This is sort of the second half of the last chapter, I had it planned for chapter ten, so that I'd go into double figures on the first 'bit of the plot' – so, the next few updates will introduce some new elements
Dean feels warm and comfortable for the first time in days, heavy with sleep. There's hunger in his belly, but he pushes it aside, Castiel has food ready for the morning, he knows that. There's no desperation to the hunger, no edge of starvation.
Dean's starved before.
When he was hunting the man that killed his parents, he'd gone without food for days. He'd slept in icy hollows and under thin coverings of greenery with an aching stomach, cuts and scrapes oozing through his fur. He knew about pain, loss and deprivation. Nature had taught him from an early age.
Castiel's rejection had been an entirely new smart, and Dean had felt its sting intensely. Now though, lying in the warm, with Castiel sleeping beneath him, and his arms resting on Dean's back. Dean felt...better, bonded, and...safe.
He hadn't felt that way since before his father died.
Dean's eyes are closed, his nose twitching as he dozes, soaking up the scents of his surroundings as his ears map out the area around himself and Castiel.
Wind, rain, trees rattling...
Earth, stone, cooking, herbs, roots...
Castiel, breathing...
Old fur, musty, sweat and skin, sleep...
Castiel, warm skin, hair, sweat...mate...
An owl hooting, fox call, sticks snapping...
Castiel, whimpering...
Dean starts to wake up at that. Castiel is making a new noise, not a noise of speaking, or one of fear. Not even his regular, deep sounds of sleep. This is a sound Dean has not heard from him before, but somehow...it's also familiar.
A long, soft...sound. And Castiel's body moves a little, sleeping, but not soundly. Dean resting on top of the sleeping man, pricks his ears up and opens his eyes a little. Castiel's body is warmer than it should be, and...
Dean shivers, from his twitching nose to his wriggling tail.
The smell. The mate smell, intoxicating as it normally is, is ten times as strong now. Deep and dark and rich as autumn soil.
Dean whines quietly, and Castiel makes the sound again, almost a growl, his body twitching.
Dean feels it then, the strange, familiar pull like...almost like he's been here before. Castiel's body moves again, and Dean feels him rubbing against the soft fur of his belly. Only, it's a kind of touch that's new. The touch of...Dean realises, and his blood drowns out the sound of leaves and rain and...everything but Castiel's breathing, and the sounds, which come quicker now.
This is a human thing...a...mating thing, that Dean remembers, that he's felt and experienced himself. Castiel is...Castiel is ready, accepting him, wanting him. There's no fear in the air, only warmth and the scent of Castiel's body. The scent of wanting.
But...there's something wrong with it. With him. Dean realises, in a creeping of his skin, as Castiel's body rises against his, the heat, the pressing of him intensifying. Dean wants Castiel...but more than that...he wants...
It's hard to remember, to think how he used to...but Dean realises what he wants, what he craves right now.
Hands.
He needs, hands, and...lips and skin, and...he needs arms and fingers and an organ to match Castiel's own.
He needs himself. The self he buried like unneeded clothes, frozen under the soil of his own winter.
It's as Dean stiffens with impotent desire, frozen in the wrong body, the wrong mind, a shudder going through him – the half forgotten change prickling his skin– that Castiel wakes up.
One moment, he's sleeping, heavy with heat and shuddery breaths of pleasure, his lower body half shucked of loose clothing, indulging in its meeting with the soft, warm fur of a living body. The next, he is abruptly awake, his fear a stench in the air, throwing Dean off of himself, dragging himself from the covers, breeches lost in the tangle of skins and blankets, baggy shirt covering his shameful arousal.
He skitters backwards onto the cold stone, leaving Dean sprawled on the cave floor.
Castiel's skin is warm, shuddering in the cold, his stomach heavy with unfulfilled wanting, the ache between his legs almost as torturous as his own shame. He can barely remember the dream. Had there been a dream? Or just the feeling of the body on him, Dean's body.
The body of an animal.
Castiel feels sick, and his chest feels tight. He is foul. A foul, disgusting creature, with a black soul.
It takes him a moment to look through his burning eyes, and catch a glimpse of Dean on the floor. Fresh fear leaps into his chest.
Dean is...writhing, legs twitching on the ground, his body jerking roughly every few seconds. His eyes are wide open, mostly white and terrified, his teeth bare themselves, and a horrible, pained sound rips its way out of his throat.
Castiel is frozen, wanting to dive forwards and help, powerless to do anything.
He hears Dean's bones crack, sees sinew rip beneath the surface, and all at once, Dean goes limp, like a child's marionette with cut strings. Then his body begins to grow longer, and Dean's throat produces agonised screams animalistic and terrified, until a wet snick cuts off the sound.
But Dean's mouth is still screaming, jaws open, eyes staring.
His legs elongate, paws forming hands and feet with awful cracking, snapping sounds, his body warps and twists until he has a chest and neck and hips – the fur and thick wolf skin underneath flaking away.
Castiel had seen Sam's transformations, and they were...almost effortless, but this...this looks like torture and birth, and a gruesome death all at once. As if Dean's wolf body had grown over him like...flesh growing over a spur of wood stabbed through a man's chest. And now it was being spliced open, flayed away to reveal the man underneath.
The screaming begins again, mangled and gargling as Dean's voice grows in his throat, human and in complete agony. He shakes and sobs and finally goes still as his skin stops boiling, and his limbs stop jerking. Left in a heap on the cold, unfeeling stone.
But he does not go quiet, and his pained whimpers are too much to bear when uttered in a human tongue.
Castiel drags himself forwards, and reaches fearfully for Dean's arm, touching the skin, rubbing gently. Sam had complained of a cramping of his muscles when he had transformed after a long period of change, Dean's body was...in a kind of shock, he presumed. His muscles knotted and abused by the change.
Castiel rubbed Dean's arms until he felt the muscles give, then moved his fingers to his torso. His hands froze when it came time to move lower, and he had to force himself to still his own shame at touching a naked man this way. He would be as a doctor or a mother nursing her son. He would not allow his baser self to slip his grasp. His arousal had faded quickly, and Castiel strives to forget that it ever existed.
He tends to Dean's knotted muscles, and then shuffles back a little, satisfied now that Dean no longer seems pained, but rather...almost insensible with exhaustion. He picks up a fur, and almost drops it again when a clumsy hand paws at his arm.
He looks down at Dean is surprise, finding the man looking up at him.
"Cas..." Dean gasps, fighting to escape the grip of exhaustion.
Castiel takes his hand, and tucks the fur over him with the other. He lies down, extending and arm for Dean to lean against.
"Sleep, Dean." He tells him.
It seems that this is all the permission Dean needs, apparently soothed by his presence, his eyelids droop, and he subsides against Castiel's arm in a deep sleep.
Castiel lies awake, and, hours later, in the shallow, pale light of the rising sun he finds that he is still looking down on the newly bared face of the man who saved his life, and claimed him for a mate.
And he is beautiful.
Castiel, alone, filled with the residual horror of his awakening, and Dean's transformation, shivers and feels a pit of fear open in his stomach.
What is wrong with him? That he is looking on the face of this man, this...face that must be like his own, like any mans, with a nose and mouth and eyes...and yet...he feels...stirred, intimately, in a way almost akin to hunger, to a savage, devouring privation.
He looks again and again, as long as he can stand to look, and still, he cannot find what it is that makes him feel this way. Not the curve of Dean's lips, or the shape of his cheek bones. There is nothing, nothing in his face that should make him feel this way. That should make him feel at all.
And yet, when he tries to, he cannot look away.