Chapter Text
Sam’s reaction goes something like this:
“Weeks?”
“What?”
“Weeks?”
“Yes?”
“Weeks. You’ve been back here for weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean, why would you not tell us?”
“I was planning on it.”
“Cas… You gotta tell Dean.”
“Like I said, I am-”
“One time I didn’t, and I don’t think he has forgiven me still, but if he has, it’s only because at the time, I didn’t have a soul.”
“I don’t have a soul, so, technically-”
“Technically, you’re a better person than soulless me. So, no excuse really.”
“Like I said, I was planning on telling him. I am working up to it.”
“Well, work fast, or I will do it for you. I try not to keep secrets from him anymore.”
The vision of Castiel starts to blur, as if it were a mirage, but Sam presses the heels of his palms against his eyes to dry up the liquid assembling there and when he looks again, the angel remains precisely where it had initially appeared.
“Sorry.” He clears his throat. “Just happy to see you again.”
There’s a pause, an uncertainness, then:
“Dean will be too. He’s been uh-” on a vow of silence with a touch of bender for three months? “-struggling.”
*
The thing about Dean’s reaction is that Dean doesn’t really react.
To be fair on himself, it’s not like he’s had a reaction to very many things over the past weeks, months? He doesn’t really know how long it has been now. His brain is worn out. He has been drinking. And drinking in order to keep oneself alive is a bit like being an ouroboros that eats faster than it grows. The circle keeps circling but gets smaller and smaller each day. So, Dean neither reacts nor acts much at this point, he mostly spends a lot of time trying to knock himself out.
There are, of course, several problems that come with using alcohol as a sleep aid, one of which is that what had the potential to be normal dreams often become nightmares and once those nightmares start to really ride your body and wake you up, the once so helpful liquid almost appears to do the opposite of what you ingested it for. It keeps you awake. Keeps you in a sleepless, restless, limbo-like haze.
Dean has all of the above problems. And Dean has a lot of alcohol to keep that circle getting tighter and tighter, going round and round. He has a chronic headache and a recurring nightmare that deviously infiltrates his dreams. The nightmare is this:
There is someone in danger, typically a friend. Sometimes it’s Bobby or Charlie, sometimes Kevin or Cas. The friend is in danger, has a knife hovering over their head, and Dean is standing in front of them and, here’s the kicker: Dean is also standing behind them holding the knife. The other Dean, the one holding the knife, looks at himself expectantly and Dean knows that he should say something, a warning, a “behind you!” or something along those lines. His mouth opens but no words come out. He pushes and pushes, and nothing comes out but a strange sort of wheezing sound. The other Dean eyes him disappointedly, and rams the knife into the back of his friend. It happens almost every night. It’s an elaborate play on his spectrum of fears, the one that ranges from airplanes and that Blue Öyster Cult will stop making music to more acute things like failing at keeping his family safe, but that is forever, no matter what, tinged with the all-encompassing dread that whatever bad thing that happens, is always, always his fault somehow. That it will add to that bag of failures he has to drag around, containing stuff he could have fixed had he not been such a piece of crap, and its most recent addition being his best friend’s death.
The thing about Cas’ death is that Dean doesn’t fear it was his fault, he sure as hell damn knows that it was. He knows that, because before the event, Cas said some things which made it clear that what was about to happen was going to be for Dean, because of Dean and induced by Dean. That’s the headline his mind goes by, at least. Deep down in some secluded part of his instinct, Dean knows what Cas really said to him, but if he were to recite those words back even just to himself, he wouldn’t be able to.
They have become something like a Pandora’s box, those words. Bad things will happen if Dean goes there. He has never mentioned them to his brother, or any other living soul. Can’t think about them, can’t forget them. It’s as if they were immediately pulled down under the deep waters of his brain by a weight, laid to rest against the very bottom of the ocean of thought-memory, deep enough to be preserved but also to not echo back into the real world. When Dean replays the memory of Cas’ teary-eyed face in his mind, the angel’s lips move but Dean can’t make out what they say. It’s like those sound bits that get lost on a tape recording while time goes on as the tape has to be flipped.
Dean doesn’t know why it’s like this. It just is.
What he does know is that whatever the reason, he isn’t going to touch it with a sixty-foot pole.
It’s right down there with why he enjoyed wearing Rhonda Hurley’s pink and satiny panties and why he can’t fall asleep knowing there isn’t any whiskey in the house. Those are all whys that he prefers to leave unaddressed.
So, when Cas comes back, the surge of soft and soothing relief has barely had a fair chance to unfold within the confines of Dean’s body before his brain fires off a crippling fear that settles in together with it.
When Cas comes back, Dean reacts the way Dean reacts to fear. Somewhere mid-hug, with his hand performing a frenzied mixture between clapping and grasping at his friend’s back, he puts a lid on himself.
He even feels it as it happens, notices the shift in his body when it does. And he knows painstakingly well what it’s going to mean. He’s been spending enough time inside his own wired mind to know that fear turns him into a jackass.
So, after that, he just sort of waits for it.
Holds his breath.
Holds his words.
For a while he holds up a pretty decent charade all in all.
He makes sure not to ask too many questions, nothing that will lead them into the subject of what preceded Cas’ return, and it works pretty well, he thinks. Cas complies with most of his requests, still can’t say no to Dean. Still says “of course, Dean” when Dean asks if he will stick around with him and Sam, still nods when Dean tells him he can even have his own personal room in the bunker. Not that Cas does stick around very much; most of the time he is off helping the new God reshape Heaven and “I am helping him learn from my mistakes” he says to Dean once.
Dean wonders what Cas would consider as his mistakes but doesn’t ask, of course. Their talks are so formal they would get them into the Nobel Prize banquet. They rarely interact when Sam isn’t around.
Dean is doing exceptionally well, keeping the peace, until he isn’t.
It all begins when he is putting laundry into one of the bunker’s washing machines, just as he is about to throw in the last pair of boxers and press start. What begins is a train of thought that, during an unguarded moment, manages to slip out of that lid he had put on. The thought pertains to Cas’ mistakes and, in the washing room, Dean allows himself to think about it so hard that the weight inside his brain starts lifting and other things start to come out. Things and words. Namely one, which Cas had used during his farewell speech. One word, one thing. The thing about wanting one thing. It hits Dean like a projectile that comes from every direction at once.
Dean starts thinking about his and Cas’ friendship. He thinks that when you have a friendship that miraculously still feels so pure even though you have hurt and lost each other over and over again, and somehow still gives you a feeling akin to safety and home, something you’ve never felt before, even though you have fought countless of fights over things you never even fully comprehended - obviously you keep that friend close to your heart. Obviously, you want that friend to always be around. Dean can admit that he feels that way about Cas.
There is nothing gay about that.
There is nothing about that, that means you want to be more than friends.
That you love them in the sense that you want them.
Dean thinks that maybe Cas has confused making a best friend with falling in love.
Cas is, albeit more human than most, an angel and angels are notorious for not quite grasping the full concept of feelings.
Dean thinks that, even though he would rather rebury the whole thing deep down and never exhume it again, it must somehow be his duty to inform Cas of this fact. A duty that comes with being Cas’ best friend.
Dean presses start on the washing machine.