AN: Language warning. Cause, you know, this is sort of a language-warning-deserving situation.
Apparently, the night before Dean was going to ask him out on their first real date, Castiel Milton committed suicide.
That's all Dean hears Gabriel say, that Cas killed himself, before he shuts down. Gabriel talks some more, and when Dean stops answering his questions he calls Sam, but Dean doesn't pay attention to any of it.
Sam talks to Gabriel some, tears fall from his eyes, and he coaxes Dean into the car so they can drive to Gabe's house.
There are police cars in front of the house, as well as an ambulance. Gabriel stands beside it, talking to a police officer, who nods occasionally and takes notes. He walks away just as Sam and Dean arrive, and the first thing Sam does is pull Gabriel into a hug.
Dean stays in the car, taking in the scene around him. He doesn't want to get out and talk to Gabriel, who has the same frown as Cas, the same mannerisms. He doesn't want to get out and see the house, which he last saw with Cas dying in his arms. He doesn't want to see anything that will remind him of Cas, and right now that's everything.
The police ask Sam a few questions as well, presumably his relation to Cas and if he noticed anything off about him in the past few weeks. For whatever reason, they leave Dean alone.
That's when, out of the corner of his eye, Dean sees a familiar flash of dark hair, and he instinctively turns before he can think about the consequences. There, being hauled onto the ambulance by two paramedics in blue suits, is a stretcher. It's covered in a conspicuous bright blue tarp and from the top of it spills a handful of dark brown hair, as if the tarp had started to slip off. There's also a quick glimpse of too-pale porcelain skin before the paramedic fixes the tarp to cover the body again and closes the door to the ambulance to haul him off to the morgue.
The body. That was Cas' fucking corpse.
The panic comes on slowly, a rising tide, but once it arrives it hits Dean full force. His hands begin to tremble, so hard that he has to clench them into tight fists to avoid hitting anything. His heart beat doubles in speed, and sweat begins to bead up along his brow. He sits in shock for a moment before he wrenches the car door open and heaves bile and the remnants of his dinner onto Gabriel's front lawn.
Thankfully, the action is witnessed only by a few police officers who refrain from comment— not that Dean could really care enough to feel embarrassed right now. He pulls himself fully to his feet and when he climbs back into the car, it's into the driver's seat.
He later tells himself that he fully intended when he pulled out of the driveway to return to Sam's house, pack some things into a suitcase, and leave. What he really ends up doing is taking a left two stop signs past Sam's street, making him end up in the parking lot of the Roadhouse.
He turns off the car, goes inside (thankful that it's open 24 hours), sits at the bar, and orders a beer. For the first time in two years, Dean tastes alcohol.
He's still sitting on his stool when Sam storms in at eight in the morning, Gabriel in tow.
"What the hell are you doing, Dean?" he demands, grabbing the bottle of beer (his seventh? Eighth?) from his brother's hand and gripping it nearly tight enough to shatter it.
"The hell d'ya think?" Dean replies, his words slurred. "Gimme back my beer."
"No!" Sam shouts, and Dean is thankful that the only other customer in the joint at the moment is an old man eating a breakfast sandwich in the corner, since his brother insists on making such a scene. "Two years, Dean. Two years of sobriety that you just threw out the window." His tone changes from angry to disappointed, and Dean wishes he'd just go back to yelling at him. "Come on, Dean," Sam says. "Let's go home. Gabe, can you give me a hand?" With Gabriel's help, Sam drags Dean into the backseat of Gabriel's car, and to his credit Gabriel doesn't make a single comment about not throwing up on the floor of his favorite ride.
"But what about my car?" Dean whines as his brother attempts to shove him into his seat.
"I'll pick it up later, Dean. Shut up and sit down."
Dean pouts— actually pouts—but silently sits in the backseat. Gabriel drives them to Sam's house, where Sam gives Dean a cup of hot, bitter coffee and an aspirin. Gabriel still sits in the small armchair against the wall, and Sam stands next to him, too anxious to sit down.
Dean's brain seems like it's attempting to crack open his skull from the inside, and he may be drunk as all hell, but he doesn't need to be sober to realize that he's just fucked up majorly, and that he's lucky his brother hasn't already kicked him out on his sorry ass— another point on the list of things Dean owes his brother for.
He sinks into the sofa, sipping his coffee with a grimace as Gabriel asks, "So, do you want to know what actually happened?" His voice is still strained, and Dean knows this isn't a story he would like to recount.
"No," he says, shaking his head, an action that just proceeds to make it pound. "No. I just... I mean, was there..."—he pauses, taking a deep breath to steady himself—"Did he leave a note?" He braces himself for the answer, but he's not sure which one would be worse at this point.
Gabriel winces at the question, and seems to try to decide what exactly he should say. Finally, he grinds out, "No. I didn't see... They didn't find anything."
Dean is marginally confused by the fact that Gabriel didn't "see" anything, until his alcohol-addled brain reaches the conclusion that, of course, Gabriel must have been the one to find Cas, and he can't even imagine how painful that must be. The glimpse of him covered in a tarp was enough to send Dean into a spiral of panic, revulsion, and regret. Seeing him collapsed at the scene itself, deathly pale, perhaps even with a sliver of life still in him, slowly slipping in the minutes it takes for the paramedics to arrive— no, his imagination is getting the best of him. Still, it must have been so awful. He wonders how Gabriel is holding it together. Maybe Dean could have too, if he really tried, maybe he didn't have to throw it all away—
Again, he stops himself. He's had too much of this fucking self-pity crap lately, and frankly he's just too drunk to deal with all the philosophical shit at the moment.
But Cas could have at least had the courtesy to leave them a fucking note.
