A/N: I started writing this before the end of s9, so I'd say this is probably a canon divergence. But I'm pretty vague about everything, so that's really up to you.

"I kissed you," Cas says dreamily, his gaze half focused on Dean. He sounds so deliriously happy that Dean wishes that was all he was going to remember. Because that's the good part. That's the really good part.

His eyes are glazed over, whether from fever or pain medication, Dean doesn't know. All he does know is that Cas only remembers the good part. So he squeezes Cas' hand and agrees, "Yeah, Cas, you did."

Cas drifts back to sleep, and Dean twists uncomfortably on the hospital chair. He can't look at Cas, and he can't not look at Cas, and he's not really sure what to do with his eyes or his limbs or anything really.

He feels like he was given the golden goose, and he stuck it with a knife. Kind of literally.

He hopes for and dreads the moment Cas wakes up again.

Because Cas is going to wake up again. He holds on to that like the lifeline it is because for a while there, no one had been too sure it was going to happen. It had been touch and go, and Dean, well, Dean hadn't known what to do.

The blade's hold, the mark's hold, whatever insatiable bloodlust had owned every corner of him for the past however many days had been steadily draining, letting him realize what he'd done, what he'd done before Cas and Sam had come to stop him, what he'd done to Cas when they had. Then knowing it, he'd paced and paced the hospital hallways in an utter daze, wanting to do something to fix this, to fix everything, and having nothing tangible to do.

There were no angels or demons to call for help, not anymore, and even if there were, Dean knew now that it would only lead back here. That was how this worked. Like Sammy kept telling him, if you play with powerful magic, there's always a price. And if the price ended up being Sam or Cas, well, Dean would be damned if he kept playing that kind of Russian Roulette.

Now, though, he settles for doing what he's been doing for most of the morning and just watches Cas sleep, listening as Sam's footsteps fade in and out of the hospital room, seeming to be unsure whether his presence is wanted or an intrusion. Dean isn't sure either so he just lets Sam be.

It's a few hours later when Cas' eyes do, briefly, flutter open, and Dean flinches. Because this is it. He's going to remember everything.

But he merely whispers, his breath hitching on an exhale, like he doesn't quite believe the words he's saying, "You kissed me back."

Then his lips turn up at the corners, and the smile is so frickin' genuine that Dean wants to disappear. Because it's only a matter of time before Cas remembers the rest - the whole Dean is kind of the reason Heaven got boarded up without him, the reason he's human, the reason he's in the damn hospital.

Dean squeezes Cas' hand once more, then as Cas' eyelids droop, he lets go and flees. He doesn't know where he intends to go. He just knows he can't stay.

He practically runs down three hospital corridors and two flights of steps but Sam catches him before he reaches the parking lot.

"I can't...I can't be here, Sammy," Dean says. "He's gonna... he's gonna hate me."

It's not true. He knows it's not true. It's not even what he means. What he means is I hate me.

Sam just gives him this look, though, like Dean's lost every brain cell he's ever had. "Dean, it's Cas."

He says it like that explains everything.

It doesn't.

Not to Dean.

"Do you really not get that the guy's in love with you?"

"That's not... he can't... dude's a frickin' angel, or was...whatever, and I'm, well..." Dean waves his hand over the fading mark on his arm. "This stamp wasn't exactly sending me to the pearly gates, okay."

Sam opens his mouth to argue, but the scritch of wheels on the hospital's tile leaves him biting his tongue.

To the surprise of both of them, Cas' nurse is pushing him across the lobby in a wheelchair. He looks like he's just barely managing to sit up straight, but he still stubbornly tells the nurse, "Yes, Paula, I assure you, one of these men will take me back to my room shortly."

"I can take his word for that, I hope?" Paula asks, smiling warmly as she looks between Sam and Dean.

"That won't be a problem," Sam says, elbowing Dean in the chest before he can say otherwise.

"Try to bring him back before Dr. Matthews comes to check on him. She won't be happy I brought him down here," Paula says with a wink as she turns around.

As she does, Sam says, "Well, I'm going to leave you two to it."

"Thank you, Sam," Cas says as Dean shakes his head.

Sam, knowing full well that Dean will have to either abandon Cas or take him back to his room, darts into a stairwell.

Dean wordlessly takes the wheelchair's handles and begins to push it back towards Cas' room, fully intending to ignore anything Cas has to say.

"Dean," Cas begins, "you were not you when you did this."

Dean doesn't respond.

"What that mark makes you feel, what it makes you do, that is not you," Cas says.

"What makes you so sure of that, Cas?" Dean asks in spite of himself. "Not like someone else is pulling the strings. Last I checked, it's just me in here."

Cas frowns contemplatively over folded hands, and it takes him half the length of the hallway to say, "Perhaps."

Part of Dean wishes that he was going to argue more, convince him that he hadn't turned into the kind of monster that he had always fought. Part of Dean knows there's nothing that Cas can say to convince him he wasn't.

He screwed up. He screwed up majorly, and there's nothing Cas can do to change that.

He stops pushing the wheelchair, grips its handles tightly, and leans his head down dejectedly. Part of him wants to run away from Cas and part of him is coiling around him refusing to ever let go, because Cas is going to try. And try. And try.

They round a corner, and he asks, "Dean, when I...when I played God, I was myself?"

Dean knows where he's going with this, and he wishes he could give a different answer - the one Cas is hoping for, the one that would absolve them. "Yeah, Cas, you were. You were twice as much of a dick as usual, but it was still you."

To Dean's surprise, Cas doesn't argue. He merely nods thoughtfully before saying, "Then you were still you but twice as much of a dick as usual."

Dean doesn't want to laugh or even crack a smile at that, he really doesn't. But that he's done something so epically stupid that Cas could even say that simply knocks the wind out of him. "God, we're a pair."

"A pair of what?" Cas asks and Dean shakes his head the rest of the way back to Cas' room.

Once there, Dean offers Cas a hand to get him back into bed. Lowering himself against the pillows, Cas says, "You cannot change what you did, Dean. You will have to forgive yourself."

"Not that easy, Cas," Dean says.

"No, it will not be easy. It will be impossible," Cas says. "It is something you must do anyway."

Dean huffs before Cas raises his hands to Dean's face, wincing as he pulls against his bruised and battered abdomen, and places them against his cheeks. "You are more than what you did."

When Dean says nothing, Cas leans farther forward and lightly presses his lips to Dean's.

You are forgiven.

You are loved.

Dean doesn't believe any of it, but he drinks Cas' lips in anyway. They are what he has, what they both have - balm against gaping wounds.