The last time he was this sober, he'd woken up in the hospital, Sam sitting at his left, staring at the floor. "You can't keep doing this, Dean," he'd said, his voice rough. "You can't keep this up."
Dean hadn't responded, counting the tiles on the ceiling. Sam left five minutes later, his shoulders tight and tense.
This time, he is alone.
He's not a hundred percent sure how he got here. It's all flashes of light and sounds—his mind is jumbled. Sam was involved, somehow (Sam's always involved, somehow, Sam's always trying to save him), but his head hurts too badly to start picking through the pieces right now.
The things he does know are that he's sober, he's in some kind of a rehab facility, and he is very much alone.
The room they have him in is dark and cool, to ward off the headaches. (That's laughable. His head is pounding, aching, weighs a hundred pounds and it's nothing compared to the bone-deep ache that spreads from his shoulders to his toes.) His mouth is dry, cottony and sticky. He reaches for the bottle that's always always always there, and finds smooth plastic instead of the cold glass. It's a bottle of water, and although Dean prefers something stronger, he chugs it in under a minute.
He regrets it almost immediately. His stomach churns unpleasantly, and he lurches to the bathroom, only to feel a tug at his arm. He looks down, sees the IV, and promptly vomits all over himself and the bed. When he's finished, he pulls the IV out of his arm roughly and stumbles to a chair in the corner of the room.
The commotion brings a young woman in light blue scrubs to the room. "Mr. Winchester, what're you doing?" she asks, keeping her voice smooth and even.
"The fuck does it look like?" Dean asks, rough and angry.
The girl in the pale blue just smiles blankly, generically polite, no emotion in her smile, her face wiped clean. She moves across the room to strip the sheets from the bed, shut the IV pump off, clean up the mess he's made.
Dean watches her move (maybe she'd be his type 15 years ago, maybe she'd have been someone he flirted with, tried to pick up, made a naughty nurse joke to if he didn't feel like absolute shit) and when she leaves, she points out the closet, where he will find clean pajamas, and the bathroom, where he can shower.
The shower soothes the ache that's settled into his bones. He moves like he's ninety, not 32, slow and measured, pained. When he comes out of the shower, there's another girl in his room, armed with a fresh IV.
She's older than the girl in pale blue; her face is set sterner, harder. She's the horror stories he's read about rehab; all hard edges and rough lines. The girl in pale blue is generically nice, polite, trained and gentle; this woman is a seasoned veteran, and she jabs the IV back in his arm, her hands and fingers rough. She hooks the fluids back up and shuts the lights off as she leaves.
He sleeps.
(This is his first interaction with the rehab staff.)
When he wakes up the second time, his stomach churns again. There's nothing to come up. He coughs and dry heaves and sweats through his pajamas and the sheets. The girl in pale blue comes back, helps him get cleaned up. She doesn't say anything beyond gentle commands (lift your arms, turn your head, stand up, sit down).
His first few days in rehab follow much the same pattern. They bring him jello and broth, crackers and ginger ale and Dean doesn't want anything but whiskey. He eats begrudgingly, and rarely keeps it down.
When he's not dry heaving, he's sweating, soaking his clothes and the sheets. He takes more showers in the first week of rehab than he's had in the past month (which okay isn't saying a lot) and when he finally does sleep, it's restless and sporadic.
Sam comes to visit around day four (maybe five, Dean doesn't have the tightest grip on time and the way it passes) and he spends the time sitting next to Dean, his hands folded, his shoulders tight against his blazer, staring blankly at Dean's knees.
He doesn't say much to him. "We just want you to get better, Dean," he says finally, before he leaves, and Dean doesn't reply, just rolls over on his side and prays for sleep.
The tremors finally ease off sometime around the fifth or sixth day-Dean's not sure. Time moves in odd patches-in great leaps and snail-like crawls-and it doesn't hold much meaning for him-it hasn't in the past year.
He spends a week in the detox room. The girl in pale blue scrubs (today she's wearing light purple, her soft blonde curls pulled up into a fountain on top of her head) puts a measurement to the time for him one week, you've been here one week, and he's finally able to open his eyes without his stomach threatening to exit via his mouth.
The girl in pale blue tells him it's been a week, and she pulls the IV out of his arm. She tells him to pack his things, that she's going to walk him over to the cottage he's been assigned to (cottage is a fucking stupid name for them, he thinks, they're little more than two bedrooms and a bathroom).
So he packs his things (there isn't much) and she walks him over. Cottage number 6 is painted a light blue, with a white door. There's a burnished brass number "6" on the door, and the doorknob matches.
"Good luck, Mr. Winchester," the girl in pale blue says quietly, and she hesitates before patting his shoulder quickly.
He ignores her.
He turns the knob and the door swings in. Dean takes in the cottage.
The cottage is divided in two sides, with a hallway tiled in burnt orange dividing it. There are two doors on the right, and one on his left. The cottage opens up farther down the hallway, and at the end, there's a window framed by white curtains.
Dean's not focused so much on the curtains, or the window, or the garden he can just barely glimpse, but rather the man perched on the seat just below it—his roommate.
His first impression of his roommate is, admittedly, poor. (He's not sure what he expected-this is rehab, after all.) He's a tall, lanky, rumpled man, with blue blue blue eyes and dark hair that flops over his eyes. He has the beginnings of a beard crawling up the sides of his face and he licks his lips and looks up when Dean walks in (he looks like hell, they both do) and lifts his hand in a wave. "Castiel," he says after a moment, his voice gravel. "Heroin."
"Dean," Dean replies slowly. "Whiskey."
Castiel nods thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling of the cottage.
"I've put my stuff in that room—" he gestures to the door on Dean's right—"but I can move if you're into like, feng shui or whatever." He takes a drag off the cigarette that dangles between his fingers. On the exhale, he gestures to the far doorway on the left. "That's the bathroom, and there's like, a couch and shit through there." He swings his arm to the other side, and takes another drag. "Cigarette?" he asks solemnly, holding out a pack of Camels. "Bullshit, but it's all they've got here," he says. "In the fucking canteen. Fucking church camp."
Dean licks his lips and sets his bag down inside the door. He reaches for a cigarette (he prefers Marlboro Reds, but it's a peace offering), and that is how it begins.
"The hell kind of a name is Castiel, anyway?" Dean asks, reaching for his lighter.
Castiel chuckles and tilts his head back, blowing a thick plume of smoke out the window. He closes his eyes and shrugs. "I'm named after an angel," he says. "I guess Lucifer was a little too…" he pauses, takes another drag, "dark for my parents' taste." He licks his lips, watches the sun start its descent. "I don't think they intended for me to take the angel thing so literally."
Dean frowns and tosses his duffle in the empty room on his left, leaning against the wall, crossing his arms.
"Spent my whole life trying to grow wings and fly," Castiel says, taking another drag from the cigarette. "Heroin is the closest I ever got."
Dean is quiet—this feels awfully personal for Castiel to be sharing with someone he just met, but it doesn't seem to bother the other man—he's too busy staring into the sky, taking drags off his shitty cigarette, sharing his soul with a man that just barely walked into his life. Dean walks past Castiel, drags one of the wooden chairs that sit around a small wooden table in the makeshift kitchen (which is generous, it's a coffee pot and a mini fridge) and sits on it backwards, watching Castiel.
"So why'd you start?" Castiel asks after a moment, flicking the butt of his cigarette out the window. He turns to look at Dean, his blue eyes tired and solemn.
"Start?" Dean asks, stalling. He knows exactly what Castiel means, he's just not sure he's ready to bare his soul just yet.
"Alright, fine," Castiel says with a lazy chuckle. He reaches for another cigarette. "We'll save that conversation for another day." He lights it, and follows the length of Dean's body with his eyes. "You look like hell."
Dean doesn't respond, just smokes, and Castiel seems content with the silence, turning to look back out the window, body twisted around itself on the window seat. The fringe of his too-long hair brushes his collar. Dean tries not to think about it.
(There's a peace that exudes from Castiel, and Dean tries to let it soak in, without thinking about how very, very strange it is that he feels comfortable with a complete stranger and heroin addict.)