Chapter Text
prologue
Cas claws out of the Empty covered in black oil. He’s drenched in it, head to toe, gasping mouth showing brilliantly white teeth in contrast. His eyes are wild and unfocused, lashes sticky, and his hand clutches Dean’s forearm in a bruising grip. Dean’s hollering to Sam, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, but Sam is at his side in a second, grabbing Dean around the waist to dig his heels in and help pull him backward. Together, they drag Cas the rest of the way through the bubbling pothole of tar on the forest floor.
The force of how hard they have to yank topples them backward, Cas landing awkwardly half on Dean’s shins and half sprawled out on the leafy ground. He’s gasping, over and over, and Dean wrenches himself up to sitting so he can drag Cas kneeling upright, hands alighting on his shoulders, his collarbone, the vulnerable underside of his jaw. Everywhere he touches is sticky-black, hot and slick like drying blood.
“Dean,” Cas rasps. His voice breaks, Dean’s name a hoarse whisper.
“Hey, hey,” Dean says. He crushes Cas close, smearing black on his shirt, on his jacket. He puts his hand to the nape of Cas’s neck, where the Empty’s muck is greasy in his hair. “You’re okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you, alright? Sam, the blankets —”
Sam scrambles up to get the bundle Dean shoved into the backseat before they left, and all Dean can do is clutch at Cas, wiping slime off his face with his sleeve cuff. Cas is crying, he realizes, tears making streaks down his filthy face — Dean has never seen him cry like this, maybe never seen anyone, dead silent and grasping with hands that dig half-moon fingernail imprints into Dean’s forearms.
Sam is back with the blankets. He wraps one around Cas’s shoulders and lets Dean swipe the other out of his hands so he can bundle Cas up into it, tight as he can, as if that can possibly contain the anguish bleeding out of him.
“Get the car running,” Dean says, eyes snapping up to Sam.
“We need to finish the ritual,” Sam says. Behind him, the hole leading down into the Empty bubbles and boils.
He’s right, but Dean hates it. “Finish it, then,” he growls.
Sam nods, tight-lipped, and opens the spellbook to begin the incantation. Cas’s legs give out and he pitches forward, falling the rest of the way into Dean’s lap in a mockery of a pieta — Dean catches him up into his arms and rocks a little, back and forth. The dazed panic of the past few weeks is beginning to melt into familiar we just cheated death disbelief, his whole chest aching like a numb limb roused to pins and needles. Cas is alive. Cas is alive and breathing and trembling beneath the blankets, and Dean squeezes his eyes closed as he presses his face into Cas’s muddy hair.
Sam finishes the incantation. The hole in the forest floor snaps closed with an uneasy rumble, spitting up black bile before it folds down on itself into nothing. Sam prods the spot with the toe of his boot until he’s satisfied, then gives Dean a sharp nod.
Dean rubs Cas’s back, up and down over the blanket. “Let’s go home,” he says.
Cas says nothing in reply, but his fistful of Dean’s shirt tightens minutely.
Back at the bunker, Dean runs Cas a bath. He half expects to be shoved out of the bathroom so Cas can handle it himself, but he isn’t, so he doesn’t leave. Cas stands in the middle of the room staring vacantly in front of himself while Dean turns on the tap, drizzles soap into the water to make suds while the tub fills, shooting little cautious glances toward Cas out of the corners of his eyes.
“Okay,” Dean announces with false brightness, standing up again. “Let’s get this shit off you, yeah?”
Cas’s trench coat is probably ruined. Dean’s throat feels tight as he goes to push it off Cas’s shoulders, easing it down — Cas woodenly removes his arms from the sleeves and unknots his tie, fingers clumsy as they start on the buttons of his shirt.
“I gotcha, lemme help,” Dean says, and steps in to finish the task. Cas’s tie hangs limply down from a lax hand, dragging against the tile floor.
It isn’t Cas’s silence that freaks Dean out. On the whole, Dean would say he and Cas have spent the majority of their time together in silence, soaking in the uneasy camaraderie they were never meant to share. It’s that blank look on his face that scares him, his slack jaw, the way he lets Dean maneuver him around to undress him the rest of the way with no protest.
“In the tub, buddy,” Dean murmurs, taking Cas’s elbow to help him step into the bath.
He pointedly does not look at anything but the parts of Cas he’s touching, his hand, his bent elbow, the broad wing of his shoulder blade. Cas slides into the water and sighs, blue eyes slipping shut as his head bows forward. Dean’s tongue is thick in his mouth.
He’s struck by a memory of a program he’d caught a couple minutes of one time while channel flipping in a motel, a nature special about wildlife caught in an oil spill. Dean pours shampoo into his hand and thinks about those small sad pelicans covered in black gunk, and the care with which their rescuers cleaned them.
“Gonna do your hair first, alright?” he says, keeping his voice soft as he starts to massage it into Cas’s scalp. The Empty’s residue looks thick as molasses, but it melts away pretty easy, sloughing off Cas’s head in filthy rivulets. Dean cups his hands under the running faucet and pours clean water over Cas’s head by the handful, repeating the process as many times as it takes to make his hair run clear. Then he grabs a washcloth and squirts soap into it, rubbing his hand against the cloth to make it foam before he begins applying it to Cas’s face.
It isn’t until he’s rinsed Cas’s face that he realizes just how haggard the guy looks, dark circles under his eyes and cracked, chapped lips. Dean wrings out the washcloth over the tub and gets more soap.
“Thank you,” Cas whispers.
Dean stills with his hand mid-scrub across Cas’s bicep and swallows hard. “Don’t mention it.”
He’s washing Cas’s hand, cleaning the webbing between his fingers, when he notices the mark on his elbow. “What the hell?” he mutters, pulling Cas’s arm out of the murky water so he can see the puffy red scar better — it blisters around the jut of his elbow in the shape of a hand print, and Dean’s stomach swoops when he realizes.
That’s from his hand. Seared into Cas’s body to show where Dean had grasped him as he pulled him out of the Empty.
“There’s another here,” Cas says, twisting his torso around to face Dean with a quiet splash and a ripple, and tips his head to the side. There’s another hand print right where his neck meets his shoulder, the shape of the fingers splayed wide. It shines wetly under the bathroom fluorescents, and Dean knows it’s his hand, but the point is brought effectively home when he fits his palm to the shape that’s been burned into Cas’s skin and finds it a perfect match.
“Sorry,” Dean says, rough. “Looks like I got you pretty good.”
Cas’s eyes are bloodshot and complicated. “Thank you for using both hands,” he says. He puts his own on top of Dean’s, pressing it firmer into his neck.
Dean strokes over the raised burn where the pad of his thumb has branded Cas, struck dumb by the sight.
“Cas down for the count?” Sam asks.
Dean is sitting on the floor with his back to the hallway wall, arms on his bent knees, and glances up at Sam. He nods.
Sam looks at the closed door behind which Dean hopes Cas is actually resting. He sighs, crossing his arms over his chest, and Dean is suddenly more claustrophobic than he knows how to handle.
“Keep watch for a bit,” Dean mutters, shoving himself up to standing again.
Sam frowns at him, opening his mouth, but Dean is already staggering toward the door, and has stopped listening. He makes it outside before nausea overtakes him, but only just — he throws up in the bushes by the front door, bent over double, hands braced on his knees. He retches, coughing up bile.
Sam is there a second later, front door slamming closed behind him, and Dean can’t muster up the energy to do much more than wave him off when Sam tries to ask if he’s okay. He spits one last time into the dirt, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and makes himself stand upright. He’s going to last maybe two minutes before he has to go inside and brush his teeth, but the cool air outside feels good while he can stand the bad taste in his mouth, even with Sam’s eyes boring holes into the back of his head.
“We did good, Dean,” Sam says. “We got him back.”
Dean huffs a hollow laugh, because yeah, that’s always what it’s about, isn’t it? Cas or Sam or Dean getting themselves lost or dead, and then taking turns dragging each other back from the brink. He shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets.
In the distance, a bird is singing, one of those mournful little warbles that puts Dean’s teeth on edge. It’s only barely the afternoon, the sun is warm where it lands on him, but his arms have both broken out in gooseflesh and he doesn’t think he can completely blame it on the residual smears of the Empty that lick up his forearms.
“You gonna talk to me?” Sam asks eventually.
“I’m tired of this, man,” Dean says. He scuffs his foot on the ground, kicking a pebble. “I’m just fucking tired of it.”
The sympathetic face Sam is making when Dean turns to look at him has Dean’s hackles threatening to rise again. He shakes off the urge to snap and glances away, toward the bunker where Cas is inside. He feels insane — he wants to dash indoors again and check, wants to make sure it wasn’t just a trick of the light, that the bed he’d tucked Cas away into after his bath is still full of angel like he left it. It’s the same feeling that has made Dean check on Sam in the middle of the night at least once a week since they were children.
“We got him back, yeah,” Dean says. Sam nods, watching him. “So now what?”