Back Together

Dean gripped Castiel's good shoulder, squeezing it tightly beneath his fingers. "Just a sec, Cas, I'll get you fixed up."

Cas didn't look up, nor did he actually respond. He actually wasn't doing a whole lot of talking, or moving, but the skin over his knuckles was taut, stretched stark white as he tightened his hands into fists. The blood against the back of his hand was a blinding contrast to the skin over his knuckles.

"Come on, Cas, talk to me. You still kicking?" Dean leaned over the ex-angel, pressing two fingers against Cas's neck.

Castiel flinched, his eyes flying open. His pupils were blown wide as they locked onto Dean's gaze. They were blue as always, but now they were dulled with pain. "What?" he rasped. His voice was thick and his pulse was throbbing erratically beneath Dean's fingers.

"Alright, you're still there." Dean dropped his hand and grabbed the bottle of whiskey, taking a drink straight from the bottle. "Let's get this show on the road."

Castiel's hands unclenched and then clenched again on his knees, fingers clutching at the folds of the blanket that Dean had tossed him so he wouldn't go into shock. He was naked from the waist up, covered in blood, and pale beneath the startling crimson. Dean had dragged his sorry ass back home, driving and supporting the then-unconscious ex-angel, blood all over his seats and the smell of it thick in the air.

Freak demon attack. Not that anything was freak with them anymore. 'Freak' just meant 'normal' for them. So, Dean should have known, he should have fucking known that something was going to go wrong, especially with the team split up, with Sam off in another state hunting another who knows what. And Dean wasn't even sure why he'd let him go off on his own, but he had bigger fish to fry at the moment. Like Cas getting his arm ripped open.

Granted, he'd woken up again, just as Dean was hauling him into the motel, going impossibly paler beneath his blood as Dean had methodically stripped him of his coat, jacket, shirt, and tie. Dean was sure that it wasn't as bad as it looked, as soon as he got it stitched up, it'd be fine. Cas'd be woozy for awhile from the blood loss, but he and Sam had had worse through the years. He'd just... never seen Cas so pale.

Dean nudged Cas's hand with the bottle. "Here. Take the edge off."

Castiel gripped the bottle and put it to his lips without any other prompt, downing a quarter of it before Dean pulled it back from his grip.

"Take the edge off, not get drunk," he muttered, setting it aside. He took up needle and thread in hand, licking his lips in concentration to thread it up. His hands were steady, but he knew that was just an illusion of the whiskey. He'd been shaking like a leaf since he had saw Cas go down.

"Alright, man, this is going to hurt. No point sugar coating it." He knelt down next to the chair, putting him at perfect height for the gash on Cas's upper arm. "It's gonna hurt like a bitch, but don't move." He braced one hand against Cas's arm gently. He looked up at him. "Ready?"

Castiel met his gaze, eyes blown wide, breathing accelerated, panic strewn across his features in that deer-in-the-headlights gaze that Cas got when he was experiencing new, uncomfortable, or painful, things. Dean would have laughed at him had it been anything else.

Instead, now he just reached across to the chair he'd thrown everything onto, grabbing one of the dry washcloths. He folded it over and twisted it lengthwise, taking pains not to embed the needle in his own skin. "Here. Open."

Cas frowned - he was shaking, that was never good - but tentatively, blindly, followed the order Dean was giving him.

Dean slipped the cloth between Cas's lips and teeth. "Bite down." Cas did, and Dean let go of the washcloth, turning his attention back to his arm. "It's all I got, Cas. I can't do anything else for it. Ready?" he asked again.

Castiel nodded hesitantly, the panic flaring to brief fear and then Dean stopped watching, couldn't watch any longer because if he didn't get this show on the road now, he never would.

So, instead of waiting, he silently positioned the needle, routine, like clockwork after all the stitches he'd given himself and Sammy, and slid it into the skin.

Castiel jerked from the initial entry point, his entire body twitching and then going stiff beneath Dean's careful hands. The strangled little noise was clearly meant to be stifled into the makeshift gag, but the low hum of pain still got through to Dean. But Dean didn't wait around to let Cas get used to it; he knew from experience that taking this slow only prolonged the pain. So, he slipped it through to the other side and pulled it closed, trying to focus on the task at hand, and not the way Castiel's fingers tightened around the blanket so much that it looked like his knuckles were about to break through his skin, or the fact that the hum turned into a moan through teeth clearly clenched around the washcloth.

If there were some joke to lighten the mood, Dean wished that he would have known it. This was bad enough for anyone, but it had always been different between him and Sam because they were brothers. They had seen each other at their worst. Castiel... he was a little different. Castiel hadn't been vulnerable to any type of attack until lately, and Dean certainly hadn't even heard him moan in pain like this. So, no, there wasn't a joke to lighten the mood. It was just what it was, and Dean wanted to get it over with.

He expertly pulled another stitch through. It would take six or so more, eight or nine in all for the entire wound. It was extensive. If they had the money, Dean would have just hauled ass to the hospital, to be honest.

Castiel shifted again. His hand left the blankets to raise up to his mouth; Dean glanced up to watch him pull the gag out and noted that his skin had, instead of white, gone ashen. He leaned over, grabbed the bucket he had picked up from under the bathroom sink, and thrust it into Cas's hands just in time for him to get ahold of it and lurch over it to throw up.

He didn't add insult to injury by continuing the stitches while Castiel threw up, just waited patiently until he had stopped heaving and then offered him the whiskey again. "If the pain doesn't get you, the sensation does," he said shortly. He could still remember the first time Dad had given him stitches when he was a kid... that horrible crawling feeling of your skin being pulled back together. It was enough to still give him shivers.

Castiel just hummed in reply, noncommental and Dean couldn't blame him. The ex-angel took a swig of the whiskey and handed it back; Dean, long having since had the traces of germophobishness battered out of him, took another pull, too, and then set it aside.

"Back to work. Hang in there, Cas."

The next nine stitches - nine more of the SOBs - went smoother. In the sense that Castiel barely made another noise of pain and the closest that he got to throwing up was swallowing doggedly for a few turns of the slide-and-tug motion of the needle into the skin.

Dean finished up the wound with a small, sardonic smile. The row of eleven stitches was professional grade, if not a little more painful. He took the last of the booze and slowly poured it over the line of stitching, dabbing away at the excess blood and alcohol with a wad of gauze from their dwindling medical supplies.

"There you go..." Dean finished wiping at the wound and leaned back to admire his handiwork. "You're going to have a hell of a scar there, dude."

Castiel twisted his head away slowly to look first at the wound, and then up at Dean. The panic that had been there previously was all but drained, leaving only a sick, hurting exhaustion in its place. "... Oh," was all he said. His voice sounded thick, and he looked horrible.

"Come on." Dean wedged his fingers beneath Cas's arms, hauling him to his feet. He painstakingly helped him limp over to the bed. "Congratulations, man."

Cas sank onto the edge of the bed and looked up at him. "This is a cause for celebration?" he asked weakly.

Dean grinned, jabbing his finger towards the newly-stitched wound. "You're going to have battle scars. You're officially one of us, Cas."

Castiel looked from Dean to the stitches on his arm again. He flexed his muscles slightly and winced, looking back at Dean. "... I don't like it," he said, tone flat.

Dean laughed out loud, in spite of himself. He almost reached out to knuckle his hair up with a bona-fide Winchester noogie, before he caught himself and remembered that this was Cas, not Sam. "Tough luck," he said instead, and pulled the blankets back so that Cas could shimmy down between them.

"Bad luck," Castiel muttered as he placed his head back against the pillow, fumbling with too-clumsy fingers for the blankets to pull closer.

"Well. You know what they say. All luck is bad luck," Dean replied.

Castiel's eyes darted back to him. He stared at him hard for a short moment before responding. "No, they don't."

"In the hunting line of business, they do," Dean said seriously. "Go to sleep, Cas."

Castiel searched him for a moment longer before nodding slightly and closing his eyes. "Thank you, Dean," he mumbled.

Dean could see him shivering through the blankets. He turned away to pull another off the other bed. "Anytime," he muttered, mostly under his breath.

Hurt!Cas and doctor!Dean. Yeah; I want to see this. Sadly, being now on Season Six and knowing that there's going to be a very large absence of our favourite fallen/not fallen/human angel after this season, I doubted I'd see it in the show, so I decided to write it.

Please do not mention spoilers past 6x01.I do not own Supernatural. Thank you!