The car rumbles across the matted grass and open, bared earth as Dean pulls unevenly over a verge and into the parking lot behind the staff cabins. The only cabin with lights on in presumably Lisa's, and two worried waitresses are standing on the porch, one with a cigarette in her hand. Dean barrels out of the car and almost sprints to the cabin and up he steps to the porch. Gabriel struggles out of the back of the car, and he waits for Castiel before they hurry into the building.
Castiel would otherwise have assumed his presence would be inappropriate.
This was after all, his fault.
But Gabriel stood by his side as they entered the tiny room, draped claustrophobically with glittering costumes and bright scraps of cloth, the serviceable furnishings lost under discarded hose and garters, make-up, scarves and magazines left open and ringed with coffee cup marks. It smelt of tobacco and perfume and the powdery scent of the costumes, there was also a sour scent, the sloppy, butcherish scent of blood.
Lisa was not alone on the bed, she was lying between two other seated dancers and under a counterpane with tufted edges. Castiel felt a lurch as the heightened hormones of lust in him combines with the horror of this scene – Lisa, waxen and pale, a bulge under the coverings making evident that some effort had been made to pad out the bleeding from below.
A bilious, salt taste filled his mouth and he thought for a dizzying second that he was going to be sick.
Dean was already crouching beside his partner, one hand touching her pale, corpselike face as she shuddered pitifully. Gabriel spoke beside him, but Castiel realised his words were meant for Dean and not for him.
"He wasn't a doctor." Gabriel's voice was strained, his eyes jerking between Lisa and Dean's face. "He wasn't...shit, he had a fucking knife and a folding table...after she started screaming I tried to get in – I goddamn tried, but..." he trailed off with a tortured expression. Castiel touched his hand gently, trying to press comfort on the tormented man. To his surprise, Gabriel didn't jerk away, but gripped his fingers gratefully. "She said a hospital would call the police." He continued in a steadier voice. "I don't know what to do."
Dean looked up at them from his place, kneeling on the floor.
And Castiel knew what he had to do.
"Stay here." He said numbly, then squeezed Gabriel's hand and bolted from the cabin, trying to force his shaking legs to stay under him and not stumble on the gravel lot. He ran faster than he'd ever had cause to run before, tearing through the rough brush between the staff area and the main part of the resort. Gravel paths and wood chip track slithered under his running shoes, and sweat painted his face as he swiped his hand urgently across his mouth, trying to remove the worst of the lipstick.
He pounded up the steps to his parent's cabin, realising from the darkness of the windows that it must truly be very late. Castiel opened the screen door and went inside, finding his father and mother asleep and waking his father with a rough shake, as he had never dared do before.
"Castiel?" Michael woke blearily and clutching at the sheets in surprise. "What..."
Castiel pulled at him, motioned for silence and then seized the doctoring bag that was never far from his father's hand, even on vacation.
His father understood that at least.
The age and relative unfitness of his father made the return journey longer and unpleasantly frustrating as Castiel began to wonder whether Lisa would still be alive when they reached her. His father had noted the lipstick stain on his mouth and the rumpled state of his clothes, the missed button on his shirt. He was cold beneath the air of urgency, and Castiel knew his father suspected him of being with a woman from the staff – perhaps even put this whole mess down to his own lax behaviour.
He was almost right. This did nothing to soothe the sharp, guilty corners of Castiel's mind.
When they at last reached the cabin that housed Lisa and her concerned entourage, Castiel barely had time to get inside before Dean was an inch from him and taking a possessive hold of his shoulder.
"Where did you go?" he hisses, eyes panicky and, if Castiel is reading them correctly, just slightly betrayed.
Castiel clasps his arm reciprocally and feels the warm resilience of Dean's flesh under his hand, he looks Dean in the eye just as Michael emerges from the darkness outside, already unsnapping his bag and going to tend to Lisa. Dean's eyes follow his movements and he seems to sag with relief and bristle with uncertainty at the same time.
"I got help." Castiel says simply, and Dean's warm fingers find his own as they stand, just out of the circle of shawl dampened light around the bed. Michael quickly assesses Lisa, prodding and rubbing at her stomach before shooing the performers from the cabin, Castiel and Dean included, so that he can take a look under the primitive wrappings.
Outside of the cabin, most people decide that the emergency is over, and since the fast approaching tomorrow is a working day, they hurry off to bed. Only Gabriel stays with them, and he wisely makes no attempt to bring up what he saw of them in the car, for which Castiel is profoundly grateful. He feels anyway a kind of shame which has a lot to do with the situation he had enabled Lisa to be placed in. It was he who borrowed the money, who had lied to his father to do so, and then covered for her so that she could have the procedure done.
He'd been enraptured beneath her friend and only source of safety as she lay suffering.
They talk little and fidget much as they wait. Dean smokes a cigarette and Gabriel scratches a sharp stone against the wooden boards of the porch steps. Castiel sits apart from them, cold and locked within his own thoughts.
Eventually his father emerges from the cabin, carrying his bag. He barely glances at Gabriel, but when Dean scrambles to his feet he glares at him.
"Sir, I'm so grateful you..."Michael brushes off Dean's brusque thanks with no acknowledgement, taking Castiel by the arm instead.
"Castiel, we're leaving." He grates out, and Castiel goes with him like a limp ragdoll, cowed by his father's cold anger.
He can't even look at Dean as he leaves.
Halfway back across the darkened resort his father begins to speak, not looking at him but striding furiously instead.
"Was that what my money paid for?" he demands. "You paid for that girl to be...butchered like that?"
"Yes...I..."
"No." His father cuts his off. "You're not the person I thought you were Castiel." He says sadly, coldly. "My son wouldn't lie for the money to do something like this...he wouldn't befriend the kind of man, who would get a girl in that situation and then get someone else to buy her out of it." As they reach their cabin Michael turns to glare at him. "I'm going to bed, and we'll be leaving in the morning." He wheels around to go back to his own room. "Wash that make-up off of you before your mother sees you." He growls over his shoulder. "she doesn't need to know the kinds of things you've been doing."
Castiel goes to his own bathroom, feeling like a kicked curr of a dog. In the mirror his reflection stares balefully, bruised lipped, streaked with sweat run make-up and smudged with lipstick. He looks like he's been debauching himself with a whore all night – which is exactly what his father believes he has been doing.
He takes a wet cloth a starts to clean his face, touching his fingers once to the edge of his swollen, reddened lips, a shamed shiver of desire goes through him, and he hastily wipes his mouth with the cloth.
There's been too much sex in the air tonight, between Dean and himself, that amorphous, undreamt of desire that had never entered his mind before. He can't block it out now. But then there was also Lisa, Lisa and her boudoir like cabin, her liaisons and her pregnancy forever tied up with his own lusts. The scent of blood. Tear tracks. Hushed and gathered spectators.
The nightmarish combinations won't separate.
He can still taste Dean in his mouth.
Castiel sets the cloth down and grips the side of the sink with both hands. He forces himself to think of nothing, of the white enamel under his hands, of the blank eye of the mirror over his bent head. He's a speck of no consequence, he's tiny, everything he's feeling is going on in his head, in his body – and both are tiny, are minute, beneath the overarching nature of the rest of the universe.
But his usual litany of small time nihilism cannot touch the raging thing at the centre of him, the thing in his chest that lashes out with anger and jibes...
The thing that Dean had noticed, the thing that responded to him.
And Castiel aches, not as a speck of no importance, but as a great cavern of rumbling need, the hungry groaning of which drowns out his most self preserving of thoughts.
Blood throbs around his body, his mouth is soft and bruised, his spine a line of tension and his skin alive and bristling with the want to be touched, so that even when he moves his own hands to rest on his shirt covered chest, it feels like the barest kind of relief.
It's like a storm or fire, some cataclysm is gathering in him, raging in him.
And it is all raging for Dean.
He sucks in a breath as he looks up to stare at his reflection.
"You're not the person I thought you were Castiel."
"You know, you shake every time I touch you."
Who is he, really? Under everything that's expected of him?
What does he want?
