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“Dean, no.”
Dean wishes he could argue, he really does, but he knows that tone. It’s resolute. The kind of resolute Cas’s voice used to take when he told Dean that he was in fact the righteous man, way back in the beginning, and it just makes the entire thing worse.
Still, he gives it a try just for the sake of trying.
“Come on, there has to be something to do about it. At least go take some tests –”
“For which none of us has the necessary kind of money,” Cas sighs as he shakes his head and moves closer to Dean on the sofa – now their sides are pressed against each other. “Dean, there’s nothing to do. This body had no business existing by now and my grace was the only thing keeping it running. There’s nothing you can do about it, or that I can do about it. And – and I’d really rather spend what time I have left not taking tests that will be useless.”
“Cas –”
“Dean. Please. Just don’t. It’ll just make the both of us even more miserable.”
Dean scowls, looking down at his hands, wishing he could punch the table just for the sake of it.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he says, not liking how shaky his voice sounds. He had been ready for almost anything, he supposes, but not for this. He had figured that for Cas it’d be hard to adjust but that he’d be there through it, and then maybe he could show him what being human is all about, what’s good about it, but – he hadn’t thought that this would be what he’d get.
He tries not to break down crying when Cas’s hand reaches out and his fingers thread with Dean’s – for fuck’s sake, Cas is the one who has probably months left to live at best and he’s trying to comfort him about this?
“All right,” he says when he’s sure that his voice won’t break when he speaks. “All right.”
--
The next day, he brings Cas to see a stupid action flick in the next town over. He buys the biggest popcorn bowl, gets them two Cokes and seats in the front row. He commits to memory the way Cas’s eyes go wide when he tries the Coke and says that it’s so very sweet, after the lights go out he lets Cas have most of the popcorn and when the plot doesn’t grab him at all he licks salt from Cas’s fingertips. At one point they completely forego the plot and start making out in the seat, and Cas is all warm and pliant against him – he tastes like salt and crappy drinks and Dean thinks they fit against each other like puzzle pieces, and after the movie is over they go to the diner in front of it where Dean buys them slices of fresh apple pie with a spoon of vanilla ice cream next to it. As Cas’s lips curl up in a small smile after eating the first piece and as he says that he finally gets what’s the deal about it, Dean tries not to think about the coughing fit he had when they left the cinema and that the tissue Cas had put to his mouth during it came off stained in blood.
--
The Fourth of July is in three weeks’ time. Before then, he teaches Cas to cook – Cas first watches him prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner, but after a few days he joins him. He’s not great with cooking meat, but he makes a mean soup and even meaner brownies, and it ends with the both of them always manning the kitchen (at least Sam gains back most of the weight he lost during the trials). It doesn’t matter that Dean always cuts the vegetables because Cas’s hands aren’t always steady.
On the fourth, Dean leaves Sam with a ready dinner. Kevin and Charlie come to the bunker and he leaves the three of them there, sharing a knowing look with Sam before leaving.
He drives himself and Cas to a nice clearing outside the city – it’s not too far, but enough that you can see both starry sky and the fireworks. The two of them sit on a blanket outside the car and eat the hamburgers and apple pie dinner that Dean had thrown together that morning. Before getting outside the Impala, Dean pushes in a Mozart best of tape that he recorded from one of the records Cas usually listens to in the bunker and lets it play throughout – he can’t even bring himself to joke about him playing classical music in his car. Cas coughs blood a couple of times, and Dean can see that he’s slightly thinner even if he’s eaten plenty later, but he looks ecstatic when the fireworks start and Dean resolutely choses to ignore that and another fit of coughing blood.
--
“You’re not going to break me,” Cas tells him, sounding almost amused.
“Right, but I’d still feel better if you were on top, all right? Just humor me.”
Cas rolls his eyes and nods, letting Dean switch their positions so that Cas is straddling him and not the contrary. Dean thinks that he’s paler than he used to be before he fell. He hopes it’s just his mind playing tricks.
“Dean, I’m –”
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry about this,” Dean cuts him as he sits up against the headboard, drawing Cas closer. He can feel his ribs through the worn out Zeppelin shirt Cas is wearing – it’s Dean’s favorite. “As if it’s your fucking fault. Just – don’t, all right?”
Cas kisses him then, slow and thorough and so damn good – Dean can’t shake that sensation of the two of them fitting like puzzle pieces, and he tries not to think about it too much. He takes off his own shirt when the kiss breaks, and he doesn’t think about much of anything minutes later as Cas rides him slowly, his hands on Dean’s shoulders, his fingers gripping tight enough to hurt.
--
Two months after Cas falls, it’s plain obvious that he’s getting weaker and that there’s nothing Dean can do about it.
Before it’s too late, he brings Cas out of the house and teaches him to drive.
He’s not bad at all, he gets all the basics right, and after three hours Dean thinks he’s got the hang of it. Except for one thing.
“Cas, you drive like my fucking grandmother. We’re on a highway. Just let it go, will you?”
“But the speed limit –”
“Fuck the speed limit, it’s not like I’d pay the ticket with my own money anyway. Go, it’s an entirely different thing. And get the windows down.”
Cas looks skeptical, but they do. Dean puts in a Springsteen tape – the closest Cas will ever get to Dean’s harder tastes, but that’s good anyway, it’s kind of suited. Cas speeds up for good and they don’t crash as he definitely breaks the speed limit while Badlands plays from the speakers.
When they stop, Cas’s cheeks are flushed red for the first time in months and he’s grinning wider than Dean’s ever seen him doing.
So maybe he snaps a picture with his phone and Cas doesn’t notice, but he can’t really resist that.
--
“Seriously?” Dean asks as Cas hands him the book. Cas glares at him in a way that is familiar and not at the same time.
“Seriously,” he answers.
“Weren’t you fucking there when this was written?”
“It doesn’t mean I read it, Dean,” Cas says, sounding almost resigned, and Dean feels horrible about it – in the last couple of days Cas’s eyesight has gone to shit or sort of, and while he can still see decently, he can’t see near objects clearly anymore, so he can’t read and none of them wants to risk going out in the increasingly chilly weather to get a prescription for glasses. Not when Cas keeps on coughing blood.
“Right. Where did you leave it?”
“There should be a pencil sign next to the last line.”
“Neat freak,” Dean says affectionately, and then opens the page, figuring he’s in for a round of completely boring Greek philosophy that he’ll read without getting unless he puts some effort in it, and he’s nowhere near interested in it. “Right. So. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?" – there – there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”
He swallows and looks down at Cas – he’s passed out with his head on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean closes the book and throws it against the wall – it’s a paperback, so it won’t make too much noise. He tries not to think about what he’s just read, because if he does – if he does, he’ll have to admit that he understood even too well, and that if he had that choice, he’d say yes in a heartbeat even if it meant that he’d die in a matter of weeks at most.
He puts an arm against Cas’s waist and realizes that he really doesn’t fucking know how he’s going to cope when the inevitable happens, because right now it feels so good, so perfect, that he can’t imagine ever going back to not have it after only a few months.
--
The next day, he picks up the fucking Symposium again and reads that entire section. When he almost starts crying because of a stupid story about people feeling lacking because they don’t have the other half they were born with, he decides that this is getting too far and closes the book for good, but he can’t help shaking the feeling that he knows exactly what this deal is.
--
Dean had thought they’d have at least weeks.
But a bit after that, everything goes to shit. Cas’s eyesight drops to next to nothing, he vomits whatever Dean tries to make him eat and he’s visibly underweight now.
Dean tells Sam that if they have something to say to each other without him being present, then they’d better get it out now. Sam swallows and goes into Dean’s room, where Cas is on the bed. Dean doesn’t try to eavesdrop on their conversation. When Sam gets out, Dean tells him that there should be food in the fridge for the next few days, and then he doesn’t leave the room until it happens.
--
He doesn’t wait long, though – it’s two days when he feels Cas’s hands on his face, his fingertips tracing Dean’s cheekbones.
“Dean,” he croaks, his voice barely audible. “I’ve never said –”
“If you’re trying to thank me, just don’t waste your breath with it.”
“… that wasn’t all of it. But I don’t know if I should say it now.”
Dean thinks he knows what he means. It’s something he had fantasized telling Cas. Maybe in a nice occasion. Maybe a few months into this humanity deal. Maybe after they were laying spent in the back of the car, or in Dean’s bed, listening to that Nat King Cole record which is the one thing Dean owns that Cas loves equally. But he never did, not after everything started going to shit. And he knows what Cas means, because if he says it now, then it’s just gonna be harder when he’s gone.
But fuck it, Dean’s never been one to chicken out of tough situations if he could help it.
“I love you,” he says against Cas’s mouth, trying to not break down crying as he does.
He feels Cas’s lips slowly curling up against his own. “Never taking the easy way out, are you?”
“And what about you?”
Cas’s grin gets slightly wider. “Of course I love you,” he says, sounding so sure of it that Dean isn’t sure that he can take it anymore, and so they kiss – it doesn’t last long, but it feels good, and Dean doesn’t want to move away when he feels Cas’s chest shaking but he does, and just in time because then Cas starts coughing again, and his lips are stained with blood when it’s over.
His fingers are threaded against Dean’s. Dean squeezes his own around them hard enough that it hurts, but he’s not sure that it matters.
--
When the door to Dean’s room opens, not long later, and Dean walks out of it, Sam isn’t sure that he can recognize him – he looks like someone who hasn’t slept in three days. He probably hasn’t.
“I’ll go get a pyre ready,” he says in a voice that has nothing warm in it. “Get the coat. Leave the rest how it is.”
Sam nods and does it. When he walks inside Dean’s room – he had expected the body to be laid out on the bed on the back. Cas looks almost asleep, if not for the paleness and the stillness. He’s wearing Dean’s favorite Zeppelin shirt and torn jeans that were too large on him by this point.
Sam leaves the coat on the bed and waits for Dean.
Dean is perfectly silent as the body burns, but Sam thinks he sees tears falling from his eyes – it looks as if he doesn’t even realize that he’s crying.
That night, he hears shouting. He walks out of his room and opens a crack the entrance door. Dean is kneeling on the ground, his knuckles bleeding – it looks as if he’s spent five minutes punching against a fairly big stone outside the bunker’s entrance.
When he speaks again, his voice sounds like the voice of someone who’s screamed his lungs out, and he’s almost whispering. But there’s a strangely eerie silence, and so he hears every word.
“Metatron, you son of a bitch, when we see each other again you’re going to wish you had never done this,” Dean says with a voice Sam’s never heard once in his life.
Sam is almost ashamed to say it, but it scares him.
--
“There’s no point,” Sam tells Kevin a few months later. They’re standing outside the bunker’s entrance, but he can hear the screams coming from that room where the men of letters used to experiment on demons.
The one screaming right now is a fallen angel, who might have a lead either on fucking Metatron or the recent Croatoan outburst.
“But – I don’t remember him being –”
Sam shakes his head, glancing down at the ground before looking at him in the eyes.
“I tried to deny it,” he says, trying and not exactly succeeding in keeping his voice straight. “But I can’t anymore.”
“What?”
“My brother died four months ago,” he says, and when Kevin puts a hand on his shoulder he feels mildly grateful.
The fallen angel screams again and Sam doesn’t even try to stop himself from crying.
And good thing that at least he can do that, because Dean? These days, Dean doesn’t that anymore at all.
End.