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It wasn’t the first thing he noticed.
His chest not being covered in claw marks, gored open and spilling his guts on the floor, that was the first thing he noticed, upon inspecting himself in the mirror.
The handprint, throbbing on his shoulder, was the second thing he noticed.
He was in the shower, at Bobby’s, when he finally noticed it.
Perhaps ‘notice’ is the wrong word, because on some subconscious level, it was something he understood from the moment he drew his first breath in the humid cloister of his coffin. It was more that he had the time and context available to him for the first time in that shower to actually digest the information.
Dean Winchester was a virgin again.
He laughed – breathless, giddy, terrified – and slid slowly down the shower wall, until he was sitting on the floor of the shower. Dean closed his eyes, tilted his face up into the warm spray, smiling without realizing that his face had decided to indulge in relief, in confused gratitude.
Reaching one hand down – his left, because his right was busy clutching his collarbone, grounding him – Dean tentatively ran his fingertips through his pubic hair, and shuddered in pleasant anticipation as his middle and index finger made delicate contact with the base of his flaccid penis. Just to see if he could, without imagining anything, without staring laser-focused at a porn magazine, without the slender-fingered attention of a beautiful stranger he’d snagged from some bar, Dean tried to bring himself to hardness. On sensation alone, with nothing to distract him, he wanted to see if he could do it. With just those two fingers at first, he made a loose circle around his cock and ran them up and down his length. It felt incredible – simple, intuitive. Innocent, somehow.
He arranged his entire hand around himself, jacking with deliberate reservation, marveling at the heat, the firmness, the solidity of his own erection, spurred on by nothing but physiological imperatives, reflexes he’d thought were lost to him forever. He pushed lower, sliding past his testicles, the thin skin there brushing against the back of his hand, and the flicker of unexpected arousal had him emitting a sharp exhale, nostrils flaring.
Tilting his hips up, he brought his middle finger to his anus, puckered tight but not clenched reflexively. Just waiting. An orifice that has only experienced extrusion, that does not anticipate violation as muscle memory. Experimentally, he rubbed his fingertip over the aperture, firmly enough to register, but not hard enough to enter. A shiver, electric and bright, danced up his spine and into his brain. He sat there, breathing hard, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for his intestines to seize and his stomach to twist. Waiting to feel that burn of fight or flight, adrenaline barreling through his veins, making his feet go numb. But it never came.
Legs shaking, cock still hard, Dean scrambled back up to standing, leaning one forearm against the wall for support. He rubbed his right hand over his still closed eyes, to dispel the water that had been dripping down his face all the while, and he blinked them open. Hazarded a look down at his cock, red and proud, standing at attention against his abdomen, twitching under the onslaught of decent water pressure.
For the first time in a very long time, Dean jacked off in the shower. He didn’t even imagine something, not even the idea of a woman’s body, or the physical sensation of a mouth, or a hand, or a tight wet anything. He just stared down at his body, and felt good.
+++
“Man, it is time to right some wrongs,” Dean mused, and Sam looked at him with a confused half smile, cocked his chin a few degrees.
“Come again?”
“Look at me,” Dean began, not sure how he could explain this to his brother without dredging up anything that should stay buried. “I mean, I came back from the furnace without any of my old scars, right? No bullet wounds, knife cuts, none of the off-angle fingers from all the breaks. I mean, my hide is as smooth as a baby's bottom.” Dean delivered his thesis statement, and Sam pursed his lips in deepening uncertainty. “Which leads me to conclude,” Dean remembered to moderate his tone, but his eyes stayed lit with joy, “Sadly, that my virginity is intact.”
“What?” Sam asked, not disbelieving exactly, more just not following the thread. Dean hadn’t explained it as well as he might’ve, but he figured providing any more detail would have been something of a downer.
“I have been re-hymenated,” Dean declared, washing down the statement with a swig of beer. His liver was refreshed in his resurrection as well, a blessing and a curse.
“Re-“ Sam interrupted himself with a laugh, resolving into an expectant smirk. He waited for Dean to elaborate, and when he didn’t he plowed forward on his own. “Please, Dean, maybe angels can pull you out of hell, but no one could do that.”
And Dean knows that his brother doesn’t understand. He’s glad, actually, that Sam doesn’t understand why what he’s just said stings so very badly. Because Dean has thought it himself, that he was beyond repair. That his body, tainted and warped as it was, could never get back to that place where things came naturally, felt pleasant without caveats. Even before Hell, but especially during. While he was in the pit, moments of Earthly horror rehashed in demonic melodrama, his most unbearable memories acted out in gruesome extremes, he’d known to his very center that he’d never be free of those things.
And yet.
Castiel, strange and threatening and unpredictable as he may be, had wiped him clean. Somehow.
“Brother, I have been re-hymenated,” Dean doubled down, and Sam shook his head, grinning. “And the dude will not abide.”
+++
In all the time that he’d known Cas, he never asked him about it.
Meg, hair sticking up on one side, shoulder blades pressing against the filthy wall of the abandoned building, breathed like a woman coming up for air after being held underwater her whole life.
“I feel so…clean,” she’d murmured, kiss still burning on her lips, wonder threaded through every syllable. Castiel looked almost guilty.
If they hadn’t been in the middle of being run down by hellhounds, Dean might’ve stopped Cas right there, asked him ‘did you do for her what you did for me?’, might have meant to ask him something else. Something like, ‘is that what you did, for me?’, something that still wouldn’t come close to what he wanted to ask. Something like, ‘would you do that again, if I asked?’, something like, ‘does it happen every time, whether you mean to or not?’, but those questions would never see light. Certainly not here. Certainly not now.
+++
It isn’t until after Hester, that Dean decides he has to know. Not that Cas is in much shape to answer. But then, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe Cas, the way he is now, is the most likely iteration of himself to be honest with Dean.
Hester said that it was Dean, who’d corrupted Castiel, and ever since the words left her mouth, it was all he could think about. So much so that when she was beating the pulp out of Castiel, he didn’t lift a finger to intercede. Meg was the one to save him. And that just brought him back to the kiss. Back to feeling clean.
Dean couldn’t help but compare the way Castiel had taken on Sam’s illness, the way it had broken him into something unrecognizable, to the way Hester might feel about Dean’s influence years before. He didn’t know what Castiel was like, before he raised Dean from perdition. Perhaps, in the eyes of the angels, he’d been broken down ever since. Perhaps he’d taken on Dean’s impurity, his scars and his damage, and lost something crucial in so doing.
Alone in Rufus’s cabin, waiting to strike against the Leviathan, he finds an opening, and he takes it.
“Cas…” Dean starts, and Cas looks over at him, eyes so wide, so open. “Can I ask you something?”
“If this is about taking a more active role in the plan – “ Castiel begins, immediately squaring his shoulders, defending himself. Dean hates that he’s made him feel so attacked, so unheard.
“It’s not. It’s not really about anything…relevant?” Dean offers, interrupting him. Cas cocks his head, waits. “It’s just. When Hester,” Cas winces, but Dean continues, words tumbling out in a rush. “When Hester said that you were…I don’t know. Corrupted, by me. In Hell. Is that. Was she just trying to make a point, or was that. Is that…true?”
Castiel gets up from where he’s been sitting on the floor and comes over to sit beside Dean at the table. He smooths his hands over his scrub pants, then looks back up at Dean, expression soft.
“No. It’s not true,” he says, lips tugging in a reluctant smile. “Hester found it comforting to believe that there might be someone to blame.”
“So…so healing me, and, you know. Making me…new…didn’t, uh, didn’t change you or, or break you, or something?” Dean asks, gaze dipping down to focus on the tabletop after the word ‘new’. It’s too hard to look at Cas these days anyway, but when they’re talking about something serious like this, it’s unbearable.
“No, Dean,” Cas assures him, but doesn’t elaborate. Dean shifts in his chair, uncomfortable. He can feel Cas watching him. He wishes he’d look away.
“I’ve always wondered…” Dean whispers, after a minute or so of utter silence. Castiel waits, listening. “I’ve always wondered how you did it.”
“Did what?”
Dean looks up at him, and he opens his mouth, and he can’t say it. Ashamed, feeling cowardly, he turns away again, cheeks flaming.
“You know,” he grunts, facing away, looking over at a spot on the far wall. Cas hums in understanding, and rests a hand on Dean’s shoulder. Right where he always does. Right where he first touched him. Dean startles, whips his head back around to face Castiel. He’s smiling, fond and distant. Like he’s lost in a memory.
“I see. I never thought you’d want to know, really,” Cas muses.
“Yeah, well,” Dean huffs, cheeks still burning with a persistent blush. “Was it – was it like when you kissed Meg?”
Cas cocks his head, brow furrowed. Realization dawns on him visibly, and he shakes his head.
“No, not really,” Cas sighs, heavy and sad. “I could never do for a demon, what I did for you. But the…nature of our contact. It may have carried similar effects, on a reduced basis.”
“Kissing her…you sort of, spruced her up?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Castiel answers, clearly amused by the analogy.
“But with me…?” Dean bites his lip, feeling incredibly foolish. Castiel squeezes his shoulder, and it snaps him back to the present.
“Have you ever read the book of Isaiah?”
“In the Bible?” Dean asks, not bothering with his usual nose wrinkle of disdain. Cas nods. “Yeah. Only book that’s in every hotel and motel from coast to coast. Get bored enough…” Dean shrugs. “Not like I memorized it or nothin’.”
“The prophet Isaiah’s book of the Bible is more faithful than several other chapters. In it, he details a vision he had, of an encounter with the Lord.”
“Yeah?” Dean asks, and Castiel gives him that endeared but chastising look, as if to say ‘be patient’.
“He was greeted by two seraphim.” Castiel pauses, waiting for something, before adding, “I am a seraph. Though, I was not one of those who met the prophet Isaiah.” He continues, “When Isaiah realized he was in the presence of the Lord, and His angels, he became distraught. He insisted that he was unworthy to be in the presence of God, let alone to go out into the world and enact the will of God, to spread the Word of God.”
“Was he?”
“Perhaps,” Cas says through an indulgent smile. “I’m not sure a being’s worthiness can be measured as I used to believe it was. But he believed he was. He said ‘I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips,’ which he could not reconcile with having born witness to God. And one of the seraphs responded by plucking a hot coal from the altar fire and bringing it to Isaiah.”
Dean remembers the story, somewhere in the back of his mind. His mouth goes dry.
“And the seraph pressed the coal to Isaiah’s lips, but it did not burn him. The seraph explained to him what had transpired, ‘this has touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged.’ And Isaiah, cleansed, was ready to take on the work that the Lord had set aside for him.”
“And that’s…that’s what you did, with me?”
“No, but that’s why, I suppose.” Castiel folds his hands in his lap, stares down at them as he laces his fingers together. Parts them again. Flattens his palms on his thighs. “But that’s not what you asked,” he acknowledges, but makes no attempt to continue speaking. Dean stares at him. Cas stares at his hands in his lap.
“Well?” Dean asks, voice coming out small. Impatient. Cas turns and looks at him. His eyes are so blue. Bluer than they were a second ago, Dean thinks. Like a mood ring, darkening when Cas is sad. And he is, Dean realizes. Sad.
“You really don’t know,” Cas says, not so much asking as taking in the fact himself. That Dean doesn’t know how Cas purified him. Dean shakes his head, just once. A small pivot to the left. A smaller pivot to the right, a lazy drift back to center. Eyes locked, all the while. Cas doesn’t speak, but he answers.
He reaches out one hand. His right. Places it on Dean’s shoulder again. Squeezes. Drops it back to his lap.
“You – “ Dean starts, but chokes on the rest of the thought.
“Isaiah was a faithful reporter of his life, but he did not understand what had happened, not really. There was no coal. No altar fire. It was the seraph’s hand, that blazed. That touched his lips.”
“Touch me,” Dean says, before he can think of a reason not to. Castiel raises his eyebrows in surprise, but he complies. Dutifully brings his hand up, matches it to Dean’s shoulder. Dean closes his eyes. Imagines grace flowing through him, a sensation he knows well by now, imagines how it must have coursed through him like floodwater, picking up all the loose dirty bits and pushing them out. Leaving him scraped clean.
“It wasn’t like that,” Castiel says, and Dean’s eyes are closed, but he can tell by the sound of it that Cas is much closer. His face is close to Dean’s ear. He can feel his breath there, on his ear, his neck. Tickling the hairs there.
“Like what?”
“A flood,” Castiel says simply, as if it isn’t a massive violation, that he’s read Dean’s thoughts. “Nothing was swept away. Nothing was lost. Nothing was taken.”
“Then how – how did you?” Dean can’t open his eyes. He just can’t.
Castiel answers once again without speaking. Dean feels that familiar pulse of grace, the electric crackle warming him up, waking up every corner of his soul, every cell in his body. It isn’t like being healed, because it isn’t stopping, and he can’t pinpoint the part of his body being affected. It’s everything, all of him, all at once, and Cas is right. Nothing is leaving him, nothing’s being cut out, pruned away, trimmed back. It’s more like every single piece of him, every memory, every patch of skin, every platelet of blood, is being washed with gentle hands, until it shines.
As Cas withdraws his grace, Dean’s eyes flick open in desperate understanding.
He means to say something, to say that he gets it, but there’s no word to describe what he’s learned.
Castiel pulls his hand away again, and Dean wants to snatch it back. Cas’s eyes are heavy and sad again. Or still. Dean doesn’t know. Cas looks unsurprised. Like he suspected that Dean would be terse and unaffected by the experience, but he was willing to demonstrate anyway. And he can’t let the assumption stand. But he doesn’t know how to counter it.
“See?” Cas asks, gazing at Dean, waiting.
Dean answers without speaking.
He leans in and cups Castiel’s cheek, pressing his lips against Castiel’s. It’s a chaste kiss, polite. Castiel’s lips are warm, and Dean sighs through his nose at the feeling. When he pulls back, Cas is just staring at him, eyes wide – but not sad.
“You know, Cas,” Dean grins, and Cas smiles back, curious about what Dean will say, “Considering you just put me back to factory settings…pretty sure that was my first kiss.”
Before Cas can respond, Dean pulls him in for another. Cas kisses back with more vigor, this time around – now that he understands what’s going on, what Dean means by it. And Dean relishes the honesty of it. The intimacy. The innocence, in a way.
It feels good.