a saint, didn’t try to come along, just murmured something about spell components and saw herself out.)

Sam’s trying to have a whole conversation with Dean with just his eyebrows, and nope, nope. The degree to which Dean is not going to let himself be alone with his damned little brother, because Dean does not want to have a conversation about the fact that he’s got an Enochian soulmark on his shoulder, is… well… it’s a lot.

“What’s it say?” Sam asks. Fortunately, he asks it before Dean’s mouth opens and spits out the reality that he doesn’t give a shit how pretty the spiral of words is, it fucking hurts. He doesn’t want either of them to know that, either, because he knows he’d punch one or both of them if he saw pity flash over their faces. (Dean suspects that punching Jack would probably hurt. A lot.) “It’s… Enochian?”

Jack nods. He doesn’t touch it—Dean doesn’t remember if they ever taught him about soulmarks, but at least he knows better than to do that—but his finger traces a spiral in the air that follows the flow of the tiny marks on Dean’s shoulder. Dean just barely keeps himself from flinching away from even the possibility of the touch. “Yes. It’s… ‘I cared about the whole world because of you.’” He swallows, and his eyes are red-rimmed when he looks up. “That sounds like Castiel. That sounds like what he thought of you, Dean.”

Dean clenches his teeth on a snarky remark about yeah, that’s what soulmarks are about—that’s why Sam’s has “You don’t know how not to be brave,” in Gaelic on his ankle, and Eileen has “I don’t deserve the miracle that you are,” on the inside of her forearm. He doesn’t think he could really say anything anyway, not with how hard his heart is beating in his ears. Hearing Cas’s words again in Jack’s lighter, softer voice—that’s going to fuck Dean up, he knows it. He never looked up what was written on his skin.

(But maybe he already knew.)

“You think it’ll be enough?” Sam asks.

“I, maybe,” Jack looks at the tip of his finger as if he actually touched Dean’s shoulder with it, and sniffs it. What? “Yes, I think so. I’ve got the scent, now.” He smiles brightly at Dean. “I won’t forget.

Fuck, Dean’s life has gotten so, so weird.

But his shoulder beats and beats. It hurts, but it hurts the way Dean’s side gets a stitch in it when he’s running, or the flutter inside his ribs after a monster’s dead at his feet. It’s the painful beat of survival.

It turns out that Jack can’t go into the Empty himself without waking the thing up again, but he knows just what kind of ingredients it takes to open up a little portal. When he cuts into his own palms, the ichor that flows into the bowl doesn’t drip, it sort of… slinks, the same gold as the blaze of his eyes. He sways, and Sam catches him around the shoulders.

Dean half-expects that the doorway that opens will be like the last one: that sticky wash of darkness that turned his stomach for how wrong it was, like watching the world twist itself inside out and spill its guts onto the ground.

(Or maybe that wasn’t the Empty that gave him that feeling—maybe it was Cas looking at him with tears in his eyes and a smile on his face that Dean’s never seen before. Maybe it was the way Dean’s mind spun empty, empty, empty when he heard Cas say, “I love you.” Maybe it was Cas’s hand shoving him, bloody, into safety, and the way pain screamed through Dean’s bones in the wake of it, the letters carved into his skin when he peeled off his layers.)

But it’s not thick tentacles of nothingness and the knowledge that this is goodbye. It’s just an oval in the air, filled with that same familiar absence of light, of life, of… anything.

“Cas?” Jack says. Dean’s voice screws itself shut in his throat at how expectant he sounds, even with his wrists dripping golden God-blood into a bowl. “Cas, are you…” Jack scowls and squints into the rip in the universe like he’s trying to peek through a keyhole. “Castiel?” His expression is so young and hopeful, it’s like he’s forgotten he’s a goddamned creation power at all. “He’s there!” he exclaims, face twisting and frustrated. He presses his palms to his bleeding wrists, all but wringing his hands. “I can feel—guys, guys, he’s there! Why won’t he come out?”

Dean doesn’t know the answer to that, but his soulmark beats, beats, beats, a furious, painful rhythm that matches his pulse. He realizes he’s about to do something very, very reckless and probably more than a little stupid.

Sam knows him a little too well, he thinks, but not well enough—he doesn’t quite make it between Dean and the rip in the world before Dean launches himself into it with two strides and a leap.

About a second too late, just as the mirrored black surface slurps him in like a mouthful of noodles, Dean realizes that for everything he’s been through, he’s still human. There might be a reason that humans don’t end up in the Empty. Maybe it’s that they can’t survive there. Maybe it’s like space—maybe it’ll just tear him apart.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because they beat Chuck; they brought everyone back. Sam’s settled and happy and soulmarked again. The girls have found their way home. Jack’s putting together Heaven. Dean’s done all he needed to.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because people aren’t supposed to survive their soulmate’s death.

But then Dean’s through, and it’s not like stepping out of an elevator, or even like the weird jump displacement of what angel flight used to feel like. There isn’t momentum. There isn’t weight. One moment he’s jumping, his body open and tight with the force of it, Sam’s hand almost managing to snatch at the edge of his flannel.

Then Dean’s just… standing, as if he was always standing here. There’s no floor or walls or ceiling. It’s not like Hell, which stank of blood and iron and the synesthesia of screams; it’s sure as hell not like Heaven. The whole world is just… quiet and dark. It breathes, very slowly, around him. It’s… peaceful.

There’s a light in the distance, a hint of a neutral beige glow. There might, just maybe, be the outline of a figure inside it.

But Dean would know the silhouette of him anywhere. He calls out, but there’s no answer—not even a flicker.

Dean’s walking. Then running.

In the beginning, he thinks he isn’t getting anywhere. Then he realizes he isn’t getting anywhere. It’s just him and the firefly of light in the distance. He’s not getting tired; his legs don’t ache, and his side isn’t getting a stitch in it. He’s panting, but he’s not breathing…

Connection, he realizes, and reaches a hand up, slapping his palm roughly to the aching spiral on his left shoulder.

And he’s there.

It’s him. Fuck. It’s Cas—his back to Dean, hair so dark the tips of it seem to be disappearing into the cool, breathing obscurity around him, his chin tilted up as if he’s looking into a nonexistent sky. Something’s wrong, though: he’s not just standing in the darkness, like Dean is, he’s shrouded in it, long drapes of it falling over his back and arms and shoulders like curtains.

Dean has so goddamned much to say. It all crowds in his throat, in his chest, strangling him under the force of the words until he’s dizzy. It’s him, it’s Cas, he’s here. For all that Dean knew this would come, that he’d find Cas someday—there isn’t a world in which he wouldn’t—he didn’t actually think—and he’s not—he doesn’t know—

“Cas, man,” Dean blurts, instead, because he’s just so damned eloquent. “What the hell, you forget how to answer when someone’s yelling for you?”

Cas jumps. He turns.

And that’s when Dean realizes that the tan strip wasn’t trenchcoat.

Cas is naked. Completely freakin’ sky-clad from his head to his feet.

Dean has the panicky, bizarre, momentary thought that Cas has weird toes, with the big one off at an angle from the rest of them.

“Dean?” Cas breathes, his eyes going wide, whites showing all around—before his expression crumples. “Oh, Dean, no, no… what’ve you done? Why are you here?”

Dean doesn’t know whether he wants to close his eyes or stare. Holy shit, there’s just so much skin. He’s trying to remember if he’s ever really gotten a look at Cas shirtless. He doesn’t think he has, not without someone bleeding, and God, look at him: strong shoulders, long, lean, delicate muscle—a hint of a treasure trail into soft-looking, curly fluff, cock hanging unthreatening against a thick thigh before Dean wrenches his gaze away and fixes it above Cas’s collarbones again. Dean doesn’t know if that body is Jimmy, if that’s all Cas, or all of the above, and Dean’s mouth should not be fucking watering right now—but it is.

Did Cas really think Dean wouldn’t come for him, though? Seriously, what the fuck?

 “Of course I’m here, you asshole!” Dean retorts—then shocks himself by asking, “Where the hell’s your soulmark?”

Goddammit. He was trying not to think about it—he really was—but the angel’s naked from head to toe. And there isn’t any writing on Cas anywhere, other than the scrape of Enochian warding on his ribs. None of Dean’s words, no-fucking-where. That shouldn’t even be possible.

Cas’s head goes tilting to the side, his upper lip tucking just a bit over the lower, and the familiarity of that little motion almost crushes Dean. “What… do you mean?”

“Y’know,” Dean mumbles, gesturing vaguely to, well… all of him. “I guess I figured…” he grits his teeth. The throb of pain in his mark is worse than it’s been in weeks. Dean’s hand curls at the side of his thigh like it wants to go up and soothe it again. He made a freakin’ habit of it, and it’s gotta stop right now. He jerks his chin in the direction of his left shoulder, Cas’s praise written on his skin, on his bones. “It’s how I found you.”

“What are you talking about?” But Cas looks at him like he thinks Dean’s gone over the edge. “Of course I don’t have a soulmark, Dean. How could I? I’m an angel, I don’t have a soul.”

Oh.

Jesus Christ, it’s not that Dean ever really thought… right? Yeah, Cas touched him, and the words rose on Dean’s skin. (Cas said he loved him.) But Dean’s soulmark always hurt so bad that he knew that there had to be something wrong with it. And he knows for a stone-cold fact that they didn’t end up in the same place after death, and that’s what soulmarks are supposed to do.

It’s not like Dean’s thought in tiny, aching moments what his words on Cas’s skin might say.

(He has. Of course he has. Goddammit. He was pretty sure it would be “I’d rather have you, cursed or not.”)

Dean knew better than to hope for shit. He’s always known better.

But none of that matters. He swallows. Nothing’s changed, right?

Nothing has to change.

“Well, I’m here to bring you home, you, you assbutt,” Dean says, swallowing down the bittersweet knot of what he doesn’t dare call disappointment or a tiny, fragile little hope shattering. So what if Cas doesn’t have Dean’s words on his skin, too? “Jack’s been fuckin’ yelling for you, don’t you know you gotta answer when your kid yells?”

Cas licks his lips. His chest rises and falls. “Dean… I know you’re… but you have to go.” He takes a small step away from Dean.

And the darkness shifts around him, behind him—fuck!

Dean’s whole body goes rigid, slapping for a useless gun that he doesn’t even have on the small of his back, as the black shadows lift and…

Flutter?

Dean’s mouth drops open, and for a second, he forgets about the fact that they’re standing in angel afterlife and Cas is naked. He forgets that he’s the fucking moron who somehow has an unmatched soulmark, and that for the first time since it appeared on his skin, it doesn’t hurt like a stab wound straight down to the bone.

Dean doesn’t know whether it’s that he couldn’t see them for the darkness, or if his eyes just couldn’t quite figure out how to focus on what was draped over Cas’s back and arms and legs, but holy shit. It’s not the Empty.

It’s wings.

For all that Dean thought they burnt up in the fall or something, Cas’s wings are whole. They’re an enormous span of ebony feathers that disappear off into the nothing around them until they move, the tips of them dripping down around Cas’s bare feet, like oil. They’re way too big to be hauling around, even for a little man-shaped pillar of celestial intent or whatever—each one longer than Cas himself is tall. Dean can’t even see where they end. The borders just disappear into the nothingness around them.

But they don’t look right, either, and the longer Dean stares, the more he can see actual details—like those magic eye pictures from the nineties that Sammy always loved but that gave Dean a headache, each edge unsticking itself free from the emptiness around them. They’re raggedy-looking and crumpled and awkward: Cas holds one of them a little higher than the other, like tucking a bad arm up to his chest. Greasy puffs of what Dean thinks is some kind of down stick out from between some of the long black feathers, and other feathers are broken off at the shaft, leaving spiky patches. A few spots have the gleam of clot, or old blood. Shit, what happened to him?

“Sonofabitch, will you look at that,” Dean breathes, anyway, because even all beat-up like Cas is, that’s probably the most damned beautiful thing he’s ever seen—Cas buck naked and not seeming to give a single shit about it, ebony wings draped all around him. He watches, eyes widening, as Cas’s wings move, shuffling back and forth in an invisible, silent wind even though Cas himself is standing completely still. Then Dean shakes his head, clearing the fucking feathers—heh—from it. “Okay, uh, we can work with this. Just gotta, I dunno, get some wing flaps cut in your trench coat now.” And get him some clothes again before Dean’s brain leaks out of his goddamned ears.

“You can… see them?!” Cas realizes, aloud, sounding shocked for an instant before his eyes go shaky and flat.

What? Dean frowns at him. “I ain’t blind. C’mon, buddy.” He wants to kick himself. ‘Buddy.’ Sonofabitch. But he’s been calling Cas that for near-on a decade, now. “Shake your tailfeathers and let’s get out of—”

But Cas is folding in on himself even as he watches. His wings tuck inwards, the edges of them curving around his shins, enfolding Cas’s knees in dark, dull feathers. They don’t move like they have bones, which, okay, weird, but on the scale of weird in Dean’s life these days, this is about the level of realizing there’s no beer in the fridge.

“Oh, it’s so good to see you, Dean,” Cas answers, and the way he’s staring at Dean’s face is so familiar—too intense, blue-eyed, and Dean is starting to learn to hate that sad, sweet smile. “I don’t know how I forgot already how beautiful you are. But… you should leave.”

What the everlasting fuck?

But there’s only one answer to that.

“Nope,” Dean answers.

Cas blinks. “Wh-what?”

“You heard me.” He holds out his hand. “Let’s go, Cas. I ain’t leaving without you, so.” He shrugs his marked shoulder, and feels it hurt him again under his flannel and Henley—but the pain isn’t the same anymore. It’s achy, yes, still, but it’s like the pressure of slippery fingers against a knotted-up muscle. And right now? It doesn’t even matter that Cas is an eldritch Big Bird or that Dean has an unmatched soulmark on his shoulder. “We go together, or not at all.”

He's not gonna say he needs him. He’s said it before. It’s gotten him jack-shit.

Cas’s face twists in pain. “You don’t understand.” He shakes his head, sharply, once. “I can’t, Dean. I… my wings.” His jaw clenches, and he looks away—tears his gaze right out of Dean’s and fixes those blues right across the nothingness. “I can’t,” he repeats, with a sigh.

When he turns all the way around, Dean gets the full reach of the wings—or almost, they blur out at the edges of his vision. They look more and more like actual feathers the more he looks at them, and now they do have bones—arching high over Cas’s shoulders, the elbow melting downwards into an elegant fan of feathers longer than Dean’s whole damned arm.

But even as Dean watches them twitch and fluff and ruffle, one of the middle-sized black feathers comes loose and falls to the floor. Dean can see that it’s only half a feather; all the little prickly bits are partially gone from it. Cas half-spreads his wings, and Dean can see the effort of it—how they move, heavy and creaky, like Dean’s bad knee on cold mornings. It makes his joints hurt just to look at them. There’s a section on the side there that looks like it got hit with a glue gun, all the feathers jammed together at crazy angles. Yeah. It’s a mess.

“You see?” Cas says, sadly.

“Uh… I, um… no,” Dean admits. He ducks as one wing jerks outwards, like it just cramped. “Does it… do they… hurt?”

“Yes,” Cas answers, quietly, turning back to face him. “They have for years,” And the awfulness of that clogs Dean’s throat. He knows what constant pain is like—or at least, he does now. “I don’t think I realized that they’d gotten this bad, though. They’re too matted. Here, they’re weightless. If I left here… I think they would only drag me down again.”

Cas’s wings sag, low as a picnic blanket, feathers trailing on the ground. Another few come loose. Cas pulls one wing around him at the front, combing his fingers through a patch of down until it comes free. He looks down at the greasy grey puff between his fingers, sadly, and lets it go. It floats off like dandelion fluff. “It’s alright. I understand. Truly, I do.”

“What?” Dean asks, confused. They’re definitely having two conversations in two different languages. His shoulder throbs again, so painfully he almost crumples under it. Dean thought he was used to dealing with it; God, it’s been weeks already. But something about the hot and cold of it here feels different. “I don’t care what you think you understand, Cas. We just beat God; hell, I’m here, aren’t I? You don’t think we can deal with some, I dunno, wing gunk?” he snorts, and crosses his arms. “We’ll dig you the biggest freakin’ sand bath of all time and pull out the hose!”

He sort of hopes that’ll get him just a flash of Cas’s smitey eyes, that little bit of sass, because seeing him so hopeless—Cas, who always hung on, who got mad rather than sad when Dean didn’t have his priorities screwed into the right socket, who always kept truckin’ even though he had a fucking deal hanging over his head that he’d never get to enjoy his perfect happiness—is messing with Dean’s head.

That does get him a chuckle—even if just a tiny one that vibrates in the darkness. “Oh, I miss you so much, Dean,” Cas says, softly. “I think I will miss you forever.” And while Dean’s still blinking, eyelashes suddenly wet, and he has no idea what look is on his face, Cas shakes his head. “But you can’t help. I don’t expect—”

“You’re not letting me help!” Dean argues. “Dude, let me try! I’m not scared of, I dunno. Bird mites.”

Cas snorts, but then he smiles, soft and sad. “It’s kind of you to offer, but that’s not really how it works. They’re not matted with… with dirt, or debris. Not really.” He crinkles up the tip of his nose, and that’s so unexpectedly cute that Dean’s not even sure how to cope with it. “Explaining angel physiology to a human is so aggravating,” he grumbles.

Dean tips back, stung. “Well, sorry for bein’ a dumb human,” he mutters.

“No, no. You’re being… very kind. I know you are.” Cas toys with the edges of his wing again, splaying his fingers through them like two sets of fingers. He plucks at the thick, dusky clumps matted between some of the bigger feathers. A little of it comes free again and falls, like dirty cotton candy.

It doesn’t waft away. It burns, and then it’s gone.

Okay.

“Okay, help me out here, Cas… if they’re not clogged up with dirt, what is it, then?” Dean demands, because he freaking can’t leave well enough alone.

Cas doesn’t answer for a long moment. He looks away. Both of his wings sag around him, all the way to the ground, drooping into smog-colored puddles.

“Longing,” he answers, very quietly. Dean’s whole body squeezes so tightly that he thinks he might strangle on it. “So. You see.”

Dean still doesn’t—what the hell?—but he wants to back away so bad that his legs are trembling with it. Goddammit, Cas’s wings are all choked up with Dean’s fucking pining over him all these years? Shit, that’s so many levels of screwed-up that Dean doesn’t know what to do with it. But he’s getting that the wings he’s looking at aren’t really wings… maybe.

“But there’s a way, right?” he pleads. “Dude… let me try. You don’t know it won’t work.”

Cas smiles at him, so wistfully that it yanks at heartstrings that Dean didn’t even realize were still working anymore. “I do know,” he says, shaking his head, slowly. “But perhaps I need the confirmation.” Cas straightens back to his full height, wings lifting with him, and his blue, blue eyes dig deep into Dean’s soul. “I wear this, this body… and I’m used to it. I like it. But it’s not me any more than your flannel is you.” Cas gestures out to his drooping wings. “These are… me. And they… they need to be touched. The emotion matting them down needs to be groomed out of them. It’s why angels aren’t supposed to feel.”

“Touched?” Dean parrots. “Uh, you mean, like… like when people reciprocate soulmarks?” Dean’s never been there himself, but he knows about the process, everyone does. He stopped dreaming of reaching out and touching, rubbing his own words onto someone else’s skin, a long time ago, though.

(Or he thought he did.)

Cas frowns at him. “I… I’m not entirely sure about that,” he answers. “I’m not a cupid. But… maybe.” He sighs and shakes his head. Dean’s shoulder… he doesn’t even know what the hell he’s feeling in his soulmark anymore, quick and bright, like stepping into water that’s just a little too hot. “I truly was content to just love you, you know,” Cas adds, like it’s the simplest thing in the world—like him saying it doesn’t pull the rug out from inside Dean and flip him back onto his head all over again. “I knew you didn’t know.” His lips curve, just slightly, and the acceptance in it is brutal. “I knew you didn’t want to know. That you’re here at all, that you’d even offer, is such a gift, and I thank you, Dean. But it’s too much—”

“Not too much,” Dean interrupts, quickly. Yep, definitely two separate conversations. But if they get out of here—when they get out of here—they can work that out. Maybe Dean can even…

His soulmark jabs him with a hot needle of reminder.

Or not.

Maybe they won’t even have to talk about it? Shit.

But that’s not right now, and Dean’s very damned good at dealing with ‘right now.’ Dean swallows, and steps closer. They’re not close enough to touch, far from it, but Cas’s wings shuffle again, and one reaches tentatively out towards him, stretching. A joint makes a little popping sound, the way Dean’s neck does in the mornings sometimes. They both huff out a soft little laugh, together.

That feels familiar, too.

But Cas turns the rest of the way around, and Dean’s slapped in the face with the knowledge that yeah: Cas’s skin really hasn’t got a soulmark on it anywhere. He shakes the thought off. Not now. Doesn’t matter. “Do I… do I need a comb, or any kind of… something?” he asks, instead.

Cas shakes his head, the motion of it almost invisible against the way his big, messed-up wings are moving and puffing even as Dean watches, stretching in achy little flutters. “Just your… your hands. You can use your fingers.” His voice shakes a little bit.

Dean’s not quite sure what to expect when he carefully reaches out and rests his hand, gently, on the slanted, reaching rise just short of the wing elbow.

He sure as hell doesn’t expect color to go streaking out from where his palm lands.

Red ricochets out in bright lines from the touch, and little dark flecks collapse off the feathers, like ash burning away. A whole feather trembles, shedding black powder, and the puff of softness at the base of it is suddenly an eye-catchingly bright yellow.

Dean almost yanks his hand back, but Cas squeaks, “What—” in a way that doesn’t sound like something went wrong. Not at all. Dean watches Cas’s hands clench and unclench at his sides, muscle rippling down his back all the way into his ass, but his wings rear back and up and towards Dean, almost shoving him backwards. A set of healthy-looking, dark green feathers right at Cas’s spine all poof up, standing on end, but when Dean, very carefully, raises his other hand and puts it on them, they don’t deteriorate and break the way the ugly, spindly feathers above them did—they fluff, the thin, limp down between them suddenly thicker and really, really…

Wow. It’s so soft.

Dean combs his fingertips carefully through it, and pastel pink lines start tracing their way up the thick spiny core of a set of bigger feathers. The wrinkly, bent little dark pieces fall off the center spines, but underneath is a thicker set of vanes, little fluffy bits the warm red-brown of a lychee coming off a delicate rose-pink core.

“I think… I think it’s…” Cas breaks off. Dean moves his hand in a long sweep, realigning some feathers in the middle that looked like they were standing off in weird angles. Something crumbles underneath his touch. When he brushes away the gunk, the feathers underneath are little, just about the length of his finger, but they’re purple and shimmering, the very tips edged with gold.

Cas shivers all over, and he sounds shocked. “It’s working. How can it—” The wing wiggles and presses closer into Dean’s hand until his fingers are almost buried in a clump of tangles. They break with a soft crunch when Dean runs his thumbnail over them, revealing a sweep of a blue that’s almost the color of Cas’s eyes. Cas’s back arches. “Oh!”

Dean swallows. Oh, shit. He sure as hell has never heard Cas make that noise before.

“Of course it’s working, birdbrain,” he mutters, but he can’t help his triumphant smile and the way his chest goes lighter as a sweep of his hand replaces the thick band of matted darkness remaining right over the elbow of Cas’s right wing. A stripe of cheerful orange, bright as lava, with tiny little tiger-markings in the feathery bits, pops free. Hell yeah. Dean pets along the heavy muscle running down the centers of both wings with both hands, and rainbows follow his fingers, the ash covering the little barbs shedding away. Dean’s got dust under his fingernails, now, his flannel is coated with it up to the elbow, but feathers twiddle happily under his touch. The darkness peels off each little fuzzy bit to flash yellow, cream, chartreuse. Dean thinks the edges of the feathers are glittering. “It’s my own damned longing, who else is gonna comb it out of you?”

It almost sounds like a joke. Dean only realizes he said it when Cas’s back tenses. The wings go rigid against Dean’s hands.

Fuck. What? Why did he even say that? Just because they both know it’s true doesn’t mean that crap should be said aloud.

But the wings don’t pull away from his hands. Cas doesn’t pull away.

“What? It’s not your longing.” Cas turns and peers at him over his shoulder, his blue eyes shocked. His face isn’t framed by darkness, anymore—just the colorful feathers along his shoulders. He swallows, and Dean can see the motion of it rolling eloquent up and down Cas’s throat, in the jerky rise and fall of his wings.

Dean almost loses his grip on where he had both hands focused on a particularly gnarly wet-looking clump that feels more like tiny little dry twigs under his knuckles. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t meet Cas’s eyes. Can’t, really. “Huh?” The not-twigs give way to a careful run of Dean’s fingertips, pulling out into more of that dirty cottony stuff that’s stuck through them—but when Dean combs the cobweb strands of it out, it disintegrates into a silvery dust.

The feathers underneath are a delicate emerald green, speckled with tiny little flecks of gold. He pets the tuft of them with his thumb, and they perk up, thickening, tickling the web between his thumb and his palm. And Cas shivers.

Dean’s shoulder doesn’t hurt, he realizes. Not at all. For the first time since the words scrawled themselves across his shoulder, there’s no pain.

“It’s not your longing that broke my wings,” Cas informs him, softly. “It’s mine. I always knew you were not mine to have. I accepted this, but I’m weak—knowing didn’t keep me from wanting.”

Dean freezes. His hands stop moving. His hands slip off the dense, heavy feathers and come to rest on Cas’s back, on the heavy rise of strap muscles where his wings seem to be springing from.

Cas hasn’t turned all the way around to face him, but his profile is so fucking pure against the darkness, now. The one eye that Dean can see is blue, and wet at the corner. The two wings rising around Cas’s back flash incandescent across the darkness, and the tips of them are so pure a pearly white that they give off a faint glow. The dust across Dean’s hands isn’t inky anymore: it looks like some kind of hologram powder.

“Dean?” Cas asks, very quietly, into a silence that’s gone awkward. “Why… did you ask me about soulmarks?”

It’d be so easy to say nothing at all. So fucking easy. They could go back to pretending. They could go back to when things were… comfortable.

“You asked what about all of this is real,” Cas told him, once. “We are.”

But that wasn’t true, was it? When’s the last time anything was truly, honestly comfortable, between them? When’s the last time Dean let that be real?

There doesn’t seem to be much point in hiding anymore.

“’Cause I’ve got yours on my shoulder, Cas,” Dean says, hoarsely. His lips twist in a painful curve as he lets go, as he lifts his hands off the warm, firm skin that he was really, sort of guiltily, enjoying touching…

But his shoulder still doesn’t hurt. The opposite. The warm glow in it feels like a hand—a hug. A squeeze at the end of a long day.

“But that’s not possible,” Cas insists. “I only touched your soul once, when I pulled you out of Hell.”

Dean’s mouth drags open, and for a second, he’s speechless.

“Wait, what?” he finally asks. “People… touch each other’s souls?”

Even with Cas’s back to him, Dean can catch the confused tilt of his head. “I… yes, of course, Dean,” he says, peering over his shoulder. His wings settle against his back, covering him from shoulders all the way down to his ankles in a drape of technicolor dreamcoat. “How do you not know that? Isn’t it obvious? Soulmarks are like… like allergies, I suppose.”

Dean blinks, jarred right out of wherever his train of thought was heading.

Cas doesn’t elaborate.

“What?” Dean finally demands, again.

Cas turns the rest of the way around. His wings curve around him, and they’re moving gracefully, now, smoothly—painlessly, and Dean feels a tiny rush of pride about that. They fold around his front like the lapels of his trench coat, covering up his nakedness when it didn’t seem like he gave a damn about it before. The riot of color and patterns on them, shades that shouldn’t look normal or right or even good next to each other, blend until they’re almost, but not quite, white.

But Dean knows what they look like, now. He knows that if he focuses, the colors come distinct again: on the bottom edge, right there near Cas’s hip, one of the biggest feathers is bright yellow with blue tiger-stripes, next to one the color of Dean’s favorite button-down. He can pick out that patch of robin’s-egg blue with copper speckles, just under the bottom edge. The tiny little fingertip ones standing on end along the graceful upper arc of the wing, trailing out into the larger flight feathers, are a delicate silvery-grey, framing Cas’s collarbone like a necklace.

Dean swallows. Cas doesn’t look even remotely human like this.

Fuck. He’s so gorgeous.

But the look Cas is giving him is all curiosity, his pink lips pursing. He’s breathing a little too quickly, and his wings are lifting and falling. “That’s… how soulmarks are made,” he says, slowly. “The first touch sensitizes the soul. Like the way exposure to an antigen causes the human body to form antibodies against it. But it requires the second exposure to brings the mark to the surface.” His feathers are shuffling so hard it sounds like papers in a high wind.

Dean licks his lips. “Jesus fucking Christ, man,” he complains, but his voice is still hoarse. Cas would know a little something about souls. “Only you would compare a soulmark to fucking allergies.” He takes a step closer. Swallows. “Why were you so surprised I could see your wings?” he asks.

Cas laughs, but it’s soft and bitter. “Humans can’t. And you never could before,” he answers. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to, anyway. Or you’d have seen why I couldn’t fly anymore, even though mine didn’t burn. All the other angels could.” He looks down at the creamy edge stretched across his body, wrapping him in a softly rustling curve of colors and muscle and bone. They hug him tighter, like he needs the comfort. “My wings… you saw what they looked like. They’re what happens when a human rejects an angel’s devotion, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t deny it. He can’t, really.

“Well, I was a dumbass,” Dean answers, sharply. “And I ain’t rejecting it now. You’re my goddamned soulmate, Cas. You probably always were.”

It comes out so easily that it leaves him blinking.

Cas’s head jerks up. He stares, his mouth hanging a little open. Honestly, he looks a little stupid like that.

But his wings, holy shit.

The wings wrapped around him light up like fireworks, each little vane at the center of every single feather going radiant with color.

And Dean almost buckles again, but it’s not with pain, this time.

Because his soulmark just sent a spark of shocked pleasure through him so bright and sweet and refreshing that it’s like a big mouthful of Italian ice on the hottest day of the year, like watching the sun come up after a successful hunt, like coming to the end of a damned good book.

Dean blinks, very slowly.

Oh.

Oh.

Okay. So… Cas hasn’t got a soul. No soul, no soulmark.

But maybe he’s got something else. It’s like he said: the body he wears—Jimmy’s body—isn’t really his. Isn’t really him.

But the wings are, and Dean’s laid a hand on them, now.

So Dean takes a step closer and licks his lips. Then another. Another. They’re so close. They’re too close, one of Cas’s wings sandwiched between them, and every little feather is trembling. Some of them prick at Dean’s hands, poke him through his flannel as they puff and settle, puff and settle, agitated. But Cas doesn’t stop him, and the wing doesn’t resist as Dean carefully reaches out and runs his fingers down the span of it, curling his fingers into the thick weight of it.

And watches the feathers glow as he touches them, like running his hands across those light-up kids’ keyboards in a toy store. The sleek muscles underneath jump under Dean’s fingertips. Cas makes a tiny, low noise. A shaky-sweet, shy happiness curls down the line of Dean’s left arm.

Maybe Dean’s soulmark isn’t so fucked-up after all. Maybe it’s always been doing exactly what it’s supposed to.

Because Cas’s wings have been clogged up with painful longing all this time—but they aren’t anymore. And maybe Dean’s forgotten what hope feels like, but Cas… Cas never did.

Cas shivers again. He whispers, “Dean.”

Dean kisses him.

It’s small. It’s sweet. It should feel like nothing—just a tiny little brush of their mouths. Dean’s seen grandmothers give more passionate smooches.

But Cas has the finest prickle of stubble just underneath his lower lip, abrading just that tiny spark against Dean’s. He has that little dip in the upper one just made for tasting, for a tongue. He doesn’t have his mouth closed, and the breath of it makes the world around them waver like it just gasped for air.

“Come home,” Dean says, into the plush infinity of Cas’s mouth, “and we’ll figure this out.”

They never have been able to do the first damned thing in the world normally.

But he knows he’s won when the other wing trembles beside him, and wraps around his back, large enough to envelop him from shoulder to the back of his knees, muffling him in feathers. They feel like lightning against Dean’s back, like static, and when they brush over his marked shoulder, they feel like looking across a bar at a dark, inviting smile.

Like anticipation.

When they walk back through the portal and step, blinking, into the bunker’s yellow lights, Dean’s fingers are tucked shyly through Cas’s.

Jack’s eyes go wide and he crows “Wow!”

But his eyes aren’t fixed on their joined hands, but over Cas’s shoulders, at the aurora of colors following them out in a span like dawn rising after a long, long night. They stretch—they spread, filling the whole Vault to touch the walls, and Dean can’t breathe for how fucking beautiful Cas is with his chin tilted up, eyes closed, like he can feel the sun on his face even here, underground.

Alive. He’s alive. He’s here.

Or maybe it’s not the sun Cas is feeling, because when Cas turns to smile at him, eyes glad in a way Dean’s never seen before, Dean’s soulmark warms right up, like marshmallows in an evening campfire. Or like blushing at midnight.

And then Sam yelps and slaps a hand over Eileen’s eyes, where she’s staring, openmouthed, too.

(It turns out that neither of them can see Cas’s wings. But Cas is, still, well… completely fucking naked.)

~fin~