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Dean comes out of his room eventually. Shit, Jack has his soul back, but then Dean’s reminded from behind a three year old’s tears that both their moms are dead.
Some things are too much.
Dean keeps to himself for a few days; steers clear of Sam, too, for good measure, after everything he dredged up.
(He thinks Dean’s queer. He thinks—)
(Dean’s thought it. He’s believed it. But believing something doesn’t mean it’s true, damnit, doing something doesn’t mean you want to, it doesn’t mean that you’re qualified to know shit about yourself, it—)
It doesn’t matter.
He can avoid it all well enough.
It’s hard for Dean to avoid Cas, though. Cas gives Dean space, he’s never stifling anymore like he was back in the days the world was ending for the first time. He makes it easier to breathe, these days, really: he’s the one constant in the never-settled landscape. That one tree that doesn’t fucking budge even when the wind has turned the dead earth into an ocean.
Yeah. Dean won’t admit it, but even though it was a point of contention not too long ago, he’s glad to have Cas here.
-:-:-:-
Castiel knows every whorl of Dean’s being. Every flicker, every howl and every whimper. He’s sung with those harmonies in his purest form in order to stitch them back together, and he’s listened to them for years like he’d never listened to anything else, so he knows the nature of Dean’s orbiting thoughts as they spin their weighted paths here and now. He watches. He continues to listen.
Dean gives him a berth, but circles him tentatively like a sun nonetheless. There’s small, cherished crossing lines over the cuts in space: pauses to heavily nod a ‘hello’ on his way into the kitchen, a grief-rough soft and indistinct humming that Castiel can hear while Dean washes out a mug.
Castiel is occupied with Jack, his heart breaking every time Jack rediscovers the broken pieces of his own, but still, he keeps an eye toward Dean’s door.
Sam’s lost in Jack’s pain (and truth be told, in his own as well): but Castiel learned to hold his breath underwater ages ago.
Dean will shift closer on his own time.
He just needs time to think.
In reality, they all do.
-:-:-:-
Eventually, it’s night. Or maybe it’s something that wished it could be morning. Dean couldn’t sleep, so he heads for the kitchen, aware of how coffin-like the Bunker gets when no one’s awake (because they’re either sleeping or dead or they were killed by the kid one hall down or—)
Kitchen. You’d think it doesn’t rhyme with ‘killer’, but in another world, on another tongue, it could.
This is the kind of shit that makes Dean wish he wasn’t such a goddamn insomniac.
(The wound will scar over again. He just needs time).
He walks, and his thoughts are sine curves overlapping, waves too bad at being waves to cancel one another out like they should. Blood sugar’s low. This is how it always was when he was a kid: he’d squirm, eyes anxious, ribs too sharp beneath his skin, steps too soft and clumsy except he couldn’t be soft like he felt sometimes but what was he feeling— and then Sammy would say he was hungry, and a leftover spoon of peanut butter would set Dean right again. Alarm clock earthquakes in his mind snoozed until further notice. High tide in his veins fast-forwarded around the cycle back to low.
Keeping shit together was how Dean kept his shit together.
That was just the way it worked.
He expected to be alone, but he walks into the kitchen and he sees a silhouette at the table. He knows those lines; even before the light hits his eyes for real, he doesn’t have to question it. (Psychologists call that “blindsight”. Dean’s learned it in blood as ‘trust’, and it’s how he knows that after everything, he hasn’t been pushed far enough to write Cas off completely).
(He's chosen not to think about the implications of that because he does not have enough time to be afraid of yet another thing).
“Hey, Cas,” he says, surprised, his voice contained by the hour. “What are you doing in here?”
Cas looks up, his eyes not startled but reminiscent as though he’d knowingly journeyed from a far-off place in leaving his thoughts. “I just needed to think,” Cas answers. He knows Dean will empathize.
Dean huffs, but it’s a soft thing for the virtue of not being cruel. “Don’t we all,” he murmurs. “Thinkin’ about anything interesting?” he asks casually.
Dean starts to move toward the fridge, looking inside for anything he could eat at that hour without burning his throat out on stomach acid.
“Nothing of consequence,” Cas tells him. “And you?”
Dean actually laughs at that, possibly for the first time in days.
“Man, it’d sure be nice to try working at something without those, for a change.”
Not so long ago, Castiel would’ve asked him if there was anything they could talk about. Anything he could perhaps help to ease the weight of. But that naivete had left him after the last time he’d died. Not at anyone’s hands, but at Dean’s words. It was interesting, the angel would muse from time to time, that the death he’d learned the most from was the rhetorical one.
Castiel simply hums in understanding.
Dean turns around when he has the materials for a sandwich in his hands: something light, nothing monstrous or heavy on protein. He hesitates before speaking, but after he takes in the serene, pointed patience on Cas’s face, he goes for it anyway. (He’s been angry too damn long: but whether he admits it or not, Purgatory helped with that). “Anything you wanna talk about? Figure I owe you one of those.”
Castiel is momentarily, infinitesimally stunned. Going from dead to a pariah and back and forth between those two to owed… While simple, it's a gesture of faith, however minuscule, and he knows it.
Dean’s expression turns sour, and he focuses on starting to put together his food at the counter.
“You don’t need to worry about me, Dean,” Castiel says. But where his voice once would’ve been even, sure, it was ever so slightly quieter. He’d been more put-together, learned to play things closer to the vest ever since he made that deal (that burden, really, that curse except it wasn’t because his son was alive but somehow it still felt like one and he couldn't articulate why without getting too close to the reason—) but it had been easier, when he wasn’t wanted. He isn’t wanted now, per se, but being acknowledged was as close as he’d ever gotten, really.
Love has always been his problem. There’s a reason he isn’t supposed to have it.
Cas clears his throat, shifting his position in his seat.
Dean glances at him, scrutinizing but with a slight hint of concern.
It occurs to Dean as he runs a buttered knife over bread how well he knows Cas’s body language. Despite it being a vessel, Jimmy Novak never held himself the way Cas does. This, right now, it’s Cas reasserting control over himself. Dean humors himself by thinking that maybe Cas picked that up from him, but Cas was always so much better at it than he was.
Dean puts his sandwich on a plate, but as he walks toward the door, he stops. Reconsiders.
Trepidant, somewhat wary but willing enough, he sits down in front of Cas.
For a few minutes, Dean just eats, and Cas lets him. It’s nicer than Dean knows how to admit. Makes him feel that sense of wanting he doesn’t know how to grapple with: that feeling that’s like trying to tame a tiger with his heart in his hand instead of a chair. Shit. His brain is still in spaghetti strings, tangled up, brittle in some places but boiling up in others.
He keeps distantly replaying the conversation they’d had the other day after the doppelgangers had left.
“ You were literally born knowing everything you were.”
“Dean,” Cas said. Almost admonished. “You of all people should know how untrue that is.”
And yet, Cas remains so composed.
How does he do that?
“Hey Cas?” Dean’s words bob like drowning apples in his throat.
“Yes, Dean?” Castiel asks him.
Dean tensely holds the back of his neck like he can hold his own identity together with nothing more than skin, bone and fucked up cartilage. “Shit,” he forces himself to exhale. “How do you know you’re you?”
Cas squints for a moment, processing the question. "What do you mean, Dean?"
Dean regrets having asked instantly. Scrutiny is never worth it unless it's a means to an end.
Dean gives a nervous laugh, shakes his head and takes one of the last bites of his sandwich. "Nah, never mind. Forget it."
"No, I— I'd like to know what you meant," Cas tells him, letting his body language relax just enough that Dean will notice. His voice gentles. "Depending on the context, perhaps I'll have an answer."
Dean pauses to swallow. Then he's pausing without an excuse.
But then Cas realizes it. "Is this with respect to the conversation we had the other day?"
Dean goes stiff too soon to deny it. “Sort of,” he forces himself to grit in concession after a second. He doesn’t know what else to say.
Castiel hums in thought. “Well,” he muses, trying to chart what he can say without going too close to the things he can never have. “It is a great deal of power for one being, isn’t it, to decide who they wish to be? To most humans, it’s… normal. To us, it’s worth fighting for. But that doesn’t make it particularly easy to reconcile once we have it within reach .” Castiel huffs, an unexpected sound that makes Dean blink. “Humans have a term for our particular causal malady. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. ‘Daddy issues.’”
Dean chokes on the phantom presence of food in his mouth when he hears the words ‘daddy issues’ leave Cas’s mouth.
“Christ, Cas,” Dean coughs out.
Castiel just smirks, a combination of something sour and something wry. “That is a name for the source of my problems, yes,” he replies.
Dean makes a strangled noise and shakes his head, and there it is, Castiel thinks despite the world ending around them: that laugh of his.
“Shit, I mean, I guess that’s true,” Dean concedes, a smile angled on his face like an old acquaintance asking for a place to stay. His expression then turns pensive, though, and his brows furrowed in thought. There’s no reason to ask what he’s tempted to ask next. It’s too close to the things he calls not safe , not safe, untouchable—
But he’s always called his plays right up against the damn line, or just a hair inside it. No point in stopping now.
“You know, speaking of,” Dean begins. “I kinda always wondered…”
“Yes, Dean?”
Dean shrugs a shoulder, maintaining eye contact. “I don’t know, I guess… how you were able to make that clean break from Chuck’s grip on you angels. How you rebelled.”
It's something that's perplexed Dean for a long time, sitting like a swollen pin somewhere two degrees removed from his heart: how Cas had come to be precisely what he had been since the beginning, and yet simultaneously chose to go against what he was told he was. It was the fact that Cas knew the difference between those things where Dean didn’t know the difference within himself.
"Identity can be a difficult thing," Cas says, and he can't keep his rumble from gentling with empathy. "One's role as a child, as a soldier, is harder still. What I've realized is that you can't replace something with nothing. I was able to rebel because you gave me something to fight for that could match my loyalty to heaven. I wasn't certain of anything, but if I wasn't certain of my Father anymore, then— how could I obey blindly?"
"But you weren't sure of me either," Dean points out. "Shit, Cas, I dragged you kicking and screaming out of that green room. How was that any better?"
"Perhaps you have a point," Cas concedes. "But it's…" he trails off, face pinched in thought. "It's complicated. Soldiers aren't trained to feel. We didn't know how. We were conditioned to never know. I had to learn, despite the fear. I had to… try. That's come with time, and experience, and leaps of faith that changed where my beliefs changed. Beliefs evolve, just as we do. Certainly, they're often temporary, but they can still be real. Still be justifiable to act upon. As I read once, just because the moon has phases, that doesn't mean it stops being the moon. It doesn't stop doing its job."
Cas breathes out a laugh. "You know, people think belief and faith are the same thing."
Dean frowns, skeptical. "You're literally a capital-A Angel. Aren't they?"
Cas hums knowingly, shaking his head. "It takes faith in the validity of our beliefs to act on them. Whether those are our beliefs about the world, or about ourselves."
Cas gives that moment to sink in, and it hits Dean softly, piece by piece.
Oh.
See, Dean’s spent a long time burying his head in the closet, but he could always feel the air on his back somewhere: sometimes in whispers, sometimes in shouts. Even when it felt like he knew that he liked—
That he could feel so—
That he could want to —
He just felt so damn lost at the same time. When your legs can fall out from under you at any time, when you can drift from sureness into the land of “maybe not, maybe I’m not this after all”, what’s the point of standing up, let alone running? Especially when your father is above you and your past is behind you and you don’t know who you are without either of those things? He’d tried embracing this part of himself before. It always ended dark: dark like the back of a shitty gas station bathroom and the stains from the floor that ended up in the knees of his jeans, dark like the minds of the people who had used him in ways no one should be used, dark like the look in John’s eyes when Dean was anything less than the spitting, biting image of machismo and confidence even when he was breaking inside.
Dean has lived in service, and service requires faith— but he’d never had that in himself before, not really. In the mission? Sure. In what he needed to do for the greater good? Always, damnit, always. But in what he wanted?
Dean knows he’s always held himself to triple standards, but it’s because he’d had to.
But he hadn’t understood it fully. What he’s been seeking, grappling for, is justification, where perhaps belief can actually be enough after all.
Cas has just put to voice something Dean had been living with for decades. He’s given Dean’s struggle a name.
Dean doesn’t know whether to scream, cry, or keep quiet.
Eventually, he settles on: “Oh.”
Dean shifts his shoulders like he’s trying to shrug it all off. “Ah, well,” he says, standing up and taking his plate with him to put in the sink. “Faith or no faith, we made it this far, didn’t we?”
Castiel smiles, just barely, the same way he did when he found Dean in Purgatory with the Leviathan blossom. Like he’s found something he never thought he’d behold again.
“That we did.”
Dean feels a wave of fatigue and relief wash under his skin, a sensation that’s cold at its edges despite the unexpected reassurance in a way that wants to tug him back inside himself. They’ve just talked about exactly what was on Dean’s mind with no pretenses and yet didn’t name the subject in truth at all. How was it still so real? How was it exactly what he needed?
Time jerks in place like a fold in the carpet.
He retreats from the kitchen with a soft “good night, Cas”.
For a moment, it feels like his head isn’t quite so heavy on his neck. Like his soul isn’t quite so heavy in his chest. He knows how much he’s pained, but without forgetting, he’s almost forgotten. Slowly, he is being untied from the straitjacket of his own mind.
It scares him, but even as he spins—
He finds he doesn’t want to stop.