Massive, massive thanks to rareparrot, who agreed to beta this for me at short notice. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
This is my first fic written in the Supernatural fandom, so, um, yeah. You can probably tell. I wrote this incredibly fast, so it's going to be chock-full of errors and mistakes, especially considering a) it was written usually after midnight and b) I'm British and trying to make my spelling as Americanized as possible. Sorry all!
(Cross-posted at AO3.)
Dean Winchester cries like a fucking child.
He's not proud of it, okay, he's aware that it's some weak pansy-ass shit to do, but it's like a, a pressure valve, right? Hell, even Robert De Niro would cry at times, get it all out. It might be embarrassing but it gets results. Right? Right.
He knows Sammy doesn't know, and the reason he knows this is because Sammy doesn't have a black eye. The logic works like this: if Sam knew, then Sam would use it to mock the living crap out of him, thereby forcing Dean to beat twelve kinds of crap out of him, starting with the face. Sam has said nothing. Dean has not had to beat twelve kinds of crap out of Sam, starting with the face, which would leave him with at best a black eye, ergo Sam does not know.
Dean's pretty relieved at this; it's not something you can explain over a bottle of Bud and a WWE rerun on cable. Not like being damned or anything, fuck no, that at least had some dignity to it.
So the first time it happens, it kinda hits him out of the blue.
He's Hell-fresh and only half-there, riding on the backwash of thirty-six hours on the burn; a day and a half out of his own damn grave, fueled by a caustic combo of disbelief, adrenaline, shock, sugar, alcohol and flat-out what-the-fuckery (Angels? Really? Jesus shit). His skin is numb from the trauma of it all but he's OK, actually, not too bad, riding easy, feeling shook up, OK, but that's only to be expected. A man don't get yanked outta Hell by fucking angels and be ready to score a home run right after, right? Gotta have time to – damn, what would Sam call it? Process, or some psychology crap like that.
There's the odd flash in the strangest corners of things, blood in the lines of the air, but Dean puts it down to aftershock, like the weird things he saw sometimes after a mission nearly went south. He's past that now, he's earned some goddamn quiet-time. And a beer. Lots of beer. And maybe some cute chicks. He's got a theory about the fact he came back with none of his scars, and cute chicks fit real neatly into that...
Sam's bent over a textbook, nose-deep in angel lore and dim-lit by the cheap hotel lighting, stuttering the odd glance toward Dean like he's just going to disappear. His eyes are half-mad with disbelief and Dean wonders how the hell he's actually focusing on the book, what with Sam twitching about like he's got a serious dose of clap-itch.
Well, he's one to talk. He feels desperately unsettled, real fucking uncomfortable, like his geometry is just twisted out of true, and ain't that the most poetic shit you ever heard to describe the fact he's not quite right, that he needs to be doing something or he'll go crazy.
Well, he decides, it might be all macabre-manly, but the fact he literally smells like his own grave ain't gonna help with the ladies. Plus, no kidding, it's kinda creepy. That's enough to mess up anybody's chi.
"Goin' for a shower," he announces to the room at large, rolling from the twin bed and shucking off his jacket. Loose grains of gravedirt scatter on the floor. He doesn't think too hard where they came from, pushes away the darklit flashes of smoke and screaming, and only wobbles a little bit. Hey, he's good, he's got this. He's cool, he's smooth, he takes no shit and no prisoners, and like hell a few fuzzy memories of the ol' barbecue pit are gonna rattle his bones.
He grabs a towel from the cupboard next to the bed, scrubbing a hand through his hair and knocking loose some of the dirt he missed the first few times. He knows, he just knows Sam is watching him with those dark, grief-puzzled, fucking mooning eyes, and his hand stills on the hem of his t-shirt.
He doesn't want Sam to stare at the handprint. He doesn't even know why he doesn't want Sam to stare at it. Back to his brother, he pulls his hand away, throwing the towel over his shoulder in one smooth move, like that's what he'd meant to do all along. Fuck it, it's just a scar, save the kid some sleepless nights.
The hotel bathroom is pretty small, but that stuff has never bothered him before, and it doesn't now. There's just enough room to spin the faucet on, shuck his clothes and stand bare-ass in front of the mirror, eyeing the hand print with blank-eyed suspicion. He feels like he's somewhere a long way away, looking through his own eyes from a distance. Like he's numb under his own skin. Dizzy without falling over. Bloodless.
Well, fuck it. Tough it out.
He steps over the high-lipped bath, walks straight into the warm-hot spray of the leaky showerhead, and starts working his fingers through his hair. The water that pours down his shoulders is grey-brown with dirt for a few seconds and he'll admit to a distant feeling of relief. Gravedirt is nasty shit. It feels good to wash it away.
His mind is kinda blank, staring ahead thousand-yard style as he mechanically rubs the bar soap over his hands. He stays like that for ten straight minutes, utterly not there, and so the first abrupt cough that jerks itself out of his chest is raw, rough, and extremely un-fucking-expected.
The Christ was that?
He stops stock still, and frowns at the wall. What –
It happens again, hoarse and desperate, a kick in his chest jerking his shoulders forward. The soap drops from nerveless fingers. He reaches up to grab at his chest, first thought that he didn't escape, Hell has come back for him with a spell, a hex, some weird freaky voodoo, making that layer of numbness sitting under his skin dissolve, flaring electric, and what –
It happens a third time and now he knows what it is, and he'd hate it were he not shocky with surprise, hate the way it's not coughs but sobs, sobs burning in his lungs and choking out his weakness to the world.
The fuck is this fresh Hell, he wants to scream, meaning every goddamn word. He's tired, God, so tired, and he hurts, and everything is too much, one mad red rush that swallows him up and leaves him panting shallowly for memory of how to breathe.
He stumbles whilst standing and drops ungracefully to his knees, face in his hands as though the petty privacy could hide him from reality. The sobbing won't stop, it can't stop, it's the end of his fucking world right here in this shitty hotel bathtub, pieces of him splintering and breaking off under the water. He kneels there, cracking himself apart for a bit before even that's too much and he's slumped on the bottom of the tub, forehead braced against the floor and his hands twisted against his scalp. He wishes that he could just wash away, diluted until the screaming stops, because he would just be tears, and tears in an ocean mean nothing.
Dean braces his elbows on the floor of the bathtub, fingers locked into his hair, and feels like his world is ending. He is helpless and he is broken. He cries without restraint, a whole world in every sound, crazy with horror and self-grief.
Ten minutes later he's washing his hair free of the last of the dirt, anger in every sharp jerk of his fingers, face set and furiously, sickeningly embarrassed. What was that? Just what the fuck was that? He is Dean fucking Winchester, he does not break down and cry like a little girl who's lost her favorite toy, it was dumb, it was weak, it was a few desperate minutes of unendurable shame that he's gonna carry around like a goddamn scar for the next couple of days.
Well, he figures, it could be worse. Shit, he had a rough enough time down under, he was owed a bit of… creative deconstruction. (What? He reads. He can use words just as good as Sam, when he wants to.) Just the once, though, he's glad it's done and he won't have to do it again.
And OK, yeah, he feels better; that tight numbness under his skin has slackened, blood reaching parts of him that he didn't realized were clenched so hard. The relief has lightened the cords of his shoulders, detorqued his spine, made him feel loose-limbed and sure, still a bit shocky, but much better. That'll do. A one-time thing, he tells himself, rinsing the last of his grave into the plughole. Once. Like break-up sex. Now it's done and he can get on with his life.
Of course, he doesn't remember a damn bit of that two weeks later when the same fucking thing happens. It'd been a bad day, sure; trying to deal with the monster du jour (the Rugaru, which Dean privately calls the Rutabaga until he manages to get the name down), Sam having a full on freak-out at Dean about his powers, more shit with Ruby, and another goddamn hunter making life as a Winchester just that much harder. Dean's had worse days though, pre-Hell. He is once again brutally embarrassed by how uncompromisingly the totality of the day, and the the dead weight of the last two weeks, breaks him.
Not until afterwards, though. Not until after nearly fifteen minutes of shaking, actually shaking, on the floor of another anonymous hotel bathtub, feeling the spray power down on his shoulders like some bizarre blessing at the end of everything. The tears are hot and raw on his face, liquid salt-burn, back of his hand pressed hard and instinctively against his eyes in a childish attempt to stop the whole world. The sobs wrack him, uncontrollable, and he has never felt more exposed or more vulnerable in his life.
Like last time, the sobs burn out and he comes back to himself in a space of about twenty seconds. Mouth tight, he picks himself up and finishes with a brutally aggressive wash (like he's trying to punish himself for vulnerability, punish himself like Dad would have punished him for being so fucking weak, and ain't that got issues bleeding through the cracks). He scrapes his skin raw to clear it from the blood and the grime of the day in a bizarre ablutionist penance and flatly doesn't think about what that says of him.
Fuck.
By the third time, he has just enough notice of the ache in his lungs to grimly wonder if he's developing a habit before the deluge breaks over him, the buildup of the last ten days' stress washing out his open wounds with surge of grief so powerful it once more drives him to his knees. This one's a bit different; it's not as all-encompassing as before, but he's weaker, so much weaker, able to do little more than slump under the spray, head bowed and long arms limp by his side. His palms face upwards and he looks supplicating, when in fact he's just… unable. Unable to do anything but crack under the pressure of another day where he had to face down the reality of his own death, shivering under the hot water.
He knows why. He fucking knows why. It's because he has spent the last thirty-six hours in the fevergrip of a fear so complete, so total, that his ability to actually feel anything at all (let alone the usual world-crumbling misery) is burned out. The goddamn ghost sickness, that fucking Buruburu, has left him with nothing to his naked name but a dull exhaustion. It fills his limbs with lead, drunk on his own fatigue poisons, and allows him to do little more than bring his cupped hands to his face, to press the heels of his palms into his eyes until he can pretend the starry darkness behind his eyelids protects him.
This jag is slower, weaker, but it lasts longer, and there is no draining feeling of catharsis. There might have been; maybe there would have been an end to it, maybe there would have been closure to the day, maybe there might have been rainbows and pixies and puppies and a goddamn pot of gold and everyone would ride unicorns into a cotton-candy sunset. He never does get the chance to find out because, kneeling there and with the sensation of dull razor wire under his skin, another voice speaks.
"Dean."
Dean yelps, jumps up, exerts exhausted muscles, falls over, flails, smacks various extremities against various unyielding bathroom fixtures, struggles upright, loses his footing on the slippery floor of the bathtub, and finally comes to an unbalanced halt with his head sticking in alarmed panic around the shower curtain. His hands attempt to preserve what little dignity he has left by using the shower curtain as a barrier between his naked body and –
"Fuck," he shouts explosively. Castiel's face is normally utterly unresponsive, but Dean can see surprise and alarm edging its way into the corners of his eyes, especially with only a foot of space between them in the narrow bathroom.
Almost in counterpoint, there is the muffled shout of "Dean?" from Sam. Dean ignores it, wrapping some of the shower curtain around his hips and slamming the shower faucet to the 'off' position. Like shit he's going to tear Castiel a new one whilst cowering behind a fucking shower curtain. Almost unconsciously, he sets his shoulders back and glares.
"I don't know how it works up on Cloud Nine," he growls, "but down here, you do not interrupt a man when he's naked and washing and – and – ever." There is hot shame underwriting the fear, shame that Castiel caught him out like this, a mortified embarrassment that's a slow-boil cousin of vulnerability. It's making his ire burn hotter than normal. Castiel's face is wearing his usual expression of eternal puzzlement at the humans in his charge (Dean thinks it makes him look mildly concussed), tempered now by open wariness. He opens his mouth to reply, and Dean deliberately cuts straight across him.
"There ain't nothin' you need to say that couldn't wait five freakin' minutes until I'm actually wearing pants," he demands furiously, jabbing a finger in Castiel's direction. "What, are all you guys perverts up there, gotta spy on a man in the shower?"
"Dean," demands Sam from behind the bathroom door, "what the hell is going on in there? Is everything OK?"
"Fine," snaps Dean without taking his eyes from Castiel, hand tightening on the shower curtain about his hips. "Just dealing with a thing here."
"Is there someone in there with you?" asks Sam, confused, and Castiel's eyes cut toward the door, head bowed slightly.
"Look, I got this," Dean responds, voice hard, fury focusing his gaze on Castiel and choosing ambiguity over details. He has an issue at hand. "I'll be out in a few."
"Dean, what –"
"I said I got this," he shouts, and Sam's response is a grumbling "Jeez, OK."
"This had better be good," growls Dean, and Castiel finally makes eye contact.
"I heard you weeping," says Castiel quietly.
Dean's eyes widen, hot shame clawing up his bones until his insides could boil with it. He jerks his free hand up, pointing a finger furiously at Castiel's face, and the threats come out before he can stop them.
"You," he starts, voice low and violence promised on every syllable, "heard nothing. You saw nothing. I do not weep. And if you ever mention that again, I will start looking up new and interesting ways to make your existence deeply, deeply painful."
Threatening an angel was not one of his best ideas, but hell with it, he's never been the thinker of this particular team.
Castiel's looking at him like he hasn't heard any of it. His eyes are grave, face set into the low lines of the perennially tired, and there is a thin tilt of compassion to his mouth that, Dean finds, infuriates him even more than a rebuttal would have. Still, Castiel cuts his eyes away after ten seconds of spine-tighteningly awkward silence. Dean finds his free hand has cranked into a fist and refuses to unclench, the day's unspent misery riding on his nerves and fraying the very last thread of his patience.
Castiel opens his mouth. Dean raises an eyebrow, mouth tight, and Castiel closes it again. There's another long bank of silence, in which Dean can feel his self-control slipping further away from him.
"This is a bad time," ventures Castiel at last, as thought the words come against his better judgement. His hands are resting in his trenchcoat pockets.
"Oh, you think?" snaps Dean, anger tempered by a cool flash of relief. Castiel doesn't look like he's going to push the issue. He might just get out of this with a pretense of dignity after all, glory glory hallelujah.
"Seriously, OK," shouts Sam from behind the door, seemingly out of patience, "what the holy hell is going on in there?"
"I said I'll be out in a minute," Dean shouts at the door. He's only taken his eyes off Castiel for a second, but the fucker has already made his escape, noiseless and unnoticed, by the time Dean looks back.
"Yeah, you better run," he shouts at the ceiling, and feels better.
Sam gets a heavily-edited version of the events through the door as Dean quickly towels himself off and pulls on jeans and t-shirt, and he thinks that's the end of it, thinks the resentment simmering, unfed, under his skin marks the last of the issue.
He could not be more wrong.
The next day is a grade-A clusterfuck. It starts badly, lukewarm anger simmering under the flesh of Dean's brain, and he knows he's off. He knows his reactions are a half-second out of normal, that there's one cylinder not firing. Like he's forgotten to do something and until he remembers what the fuck it is, he'll be fuzzy and incomplete.
It nearly gets Sam killed.
No, Dean amends, he nearly gets Sam killed.
Being off your game is not an option for a hunter, and Dean finds himself taking too much time to process and to make decisions that normally seem obvious. Usually so quick with his shotgun, usually so fluid on his feet, Dean turns a standard hunt-n-burn haunted house scenario into a panic-fuelled scramble to get out alive. The ghost or ghoul (or whatever the fuck seemed so keen on carving out bits of people) actually has Sam pinned, has Sam struggling for air through the ethereal hand on his windpipe, before Dean can put a rocksalt round through the thing's chest. It buys them enough time to construct an emergency salt circle, Dean feverishly checking Sam over, cursing himself aloud and rattled at his complete lack of competence.
"Shit," he says furiously, sitting back on his heels as Sam levers himself onto his elbows. He gets a piercing look in return.
"What's up with you today?" demands Sam, half-puzzled, half-angry. There are reddening welts under his jaw. Dean pushes a hand through his hair and shakes his head.
"I'm a goddamn danger to you is what," he growls. "I'm off my game."
Everything runs a bit smoother after that, Dean trading his shotgun for Sam's crowbar, and they find the skeletal remains of the house's previous owner curled into the corner of a badly-hidden basement room. A handful of salt and a bottle of lighter fluid takes care of the problem at hand and they beat a quick, tense retreat to the hotel.
"Trouble sleeping," Dean mutters later by way of explanation, half-truths over Chinese food. Sam eyes him carefully and doesn't say anything, content to accept the explanation as it has presented itself, but Dean can almost hear the curiosity burning in the back of Sam's throat.
The urge to go hide in the shower is like a compulsion. Muttering something about sorting his head out, Dean makes straight for the bathroom. He spends ten minutes standing under the spray in flat, frustrated silence, the tension in his chest building until he could scream from it. He needs to cry, he needs to bleed this poison off, because it's not about his pride any more. It's about Sam's life and Sam's safety, it's about dull bruises the colour of dead blood under Sam's jawline, and if a few fucking tears are the trading price for his brother, then Dean will pay them.
But there's a tight prickle on the back of his neck, paranoia operating with bright and ruthless efficiency. Dean can't stop wondering if Castiel can see him, if Dean's broadcasting his vulnerability on 105.5 FM, the number one angel radio station into Dean's shredded soul, all hits all the time. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.
He towels off, redresses, and throws himself into his bed with a panicky sense of doom drawing near on the horizon.
Dean's dreams that night are unquestioningly awful; sweaty, shaky affairs that are conducted in near-perfect silence. He wakes up pretty much on the hour, every hour, until six AM. Ninety minutes later, when Sam is stirring in his bed and peering groggily around the room, Dean is already up, dressed, hunched over one of Sam's books on demonic possession, and on his third cup of coffee.
"There something you gotta tell me?" asks Sam from across the room, clocking the book's title through bleary eyes and reaching for his phone. Dean glances up.
"No, just bored," he says. "'Sides, it won't hurt for me to nerd up on a little of this stuff."
"Bad dreams again," says Sam, half-questioning, as he sits up. Dean turns a page and doesn't answer.
Over the next few days, Dean mainlines caffeine likes it's the elixir of fucking life. There's a chemical edge to his movements, nerves artificially sharpened, and it takes the worst of the dull reaction (the helpless sluggishness that nearly ended Sam's life) from him. The dreams are pretty bad and they get worse, an even mixture of hell-memories and what-if fantasies that usually end up with him standing over someone's corpse. Sam makes more than a few appearances, though Bobby has a starring role once or twice, as does John Winchester. Those particular ones catapult Dean from sleep with a cry he can only stifle by forcing his throat shut, body thrashing for air even as he locks off his lungs in the last few panic-seconds of the dreams.
If Sam notices, he never says anything.
Dean feels himself coming apart, day by day, with a helpless finality that scares him down to the marrow. He's pretty experienced at cruising through his problems like they don't exist, and the coffee means he can actually operate, but Dean finds himself wondering what it's going to feel like to crack without any recourse for repair. The caffeine's probably only speeding up the process; he's constantly jittery, nerves wrapped around a tight helix of chemical dependancy.
It probably is the coffee that does it, in the end, he reckons. It undermined the control he fought to built, weakened the foundations of his paranoia, and everything gives way in spectacular fashion.
It's been a week of grey-eyed hell, little sleep killing his appetite so he isn't eating much either. Sam has noticed by that point but, awkward and unsure, doesn't seem able to say anything. He will soon, though; if Dean refuses a bacon cheeseburger one more time it might just be enough to push the kid into full-on panic mode and haul him off to a shrink or something. Dean can't actually bring himself to care. Oh, he worries about Sammy, alright; and he worries about Sammy worrying about him. But honestly, there's not a lot he can do right now, save plough through every day with the same grim determination that got him through Dad's death. It's rough but it works, even if it means he finishes each day wondering how many he's got left.
"I'm going to the seven-eleven," announces Sam, after an evening's fruitless research into the hunting habits of Ornias' 'Falling Stars' demons. Dean, trying to work out if a shotgun blast would have enough sheer power behind it to get through the thick flight-muscles over the damn things' chests, glances up, pen hanging out of his mouth.
"Pie," he says, more out of force of habit than hunger. "Don't forget the pie."
"When have I ever forgotten the pie," responds Sam automatically, and he smiles, relieved. Dean figures he must be sounding normal enough to pass muster. He tosses Sam the Impala's keys and turns back to the book, not actually taking anything in now his concentration has been broken. Fuck it. A shower and a beer sounds about right. Ancient spy-demons could wait until tomorrow.
He's actually just about to get out of the shower when the whole thing goes. It's not like the times before – confusion in the face of his body's betrayal, wracking sobs, etcetera. This is… this is a complete break-down, a total shaking-apart of the machinery that builds him.
He can't breathe.
That's how it starts. Hand reaching for the faucet, Dean finds that there isn't enough air, and he's full-on hyperventilating before he can think his way through it. Rational thought gets wiped out in a single wave of panic-fear and then he's heaving at the oxygen in the room, dizzy and getting dizzier. He finds himself face-down on the floor of the bathtub (again, Christ, people were going to talk) and bracing his arms against the sides as though they could anchor him. His vision is grey and he can't stop moving, semi-spasms, panic-thrashing.
He's like this for a long time, going crazy by inches, constantly shifting in panic-dumb movements that stretch out his muscles to snapping point and use up all the oxygen he can claim for himself. His heart is banging itself against his ribs as though demanding to be let out.
Finally there's a breath, and another, that doesn't immediately go to fuel the panic. Instead they become sobs, miserable tremors that crackle in his lungs even as his oxygen debt is repaid. But he's tired, shell-shocked, and he has nothing left to give. He lies unmoving under the spray as it washes away as much as it can.
He greys out for some time. He's not even sure how long; his entire body is stunned and unresponsive. His eyes are unfocused, glassy, and he's seeing absolutely nothing, feeling nothing, not actually there.
Dean comes back to himself in stages, the feeling of water on his skin preceding all else. He blinks against the water droplets on his eyelashes and shivers, levering himself up with joints almost too stiff to move. He's cold, cold to the goddamn bone under the now-lukewarm spray from the showerhead, and his thinking is slow and shock-stained.
Mechanically, he turns off the shower, dries, dresses and braves the reality of the world beyond the bathroom door. Sam's not back yet, which either means the seven-eleven is pretty goddamn far away or Dean wasn't, uh, out for as long as he thought he was.
Damn it, he's so tired.
Dean dumps himself on his bed and is asleep pretty much straight away.
Later on in the evening there is pie and beer, in which Dean overindulges, to Sam's clear-cut relief. Dean can see the worry and the curiosity in Sam's eyes retreating, subdued, and he makes a special effort to crack jokes and needle the kid.
All the while he thinks, gears moving under the bright blank canvas of his eyes, and he makes a decision. No more fighting whatever the fuck this stupid-ass crying thing is. Not if it nearly gets Sammy killed, not if it results in the nightmare shock-horror of the afternoon, helpless and immobile under the shower. Castiel can watch all he goddamn likes, Castiel can gets his kicks or whatever, perv the fuck out, but Sam is more important. Sam and Dean's ability to function.
Next time, Dean doesn't wait for the crying to find him. That last jag leaves him feeling broken and jittery, raw around the edges, and it's only three days until he finds there's a light tension along the lines of his shoulders. Normally he dismisses it, normally he puts it down to bad sleep and worse troubles, but this time he makes an executive decision.
"Shower time," he announces to the world at large, bouncing out of his chair and slinging his jacket on his bed. "And Sammy, uh, you might wanna grab your headphones."
"What? Why?" asks Sam, confused, looking up from his laptop. He immediately freezes at the sight of Dean holding up a copy of 'Busty Asian Beauties' and wiggling his eyebrows. "Oh – oh, Jesus, Dean," he says, disgusted. Dean's grin widens.
"What? I'm a guy, Sam, I have needs," he says with a wink, laughter on every syllable. "It's a perfectly normal, natural thing for a dude to enjoy."
"I – oh, Jesus," repeats Sam, utterly freaked out and scrabbling for the headphones in the bottom of his laptop bag. Dean laughs all the way into the bathroom.
Stripped and under the spray, he leans his forehead and braces his hands against the tile of the wall and just lets it come. It's brief and not too bad, actually; not great, no, but manageable, short, stifled sobs that shudder through him for maybe ten minutes before he feels drained enough to stop. There's no crashing to his knees, no uncontrollable movements, just stillness and a controlled misery that doesn't take him out. There, then, the edge of the stress and trauma bled away, he actually feels kind of good.
Dean makes a point of staying under the spray for at least another ten minutes for the sake of his reputation, and makes sure to tip Sam a wink when he emerges from the bathroom. Sam rolls his eyes in good-natured disgust and unplugs himself from his headphones.
Dean establishes a pattern after that. He listens to the noises his mind makes late at night, he pays attention to the tension that can pull his muscles tighter than is healthy, and learns to judge his timing. Short, periodic bursts seem to act as a pressure valve, bleeding off the worst of it and leaving him functional and, for the most part, balanced. It doesn't stop the dreams (nothing short of a god-damn brainwashing will stop the dreams, he reckons), but it allows him to ride them out without too much scarring. He's a sharp as ever, as quick and lethal and downright dangerous as ever, and he takes pride in it. He's got this shit managed.
And Castiel appears to have enough sense to either not watch, not care, or not speak. Dean tries to pretend he doesn't care which, but he hopes down to the very core of his bones that the damn angel isn't watching. He's not proud of the crying – every tear is a hot burn of shame, every choking breath a blasphemy – so he just hopes that, wherever the feathery little fucker is, Castiel knows enough to turn his gaze away and at least let Dean pretend at dignity.
He establishes a pattern, the odd moment to himself every three or four days, and holds to it for a week. That week becomes two, then three and finally a month, and he finds he needs the crying jags less and less. The blunt-force trauma of Hell is still very near the surface of his skin, but day-to-day he feels more managed, more in control. He's got this, he's good.
In fact, by the time the third month rolls round, he hasn't done it in ages. He hasn't felt that particular itchy stress sitting in lines under his shoulders, hasn't needed to cloister himself away or break down in tightly-controlled stages, and he's actually feeling cautiously optimistic. OK, so the dreams are still sitting in the back of his brain like nasty-ass hitchhikers farting and picking at the upholstery, but that's something he just has to deal with.
He's actually getting a bit cocky about it all.
So, of course, the universe hands him a steaming turd of a day in the shape of two angels, one an expression of terminal worry in a trench coat, and the other a simmering cauldron of wrath and bloodthirst ill-disguised by an attitude of righteous conviction. Dean knows a psycho when he sees one and holy fuckballs but there's a spark of insanity doing somersaults in Uriel's eyes. How, he wonders, is Castiel the WonderBoy not seeing this? How is Castiel so blind to the badly-fettered nutcase in the black suit standing right next to him?
Dean's a stubborn little shit and he knows it, but it isn't stubbornness that makes him throw the gauntlet back into Uriel's face, 'specialist' psycho wrath and all. He and Sam are going to save the goddamn town, stop the seal being broken and make Uriel fucking eat that superior look. Uriel dared to threaten Sam. Sam is Dean's breaking point, has always been Dean's breaking point, and he takes perverse pleasure in laying a verbal bitchslap on the sanctimonious shit. Maybe Dean'll wake up one day with a horse's head in his bed for his troubles, but hey, he can deal.
The look in Uriel's eyes promises murder. Dean calls that a win.
What blindsides Dean, though, is Castiel's brief, deliberate cruelty. Making mention of John Winchester is, as far as Dean is concerned, a quick route to a diagnosis of a fist-related teeth disorder. The sharp shock of betrayal lasts only for a second before hot rage swamps it, drowns it out.
The look Dean gives Castiel is hard, unforgiving, and probably writ large with his vulnerability. It takes him a long, hot second to find his balance, and when he does, he's ploughing into the challenge with nary a backwards glance.
And he can't even do that.
They fail. Well, kinda. The town's still standing, everybody's alive who should be and dead who ain't, sorta, but the seal's broken and Dean can't take that back, no matter how pissed off he is. He feels like he's taken a body blow, winded and staggered and badly balanced, but still on his feet.
Castiel comes to find him, sitting silently in the play park like the creepy, pathetic idiot he feels. Because the day wasn't fucked up enough already.
Dean's pretty prepared to be on the defensive, he's prepared to fight his ground for the choices he's made, because the sight of the children playing is more of an argument than he could ever articulate. So when Castiel looks at him, grave and flatly resigned as he always is, and tells him "Our orders were not to stop the summoning of Samhain, they were to do whatever you told us to do," Dean can't decide whether he's furious or wildly off-balance. Both, maybe.
The revelation that the entire thing was a test bolsters the river of anger running through him, but Dean knows there's something else there, exhaustion and misery swimming in the undertow. He can feel the downturn at the corners of his mouth, frustration riding in the creases of his forehead. His ire takes over, and all his defensive arguments spill out, and he finishes with the most important thing, the thing that's been preying on his mind, guilt in shame in fear: "These kids, the swings, the trees, all of it is still here because of my brother and me."
He feels low but he makes his voice strong and pours the full weight of his conviction into it. There's unspoken cracks fissuring through into his self-control, his fingers wrapping restlessly around themselves, a short glimpse into the state of him. He is so angry and so tired.
Castiel doesn't appear to notice any of it. "You misunderstand me, Dean," he replies, wearing his fucking solemnity like armor. "I'm not like you think. I was praying that you would choose to save the town."
Angels pray? is Dean's first thought, until the rest of his brain catches up. "You were?" Disbelief is heavy in his tone.
Castiel's reply is thick with Biblical poetry, all "my Father's creations" and "works of art" with a side order of hellfire, which is pretty much what Dean expects.
"Can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul?" adds Castiel, and that's not what Dean expects.
"OK," he replies, feeling worn and pissed off, but curious too. Castiel's face is as expressionless as ever, but Dean picks up something deep-veined and frustrated in the angel's tone when he says, "I'm not a… hammer, as you say."
Dean says nothing.
"I have questions, I – I have doubts. I don't know what is right and what is wrong anymore, whether you passed or failed here. But, in the coming months, you will have more decisions to make. I don't envy the weight that's on your shoulders, Dean. I truly don't."
Dean stares at Castiel for several long, awful seconds, feeling the words sit in his stomach like food poisoning. His blood feels thin and staticky, friction on the inside of his veins. His muscles are tight.
He looks away for a moment to sort his shit out, forcibly releasing the tension in his hands, and when he looks back, Castiel is gone.
Dean takes a single deep breath, jams his scream down, pulls himself together in a quick, brutal movement, and goes back to the hotel.
Sam is quiet and uncommunicative for the rest of the day. Dean doesn't take it personally; Uriel shook him up somethin' fierce and besides, it's been a rough ride, a half-success buried under pessimism and fear. Sam needs time to short his head out. They both do.
"Goin' for a shower,' Dean mutters, getting up from his hunched silence over the table. Sam looks up from the book in front of him. He's been staring at it, still and eyes unmoving, for the last twenty minutes. There's something, some high emotion, written on his face. Dean pauses and frowns at him.
"What?"
"I – can I ask you something?"
What fresh hell, he thinks, feeling his edges fray. "Can it wait 'til I'm outta the shower?"
Sam stares at him for a long moment, worryingly wordless, before bending back to his book in a clear-cut gesture of capitulation. "Yeah, I guess."
Once inside the bathroom, Dean strips mechanically, spinning the faucet on, all movements muscle memory and with absolutely no input from his brain. The touch of his fingertips on his own skin feels wrong, delicately numb, poised on the knife-edge of something.
It breaks.
Of course it fucking breaks.
The knowledge that it's going to break has been casting one hell of a shadow over his shock-blank mind ever since the play park, and he is utterly unsurprised when, midway through running the soap over the curve of his arm, the tears come.
They're not violent. That's what gets him. They're not forced from him, they're not torn out of his chest, there's no bright anxiety beating at his lungs. They come smoothly and easily and he doesn't fight them, curling the heel of his palm against his mouth to muffle the noise and carefully sinking to his knees, the better to let this bypass him. He knows he's vulnerable, but this time he can't care because he can see ahead into the immediate months and years and is flatly aware he can't do it. He can't be the load-bearer for heaven's conscience, he can't be the frontman in a war waged by powers bigger than he can conceive, and he can't do the things that Castiel has promised him. He can't. And it's not refusal, Dean knows he's not turning his back out of choice; he knows that he will fight and scream and bleed out everything he has ever had into the future and what he will get back will be worse than nothing. And he will fail. He will fall. And Sammy –
This isn't like before (the hot rush of shock-panic-fear). This is bone-deep pain coming out through the face of him, building, building, building. He's not used to this, doesn't know how to handle it; he's used to sudden outbursts and then the decline, not some thing in his chest clawing its way out, shredding his heart and his lungs on an escape course at terminal velocity.
And everything he's put himself through, every time he's stood under the spray of the shower and felt like his world was coming apart at the join, it was never this final; it was always whatever he could do to hold himself together and push through to tomorrow. What this feels like – what this is – is giving up.
These are tears born from pain, not terror, because this is the breaking of him and breaking hurts.
"Dean," says a voice. It's compassionate, grave, and familiar. Dean doesn't move or even acknowledge Castiel's presence; he's paralyzed by grief and self-pity, crying his shame into his hands, end-game. (Self-hatred is a familiar language for Dean, but this particular dialect is new, strange, and has left him overwhelmed.)
"Dean," Castiel says again, and his voice is different. There's a more direct sorrow hiding behind the slide of the vowels, worry in the softness of his tone. It looks like compassion, but it smells like pity.
Dean feels fingers on his shoulder, then, firm and cautious, and he reacts to both voice and touch: he knocks the hand away from him in a violent swipe that leaves him slumped over at an awkward angle, face turned away from the angel standing only a foot from him. It shakes him up enough to turn off the tears, shocked into gasping rather than sobbing.
He doesn't hear Castiel move again, and thinks maybe that's the end of it, that Castiel will walk away as he should and let him be, broken in a bathtub. But Castiel takes him by the shoulders, sudden, one hand fitted perfectly over the brand on his upper arm, and he's in the shower, he's actually in the motherfucking shower, crouching down, and Dean's instincts come into sudden, violent play.
He grabs Castiel by the shirt, quickfast, fists tight into the material and knuckles pressed hard against the angel's breastbone, tipping Castiel off-balance and bringing him from his squat down on to his knees. Dean can't stop the vulnerability written all over his goddamn face like it's owed advertising space, but the emotion is torn by the rough, crazy snarl stretched across his jaw. He never did fight clean when he felt cornered.
"Get out," he half-roars, vicious. His voice has desperation on the edges, but there's a heavy current of violence that surely not even Castiel can miss. Dean holds eye contact despite the way he knows he looks exactly like what he is, a broken man naked in a shitty motel bathtub, but if Castiel doesn't move right goddamn now then Dean isn't even sure what he's going to do, only that there's blackness curling softly about the back of his thoughts and he is really, truly beginning to think he has nothing to lose.
Castiel's eyes are locked tight to his face even as Dean's fists twist harder into his shirt, trying desperately to convince himself that he's got this, he's in control, ain't nothin' more in control than being the one holding another man at the end of a fist. But even through the thin violence of his rage, Dean knows that he hasn't got this, he hasn't, and that Castiel has still got the casting vote here, somehow.
Castiel's mouth is tight and he's frowning, half-confused and all concern. He seems utterly unaware of everything but Dean; unaware of the fingers nearly tearing holes into his shirt, the way the fine spray is slicking down the peak of hair over his forehead, the way his ill-worn tie is staining a darker color, and how his knees are a half-inch deep in water soaking up into the cloth.
"Dean," he says for a third time. "I came to apologize." His voice is calm but there's a thick thread of intensity in his tone, and though his hands are steady, his mouth is a grim slash across his face.
Dean's throat works but he says nothing.
"I shouldn't have said what I said. I put too much on you," Castiel continues, and Dean just looks at him, sees the reality of the angel in the wet trench coat, and he breaks. He just fucking crumbles.
It hurts, oh God it hurts, he's never known grief so strong, it's the loss of Dad and the worry about Sam and the everyday microfears projected hard into the future until the sight is mountainous and daunting enough that he can see his own end painted in grisly symbols over the next year, all rolled into the small hollow space of his skull until he could burst from the poisonous pressure.
"Get out," he says again, only he doesn't say it, he chokes it, he chokes on the fucking words, going mad with it all. He could have managed this, could have skimmed the crest of the worst of it and left this deep well untapped, but Castiel had to come here, Castiel in his fucking stupid trench coat sitting in his goddamn shower, offensively real and carrying the weight of his apologies like a weapon.
Castiel's hand is on his shoulder again like he can't take a fucking hint, fingers sitting along the lines of the scar he left behind. Dean makes an abortive gesture to shake him off, head dropping to hide his face from Castiel, too little too late. "Don't," he says, griefblind, half-snarl and half-gasp, and Castiel flat-out ignores him. Castiel's other hand is settling firmly just below the exposed nape of Dean's neck, not soothing, not stroking, but exerting a mild and unyielding pressure as though that was enough to keep Dean tethered to the ground.
Dean's hand flies up to grasp at it, to turn up the ends of Castiel's fingers and peel his palm from his skin, but he can't. He can't do it, eyes screwed shut and frozen into a tight clench of muscles, not knowing if it was an angel's strength or a human's weakness that stymied him, with his fingers locked uselessly about Castiel's own.
He hears his name – Dean – said once, tight emotion painted into the word, and Dean twists the fist wrapped into Castiel's damp shirt.
"Shut up," he says, spine curved tightly and chin almost to his chest. The net effect is a half-roar muffled into a whisper by the uncompromising curve of his throat, Dean's fingers tightening on Castiel's to the point of pain, unsung violence in the movement. It's that same vicious reflex that jerks Castiel closer with the hand still twisted relentlessly into his damp shirt. There is grief screaming its own patterns down his neurons until his insides seem to char with it, painblocked, so Dean pulls, he pulls tight, forehead pressed hard against the angel's chest, half-believing that he can be the one in control if only he can lock Castiel down hard enough. He's got this, right, he's the one who dictates where this goes.
He stays like that as the seconds roll by to become actual minutes, a stranger's hand on his neck and his shoulder, his knuckles pressed against foreign bones and an alien heartbeat pulsing against his face. He can't let go, can't unclench, because to do that would be to admit to everything, to admit to the tears and the shame and the hot, crawling insanity in his marrow, and it would make his world unreal. Because he can tell himself like this that the fingers he digs tight into the back of Castiel's hand are not desperation but a threat; he knows he's a hair away from exploding, not collapse; and it's obvious that his forehead pressed hard against Castiel's breastbone means hair-trigger violence, and not paralytic grief. Those things are real, the control he has is real, and he is not a man fresh from breaking and clinging tight to the only being in grabbing distance. That's not Dean Winchester. That's some cheap copy. The real Dean is the son of the man who raised him, tough and all-American and he emphatically does not curl up in bathtubs and cry out his fears and frustrations against the shirt of a non-human being that couldn't outwit a bag of squirrels.
So he stays there as the long minutes begin to stretch out, holding on to his choice of reality, the last thin line. And if Castiel's thumb traces short, brief strokes against the skin of his shoulder, if Castiel's fingers twist just so in between Dean's own and hold on, then that's all Castiel's fault, not Dean's. Obviously Castiel needs the comfort, right, so it only makes sense to cling back, to hold tight, as Dean shakes the last of the sobs from his lungs, back to even ground.
(Anyone else might have said something at this point, been something, but Castiel keeps his silence. Later Dean will probably figure it's because the angel is as adrift in this as he is when dealing with every other aspect of human emotion, and can only imagine the confusion thick in his eyes.)
His breathing evens out and his muscles unwind from their end-of-the-world taughtness, and now the silence is pregnant and patient. Dean allows himself to float in the moment, just for a while, eyes shut, and holding still under the shower spray.
It's Castiel who moves first, in the end; Castiel who gently untangles his fingers from Dean's and carefully sweeps them up the bony line of Dean's spine, stopping to cup the base of his skull. His palm is broad and skin-warm against Dean's hair and Dean shivers, actually fucking shivers, right there in the goddamn bathtub, and that's where he has to do something. Or else his chosen reality shatters. Gotta choose to be awake, after all. Dreams aren't real.
He leans back from Castiel, untwisting his now-stiff fingers from the angel's shirt and being pretty damn clear that OK, huggy times are done now, you can let go, Cas, take the hint.
Cas's hands withdraw after a moment, and Dean doesn't look up. Instead he scrubs his hands over his face, trying to stabilize, not entirely sure what the fuck you're meant to say after something like this. Most of his two-in-a-shower scenarios end up with one person asking the other if it was good for them too, but this doesn't seem like the time.
"Cas," he ventures, voice raspy as he looks up, but the bathroom is empty.
The feeling he has, upon emerging from the bathroom, is closer to 'hangover' than anything else.
Sam is staring at his laptop, eyes flat and mouth a hard line. He looks up when Dean closes the bathroom door. There's conflict warring in his eyes, some deep-seated worry. Dean tucks the last half an hour behind him, locks it away, and frowns.
"What?"
Sam hesitates, looks down, looks up, and finally starts, "Uriel – he said..."
"Yeah?"
Sam looks at him, mouth an uncertain line, and says nothing for a long, long moment.
"Never mind," Sam mutters, slumping slightly, and his eyes drop back to his laptop.
"C'mon, Sam," Dean says, and the worry feels like well-trodden ground. Familiar. "What did the dickface say? Was he butthurt we ruined his little mass-destruction party?"
"I – no, it doesn't matter," says Sam, not meeting his eyes, and now it's Dean's turn to give him a long, uneasy look.
For once horrifying moment, he considers the idea that Sam might have heard him, might have listened to him breaking in the bathroom, but he decides, no, probably not. Sam's not the kind of guy to let something like that lie, surely. Half the problem is shutting the kid up, not getting him to talk, as John Winchester would have loudly attested.
Dean feels a little rattled and rubs his hand over his face a couple of times, trying to ignore the fact he was just naked in the shower with an angel and he's pretty sure that's the title of at least one gay porn film.
"Any news?" he asks instead, and Sam visibly switches gears, clicking on tabs and shifting paperwork, and rattling off something about Concrete, Washington and a series of weird-ass events. The strange moment is gone.
They make plans and check maps for the route that'll get them to Washington, and Dean just doesn't stop to think about how much of it is displacement activity. So, of course, it comes back to him at about one a.m., lying under the covers of another motel bed so anonymous it actually feels kind of familiar.
There's something in his chest, a heavy weight; not unpleasant, but with an inability to be ignored. Something is new now, some chink in his armor opened wider. Dean doesn't want to think about what it means, doesn't want to think about the look in Cas' eyes, the compassion and the pity and the total obliviousness to the 'fuck off' field that Dean projects. Or the hands on his shoulder, fingers on skin, and the bright white shock that washed through him, the last of its jetsam sitting unmovable in his thoughts.
Dean curls his fingers against his neck, feeling phantom fingerprints, and allows himself to wonder.
Just briefly, though.
After all, that's just a dream, and dream are for sleepin'.