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Dean isn’t exactly up for sex, after getting his nuts cracked and pulling oil out of his brother’s trunk. So that’s not why he calls Cas, this time.
No, this time it’s because…
He’s genuinely fucking worried about him.
He knows he and Sam probably got off easy, compared to what Cas had to deal with from his asshole older brother. Can only imagine what exactly Cas had to face while they were in TV land; doesn’t even really want to.
“Cas,” he prays, when they get back to the motel room and Sam heads out for food (and probably to get away from him for a while—it was mega weird for Sam to be his car).
“Man, I know you probably don’t want to see me right now. After what we got you into this time. But I need to know you’re okay, alright? If you can just pop in here for a bit so I can make sure of it?”
A few minutes go by, and then Dean’s phone starts to buzz.
“I don’t blame you,” is how Cas greets him when he answers. “Gabriel can reshape reality. You couldn’t have possibly known, what you were dealing with.”
“Does that mean you’re gonna show then?” Dean asks with a smile forming on his lips, telling Cas the address before he does anything else.
“Of course,” Cas says, and then there’s the sound of wings, and he’s in the room with Dean, squinting at him and slowly hanging up the phone.
He must be getting low on grace, because there’s still a hint of dried blood on his coat and on his face. Dean winces, lifting a hand to trace that face and wiping it away.
“I got a first aid kit, c’mon and sit down,” he says, choosing not to linger on how it makes him feel to take care of this angel until later.
Cas blinks at him. “Dean, I will heal,” he insists, not moving to follow Dean’s instruction. “Today may have drained me, but…”
“Yeah, exactly what happened today?” Dean asks, stepping forward so that Cas has to take a step back, all the way until Cas is on Dean’s bed.
“You don’t want to know,” Cas says like a promise. “Trust me, Dean. I wish that I didn’t have to know.”
Dean leaves Cas for just a second, to grab a towel from the bathroom and wet it, before he’s back, pressing that towel to Cas’s forehead and the skin beneath his nose, rubbing what he got off earlier onto the terrycloth.
“It makes you feel better,” Cas says after a few minutes of dabbing at the blood on his lapels, “to do this for someone.”
Dean wants to shut him up by stuffing the towel in his mouth or something equally ridiculous. “Yeah,” he grunts instead, making a little sound of triumph in his throat when he gets the blood out.
That’s when Cas pushes the towel aside, and gives Dean a long look that Dean could almost call lustful.
“Perhaps you need some reassurance… of just how okay I really am.”
And without further adieu, he tips his head up enough to kiss Dean, for long, slow minutes.
It’s not that Dean doesn’t feel that usual flutter in his belly—or that he doesn’t get on that road to Boner Town when Cas’s tongue rubs along the line of his.
It’s that Dean is exhausted and still weirded out by a lot of what’s happened today.
So when Cas starts to turn to press Dean onto the bed, he breaks the kiss abruptly with a, “No, wait. Stop.”
To Cas’s credit, he does, instantaneously, though his nostrils flare with obvious frustration.
“I’m fine, Dean,” he says, his tone full of vehemence.
Dean nods, and wants to take it back immediately when he says, “Yeah, but I’m not.”
There’s no way he’d rather talk about how uncomfortable today was, than fuck, right?
“Dean?” Cas asks, sounding concerned and confused about it.
Dean shrugs, but doesn’t kiss Cas again. Lies himself down on the bed, and wants, wants, shouldn’t want, Cas to join him and just… hold him.
It all starts to come out before he can swallow it down like he usually does. The whole thing: TV land, seeing Cas vanish like that, being reminded of their roles…
By the end, Cas has crawled over to sit against the headboard and not complained of Dean leaning heavily on him, so it’s almost as good as what Dean wants.
Almost.
Especially when Cas puts in, “I can understand, why you’d be hesitant about sex after all of that.”
Dean can’t help but kiss him after that, but it goes nowhere.
Dean makes sure it goes nowhere.
Nowhere except, shifting Cas down until Dean can lie on his chest and go to sleep.
“When Sammy gets back, you vamoose, okay?” he asks sleepily, and gets a hum in response.
And maybe he’s wacky—today would certainly put a tally in that column—but he swears he feels elegant, long fingers in his hair just before he conks out.
It’s on the way back from the convention, Sammy asleep in the passenger’s seat, that Dean has a thought—and it’s a damn persistent one.
The Homoerotic Subtext of Supernatural.
Not something Dean ever wanted to hear about his life, really, but he can’t blame them, not anymore. Because that subtext met the brick wall of sexy that is Castiel and exploded into text in a big way.
He blanches, flinching enough to almost swerve into the next lane, as he thinks about what would have happened the past few days, if Chuck had kept writing past Hell.
Anna’s hand, over Cas’s brand.
He likes you.
I was getting too close to the humans in my charge. You.
Holding Cas’s eye like that, when he told him to throw away his family and his whole damn society and join him in fighting them all.
And Cas did it.
And then- then, they started fucking.
And then, well.
The last time they saw each other…
“Fuck,” Dean groans aloud, flicking a glance over to make sure it didn’t wake Sam.
What if Chuck does publish more books?
What if the next convention is full of “Castiel”s along with all the fake Deans and Sams?
Holy god, what if people LARP them goddamn kissing right in front of him? In front of him and Sam?
Thankful that it’s the middle of the night and they’re the only car for miles, Dean pulls to the side of the road, feeling like he might have to stick his head between his knees for a second before he ruins Baby’s upholstery.
It’s one thing, knowing he’s full frontal in a few of those books, with women. It just about takes him out at the knees, the idea of people reading him fucking a guy angel and then walking around telling people.
And, the last time.
That hadn’t even been fucking. There was no excuse for that.
Dean breathes hard, his forehead on the steering wheel, and prays Sammy don’t wake up. He has no idea how he’d explain this… god, is it a panic attack?
Alright. Man up, Winchester. Real men don’t have those.
Dad would be ashamed.
No, Dad’d be ashamed of the reason for it in the first place.
Damn it. Damn it.
He’s gonna have to end it.
Or at least make sure that Cas is aware, it’s not like it was last time.
It can’t be.
Dean can feel eyes on him all damn night. Even, somehow, when Cas is faced away from him, the angel makes his presence felt, after weeks without Dean getting at all close to him.
He makes sure to glance at Cas, once, to let him know he feels those insistent peepers (and doesn’t care), just before he gets close to Jo in the kitchen. Knows that everything he says, Cas can hear, and still says it—still tries for a “last night” with Jo, even as the side of his face burns from that stare.
Cas only seems to relax any when Jo turns him down, and when Dean turns his way after that, he’s finally not looking at Dean anymore. Just staring at the line of finished shots on the table.
If Dean’s really, truly honest with himself… he’d rather spend the last night with Cas. He’d rather pin Cas to the door of one of Bobby’s bedrooms and kiss him breathless; rather bend him over the mattress and fuck out all of his fear and frustration into that solid, sexy angel’s body; rather come into Cas and let Cas suck him until he’s back to fighting form and do it all over again.
But that’s not an option. Like Jo said, he’s going for self-respect here. He guesses.
So he ignores Cas’s glances as he leaves the kitchen. Ignores the pointed look he gives Dean before he says, “This is our last night on Earth.” Ignores, ignores, ignores, and pretends he doesn’t feel even a twinge at how he’s treating one of his best friends.
All the way until bed, when he walks right past Cas sitting firmly upright on the couch and to the bedroom he was imagining, alone. No Jo. No Cas. No anybody, on Dean’s last night.
Serves him fucking right, he thinks, in the few minutes he gets for thought before he’s out.
Kissing Jo isn’t planned.
Dean just saw that she wanted it, and knew that he wanted to give her that last bit of comfort, before the end.
It doesn’t help him at all, especially when the hardware store explodes into a ball of orange flame. When he realizes they’re both gone, for good.
He wants to fall to his knees in the next second, drop onto the ground and give the fuck up. He’s so tired of burying friends, and Jo and Ellen were just about as close to them as it got.
But he’s still gotta kill the Devil, so he can’t stop.
Dean stares at what Lucifer is doing, Sam beside him, and tries not to panic. He’s not sure exactly what Death will do when he gets topside but somehow, he doesn’t think either of them want to find out.
He wonders where Cas is, in all this. Hopes whatever Lucifer did to him was quick, at least, and mourns that there probably isn’t even enough of him to bury.
…Almost cries out his name with pure, relieved shock, when Cas shows up in the last seconds before Death rises—only doesn’t because Cas puts a finger to his lips. He’s never been gladder to see him in his life, and he’s even gladder, when Cas zaps them away.
He doesn’t cry, when Bobby burns the picture of them all.
Or when he spends the next day and a half drowning his sorrows.
Or when Bobby or Sam tries to “talk” about what happened.
No, the only time he lets himself cry, is when Cas has him bent over the bed in a motel room a week later, pounding him hard.
He watches tears drip off his face and hit the bed between his hands where they’re holding him up, and he never alerts Cas even a little to it.
Just closes his eyes against the sight, and moans through another shattering thrust.
This is all he’s got.
All he’s ever gonna get.
And for now, he’ll make it enough.