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The waiting room is clean: bright white walls and chairs lined up evenly, a couple careful feet of distance between the arms of each of them. There’s a table full of glossy magazines in front of Dean, and a picture of some fruit that looks like stock footage hanging to the right of the reception desk.
Dean doesn’t reach for a magazine, and he doesn’t let his gaze wander from that picture. Breathes in. Breathes out.
There isn’t anybody else in here, except for the receptionist who had smiled politely at Dean as he wrote down his information without meeting her eyes. He woke up speechless again this morning. Hadn’t been a surprise, but the bitter tang of disappointment still sours the back of his tongue when he thinks about it. Today is a big day and he just—he just wants to be normal.
God, he wants to get up and leave. If it weren’t for Sammy he would—if it weren’t for Sammy he wouldn’t have stepped foot in this place at all—but the kid had looked so hopeful when he handed the pamphlet to Dean and flashed those big puppy eyes and told him that he really thought it would help, that he just wants Dean to be happy. To please go to one appointment, just one, before he wrote it off completely.
Damn him. Damn Dean’s own soft heart.
“Dean Winchester?”
His gaze skips over the picture to the doorway at the sound of his name, where a woman in jeans stands with a clipboard. Dean can’t quite manage a smile, but he nods stiffly and rises to follow her.
They don’t wear scrubs in this place, which makes some amount of sense; like Sam kept saying, it’s not officially a medical facility, not gonna come recommended by any kind of a doctor. It’s closer to a massage parlor, in an official sense.
To Dean, it sounds more like the kinda place their dad woulda had them burn to the ground. If the information in that pamphlet meant what it said, that might not have worked too well.
The woman leads him down a hallway painted a soft sage green. Her footsteps are silent, but the tread of Dean’s boots echoes loudly in the narrow space.
He’s breathing a little too quickly.
“Wait in here,” she says, pushing open one of the doors on the left side and showing him to a room with a table in the center. “Castiel will be with you in a moment.”
Another nod, and she leaves, shutting the door behind her.
Castiel. Well, it sure sounds like an angel’s name.
There’s supposed to be a whole host of the feathery bastards working here, in this strange little business with no name on the door. They’re healers—they’re soul healers.
Dean doesn’t have much faith.
By the time the door has opened again he hasn’t moved, just standing in the center of the room like an idiot, and he jumps a little and flushes as he moves out of the way.
Somebody chuckles behind him, warm and low. Dean turns around, sneaking a glance.
This must be Castiel. He’s sort of rumpled looking, dark hair a mess on his head, bags beneath his eyes and a face full of smile lines. The shirt stretched across his broad shoulders and chest is pale blue. Soft. Makes his eyes look nice.
“Hello, Dean,” he says, and extends a hand for Dean to shake like they’re in the middle of a goddamn business deal. His skin is warm, soft in a way Dean’s has never gotten to be. Dean swallows and shakes. “I’m Castiel, and I’ll be taking care of you today.”
Dean wants to turn around. Wants to tell him that actually no, thank you, nobody’s gonna be doing any taking care of Dean Winchester, today or tomorrow, especially not a fucking angel, and take his hand back and walk out the door and climb into Baby and drive the hell away.
Except he doesn’t do any of that. Except his hand is still clasped in Castiel’s, except there is something about Castiel’s voice that slows the breath in Dean’s chest, except, except, except.
Castiel watches him for a moment more. He doesn’t seem to be waiting for an answer, and that’s… nice. Maybe the lady out front told him that Dean don’t speak, or maybe he simply ain’t pushy.
It’s a relief either way.
“Have a seat, if you please, Dean,” Cas tells him, and gestures to the low table behind Dean. He lets go of Dean’s hand. Dean doesn’t think the way his skin buzzes slightly as if he’s just touched a livewire is a coincidence. “You may take your coat off if you wish.”
Dean very much does not wish.
Security blanket, Sam says in his head, like a know-it-all. Dean frowns down at his boots and leaves it on.
Castiel moves easily around the room, surety radiating out of every inch of him. He’s comfortable with this space, and with himself; he belongs here.
When he bends his head to read the folder full of Dean’s information, something flashes like electricity in the iris of his eyes.
Dean doesn’t think he wants his soul to be healed.
It sounds invasive. The thought of somebody sticking their hands up in there and fiddling around makes him sick, makes the back of his neck cold with sweat and his own hands shaky. He knows what it’s like to have your soul fucked with. He knows what it’s like to be outside of your body, to be twisted and stabbed and cut and burned, violated in a way he didn’t know somebody could be violated—
“This is your first time visiting us, I see.”
A nod. Cas is still looking at the papers, and whether it’s because he’s still not done reading or because he’s giving Dean himself an excuse not to be looked at, Dean’s grateful.
“Alright,” Cas says. He closes the folder and sets it on the counter, and then he looks at Dean. Cas smiles again. “I’m sure you know that I and my coworkers are angels,” he says.
Dean did know, but it’s still sort of a trip to hear it said aloud. Yeah, he thinks, but when he opens his mouth nothing comes out so he slams it shut and nods again.
A real fucking angel.
“We specialize in healing damaged souls,” Cas continues. “Human souls, mostly, though of course we don’t turn anyone else away. Since it’s your first time here I’d like to take a look at your soul, assess how I can be of help to you. Does that sound alright, Dean?”
Here it comes.
Dean wonders if his hands will feel like Alastair’s on Dean’s soul, cold and harsh, every brush of his touch an agony before he even got the knives out. Maybe Cas’ll do something to numb that—he’s an angel after all—but the fact of the matter remains that he’ll still be touching it. Touching Dean’s soul.
One more nod. His jaw hurts.
Castiel moves close and Dean braces himself, shoulders squared like he’s about to take a killing shot, spine so tense that it aches—but Castiel doesn’t lift his hands. Castiel doesn’t touch him.
And something—and there must be something wrong with Dean, because his first thought isn’t one of relief, it’s one of shame. Shame that his soul’s so busted, so ugly that Cas won’t even try.
“Dean,” says Cas again. He dips his chin down in an attempt to meet Dean’s eyes, but Dean just looks at his boots again. The scuffed toes, the mud around the sole.
He’s doing this for Sammy. Sammy wants him to do this.
“You know that I won’t hurt you, yes?” Cas asks. Dean bristles—he’s not a fucking kid, he doesn’t need his hand held like he’s going to the doctor’s office for the first time, he’s been to Hell and back, he’s not good —but those words are caught in his throat like a tightly-held fist. “I’m here to help you, Dean, to heal you. You won’t feel any pain, and if you do, we’ll stop immediately.”
Cas sure does like to say Dean’s name a bunch. He tosses it into his sentences like a diversion. Like an anchoring point.
Dean looks at him. Shrugs, short and sharp.
There’s no smile on his face any longer, but he doesn’t look disappointed or disgusted or repulsed.
Doesn’t look hungry, either, the way Alastair had. Like he’d been starving for years, and Dean’s soul was a buffet.
He just looks kind. Unfailingly so.
Something in Dean’s chest unwinds. He’s still not looking forward to this, but he forces his shoulders down and closes his eyes, tipping his face up toward Cas.
“Oh,” Cas says quietly. His voice is like a wave, the scrape of it gentle on the sand. “Thank you, Dean.”
He’s got no clue why Castiel is thanking him, but he doesn’t bother to fight it.
The room they’re in is carpeted, and he listens to the quiet whisper of Cas’s steps as he moves a bit closer. When Cas lifts a hand and places it over Dean’s chest, Dean is ready for him.
Nothing happens at first. Nothing happens except Dean feels warm all over, like the sun-baked ground, warm in a wave from the top of his head to his toes; nothing happens except the tension that has been building up in Dean for three months, for a year, for his entire life snaps like a string being cut and he slumps forward, bonelessly relaxed.
He realizes distant, as if through a dream.
This is what it feels like. This is Cas touching his soul.
“Oh,” Cas murmurs again. There’s a note to his voice that Dean hasn’t heard before, and he’d cringe away with embarrassment if he didn’t feel so relaxed.
He’s sure his soul is gnarled, scared and twisted and branded with the marks of all the things that have been done to him, of all the things he’s done. You don’t kill beings for a living and come out of it with a sparkling soul. You don’t live through being a demon’s plaything and you don’t watch your father die without doing anything about it and emerge on the other side with something beautiful inside of you.
Dean doesn’t want Castiel seeing this part of him. But it feels so good, it feels so safe…
“Look at you,” Cas says softly. It’s clearly rhetorical but there’s a part of Dean that longs to respond to the command, so he opens his eyes.
Castiel is standing above him, the color of a star.
Dean’s breath hangs tremulous in his chest. Cas is glowing, silver-bright, the light pouring out of him in long tendrils and enveloping Dean. Grace, the pamphlet said. Castiel’s grace is touching his soul.
He is so beautiful that Dean’s eyes grow hot, and he has to close them again.
“Are you alright?” Cas asks him, low, like he really cares. He’s got at his job. He’s damn good at his job. He’s astounding. “No pain?”
Dean shakes his head. He couldn’t speak even if his voice didn’t decide to up and leave him every time he freaks out a little. His throat has welled shut.
One human ain’t supposed to see all this purity. Especially not a human like Dean.
“Good,” Castiel tells him, and then he does— something, something with his grace, something that feels like a caress, and Dean has to bite back the horrible soft keen in his throat when, on top of that, Cas uses his corporeal hand to curve over the point of Dean’s shoulder. Even through the layers of Dean’s coat and flannel and t-shirt Cas is warm. “Somebody hurt you very badly before, didn’t they?”
Dean doesn’t figure he has to answer that.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Cas says. His voice is low, firm: the fervency of it surprises Dean. The only other person who’s ever cared so much when bad shit happens to him is Sammy, and even then Dean will only tell him so much. Kid shouldn’t have to bear Dean’s burdens on top of his own.
Maybe Dean does make a sound. Something questioning and ashamed.
Cas squeezes his shoulder and his grace soothes over one of the scars Dean can feel on his soul.
“You’re wonderful,” Cas whispers, and that doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t know Dean, but still. Still. “Just rest, Dean.”
Against all odds, he does.
He’s not sure how long Cas works on him: untangling knots, soothing over cracks and lesions, pressing cool sweet solace down on the open burns. Dean drifts, almost weightless, held up by the places Cas touches him. He’s never felt like this before. Never felt so whole.
There’s no way he deserves this, but he isn’t a strong enough man to walk out.
When he’s aware of his surroundings again Dean is curled on his side on the table, a pillow beneath his cheek.
He blinks his eyes open. Castiel is crouched on the floor, eye-level with Dean, and Dean’s hand is once more in his.
Castiel smiles at him. “You have the most beautiful soul,” he says.
He shouldn’t be allowed to lie to Dean like that. Still, Dean feels better than he’s maybe ever felt, so he lets it slide.
Dean struggles to sit up, loose-limbed and floating, everything swaying a little around him. It’s almost like he’s drunk, or high, except better. Except Castiel is helping him, and Castiel just touched his soul, and it didn’t hurt or freeze or feel violating in any way at all.
Cas stands and steadies Dean by his shoulders again. Dean doesn’t realize he’s leaning into the comfort of his palms until Cas smoothes a thumb over his collar bone, and by then there’s really no point in pulling away, right?
When he feels like he isn’t gonna fall over he sits up a little straighter, and Castiel’s hands fall aside.
Dean wishes today was a speaking day. He’d like to thank him. He would.
He wipes his face, conscious that it’s wet and glad he wasn’t aware when he was crying. God, that’s fucking humiliating.
Nobody’s touched him so kindly in a long time.
Cas takes a seat in the chair at the end of the table, folds his hands carefully in his lap, and looks at Dean with those deep blue eyes.
“Do you feel any better?” he asks quietly.
Dean scoffs. Fucking of course he feels better, he just got some kinda cosmic massage from one of God’s purest creations. He feels like he could fly.
Castiel’s smile is the biggest yet. He’s lovely when he smiles. Doesn’t have the same blinding brilliance as he does when his grace is activated, maybe, but there’s a quiet kind of beauty to Cas in his human form that Dean can’t drag his eyes away from.
“I’m glad,” Cas says, and he looks it. “Your soul is one of the most injured that I’ve seen in a long time.” He grows solemn at that, leaning forward slightly in his chair. Dean’s body sways toward him on instinct, but he jerks himself back. “I closed your open wounds and took care of some of the deepest injuries, but there is much healing still to be done. You’re tender—think of it as new scar tissue growing, only healthily this time, but still fragile and given to pain if it isn’t maintained.” He hesitates, lips parted around a breath. “I’d like you to come back, Dean.”
He should be disappointed that he’s not fixed. It wasn’t expensive to come here but he’s not made of cold hard cash so if he makes a habit of this his wallet will be aching in a couple weeks—plus it sort of sucks to know he’s so broken that Cas is gonna need to pull out the big guns.
But coming back means that Cas’s grace will make his soul feel as wonderful as it did again, and Dean just can’t complain about that.
Cas must see the agreement on his face, because he nods and stands, offering a hand down to Dean to pull him to his feet.
Palm-to-palm, like touching the sun. Something deep in Dean shivers.
He’s slightly unsteady, but it isn’t anything he can’t manage. Still, Cas stands close as he walks him to the door.
Dean stops him right before he can open it.
He closes his eyes again. Maybe if he can’t see it’ll help.
“Thanks,” he rasps finally, the word torn rough around the edges, sharp and mangled, voice aching from disuse. He cringes at the sound of himself, face hot, but forces himself to look up at Cas anyway.
Cas touches the strip of Dean’s wrist that shows beneath his coat sleeve. If he moved his fingertips half an inch down he’d feel the race of Dean’s pulse.
“Thank you for trusting me, Dean,” Cas says seriously. “I hope I see you again.”
*
Sam calls when Dean’s driving.
Dean lets it go to voicemail, because there’s no fucking way he’ll be able to vocalize anything else today, and waits until he’s at home and sitting on his couch beneath his heaviest blanket he owns before he pulls his phone out and navigates to their text chain.
DEAN
What’s up bitch
SAM
Are you out? How did it go? Are you ok? Was it a scam? If it was I can totally shut them down.
He smiles at the message, endeared despite himself at Sam’s enthusiasm. He’s a good kid—well, not a kid anymore, not really. Not with a full-time fancy lawyer job and a house and a serious girlfriend and probably a bunch of bills. And apparently the ability to shut down shady fake angel businesses.
DEAN
Hold your horses Samantha it was all on the up and up
I’m ok. Feel pretty good. The guy wants me to come back
SAM
That’s amazing Dean!!! Told you it would help :D
DEAN
Yeah yeah enough about me. How’s Eileen?
His effort steer the conversation into not-about-Dean-anymore-territory successful, Dean lets himself relax back into the cushions and smiles at the influx of messages Sam pours into his phone. There’s nothing in the world he loves better than knowing Sammy’s happy. Every decision Dean’s ever made—dropping out of high school and getting a couple jobs so he could pay to send Sam to college, roaming around the country with their dad killing monsters and doing whatever John said to keep Sammy out of the life, even getting dragged down to Hell in place of John Winchester so at least Sam would have one living parent left on earth—is worth it if he knows Sam’s happy.
Dean should get up and eat something and change. He falls asleep on the couch instead, phone screen lighting the room up blue.
When he sleeps, he dreams of warmth.
*
Dean puts it off as long as he can, but a week and half later when he’s buckled over with pain three times in the middle of working on somebody’s engine at the garage, he gives in and calls the number on that pamphlet again.
“Charlie speaking,” says the receptionist from last time, chipper and bright-sounding even though it’s nearly five pm on a Friday and Dean can’t imagine wanting anything right now except to go home. “How may I help you?”
“Hi,” Dean says, pressing speaker and resting his phone on his dashboard so his hands are free. He’s sitting in the Impala but she’s still parked, idling on the curb outside the garage. His soul aches, long and low like a bruise. “This is Dean Winchester. I was in a little over a week ago?”
“Oh, Dean, hey!” Charlie says, sounding weirdly happy about hearing from him. He remembers the way she hadn’t stared when he couldn’t force himself to speak. A good egg, then. “How are you?”
“I’m, uh…” he rubs a hand over his sternum, remembering the way Cas had touched him there before channeling his grace beneath Dean’s skin. It doesn’t have the same effect. “Honestly, I’ve been better.”
“Shit, sorry, duh, ” says Charlie, chagrined. “I’m a total dork, obviously if you’re calling here things aren’t hunky-dory.”
He laughs without thinking about, amused even though every time his heart beats his soul yearns for the sunshine-touch of Cas’s grace. “Nah, that’s fine, Charlie,” he says. “I was just wanting to… um, I’d like to schedule another appointment. With—with Castiel, if he’s available.”
He blushes, by himself in his dark car on a street that nobody else is frequenting, just from saying the words. God, he’s a mess. He really shouldn’t be going back there.
Charlie’s voice smiles. “Oh, he’ll be available. Does tomorrow work for you?"
“You all are open on Saturdays?”
“Most of the angels aren’t working, but Castiel always does,” she says. It doesn’t surprise Dean; if Cas makes his living healing fractured souls it stands to reason that he’d work Saturdays. “And anyway,” she adds, “I’m sure he’d make time for you regardless.”
Dean has no fucking clue what to say to that.
He must be silent too long, because Charlie takes pity on him with a bright laugh. “How ‘bout three?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Dean says, and presses hard down on his chest, and hopes he can wait that long. “Three sounds perfect.”
*
There isn’t a wait when Dean shows up the next day. Charlie smiles sunnily at him from behind the reception desk and, telling him which room to find his way to, waves him on back.
Dean tries not to look too obvious about the fact that he’s hustling, but probably fails.
Every time he breathes in he can feel those faulty places in his soul, those imperfections, those fissures. They hurt worse than they ever did when he was entirely broken.
Cas is already in the room when Dean arrives. He looks up with a smile, but as soon as he catches sight of Dean that smile dips down into something creased and worried and he comes toward Dean with both hands raised. “Dean,” he murmurs, and Dean keeps walking until Cas is right in front of him. “I’m so sorry.”
Dean doesn’t know what he means—doesn’t care to. Shakes his head.
Cas takes Dean’s wrist in his hand and lifts it away from Dean’s chest, replacing it with one of his own.
It works. Immediately Dean sags forward, head hanging, breath evening out, just from the warmth of Cas’s palm.
“Hurts,” he manages.
“I know,” Castiel says. “I know, Dean. Come sit down—” and guides him over to the table.
Cas doesn’t waste any time talking. He stretches his grace out immediately, suffusing Dean with the kind of warmth that turns his bones to liquid.
“You should have come back sooner,” Cas says, with a voice like he’d be giving Dean hell if he wasn’t so professional, and Dean should be annoyed by that probably—he doesn’t know this guy—but instead he just winces a bit. It feels like Cas is disappointed in him, and that doesn’t… feel good.
“I was busy,” he says, a little gruff. Great. The third thing Castiel’s ever heard him say and he’s sounded like an asshole each time.
“Dean, you’re clearly in a lot of pain,” Cas says. There is a crease between his eyebrows, deep; he’s wearing a shirt the color of the hallway walls today and the long sleeves of it fold down over his palms, brush Dean’s neck when Cas steadies him with a touch to his shoulder. “You shouldn’t put off taking care of yourself if you can help it. Just because this isn’t officially a medical practice doesn’t mean that they aren’t real injuries you’ve sustained.”
He’d answer—argue, maybe, or maybe just fold in on himself and agree—but Cas is glowing again, as bright as the curve of a storm, and Dean’s throat closes around whatever he was going to say.
“I am sorry,” Cas says again a little while later, when some of the ache beneath Dean’s skin has eased away. He’s watching Dean close, blinking very little: Dean doesn’t know if it’s an angel quirk or just plain Cas, but the guy doesn’t seem to understand that staring is rude. Captivated, Dean can’t look away. “I knew that you would feel some discomfort again without another session, but I didn’t believe it would get this bad. I should have warned you regardless.”
He sounds mournful, giving the situation much more gravity than it’s worth. His grace doesn’t dim but it turns a darker color, a foggy shade that makes Dean want to reach up to the hand on his chest and hold it.
“That’s ok, Cas,” he says, and gives him a small smile. “I’m pretty fucked up.”
Something about what Dean just said makes Cas’s eyes widen slightly. Makes the curve of his lips go soft.
Dean’s got no idea what, but his soul buzzes happily anyway.
“You aren’t fucked up,” Cas says. He forms the words carefully, like he isn’t used to saying them; it’s overwhelmingly endearing. Dean wants to lean into him. “You’re very badly injured, and it isn’t your fault.”
There he goes with that again. Dean would fight him on it if he didn’t feel like this, languid and safe and watched over, relaxed as a cat soaking up a sunbeam.
As it is, he’s gotta close his eyes again. He knows Cas is looking at his very soul right now, seeing all the evidence of everything Dean’s ever done laid out like a roadmap, but for some reason the idea of Cas meeting his eyes and seeing Dean in them is too much right now.
Dean realizes he’s afraid. Afraid that Cas will reach the most horrible ugly part of him, and turn him away.
“Somebody, um.” He stops, words leaving him for a moment, and Cas’s grace surges slightly. It wraps Dean’s soul up tight. Dean shivers. “Uh, I was in Hell.”
He leaves it at that.
Cas is quiet for a long time. His grace sorts through strands of Dean’s soul and it feels almost like fingers running through Dean’s hair, soothing him, even though he knows Cas is healing deep-set bruises that Dean can’t see. It feels unspeakably good. Dean shivers again, unable to stop it.
There is something so intimate about this, so gentle, so diametrically in opposition to anything that happened to Dean down there in the pit.
“It wasn’t supposed to be you down there,” Cas murmurs finally. “Was it?”
Dean can’t do anything but shake his head.
It was some kind of deal gone wrong. John was faced with Hell’s flames—his price to pay for killing the demon who killed his wife, he said—and when Dean offered to pay the toll instead of him, John had taken him up on it immediately.
Just like that.
He’d watched his son be dragged down, and he hadn’t done anything to stop it.
That shouldn’t have hurt Dean as badly as it did—a deal was a deal, after all—but shit. It wouldn’t have hurt the guy to try.
“You must have been gone a long time,” Cas says quietly. There’s so much of his grace flooding through Dean now that he’s dizzy with it; it tastes like a thunderstorm on the back of his tongue. “You’ve built up many scars.”
He’s holding onto Cas, he realizes, hand wound up in the front of his shirt. He can’t make himself pull away.
“Forty years, Hell-time,” he says. It hurts to breathe in again, but it ain’t ‘cuz of his soul. “That was the deal.”
He shouldn’t have said that. Sammy don’t even know the truth: thinks it was just the one year that passed up here on the surface.
Cas doesn’t answer him. Just touches him soft.
For a long time Dean lets himself be washed in the tide of Castiel’s grace, winnowed gently from side to side, held so close by something so perfect that it’s almost a different kind of ache. It doesn’t seem fair that he should get to have something like this, and not the thousands of other people on earth who are hurt. It seems… it almost feels wrong to let himself be healed.
Once again, he can’t make himself pull away.
When Castiel is done he eases his grace away from Dean gradually, leaves all the surface of him gently warmed.
“Thanks,” Dean tells him. It’s ragged-soft with too much breath.
“Of course, Dean,” Cas says, sitting back on his chair. He draws his hands away and Dean looks at the ridge of his knuckles. “You don’t have to thank me.”
“Aw.” Dean shrugs. He checks his face surreptitiously, glad to see he didn’t cry this time. “Well I’m a polite guy.”
There is still a tinge of something luminescent around Cas’s pupils. “Yes,” he says.
Dean breathes in and out, slow. Usually he feels hollow, empty, wind whipping through his husk.
Not so today. If somebody tried to convince Dean he’d just swallowed the sun, he wouldn’t be a hard sell.
“So, Doc,” Dean says. He smiles again, and it’s easier this time. Cas’s eyelids flicker down and then back up, very quick. “Think I’ll live?”
“Of course,” Cas says again, and Dean can’t tell if he’s serious or just keeping a straight face to be a little shit, but either way it makes Dean want to lean forward and touch the lines at the corners of his eyes. Which is an absolutely insane thing to want to do. Dean keeps his hands closed tight. “On top of its beauty, your soul is a remarkably resilient one.” He tips his head. “You’re strong.”
“Oh,” Dean says, a little dazed. “Um, good. Great.”
“Just so,” Cas says, and who fucking talks like that, he’s so charming, Dean is so charmed by him, and then, “We certainly aren’t therapists here either, you understand, but… I think you should be very proud of surviving what you did. I think you are a good man.”
Shit. Oh, what the hell.
“I gotta…” Dean says vaguely, standing unsteadily on his feet and hooking a thumb toward the door. His heart is beating double time, like a bird struggling out of a cage. “Uh, see you later, Cas.”
He’s out the door before Castiel can say anything else. Before Cas can look into his eyes and see.
*
Dean comes back. Of course he does.
Each time Charlie greets him in the waiting room and she always talks to Dean whether it’s a day he can talk back or not. He legitimately comes to look forward to seeing her. They’ve got all the same Star Wars opinions, which isn’t a thing to be taken lightly.
Cas is kind to him each time, too. Cas, with his soft smiles and big hands and his strange speech patterns.
It isn’t just Cas’s grace Dean is becoming addicted to.
He doesn’t try to talk about Dean’s time in Hell again, and he doesn’t try to tell Dean that he’s good. Dean isn’t sure if what he’s feeling is relief or not.
Dean’s been to see Cas four times when he wakes up one morning from the worst nightmare he’s had in months.
His soul feels brittle, feels curved in on itself like a wood shaving, sharp and bright with pain and ready to shatter inside him. With fumbling hands Dean texts Charlie—she’d given him her number a few visits ago—and sets up an appointment, not even attempting to speak.
She gets him in as soon as she can, but Dean won’t see anybody but Cas and it’s well into the evening before he’s got a slot available. When he finally walks back into the room he and Cas are always in and sees the bright slip of Cas’s blue eyes looking up at Dean from beneath his fringed eyelashes, a piece of Dean that he didn’t even realize was agitated settles.
They don’t speak as Dean gets settled on the table, hands shaking at his sides. He slides his coat off his shoulders—yeah, look at him, security blanket his ass—and leans toward Cas as Cas reaches up, his soul wanting for Cas, yearning for the touch of his grace—
Something gold catches in the corner of Dean’s vision. He looks, and he freezes.
There is a light emanating from him in long, looping tendrils.
“Dean,” Cas murmurs, a hitch in his voice. His eyes are round and incredibly gentle and Dean’s face burns, burns, burns. “Your soul is reaching out to me.”
Jesus, Cas doesn’t hold any punches, does he? He’s just gonna lay it all out there. They’re just gonna acknowledge this.
Dean’s soul shimmers, a swirl of colors moving beneath the golden surface like an oil-slick; it strains toward Castiel, and when Cas’s grace rises to meet it, it shines so brightly that Dean has to look away.
It’s absolutely mortifying. Dean couldn’t stop it if he tried.
“Sorry,” he mutters around the throb of his heart which has lodged itself neatly in his throat. “I can’t—I can’t stop it.”
“Dean, no, don’t apologize,” Castiel says. “I didn’t even have to touch you this time. This is remarkable.” And then, when Dean has the guts to look at him again, “ You are remarkable.”
He is smiling so wondrously. As if Dean is a marvel, someone to treasure.
Dean can’t take it anymore. He has to tell him.
“I let my father die,” Dean says.
Cas doesn’t move. He just watches Dean, softness in his eyes. He glows like a star.
Dean curls his hands into fists and makes himself keep talking. He has to. Cas can’t keep believing he’s good.
“We were hunting a werewolf in Kentucky,” he says. “The thing took a lunge at him and I just—I froze up, Cas. Couldn’t lift my gun, couldn’t get between ‘em. And the worst thing is,” he says, and his breath shakes in the cage of his ribs, “the worst thing is that I don’t even miss him.”
He doesn’t. He’d watched John Winchester die and he’d felt relief : at least now Sammy wouldn’t be called by a drunken, raging man at three in the morning, begging for him to throw his life away. At least now, Dean wouldn’t have to follow his father around the country, wouldn’t have to bail him out of jail at every turn, wouldn’t have to kill the things his father wanted killed and wash their blood off of his hands. Would never again take a trip to Hell in John Winchester’s place.
“I ain’t good, Cas,” he says. “I don’t deserve—whatever this is.”
Cas’s grace is still wound up in Dean’s soul, and Dean has no control whatsoever of what that part of him is doing—doesn’t control when it dims or when it flares firework-bright, doesn’t control the way it butts up against Cas like an eager cat.
Cas should turn him away. Dean thinks he might break apart if he does.
“A thousand of my siblings are dead because of me.”
Dean’s head jerks up so fast that his neck hurts. He stares at Cas. Good, sweet, beautiful Cas. Perfect Cas with his steadying hands.
He hasn’t looked away from Dean yet. He isn’t touching him physically, but his grace is tender.
“I was a commander in my own father’s army,” he murmurs softly, and his eyes grow distant, hazy; he is looking at Dean, but through a memory. “I led a company of my fellow soldiers, my siblings. They put their trust in me. They believed I would keep them safe.” Castiel smiles, but it’s sad. Dean longs to touch the dip of his chin. “But I was foolhardy, headstrong; I thought myself, and therefore those under my command, invincible. I led them into a battle we had no hope of winning, and I was captured by the enemy and made to watch as one by one they were killed. They had no chance.”
Dean’s eyes prick, hot, and without thinking about it he curls his hand around one of Cas’s own.
Cas glances up at Dean at the touch. He strokes his thumb over Dean’s knuckles.
“Cas,” Dean breathes. “That wasn’t your fault. You were captured; you didn’t want them to die.”
Quietly, Cas tips his head. “Perhaps,” he murmurs. “Perhaps not. It was nearly a millennium ago, but I have spent every moment of my life since then attempting atonement. It’s why I work here, doing this: healing those whose injuries cannot be touched by conventional medicine. Either way,” he says, cupping Dean’s hand in both of his, “you still think I’m a good man, don’t you? You still think I deserve kindness?”
“Of course you do,” Dean says. His voice comes out too gruff again, roughened by a lifetime of being told that any emotion must have harsh edges if he was going to dare to feel it. He grips Cas tight, hopes it hides the way he shakes. “You’re… you’re the most deserving person I’ve ever met.”
“Dean,” Cas says. He is so warm. “If I deserve kindness after what I’ve done, then why shouldn’t you?”
“You can’t ask me somethin’ like that, Cas,” Dean says. He wants to hide his face in the soft place beneath Cas’s shoulder. He wants . “You can’t…”
“Think about it,” Cas says, wrapping his grace around Dean’s shimmering soul, his hands around Dean’s unsteady hands. “Think about it for me, Dean.”
He will, because it’s Cas, and he’d do anything Cas asked. Curl up at Castiel’s feet if he wanted. Bury his head in Cas’s lap and just be still.
Consider that maybe he deserves goodness after all.
*
At the end of Dean’s sixth session Cas says, “I don’t think you should be my client any longer.”
Dean freezes up, quick as a shot. Feels his blood turn to ice.
His soul had still been detaching from Cas’s grace—a slow, reluctant process, one they simply have to wait out depending on how clingy Dean is feeling, which is usually pretty clingy—but it snaps back beneath Dean’s skin in the blink of an eye now. Rejected and acting like it.
He woke up this morning and couldn’t make himself speak, but even if he hadn’t, there’d be no hope for him now.
Dean stares at his boots. Nods, sharp.
He can tell Cas is confused just by the quality of the silence—surprised in his own right, the gears turning in that strange amazing head—and then Cas breathes in a sharp little breath and sits next to Dean on the table, taking one of his hands.
“Dean,” he says, “Dean, no, not because of anything you’ve done.”
Dean fixes his gaze on a place to the left of Cas’s ear. Scoffs soundlessly.
“Dean, it’s just that…” Cas is holding his hand too tightly. He touches Dean’s cheek and Dean’s eyes dart to meet his, helpless.
Cas is biting his lip. Dean leans into his touch without thinking about it.
“I would really like to kiss you,” Cas whispers. “And I think that’s unprofessional of me.”
Oh.
Dean’s throat works, but he still can’t quite manage words. He nods vigorously anyway, gripping the hem of Cas’s shirt.
Cas’s smile is breathtaking. He leans in a bit, and Dean’s heart quivers, and Cas thumbs at the tender skin beneath Dean’s eye. “Just so we’re clear, I mean that I’d like to see you outside of here. And kiss you preferably more than once, if you’re amenable.”
God he’s a dork. Dean’s half gone on him already.
He nods his head again, hard enough that Cas’s arm jostles, and Cas laughs his low laugh and presses his mouth to Dean’s.
His lips are as warm as the rest of him, and he holds Dean close, and he tastes pleasantly of a storm, familiar and electric.
It’s soft, not too much heat but with an undercurrent of intent that has Dean fizzling all over; each time they part for breath one of them dips back in again, and Dean’s heart is swooping in his chest by the time he realizes Cas is sort of just nuzzling at his cheek now, a hand in Dean’s hair, breathing even and quiet and sure.
“I think you’re lovely,” Cas tells him on a sigh.
Dean can’t speak, but he can hold Cas tight, hug him as close as he’s wanted to from the beginning. I think you’re lovely too.