It took something like work to get his eyes open. Days in the desert had left every crease and crevice caked and crusted, Dean's skin too tight and too dry, his lashes a mashed and knitted mess. Snot and sand had him scrubbing the grainy sockets with clumsy hands, brow furrowed, until he could blink his way to a bleary awareness of where and what he was.
The cottage was tiny. Standing dwarfed by the ancient giants of California's redwoods, it was small and squat, big enough for two beds, a fireplace and a rickety table, and not a whole hell of a lot else. Sam was crashed on the bed under the window, stripped down but for a pair of plaid boxers, both hands shoved possessively into them while he slept on his back with his mouth open. He was a dusty fucking mess, too; they had been drunk with exhaustion when they had reached this hiding hole, tripping out of and then over their own boots, battling with filthy clothes and falling down hard, down heavy in their bones, comatose before their faces ever touched the quilts.
Dean remembered it all, from the nauseous handful of final miles dozing behind the wheel to their dead-man's dance into bed, in a blurred series of snapshots. Getting to his feet was a chore, and he limped on sore knees in the direction of the door, stiff for a few steps until his body yielded to the idea of being upright. He walked out onto the porch in his shorts alone, stood and pissed for what felt like an hour into the thick blanket of pine needles with the blessedly cool breeze ghosting down from Oregon and across the breadth of his oversunned shoulders.
The air was pastel, a paschal gradient rising over the treeline, but Dean could only see it in patches, pale freckles against the thickness of boughs and branches overhead. He wrapped his arms around himself and stood still and quiet, listening to birdsong and tasting the promising dampness of the air, long enough to deduce that the light was fading rather than blooming; the day was dying, not breaking. The past ten days of hell – figurative, not literal – presented poetic contrast to the perfection of this place, and while Dean knew better than to feel safe anywhere anymore, this would do him just fine.
A strange mechanical sound shook him from his waking daze, a rhythmic clanking. It was unfamiliar, but methodical enough to pique curiosity rather than concern. He reached for a shotgun out of habit, anyway, and padded barefoot across the weathered floorboards to the opposite end of the porch, climbing down and rounding the side of the cottage. In the blue pallor of failing daylight, he saw a small green outhouse set back into the trees, a picnic table and some hand-fashioned benches, a metal water pump complete with lever and hanging ladle for drinking, and a naked angel priming it.
Dean propped the shotgun against the side of the cottage and pushed at his lower lip a little with his tongue. Castiel was working the lever with one hand and holding the priming jug in the other, pouring water down the neck of the well. When the prime took, drawing the first healthy surge of icy water from the underground source, sending it slinging from the broad mouth of the spigot and through the air and onto the cobblestone paving surrounding it, Castiel filled the jug so it could be used again next time. His body was pale in the low light, but the gathering shadow spilled nicely into the grooves of his well-muscled back, and the rounds of his shoulders and buttocks and calves were like polished stone.
It was a tricky business, trying to work the pump and bathe beneath its downpour at the same time. The flow was short-lived without the lever working, and Dean knew standing and watching was selfish. He shucked off his shorts and chucked them over his shoulder, closing the distance between them and relieving Cas at the helm, his own calloused hand covering a softer one and taking over its duties.
"There you are." Castiel met Dean's gaze and lifted his brows just subtly, eyes as navy as a northern sea and still an open book. He was pleased.
"Here I am. I got this. Get in there."
"Thank you, Dean." Cas knelt on the ground at Dean's feet, sitting back on his heels and facing the downpour. In the cold onslaught, his muscles were tense beneath taut skin as thorough hands rubbed it clean of the desert. He spread his knees and cleaned himself without shame, without hesitation, the way an animal might, chin to chest as he watched himself do it. Dean watched, too. In the distance, somewhere along the coast, thunder rolled lazily, a great yawn across the California sky that momentarily drowned the clanking of the pump and the roar of blood in Dean's ears. The wind picked up.
They traded places wordlessly, Dean squatting and Cas working the arm of the pump again. When the first slosh of water careened through the air and broke across his gritty skin, he caught his breath and cursed, recoiling a little from the frigid shock. It was the sort of cold that made his bones ache, that sort of cold that could jolt a person alive in an instant. But all of him was too thirsty to stay out of its reach for long, and after more than a week of being too hot and too dry, it was easy to forgive the cold and rejoice in the wet. Upturning his face, he took the heavy rush willingly, rubbing away the grime that had found its way into everywhere, dipping his head and shutting weary eyes and surrendering to the goodness of the solid humanity existing in cleanliness.
Cas stopped pumping when the sky broke, an eerie flash of purple followed by a thunderous torrent of rain far warmer than what they'd bathed in, and Dean laughed at the irony. Castiel smiled, too, overturning his hands and gazing heavenward. He looked exactly like what he was, like something half-crazed and otherworldly, even in the simplicity of his human body. For weeks, there had been only work, only toiling and fighting and falling down exhausted for an hour or two at a time. There had been no time for anything apart from surviving.
Time was on their side now, though. Still on his knees, Dean reached for one of Castiel's hands, and that other set of wet fingers closed around his own as though they had been waiting for the touch. Cas fell onto him with a precision born of practice, straddling the hunter's thighs and finding his mouth. There was no longer any virginal awkwardness in his kiss, no bleeding heart desire to do it right, no selfless desperation to please tripping him up; Dean had given him enough to chase that from his lips and replace it with wanting of his own. In a humid motel bathroom, in a chilly New York alleyway, in a roadhouse kitchen, he had made Castiel shake and taught him how to need release, had dismantled him with steady hands. It was easy now.
For the first time, though, there was nothing they had to get to next, nothing they needed to rush for. There was no frenetic urgency, in spite of the storm, as they drank the rain from one another's thirsty lips and surrendered any perceived importance of society, gender, origin. Dean hooked one hand at the nape of Castiel's neck, fingertips in the short damp hair at the base of his skull, and gripped a handful of his ass with the other. The angel tilted forward, tilted something equally foreign and familiar into nudging at Dean's belly, hips that had so recently known nothing of lusting or seeking pleasure now well-versed in both.
"I want to tell you something." Cas murmured the words into Dean's lips, barely discernible over the storm.
"Tell me something." Dean smiled against the kiss, but he didn't make it easy for the other man to speak, instead deepening the union of their mouths, tasting the fleshy heat of Castiel's tongue, feeling the sandpaper rasp of chin against chin. Strung out from the road, this was their first shower in days and the other formalities had been more or less abandoned, as well.
"I want to do what we haven't yet." The statement, though muffled, brought Dean up full stop. He pulled his mouth back just far enough to move his lips, and as he responded, they brushed the angel's.
"There's two things we haven't done yet, and I'm sticking with 'no' on one of 'em."
"I want to say yes to the other." Castiel's meaning was clear, but Dean didn't answer right away. The rain filled the silence of his pause as he considered it. Steady, heavier streams fell from the eaves, sounding a quiet applause on the grass below, as though even the natural world wanted this thing to be done now that they had the time to do it right.
"Get on the grass," Dean whispered. Obediently, Cas moved away from his lap onto softer ground, away from the scratch of cobblestone and into the plush wet lawn, a planted clearing only big enough for a fire pit and a picnic table and, it seemed, two wanting bodies laid out together. Castiel sat, pliable and waiting to be positioned by hands that better knew how this was done, and Dean didn't disappoint. He kissed Cas and coaxed him to his belly in a darkness that was nearly absolute now, the world illuminated only here and there by the violet brilliance of lightning.
It was nothing Dean was new to. This wasn't his first wind-up to the pitch, his first time rendered breathless by the hard drumming of his pulse against his ribs and elsewhere, making a lover ready for what he had to give and burning all the while, impatient to give it, relishing the flame and compelled to extinguish it alike. It wasn't his first time laying open-mouthed kisses on dark places, holding nervous hips still, sucking his fingers wet to touch someone from the inside, working his jaw as he bested a tight body's resistance with a steady hand. Still, as he did those things, no part of it felt routine.
The tremor in Castiel made Dean's own limbs shake, made him feel weak through his joints, disconnected and frenetic. He knew by the way the angel shifted and lifted into his touch to make it deeper that this would-be lover was ready for everything. Once, not so long ago, Cas had lain a hand on him and saved him with a simple touch from burning alive forever. Tonight, Dean would repay the favor.
Dean pulled away from Cas, and an aggrieved sound rose and died in that man's throat in protest of his emptiness. The lightning revealed white skin, a furrowed brow, an upturned ass, limbs in the grass, a cheek pillowed on wet forearms, drenched black hair, all the briefly-visible world tinted blue. Dean spat into his hand and touched himself, then did it again. He was advancing on Cas in the dark, moving to blanket the familiar body with his own, when the frantic anticipation and the comforting cloak of night were split and obliterated by a flood of yellow light and a familiar voice.
"Dean? Phone." Sam. And the cottage's back door banged shut behind him. And the patio light was showing him everything his eyes weren't really registering yet. Dean froze, his weight on one hand and his dick in the other. "Uh... Sorry." Sam was standing beneath a small awning, reaching behind him, scrambling for the knob, clearly wanting to let himself back in and undo whatever damage he'd undoubtedly done to his brother's evening. But the door was one that locked when it closed, and he had a mortified look of remorse on his face.
Dean weighed his options. He was half-gone in his own hand already, Cas was tense beneath him, and no one called him for anything other than business. Business, unfortunately, won out over an orgasm in a contest of priorities ten times out of ten. "It better be the Mother of God on that phone."