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Dean
"Anything?" Sam hisses from his right.
"No." Dean shakes his head, even though it's too dark for the gesture to be seen. "I'm going to loop around to the left again."
Sam doesn't say anything, but Dean knows he's thinking about how long they've been looking, and how they haven't yet found a trace of Castiel. Sam takes out his cell phone and Dean hears him start talking to Gabriel.
"...still nothing, how about...oh. I see." Sam sighs. "Give it another thirty minutes – then...I don't know, we'll have to get Balth and Zachariah out here...maybe call the police?"
Dean's heard enough.
He stalks the narrow paths of the wood and stills at every sound, every rustle that sounds like a person in the brush, every whimper of wind that sounds almost like Castiel.
"Cas?" he hisses into the dark. There's no reply.
Dean goes off the beaten track, pushing his way through long grass, nettles and thorns. He trips over something at the base of a tree, but looking down he sees only a huddled mass of cloth, like a discarded tent left to mildew. The force of his collision with it would have woken anyone, no matter how deeply asleep, so he continues, putting it out of his mind.
"Dean!" Gabriel calls from somewhere ahead.
"Have you found him?" Dean shouts back, struggling forwards.
"...No." Gabriel admits. "But...Sam thinks we should get the authorities out here..."
Dean bites his lip, eyes blurring. This is all his fault. He never should have left Castiel. He never should have had such blind faith in such an adolescent fantasy. Of course they could not stay apart for three years, of course Castiel would fail at his pretence – and now he could be gone for good.
It starts to rain, in a truly shitty example of pathetic fallacy, and Dean's t-shirt is sticking to his skin by the time he reaches Sam and Gabriel, his jeans soaked by the swishing layers of leaves.
"Sam is going to call the police, then get Balthazar out to help." Gabriel tells him, uncommonly sober, the stupid streaks of commando paint sluiced away by the rain. "I'm going to take you home, ok?"
"I need to be here." Dean insists.
"You're no good like this." Gabriel tells him frankly, then glances at Sam and lets his eyes fall to the ground. "And...if we find him...Dean it might not be..."
Dean remembers the wet hump of fabric by the tree, a wave of panic so intense that it robs him of breath strikes home in his chest. Hysteria, a powerful urge to just fall apart, engulfs him and for a moment Dean can't think beyond that moment – the rain falling onto him and Gabriel's hand on his arm.
"There was a...I found something, on the ground." Dean forces himself to say.
Sam and Gabriel exchange a glance.
"I tripped on it..." Dean looks at Sam and feels a pang of fear when the other man doesn't immediately look dismissive. "It didn't move..."
"Back there?" Sam points.
Dean nods.
"I'll go look...but you have to go with Gabriel."
Dean lets the smaller man guide him through the dripping trees, back towards the van. He pulls open the passenger door and gets in, suddenly surrounded by the sound of the rain striking the metal. Gabriel climbs into the driver's seat. He starts the van and pulls away from the fence. He doesn't say that it'll be ok – Dean doesn't know what that's the thing that seems the most real of all of this – that Gabriel doesn't reassure him.
"If he's dead." Dean says, and the words feel like clay in his mouth. "If...then it's all my fault."
The van slumps to a halt. Gabriel twists in his seat and pulls Dean closer, his arms going past his waist and up on the other side of him, clapping his wet back in an austere hug. He squeezes Dean once, hard, then pulls back and puts the van in gear again.
"If something has happened...it wasn't you." Gabriel says bluntly, looking out onto the road, the two puddles of rain spattered light in front of them.
Dean doesn't respond.
The drive back to Gabriel and Sam's house is the antithesis of their earlier journey. There's no nervous excitement, no jokes; just a deep hole of awful certainty in both of them that Castiel is right now being discovered in the woods – just another statistic in a long line. Another teenager swallowed up by a nights despair.
Several times Dean somehow forgets how to breathe, stays frozen for a moment before his body clasps at oxygen. He's cold and wet and none of it means anything.
Gabriel pulls up at the house and pauses, his hand on the door catch.
"Go inside, get some dry things on and..." he pauses, at a loss, for all that he's the elder, the more experienced, he has no idea what to say.
"And wait." Dean fills in, shoving the door open and stepping out into the rain.
Gabriel walks ahead, Dean somehow unable to move his limbs any faster than a crawl.
"Dean!"
He looks up at the shorter man's exclamation and sees Gabriel standing by the front door, already cracked slightly open, his hand still pushing the key into the lock, the light spilling out from inside on to...
"Dean?" Castiel looks up from the doorstep, sheltered in a drenched black wad of jacket, his blue scrubs peppered with rain drops.
Dean's legs don't want to work properly as he moves forwards, the path melting away until he's right next to Castiel, dropping onto the brick next to him and wrapping his arms around the drenched shape of him. Castiel's fingers clutch at Dean's bare, thorn scratched arms even as Dean pulls him to his feet and buries his face in the curve of the shorter boy's throat.
Gabriel pushes the door open.
"Get inside." He says, voice low as if struck dumb by the scene unfolding on his doorstep. "I have to call Sam." He leaves them alone as he does so, hand already on his cell. Dean moves into the living room with Castiel, their clumsy feet scattering cats. Dean's already kissing Castiel's cold mouth, almost convinced that the other boy is somehow back from the dead. He can't find it in him to speak, questions right now are pointless – Castiel is here, why ask why he isn't elsewhere?
Castiel clings to him with just as much desperation, his discarded coat sliding to the floor heavily. Dean recognises his own shirt underneath and slides his cold hands underneath it, feeling Castiel shiver, but press into his touch regardless. Castiel's kisses are planted wherever he can reach, more like mouthing, tasting than actual presses of his lips, sliding from the corner of Dean's mouth, over his cheek and jaw.
Gabriel coughs rather pointedly.
Castiel backs away, but his eyes are swamped in pupil, his hand still clutching the front of Dean's shirt.
"Sam's calling off the search...but Zach already knows that you skipped out on the programme." Gabriel tells them.
Castiel looks up at Dean. "It doesn't matter, I left –Dean...I left for good."
"Why?" Dean's finding staying even a foot from Castiel extremely difficult, if it were up to him right now, they'd retreat to his cat infested room and never leave again. He just wants to keep Castiel safe.
"I missed you too much." Castiel's hand flattens against Dean's chest and he moves almost unnoticeably closer. "I...I could not take three years without you, just for my brothers and a degree that I..." he shakes his head. "This is what I want – everything else I can work on."
Gabriel sighs something about abc screwing with the youth of today.
Neither Dean nor Castiel pay him much attention.
"I went for a walk to think it over...and I decided that I wanted to be with you now, not when it suited everyone else. My brothers are going to hate me no matter what."
"Then you just walked here?" Dean's hand creeps up without his consent, smoothing up against Castiel's cheek.
"No." Castiel looks abruptly haunted, like Bambi stumbling across his mother just as the hunter starts butchering her for the ride home. "Then I saw Zachariah and Balthazar in the practice car in the woods." He frowns. "Actually...on, the practice car...in the woods."
Gabriel retches involuntarily.
Dean looks at him.
"Sorry." Gabriel shudders. "Ugh...I think I'm straight now – tell Sam I'm sorry."
To Dean's surprise Castiel laughs, a clear little sound that seems to shock the shorter boy even as it bursts from his mouth.
He picks up the coat from the ground and removes a blocky shape from the pocket. He pushes it into Dean's hand.
Dean looks down wordlessly at the bundle of fifty dollar bills.
"Turns out, you can't run a gay recovery camp if everyone knows the two counsellors are sleeping together." Castiel shrugs.
"You blackmailed them?" Dean asks, shell shocked.
"For my education and our future happiness." Castiel says haughtily.
Dean grins, a rush of intense euphoria making him suddenly lightheaded. He feels like he could laugh for a very long time. Instead he closes the space between them, kisses Castiel again until his chest drums tight with need of air.
In the background he can hear Gabriel on his cell phone.
"Sam...you are never going to believe this...also, you owe me ten dollars."