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It was a story about Cas, first and foremost, though Dean and Sam had cameo appearances in it as well. Angel possesses an AM radio salesman, who wears a trench coat because the first time he met his wife they were at a Casablanca costume party and she was Ilsa Lund, and she went down on him that night in the backseat of a 1987 Toyota station wagon without knowing anything to call him other than Rick. Angel slips this body on like a condom and uses this man to do great things. In this man he walks the world, until one night two brothers call him back to Burlington, Vermont, because there are dead things there that will not die, and witches that have called them up. Angel goes. Demon there sees the angel breaking a woman's neck with his bare hands, or rather, sees a small white man in a trench coat do this. Not-very-bright demon goes and kills a small white man in a trench coat, no relation. End story.
Dean takes one look at the guy and shakes his head at Sam. Sam nods, expression unchanging, and goes back to lookout duty, looking for cops or whoever else would be lucid enough to care or remember that two guys were standing over a body slumped against a dumpster in an alley with a broken streetlamp. Dean doubts anyone's called 911, and the sirens occasionally going off in the distance have been moving away from them, but the hard, sour set of Sam's mouth means he thinks they should still probably leave soon.
Dean glances back at the body. In the dark, with the light from the street catching on the hard curves of his face and throwing the rest into shadow, he can see the guy as the demon must have seen him when it spotted him from the alley mouth: a crumpled, weary shape huddled into his trench coat, dark head tipped towards his chest. From this close, though, the illusion of sameness vanishes, caught in hollow cheeks; the slack, crusted mouth; the way his head tips back from his neck, slit throat gaping like a Devil's Gate and the dim road of blood running down from it. An addict, probably, looking for his next hit or just out of it, and getting this instead. It's not the same as Jo, and it's not the same as Pamela, but he's still fucking sick of it, this slow dying by proxy, like every other step he takes towards his grave is on someone else's back.
It didn't used to bother him, or not as much, anyway; it bothered him a little. You don't get out of this game not fucked up, and if you went in like that you ended up more. But he was okay, mostly. It was a side effect of the job, he was avenging them, he didn't let it get him down. And then the rules changed; or he changed. Something changed, a lot.
There's a sound from up the alley, and Dean turns, boot-heels grinding on bottle glass and gravel. Beside him, he can feel Sam tense and then relax when he recognizes the figure walking towards them.
"The demon is cast back," Cas says. "I exorcised it behind a Starbucks. I don't understand why the demon attempted to flee on foot, though."
"Plain and simple: it was one dumbass demon," Dean says. "Probably got too comfy in one vessel and thought he could get away running." With the real Cas here the lookalike feels even more wrong than before, like looking down at the bottom of a well - that shivering feel of possibility and future and distortion, everyone you might have been looking at you back, up through the water. For a moment, Dean feels as if he's got the Cas of Christmas Future behind him again, the sweet-sour junkie breath hot in the back of his neck, thick with the smell of sweat and sex and cannabis. Dean closes his eyes, then opens them. He doesn't turn around.
Cas is peering at the body still slumped against the dumpster.
"He didn't make a move to defend himself," he says, frowning. "He died where he sat."
"Junkie," Dean says, and doesn't look at Sam. "Bad one, from the looks of it, out in Dreamland 24-7. Probably didn't even know what was happening until it was too late."
"We should go," Sam says, and bends down to wipe the corpse's hands and wrists with the edge of his sweatshirt.
"Right, because they're really going to dust a guy's wrists," Dean says.
"When that guy is found dead with his throat slit - yeah, Dean, they might," Sam snaps back.
"Excuse my ignorance," Dean says. "I didn't know a dead junkie was the crime of the century."
"Can you stop saying - " Nostrils flaring, Sam bites the last word back, though Dean can guess what it is. "Let's just go, okay? Before Cas takes the Impala and makes us take the bus."
"I would never do that," Cas says, gravely. "I don't know how to drive."
He doesn't ride back with them in the Impala, though Dean knows it's nothing Cas has against his baby and so doesn't blame him. The last time Cas rode in a car was on the road to Carthage; there's a lot of things they did before Carthage that they don't do now. He's there in the motel room when they get back, though, sitting in the dark with his trench folded around him and cigarette butts glowing in the ashtray, a frankly horrifying ceramic cow that Dean thinks is just begging for someone to commit murder with it. Sam immediately disappears into the bathroom, and Dean waits until he can hear the shower running before he turns to Cas and says, "Fight Club tonight?"
"Yes, Dean," Cas says, and clicks the lighter Dean tosses him, lighting another cigarette in a private curve of unmarked skin, hands coming up to cup the flame.
*
He didn't notice it at first, but after Sam killed Famine, Cas got quiet. It wasn't a clean kind of silence, like how he had been after the angels dragged him off to Heaven, or like Carthage, the loud bloated silence that a flood leaves behind, waterlogged books and bedframes sunk into the lawn. He wasn't distant, or cold. Instead he was polite and watchful and never there. They left Plainville and blew through the rest of New England, and in Ohio Sam put down the socks he was balling up, turned to Dean, and asked, "Do you think there's something wrong with Cas?"
"No," Dean said.
"It's just, he doesn't come unless you call him, but usually he stays for a while afterwards," Sam continued, as if he hadn't heard. "But he hasn't been doing that lately."
"What, you miss him?" Dean asked. "Should I be looking for emo lyrics in your diary? He doesn't come around no more, now I feel," he paused, thinking. "- Poor?"
Okay, so maybe that hadn't been his best one that week - or, you know, ever - but Sam still flushed. "Cas speaks and reads pretty much any language on earth," he snapped. "He's useful. Whereas you only know Latin, and only enough to read the dirty parts."
"Damn, Sammy," Dean said. "I guess the magic's gone between us."
"It was never there to begin with," Sam said, and lobbed a sock at him, which Dean caught. He wasn't surprised that Sam didn't remember, but once Dean had known how to read Latin and Greek; he had just forgotten. Forty years would do that to any second language. Sometimes even English was a struggle, spitting out words like stones and hoping they were the right ones, though they never seemed to be. He could be forgiven; it wasn't his native tongue anyway. The first language he had ever learned had been Sam, and that was pretty much the only thing he'd spoken down in the pit, a decades-long mantra of supplication and prayer. After a while he'd felt like a prophet, and then like he'd dragged Sam into hell after him, his baby brother tangled up in the back of his throat with his vocal chords, and he'd stopped speaking at all, except for one yes that may have come out like Sam anyway.
"De nile ain't just a river in Egypt, Sammy," Dean said. Smiling, he threw the sock back, ducking the detergent packet that Sam threw at him next, and that was that, until they got to the vampire nest in Valles Mines and Cas' sister kicked him through a support beam.
*
Dean expected knives, but Israfel didn't seem to have any, and God knows what Cas was doing with his. Israfel: that was what he had called her, sister, and she had named him brother back with something neither fear nor sorrow before she'd gathered up her librarian-suit and slammed his head into a hitching post. She may not have wanted to kill him, but Dean could tell that she was enjoying beating the shit out of him; he recognized it, like to like, some economy of movement he found in his own, and if she hadn't mojo'ed him and Sam halfway up a wall he would have taken an ax to her, as if it would have done any good.
As it was, he couldn't do anything but watch as they traded punches strong enough to break bones, had they been human. Cas elbowed her in the throat, but she blinked and threw him to the ground, unaffected. His hands flew out to the sides, and that's when the bitch drove the heel of her librarian pumps through the soft curve of Cas' open hand with a wet crunch. And Cas - Cas shrieked, face contorting, Israfel freezing with her heel still nailed through his hand. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling exploded in a storm of glass and sparks; the windows in front of the angels exploded, shards slamming into Israfel's face and eyes and the back of Cas' head, and maybe that's why she didn't see the knife appear in his other hand until he had sunk it home between her ribs.
She died in a sudden screaming blaze of white, her meatsuit collapsing on top of Cas with the charred tracery of her wings burned across his shoulder, and Dean and Sam fell off the wall, gasping. Across the room, the victor of the fight had pushed the body off of himself and was keening, hand cradled to his body, face twisted. It was the most emotion that Dean had ever seen him wearing.
"Jimmy?" he asked.
"No," Cas hissed, eyes wild, and Dean started to breathe again.
"Cas, come on," he said. "We gotta go, someone will have seen that light. Mojo us out of here."
"It hurts," Cas gasped. "Dean, it hurts."
"Wait, pain, you're feeling pain?" Dean asked dumbly, even though it was pretty fucking obvious.
"How do you stand it?" Cas demanded; he didn't seem to be hearing Dean. "How do you stand it?"
Dean opened his mouth, and Sam said, "We have to. Just like you do. Get us out," and they were in the janitor's closet in the Valles Mines museum, where they had waited earlier for the vamps to come out, and Dean was just fast enough to get Cas over a bucket before he threw up.
"Oh, shit, shit, shit," Dean hissed, looking at Cas' mangled hand. It had been dim after the fight with the lights gone, but under the flickering public-building fluorescence it was a mess of muscle and arteries and bloody bone. This place was deserted at night, a tourist trap; they didn't have their med kit and the nearest hospital was an hour away. 'Cas, I gotta -" he started, and Cas let him cradle the hand in his own, hot and slick, blood trickling from Dean's cupped hands down into his shirtsleeves. He thought, suddenly: I'm holding his hand, like a goddamn Beatles song. When it spasmed, Dean could feel pieces of bone grinding under the skin.
"She hit an artery, there's no way we can fix this in time," Dean told Sam, and then: "Cas, we can't do anything. You need to fix this, angel it up. Concentrate, okay? Can you do that for me? You need to heal your hand. Soon," as if he were twelve years old again, talking Sammy through a sprained ankle, soft and insistent. "I don't know if you guys are affected by blood loss, your cousins can ride a fucking corpse, but pretty soon you'll have lost a lot, and when humans do that we're not good for shit. Come on. Cas. Cas."
Cas shuddered, face still turned towards the bucket, away from them. Dean was about to do something - what, he didn't know, but this was not the way another ally went, bleeding out onto ugly linoleum, bleeding out from his fucking hand; he didn't know, but he - and then the blood stopped spurting. Skin crept back over Cas' palm, arteries closing and withdrawing, and Dean could feel the bones moving inside Cas' hand again, but this time they were knitting back together, collagen and fibrocartilage and finally bone callus; realigning themselves. Cas shuddered again, and red bits of window-glass fell out of his hair, hitting the tile with a kind of music.
"I do not -" Cas started, voice scraping. His hand flexed, once, and then, with a faint look of surprise, his eyes rolled back into his head and he tipped back into Dean's lap. He was heavy and surprisingly warm, and his head was leaving a bloodstain on Dean's thigh, and he was breathing.
"If you take a picture I will murder you in your sleep," Dean growled.
"I'll go get the Impala from the mines," Sam said, smirking. "Enjoy being a body pillow."
*
A few hours and life snapped back into the canon, as if the mines had been myth and not history. Sam was presumably still out having adventures on the Jefferson County bus system - he didn't hitch anymore; no one would pick him up - but Dean and Cas were back in the hotel room, mojo'ed out of the closet after a few hours of unhappy sleep and a note left for Sam, who would be pissed but not alarmed at the detailed treasure map Dean had drawn on the back of a White Castle receipt he had found in Cas' pocket: something he would have never had the time to do had the angels come back for a grudge match.
Dean was careful like that, all the tricks he picked up from Dad, bullshit with significance. Neither of them ever prided himself on being honest, and sometimes Dean felt like everything they'd ever given Sam had been with layers of meaning on meaning, as if they'd been jamming in barometers all over the damn country, feeding their own text under his skin.
"I'm sorry for... inconveniencing you," Cas said. He reached for another print-out and the movement sent the stack by his elbow fluttering. Sam may have been gone, but there was still a nest of vampires in the mines that were killing tourists and bums, and for some reason Dean had chosen action over inertia.
"Hey, it's okay," Dean said, absently. Fuckers had drained a fourteen-year-old kid; why would they even do that? Kids didn't have nearly as much blood as adults. "You have needs."
"This vessel needs," Cas said. "More and more, it needs. It craves."
"So indulge," Dean said. "I'm not talking orgies, but maybe take a nap once in a while. That thing's gotta be pretty tired by now."
"Lose the battle, but win the war," Cas said, sounding thoughtful. Dean snorted. No, he thought.
"Yeah, sure," he said, and then: "Dude, who taught you that?"
"A song on the radio," Cas said. "And you."
Dean looked down at the photograph in his hands, turned it sideways, squinting. When he was a kid they had car games, motel games, research games, anything Dad could dream up to get them to shut up. Fifty-odd years later Dean still remembered playing the crime scene photo game with Sammy: What ya think that is? A cow? A pie? Kinda looks like that librarian back in Knoxville, the one you were half in love with.
Don't deny it, you know it's true.
What about this one, then, if you're so smart? This one?
His mind shook off exorcism chants and the proper way to load a Beretta and all the beloved and unfamiliar names he's cried out in bed, but it kept the afternoons when blood was anything he and his brother could dream up to make each other laugh, instead of just an ugly stain on someone's hardwood floor and eventually a ghost they'd have to rip up the floorboards to kill. He wondered what that said about him, but didn't particularly care.
It was that night that Cas asked Dean to teach him how to fight. His vessel wasn't as strong as it had once been, he said. He needed to fight as humans do, technique to compensate for this loss. That's the word he used: compensate, like was one of Bobby's crap engines or a wound-weakened shoulder, or pulling someone's weight. Dean recalled the punches Cas had thrown with his thumbs tucked behind his fingers, and the wars he'd told them he'd fought in, and Israfel. He remembered Dad yelling at him as he practiced with Sam on someone's lawn: Pin the skinny motherfucker, Dean! And their last fight; he remembered that too. Dean agreed, but with one stipulation.
"First rule of Fight Club," Dean said, finally. "We don't tell Sam about any of this."
*
They start with punches first, which Dean thinks is fitting in a completely ironic way. In the crackling fields behind roadside motels, he shapes Cas' hands with his own, arranging his bird-bone fingers into fists - "Thumbs out, Cas, thumbs out" - and shows him the basic defensive position, leading arm in front of his head, other arm guarding his chest. Defense will be the problem, or at least the main one; angels aren't used to being the ones attacked, and Jimmy was on the short and small side. Of course, there are other problems. Precision. Aggression. Reading body language. Castiel could be one scary motherfucker, but it's Dean's opinion that Cas never really learned how to fight. He depended on the fact that he was stronger and quicker and smarter than almost everything else, low-rank angels included, and rode through existence on that.
"If someone punches you, try to grab their wrist," Dean says. "Break it if you can; you're trying to disable them. If you can't grab it, block the punch." Cas mirrors him, and in this way they move through the whispering grass, a peculiar dance of call and response. Sweat drips into Dean's eyes, dampening the back of his t-shirt, and from this close, Dean can feel the heat shivering off Cas' body. Cas doesn't seem to notice it; it doesn't belong to him, in a way, he doesn't own it. The trench coat stays on, and his skin is dry and only pleasantly flushed.
Cas mock-punches, pulling back his strength; Dean dodges. Again, and Dean blocks, fist grazing forearm. There is always a moment of stillness on contact, a hardness beneath his hands. In this moment, gripped in irrational terror, Dean's heart starts to pound, and adrenaline closes this throat. He remembers the millions of pilgrims he saw once on the news and the rock they circled, the still point at the center of the world, and the three hundred sixty-one deaths reported by trampling. He feels like the word obscene, and fights to submit. And then Cas changes, Cas yields, and Dean's hands register warmth, and skin.
He forgets. Impossibly, he forgets.
*
Grey-snow Missouri starts to give way to spring and Dean and Sam move on, chasing the tailbone of winter through Iowa and up to St. Paul, where there are ten beers on tap and another forty by the bottle, and a ghost that appeared as a soldier or a butcher or maybe both. Sam's worried that it's another Tulpa, and this time they have no probable source - it appears to be haunting an insurance building, for fuck's sake - but Dean thinks that the guy just picked up another career after the war. They argue about that through most of the northeastern Midwest, Sam's shins bumping the underside of the dash with the shotgun seat racked back as far as it will go, yelling at Dean when he cranks down the windows after the Mexican restaurant and Sam's papers go flying all over the place, thwacking them both in the face like startled birds.
Their fights out here in the midlands are always worse, with only the road and the skyline and each other. Dean's always thought that there was something about the Midwest, the way the land is flat and huge enough for God or even Sammy's anger.
"Ghosts don't change, Dean," Sam yells over the radio. "They don't change, they don't adapt, the people may have been two different things but their spirits are static! They relive trauma or focus on one thing, and that's it!"
"So maybe it's two different ghosts," Dean says.
"Not unless they're identical twins," Sam says. "- And no, Dean, they're not identical twins."
"Maybe this Billy Prior guy is reliving two different traumas," Dean says. "Maybe he died twice. Maybe his soul died during the war and his body died back home. How should I know?"
"None of that makes any sense," Sam snaps, and from the backseat Cas adds, "He developed a split personality during the war. Both of them now haunt the building," and Dean nearly crashes the car.
"Jesus," Dean says, trying to get his heart rate under control. "Where did you come from?"
"Antarctica," Cas says.
"No, I mean, how did you find us?" Dean asks, and Sam admits, "I texted him at the last rest stop."
"That was an hour ago," Dean says, suspiciously, and then a thought dawns on him. "Were you waiting for us to stop yelling?"
"Consider it positive reinforcement," Cas says.
*
It's snowing in St. Paul when they get there, flurries the size of old coins that disappear on the hot hood of the Impala and gather in Cas' hair, curling the hair at the nape of his neck. The vessel has a bit of a sunburn starting there, Dean notices; just a slight flush spreading under the collar, probably from too many hours spent at the edge of the world, with the sunlight ricocheting off the ice. He expects Cas to be oblivious, but throughout the surviving-family interviews he keeps touching the back of his neck, pressing on the skin there and frowning, though he drops his hand whenever he sees Dean watching him. After the third interview, Dean takes pity on him and stuffs a handful of snow into one of the sandwich baggies Sam collects in the glove compartment. It's only a sunburn, but even a pinprick's got to be upsetting after an entire existence of not feeling anything.
"For the sunburn," he says, handing it to Cas. "Hold it up against the back of your neck and it'll cool it down, make it feel better."
"I don't need this," Cas says.
"Yeah, whatever," Dean says. "Take care of your meatsuit."
Billy Prior's second death is a quiet one, an easy salt-and-burn with no death, dismemberment, or nasty surprises. They get where Prior is buried off of his blue-haired great-granddaughter and drive out there that night, getting lost somewhere in Minneapolis before Sam turns the map the right way up and puzzles out the roads to the Oakland Cemetery. Prior's grave is conveniently tucked away towards the back, in front of a hydrangea bush shuddering with snow, and the bones burn quick, sending up bitter puffs of smoke into the orange-tinged city sky. Prior & Prior never make an appearance. The adrenaline does. It makes his bones quiver, his heart beat a long confused ramble against his ribs. He's never been able to fall asleep after hunts unless he passes out, though lately he's thought that he could; he's tired since Carthage, quieter, stiller. The gravity that drew him towards things like sex and food and fights and Sam is now only the weakest of holds, orbits that command his body but not whatever else is there, if anything.
The body still needs, though, sleep and with it some semblance of clarity, and for that sparring is as good as anything else. Their motel has a loud parking lot, but the parks are empty at this time of night, cold and faceless with snow. Dean puts Cas through the paces, punches and blocks, punches and blocks, their footprints and falls writing a short and frenzied history in the snow. Cas is getting better; something about him appreciates repetition. He dodges, the side-palm slap meant to jar his vertebra hits his red-skinned neck instead, and he shudders, guard dropping. Dean frowns.
"You gotta let it go, Cas," he says. "If a sunburn distracts you this bad, you're not gonna survive fighting with anything worse. Block it out, ignore it."
"I can't," Cas says. "I have tried."
"Then fix it, at least, for now. I mean, is there a reason you're being deliberately dumb?" Dean asks. "It's not as if ice is going to hurt your angel mojo."
"It bothers me," Cas admits. "The... consequences, of wanting. You see some of them in the things you hunt, in their hunger, but there are worse. I've seen them."
"Wanting something doesn't make you a monster," Dean argues. "It doesn't make you them. People who are empty, they're the ones who do the worse things, not the people who feel and want and aren't... dead without the dying. Not feeling isn't a good thing. Trust me on this one." He glances around, slides his hands into the bitter cold of a snowdrift. "You trust me, right?"
"...Yes," Cas admits.
"Okay then," Dean says, and cups the back of Cas' neck with his cold hands, gently. "Feels better, doesn't it?"
"I - yes," Cas says. He's very close, head tilted up slightly, against Dean's hands. The heat of the last sibilant s brushes against Dean's own mouth. "It does."
*
The war drags on. Every day Bobby passes on another piece of news, sour with dirt, and signs off with, "Be careful," with a little more desperation for every dead friend he can't get there to bury. Travel is a shuddering yoke between gravity and speed, and they've peeled out of towns at two in the morning and one-thirty in the afternoon and every time in-between. The unfamiliar is dangerous, places where they don't know the terrain, but if they stay in one place too long they have sometimes have to fight their way out of it. Sam's strung tighter, worrying at the widening holes in his jeans and sharpening machetes at breakfast, and Cas has been calling more than usual, dropping in almost every day. Sometimes his skin is very cold, or very hot, or dusty. "Where were you?" Dean will ask, and Cas will answer, "Ho Chi Minh City. Antarctica. The Steppes." Dean's not stupid, he can read between the lines; Castiel's search for God is widening, far-flung and desperate, and he's finding nothing. On the radio they talk about brushfires, SARS outbreaks, floods. No one but Dean's kind have put together the dots yet but they're creeping towards each other, and they picture they make is getting smaller and smaller.
Despite the grief, the photos of charred baby shoes on the eleven o'clock news, the war is still an invisible thing, quiet and sinister at the edges of a world which Dean has only ever pretended to belong in. There have always been thousands of people dying in Africa; famine and outbreaks shock no one except the people in the midst of them. Likewise go the civil wars. None of the instruments of the Apocalypse are unfamiliar things, and this is what will damn them.
Three weeks after Carthage, the news starts to get personal. Dean's first boyfriend is found hanging from the bedroom fan. The doctor who delivered Sammy back in Lawrence is ridden all the way to Portland before someone puts her down. M.C. and Peter Straley drown on the same job; Jenny Oaxaca's eyes are burned out. Cassie's gone missing. Cas kills two more of his brothers and their vessels, and fifty miles down the road a Satanist tries to shoot Dean in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. It's a kid, Dean registers as the gun goes up, probably barely seventeen, eyes wide and scared under the black hair and pentacled leather jacket. Her hand is shaking, and the first shot goes a mile wide, pinging the sign above their heads.
"Hey, wait," Dean starts, and Cas is in front of him before he can blink, dodging the second bullet and grabbing their attacker's gun. Two shots to the heart and she dies with her eyes wide open and scared under the greasy hair, the leather jacket. Cas glances at the silencer, then wipes it off with his trench and drops it on top of the body. 'We should go," he says, and the sound unlocks something paralyzed in Dean.
"What the fuck?" Dean yells. "What the fuck was that?"
"Dean," Sam starts.
"She was going to kill you," Castiel says.
"She was a kid!" Dean yells. "She was scared! We coulda talked her down - or, hell, if you wanted to shoot her, you coulda kneecapped her! You didn't need to kill her!"
"I couldn't take that chance," Castiel says.
"You don't get to decide that," Dean spits. "I decide, not you. No more dicks with wings making decisions for me about what risks I can take. I give the orders from now on, 'kay, and when I say don't kill a fucking kid you don't kill a fucking kid!"
Something low and furious unfolds in Castiel's face.
"I am not your hammer either," he hisses.
*
Fight Club doesn't happen for a while, after that. It's understandable, but apparently not advised. A week and a half later, Cas texts them for their location because, as it turns out, he has a crushed larynx, and it's Dean who sews up the long gashes in his forearms, holding on the anger like the thread holds together Cas' skin, stubborn and terrible.
"I don't want you to die," Cas whispers. His throat is still healing; Dean can barely hear him. "I'll do what I have to to make sure that does not happen, and the burden of these things is mine, not yours. I will carry it."
"I don't forgive you," Dean says, finger tracing down the crooked line of stitches. Something between anger and heat makes him press down, lightly.
"You will," Cas rasps, and Dean must be causing pain, now, but he doesn't flinch.
*
Slowly, Cas starts accumulating things - things, because Dean's not sure if he would call them possessions. Lighters, prayer cards, salt packets, a pen that says Washington Potatoes, a sudoku book Sam finds under the passenger seat that he doesn't remember buying and that Dean never would. Neither of them have ever had much, just what would fit in the Impala and eventually the Impala herself, and so they're not the type to define themselves through their possessions, but with the advent of the things, it feels like Cas is starting to become a real person, closer somehow, not as hazy in the distance. He doesn't need the things or particularly want them, he explains when Dean asks, but if he stands in one place too long, people give him money, and he doesn't like that he doesn't know what to do with it. Spending it seems the best recourse. It's Sam, then, who teaches him how to buy and barter, the same way Dean taught him, giving Cas the coins in his pocket to sort out into little towers and pretending to sell him things.
"If I had a gun and told you to give me twenty-five dollars and ninety-three cents, how would you give that to me?" Sam asks.
"I wouldn't," Cas replies.
Cigarette butts start cropping up in their motel rooms' ashtrays, and the inside of the Impala smells permanently like smoke, which ends with Sam having to convince him not to go looking for the punk that's somehow been joyriding in his car. After all, it's obvious that Sam's not to blame, and Dean got over his whole tobacco rebellion when he was still in middle school. He doesn't put it together until the motel in Iowa City, when he goes to get ice and finds Cas perched on the hood of some guy's car, staring thoughtfully into the distance with a cigarette burning into nothingness between his fingers.
"You do know that stuff isn't good for you, right?" Dean asks, joining him on the hood. They're both leaving ass-prints on the hood and he's pretty sure he's still got some motor oil on his jeans, but fuck it, it's not his car, and the slow bleeding heat of the engine-warmed metal is comforting in the bitter air.
Cas takes a drag before he answers. His sleeve-cuffs ride up, revealing pale and fine-boned wrists.
"I can heal myself of the damage," Cas answers, smoke curling around his teeth. Combined with the trench and his broken, gravelly voice, the whole effect is surreal, like Dean's mind decided to take a walk in a Bogart movie.
"What about your vessel?" Dean asks. "Jimmy. He want you lighting up?"
"Jimmy Novak is dead," Cas says, "or he is beyond death. The archangels took him. I'm alone in this body."
Dean looks out onto the parking lot, flickering blue and then red in the neon light of the vacancy sign. Beside him, what was once Jimmy Novak's body is very still.
"What's with the Marlboro Man?" Dean asks, eventually.
"Jimmy is dead, but the vessel still has his cravings. This is one of them. It grew distracting, and so I," the angel pauses. "Indulge."
"Yeah, well, good for you. Could you not indulge around my car?" Dean asks. "It's not like either of us are going to live long enough to get cancer from second-hand smoke, but I'd prefer my baby not to end up smelling like an ashtray."
"I can do that," Cas agrees.
"It better not slow you down," Dean says, for good measure, and Cas looks at him, unashamedly studying, as if Dean were something fascinating and not just himself. Dean shivers, hands pressed flat against the cooling metal.
"It won't," Cas says, finally, like the fire of heaven, fierce and intractable, as if he were never really speaking to Dean at all.
*
Piece by piece, border by border, the world is shuddering itself apart. Mudslides devour mountainside villages; whole towns vanish into sinkholes, and the white-lime Dover cliffs fall into the sea, sending sea-waves over Venice. Flash floods roar through the Pacific Northwest. In small towns and big cities churches open their doors wide, and sometimes when Dean drives past he can hear the congregations inside, singing out their faith, hands reaching for the rafters or something further. Castiel comes back from one of his God-hunts with a rock the size of a child's fist lodged in the back of his head. Countries are getting nervous, and people are predicting World War Three will break out any day now, in the Middle East, between China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan, North and South Korea. That's exactly what they need, Dean says angrily, another fucking war, and Castiel says, This is the way of the world. Wars on wars, fighting on fights. This is the way it always has been; this is the way it is.
Dean's not sleeping well. Drilling with Cas is wearing him out, but the dreams trample over him every night, nightmares filled with litanies of Sam like rosaries running through his viscera-slick hands. It's Hell; there are no words to describe it in any language beyond its name, and if there were he wouldn't speak them. Once in a while he thinks about inviting Cas into his head to clean it out the way he used to, burning out the twists and corners and leaving only the bright and shining and straight, but he doesn't. There's too much Cas in his life, anyway, Dean's overflowing with him, Cas in his car and under his fists, too much of his vessel's body heat and blue eyes and smell of smoke. Get Cas in his head and he'll overflow; he'll pull it all back into himself and drown. He's been losing most of their fights, anyway.
*
In Burlington, he wins one.
*
After Burlington is a haunted farmhouse in Lancaster, and after Lancaster is a poltergeist in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, where Sam spends most of his time sulking in a coffeeshop with free WIFI and Dean nearly gets run over by a bus. "ADVENTURE BUS, Sumiton, AL. Exploring God's creation," he reads off the side as it passes, still honking at him. "Figures. Hey, Cas, there goes your ride," but Cas has his hands in his pockets, and the clean line of his jaw is shaking, slightly.
"What's wrong?" Dean asks, and Cas says, "I don't know, I don't know," and if he were human, this is the part where he would start tearing his hair out, kick cats, punch mirrors and invite bad luck. As it stands he just stares at Dean, looking furious. "The vessel needs, but I have eaten and slept and still it won't stop -"
"Had a smoke today?" Dean asks. Now that he thinks of it, Cas has looked like crap all day. "Because if not, that's the downside of addiction you're feeling: withdrawal -"
"I am not an addict," Cas snaps, loudly, and Dean is beginning to think that they maybe shouldn't be having this conversation on the corner of 5th and Wabasha; people are starting to stare. "That is not the problem."
"Hey, calm down," he says, soothingly. Apparently, yes, he is going to play Doctor Phil in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. "Is it pain? What does it feel like?"
"Like this skin is too small and too thin," Cas says. "Like the first time I came down from Heaven, and I was no longer my own form and not yet within another, and I was caught between what I was and where I was going, and I could not hear my kin."
Castiel breathes. Impossibly, he takes a breath, in and out, even and measured, and Dean doesn't know what to say to any of that. He never will.
Instead, dumbly, he asks, "Is it your hand?"
After all, he thinks, maybe he healed it wrong; maybe it's phantom pain, the exhumation of his approaching humanness. "No, it -" Cas starts to say, but Dean reaches for Cas' hand anyway and cradles it in his own, feeling for bumps or contusions; traces the lifeline, mostly just because he can. The skin of Cas' vessel is hot and well-worn, and his pulse is going a mile a minute, but everything else looks fine. It shouldn't have been causing him pain, but maybe it actually had been, because Cas has gone silent, and Dean looks up. Cas is staring down at the interlock of their hands. His hand tightens into a fist, muscles dragging minutely against Dean's palm, and Cas says, very quietly, "Oh."
"Apparently I have magic hands," Dean tells Sam, later, plonking down one of the frou-frou coffee drinks Sam likes in front of him.
"I really didn't need to know that," Sam says, making a face.
His brother accepts the peace offering anyway, though two hours and five unsubtle hints later, he makes Dean go back for a brownie so they don't get thrown out of the shop for loitering. The shop's cardswipe is broken; of course it is. Sam smiles at the waitress hassling them - We'll buy something, my brother'll be back soon with cash, I promise - and she smiles back, hesitantly, keeping the table between them. Dean goes. He knows Sam is trying to get rid of him.
The line at the ATM moves slowly, a halting chain-gang shuffle, and Dean sinks into the soundtrack that's playing continuously at the back of his mind, tapping Black Flag out against parking meters as he passes them. He doesn't wonder where Cas is right now; he doesn't picture him walking deserts and wading through rice paddies, the hem of his coat dragging ripples behind him. The line is really fucking slow, and he cranes his neck to see what's taking so long. There's a guy up at the front of the line working his way down, getting in people's faces, natty backpack and little suitcase bumping behind him.
"You speak the Russian?" he asks, and when one person shakes their head, he wheels on someone else. "You speak the Russian?"
"Hey, man, get lost," someone shouts.
"You speak the Russian?" the man asks, again, bumping down the line, and his suitcase drags a double line through the snow.
*
Dean, Cas calls to him that night, formless and formed, a sensation of body somewhere across the vast and empty space. Dean, you are only dreaming.
*
Kick; push. Punch and block and move away, winter-dead grass tangling around their ankles like hair. Stumble over the broken chunks of asphalt someone has thrown into the motel lawn someone has let go to seed, and shatter frost-brittle branches when they're stepped on. Go blind in the sudden headlights of passing cars. Regain sight.
"Okay, slow-mo," Dean says, and Cas lets Dean move him through the motions of the first defensive take-down. The floor was a bad place to be in a fight, but if you were going down, you wanted to take the bastard down with you. Hands fisted in the shoulders of Cas' trench coat, foot hooking around the back of Cas' calf, and he lets himself drop backwards, but Cas - stubborn, immovable Cas, who Dean suddenly remembers is tenfold stronger than any of the bar toughs he's pulled this one on - Cas holds his weight and Dean is left bent over backwards, clutching the lapels of Cas' coat and looking like an idiot.
"Cas," he says. "Cas, you gotta fall."
Something hard and angry passes over Cas' face, and then he shudders and lets himself go and they're hitting the ground, Cas heavy and loose on top of Dean, and Dean's flipping them over, rolling them through the tall grass until he's on top of Cas with his knees bracketing Cas' chest and his hand on Cas' throat, breathing hard.
Beneath him, Cas is still. He isn't breathing hard - he barely seems to be breathing at all - but Cas' jugular is jumping under Dean's thumb, and the skin of his throat is hot and soft. He's been shaving, Dean realizes, distantly. Castiel feels real instead of a concept, and he feels human, and at the intersection -
Tentatively, Cas' hands come to rest on Dean's thighs, palms sliding towards his hips, and Dean scrambles off, cheeks burning. After a moment Cas rises more sedately and brushes snow off his shoulders, his legs. There are faint watermarks on his back, Dean notices. The knees of his jeans are wet and cold, and there's a dark hot scratchy feeling building low in his stomach, skin tight and thrumming like a thin-skinned drum.
"If that was you trying to overpower me, that was one sucky attempt," he tries, hoarse, and Cas' eyes narrow at him. "In fact, let's just - ignore that whole thing entirely, okay?"
Cas' mouth tightens, and then he steps forward, cool hands coming up to cup Dean's neck.
"No," Cas says, low and rough, "No, I will not," and kisses him.
He's clumsy, inexperienced. He tastes like a forest fire. A million comparisons hurtle through Dean's mind, similes considered and discarded in the space of an instant - infinite ways of making sense of this moment, as burning, as drowning, as kissing, the smooth slick motion of lips to lips. None of them are big enough to hold what this is. And Dean's caught between kissing back and pushing him away, fight and flight, writhing between submission and safety from the heat that cuts through the ease of numbness. Cas doesn't seem to know what he wants, either, besides the obvious; he kisses Dean's lips, the corner of his mouth, the side of his jaw, mouths words into his skin. "I want this," he murmurs, "Dean, I want this -"
"I don't," Dean says. "Cas, I don't want anything, I can't -" and Cas kisses him again, desperation and heat and clumsiness, hands sweeping over his shoulders, his arms, tracing the muscles of his stomach; moving as if his skin burns. "You do," Cas says, sure. "You do, Dean, you are not broken, you just need to - ah! - to remember." He hesitates, then cups Dean's erection through his jeans. "To remember this." Dean swallows, Adam's apple bobbing. He isn't, he doesn't - but God -
"Fuck, Cas, get us out of here before someone calls the cops on us," he says, and the world reshapes itself around them, color and shape twisting in the corner of his eye. He kisses Cas back, harder now, walking him backwards, stumbling into buckets spray-painted with PROPERTY OF VALLES MINES JANITORIAL STAFF -
("Seriously?" he gasps. "A closet? This closet?"
"I am not thinking clearly," Cas says, deadpan.)
- until they slam into the wall, Cas with his shoulders knocking against shelves, sending their contents flying. "Ow, Jesus -" Dean starts when a bottle of Lysol hits him in the head, but loses it somewhere in Cas' mouth. He's got Cas caught between him and the shelf, and then suddenly Cas flips them, pressing Dean against the wall, hands under his t-shirt and tasting skin. There's nothing in his world but this, every molecule full of Cas, his senses singing the blood and flesh and skin, no space for any sense of himself beyond what he's touching, blind, no space for air; Cas leans in for another kiss, and it's too much.
"Cas, please," he begs, and something in it stills Cas for a moment, breathing into the heavy dark space between their mouths. It's not much, but it's enough. A little space to go on. A little bit of himself to regain back. He fumbles with the trench, popping a button on Cas' shirt - seriously, how many layers is he wearing? "You gotta let me touch you," he says, and Cas arches prettily under his hands, sweeping nonsense circles onto Dean's stomach, dipping lower. He pauses, slows.
"Something wrong?" Dean asks.
"I don't know what to do," Cas says. He sounds frustrated, but the desperation of before has smoothed over. Not vanished; burnished. Hardened, and refined. Dean's amulet is still around Cas' neck, and tangles his fist in it, uses it to pull them closer.
"Just follow my lead," Dean says. "You can do that, right?"
"You know that I can," Cas says, pressing down on the hard line of Dean's hipbones with his thumbs. Dean shivers at the sensation, cords of pain-pleasure whipping up and down his spine, and catches Cas' wrists in his hands. Stability, and balance. Stilling the endless circling.
"But you won't always, will you," Dean says, flatly. "Won't always follow my lead."
"Not always," Cas answers. "But enough."
*
The next night, he manages to wrestle Cas down for the first time. Cas is stronger than him, for now, but they have a system, they've worked out the rules and a rhythm. If what Dean's doing would take down a human, then Cas goes down. Dean suspects that Cas may have let him win this one, but he doesn't really care. Another Hunter dead today, another earthquake, and daily Sam burns with anger, like someone shot him up with rock salt. Those are the things he cares about. Those are the wars.
"Say uncle," he pants.
"...Why?" Castiel asks. He's not even breathing hard.
"Declaration of surrender," Dean says, grinning, and Cas laughs, quietly, under his breath.