Chapter Text
Naomi comes to him in a dream.
She’s every inch the angel he’s come to expect: buttoned up, a little anonymous at first glance. Ice cold blue eyes that come alive when she mentions Castiel. It seems that in one respect Castiel has had a profound impact on all of them. He’s made even angels feel.
“He’s our brother,” she says. “Our family,” she says. “Ours.”
The room is like the modern and designer-minimalist version of Zachariah’s beautiful room. She’s very different from Zach, and yet the warmth she’s trying to project reminds him of the original douche-meister.
“We saved him and took him back after all his sins,” she explains calmly, “and he was simply atoning for them, working for Heaven once again. Protecting his family.”
Dean thinks he wants to get up, off the stiff office armchair, bang a hand on the shiny desk and see if he can put a crack in the glass tabletop, but he can’t. He can’t move.
“He was almost back to normal, but your interference stopped his recovery. For his sake, you must stop.”
And
“Please Dean, we only want our brother back, safe and sound.”
Ooooo
When he wakes up he barely manages to grab a trashcan before he’s dry-heaving. He’s unsettled, he’s freaked, and he can’t make out just why.
He talks it out with Sam, his dream, seeing this angel Naomi and how she pleaded with him to leave Castiel alone, to leave him to Heaven.
It’s where he belongs.
But every time he thinks of the white room his heart starts beating faster, and if his hands aren’t shaking it’s because he’s clenching his fingers so hard he’d draw blood if his nails were any longer.
Sam thinks that if she was mind-controlling Cas, an explanation could be that she did some messing with Dean’s head, too.
They need to find a psychic to take a look. They call Garth.
Oooo
Garth humms and haahs and tells them it’ll be difficult to find a psychic who can do that kind of thing. “It’s one thing to read spirits, or read minds, but dealing with mind control? Whole other freaky ballpark.” It’s even funny they should mention it, ‘cause there’s this nest of vampires out in Ohio who’s set up digs like a cult, and they keep people to feed on with mind control. Hunters still trying to figure out a way to shut them down. “You try to free ‘em and they go right back, you see. Reaaaly tricky business. Everyone knows about them, so you can’t exactly just wipe them out. FBI is watching, but they think it’s just zealots gone nuts. Balls up in every direction.”
Dean thanks him and hangs up and turns to face Sam.
“I think I know someone who can help.”
Ooooo
Benny’s number doesn’t work, but tracking him down isn’t the hard part. The hard part is getting within twenty feet of the boathouse he’s docked at the end of a rotting pier in fucking Noweheresville without getting their heads blown off. Benny seems to be tweaking, or detoxing, it’s difficult to tell. Either way the bandwagon has good chances of having been kicked to the curb, and Dean doesn’t want to poke at the matter too closely.
Except how apparently he just drove thirty-seven hours to do just that.
“It works fang to fang, brother, not fang to blood-bag. Otherwise we’d all be hitting up Vegas for all it’s worth.”
And
“I thought we bid each other a sonorous fare-thee-well,” when Dean keeps asking.
And
“This is for that angel? Again?”
Dean comes out with it. How he knows it can work because, once, for twenty four hours, he was just like Benny. He just needs Benny to rummage around, see if anything got shaken loose, or shoved under the rug. Shine a light, and Dean can do the rest.
Benny responds by coming out with it. Yes, it could work (and what the hell, he didn’t think to mention something like that before??). But he’d have to bite Dean to do it. “I’m here, hanging by the skin of my teeth and you waltz in after fucking off and ask me to throw it all away again?”
Dean has nothing. “Benny, man, I just need to know.”
And Benny agrees.
Ooooo
They set up precautions. Sam is present.
(“he’s not your brother, stop calling him that” he hisses when Dean’s in the other room, and Benny leers, showing his teeth.)
They have dead man’s blood and restraints and bags of regular donor blood to get him back on track afterwards. (Benny doesn’t think there’ll be an afterwards, but he doesn’t tell Dean. Sam seems to know, and that’s enough.)
Dean takes off his flannel, he’s only in a T-shirt and he’s facing Benny, half-joking. Come at me, bro.
Benny does come near and looks at Dean, standing there, trusting him not to rip his throat out in one go. He can’t.
“Not like this,” he says. “Sit down.”
And
“Relax. Open your mind. Show me what you want me to look for.”
He sits behind Dean, pulls him back until they’re back-to-chest and his arms tighten around him, holding him still, hand lightly on the neck, tilting the head just so.
Benny drained two bags before this, tried to quell his hunger as much as possible, but they all know it’s not the same, not by a long shot. He bites down, almost delicately, and Dean closes his eyes.
Ooooo
Sam must watch, but it’s difficult to stand back and watch a vamp slowly draining his brother. The worst part is that Benny is keeping up his hand in the bargain. He’s slow and focused and doesn’t at all seem out of control. Sam has no excuse to stab him in the eyeball with the syringe he’s clutching and put a stop to all of this. Dean seems to have fallen in some sort of a trance, breathing deep, head tilted back and lips slightly parted, quiet, breathy moans escaping on every other exhale.
Benny inhales sharply and stops. Looks up at Sam. “There is something,” he growls, licking too-red lips.
“What? What did you find? Dean!”
“Don’t!” Dean’s still out of it, cradled gently in the monster’s arms. “You wake ‘im, I can’t access it. Just a friendly warning, don’t interrupt, or it’s all for nothin’.”
He bites back down and, after a moment, Dean frowns.
“Nnnngh. No. No!” Sam steps forward, but Dean’s still under, eyelids fluttering, the muttering not purposeful. “Cas! No!”
Dean shudders, and Benny detaches himself from his neck with a snap. He bends down and licks the last few drops of blood that escape, just as Dean is becoming aware again, before pushing himself away forcefully and locking himself in the bathroom.
Sam rushes to Dean.
“Son of a...” he blinks, hard, his face going from bewildered to furious to murderous in a matter of seconds. “That bitch!”
Oooo
So the encounter and Dean’s memory of it don’t match. At all.
“She tortured him,” he rambles, furious like it’s a personal offence. “She showed me what he went through for angelic re-education and- she said she was fixing him and all she really was doing was torturing him!”
But Cas doesn’t come when they pray. They don’t know what to do.
Oooo
“Do you know,” Crowley whispers, like he’s imparting a secret, “what happens when you slam an angel with a banishing sigil inside a warded place?” He twists his fingers. “Hurricane inside a room. Stampede in a slaughterhouse. Nuke inside a shelter. All of the above. Personally I’m hoping for a little angel/grace split, but then, I’m an optimist.”
The ropes won’t hold them for long. Crowley knows this. He’s delivering his evil monologue and then hightailing it out.
“Not staying to see the results of your experiment?”
“God, no. It’s dangerous. That’s what ‘staff’ is for. Word of advice. Close your eyes.” And then he’s gone.
Somewhere from the depths of the abandoned industrial compound, something advances like an earthquake.
Oooo
They follow the trail of dead demons down to a room that’s more heavily warded than even the rest of the building.
Cas is in there, half kneeling in a pool of blood, trying to push himself up off the ground and failing miserably.
“Cas!” Dean calls, and falls to his knees in front of him, grabbing him by the shoulders and holding on, grounding them.
“’M sorry, Dean,” Castiel mumbles, blood dripping out of his mouth and eyes and ears. His head lolls forward and he almost crumples under Dean’s hands.
“No, no, no! You’re ok, we got you, I got you, you’re ok.”
And
“No apologising, you’re ok, you hear me?”
And
“No checking out now, Cas, please don’t check out on me, please.”
And
“Stay. Please stay.”
Cas brings a hand up to grasp Dean’s shoulder and rolls his head until he can make eye contact.
“Yes,” he says, simply, and Dean huffs out in relief and smiles, giddy, happy, and pulls him forward and hugs him, holding fast and strong.
After a moment, Sam clears his throat.
“Shut up,” Dean growls. “You both shut up, everyone can shut up now. I just- I need to make sure. I’ve earned this. Shut up.” He hugs tighter.
Cas brings his arms around slowly and hugs Dean back.
Oooo
“Men of Letters?”
“It’s pretty cool. You’ll see.”
Oooo
Cas pokes with more interest in the human relics than he displays for the supernatural ones. Dean finds him frowning at vinyls, the pad of a finger slowly following the grooves.
“Wanna share that with the class, Cas?”
“We’re the only ones here, Dean.”
“You, me, and... let me see that. Louis and Ella. Good choice. Here.” He puts the record on.
A deep, gravelly voice starts crooning. “Heaven, I’m in heaven...”
Dean’s face twists with displeasure, and he shakes his head.
“You don’t like this song?” Castiel asks.
“I do, actually. Fuck him, can’t ruin everything for me, you know?”
Castiel doesn’t, so he frowns. Dean barks out a laugh, and starts dancing on the spot, swaying to and fro, arms up like he’s leading a woman in a quick two-step.
“Come on, Cas! Ever danced?”
“Not that I recall, no.”
“I’ll show you, it’s easy. Well, not if you do it properly with all the steps, but who cares. Just- come here.”
He steps up to him, arranges his arms to mirror his and they sway a bit together, at arm’s length, as a woman takes up the lyrics.
“Why is she calling Heaven ‘dancing cheek to cheek’? Is this it? It bears no resemblance to Heaven.”
“-not exactly, it’s more like this,” and Dean yanks him forward until they’re moving chest to chest, and he’s humming the song as he parks his cheek against Castiel’s.
“This makes more sense,” Castiel declares, and the rumble of his voice echoes in Dean’s skull.
Dean smiles.
Oooo
Sam follows the music, but when he sees his brother and Cas he stops short on the threshold, book still open but forgotten in his hands. He gapes for a second. He’s about to take a step back and leave them to it when Cas looks up and straight at him.
“Hello, Sam.”
They all freeze. Dean takes an abrupt step to the side, pushing himself apart from Cas, and doesn’t turn to face his brother.
“Dean was teaching me how to dance,” Cas explains, letting his arms fall to his sides like he doesn’t have much use for them at the moment.
“Yes, huh,” Sam says loudly, “Dean’s a good teacher.” His brother still doesn’t turn to face him.
“I... I found something about the Knights of Hell,” Sam offers, holding up the book.
Dean finally turns, but doesn’t meet his eyes. “Let’s see what you’ve got, then.”
Oooo
Charlie fixates on a particularly artless miniature in a twelfth-century prayer book about the Angel of Harmony. The angel is stepping on two discarded swords and pushing two dudes’s faces together. She wants to scribble ‘now kiss’ in the margin.
Sam is hilariously scandalised at the idea of ball-pen on ancient paper. Cas informs them that the Angel of Harmony looks nothing like that, and Dean can’t stop sniggering.
After Sam confiscates the book, Charlie regales them with the story of her first kiss. She was sixteen and the other girl was in the drama club. She was helping her rehearse a modernised version of Romeo and Juliet.
“Late bloomer, eh?” Dean teases.
“The real first kiss, not the practice ones,” she specifies primly. “Otherwise I started at twelve.”
Sam is impressed. “Earlier than you, Dean. Weren’t you, what, thirteen?”
“No, practice kisses don’t count.”
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Well, I had some practise kisses when I was twelve too!” Dean challenges hotly.
“No you didn’t.”
“Did too! Remember Danny Michaels? He had that older brother with the dirt bike?”
“Oh god, I thought you’d end up stealing that bike, the way you used to go on about it. So?”
“So, me and Danny were hanging out at his house once, trying to get in his brother’s motorcycle mags, and guess what we found?”
Charlie starts laughing and Sam rolls his eyes, and Cas doesn’t get it.
“Porn, Cas, they found a seventeen year old’s porn stash.”
“Yes, so there’s these photo stories, right? And one of them’s about these two chicks getting it on. Then Larry caught us-“
Charlie howls. Sam starts laughing too.
“The older sibling?” Cas asks.
“Yes, and he’s pissed but he’s also afraid of getting in trouble, right? So he tells us that it’s all practice. That girls and boys practice for when they get together, and we’ve got to always be prepared.”
Dean is laughing a bit too, the memory a good one. “So Danny and I, we think, damn, we’re not prepared at all! Chicks are out there, getting ready, and we’re not! So we snuck out to the garage and we start practicing ourselves!”
Charlie smacks him on the arm, shouting ‘attaboy’, and demanding to know what happened next.
Dean’s smile fades from his face. “Dad came to pick me up. He saw us and...” He trails off. Clears his throat. “He pulled me in the car and demanded an explanation. I told him about practicing and how we were afraid we wouldn’t know what to do with the girls, and he went real quiet and drove me out to town.”
Sam sobers up. “You never told me. What happened?”
“Oh, nothing. He took me to this lady’s house- in hindsight I guess she was a hooker. She taught me how to make out with a girl. Gave me some great tips. Her name was Jiao. Oh, gave me my first hand job too, so I bet that’s earlier than you two mooks, if we’re counting practice sex now.”
Charlie stops laughing, and she’s looking at him with wide eyes. Sam has that tragic puppy face going on, and he’s nodding to himself. “So dad said nothing then?”
“He just- look, he said not to practice again with Danny, that we’d end up getting in trouble. He... he made me promise I’d never kiss another boy again. Huh. I hadn’t thought about this in a very long time.”
“And you didn’t, did you? You never did kiss another boy.”
“No need to, right? Besides, Dad was just looking out for me, he was right, we could have gotten into real trouble if somebody had seen us. We moved town two days later.”
There’s a moment of silence. “At least he didn’t try to exorcise you. It happened to a friend of mine,” Charlie confides, patting Dean’s hand.
“That would have been utterly pointless,” Castiel declares. “Why would an exorcism help a youngster learn how to kiss?”
oooo
Sam watches Dean cook while he nurses a beer. He didn’t think a kitchen would relax his brother so much, but there you have it.
“You know he’s an angel, right?” He starts, and when he sees Dean tensing up he knows he’s got the be quick about this. Dean won’t walk away and let the food burn, but he’s already misinterpreted Sam’s meaning.
“Of ‘course I know he’s an angel, Sam. Celestial being. Not human. Got it.”
“I mean, he’s not going to know-“
Dean takes the pan off the fire and goes to stalk out, so Sam rushes ahead.
“You’ll have to make the first move.”
“What??”
“I know you, and I know you’re used to... people making the first move, but here you’re really going to have to take the initiative, because he will not know how to.”
“Sam... I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“I shouldn’t, ok?”
“Dean... maybe you should stop worrying about what you think you should do... what you think others think your should do, what dad thought you should do, and think about what you want.”
Oooo
He’s out with Cas, having a beer by the roadside. It’s something he’s done often with Sam, but this time they’re alone.
He watches Cas bringing the bottle up, taking a swig, swallowing, licking his lips.
Dean has started to wonder what it would feel like to kiss him, lately.
Catiel is looking at the stars, expression serene. “Dean,” he starts, “is there something you wish to ask me?” and he turns and fixes Dean with one of those my-whole-attention-is-focused-on-you stares.
Dean swallows. He could just say ‘nah’ and let it lie there, but he already knows ignoring it is not going to make it go away. There is the distinct possibility that Cas is not going to care and that he wouldn’t get offended if Dean asked. That Cas would simply say no and never mention it again, and they go on and be friends like they are, no harm done.
He’s an angel, after all. He doesn’t know.
“I’d like to- Can I-“ He slides down the hood and stands in front of Castiel, who keeps looking right back at him. Dean brings his hands up and cups Cas’ face. “Do you know what I’m about to do?”
Castiel blinks. “Yes.” He tilts his head forward, and meets Dean halfway.
When Dean pulls back and wills himself to open his eyes and see the consequences of his actions, Castiel’s expression is soft and fond.
“Well?”
“I think... I’ve waited a long time for that, Dean.”
“Yeah, you and me both, buddy.”
Oooo
So they’re on the couch making out like horny teenagers instead of in Dean’s room, and the couch is in what you’d call the ‘common’ room. But Sam was supposed to be already out and, most importantly, stay out all morning.
“Why didn’t you wake me, Dean I’m going to be so late- Oh. My. God.”
“Hello, Sam.”
“Sam, wait!”
Dean catches him in a vice-like grip by the wrist just as Sam takes the stairs. Funny how of all the times Dean has avoided talking to Sam, the one time Sam wants to skip a heart-to-heart it’s Dean who pins him down and insists.
Dean, who’s shirtless and buttoning up his jeans, and looking mortified and pained and stoic.
“I know this is difficult-“
“No, Dean, I just-“
“But hear me out, ok? You said to think about what I wanted, right? Well, apparently Cas and I... we are in agreement on what we want. So.”
“Dean, it’s fine, really. I’m happy for you guys.”
“Yeah, so happy you roadrunned out of there so fast the tumbleweeds are still rolling.”
“Look, it’s just... you were practically at home run, and you know I love you, man, but I really don’t want to see that much of you.”
“So this is not because he’s a guy.”
“Technically, he’s not.”
“Sam.”
“Dean.”
“He’s close enough. Tell me this isn’t because you just saw me with a guy and I let you go.”
“He’s- ok. So. Yes, I’ve seen you with girls more often than I care, and this was different. Because he’s Cas, and I know him, and- fine, because he’s a guy, and I’ve never seen you with a guy before. But Dean: different isn’t bad. We, of all people, know that.”
“So you’re not freaking out because I’m gay now.”
“I’m pretty sure you need to look up ‘bisexual’, Dean, and no, I’m not freaking out. I don’t mind if you guys er... do stuff in front of me but, just, you have a room now, with a door. Use it for your special moments, ok?”
“We’ll try to spare your virginal eyeballs. Bitch.”
“You do that. Jerk.”
Oooo
“Is everything all right between you and Sam?”
“Yeah. Come on, grab your shirt and let’s move to my room. It’s more comfortable.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that your bed is far superior to this couch in terms of comfort.”
“Huh. I guess we all agree then. My room it is, from now on.”
Ooooo
Dean’s smile is threatening to split open his face, but he can’t stop. Bobby and Ellen and Jo and Pam and Ash, and so many others, and-
“So, what ganked you in the end, Winchester?”
“Just passing through, Rufus. Hitched a ride with my buddy Cas.”
“Not that we don’t appreciate social visits, but why the house call, Dean?”
Dean’s smile fades, and his expression hardens. “There’s a problem we need to take care of, and I’m going to need all of your help.”
Bobby groans. “What the hell have you three idjits gotten yourself into this time?”
ooooo