Archive of Our Own

“He seems nice,” Gabriel said, all bite. “Pretty, too.”

Castiel dragged himself up from where he’d been planted facedown in his flat pillow, shaking his head to clear the haze from his brain. Sobriety had crept up on him while he slept, and the world was too-crisp, too-loud, too-sharp. From just the dim, sickly light of the streetlamp outside his window, Castiel could see his apartment in its entirety. The strip of his galley kitchen. The crusty recliner, the little TV. And the card table in the corner where Gabriel sat, back to Castiel, fingers drumming atop Castiel’s laptop.

“Who?” Castiel ground out before he could stop himself. He closed his eyes and pushed the butts of his palms into the sockets until fireworks exploded behind his vision. When he opened them, swimming for a moment in white, Gabriel was facing him.

He looked as he had the last time Castiel had seen him. Which is to say, half his face was missing. His skull gaped in the front, open to a pulpy mess of gray brain. The skin was missing on the side of his face where the explosion had hit him, revealing a patchwork of torn muscles that left one side of his jaw swinging freely when he talked. His eye was a mess of red but nearly intact, a rounder, more spherical twin to the soft brown of the other side, which was, like the rest of the right side of his face, almost comically unblemished. If Castiel were to look at him in profile, he might never know that his brother was dead.

Well. He would know that. He wasn’t sure he could ever forget that. But he might be able to trick himself for a moment if he really tried.

“Hunksicle,” Gabriel said. “Babe on a stick,”

“Please.”

“The one-legged wonder.”

“Gabriel.”

“Hey, I’m in your brain, buckaroo. I wouldn’t be hung up on the whole peg-leg thing if you weren’t.”

Castiel scrubbed his hand over his face one more time and sat up in bed, squinting at the pulsing red numbers on the digital clock at his bedside. Almost four. He weighed the pros and cons of smoking another bowl to get back to sleep. His shift at the Starbucks down the street started at seven, and he didn’t want to oversleep and miss it. He also didn’t want to be too high when he went into work, because he got the sense that his shift manager was onto him. Nineteen years old an absolute prude about weed. Just his fucking luck.

As he did too often these days, Gabriel made his decision for him. When Castiel looked back from the clock, he was sitting on the edge of his bed. His wounds never got any less fresh. They were always raw and new and angry and pulsing red like he still had oceans of blood left in him. But they never dripped anywhere. Never got on his sheets, even when Gabriel whipped around and pumped out a harsh, arterial spray of it.

Pushing down a familiar surge of nausea, he got up, back pointedly turned to his brother, and staggered to the little card table where his bong sat beside his laptop.

As he was packing a bowl with the last flaky dregs of his stash, still in a crushed-up pile on the table from when he’d smoked before bed, Gabriel said, “He seems familiar, though. Doesn’t he?”

“I—” he cut himself off, lowered his eyebrows. Thought about Dean. The quiet lostness of him.  The rough edges. Then he gave up on not having conversations with his dead brother. “No.” He shook his head.

“No?” said Gabriel, leading. “Not even a little?”

Castiel patted his hand around the shadows of the card table to find his lighter.

“No,” he growled.

He turned around to light up, mouth pressed hard into the chamber as he waited for it to fill with smoke. Gabriel was smiling that lopsided smile of his, half of the warmth that Castiel remembered, as Castiel sucked in a healthy cloud of smoke and pulled back. He held it in hard and waited for the telltale flutter of a struggle in his lungs.

“Hm. You like him,” Gabriel appraised cheekily, eyebrows furrowed, as Castiel released the smoke gently out his nostrils, then let it flow out between his cracked lips in a smooth sheet. As Castiel watched, Gabriel flopped back on the bed. For a moment, Castiel could only see the intact side of his face, and it made his heart pinch just like it always did.

Castiel shook his head. Gabriel turned his head, shattered the illusion, the wet red of him glistening in the yellow light.

“No? So you’re not gonna ask him out?”

Castiel took another hit, held this one even longer. On his exhale, he said, “He has a lot of baggage. He was in Afghanistan.”

Gabriel laughed, a guttural sound that could have been a cough, and sent a spray of blood straight into the air to dissolve there, an impossible, invisible mist.

“Broseph, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you just told me that someone else has a lot of baggage.”

Castiel shut his eyes and tried to lose sense of the up and down of his tiny apartment, grasping desperately for the sloppy edges of an easier world.

When he opened them, the room was fuzzy, and Gabriel was gone. He heaved a shaky, relieved sigh and set three more alarms to make sure he didn’t miss his wake-up call. Then he fell back into bed, a relieved, loose-limbed deja vu throwing him into the same face-down pit he’d inhabited before his rude awakening.

In the morning, he was only ten minutes late for his shift, and he was only a little bit stoned when he got there. Gabriel wavered in and out a few paces behind him the entire walk, nattering on about Dean Winchester and all the things he may or may not have been. He stood politely outside the big picture window at the Starbucks until Castiel got fed up enough with his hovering to smoke the stub of a joint he found in his jacket pocket on his lunch break, puffs of stale smoke between choked bites of stale croissant. He smoked until he burned his fingers on the encroaching cherry, and then he disposed of the stub in the garbage can across the street, because he’d made fun of Dean for getting paranoid when he smoked, but Dean sure as hell didn’t have the market cornered on it.

He stared at his phone for a long time, just considering the pros and cons and implications of giving any credence to his dead brother’s nagging, but when the joint skewed his judgment to just the right mix of sharp and clouded, he called Dean.

Dean sounded utterly surprised to hear his voice.

He said, “I thought you—” Forgot, Castiel could discern. Forgot me, more likely. I thought you forgot about me. He felt simultaneously pleased and apologetic. Sorry he kept him waiting and perversely glad he had that kind of power over him.

Castiel didn’t give anything away in the conversation, aloof as he could manage as he asked him to an early dinner at a hole-in-the-wall diner downtown where he always met up with his dealer, anyway. Two birds with one stone. He didn’t tell Dean that, but it was always nice to have an out if things went south, especially when it came to the kind of company Castiel generally kept.

And with no expectations beyond a solemn and driving desire to come all over Dean’s beautiful fucking face and maybe figure out where he knew it from in the process, he figured a contingency plan that wasn’t “blow your fucking load as fast as humanly possible and get the fuck out of dodge” was probably sound. Especially since Dean was—an anomaly. A variable. A wildcard. The kind of chance that he hadn’t, in recent years, necessarily been wont to take.

He told himself that it was worth it for the prospect of a blowjob, and he almost had himself convinced.

The rest of his shift went smoothly because between the manager that opened early and the manager that closed, Castiel was left alone to stare dazedly at the burbling coffee makers in peace, and the evening guy didn’t give a shit that he smelled like a fucking Grateful Dead concert.

He took a bus downtown. Driving became a no-go when he started being stoned 24/7, and it wasn’t like he could afford to keep a car anyway. The diner was accessible enough, and the strategic pieces of his brain that couldn’t stop caring about drops and extractions and evacuation picked out a booth with an easy escape route and a good view of anyone who arrived the curb outside. Just in case.

So he knew to the second how late Dean was (twenty-two minutes) when he showed up with a black cloud over his head and a sister-in-law-shaped shadow.

He looked—bad. Not to say he didn’t look beautiful, because he seemed to wear that weary beauty easy and natural like a second skin, but his eyes looked sunk deep into his skull, and his mouth was bracketed in firm, deep-set lines of pain. And it seemed altogether unlikely that he was managing his prosthetic well, because he could barely keep his feet, stumbling over every little lip in the linoleum tiles or crack in the cement outside. Plus, he’d swapped out his nimble cane for more heavy-duty hardware—two crutches that wrapped around his forearms, stabilizing and rooting him hard to the ground.

The shadow spoke first. While Dean sunk shaky and pale-faced into the booth opposite him, she blurted, blonde and burbling and bubbly, “You won’t even notice I’m here. I swear. It’s just that Dean can’t drive right now and I didn’t want him taking public transit because he’s not feeling well, and he has an appointment with a psychiatrist at the VA right after this, so I figured, hey, since his brother has classes all evening, I’ll drive!”

There it was. The variable. The unknown. The reason he didn’t let his curiosity get the fucking better of him. Castiel tried to quash down his disappointment, keep it from showing on his face, but in recent years he’d acquired a bit of a one-track mind, and, well—drugs and sex, two of his foremost priorities, were going to be considerably more difficult to achieve if Dean had a well-meaning, goody-two-shoes babysitter. He puffed a sigh up and out of his mouth, blowing unruly, bleach-fried curls of too-long hair off his forehead.

“Jess,” Dean grunted, shifting the crutches off his forearms with a pinched frown. He moved to settle them into the unused end of the booth next to them, but before he could even get himself situated, Jess took them out of his hands and propped them neatly against the wood seatback that separated their booth from the next. Castiel watched with a cool familiarity creeping up his spine.

He remembered the sort of overzealous attention people paid you when you first got back from a tour. Everyone was gung-ho right up until they realized they weren’t actually running a sprint and they hadn’t prepared themselves to commit to a marathon. Nobody wanted to deal with the hurts when they healed up top and sunk down inward.

“Right. Sorry. Sorry, Dean. I said I wouldn’t be in your face. I’m going to be,” she pointed with both hands at a little stool in front of the diner counter, not ten feet away from their table. Dean nodded wearily. Jess nodded back, forcibly chipper. “Okay, have fun with your friend!” She drew her fingers across her lips in a zip! motion and mimed throwing away a key. Castiel barely held back a snort.

This wasn’t exactly the nicest joint in town, and the only stool left at the counter was sandwiched between two surly-looking men in baseball caps and flannel. She sat down with a curled lip, like she expected to contract the clap from the vinyl on the barstool, and then Castiel watched her delicately order a spinach salad and a diet coke.

God save him from Stanford preps.

When he looked back to Dean, his eyes were closed. He breathed carefully controlled breaths through his mouth and sweat beaded heavily on his brow. He was in pain. Castiel couldn’t say for sure, but he knew Dean’d had a limb amputated at some point in recent history, and they’d absolutely make sure he was set up with the very best shit when he left the hospital. If he was still acting like this, it stood to reason that this probably wasn’t the type of pain a painkiller could touch. Which, yeah, Castiel definitely got.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel said, voice carefully pitched low and neutral. At the counter, Jess didn’t look up from her thorough inspection of her own cuticles.

“Thank Christ, man, I mean fuckin’ thank Christ.” Dean opened his over-bright eyes and slapped his hand across the sticky table until he hit Castiel’s and patted that absently. Castiel grabbed back, just the tips of his fingers, and squeezed awkwardly. “I been goin’ crazy talkin’ to no one but those two, you know? Fuckin’ crazy. And now they wanna take me to that fuckin’ headshrink—”

A waitress stopped at the head of their table, waiting to take their orders. Dean shuttered up, drawing in a heavy breath and keeping it.

“What’ll it be, hun?”

With one last lingering look at Dean, Castiel restrained himself enough to order one cheeseburger and a double order of fries instead of the whole fucking menu like he wanted. Dean waved her off.

“Not hungry, sweetie?” the waitress cooed. Because apparently this coddling was going to be a thing. And if Castiel was honest with himself, Dean did look like someone who needed to be babied. He did. The crutches and the baby face and the perpetual pain grimace just begged maternal figures to put a hand on his forehead to feel for fever. Brush the sweaty hair out of his eyes. Cas wondered if there was something wrong with him, that his very first reaction was to want to fuck him instead.

“He is hungry,” Jess said from the bar, turning around with her diet coke in hand. Dean squeezed his eyes shut again. “Dean, I know you’re hungry, you barely touched your oatmeal this morning and you didn’t eat lunch. He’s hungry.”

“Unless you want me to blow chunks all over this table, I’m not hungry.”

“Sam’ll have my head if you don’t eat, Dean. Look, I’ll even let you get a burger. Sam said you used to love burgers.”

“Let me?”

“You know Sam and I had that talk about your diet with Dr. Anand.”

“I hate Dr. Anand.”

“You hate all your doctors. Doesn’t mean she isn’t right.”

“I hate the ones that give me orders like a goddamn SO. I thought comin’ back from Afghanistan meant I didn’t have to take orders any-fuckin’-more.”

The waitress shuffled awkwardly from foot to foot, tapping her pen absently against her order pad.

She looked to Castiel.

“Should I...come back?”

Jess announced, “He’ll have a burger. Just a normal burger.”

The waitress looked to Dean to confirm.

Dean threw his hands in the air and brought them down to the table in a sharp slap.

“Sure, I guess I’ll have a burger ‘cause this is a fucking dictatorship.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” Jess waved a hand in front of her face and turned back to the diner counter, sucking down her diet coke magnanimously.

Jesus Christ. Castiel thought he had it bad when he came back, but it turned out he didn’t have shit on this poor sod. Dean looked down at the table in front of him with bloody murder in his eyes, every muscle a tight coil, down to the painfully clenched white knuckles of his fists. And yeah, Castiel remembered that too. That resentment. He still felt that, every time he went to his brother’s house. The impotent outrage that stemmed from the well-meaning condescension of someone who thought you’d lost your mental faculties overseas.

Which, hell, even if you had, they could shut up about it for five fucking seconds for once.

Castiel was struck with a heady urge, and he finger-walked his hand across the table with heavier intent than Dean had earlier. He hit Dean’s hand and then squeezed gently at his fist, just like he had his elbow, that New Year’s Eve together, when Dean had clenched his stomach so hard Castiel thought he might rip himself open. It had the same effect. Dean’s fist uncurled slowly, one finger at a time. He took a deep breath through his nose.

“I...y’know. I—missed you,” Dean said helplessly, shrugging. His eyes flitted rapidly around Castiel’s face, examining his features for a tell. He cleared his throat. “Jesus, that sounds stupid. I just mean. I thought about you, I guess. Weeks later and you’re still dug in my head.”

If Castiel was being honest, it was hard to say he’d missed Dean. It was hard to miss someone who so forcefully reminded you of the worst time in your life. But it was also hard not to come back to their final moments together, probably the only reason he was even here now: that first night, when he and Dean had breathed the same static-charged smoke, the world had been clear and quiet in his sobriety for the first time in a long time. He sat alone and clear-headed with Dean on that bed. Really alone. No Gabriel, and the room was empty of all but his steady breathing. And even now, Gabriel was gone. Blessed silence.

Did he miss that? Definitely. Did he miss Dean? Maybe. Was he above using Dean’s presence as a pacifier until he found out one way or another? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Especially not if he could get a good lay out of the bargain. Castiel wasn’t above much these days.

So Castiel said, “No. Not stupid.” He squeezed Dean’s hand one last time and let go.

Silence.

He didn’t know what to say next, where to go from there. They were—-different people, to say the least. He could only imagine what they looked like sitting across the table from one another. Dean with his military buzz and his strong build and his straight back and his carefully blank face and his waxy complexion. Castiel with his slouch and his blue hair and his piercings and his perpetual pot-musk. They looked like they came from different worlds. Maybe the only thing they had in common was a strong sexual appetite and a penchant for killing folks, neither of which had much place in a booth at the diner.

They sat in the quiet, Dean toying with his sleeve, glazed eyes scanning the table like it would tell him what to say next.

Castiel looked out the dusty blinds, onto the crowded street facing the diner. It was purely serendipitous that his dealer pulled up in his beat-up old van at the same time Jess excused herself to the ladies room with a backward glance and a little wave, and the idea hadn’t even fully formed before he was already executing it. And after just fucking fifteen minutes of watching what kind of shit Dean was putting up with, there was never any question that he had to come with him.

Castiel looked away from the window just in time to wave back at her, smiling toothily and waggling his fingers. The moment the ladies’ room door swung shut, he snatched his coat off the seat beside him. Dean, mumbling awkwardly now about the dessert menu he found sandwiched between the mustard and ketchup bottles, snapped to attention.

“What are you doing?” He put the menu back. Cleared his throat again. “Did I—uh, your food’s not even here yet.”

Outside the window, his dealer honked three times—short, short, long.

Castiel was already out of the booth and picking up Dean’s crutches, urgently pumping his hand in a come-hither flap, just a second away from snapping his fingers at Dean like a dog.

“Doesn’t matter. We’re leaving.”

Dean blinked a long blink.

“What?”

“We’re leaving.”

He still didn’t move. Castiel sighed.

“Do you want to let some shrink lobotomize you for the rest of the evening?” Dean’s back was turned to the diner counter, so he couldn’t have seen that Jess was gone. Castiel gestured urgently at her empty stool. Dean, moving in slow motion, poked his head around the wooden seatback and squinted.

“No,” he said carefully upon finding the seat vacant. Jesus, he really had to be on some kind of painkiller. Everything he did was dragging and chemical-slow.

“Do you want to spend another night making smalltalk with Sonny and fuckin’ Cher?”

Dean said, “Not really.”

“Well then let’s go.” Even with the prompting, Dean still scrutinized Castiel’s outstretched hand for longer than they had to spare, depending on what kind of business Jess was doing. He flapped it again. “C’mon. ”

Dean grabbed hold and let himself be helped out of the booth, and Castiel tried very hard not to be impatient when he was slow to get to his feet, slow to line his legs up right. It became even more apparent he was drugged to the gills when his depth perception was so fucked he could barely put his fist through the holes on his forearm crutches. Castiel, probably fed up with the struggling just a bit too quickly, stopped him after the first crutch and just carried the other, using his body as a crutch instead, just like he had at Mike’s New Year’s party. He lined himself up strategically against Dean’s side and under his arm, butting his shoulder into Dean’s armpit.

“Th’fuck are we even going?” he slurred, pain edging into his voice. Castiel didn’t answer, but Dean was a good sport about moving with Cas down the black-and-white-tiled aisle between the diner booths and the counter anyhow. Cas tried to keep his steps even and slow, but even that was too fast for Dean. He heard Dean’s sharp little intake of breath with every three-footed step they took.

The three concrete stairs down to the sidewalk were tricky, and Dean almost lost his crutch when Castiel gave up and just hoisted him down them. They were painfully visible to the inside of the restaurant as they made their way for the van at the curb.

“Are you fuckin’ kidnappin’ me?” Dean slurred when they reached the sliding side door and Castiel whipped it open so hard he shook the whole van. “Am I like, about to get murdered?”

From inside the van, Aaron shouted, “What the hell! Watch the fucking door, Cas, Jesus Christ.” His voice cracked.

“Like this van could get any shittier,” Castiel shouted back, just before he took Dean’s second crutch from him and—very, very gently—with with a quick tap of his fingertips right to Dean’s sternum, shoved him into the back of Aaron’s van. It didn’t have seats to break his fall or let him find his balance, so Dean just windmilled his arms for a second before he tipped flat onto his ass. Castiel helped him swing his legs up and around into the van as well, finding some secret reserve of patience to take special care with the leg that didn’t bend quite right. He looked over his shoulder, into the restaurant, as Dean was struggling sluggishly to get settled. He could see Jess coming out of the bathroom, and he bounced restlessly on the balls of his feet as he waited for Dean to get clear of the sliding door.

He hoped that Jess didn’t have the foresight to get the van’s license plate number when she inevitably realized they were escaping into the mid-afternoon with her wayward sort-of-brother-in-law, because that would undoubtedly cause issues for Aaron later. Then again, civilians didn’t usually think that way. The strategist inside him that won a Distinguished Service Cross and occasionally surfaced through a fog of THC knew she’d probably waste her time checking the men’s room for them before she even thought to look for them out the goddamn window. 

Once Dean cleared the door, Castiel looked into his eyes, gave his cheek two light slaps, threw his crutches onto his lap, slammed the door closed, and climbed hastily into the front.

Aaron blinked long and slow at him, clearly coming off some kind of a high himself. At least he seemed to be moving a little bit faster than Dean.

“Drive,” Castiel said, with all the urgency of an ‘80s action flick, like they were fleeing a crime scene instead of a bubbly blonde nursing student.

“Dude, did you just steal a gimp?” Aaron jerked his thumb back at Dean, who was staring dazedly up at the both of them from the floor. Castiel turned around in his seat, looking Dean in his baffled eyes and feeling a little guilty now that the adrenaline rush was fading. Dean’s question about kidnapping was perhaps more apt than it should be. “Are you using me as a getaway car?”

“Aaron, just drive to my house, please.” He looked at Aaron, very pointedly ticked one eyebrow up. “You owe me one.” And yeah. He did. He didn’t put up any more fuss before he sighed, nodded, put the car into gear, and pulled away from the curb.

“Forgot m’jacket,” Dean said absently from the backseat. “Left it in the booth.” And that little seed of guilt blossomed just that little bit more. Castiel reached his hand back between the seats, like he remembered his mom used to do when she was driving, and when Dean took it, his hand was shaking in fine little tremors. Castiel squeezed it and dropped it back into his lap. When he had both his arms back, he struggled out of his own jacket, maneuvering it carefully around his seatbelt as Aaron pitched around a corner too fast. Castiel jerked into the door, Dean listed hard toward the wrong side of the van and looked a little green.

“Take it easy,” he barked at Aaron, and Aaron mimicked him, mocking, but did slow his roll a little bit, easing up to the next stop sign instead of throwing them both headlong into the dash.

“Here,” Castiel said, thrusting the jacket back between the seats once he managed to get it off. Dean couldn’t seem to gather his thoughts enough to take it, so Castiel swung it up and around his shoulders and wrestled it into a makeshift cape. He tied the arms around Dean’s neck. Dean flicked an absent tick of a smile at him.

Castiel turned back to the windshield and huffed out a shaky sigh. Aaron cleared his throat as they pulled up to a red light.

“Seriously, Cas, I don’t wanna like—pry. But am I gonna get the cops on my ass? I got saleable quantities of more than a few substances in here, buddy.”

“No. No, he’s just a friend.” Friend. Castiel’s tongue felt funny wrapping itself around the foreign word. “I didn’t realize he was so—” Shaky. Weak. Broken. “High.” High was something Aaron understood.

“Oh yeah? What’s he on? I don’t recognize him. Where’d he get his shit from?” Aaron looked at Dean in the rearview mirror. “Was it that flashy sonuvabitch Gallagher? With his stupid van and his Moby Dick bongs?”

Dean’s laugh floated in shakily from the back. “Heh. Moby Dick bongs.”

“Jesus, Aaron, I dunno. You know I know you have the good shit.” He didn’t. Andy had the good shit, and Castiel went to him whenever he had a specific itch to scratch. But right now, Aaron was cheap and Cas was broke.

Aaron nodded fervently. “Damn right.” He licked his lips and peeked into the rearview mirror again, this time focusing on himself. “He’s your ‘friend,’ huh?” He ran a hand through his hair, checked his teeth for food, inspected his skin for blemishes. “Not your usual fare.”

Aaron knew his usual fare pretty well, because Aaron was his usual fare. Sometimes. Castiel was a regular customer and a semi-regular fuck. The whole reason Castiel was even getting a ride was because the last time they’d gotten stoned together in the back of the van where Dean was currently sprawled, Castiel had given him the blowjob to end all blowjobs. And it really must have been good, seeing as Aaron had agreed to drive off before he even knew he wasn’t kidnapping someone. It was comforting that Castiel gave good enough head to justify a felony. Honestly, he’d thought he was a misdemeanor lay at best.

Either way, when Aaron said, “not your usual fare,” he probably meant that Dean looked pretty enough that he could afford to have standards, which wasn’t generally Castiel’s scene. He liked ‘em quick and easy. Going after Dean at that party had been a moment of weakness, and look where fucking it got him.

“He’s my friend. Just my friend. I’m serious.” Aaron flicked his eyes to the passenger seat.

“Didn’t know you had any of those.” Which, okay, fair point, but it stung a little. Aaron was one of the only people he interacted with in a friendly way on a semi-regular basis. But he wasn’t his friend, was he? He was his dealer.

Aaron grinned, playful, and waggled his eyebrows. “Does that mean he’s available?”

Dean hacked out a laugh. “He can hear you, y’know.”

Castiel turned in his seat. Dean’s eyes were closed, and he looked no less green.

Peeking through the rearview mirror again, Aaron said, “You’re more likely to make yourself vomit with your eyes shut, y’know. You lose your bearings that way. Dunno up from down until you open ‘em and you’re not where you’re s’posed to be”

Dean opened his eyes and groaned.

“Told you so,” Aaron crowed.

“Pull over,” Dean choked.

Aaron did. They were in a charming little residential area, nearing the suburbs where Castiel had been able find affordable housing. Dean swung open the side door and puked in front of a house with birds painted on the mailbox and a Neighborhood Watch sticker on the window. Honestly, they probably deserved it.

Aaron shouted, “Better out than in!”

Dean flashed his middle finger, weak and shaky.

Castiel bit his lip. When they were back on the road, Dean reassured him, “I feel fine. Sometimes you just gotta puke.”

“Bro, what are you even on right now?” Aaron called to the backseat with one of those smiles so wide you heard it in his voice.

“Oxy,” Dean grunted.

Aaron let out a low whistle.

“Man, even I don’t fuck around with narcotics.”

“You probably would if you had your leg amputated,” Dean snapped.

From his vantage, Castiel saw Dean following Aaron’s advice about the motion sickness—his eyes were half-open and glinting in the dying light of the late afternoon. He also saw the exact moment when Aaron went ghost-pale.

“Yeah, uh,” he stuttered out, trying to cover his ass. “That’d just about do it.”

“I wish I wasn’t fuckin’ with ‘em so much, y’know. They make me fuckin’ sick.”

Aaron, who seemed to have no sense of self-preservation to speak of, sputtered a long, rambling series half-apologies, unknowingly putting himself in deeper in shit, as Dean started massaging at his bad leg, digging his fingers in hard. Castiel couldn’t see the detail through his pants, but it was undoubtedly where the leg ended and the mess of scar tissue and prosthetic began. Pretty high amputation. Nearer to his groin than Castiel would have thought from the way he moved. Castiel had seen more than his fair share of amputations—he’d been a medic, after all. He’d been the first line of defense, and working in the crossfire of heavy-duty ballistics tended to result in a whole lot more missing limbs than being a doctor stateside would’ve, that’s for sure.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t wear yourself out pitying my ass.” Aaron swallowed audibly. Castiel could only imagine how grateful he was when they finally pulled up to the curb in front of the shabby drycleaner under Castiel’s apartment. Dean was clearly grateful too, and he showed it by throwing open the door and throwing up again, this time with considerably less gusto, just few half-hearted spit-ups onto the asphalt outside.

Castiel and Aaron left Dean to catch his breath and circled around to the back where Aaron kept the merchandise. Aaron made a show of peeking around the back doors, looking for cops, like anyone in his shitty neighborhood could afford to get riled up every time they saw a deal going down. It wasn’t like Castiel was a violent offender or anything. He just wanted to sleep be left alone.

When he was satisfied there was no one watching them, Aaron lifted a tarp and pulled out a plastic toolbox, and when he flipped the lid open, cleanly segmented tiers of neat baggies with tidy name labels and percentage markers popped into view.

“Alright. So what are we looking for today?”

Dean squinted at them through the flood of light from the back doors as Castiel scrutinized the merchandise.

“You seriously threw me in the back of your drug dealer’s van? Were you trying to get my brother’s girlfriend to call the police on you?”

Castiel shrugged. “I just wanted to help you out.”

“I thought we were just having dinner. That was helpful enough.”

Aaron watched them like a cat with a laser pointer, his head zipping back and forth with the ebb and flow of the argument. Castiel wondered distantly if he still thought the blowjob was worth all the trouble.

“I didn’t think you were going to show up with a fucking babysitter.”

“I can’t drive, asshat, what did you expect me to do? Hobble onto the fuckin’ bus and hope real hard that I didn’t dissociate before my stop?”

“Why’d you come with me if you’re so miserable about it, huh? We barely even know each other.”

Dean didn’t say anything, but he held Castiel’s eyes in a long, meaningful look and clenched at his crutches in his lap, knuckles going white around the cold metal shafts. Then he scooted to the door, planted the plastic nubs of his crutches on the ground, and hoisted himself up. Both Castiel and Aaron lifted their arms in reflex when it looked like he was going to pitch face-first onto the asphalt. Then he started walking.

Castiel groaned. “What, are you going to walk home?”

Dean didn’t say anything.

When Castiel turned around, grinding his teeth and glaring into the shadowed interior of the car, Gabriel was there, sitting cross-legged in the spot Dean had just vacated. The white tip of a bone poked out of his bent knee. He looked gleeful.

“Hoo boy. He’s a spitfire, ain’t he?” Gabriel shimmied his shoulders. Pieces of his skin that had burned up and come loose shivered off of him and disappeared before they hit the floor of the car.

Castiel said, “Go away.”

And Aaron, indignant, said, “Excuse me? Castiel, I didn’t sign up for some Maury-fucking-Povich shit with your fucked-up boyfriend. I did you a solid because you’re a good goddamn lay, but I’m just here to sell you some weed.”

Gabriel snickered.

Castiel said, “You wanted to get in his pants like ten minutes ago.”

Gabriel said, “Who wouldn’t!” about two seconds before Aaron said the same thing. Castiel wanted to scream.

“Bad idea to ball-bust your dealer, bucko,” Gabriel said, clicking his tongue. Tut, tut, tut and three sprays of blood.

“Fine, then just give me an eighth of your best indica.”

“What? You always get my sativa stuff. I brought a new hybrid just for you.”

“Aww, are you getting weed to woo your man?” Gabriel crooned. “How romantic.”

Cas glanced over his shoulder at Dean, who was making his way down the road at a slow plod. It was a more symbolic gesture than anything, that much was clear as he doggedly crutched forward. He wanted to roll his eyes.

Castiel shook his head. “Just give me an indica.”

Aaron shrugged. “Sure.” He dug through to the bottom of his kit with plasticky rustle of bags on top of bags on top of bags. “You really want the best shit? Cost ya extra.”

Castiel felt around for the three twenties he had in his pants pocket. Lucky for him, he never got around to spending any of it on lunch, so he’d probably have enough. Maybe even enough for the gas money it took to get Aaron out to the burbs.

“That’s fine.”

“Dean just looked back.” Gabriel said, pointing with his skeletal hand. His thumb was crooked, his pointer finger broken at the tip. “He’s goin’ all end credits of The Incredible Hulk over there. This is pathetic. He’s waiting for you to come after him and you’re busy buying weed.”

Castiel wanted to snap, I’m buying it for him! Because honestly he’d sooner smoke a fucking cigarette than get a pure indica. They did fuck-all for him. But. Again. Gabriel. He flicked him a look. Gabriel smiled his crooked smile.

Aaron opened up a baggie and held it up for Castiel to sniff. Castiel took a deep inhale, and it was clearly better than his usual fare. Deep, earthy, and pungent, nothing too harsh or skunky about it. Castiel smoked the bottom of the barrel, but, okay, yeah. He was trying to impress someone this time, all joking aside.

“I’ll take it.”

He paid Aaron his three twenties and released him back to the city, but not without a lecherous parting remark about calling him if the two of them ever needed a third. Gabriel disappeared the moment he turned around and found Dean, who’d given up on his little jaunt away and sat himself on a public bench, right in front of a real estate agent’s smiling face.

Castiel approached, clutching his fresh baggy of weed. When he got close, he waved it like an offering, smiling meaningfully.

“Feeling better?” Castiel said.

Dean grunted, staring down at the ground with a furrowed brow. He spat on the sidewalk and wiped his hand across the back of his mouth for emphasis.

“I got an indica.” Castiel continued brightly. Dean’s face didn’t change. Blank and neutral. When he looked up, though, his eyes were clearer, more lucid, like the vomiting had done its job and wiped his system. No more painkillers meant a clear head. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always the lesser of two evils when it came to chronic pain.

“I might be impressed if I knew what the fuck that even meant.”

“It’s a strain of weed. I think it’ll help you.”

“Yeah I’m sure you fuckin’ do. You know what’s best for me, huh?”

Castiel turned in a little circle, grounding out an exaggerated groan. This was a whole lot of effort to go through for a fuck. And the alternative, that it was more than just a fuck, was a little unfathomable.

“I’m sorry, okay? I just think you need—”

“Everyone thinks I need something, okay? Everyone thinks they know what it is. You dragged me across the whole fucking city without so much as asking me what I wanted.” Castiel looked down. “Christ. I thought you—you’re no better than Sam.”

Castiel sighed and sat down beside him on the bench. He let his head droop between his slouching shoulders, elbows on his knees, waves of blue falling into his eyes.

“Well?” he said. “What do you want, then?”

“I don’t know! I guess I didn’t. Think this through.” Dean said, sounding frayed. He rubbed his knee, tapping his fingers on his pant leg. He still had Castiel’s jacket strung around his neck. It was nearing the end of January, as chilly as Palo Alto ever got, but he didn’t seem to be feeling that. He reached up, unstrung the jacket from around his neck, and seemed to remember just then it wasn’t his. “I mean, I came with you, didn’t I?” Castiel nodded. “Fuck. My painkillers were in my jacket pocket. Fuck.”

Castiel shoved the weed in his back pocket then patted himself down, looking for his cigarettes. When he found them, he didn’t offer one to Dean, but he lit up one to share between them, searching for common ground. Taking them back to that first night together where everything had just sort of clicked.

He took the first drag, and when he offered, Dean only hesitated for a second before he took it, tapped off the ash, and sucked in a long drag as well. It seemed to settle him. Sober him.

“I lost the trick of it.” Dean said, waving the hand with the cigarette in it in an all-encompassing gesture. He looked beyond the building across the street, a tiny Lebanese restaurant with a red awning. “Or maybe I never had it in the first place. I dunno. I forget what I used to be like anyway.”

He passed the cigarette back, steepled his hands in front of his face. Castiel inhaled and tasted Dean on the filter.

“The trick of what?”

“Of. I mean. You saw me with your—friend—”

“My dealer.”

“Yeah.”

“Aaron.”

“Yeah, him. I was a dick.”

“He’s a dick too.” Castiel shrugged.

“It’s not just that, though. If you hadn’t fucking kidnapped me I’d have nothing to talk to you about. We’d still be at a crappy diner talking about the weather.” He ran a hand over his mouth. “I been overseas since I was eighteen. What else do I even got?”

Castiel handed the cigarette back. Restrained himself from his default state of snark and didn’t say, “A cigarette, now.” He also didn’t say, “A nice ass,” which was where he really wanted to get, because if he was being honest, these sorts of questions hit a little too close to home. Dean had only just gotten back and he was stuck in the same sort of middling nothing Castiel still was. What did Castiel have, two years out from the military? A dingy studio apartment, twenty or so unfinished med school apps, a drug habit, a job at Starbucks, a rusted-out war medal, and a dead brother. No more than Dean.

He couldn’t say anything nice. He didn’t say anything at all.

Dean was quiet for a moment too, pulling back hard on the cigarette, an aggressive breath that took the glow right down to the filter. He stubbed it out on the bench beside him and stared at it for a moment before he flicked it into the dirty sewer grate set in the curb ahead of him.

“Fuck. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I shoulda just gone to my fucking psych appointment so they could give me more fucking drugs. Balance out my head.”

He patted himself down again, an instinctual, second-nature quality to it. Still looking for that bottle of oxy. Still not finding it. Still in pain. Castiel knew what a fucking burden it was to be sober.

“I—” he said. “I mean. I think this might help you. This indica.”

Dean laughed. “Christ. Cas, if it’s anything like the last thing I smoked with you, it’s just gonna make me wanna claw my guts out.”

“It won’t make you wanna claw your guts out.” Castiel said, tapping his fingers on his knee. “What I gave you last time was a sativa. Strong one. That’s—that affects your brain more. Indicas are mellow. People use them to sleep and chill out. And for pain.”

Dean clenched at his bad knee, cleared his throat. He seemed to be considering it for a second before whatever anxiety he was nursing reared back up again.

“What are we doing here, dude? I don’t wanna be a fucking stick in the mud but like. Are we just gonna—”

Castiel couldn’t take it anymore. When Dean kept his mouth shut, he thought maybe he could like him, but Dean talked too fucking much. Dean thought too fucking much. True, he made Gabriel disappear for a second, left the world blessedly silent, but then he filled it with his own anxiety. And the more he talked, the more Castiel could feel the shallow panic building inside of him, too, something he normally tamped down with heady clouds of smoke. Time to take a step back from that ledge.

So Cas kissed him. Nothing delicate, either. There wasn’t anything to lose, and Castiel was good at this. It was the first thing he’d wanted in a while, one of the first feelings that had lingered past the flighty, up-in-the-air, instant-gratification quality the pot and the headspace he lived in often gave him. He’d wanted to do it ever since he’d seen him in the kitchen that first night, way too beautiful for his own fucking good. And Dean felt just as good as he imagined. Castiel tried not to think that he’d been vomiting up poisonous painkillers a second ago, but the cigarette had done its job in erasing any acrid residue. He tasted like the Dean on the cigarette filter but a thousand times more intense. He breathed out stale menthol on his breath.

When Dean didn’t object to the first touch of his lips, didn’t pull away from a deepening smack, Castiel went in harder, bringing his body around so he was no longer beside him on the bench but a step away from being in his lap. He brought both hands up to Dean’s head and splayed them along the base of his scalp, burying his fingers hard in the short hair there, and he used the leverage to force Dean even harder against him, opening his mouth to give them both more room and nearly moaning when Dean responded in turn, opening his mouth to Cas’s tongue.

Out on the street, on a bench in a dirty little piece of a suburb, with the cold air kissing everywhere that wasn’t hot, there was no question that this was foreplay. Dean asked what they had in common. What they both wanted. What they could even do together or mean to each other when both of them were nothing and no one without scorched earth and the constant threat of breaking violence. This was the answer, the one they’d been skirting around since they climbed into bed together the first time and had done a disappointing diddly squat with it.

Dean whimpered into his mouth and Castiel wanted more than anything to swing his leg over his lap on the filthy bench in front of the Lebanese restaurant and rub off against him, but he forced himself to pull back. He kept in close enough to almost touch noses, left them both breathing the same air and said, “You think too much. Listen. Don’t think.”

Dean—agreed. Just a little bit of hesitation at the top of a nod.

“We’re going to go upstairs to my apartment. We’re going to get stoned off our asses. And then we’re going to fuck.”

Dean nodded again.

It wasn’t particularly sexy helping him to his feet after, slipping his arms into the cuffs on his crutches and ignoring the pained hiss of air between his teeth when he was standing. And it was even less sexy when his elderly Vietnamese landlord screeched at him in garbled English about the late rent when he passed.

Dean took his time getting up the narrow wooden staircase, one gasped breath after another, so Castiel took his time unlocking his front door, focused internally on the ways they could fuck most easily, with Dean being so—how he was.

He probably should have accounted for the possibility that he might be bringing Dean back here, but it had been such a spur-of-the-moment type thing. He didn’t necessarily care that it was a fucking pit so much as it wasn’t the best form to have so much shit on the floor that your disabled fuckbuddy couldn’t even crutch his way to the bed to get fucked.

Castiel kicked a paper bag full of garbage away from the door and then did a languid lap around the apartment to pick up the strewn dirty laundry. He moved trash from the floor to the counters and left all his dirty shit in a pile on top of his laptop. Dean didn’t seem too put off by it.

“Uh. Where’s your bathroom?” He could only assume that he asked to be polite. From his vantage on the edge of the kitchenette linoleum, he could see the whole apartment. There was only one door besides the one they had come in, and it led to a closet-sized bathroom that was difficult enough for Castiel to navigate, nevermind a guy who could fall over in a stiff breeze. Nevertheless, he nodded gamely when Castiel pointed, picking his way around the residue that Castiel hadn’t gotten to yet, and slammed the door behind him with a crutch.

Gabriel appeared the moment the lock clicked into place, sitting with his hands stretched out behind him on the unmade bed.

“You’re a shitty host. Lookit this place. Not exactly the high-class love cave your boyo was expecting, methinks.”

Castiel swept a few empty takeout packages under the bed, diligently ignoring him.

“Remember when you were in middle school, and you wouldn’t talk to me for a week because I un-alphabetized the books on your shelf? Remember? What happened to that Castiel?”

Castiel clenched his hand into a fist around an empty beer can.

“D’oh!” Gabriel smacked himself in the forehead with the butt of his palm. It made a bloody-wet squish on impact. “Of course you remember that guy, huh? I’m in your head, right? I wouldn’t remember it if you didn’t!”

Castiel bent down to pick up a stray sock that was more than likely used as a jizz rag more recently than it was used as an article of clothing, and when he straightened, Gabriel was right in front of him instead, pulsing blood and breathing heavy. He was so close Castiel could see the muscles behind the eye on the ruined half of his face as they flitted around, studying Castiel’s expression. He was an excellent study of human anatomy, if his years as a medic and past aspirations were any indication. And he used that to his full advantage in his hallucinations.

“He’s familiar though. Isn’t he? Dean. I know him from somewhere. I know I do. Dean Dean Dean.” When Gabriel said it, it became more dangerous with each pass through. A sharp stab of a name.

The bathroom door thumped open behind him, and Castiel startled so hard as he turned around that he put a hand up to his chest, like that would stop it beating so hard it hurt.

Dean was in boxers and crutches and nothing else. He’d removed the fake leg too, and Castiel had been right, the amputation was so high that the end of the severed limb didn’t even peek from the bottom of the shorts.

“I used your toothbrush,” he announced. Castiel shrugged. Dean tilted his head. “You okay?”

Dean wasn’t a stereotype. He wasn’t a blushing wallflower when it came to his scars, at least he wasn’t in front of Castiel, and his injuries were—extensive.

“Fine,” Castiel said absently, heart slowing to a normal beat as he took in the spindly network of scar tissue that made up most of Dean’s lower torso. He remembered that first night, Dean taking a healthy first hit of a strong strain, the way his hand had immediately gone to his stomach like he was afraid of it coming apart.

No fucking wonder.

Dean didn’t flinch away from the attention, but that clearly cost him something. Even in the low light of the one lamp across the room, Castiel could see the pink flush that spread across his face, the way his eyes shuttered like the buildings downtown did after dark, grids of metal that didn’t keep the light out but clearly said closed for fuckin’ business.

“Didn’t figure you’d have a problem with. The scars.”

“No.” He wasn’t lying, but the fact was, memories had a funny way of sneaking up on you. One second he was staring at a willing vision of a fuckbuddy in his apartment, the next he could feel pulses of blood oozing up between his fingers as he tried to staunch the desperate flow from someone’s stomach. “I did medevac. I’ve seen worse.”

He turned abruptly, retrieved his bong from where it was buried underneath the clothes he’d heaped on the table a few minutes before, and started packing a bowl without looking back at Dean. This would make it all go away, or at the very least, it would make it all stop mattering. The best thing about fucking while you were stoned—if everything went how it was supposed to—was that all the feelings that you wanted to feel amped up and all the feelings you didn’t became a dull background buzz, a frequency that you didn’t have to notice for a little while because it reached just the right pitch.

He heard Dean crutch over to the bed, the uneven thu-thunk of crutch-foot-crutch-foot that his landlord was probably going to bitch about the next day. He heard him plop down on the bed with a loud complaint from the noisy springs. He turned around, bong in hand, in time to see Dean nudge a stray t-shirt with the rubbery tip of a crutch and then set both crutches, with great care, off to one side of the bed.

“Medic, huh? You, uh. Doing medical work still?”

“I’m a barista,” Castiel grunted, searching his pockets for his lighter and easing down next to Dean on the side where the truncated half-leg rubbed up against his side. Dean sucked in his lips between his teeth and nodded.

“Do you know how to smoke out of a bong?”

Dean shook his head.

“Watch.”

Dean did. Castiel felt Dean’s eyes on him hard, felt the smoky quality to them already, the hungry way they looked him over. And Castiel was buzzing himself, despite everything. Or maybe he was fucking hair-triggered because of everything. Because of Gabriel’s recent overzealous stalking, because of the scars that snaked up Dean’s chest. He wanted some kind of exorcism, and a good, hard roll in the sheets had never failed to help him ditch his demons before.

He put his mouth on the top of the bong, lit up the bowl, filled the chamber, and sucked it all in. The indica was a different feeling. A loose-limbed sort of distance that took him away from himself as he handed the bong over to Dean and guided him through the process of smoking it with hard, lingering touches on his arms, the back of his neck. When Dean had his mouth pressed up tight against the chamber, Castiel couldn’t stop himself leaning in and mouthing hungrily at the exposed side of Dean’s neck. He felt Dean’s muscles tense between his lips when he inhaled; he felt Dean’s throat jump against his tongue as Dean held back a cough.

“Good boy,” Castiel breathed into his skin when Dean released a stuttering cloud of smoke. “That’s right.”

“Ah,” Dean sighed wordlessly when Castiel sucked a dark spot into his skin just under the bolt of his jaw. Castiel could tell the exact moment he started feeling the high, because he tipped his head to the side and let Cas in, his whole body opening like a flower. He raised one arm around Castiel’s back in a loose curl, drawing him closer, as he held half-heartedly to the bong with the other. Castiel used that new languid compliance to lay a hand on the ruined thigh, snaking up the gaping bottom of the boxer shorts. The limb jumped off the bed in an automatic response when Cas’s hand crossed some invisible delineation in the scar tissue between zero sensation and way too sensitive. It drew a whine from the back of Dean’s throat, which was a pretty good indication that his uptight ass was not high enough yet.

Castiel took the bong back and did another hard hit, and he repacked the bowl before he guided Dean into doing a few more too. By the time he got up to set the bong back on the table next to the heap of garbage, the room was closing in, swelling and retreating in pleasant waves. Dean was running his hand up and down his own thigh wonderingly.

“This sounds so.” He spoke slowly. Paused. “I can’t feel it?” He looked up at Castiel, blinked slowly. Ran his tongue over his lips in a motion that seemed to last forever. Castiel followed the stroke, felt his eyes moving with it, and licked his lips right back. Could hardly help himself. They really should have prepped themselves before they got this stoned. They were gonna have a hard time rallying the coordination they’d need to open one or the other up. Castiel especially got a bit—needy when he was like this.

“Can’t feel what?” Castiel said, breathy, absent. His focus narrowed to Dean, and he made his slow way back to the bed, to him. He put one knee up on the comforter, then the other, bracing his arms on Dean’s wide, sturdy shoulders until his legs were bracketing Dean’s hips and Dean was blinking lazily up at him, like he wasn’t sure how Cas had gotten there.

“My. My leg.” He lifted the stump half-heartedly, running it along the inside of Castiel’s thigh. Castiel groaned and thought, Of course. Of course you can’t feel it. It’s gone.

But he wasn’t stupid. He knew that things weren’t always so straightforward, and a lost limb could stick around the same way a bad memory did.

“Phantom limb.”

Dean nodded.

“It hurts. Usually,” he gasped out. Cas brought his hands up to the sides of Dean’s face, cupped his cheeks. They breathed against each other’s mouths reverently, held each other’s eyes in the way that was only not awkward when you were stoned off your ass and you could pick out every precious gold fleck in a pair of green eyes without feeling self-conscious about it.

“Mmmm.”

“It doesn’t now,” Dean breathed against his lips.

“Good.” And then they were kissing properly again. It was just like it had been on the street, except now, this was all there was. No Gabriel and no Lebanese restaurant and no landlord and no car noises and no filth. Just the firm pull of their bodies and the way they had to come together.

“It doesn’t hurt here, does it?” Castiel reached a hand that had been holding his face down to knead steadily at the firm plane of his stomach, around the same place Dean’d thought he’d been losing his insides out of the last time they’d done this. He felt it jump and hiccup under his fingertips, but it wasn’t a pain response—it was ticklish more than anything. If no other good had come of it, at least the thick, puckered lines of newly formed scar tissue made Dean remarkably, overwhelmingly—responsive.

“N-No,” he stuttered. “No. Feels.”

Castiel had a good idea of how it felt. He was sitting right on top of Dean’s cock, after all, and Dean was only in his boxers. Castiel stroked harder at his stomach and felt the direct response in the all-over twitch of him and the hardening of him in his shorts. Dean groaned and lifted his hand with what seemed like painstaking effort, grasping at air a few times before he landed on Castiel’s hand on his stomach, stilling it. He stopped moving, stationary astride Dean’s hips.

“What’s wrong?”

Dean bit his lip.

“I haven’t since I lost it.” He cleared his throat. “Fucked,” he clarified, looking down at their laps. At where Castiel’s hardness wasn’t apparent yet, not through his jeans, but one more of those noises out of Dean’s mouth would just about get him there. “It’s been. And I was in the hospital. And my leg—I don’t know if I can like I used to.”

He hadn’t had sex since his accident. No wonder he was near incomprehensible. Castiel would have blown his fucking top by now. But then, Castiel had come back from the war sound of body, if not sound of mind, so it was probably easy for him to say.

“No, no, baby,” he said. “Shh, I’m going to take care of it.”

Dean’s breath hitched at the pet name but he didn’t object to it. Castiel used those sometimes when he got high. Terms of endearment. They slipped out of him without his permission, rogue affection. This one hit him right in his gut. When he said he wanted Dean to feel good, he really did mean it.

He braced himself on Dean’s shoulders again and found his footing long enough to sink to his knees in front of him instead of on top of him. Dean watched him go with an expression of disbelief that bordered on worship. And that—unabashed lust and heavy breathing that Castiel knew was just for him did him in just like it always did. Some half-assed Freudian military pysch would probably have a field day with that—you like to feel powerful because your power was removed from you, you like to have power over people in a way you never did in your service.

But Castiel was more in the business of fucking dudes’ brains out without thinking of all the implications. Call him old-fashioned.

Either way, that look tipped him far enough over the edge that he had to undo the button on his pants to make room, and hell, somehow even though Dean had been in just his boxers for twenty minutes, Castiel’s cock was the first one to come into play, because he was a slut and he really liked the response that he got out of Dean when he gave himself a few good, hard strokes, naked between the teeth of his zipper, firming himself up in his fist and palming at the head. It was always so good when he was stoned—the almost tingly absence of feeling in his hand that made the phantom drag on his cock ten times more pleasureable. Or maybe he just jacked off when he got stoned so much that he was starting to romanticize his relationship with his fist.

Dean put a heavy, clumsy hand on his head and panted. Even though he didn’t try to bring Castiel closer or force his hand, Castiel took that as his cue to hook his fingers into the elastic of Dean’s boxers on either side of his hips and yank down. He bared the stump and the network of scars surrounding it like he was ripping off a band-aid.

Dean was hard and beautiful and that sure was something, so Castiel was almost disappointed in himself when his attention was drawn instead to the irritated mass of red that was his wrecked thigh. There wasn’t much of it left. It was miraculous that his dick was untouched—miraculous enough that he deserved some lavish attention on his miracle cock to reward it for still existing. There were whole patches of skin at his groin where pubic hair wasn’t growing anymore, lightning-bolt trails of red scarring that cut through the downy soft of new hair growth, so it stood to reason that it just as easily could not.  

Castiel shook his head, shook it again, and got hit hard with a series of freight train recollections. There was memory in the angry red of the wounds on his leg, in the hurt so fresh it radiated heat. There was memory in the map of scars on Dean’s stomach that made him want to shrink back, away. He could imagine the sort of wounds these had been when they were open and fresh because he’d seen wounds like them a million times before.

He shook himself back into the moment, coaxing his brain into a puddle, seeking out the high, looking for that bliss.

He found it. Inhale. Exhale.

“You wear your prosthetic too much,” he said, the loose-lipped proto-doctor in him bubbling to the surface with the endorphins. “Or perhaps it doesn’t fit correctly?” Dean’s severed limb gave an instinctual and subtle twitch away. “No, no,” he soothed, reaching up with one hand to stroke at Dean’s hipbone, at the flesh that was still creased with evidence of a prosthetic he wore high on his hip. “No, no. It just looks painful is all. You’ve got blistering.” He looked up to Dean’s face, his glazed eyes, his blown pupils, and he laid a delicate kiss where the limb ended in a swollen surgical seam. For good measure, he did it twice more, methodical and deliberate as the drugs slowed everything to singular everlasting moments that hung between their breaths. 

Breath hitching, Dean bent forward to catch his mouth and Castiel met him halfway, bracing himself on the bed. He kept up the soothing stroke of his thumb at Dean’s hipbone, and Dean kept a loose hold on his hair. He didn’t let go when Castiel dropped back down and planted a few more kisses on his leg—but this time the kisses crept north with far more purpose, until he was nudging at Dean’s cock with his nose and taking him into his mouth, picking up the slack that had left him a little bit softer, slumped against the scarring on his inner thigh.

Castiel braced himself on Dean’s hip with one arm and reached down to stroke himself with the other, his hand vacillating between their erections in an uncoordinated frenzy as Dean fattened and lengthened and Cas struggled to swallow the whole thing down his throat.

He was a slut, though, and that had its benefits, the least of which was not the deepthroating prowess, the moments he found himself nosing up against the shrapnel-shaped flecks of scar tissue, drooling and humming around Dean’s dick, as Dean’s gasping moans above him took on the unabashed porn-star quality of the truly inebriated.

He was nose-to-groin, up close and personal and high on a combination of oxygen deprivation and pot, when he thought, these look different. Out of nowhere.

Some scars, namely the ones that smacked of evisceration and jumped on his fluttering stomach, were older. More healed. And some scars, mostly those on his thigh that were wet and gleaming from Castiel’s lavish attention, were fresher, angrier. More painful.

He backed off Dean’s cock, jerking him in distracted, half-hearted apology as he observed the strata of Dean’s scarring more carefully. Dean didn’t seem to notice. He responded to a thumb at the base of his crown much as he did to a firm tongue on his glans. He was probably so far gone on that fucking indica that Castiel was just the dick-sucking cherry on top of his painless chocolate sundae.

That thought got waylaid pretty abruptly when he saw Dean’s balls drawing in close, tight and high already in a way that made it very clear he hadn’t been lying about his longstanding dry spell. His breath escaped him in staccato hahs that turned back into groans the moment Castiel bent down and poked a delicate kitten lick into the shallow divot right at the tip of his cock, lapping up the fluid that was gathering there more liberally than it had been before.

Then Castiel stopped. Stopped stroking, stopped licking, stopped everything, choking Dean off at the base of his cock with a loose loop of his fingers. Dean groaned louder at that than anything, and he finally fully collapsed back onto the bed when his shaky arms refused to hold him. Castiel gave his dick one last nuzzle, an apologetic parting stroke to the head with his prickly cheek.

When he was on his feet, he stripped, slow because he was high and not because he was teasing, though he could see the way Dean was looking at him, head tipped up to catch the peek of his ass from his jeans, the plane of his stomach under his t-shirt. Dean let out of a half-hearted wolf whistle when Castiel revealed he wasn’t wearing any underwear, and Castiel chuckled despite himself, trying to remember the last time he’d laughed during sex. Physically, sex was easy, because Castiel was hot. He had no illusions about it. It was easy to be in his skin, and he knew he was beautiful. He’d had enough lovers tell him in the heat of the moment that it couldn’t be a lie. But that didn’t mean it was easy on his fucked head.

Fully bared, Castiel climbed carefully until he was on top of Dean again, blue hair hanging down into his eyes, cock hanging heavy to drag along Dean’s rough torso, knees on either side of his hips and hands on either side of his head.

Dean smiled like it was his birthday.

“Hey,” Dean said, dopey.

Cas couldn’t help but smile back. What the fuck.

“Hey.”

Dean lifted one unsteady hand and made a determined effort to grab Castiel’s cock, but he could only sustain a competent handjob for all of two seconds before his arm fell back to his middle, stroking instead at the trails of precome that Castiel had left there. He giggled.

“Suh-sorry.”

They kissed, equal effort, Dean on Cas and Cas on Dean and meeting in the middle. Castiel dipped his hips in a shallow fuck he couldn’t resist as they pressed into each other, open-mouthed, tongues dragging and twisting and twining with extravagant, exquisite slowness.

When Castiel finally pulled away, he said, “Does it feel good like I promised?”

Dean licked his lips, nodded. He looked sex-flushed and kiss-swollen, the very picture of debauchery. It looked exceptionally good on him.

“It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Dean shook his head.

“It looks like you feel good. It looks like you feel so good. And I feel good because you do.”

No lie, there. There was something immensely satisfying about all this, when Dean had only ever looked pretty well miserable every time Castiel had seen him.

Dean whimpered and tried to rise up to meet him again, but he really had reached the newborn-fawn stage of inebriation, so Castiel took pity and gave him another lavishly long tongue-fucking. The way the world narrowed to the point of heat between their mouths made it almost obscene, the only thing in the world. They weren’t good at talking. Neither of them. Maybe because neither of them had much interesting to say. They could have sat at that diner table the whole damn day and not said as much as their bodies did in just five minutes of the wet slide of them, damaged, together.

When he pulled back he said, “You have to tell me how not to hurt you.”

Dean blinked, kiss-drunk and actually-drunk, trying to parse the question.

“What?”

“You have to tell me how to—you’ve been in the hospital. I don’t know the extent of everything. How do I fuck you?”

Dean let out a delayed little moan when he understood, plaintive and raw.

He leaned down to mouth at Dean’s neck, and when he spoke, he spoke into his ear, slowly and deliberately, every syllable definitive and clear.

“Okay, here. How about a few options?” he said, when Dean didn’t do much more than pant. Castiel called on every dirty fantasy he’d had since he’d met Dean for inspiration. “Option one. I fuck you. I spread you out on this bed and split you open slow, and you look me in the eye when you take me in and I fuck you deep,” he kissed his neck for emphasis. Dean made his first grab for his own dick since Castiel had let it go a few minutes before, the frantic effort of a man possessed. His addled brain couldn’t figure how to navigate his twitchy fingers around Castiel’s leg where he straddled him though, so he let it drop again against the comforter, clasping open and closed compulsively.

Dirty talk. Good to know for when—for if they fucked again with their wits about them and Castiel could gather himself enough let out the neverending slurry of come-pumping profanity he knew he was capable of when he was getting his ass pounded.

“Shh, shh,” he soothed, rubbing with the flat of his palm on Dean’s belly. “Option two. You fuck me.” He very pointedly did not say all the things that Dean would have hard time doing without two knees to get down on. There sure was plenty he could do, anyway. “I can lay you down and slick you up and ride your pretty cock until you come in me.” He ended the thought with a well-timed flick to Dean’s nipple.

Dean’s cock jerked so hard it slapped against the back of Castiel’s thigh wetly, and Dean sounded like he was about a step away from coming without even a hand on him. Castiel chuckled his smoke-drenched stoner chuckle and tried not to project the wanna-get-fucked-so-bad horniness he’d been aching with since he jerked himself out of his pants.

“Pins,” Dean said, slapping his own flank.

Castiel squinted. “What?”

“Pins. In my—h-hipbone. Can’t spread my legs so good right—” Dean’s eyes tipped up, got that faraway look Castiel knew he himself got when he was sinking into a reverie—that was a risk you took with the pot, the hyperfixation. By now, Castiel had figured out how to get himself out of the spirals, but Dean was new to this. Castiel literally nipped that shit in the bud by laving a whole hot tongue over Dean’s nipple, and god it felt good to be able to pull that evil out of him, to take him back to nothing but heat and satisfaction in a split second. He couldn’t seem to fight those demons off anywhere else, certainly, but here, in this moment, with too many drugs and the satisfying pull of sex, the afterward didn’t seem to matter.

Dean groaned. Here and now again.

“Sweetheart,” Castiel grinned toothily. “I thought I told you I was gonna take care of it.”

He braced himself on one hand by Dean’s head, and Dean looked up at him, ruffled and worshipful, at the exact moment Castiel reached his other hand back to scissor himself open. This wasn’t going to go far because he’d have to get off the bed to get the lube—another fucking massive oversight on his part—but he couldn’t resist seeing Dean’s face in the moment he fingered himself for the first time. Every moment was clearly new, for Dean, the best first moment of his life so far if his face was any indication. The abject, slack-jawed wonder did not disappoint.

“Is it okay if I ride your dick, Dean?” he panted, tracing his hole behind him. Castiel was already ridiculously relaxed, nudging two fingers up to the second knuckle right off the bat even without lube. Fucking indicas. Loose-limbed and just dulled enough to forget to be scared of the pain.

Dean said, “Uh. Yes.” Castiel nodded.

He turned getting the lube into a show. He could’ve swung a leg over Dean’s body and climbed off the bed the logical way, but instead he did a slow, four-limbed creep, dragging his cock all the way up Dean’s body, reaching back to squeeze at his balls and groan when they were right over Dean’s face. And Dean, bless him, all delayed response and naive determination, managed to get in a few licks at the swollen cockhead when it nudged at his lips.

Castiel groaned like it was the best fucking blowjob he’d ever had in his life. Like Dean had just swallowed the whole fucking thing down his throat in one fell swoop, and he was rewarded when Dean looked immensely gratified upon his triumphant return with the lube.

“Disappointed the carpet doesn’t match the drapes, huh?” he asked, coating his hand and reintroducing two fingers. Dean’s eyes made a couple lazy loops from his blue hair to the dark thatch of thick hair that framed his cock. When Dean got the joke, he laughed a hearty stoner laugh, and Castiel couldn’t help but laugh too, before he got right back down to business, urgent desperation driving him to open himself faster.

When two fingers brought him nothing but healthy twinges of pleasure that curled up his spine like smoke, he commandeered Dean’s hand, dousing it with lube, shaping it finger by finger like putty, to get Dean to help Castiel work himself open. Dean had big, callused fingers that couldn’t seem to rally the coordination to do much more than trace circles around his open hole, twitching around Castiel’s own fingers, wedged inside him. Castiel groaned.

“Feels good, huh?” Dean parroted his own question back at him, smiling sloppily.

“Oh, jesus.” When Dean managed to get a finger in alongside Castiel’s, a damningly unsubtle pop that went deep fast and left a burning ache around his rim, Castiel couldn’t stop the steady stream of filth from his mouth. “Yeah, Dean. Feels so good. Fuck, feel so good for me.”

He rocked himself back on his fingers, looking through the haze at Dean’s face when he laid a testing weight on Dean’s hips, a careful downward thrust. And there it was. A twitch of pain. A backslide. Dean’s finger stilling inside of him where before it’d been wriggling like a nightcrawler.

“Should I not put too much weight on your hips?”

“Hng—” Dean ground out at the edge of a strangled breath. His eyes were clearer suddenly, pain cutting through the comfortable fog. “Huh—” He slapped the hand not in Cas’s ass down on the bed and made to sit up, the muscles in his stomach jumping and tightening.

Castiel picked his weight up and ran a soothing hand up and down Dean’s belly again. He seemed to like that.

“You really fucked yourself up, huh?”

Dean exhaled shakily, lowering himself back to the bed.

“Fucked up,” he echoed enigmatically, wiggling his finger half-heartedly. Castiel bit his lip.

“Okay.” Castiel sat back on his haunches, considering. And then, more definitively. “Okay.” Honestly, this was more effort than he’d ever gone through for a fuck in ages. He wasn’t sure what possessed him to salvage this, but goddamn if he wasn’t determined to make this something-or-other with Dean work out.

He freed his own fingers and then wrangled Dean’s finger out, too. Dean wriggled his hand expectantly in the air behind him. Then, with one last parting kiss to Dean’s lips, he slung his leg over Dean’s hips until he was facing the bottom of the bed, the little galley kitchen, and his ass was—

“Oh.” Dean said, running his lube-slicked hands up and down Castiel’s thighs on either side of Dean’s torso, up to his asscheeks, pulling them wonderingly apart. Castiel took hold of Dean’s ankle on one side, and used the sans-ankle hand to reach back and resume his earlier business of fingerfucking himself open.

“This should be a easy on your hips,” Castiel panted, as Dean’s dick thwapped up happily into his bellybutton, clearly enjoying the view.

“Oh.” With a visible target, Dean was instantly more engaged, bringing his fingers into play right away, and Castiel gave him free reign, pulling away to brace himself against the bed in front of him. Castiel’s spine, which had held out quite well until now, considering the quantity of THC in his system, gave out when Dean, clumsy and uncoordinated, plunged his fingers deeper. He fell from his hands to his elbows, close enough to bite the sheets when Dean managed to bump just the right spot. And just when Castiel really started to feel the good, languid stretch that usually preceded him needing something inside him, Dean reminded him—exactly how much upper body strength he had to have to cart himself around on those crutches all day.

He wrapped his big hands around Castiel’s upper thighs and hauled back, until he was breathing down Castiel’s ass and then craning his neck to plant his tongue right where his fingers used to be.

Castiel yelped.

“Jesus Christ.”

Suddenly unbalanced, he sat back on his haunches again, doing his very best to keep his weight off Dean’s scarred everything. Dean clutched harder to his thighs, hauled him back a little further, and then Castiel was riding his face, softly rocking his hips and pumping his own cock in one hand as Dean, with real, honest enthusiasm, ate him out.

He groaned, throwing his head back and tracing the line of his own throat down to his nipples.

“Fuck, I knew I called you for a reason.”

Dean slapped his ass cheek in recognition. Licked and sucked, open-mouthed, against his hole, with the same wild abandon.

When Castiel was so hard he was leaking, he lifted his hips and crept carefully down the bed again on all fours, determinedly ignoring the sinfully fucking disappointed noise that came out of Dean’s mouth when he didn’t have his tongue in Castiel’s ass anymore.

“Cas,” Dean breathed, hands still on his hips, thumbs in the divots at the of his spine. When Castiel looked back, Dean licked his fucking lips, his face red and wet, his hair disheveled. Castiel could feel that expression pooling in his groin. He spared half a thought for kissing that dazed look off his face, but considering he’d just been eating his ass, Castiel figured a thank-you fuck would have to do.

“I need you in me now,” he said. 

“Oh. Yeah. Cool.” Dean nodded.

He settled his hips where they had been, over the top of Dean’s hips, and reached down to the end of the bed. He had no recollection of dropping the lube there, but he was just glad it hadn’t ended up on the floor, because god knew if he’d have the wherewithal to find it again. He spared half a thought for the condoms in the drawer of the bedside table and groaned again, this time in frustration.

He turned again.

“Are you clean?”

Dean blinked languidly, nodded. Castiel knew he would probably agree to anything now if it meant that he got to put his dick in something already. In fact, Castiel might as well have been speaking another language. Dean looked like he was floating, eyes practically crossed at the ceiling, apparently having expended all his higher cognitive function on getting his tongue in Castiel’s ass.

Which, to be fair. Well spent.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done some ill-advised fucking without protection, generally with people a lot more loose than Dean—what Aaron called his normal fare. And fuck it. If Castiel was riding this high straight to venereal disease then so be it.

He slicked Dean’s cock liberally, coating it while Dean strained and groaned and petted at his thighs. Then he took hold of the base, lifted his hips, got the angle just right, and sank slowly down. He was wet and open from Dean’s mouth, but he felt the stretch of the head nonetheless, right up until he popped past it and it started to get awesome. And fuck, that first pull of taking a cock bare always felt so fucking good. Especially when he was stoned, and the sensations were concentrated just there, pure feeling that spread out from his ass and his groin in concentric circles of good. Dean didn’t move to thrust up against him, did little more than quiver from his hips upward, whining from low in his throat.

He didn’t seat himself fully because he didn’t want to put weight on Dean’s hips, but it didn’t matter because the angle suited them both just fine, and the fucking devolved into the slow, stoned drag it was always destined to become. Castiel sank to his elbows, put most of his weight on his forearms, relished in the feel of the sheets in his fists and the cock in his ass and, every once in awhile, when he finally roused the urgency to realize that he wanted to come at some point, the heavy drag of his own dick in his fist.

He surprised himself wishing he could see Dean’s face, but he settled contentedly on touching every part of him he could reach, stroking reverently along his calf, against the grain of his leg hair and with it, and then more soft touches on the tender scar tissue at the base of his truncated thigh. He never let Dean’s cock leave his ass, just keeping up a languid flex of his hips that jostled the dick inside him more than anything, bumping it up against that toe-curling spot inside him whenever he got lucky, every dozen or so rotations.

Dean gamely maintained a steady stream of pornstar moans right up until he got so breathless they turned into gorgeous little whimpers, and just concentrating on those was enough to push Castiel into that heady, floaty stage of arousal. That precipice where he wasn’t going to come, but he felt full inside nonetheless, felt close to it, felt buoyed up by hot air.

“Are you—touching yourself?” Dean asked, chivalrous, a full ten minutes after that question would have started to be pertinent. He wasn’t just then. But he took his hand from where it was rubbing the knob of Dean’s ankle and replaced it on his cock, thumbing under the head with purpose. It ratcheted everything up a notch. Filled him up just that much more just because Dean had asked.

“Uh-huh,” he panted.

“Nghood,” Dean breathed. Castiel could feel him grasping the bedsheets by his knees.

“Why?” He smirked, stripped up and down his cock with more purpose. More power. He groaned. “Why—you gonna come?”

“Mmmhmmm,” he hummed. “Gonna.”

Castiel was a bit surprised he’d lasted this long after all that time without, but those turned out to be the magic words and—he did. No big production behind it. It was the chill orgasm of the thoroughly stoned, just an extra little jiggle in his hips, a spastic hand that lost track of itself and slapped Castiel on the flank, the extra splash of wetness inside him, and the hard, beautiful exhale that ended in a strangled moan high in his throat.

“Good?” Castiel asked to the end of the bed. “Do you still feel good, Dean?”

Another hum. Castiel felt hot inside.

Castiel kept right on riding him until Dean was soft enough he couldn’t anymore, the same unhurried rock of his hips back onto his cock and forward into his fist, right until Dean slipped out with a little oversensitive gasp.

“Dean,” he bit his lip, feeling the waves of his own orgasm creeping in, finally, singing soft through his blood. “Can I—”

“Mmmmm?” Dean hummed, completely boneless. Castiel could see when he looked over his shoulder that his eyes were half-crossed, glazed and trained on where he could feel a trickle of Dean’s come leaking out of him. He had a sloppy little smirk on his face and—

Fuck. Here was his fucking shot at the one thing he’d wanted to do since he’d seen Dean’s fucking dumb, beautiful face across the haze of his brother’s fucking kitchen. He debated on the merits of knee-walking all the way up the bed to come on Dean’s face, because hell, he had no doubt Dean would be okay with it. And he was going to have to wash his face before they did any post-coital anything after Dean’s impromptu rimming session anyway.

“Can I—ah—” he grabbed himself by the base of his dick, slinging a leg over Dean’s hip and beginning the awkward slink up the bed. Dean didn’t move. It seemed to take all the energy he had to just to track the movement with his eyes. But when Castiel’s cock was level with his nose and Dean licked his fucking lips and opened his goddamn mouth, that was it. It was the end. He gave up. He lost himself in one, two, three pumps, a strip on Dean’s eyebrow, up the side of his nose, on his cheek. A little splotch on his mouth that he sucked off, delicately, teeth cutting into the divot under his lip. Effortlessly one of the most sexy fucking things he’d ever seen in his life and absolutely worth the long, arduous trek up the bed.

“Fuck,” Castiel said, coaxing the last few drops out of his dick, right onto Dean’s chin. “Fuck. Sorry. I meant to—”

Dean patted his flank, closed his eyes. Smiled like an enlightened soul with splashes of come from the tip of his chin to the roots of his hair.

“Shhhh.” He breathed. “S’good.”

Castiel’s heart thu-thumped in his chest.

Castiel was a gentleman when it came to coming on people’s faces, and also about ninety percent less high than space cadet Dean, so it fell on him to make the naked journey to the bathroom to fetch a warm rag and—hell. A toothbrush. Because Dean deserved some lazy stoned makeouts but Castiel had some standards.

Back on the bed, he set the lube on the bedside table and settled cross-legged by Dean’s head. Dean turned to look at him and smiled again, not even bothered by what Castiel knew was the itchy sensation of come drying on his face. Castiel took his time unearthing his face again, smiling probably too tenderly when Dean squinched up his nose as the warm rag tracked over his unearthly-long eyelashes, his stupidly full lips. Castiel was a lot less high than Dean, but he was still high enough to get caught up in the textures of this, the rough washcloth, the uneven patches of five o’clock shadow, the soft pull of Dean’s lips as Dean squinched them into a pucker, laid a soft kiss on the fleshy pad of his thumb.

Christ.

Castiel ruined any tenderness by nearly choking him with a toothbrush. Dean chuckled and rallied the energy to run it over his teeth while Castiel cleaned his stomach and between his legs, soft over the shallow divots of the scars.

Cas took the toothbrush back out, held a water cup from the bedside table to his mouth, and commanded, “Spit.” Dean did. Then Cas was kissing him again, minty and sharp. He smiled a white-toothed smile when Castiel pulled back.

Castiel was too fucking sober for all the shit that did to him.

“You want another hit?” he deflected smoothly. Dean didn’t need another hit. Probably couldn’t find the coordination to take it anyway. But he hummed agreement.

Castiel fetched the bong from the table, filled and lit it again, and when it was clear Dean wasn’t going to muster the energy to sit up and smoke it with him, he took a long hit, held it in his lungs, and leaned down for another smoky kiss, a hard, swirling exhale that Dean pulled straight into his own lungs like a fucking champ. He closed his eyes as it leaked out of his nostrils in serene trails, calm like fogs rolling into the valleys of his bedsheets.

Castiel did it twice more, set the bong back on the table, and somehow found the comforter to pull over them both, laying down against Dean’s side.

“Do you still feel good?” he asked, settling, sticky-skinned, together, knowing he’d probably wake up sweaty and uncomfortable, but floating just high enough that this seemed like the only thing he needed—they needed—right then. Dean’s eyes were just slits of white under the heavy fall of his lashes, his face completely relaxed.

Gabriel’s voice was a faded echo, far away on the canyon walls, a distant, unhurried fugue of you know him you know him you know him.

“Yeah,” Dean whispered. “Thanks.”

It was easy to fall asleep.

He couldn’t be sure what time it was when the pounding came on his door, but he knew that A) it was either way too fucking late or way too fucking early and 2) he was still too fucking stoned for this.

While he was still trying to situate himself in time and space, mouth dry and Dean a sweaty, head-spinningly warm deadweight at his side, he heard a single bark of a yell, and that was all the warning he got before the click of a key in his lock and the metallic turning of tumblers that could only mean one guest.

Michael busted through the door looking absolutely fucking done and Castiel hadn’t even opened his mouth yet. Usually it took at least a couple minutes of conversation before Michael was ready strangle him.

But then, behind him, an even more intimidating vision surfaced through the haze of smoke. Six-foot-fucking-something of built muscle and justified rage that Castiel fog-headedly recognized as Dean’s younger brother.

Castiel croaked, “Hey,” the picture of calm insouciance, at the exact same moment the smell must’ve hit them. The pot musk met the fuck stench and layered into something he knew from experience was only appealing if you were the ones who’d made it.

“Hey?” Michael barked, pulling a face and rattling his keys. Castiel never should’ve made that copy for him. “Hey?”

Castiel spared a glance at his bedside clock and rubbed a hand over his face.

“Jesus, this couldn’t wait until morning?” he said, the words thick and molassesy coming out of his mouth. “It’s like three a.m.”

At his side, Dean snoozed on, deep under, snoring a little bit and radiating heat. Castiel brought himself up on his elbows. Tried not to look as debauched as the mess, the bong, the lube, the come rag on the floor, and the naked man in his bed must’ve made him look.

“It’s a bit hard to ignore five hundred persistent calls from your classmate who thinks your brother has kidnapped his disabled brother in an unmarked-goddamn-van, Castiel. Call me a fucking sociopath.”

Of all the things to stick with him in that sentence, Castiel got hung up on disabled. Just the way Michael said it left a bad taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with sucking dick.

Castiel nudged Dean with his elbow. Harder when he didn’t rouse, just gargled a still-stoned, deep-under hrk.

Dean was fried. Castiel had shotgunned him about three more hits than he probably should’ve. Oops. If he was a better person, he’d probably regret that more.

“Dean,” Dean’s brother barked from across the room, one long-legged stride bringing him halfway across the tiny apartment, filled now with two-too-many giant men. He picked up the bong from the bedside table. It looked small in his bear paws. Castiel tucked the comforter harder around himself, hyper-aware of the feel of the blanket on his junk. “Jesus, are you mixing this shit with his meds? Has he been drinking?”

Dean opened his eyes. Blinked slow. He was somewhere else.

“Hwah?”

“Dean. Dean.” Sam set the bong back down and came closer to the bed, snapping his fingers like he was commanding a dog. “Do you have any clue how worried I was?”

Dean blinked one eye at a time.

“Sssmmy?” he slurred.

Castiel wanted to laugh.

“Listen we weren’t exactly prepared for company. Maybe you could give us a moment to, uh—find our pants?”

Michael, waiting in the kitchen with his sleeve over his nose and all too used to finding Castiel passed out in various drug-induced stupors, snorted a dry laugh. But Dean’s brother couldn’t be less fucked to see the humor of the whole tableau. His nostrils flared.

“Did you take advantage of my brother?” 

Castiel did laugh that time, couldn’t help it. It just bubbled out of him with the memory of Dean’s tongue in his ass. But that wasn’t the right thing to do either, because Dean’s brother went to all the trouble of stamping to his side of the bed and getting up in his face, and Castiel had no doubt that if he was wearing a shirt, Sam would’ve grabbed him by it by now, hoisted him against the wall above the bed, and shook him like a fucking dog. Castiel backed himself up against the wall at the head of the bed and raised both hands in surrender, placating.

“You think this is a fucking joke? He’s high as a fucking kite! Technically he can’t even consent right now and you were—”

He circled his hands frantically, frenetically, in the air, so much ardor that his long hair flopped around on his forehead. Was it even possible to sound like more of a narc than this?

“Sam,” Dean said, prying his eyes open with visible effort beside him. They didn’t seem to want to stay open at the same time. He kept blinking one and then the other. He opened his mouth a good five times before he got out a single thick word. “Chill.”

“Dean. What—what.” Sam ran his hands through his hair, then ran his hand over his mouth, a gesture that Castiel recognized from Dean. “What the fuck were you thinking? Do you know how—you left Jess sitting at that diner not knowing what the hell to do—”

Dean tried to hoist himself up, but he was an uncoordinated tangle of sloppy limbs, and he was down one of those already anyway. Sam was back at his side in an instant, taking hold of his upper arm and trying to give him a boost. Dean made to slap him away, but Sam was strong and fast, and even though he was delicate about it, he was determined to help. The blanket in Dean’s lap came precariously close to slipping off his hips as Sam pulled, and Dean groped clumsily for the edge of the comforter to pull it up. Castiel took pity on his fumbling fingers and brought it up around Dean’s hips himself. He seemed strangely self-conscious of the scars on his torso in a way he hadn’t in front of Castiel, so Castiel settled the comforter as high as he could.

“Lay off,” Dean grumbled at Sam about a minute too late, after he had let go and Dean was sitting up against the wall. He—didn’t make too pretty a picture. Or at least, he didn’t paint too pretty a picture of Castiel’s morals and integrity. He looked stoned, fucked out, freshly scarred. Castiel felt just the slightest twinge of compunction.

Sam checked his douchey glowing wristwatch in the dim dark of the apartment.

“Where are your clothes?”

Dean sighed a put upon sigh.

“Who fucking knows.” He made a noncommittal wave at the rest of the apartment. “All over.”

The tips of Sam’s ears went pink. He pursed his lips.

“Well make an educated guess, Dean. It’s time to go home.”

Dean eyed him up and down, as skeptical as a stoned person ever got.

“No chance you’re gonna walk out that door without me, huh?”

Sam’s face solidified into stone, the first time Castiel could really conceive of this fucking nerd as being part and parcel with the tall, intimidating figure he cut. The time for argument had clearly passed. He didn’t even have to say anything.

“They’re in the fucking bathroom, Jesus,” Dean conceded. When Sam turned on his heel to go looking for them, Castiel reached over Dean for the carton of cigarettes on his nightstand, if only to have something to do with his hands. He lit one up.

“Are you supposed to smoke in here?” Michael asked from across the room, mouth still covered with his sleeve because he was a fucking baby. Like that question wasn’t so far past relevant when the tar-yellow walls told his whole fucking life story.

Cas spewed a pointed cloud of smoke in his direction.

“I dunno, Mr. Law Student. What are you gonna do? Sue me?”

Dean took the cigarette as Sam came out of the bathroom. Castiel didn’t want him to smoke it. He wanted to shotgun it straight into his lungs and rub up against him some more. And—yikes.

“Dean, I couldn’t find your underwear. Or your other—” he stopped abruptly, shutting his mouth with an audible snap.

It took Dean a second to process it, but then he cackled like the stoned asshole he was.

“How were you gonna finish that one, Sam?”

“Dean.”

“Were you seriously about to tell me you couldn’t find my other sock?”

Sam chucked the clothes across the room. They sailed smoothly into Dean’s lap.

Dean grunted at the impact and took one more self-satisfied drag on the cigarette.

“If you can’t tell me where your underwear is, Dean, you’re going home without it. I don’t give a rat’s ass either way.”

Castiel volunteered, “I took them off him at the foot of the bed.”

He winked lasciviously. Any part of Sam that wasn’t blushing before went red when he started root delicately through the heap of clothes at the foot of the bed until he unearthed a pair of boxers. When he hit paydirt, he picked them up between his thumb and forefinger to hand them to Dean.

Like a fucking narc.

“Sammy, please, tell me you don’t act this fucking delicate when you and Jess fuck.”

Sam turned around, tense, back to Dean. The very picture of I’m-not-looking-at-you-right-now.

“Put them on.”

“Alright, little brother, play the virgin, but I know you do. The walls ain’t that thick. And I got a lot of sleepless nights in me.”

“Put them on, Dean.”

Dean took his time about it. He passed the cigarette back and flung the comforter off his lap without ceremony. Castiel wasn’t shy about ogling him as he scooted his way to the edge of the bed, slipped his foot through one leg of his boxers and then used his hands to maneuver in the stump. He did a few practiced hip shimmies to seat them loosely over his hips. And then he was out of breath. While he recovered, shirt strung limply between his palms in his lap, Castiel finger-walked his way up Dean’s vertebrae, one by one by one, until he reached his shoulder blades, where he felt his overtaxed lungs working. As his breathing settled, Castiel felt a wave of aggressive affection take hold of him, and he leaned across the bed, comforter slipping down past his hips, to lay a kiss at the base of his spine, just above the elastic of his boxers.

Across the room, Michael cleared his throat.

Castiel pulled back, pulled up the comforter to his chest, and glared bloody daggers at his brother as Dean hurried to put his shirt on—inside-out first, then backwards when he hastened to try again, and then the third time he managed to squeeze his head most of the way into a sleeve, until a tuft of brown hair breached the cuff at the end. He finally managed it on the fourth attempt, but he still got his wrist caught and flapped like a chicken wing when he put his arm through the sleeve elbow-first. He was still fucking high, alright.

“Hey, champ,” Cas rasped at Sam’s back. When Sam didn’t so much as twitch, Castiel whistled shrilly, grinning when Sam bristled, annoyance visibly coursing through him like a vibration through a plucked string.

He turned, lip curled in disgust.

“You don’t want an eyeful, you wanna hand me those blue jeans?” Castiel grinned. “The ones your brother’s boxers were camped out under.”

Castiel had to admit that most of the joy of asking Sam to do it was the half annoyed, half disgusted cast his face took on as he rooted through the illicit pile again. When Sam turned around to hand them to Cas, Dean was still staring at the pants in his lap in resigned consternation, but his shirt was on all the way.

“Dean?” Sam said, gentler. “Hey. You need help?” Dean didn’t say anything. Sam reached for his shoulder. “Do you need help getting your pants on?”

Dean shrugged him off. Sam persisted, more forceful this time.

“If you hurt too much—”

“Leave it.”

“Remember what Dr. Anand said? All...all this, tonight, was probably just too much strain on your hip like we were trying to avoid. Here.”

He went for the shoulder again, and this time, Dean slapped him off, swiping two or three times at the air before he managed to a chop at Sam’s wrist with the side of his palm.

Sam recoiled, holding his wrist to his chest.

“Ow,” He said, pointedly.

“Lay the fuck off. I don’t need your help putting my fucking pants on.”

“It wouldn’t be the first—”

Dean looked about ready to launch himself off the bed and wring his brother’s neck.

“Hand me my fucking crutches.”

“No. Just let me—”

“Sam.”

“Dean.”

There was a certain powerlessness, a desperation in Dean that he’d seen from the moment he met him. Maybe it was in having to rely on someone else when every part of you was screaming against it. He got that. And there was a certain douchebaggery in withholding someone’s ability to even get away from you when they had no other fucking options. He got that, too.

Despite what he’d said about not giving people an eyeful, Castiel didn’t hesitate to hoist his naked ass from the cover of the sheets and collect the forearm crutches from where they lay at the foot of the bed. Sam smacked his hand over his eyes like he was twelve years old when Cas flapped his way over, and Michael let out a mighty choking gag across the room. Dean’s hands trembled as he took them, his eyes foggy and more grateful for the effort than Castiel deserved.

It was an arduous process for Dean to wiggle into his pants from there, and Castiel almost felt bad about how easily, how fluidly, he was able to pull his own pants over his hips after Dean spent a good couple minutes huffing and grunting and wriggling and wordlessly using Castiel’s shoulder to balance himself. But at the end of it, he was standing on his own, fully dressed, a little disheveled and definitely still stoned, but it meant something to be standing under his own power, clearly.

“Let’s fucking go,” he barked at his brother, like leaving was his idea all along.

Sam looked at his douchey watch again and nodded breathlessly. Dean navigated the apartment with more confidence and Sam trailed behind him, looking like a little brother for the first time since Castiel had met him, head ducked down, instinctively, through the unfamiliar low ceilings of his shitty apartment. Dean looked back at him, one time, right on the threshold, expression inscrutable. When they slammed out the door and banged down the stairs, Castiel could hear the arguing restart. His landlord was still going to murder him. He felt a ghost of a smile twitch up the corners of his lips.

And then he noticed his fucking brother leaning against the kitchen counter.

“Oh,” he said idly, toying with the open fly on his jeans. “You’re still here.”

“You’re still here?” Michael echoed, oozing condescension. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Castiel?”

He was going to need to be more stoned to deal with this. He walked to his bedside table to pick up his bong.

Before he could even track the movement, though, Michael was across the room, grabbing it from his hands. He hoisted it above his head dramatically, like he was going to shatter it on the kitchen linoleum. Castiel couldn’t stop himself from jolting toward him, hands held defensive in the air. Mostly because, hey, that shit was expensive. It wasn’t like he didn’t have other smokeables on hand.

Michael didn’t throw it, though. It just figured he wouldn’t have the guts.

“No. No. I don’t think I’ve talked to you while you were sober since you came back from overseas, Castiel, for god’s sake.” Castiel narrowed his eyes.

“I was sober last Christmas,” he opined thoughtfully. It wasn’t exactly true. Last Christmas he was just drunk, though. Not even a little bit crossfaded. Mostly because he forgot his weed before the drive up to his parents’.

Probably because he was stoned when he packed.

“Fuck, Castiel, listen to yourself.”

Castiel was listening, though. And he knew exactly what he sounded like. And he was hyperaware of his barely contained desperation for the pre-rolled joints he had in his bedside drawer next to all his buttplugs, the edibles he had in his refrigerator, the prescription shit he had had in his medicine cabinet. He weighed the pros and cons of opening any one of those cans of worms in front of his brother, not sure he was ready to expose just how many substances he had floating around his four hundred square feet.

“Well,” he mumbled. “You haven’t exactly tried to talk to me, you know.” He sat heavily on the foot of the bed to curb the temptations, which was probably a mistake, because then his brother loomed over him, a tower of sanctimonious fury. Slowly, Michael lowered the bong from where it was hoisted above his head and rolled it in his palms, inspecting the curves of it like one might inspect a loaded gun. When he tipped it to the side, he sloshed bong water all over Castiel’s shitty carpet and jumped back from the splash like it was acidic.

Castiel looked down. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. If he wasn’t allowed to get stoned, he wanted to light up another cigarette, but his brother probably wouldn’t take too kindly to that either, and he’d just smoked one and didn’t necessarily want so much nicotine in his system he got nauseated. He’d been down that road before.

When he looked up from his fidgeting fingers, Gabriel was leaning against the kitchen counter, just where Michael had been before. In the low light from the window, Castiel could only see the sickly side of his face, the sinews outlined in lurid, bloody brushstrokes. He gave a finger-wiggling wave.

“Classic Michael,” Gabriel tutted. “Just like ma n’ pa raised him. Only wants to deal with the problem when you start making him look bad in front’a his besties.”

Castiel chuckled darkly.

“What’s so funny, Castiel? Huh?” Michael prodded. “What’s so fucking funny about this?”

“Nothing.” He said, distant, watching Gabriel mock I-Mean-Business Michael across the room, a tableau straight out of his memories. Something Gabriel did to make him laugh every time shit got too serious at their house. When Lucifer was having another knock-down-drag-out fight with Dad, and Mom was downing another bottle of wine in the kitchen, and Michael was lecturing him about finishing his fucking homework—there was Gabriel. Nose in the air and unruly hair slicked back, jabbing his finger dramatically in the air right behind his brother’s back while Michael carried on.

Michael shifted into his line of sight until Castiel looked up at his face. When he shifted back, Gabriel was gone.

“Damn right nothing, Castiel. There’s nothing fucking funny about this.” He took a few careful strides to the kitchen counter to put down the bong out of Castiel’s reach. When he came back to tower over him, his arms were crossed and he had dirty bong water splashed all up his front. “You’ve pulled a lot of stupid shit, but you really went too far this time. Sam Winchester would have every right to call the authorities on you, you know.”

Gabriel was back. By the window now, looking out on the empty businesses below.

“The auth-or-i-tays.” Gabriel mocked softly, ambiguously accented, full of mirth.

“Why? Is screwing someone’s brother a crime, now?”

Gabriel laughed. Another noise straight out of his memories that blew in one ear and out the other like a ghostly wind. He wasn’t standing by the window anymore.

“Castiel.” Michael ran his hands over his face, a man on a precipice. He sighed out his self-righteousness and took a seat next to him at the foot of his fuck-mussed bed. “Dean. Sam’s brother. Sam told me that—”

“What?” Castiel snarked. “That Dean’s not mentally capable? He’s too fucked up to take care of himself? Huh? What?”

“He spent seventy-two hours at the VA hospital last week on a psych hold. Dean did.”

The wind of fury that was blowing his sails open went abruptly flat.

“Oh.”

Castiel rolled his shoulders, feeling the absence of his shirt all of a sudden. Feeling the cold. He was too naked to have this conversation. He spotted his shirt in the pile on the floor and bent down to pick it up, popping the button on his jeans closed while he was at it, smelling the armpits of the shirt instinctively.

He knew. Just from the phrasing, he knew what that meant. But he had to ask anyway.

“Why did—I mean. What—?”

“Suicidal ideation. He’s suicidal, Castiel.” Michael rubbed at the stiffness in his his neck. “I mean. They—he didn’t try or anything, not as far as I know. I don’t know all the details but. But. Sam was afraid he might kill himself.” He pushed the hand on his neck up through his hair. It was maybe the most mussed Castiel had ever seen him, which wasn’t saying all that much. Three a.m., stressed as hell, and just a few hairs out of place. Castiel wondered if he had class tomorrow. He wondered what day it even was. Wondered if he had a shift at the fucking Starbucks tomorrow.

“Do you remember when I died?” Gabriel said. He sat at Castiel’s other side, sudden, straight-backed. His fidgeting hands were a gruesome, bloody mirror to Michael’s doing the same. It was posed innocuously enough, an innocent question. “Hey.” Gabriel went to jab him with his bony elbow. It didn’t land—probably because Gabriel wasn’t real. “Do you remember when I died?”

Castiel nodded. Not sure which brother he was nodding to.

“He was—frantic, when he called me. He was beside himself. He thought Dean had—jumped off a bridge or something.” Michael nudged him from the other side, and that one did land. Rocked him a little to the left, straight into the space where Gabriel was. Wasn’t.

“We were responding in an area with live fire, and some shit went down before we got there. But a second IED went off—right after we got off the medevac copter,” Gabriel intoned lightly. Castiel nodded. “I was the first off and—I was dead already, I think. Or I was on my way there real quick by the time you got off too. Either way, you were smart enough to know there wasn’t any hope for me, I think. But you were—you were working on me still, anyway. Just throwing all your lil’ heart into trying to help your big bro out.” Gabriel exhaled. A sigh, a gentle mist of blood. This was where Gabriel, the real Gabriel, would probably thank him. Gabriel was an asshole, but he was all about the life-affirming garbage. But this was in Castiel’s head, and he didn’t figure he deserved that at all, because it very clearly hadn’t worked.

Castiel wanted a cigarette. He wanted the bong that Michael had put on the kitchen counter. Everything felt far too close.

Michael said, “And, well. All that just got me to thinking about you. You know? And that—I couldn’t. I mean. With—with Gabriel—”

Castiel sprang off the bed. It was probably the first time he’d heard any member of his immediate family say Gabriel’s name since he had saluted a flag-covered casket as it squeaked inelegantly down the gentle slope of a 747’s luggage conveyor.

He turned around and came face to face with his two brothers. One of them lost in time, never feeling the pull of years even as Michael and Castiel and Luke all aged without him. They were all grown and different and hollowed-out. Gabriel, though, Gabriel was only half there on the best days, and he might as well have been more whole than any of them.

“You only stopped because there were other people still alive. Do you remember?” He did remember. Distinctly, definitively. Which was saying something, because in the heat of the moment, all battlefields started to look the same, and he’d seen a lot of them. Just blood, dust, sand, and body parts layered like a fucking gruesome lasagna. “And there was one guy. You got to him first. He got a bunch of shell fragments to the gut. He was bleeding out. You could barely hear him over the chopper blades, could barely see him through the smoke, but.”

Already on edge from a relapse earlier with Dean and from the brutal sobriety of however-many hours gone he was, the words sent him back there, pop-snap-quick like whiplash, and his two brothers were suddenly sitting on a white island in the middle of a war zone.

The mess didn’t touch them; Castiel’s messy sheets looked pristine and snowy compared to the landscape. When Castiel looked at his own hands, though, they were covered in blood, and his brother was on the ground between his legs, too. A reflex, a phantom muscle impulse, had Castiel trying helplessly to pump a bloodless heart back to beating at the same time Gabriel sat there on the bed, uniformed, two-faced, torn apart.

And then he saw—

“Who was it?” Gabriel drawled mildly, tapping a skeletal finger on his chin, inquisitive. “Who was it?”

And then he saw Dean.

It was Dean. Wasn’t it?

Writhing, hurt. Mouth open, but who knew if he was screaming or if the scream was silent, because the gunfire and explosions and the hard slice of the chopper blades through the air drowned everything out.

“I know you think I don’t care. But I don’t want to lose another brother,” Michael said.

Michael’s words cut through the noise clear as anything, like someone adjusted the audio levels on his waking nightmare. They felt more real than everything else, and he clung to them as his phantom body dragged itself off Gabriel’s corpse with little more than a final stroke to Gabriel’s cooling forehead, and he was at Dean’s side, applying pressure to gaping wound at his side, until it was suddenly healed to his eyes, just the spindly creep of horrible scarring as Dean panted in pleasure below him.

He blinked, and.

Back. The only evidence of his fading nightmare was the hand he had stretched out to Gabriel in that last moment when he left him to save someone else. When he abandoned him like some half-cooked piece of meat someone dropped in the mud. Michael took his hand instead. The one that was meant for Gabriel. He was warm. He was close. Castiel forgot to pull away.

“I kept telling you,” Gabriel said, steam and smoke rising off him like he’d switched places with the Gabriel in his flashback, and the bomb had just hit, and he was boiling in his own blood. “I kept telling you he looked familiar.”

In hindsight, it was fucking obvious. This serendipitous bullshit that followed him around.

The revelation left him feeling—blank. He reached, mind swirling and face slack, for some recollection of Dean’s leg being gone, too, but all he could remember was the pump of too-hot blood slipping between his fingers as he gasped like a fish out of water. Hefting him into the open door of the medevac copter that took him away from his brother’s body. How light he felt in his hands. How similar and different the shape of him had been in bed earlier. He almost wouldn’t have recognized him were it not for a certain conflation he couldn’t help pulling to mind—pleasure juxtaposing grotesquely with pain, an almost identical grimace whether it was come or blood on his face. Castiel reached down, clenched his own gut, a gruesome echo. He hadn’t been with him for long. Triage. A fifteen-minute copter ride. He got to hand him back to someone else and freak out on his own right after.

It was enough.

“I know you—miss him. I do too,” Michael said, soft. He sounded like their father when he spoke like that. Like emotions were something he studied rather than felt for himself.

It was a funny thing to say when Gabriel was right next to him, throwing off steam and smiling enough to show off every single bone-white tooth inside the wrecked half of his face.

I don’t though, Castiel wanted to say. I don’t miss him because he’s still here with me. He’s right next to you.  

“But I want you here, Castiel.”

“I am here,” Castiel said, voice a faded and contrary distance outside himself.

“Are you really?” Michael said. There was an early-morning earnestness in Michael, the echo of a muffling quiet that couldn’t tell your secrets all around him. Castiel had only ever heard him talking like that when they were much younger, a different time, in the dead of night, camping in the summer with the sounds of quiet buffeting around them. Crickets, a stream, leaves in the wind. The kind of quiet that bred camaraderie. Confidence. Even in people who had nothing else in common. “Sometimes you feel very far away.”

That was a funny thing to hear from someone who was holding your hand. Castiel let the hold drop between them.

“Maybe you were never close to begin with,” Gabriel insisted from Michael’s side.

“Maybe we were never close to begin with,” Castiel repeated.

“Well,” Michael said, testing the words slowly on his tongue. “Maybe we should be now.”

Gabriel laughed. Castiel couldn’t stop himself rolling his eyes.

“Puh-lease,” he said, borrowing the inflection from Gabriel. “You suddenly want to be my friend? You’ve done nothing but treat me like a pain-in-the-ass little brother your whole life. I’ve never been more than an—” he searched for a word to wrap his tongue around, something that felt right. Because Michael—Michael and Luke both—they weren’t bad brothers. But they were so wrapped up in their own shit, and Castiel was just an—an— “Obligation. Never.”

It never mattered before Gabriel died. Michael and Lucifer had their own show and Castiel and Gabriel had theirs. Two independent thirty-minute time slots.

Michael had stood up at some point and he hovered behind him. He was taller than Castiel, more built too. The years out of the military hadn’t done Castiel any favors. And they looked almost comically different, like they couldn’t even come from the same world, much less the same bloodline. Castiel had taken a hard right into body modification around the same time he dove headfirst into substance abuse and never looked back.

“If that’s how you want to see me, fine,” he said. “But I do care, whether you think so or not, and things obviously aren’t how they were before. Something has to change. Maybe you could see someone.”

Gabriel went suspiciously quiet behind his back, same way he did anytime anyone suggested that. Less frequently now that Castiel had done his very best to fall off a lot of radars. Gabriel probably knew that he was one good shrink away from dying all over again. Gabriel must’ve known, because Castiel sure as hell did. And as much as he sought the right drugs and the right company to get Gabriel to leave him alone long enough to eat and to sleep and to have some quiet every once in awhile, the prospect of him being gone forever was just as terrifying as the prospect of him being there all the time.

He couldn’t kill him again. He’d already let him die the first time.

“I’m tired,” he said robotically. “I need to sleep now.”

Gabriel was in front of him again. In the kitchen, holding a paring knife from the drying rack by his sink. He was plucking at the skin on his good hand with the paring knife held in his bad one, peeling it back layer by layer until the flesh hand was just bloody bone, too.

“He thinks you’ll be better off without me,” Gabriel said casually, another flick of his wrist curling away his skin like a potato peel.

Michael couldn’t see what his eyes were fixed on through the haze of the dark. “Castiel, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Sam and Dean Winchester, it’s that I shouldn’t just leave you to your own devices, here. I’m worried about what you’ll do,” he said.

“No,” Castiel said, pained.

“No?” Michael said.

“He does,” Gabriel said, flexing the newly bared bone, testing the bloody power in his squeeze. “He thinks you’re better off with me dead.” Gabriel punctuated the hard d in dead by breaking off the bone of his newly bared index finger at the first knuckle. It snapped like a fucking carrot stick.

Castiel considered, quiet for a moment.

“I’m not going to kill myself, you know.” The idea itself tasted awful coming off his tongue. A bitter thing that other people did. “So you can stop fucking worrying your pretty little head about it.”

Gabriel and Michael never looked much alike, not like Michael and Luke did, but everyone in the family got the same expressions. The same smiles and hang-dog frowns, whenever you could wrangle them out of everybody at the same time, you could see. There were just a few rare photographs where the family resemblance shone through. Gabriel and Castiel with the same manic grin under the Christmas tree. Luke and Gabriel with matching furrowed brows in the sunshine. And maybe it was projection, but even mangled and half-formed, Gabriel still managed to have the same look on his face as Michael as they both stood by the door, side-by-side. His brothers.

“Castiel, forgive me for saying so, but there are worse things you can do to yourself than—than all that.”

Gabriel shrugged a pained shrug, paring knife still dangling from bloody fingertips, like even in death, it hurt him to agree with their stuffed-shirt older brother, but he did regardless.

And when Michael went out the door, probably satisfied at having the last word, he left him absolutely stone-cold-fucking sober.

By the time the sun had come up and blazed low in the sky for a good few hours, Castiel had spent longer both sober and conscious than he had in probably a good year. Gabriel meandered his way quietly around the apartment in the early-morning slant of light through the blinds, unobtrusively making himself known. Blowing on dust bunnies. Flexing into a bathroom mirror empty of any reflection. Castiel laid on his bed. Tried not to think. Thought too much.

In the middle of juggling Castiel’s dirty socks, Gabriel snapped his fingers like he’d just remembered something. He let the socks drop. They disappeared before they hit the ground.

“Hey,” he said pensively. Castiel hummed in acknowledgement, too tired to pretend he wasn’t fucking insane.

“They gave me a sweet medal for dying, huh?”

Castiel cleared his throat, heart at the base of his throat suddenly.

“Yes,” he said.

“And they gave you an award for it too, didn’t they? For killing me?”

The words zinged straight to his chest, a lightning bolt of pain that lanced straight through his heart. Fast where the rest of his life was slow, now.

Castiel hated talking about his goddamn award. Everyone fucking knew it. His whole goddamn family knew it. The last time they’d tried to talk about it, he’d thrown it in a water trap. So they tended to not do that anymore. And, well, technically this wasn’t his family bringing it up again. This was Castiel bringing it up with himself. He tried not to think awful thoughts in Gabriel’s voice, but the very worst things he thought about himself tended to come out that way.

“In so many words.” He swallowed around a dry mouth. “Yes.”

“Hey!” Gabriel snapped his fingers, more of a wet schluk now. They hadn’t recovered from the paring knife. He was falling apart from both ends. “Hey, that means you killed me to save Dean, huh? And you got a medal for it?”

“Well.” He furrowed his brow. “That’s not exactly—”  

He helped more people that day. Possibly a lot of people, objectively speaking, if his waterlogged Distinguished Service Cross was any indication. If someone asked him today, he couldn’t tell them how many. It seemed unimportant, given the scale of things. Dean was the first, though, he was almost certain of that. And the clearest too, because he’d seen him just this morning. His face stood out as the only point of focus in a blurry nightmare, a sharp-edged dock in the sea of hazy chaos.

“Fair?” Gabriel asked. “Were you gonna say it’s not fair?”

Castiel stared at the ceiling, lips pursed.

“‘Cause I gotta say, broski. I don’t exactly think it’s fair that I ended up dead. Do you?”

He paused. Considered how this would sound out loud, how it needed to be said.

“I wish you hadn’t,” he said carefully to the open air, throat feeling clogged, heart beating too fast. Normally this sort of hyperawareness was supposed to come along with being stoned. For Castiel, it was the opposite. All the anxiety and heart-pounding and dry mouth came with sobriety, because Michael wasn’t wrong. He’d managed to fuck his body over good.

“I’m sure you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said irritably, squinting at the translucent webbing of his fingers through the early morning light beaming in the window. He could see the veins snaking along under his bright-white skin and jesus, maybe he should go outside every once in awhile. He remembered having a tan, once. He remembered being a toasty golden brown; he remembered the perpetual pain on the bridge of his nose from the ever-present sunburn the desert brought with it.

“Well.” Gabriel said. “You did just have his dick up your ass. You don’t seem very contrite.”

“Contrite.” He squinted harder.

“Sorry. You don’t seem real fuckin’ sorry, broheim.”

Another pause.

“So what do you—what do you want me to do? To be sorry?” Castiel said into the empty air above his head, very. Very. Even. “Am I supposed to hate him?”

Gabriel didn’t answer. Castiel rolled over and peeked toward the kitchen. He expected Gabriel would be gone when he looked up, but he was still there. Wavery like a mirage. Intense. The blood on him dried dark for once, scabbed over instead of free flowing. He looked deathly pale, too. Like the life had finally drained out of him, like the sand had finally leached it all away.

Gabriel shrugged. “What do you think?”

What did Castiel think?

Castiel thought—Castiel knew now there was a piece of him that had been trying to hate Dean since he’d met him, and maybe that piece was Gabriel, in the back of his head, urging him not to get too close. He’d shoved Dean in the back of his drug dealer’s van earlier. He’d jerked him around. Gotten him way too fucking tanked. Watched him vomit out the side door with maybe a bit too much satisfaction. Deprived him of his painkillers.

But he’d also—rode his cock until he came and spooned with him all night and reveled in taking away his pain and making him him come.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well. Maybe you should figure it out.”

Maybe he should.

He sat up dizzily in bed and thought, maybe I hate Dean. After all, the alternative seemed to be hating himself even more than he already did, and he’d sworn to his brother that he wasn’t going to kill himself.

He held strong to that conviction for all of five minutes before he had to take a piss. It all fell apart pretty quickly when he went into the bathroom and tripped over a fucking leg. He had to do a doubletake, a triple take, but it was still there, edging out from underneath his ripped shower liner. A set of artificial toes that Sam, in all his self-righteous fervor, had managed to overlook.

Talk about a Cinderella story for a modern era. Except Castiel wasn’t some idiot prince, and he knew exactly who he’d fucked last night. And in hindsight, if Cinderella had lost her prosthetic leg instead of a glass slipper, that would have narrowed the Prince’s dating pool considerably. And it probably would have made it easier to stop her getting away in the first place.

He picked it up and sat on the edge of his bathtub for a while, just looking at it, trying to bring that hate to the surface but feeling only a swell of fondness for a man that could manage to misplace an entire limb. He held the breadth of the leg in his palms, moving the fake joints and testing the bounce to them. The artificial curve of the foot, the sturdy rod in place of a calf. He studied the shape of the socket, an exact inverse to the stump of a leg he’d laid his lips on just last night.

And in that moment—hating Dean seemed unfair, especially after the universe had gone to all the trouble of bringing them together, time and time again. And indeed, just then, it had dropped another opportunity in his lap. Because maybe he needed to see Dean again to figure out whatever he needed to.

He didn’t go door to door looking for any hot guy missing a limb like the Cinderella prince, either. He called Luke for Sam’s address, praying that Luke hadn’t had a chance to talk to Michael this morning and he wouldn’t interrogate Castiel about his motives. He hadn’t, and he didn’t. Michael was asleep. Turned out it was Saturday now, and Michael hadn’t made such a great sacrifice in staying up until buttfuck o’clock with him. Luke pointed out that he could’ve just as easily asked for Sam’s phone number so Sam could pick it up with his car in a fraction of the time, and Castiel very pointedly did not object that that would defeat the purpose of everything, and then he’d have no limb and no reason and no Dean.

He got dressed in silence, but he was aware of Gabriel hovering behind him the entire time. He didn’t speak up until Castiel was standing at the threshold of his apartment.

“You going to see him again?” Gabriel said, brows furrowed in concern, bleeding in ten trickling trails from ten broken fingertips. “Do you hate me that much?”

Castiel took a deep breath and looked hard at his bong.

He figured that maybe Michael thought his little ten-minute intervention would end in Cas putting down his substance-crutches and never touching them again, but that wasn’t the way shit worked. He told himself that he would smoke just enough to carry him through the bus ride in a quiet THC bubble, and he’d be sober by the time he had to talk to Dean.

So naturally, he smoked so much that he was floating and seeing double the whole first leg of the journey. He smoked so much he missed his first stop and had to double back a half a mile to catch his connection.

The weed didn’t necessarily have the effect Castiel wanted. Which is to say, this time, for the first time in a long while, it didn’t stop Gabriel.

He fritzed in and out of existence like bad TV static, in various states of disarray, intactness, and friendliness. He was getting meaner—snake-mean, whiplash quick and venomous and barbed in a way he never had been in life.

Castiel tried to concentrate on the night before instead, to think about Dean, and how ridiculous Dean was, and about Dean’s scars, and about putting his mouth all over Dean’s scars. He determinedly routed them out in his memory, tracing them like he traced the rivers and roads and topography of the landscapes in Afghanistan on his frayed and torn military-issue map before he swooped in, grace from above.

He remembered traversing the landscape with his tongue. He remembered flying above the highs and lows of desert dunes. He remembered the peaks and valleys of brutal scar tissue in various states of healing.

He remembered sucking Dean’s cock. That was nice. It was hard to imagine hating someone with a cock that nice.

He shifted, both his arms wrapped around the leg like a security blanket as he subtly adjusted himself, trying valiantly to keep from nudging the man next to him. He apparently did a very bad job of it.

He was sitting next to an older guy, white-haired and dark-skinned and soft-spoken. He’d heard him talking to some kids across the way when he first got on the bus, but it was the man’s first time turning attention to Castiel. Maybe the first time he’d noticed him, what with all the boner-killing he was trying to do.

“That’s a funny thing to be carrying out in the open on a public bus, son.” He nodded his head toward where the foot was peeking over his shoulder. He was friendly, but it sounded accusatory to Castiel’s ears. He wrapped his arms around it a little harder. When Castiel didn’t answer right away, he said, “I only say so because—I figure most of the time, you’d be using something like that if you had it.”

“Not mine,” Castiel grunted.

The man laughed. He sounded like some wise old fucking stereotype, all deep, holier-than-thou chuckles.

“Well that’s even more concerning.”

Castiel felt his brow dip.

“My—friend left it at my apartment.”

The man smacked a palm to his temple, smiling.

“This story gets more mystifying the more you tell it,” he said, chuckling.

Castiel blinked, tilted his head, squinted. Not sure how he could be more clear.

“I s’pose I’m just wondering how a fella wanders off without his leg.” The man chuckled again. “He got a spare?”

“Oh,” Castiel said mildly, furrowing his brow harder, trying not to let on how much it actually concerned him that something so obvious had escaped him with a desperate clearing of his already-clear throat. “Oh, uh. No. He—still uses crutches a lot. It hurts him. It’s still sensitive, I guess.” He shrugged.

The man nodded sympathetically and gave him a brief pat on the shoulder that made Castiel bristle like a cat.

“So it happened just recently then?”

“It—” Castiel’s already slow-moving brain sputtered to a dead stop. Realizing again something it already knew.

His final tour had ended shortly after his brother died. Two years ago, give or take. And if that was when Dean had gotten half his fucking bowel torn up on a muddy battlefield, but he’d lost his leg a mere few months ago, like this old guy said, like he knew must be true—

The mental math came slow, sluggish, from the back of a drug-addled brain, but he muddled through, and, stoned and staring at the prosthetic leg in his lap in the middle of his crowded bus, Castiel had a revelation that literally anyone who hadn’t been stoned for the last two years would’ve had about twelve hours ago.

“Oh,” he breathed.

“There it is, little brother,” Gabriel said, surfacing staticky and half-formed next to him. He held one of the stabilizing loops that hung from the ceiling rails on the bus with one skeletal hand. “It took you long enough, but you got there.”

In his absence, it looked like Gabriel had lost even more flesh from his good forearm. There was so much shocking white bone showing through that it almost matched its crispy twin on Gabriel’s other side.

“He did another tour,” Castiel mumbled.

“Good boy.”

“Excuse me?” the old man said, cupping his palm around his ear. “I didn’t quite—”

Castiel reached up and tugged the cord to request a stop. He had no clue where he even was.

“After—” he mumbled urgently. “He did another tour after.”

Turned out he got off five stops early, and turned out he looked like even more of a nutcase tromping down the street with a leg in his arms and mumbling under his breath.

Half of him was just angry with himself for not even thinking. For not even listening. Dean had said he was fresh off the battlefield, hadn’t he? And he hadn’t even been joking. He’d just been to the doctor. He was still on pain medicine. He had stratified scars and a blistered stump. Castiel could barely count the number of times he’d strained, trying to remember the moment that he’d done triage on Dean’s leg on the battlefield, chalked his shitty memory up to stress, but of course he fucking hadn’t. He’d only just lost his leg. He’d been gutted two goddamn years ago.

So the other half of him was trying to hate Dean again and succeeding more than it had before.

Which seemed to be exactly what Gabriel wanted.

“Let it all out, little brother,” Gabriel said, peeling away the skin at his ribcage as he trotted down the city street behind him. “You get what he did, don’t you?”

He could barely see straight, could barely remember the last leg of the journey through the wild up-down tumult of his own overactive emotions, and before he knew it, he was—

He was at Dean’s door.

He was pounding on Dean’s door.

He was pounding on Dean’s door, Gabriel cackling distantly behind him, and the moment it opened, he said—

“You did another tour.” And he thrust his loose fist forward in an aborted, uncoordinated, accusatory jab.

The same part of his addled brain that hadn’t figured out this dumb detail until now also didn’t manage to figure out that maybe Dean wouldn’t open the door. Sam caught his hand in his own big, meaty fist, completely unflappable. His fingers were so long that the tips reached Castiel’s wrist while his knuckles were still cradled soundly in the fleshy curve of Sam’s palm.

“I need to speak with your brother,” he said when he was able to discern what had just happened, eyes fixed on his fingers twitching in Sam’s massive paw.

The anger fell out of him with the shock of the impact. He tried to rally it again, but he could only concentrate on the sensation of warmth seeping into his skin.

“Is this what you call ‘speaking’?” The palm around his fist tightened momentarily, and then he foisted Cas’s hand back, away from himself, propelling him half a step backwards with the pressure. It set him off balance, and Castiel took the step back so quick his heel almost slipped off the top step. The stairs were narrow and perilously steep. Windmilling his arms to get himself back in equilibrium, he spared half a thought for how Dean had managed them at his very worst.

At the thought, the anger fell away harder, thick sloughs like a shattering glacier. Gabriel dissipated behind his shoulder.

“You—uh. Crap. Mike told me your name—” Sam snapped his fingers, trying to recall.

“Castiel.”

“Right.” Sam wrinkled his nose. “Castiel.” Castiel looked him over. He was in a white sleep shirt and thin sleep pants, and he had deep shadows under his eyes. The late-night, no-sleep look really wasn’t working for him. “Right. Okay. I see you brought Dean’s—” he gestured the prosthetic, not willing to put a name to it. “I. Didn’t realize Dean was wearing it when he left the house yesterday afternoon. Dean didn’t say—” He shrugged. “But I guess I shoulda known. That was nice of you to bring that back.” Sam acknowledged grudgingly. “I’ll just.” He held out his hand and made an aborted grab, and Castiel nearly pitched himself off the step again moving out of his over-long reach.

“I need to speak with your brother,” he said.

Sam scrutinized him right back. In the very few times he’d met Sam Winchester, he’d already seen many distinct facets of his personality. And here was another, a step past the surface-level anger and the neanderthal brow and the douchey glowing watch. This was the intellectual—the law student. Maybe an echo of what Castiel might’ve been, if he was sitting in a classroom eight hours a day instead of doing shifts between a drug den and a Starbucks.

“What the hell is your deal?” he said. “Because I genuinely can’t figure it out, man. You or Dean.”

“I need to speak with your brother.”

“Yeah, okay Mr. Broken Record.” He leaned forward, took hard sniff of the air around Castiel and pulled back hard with one eye squinched. “You smell like a dispensary.” He took another whiff. “A dispensary that someone planted next to a brothel.” He peeked his head back out the door to peer up and down the street. “Come in then. Dean’s still asleep. I think. Who knows anymore. I’m sure not waking him up if he actually is for once.”

Sam led Castiel into a cramped, narrow old townhouse while Castiel kept his insurance policy clutched to his chest. They passed by a thin, steep staircase and into a living room, strewn with textbooks and notepads and used mugs and blankets. There was a dead plant on the top of an overflowing bookshelf, a dusty TV shoved into the corner, and an empty fireplace with a big black crosshatched grate in front of it. He got a brief glance at the mantle before they passed through an open doorway.

“Tea?” Sam said, when they reached a well-loved little kitchen, herbs growing on the windowsill, teapot on the stove, a sheaf of papers from a doctor’s office on the table, and a medication regimen schedule hung on the fridge with a Smurfs magnet. The last two looked out of place among the rest of it, sterile and clean in the way nothing else was, but also two of the only things he could visibly identify as Dean’s.

“Uh,” Castiel said, mouth hanging open, completely unable to parse whatever he’d just said.

“Tea?” Sam repeated pointedly, lifting the empty kettle off the hob for emphasis.

“Oh,” he said. “Sure.”

Castiel sat down in one of two wicker chairs at a tiny dining room table. There was hardly room to pull out the chair between the formica-topped table and the oversized china cabinet next to it. He made himself smaller, kept his arms wrapped around the leg.

“What did you mean by what you said at the door?” Sam asked lightly.

Something flared up at the base of his throat. Half anger, half shame. Gabriel flitted in and out of his periphery. He had no clue how to talk about it. The significance of this. The disrespect. It was a half-formed thought in his mind. A series of exclamation points tinged red.

So he said, “He did another tour,” sheepishly, no clarification.

Sam hummed, but seemed to know that was all Cas had to say on the matter. Or maybe he just trusted that Cas was too stoned to know what he was saying. Either way, he didn’t probe further.

Sam went silent then as he measured loose leaf tea into two mesh metal infusers, and he was silent as he poured water into the kettle and put it on the stove. Castiel could feel his eyes glazing over as he watched Sam’s muscles bunch and release through the back of his thin T-shirt while he worked.

Sam didn’t face him before he spoke next either, choosing instead to keep his head bowed, his eyes on the countertop, his hands spread and fingers curled as he waited for the water to boil.

“So. You and my brother,” he said, a few awkward minutes later.

Castiel—blinked.

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Sam snorted softly, a thoughtful noise. “You. I mean. What’s that all about?”

“We fucked,” Castiel supplied helpfully, fiddling with Dean’s artificial toes.

“Yeah. No kidding.” He sighed shakily. “Dean sleeping with men. Who knew that was even a thing?” His knuckles went even whiter on the countertop.

Castiel furrowed his brow. “You’re angry he slept with a man?”

Sam turned around so fast his floofy hair cut through the air in one solid blade.

“Christ, no, jesus. I’m not some, some bigot or something. I. You know. I thought about going into civil rights law over the marriage inequality bullshit. I’m not—I have gay friends.” Castiel would have laughed if he didn’t sound so fucking earnest.

“So you just didn’t know your brother slept with men.”

“Well—no. No, how could I?” He shrugged, curled in on himself defensively, shoulders drawing up around his ears. “I don’t know—anything about him. That’s the whole problem! He’s been—he’s been on one tour or another since I was fourteen. I know an eighteen-year-old kid who fucked around with girls in the backseat of my dad’s car. I don’t know this—this—soldier.” That assessment struck Castiel funny—and not just because he could hear Sam dancing around the word broken with every waver of his voice. “Did. I just wonder if something happened to him in the military…” Sam trailed off.

“Something…” And then he realized. “To make him sleep with men?”

Sam went red. “No, I mean. Of course not. I’m not—stupid. It sounds stupid when you put it like that. I just—”

Castiel narrowed his eyes.

The tea kettle whistled on the stove, saving Sam from another awkward defense. He turned around to take it off the hob, going for it first without an oven mitt and then jumping back when it was clearly hotter than he’d anticipated. He shook his hand in the air to stave off the burn. Then he got wise and used a tea towel. Pouring the hot water and carrying the cups to the table seemed to require all his concentration, and he was silent and shaky and slow.

Sam lowered himself into the chair opposite Cas. They sat in silence waiting for the tea to steep, neither of them looking at one another. Castiel willed himself to be more sober for this conversation, blinking hard at the steam, unclenching his arms from their vice grip on the prosthetic.

“You’re not what I would’ve expected,” Sam offered, contrite.

“As someone to fuck your brother?”

Sam sighed, but there was almost humor in it this time.

“Sure, yeah. But I guess I wouldn’t have expected you to have a dick either.”

Cas hummed agreement.

“No, uh. When he talked about you before, he said you were a veteran too,” Sam said eventually, playing with the metal chain on his tea infuser, still refusing to look at him.

“Yes,” Castiel said neutrally.

“You don’t look much like a military man.”

“No. Not anymore. I suppose I wanted to distance myself from that person.”

Sam nodded like he understood. He very clearly didn’t. And Castiel wasn’t sure he did either because—surely he didn’t look like a soldier anymore. He had done his very best to make sure of that. But how far was he from that mindset, actually? How far was he from the guy that walked off a battlefield two years ago?

“Thanks,” Sam said. “For your service.”

Castiel snorted. “Please. There’s no need.”

Sam shrugged. “Dean likes it when people thank him.”

“Dean and I are very different people.”

More quiet. Castiel felt a little like a hypocrite.

“Sorry about the whole. Raiding your house with your brother like a SWAT team thing, but like. He—” Sam stopped, pursed his lips. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s best now, you know? I don’t know.” The words got all choked up, caught like his throat was narrowing around them. “What I’m supposed to do. I’m flying totally blind. Maybe you know better than I do.”

Castiel squinted. “What you’re supposed to do?”

“Well, he’s not okay,” Sam said, rubbing along his nose, lowering his voice to just above a whisper.

“He’s missing a leg.” Castiel hefted the prosthetic up a bit in demonstration.

“Well. Yeah. That. But I mean like—like—mentally.” He made a vague gesture at his head. A palm wiggle. Flapping fingers. Just a hair away from the screw-loose, winding-finger motion people made when they were indicating that someone was cuckoo.

“My brother said you had him institutionalized,” Castiel threw savagely into the calm, toying with his teacup.

Sam jolted back, his broad back smacking against another set of cabinets and prompting a noisy clack as the dishes inside it jolted too. He looked Castiel in the eye for the first time since they’d come into the house, startled like an animal.

“Jesus. No, not institutionalized.” He jerked the infuser out of his cup, burned himself again when he trailed the dripping hot water across his lap. “Christ. You want some, uh. Cream? Sugar?”

Castiel shook his head, but kept his eyes on Sam, probing. Sam got up, opened the fridge, fiddled with the milk, the cream. The picture of avoidance.

Castiel waited him out.

When he came back to the table empty-handed after a reprieve behind the fridge door, he said, “I—I got scared, is all. He spent some time getting evaluated by a psych in the hospital. To be safe.”

“Why?” Castiel growled. He tried to imagine how he would feel if his brother tried to foist him off on some unsuspecting psych without his fucking permission.

“He just—he told me something I didn’t know how to deal with.” Sam looked him right in the eye, a pleading whine in his voice. Castiel didn’t give him an inch.

“What did he say?”

“He said that his last tour of duty was a botched suicide attempt.” It wasn’t Sam’s voice. Castiel turned so fast he smacked Dean’s prosthetic foot on the china cabinet.

Dean stood in the doorway behind him, and if Sam looked like hell from a sleepless night, Dean looked about a hundred times worse. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair mussed, the empty leg of his soft pajama pants trailed limply behind him.  Castiel wondered distantly if he’d even showered off their night together. He pushed away the alpha male desire to go and smell it on him.

“He said,” Dean said, taking one skip-hopping, crutched step forward, into the light, “that someone fucked up letting him live through that, because that was all he was ever gonna be good for.”

Sam sighed shakily.

“Dean, you know that’s not—”

“I wanna talk to Cas, Sam.”

“Well,” Sam snarked, kneading his sinuses between two fingers. “You two have so much in common.”

Dean threw Sam a withering glare over his shoulder as he made an abrupt one-eighty, a surprisingly graceful pivot on his crutches, back into the living room. Castiel gave Sam a nod before he got up to follow his brother, and he left Sam staring pensively into his cooling cup of tea.

“I figured you might show up here,” he said. He looked toward the ceiling, tilted his head, considering. “Well, okay, I figured it about the same time my stoned ass realized I left my leg in your bathroom.” He let out a whuff of a laugh.

In the living room, Dean gestured him to the mantle, a wave of his hand that turned into a grand arc of his crutch.

“That’s it,” Dean said. “That’s what I got.” He sucked in his lips, and blinked so long it looked like he was falling asleep before he corrected himself. “That’s all I got.”

It was his Purple Heart, there just like he’d said it’d be, weeks ago.

“I guess I just wanted to set the record straight because—I. I guess I don’t feel like I’ve been fair to you. With all this bullshit happening in my head. And all the—I mean, I told you before.” He smiled ruefully. “I’m good at fightin’ and not much else, y’know? I’ve lost the trick of all this.” Dean shrugged and lowered his voice. “So I’d—get it. If we couldn’t do last night again.”

Castiel felt a twinge for Dean, who expected that Castiel should hate him as much as Dean himself did.

Gabriel surfaced next to the mantle. Bloodied again, only the one half of his face really intact. Perhaps he’d only left it untouched so Castiel could see the disappointment written all over it. It was the first time he’d seen the two of them, Dean and Gabriel, in the same room together.

Castiel approached the mantle slowly, putting the leg down gentle to lean against the brickwork of the fireplace before he reached for the medal in its little hinged box. Velvet-lined. It was strangely pretty, considering what it was for. Gabriel’s was just the same, and he remembered being surprised when he saw it, too. It was presented to his family in lieu of his brother, and it wasn’t an honor to him so much as it was an insult on top of an injury. Put that shit on a t-shirt.

I lost my brother, and all I got was this lousy medal.

“That’s what I got for dying, huh?” Gabriel said by his shoulder. “That lousy piece of scrap metal?”

Castiel heaved a noisy stream of air through his nostrils.

Dean’s medal was the only dustless item on a mantle that was otherwise covered in grime—indeed, the only spotless thing in a room that was covered in a layer of standard collegiate filth. Someone in the house paid it close, meticulous attention, that much was clear. Castiel picked it up, hefted the weight.

“That’s what I’m worth to these people?” Gabriel said. He wasn’t sure about Gabriel, but for Dean, that answer was clearly—yes. Here you are. The only visible piece of you on display in a house filled with your brother’s things. It’s an award for something you lost from a time that did nothing but take from you. A time that left you a deficit, another dark red figure in the budget books of an unholy war.

This was the part where Castiel was meant to say, I think I hate you.

It was what Gabriel wanted.

This was the part where he said, You did another tour after I left my brother to save you.

You risked your life. Indeed, you made a concentrated effort to end it.

You did your best to feed yourself into the machine that took my brother’s life, you absolute piece of human garbage.

Gabriel whispered, “It’s okay, Cassie. It’s only right. That’s what he is. And it’s not like he’s gonna disagree.”

Instead, he put the medal back in its box and said, “Do you have somewhere more private we can talk?”

Dean crutched unevenly to the mantle and leaned heavily on one crutch to straighten and clean the Purple Heart where Castiel had left it askew and muddied with fingerprints. When he was satisfied it looked alright, he nodded and started down a short hallway to the right of the stairs. Castiel followed him. It wasn’t far to go, just a few feet to a closet-sized room with no window, a bed shoved against one wall, and a massive pile of haphazardly labeled boxes stacked against the other.

“It ain’t much ‘cause Sam ‘n Jess are both still in school. I’m—it sucks ‘cause I’m in their faces, and they weren’t expecting t’have anyone stay with them so they don’t have a spare room,” he babbled. “I keep tellin ‘em I can use some of my salary to get my own place but Sam—won’t let me. I keep telling him it’s a pain in the ass to get up the stairs to shower but.” He shrugged laboriously and took the two short steps across the room to fall heavily on the bed.

Unspoken was this, and Castiel could feel it now, heavy around him: I wasn’t expecting to have to stay with my little brother. I wasn’t expecting to be alive right now. The only personal effect Castiel could see in the whole space was what Castiel recognized as Dean’s formal uniform cap on his bedside table. And it was the only thing there at all besides an alarm clock and a dim little lamp cut down the middle by a jagged break.

Dean rubbed a hand over his mouth nervously, fiddling with the cap, straightening it too, tapping on it thoughtfully. Castiel slammed the door closed behind him when he passed through the doorway, hard enough that Sam and Jess must’ve heard.

Here was the part where he confronted Dean about taking another tour after he had his guts ripped out. Where he told him how exactly he got his own medal. Where he watched Dean’s face break when he told him about how his brother died and about how he’d held his hands over Dean spilling guts to keep his life from seeping out of him. Where he told him how that night at the party hadn’t been the first time they’d met at all. How a dead brother and their first spilled blood was always going to color their relationship red.

This is when he said, I hate you.

Except it wasn’t.

Instead, he crossed the room, pushed Dean back on the bed, straddled his waist, and kissed him. Because fuck if he didn’t hate Dean’s fucking guts for making the choice to die when Gabriel died to make sure he had that choice at all, but fuck he didn’t love the feel of Dean’s mouth, too. Fuck if he didn’t love a million little things about having him under him.

“Jesus, Castiel, don’t you fucking get it? I’ve been trying to tell you all along—” Gabriel said, incensed, bloody, leaving pieces of himself on the carpet as he paced by the door. “He fucking killed me.”

He could list the things he knew about Dean on one hand. First and foremost being, above all else, Dean was a soldier.

Second being—he wasn’t anymore. Funny thing was, it really didn’t seem that Dean had yet realized that second thing about himself. So far as Dean knew, he was that man and that man alone. The one with the gun and the medal and the hat and the scars. And those were the only visible pieces of him in the house, in his room, to his brother, to his life.

Despite that, he could only imagine how much it would hurt Dean, knowing what Castiel knew, knowing the depth of the hurt and regret and accountability. Finding out that Castiel felt he’d contributed to his brother’s death? He didn’t know much, but he knew Dean was a good man. 

Dean didn’t kill you. I don’t think I did either.

Castiel sucked Dean’s tongue into his mouth. Dean was receptive to the touch, if tentative at first. Castiel had been right earlier—he still smelled like him. Burying his nose deep in the crook of his neck and his shoulder, he got a hard, heady hit of the smell of lube and musk and shared sweat. Oh, but he liked this Dean. So much. The Dean that smoked with him and came inside him and let out those breathy little moans when Cas tightened around him. He liked the way he felt in his arms. The weight and breadth of him. He liked the feel of him on top of him, heavy and warm like a blanket.

Castiel sucked a bruise into the side of his neck.

“Ah,” Dean gasped. A new noise. A pretty noise. He pushed his hand up under Dean’s shirt, palm splayed against his belly, and felt the fluttering heave of every breath.

“I thought you wanted to talk,” Dean said against his ear while Cas mouthed at his neck. “I thought you didn’t want to see me anymore. Thought you were gonna fucking tell me off.”

“Yeah, Castiel. I thought we were gonna talk,” Gabriel snarked across the room. But he was getting easier to ignore. Quieter. Castiel pulled back, admiring his handiwork at Dean’s neck. You did another tour. You did another tour. You did another tour. My brother died and you lived and you did another tour. “I thought you were gonna fucking tell him.”

Here was what he thought he liked most about Dean: when he was with him, Gabriel went away. He concentrated on that, on that piece of his past disappearing for a moment, before it came creeping back to overtake his life.

Maybe what he should have liked most about Dean—was Dean. Dean, alive. Maybe then Dean would realize there was a Dean in the here and now that was worth liking too.

And maybe Castiel could stand learn that there was more to life than with and without Gabriel. Hell, that there was more than a before and an after. Two Castiel’s, defined by a loss, the same way Dean was. Dean the soldier. Dean the amputee.

Maybe there was just—Dean and Cas, sharing an illicit fuck on Dean’s bed while his brother cleaned tea off his crotch in the other room.

Castiel pressed his palm against the front of Dean’s pants and tugged Dean’s earlobe with his teeth before he pulled back, swooped around front for another proper kiss.

“Maybe I ought to.” he breathed against Dean’s lips. “But I don’t want to talk about that.”

Dean spread a firm hand against his chest and pushed back until he was far enough away that they weren’t breathing the same air any longer.

“You don’t wanna—” he blinked a slow, long blink. He was back on painkillers. It was pretty clear, just from the subtle droop of his eyelids, the hint of a slur to his speech. “I mean—”

“Why should I talk about all that,” Castiel puffed, moving in closer, going for another kiss. “When I got you right here and I can talk about that instead?” Dean pushed him back again.

“What’s there to talk about?” he said.

“Fuck, Dean,” Castiel breathed. “There’s still a whole lot of you left when you take the prosthetic leg off, you know?”

This time, when he moved back in, Dean let him, and Castiel brought his hands up to run them through Dean’s hair. They lost themselves for a frantic moment in loud, breathy, frenetic kisses. Dean’s strong arms curling protectively over Castiel’s shoulder blades to draw him closer.

“Remember how good it was when we fucked? Remember how good we were together, huh? Do you remember?”

They had been. The chemistry, the electricity, it was there now, too, and it had nothing to do with Dean the soldier. Castiel the soldier. Gabriel, the dead brother. Who gave a fuck about them? They didn’t have fuck-all say in what was happening now. Every concession he made to Dean’s health, the Dean that this Dean was now, just ratcheted everything up. He wasn’t missing anything. It wasn’t a burden to work around. He was just a good goddamn lay.

Dean nodded.

“Fucking hell, I know you do. And jesus—”

He reached down to rub the butt of his hand against Dean’s dick through his pants again, squeezing the hard outline of him there. Loving every new response.

“Jesus, Dean, but you’re good at this. I wanna know fucking—” he gasped. “I wanna know every filthy fucking thing you have to say to me.”

“Fucking, then.” Dean let out a breathy laugh. “I got one thing that isn’t fighting.”

Castiel looked him hard in the eyes. He couldn’t feel Gabriel behind him anymore. Maybe he was there. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it didn’t matter.

Did he hate Dean? Maybe—maybe he hated some version of Dean that didn’t exist anymore. A hard, self-hating sonovabitch who made the mistake of being a goddamn casualty of an unforgiving war.

But how the fuck could he hate this one? This soft, mussed, sexy piece of shit who moaned like a pornstar when he was stoned?

Turns out, there was more to both of them then all-fucking-that. And maybe Castiel got to be the very first person to tell him.

“Maybe that’s all you need right now.”

And he kissed him again.