Disclaimer: Supernatural and all of its characters belong to Erik Kripke and The CW Network.

The first time is always free...

The first time time, it happens by accident. It's more out of social protocol then anything else. Dean had been sitting in a circle of his 'hunting posse' in his cabin when Cas had ducked through the door to ask him a question about how exactly he was supposed to go about cutting his finger nails (which he never quite mastered. Damned human necessities.), and he'd found the room clouded with a plum of thick, strong smoke.

Dean had giggled goofily at him, and waved him over with a limp wrist. Cas had gone without question. He always went without question when it came to Dean. When he'd settled onto the ground next to him, his legs crossed under him, Dean had handed him a small, smoldering joint. Cas surveyed it carefully before realizing what exactly the potent smelling pot was rolled in. The paper was yellowed, and partially burnt, but it would've been hard not to notice the blank ink under his fingers.

"Zechariah. An interesting choice. Chapter fourteen verses twelve and thirteen. And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the peoples who have gone to war against Jerusalem; their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth. And it shall come to pass in that day that a great tumult from the Lord shall be among them. It is rather fitting." He stated, bringing it to his lips and inhaling deeply. He let the smoke burn through his lungs for a moment like Dean had, before releasing it. He coughed and hacked as if his lungs were trying to make a desperate escape from his chest. His head was swimming by the time he handed the joint to the next man (who's name he couldn't be bothered to remember).

"What d'ya think?" Dean asked on the tail of a breathy giggle. Cas held his hand out in front of him and wiggled his fingers before looking over at Dean.

"I feel...odd." Cas broke into a fit of laughter and looked over to where Dean was watching him with blurry attention.

"That's cause you're high, Cas. A bit of a lightweight, but high nonetheless." He smirked, lifting the bottle of booze from beside him and taking a long drink. Cas glanced around Dean's cabin, noting that all of the colors seemed a bit...different. "Feels good, don't it?" Dean's voice pulled him back to the circle.

"It feels...pleasant. Kind of like flying. It's nice. I miss flying." He frowned, worrying his overgrown thumb nail between his teeth. Dean's hand fell heavily on his shoulder, the pad of his thumb rubbing a soothing circle. When Cas looked over at him, his green eyes were dancing with the smile that stretched across his face. He liked that smile. It was the smile that Dean used to give him before the Croats, before Sammy left, before...everything. He missed that smile. It was another thing that made him smile.

When the joint was back in his fingers again, he inhaled a little deeper, because the weed made him feel like he was flying, and when he was flying, Dean smiled. He didn't want to have to miss Dean's smile anymore.

I can still stop whenever I want...

It became a nightly ritual with them. They'd meet up in Cas' cabin. By the sixth time, it was just him and Dean. The others seemed to have found better things to do, but Cas didn't mind. It's Dean that he'd been really interested in spending the time with anyway.

They settled onto the various brightly colored cushions that Cas has strewn about the floor, and passed the joint in between the two of them. The first time Dean leaned forward, his mouth closed around a mouthful of smoke, Cas was startled and tried to pull away, but Dean's large hand had closed around the back of his neck, holding him still. Dean had nudged his mouth open with his nose and released the mouthful of warm smoke into Cas' mouth.

It was intoxicating, and far more erotic then Cas was sure it had any right being. He heart had clenched in his chest as he chased the smoke, inhaling deeply and holding it in his lungs before letting it snake out his nose.

"Cool, huh?" Dean had breathed, his hand still closed around Cas' neck. Cas couldn't do anything but grin and nod, his nose brushing over Dean's. His heart was pounding in his chest with their proximity, but he tried to push it out of his mind, focusing on the haze of pot smoke filling his cabin instead. He ran his thumb over the slowly shrinking curl of bible verses pinched between his fingers.

They'd smoke their way through the first few chapters of Revelations already. That had been Dean's idea. He'd told Cas that, if the world was ending, they may as well get God's take on the whole thing through osmosis. Cas still didn't like talking about what God thought of the whole situation.

His father and his brothers had left the human race to suffer and die, and still felt as though they were the superior race. There was nothing superior about such cowardice. It felt a little blasphemous, smoking weed with the tattered pages of a bible some poor bastard had left behind. But, then again, there was really no one to blaphesmy when the God you had always prayed to left you for dead.

"Come back to me, Cas. Get out of that brain of yours." Dean whispered, brushing his thumb over the worried creases in Cas' forehead. Cas gave him a small, lop-sided smile.

"I'm still here." He whispered back, not wanting to break the passage of communication between them. Dean frowned softly at him.

"I miss him."

"Who, Dean?"

"Sammy. I miss my brother." He smoothed his hand down Dean's back like he'd seen some of the other's do in camp to comfort each other. Dean shuddered under his fingertips.

"I'm sorry, Dean. I miss him too, for what it's worth." Dean leaned forward and pressed his lips against Cas' suddenly, stealing all of Cas' breath in the form of a gasp. His hands tightened in the fabric of Dean's shirt. When they broke apart, Dean was sucking in sobbing gasps of air.

"I need you, Cas. I need to...I just need to know I'm alive." He had sobbed, his hands fisting in Cas' hair. "Help me remember." When Dean snubbed out the joint and laid Cas across the colorful cushions before fucking him through the floor, Cas caught a glimmer of the old Dean, his Dean, hiding behind the new monster mask that Dean had become. When they came together and Dean pressed sloppy kisses to his red, swollen lips, and murmured 'I'm sorry' over and over, Cas decided that he didn't like coming down from his high. When the smoke cleared, he still couldn't fly, and Dean wasn't smiling anymore.

I need it...

Truthfully, the day that he breaks his foot is the turning point. Dean brought him a bottle of painkillers, propped some pillows under his foot, and dropped an old magazine on his chest. He didn't stay to talk, as much as Cas had wished he would, but he understood. He was their fearless leader. He had shit to do.

So, he'd run shaking fingers through his shaggy hair, and popped the top to the pain killers. The bottle said to take two. He took four. If two was good, four must be better. Soon, he was flying again, and there were furry orange spiders settling themselves onto his comforter to keep him company. In the back of his mind he could see Dean smiling again.

By the end of the fifth day, the pain killer bottle is empty. Dean brings him another one, along with some absinthe that they'd found in some poor saps basement, a joint that Dean had proudly beamed about rolling on a bible verse that he'd picked out himself. Cas hadn't heard which verse it was, because he was too busy scrambling to light the joint and inhale the blissfully familiar smoke.

Dean leaves before he can offer him a hit. He makes some shitty excuse about having to go talk to the hunting party about something. Cas doesn't believe him, but he also doesn't give a fuck. There's a full new bottle of painkillers in the pocket of his borrowed, baggy jeans, and a musty tasting joint burning between his lips.

The next time that Dean comes, bearing pot and pills, he convinces Cas to shuffle enough so that he can fuck him senseless. Twice. When they're both sweaty and spent, Dean pats him awkwardly on the shoulder, wiggles his jeans back up, and leaves Cas to struggle his way back onto the bed. Dean doesn't kiss Cas when he fucks him anymore. Cas doesn't care. Except that maybe he really, kind of, totally does care. When that happens, he tosses back another painkiller and then he doesn't care as much.

He doesn't feel like he's flying anymore, and it feels like someone is ripping his wings out of his back all over again. Sometimes his scars that he got when he fell hurt, and sometimes the pain killers weren't enough. He was going to have to find something that worked.

Sobriety is a rarity when Croats are trying to kill you...

By the time that Past Dean showed up, Cas was rarely ever sober. He drowned himself in drugs, and booze, and women to block out the fact that Dean seemed to avoid being alone with him as much as possible. There was no denying the fact, however, that Dean got a sour look on his face whenever any number of women weaved out of Cas' cabin through the beaded door. Cas saw the way he looked at them from where he was perched in his window, observing. Cas didn't know if the look was one of jealously or of disgust.

When Past Dean had botched his plans for a good old-fashioned orgy, he was about seven sheets to the wind, and had more drugs in his system then anyone rightfully should have. He liked Past Dean. He told his Dean as much at the little pow-wow they held in Dean's cabin while planning the raid. Past Dean made jokes, and laughed, and he'd even caught him smiling.

Past Dean had morals. Past Dean didn't want to be torturing demons. Cas missed Past Dean. So, when he got the chance, he'd jumped at having Past Dean ride with him. It was like old times when Baby wasn't rotting in a pile of dead leaves, and things weren't completely down the shitter. That was why he had thrown Past Dean down on his bed and fucked him until Dean begged him for release. It was only right that the past mirrored the future.

He offered Dean some of his pills, the ones that made his mind so clear that he felt like he could solve any problem the world asked him to, but Dean said no. Past Dean always was a smart one. Cas just shrugged and tucked the bottle back into his pocket.

"What happened to you, man?"

If that wasn't a completely loaded question, Cas didn't know what was. He had thought it all over, muddling his way through everything that had happened. Life seemed like the most logical, easiest answer that he could give. Past Dean seemed to accept it, but he also didn't seem pleased with it. Cas still didn't give a fuck.

When his Dean sent him and the rest of the hunting party into the front door of the building, he knew it was going to be a trap. He knew that he wasn't making it out of there. And yet, he still went in willingly. Why? He wasn't sure. Maybe it was because he knew that they weren't souly there for the reasons that Dean had disclosed. There was some other reason that they were running into trap, and there was some other reason that they'd drug Past Dean along with them. But he'd said nothing. Maybe it was because, as he'd said before, he was always willing to bleed for the Winchesters, and always meant always.

He run through that door, and he'd risked life and limb to get into a building that they should have run screaming away from. And he'd been right. It'd been a trap, and he got the blade of one of their knives driven through his heart. He'd laid in the middle of the floor, listening to the sound of footsteps approaching him.

He'd been hoping it was Dean, coming to save his sorry ass like he'd been doing more and more those days, but it wasn't. It was one of the other men from their camp. He'd hooked his hands under Cas' arms and started to pull him back, the slick of blood under Cas' body making it easier to pull him. They'd almost made it out of the building when Cas felt his heart skittering to a hault.

Death was painful. There was nothing peaceful about it like all of the movies tried to tell him. Every part of his body had screamed in pain under the stress of his organs shutting down. Dean wasn't there. That was more painful then the knife wound. He screamed out Dean's name, but he wasn't there. He was probably off hunting for the Holy Grail or something equally noble.

When Cas' heart stopped, the haze of the painkillers fell away, leaving him utterly clear. He felt like he was flying again, but he supposed that was because he was. He was flying away from the shattered remnants of his vessel, leaving Jimmy Novak in a pool of cooling blood. He watched as Dean walked into the room, his eyes doubling when he caught sight of him.

He heard the choked and shuddering "Cas?" that fell from Dean's lips as he jogged forward and dropped to his knees beside Jimmy, lifting hhis head into his lap. He watched the single tear fall from Dean's left eye as he repeated Cas' name like a mantra, or like one of the prayers he used to utter before the world went pear-shaped. That was the last time he saw Dean Winchester before he was flying further away from Earth then he had been in years.

He flew towards Heaven. Towards the sun. The sun that was so bright that it illuminated the entire world. The sun reminded Castiel of Dean's smile that way. The smile that Dean had given him the first time that Cas had accidently been roped into smoking pot with him. He missed that innocence. He missed everything about those days that he would never get back. From seeing Dean smile to having Dean buried so deep in him that they were one person with eight limbs and two heads.

But the thing that he missed the most, and the thing that he knew that he would never see again in the rest of the eternity he was doomed to endure in Heaven, was the sight of his Father's words going up in smoke. With Dean. The only person that he had any faith in anymore. Dean would fix the world, he had no doubt. Because Dean always fixed the world, even when it wasn't his job to fix it. That wasn't what he was worried about.

What he was worried about, was who was going to fix Dean when he ran out of words to burn and Cas wasn't there to hold him together anymore.

That was why, when Balthazar and Gabriel greeted him at the gates of Heaven with large hugs and a soft 'welcome home, Cas", despite everything he'd put them through, he didn't really feel like he was coming home. Because this wasn't his home anymore.

His home was in some crappy motel with moth-eaten sheets, and in the passenger's seat of an Impala going way too fast as he crammed a burger down his gullet. His home was with the Winchesters. But he could never go back.

All he could do was watch the smoke from the smoldering ashes of his family. It was the only thing he had left.