Chapter 12: I was once a loyal lover

Ok, what the fuck just happened? Dean couldn't figure it out. One minute they were making fun of each other and kissing and the next Castiel was storming out of his apartment. Did something happen while he was in the bedroom? Did Castiel get a phone call or something? No, that couldn't be it, because Dean hadn't heard anything and he hadn't been in the bedroom for that long.

Furthermore, Castiel had said that it was him. Dean had done something, but he hadn't done anything. Dean desperately wanted to believe that he was making it up again. That Castiel was simply an asshole who had walked out on him for no reason whatsoever and that there hadn't been that look of pain on his face. But there had been.

Making a decision, he grabbed his keys and ran out of the apartment. The elevator was going neither up nor down, which either meant that Castiel was taking the stairs or that he had long since arrived downstairs. Dean took the steps three at a time and reached the ground floor in record time. No Castiel. He went outside and looked around. No Castiel. He rounded the left corner of the building and then doubled back and rounded the right corner, but Castiel was nowhere in sight.

Unsure of how to proceed, Dean dug in his jeans for his cell, but of course it was still in his other discarded jeans. Well, he couldn't demand an answer of Castiel when said Castiel wasn't around. Dejected, he entered the building again. This time he took the elevator up. It pinged every time it passed a floor and somehow it sounded as if precious seconds were ticking away. As if something was coming to an end.

Back in the apartment, Dean was relieved to see that Castiel had not left his phone, so Dean could at least reach him. He retrieved his cell from the pile of dirty laundry in the bedroom and dialled Castiel. Castiel didn't pick up. On the kitchen counter, Dean spied Castiel's wallet and the keys to Castiel's apartment. For some reason, this made him feel worse.

In an agitated state, he tore through the living room in search of the phone book. It was stupid to think that Castiel would have arrived at his apartment already. Not because his keys were here, because his neighbours could have a spare or Castiel could have a spare under the welcome mat. It was hard to imagine Castiel being on friendly terms with his neighbours or having a mat welcoming people to his apartment, though. Castiel couldn't be there, because it was practically across town and he had left only a few minutes ago.

With the vague idea of leaving a message, Dean called Castiel's apartment. There was no answer, but also no invitation to leave a message. The bastard didn't have voicemail. Dean's surprise annoyed him, because Castiel's cell hadn't offered him the option of leaving a message either. It simply rang and rang and rang. The sound set his teeth on edge.

The wallet and keys were staring at him. Castiel would need money or his credit cards or his driver's license, surely? Sam would be very rational and reason that Castiel would have to come back to pick up the wallet and his keys. It weren't just the keys to his apartment either. There were car keys and other keys Dean couldn't place. They should make him feel better. They were proof that Castiel would come back. Instead, however, they convinced Dean that Castiel was not coming back.

'Well, fuck that!' Dean said out loud. He took a small plastic bag and put Castiel's wallet and keys in there. In the bedroom, he also shoved a volume of poetry into the bag, in case he had to wait for a long time. Grabbing his keys again, he bolted out of the door. He drove straight to Castiel's apartment.

The sun was fierce and Dean felt antsy as hell. He sat down on the pavement next to the door of the building and fortunately no one came to tell him he couldn't sit there, because he would probably not have responded politely. It had been a while since he had looked at himself in the mirror, but he suspected he looked a tad crazy. Between thinking that Sam might be dead and having Castiel vanish, the day was proving to be exceptionally long and crappy.

He tried to read, but his glances at the door ruined the flow of the poems and he couldn't concentrate anyway. The horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach hadn't subsided. On the contrary, Dean thought it might be working itself up into an ulcer. And nothing had really happened. That was the clincher. They hadn't been fighting. Castiel had just left. Yes, there had been that expression on his face, which Dean wished he could forget, but essentially what had happened was nothing.

Three hours passed.

His anxiety grew. Castiel had nowhere else to go, except back to Dean's apartment and Dean knew he wouldn't go there. Balthazar! Stupidly, Dean felt as if coming up with the name of Castiel's only friend, as far as he knew, was some sort of breakthrough. He grinned and called Balthazar.

Balthazar hadn't heard of or seen Castiel that day and started to tell Dean that he had been questioned, but had been released pending the investigation, which Dean had all but forgotten about. He tried to impress upon Balthazar the importance of calling Dean if Castiel contacted him, but Balthazar was busy with his own problems. Also, it was difficult to convey how awful it had been and still was when Castiel had walked out.

Dean gave up on reading and called Castiel's cell and apartment a dozen times in the next hour. If someone had asked him to explain why he was calling Castiel's apartment, he would have been hard pressed to come up with an answer. Hadn't he been here almost the entire time? Didn't he have the key? He could have gone in and seen for himself whether Castiel was there, but that was too invasive. His back started to ache and he remembered the fall.

Falling off the roof and Castiel's hand digging into his shoulder. It seemed so long ago, but it was only a couple of days. He had forgotten to take his painkillers with him and didn't think Castiel was going to show up. Groaning, he got to his feet and drove back to his own apartment.

He took a shower with his phone nearby. He took a painkiller. While watching TV and surreptitiously checking his phone, Dean decided that he was being ridiculous. Five hours ago Castiel had walked out of his apartment. That was what had happened. And Castiel was nothing to him. He was an attractive asshole; that was all. They'd had sex; that was all.

There was leftover Chinese in the fridge and Dean didn't even bother to heat it. He sat at the kitchen table, eyeing the bag with Castiel's wallet and keys and picked at his food. His mind couldn't stop the onslaught of thoughts.

Castiel looking up at him with his lips around Dean's cock. Castiel kissing him. Castiel slamming into him from behind. Castiel making snide comments about how dumb and lazy construction workers are. Castiel just generally being a douche bag. A douche bag whom Dean had almost said 'I love you' to.

After an hour of shuffling his food around, Dean dropped the Chinese into the trash and went to bed. He was tired beyond belief, yet he didn't think he would be able to sleep. His worries over Castiel would keep him awake. That was merely one other thing wrong about that day: Dean slept like a baby as soon as his head hit the pillow.

(***)

The first thing Dean did the next morning was check to see whether Castiel had called. He hadn't. The second thing he did was cross the hall and knock on Pamela's door. Sam was already there, saying something about shrieking schoolgirls and Dean knew that Sam was rarely alone with Pamela; it was usually the three of them. So, he should have addressed that, but truthfully he hardly noticed it.

He explained what had happened with Castiel to them, but they seemed unable or unwilling to grasp how violent Castiel had reacted. Strictly speaking, it wasn't violent in the sense that a lot of Dean's boyfriends were violent, but it was severe.

'What did you say to him?' Sam asked and Dean sighed.

'You're not listening. It wasn't something I said,' Dean explained again, which only prompted another clueless question from Sam.

'What did you do?'

Pamela put her hand on Dean's arm; otherwise he probably would have at least made a move to punch Sam.

'I didn't do anything either. Sam, I swear, I just came out of the bedroom and he left. You should have seen his face. There was this sort of... I hurt him. I didn't even think that was possible. I didn't think I could do that, but I did. I hurt him and I don't know how.'

Dean despised how desperate his voice sounded and how Sam and Pamela still didn't understand. He could see them thinking that either Castiel was an asshole or that Dean was keeping something back and they had been arguing. Dean rubbed at his face. He felt rested and physically fine, except for his back, but emotionally he was a wreck. Like Castiel. He told them about what Castiel had said about not wanting to engage in a serious relationship or any kind of relationship, really, aside from sex.

'In professional terms I'd say he's pretty fucked up,' Pamela said. She seemed to at least comprehend that it wasn't an excuse. It wasn't an I'm-only-interested-in-sex thing. Something had happened to Castiel when he did do feelings and it had scarred him for life.

'Yeah, but something must have triggered it, right?' Sam asked and Dean thought back, but he couldn't come up with anything that might have caused it. Nothing he had said or done that would have made someone walk out the door. Sam and Pamela both needed to work, while Dean's back was not ready yet, so he left and looked around his apartment. Was there something he could see that could have hurt Castiel? The trouble was that, since he didn't know what had happened to Castiel in the past, he didn't know what to look for.

After two fruitless phone calls – one to Castiel's cell and one to Castiel's apartment – Dean took the plastic bag containing the wallet and keys. He drove over to Castiel's apartment and this time he did enter the building and opened the door to the apartment. There was a thin layer of dust on the floor, which indicated that Castiel hadn't been there for at least two weeks.

Disappointed, Dean immediately closed the door, because even opening it had been an invasion of privacy. He drove around for a while, randomly. He was about to go back to his apartment, because he had forgotten his painkillers again, when he saw Castiel. Dean immediately parked the car and approached him from behind. Castiel looked rough.

As if he had slept on the bench he was now sitting on or had spent the night under a bridge. His stubble nearly formed a beard and there was a hardness to him that was like the mean remarks. A sort of sign that people should stay away or else. Castiel's phone rang, still the original ringtone; the same for everyone and Dean paused. He wanted to see whether Castiel would ignore the call or whether it was just Dean's calls that weren't answered.

It hurt a little bit when Castiel looked at the number and subsequently answered. Suddenly, Dean was no longer sure whether he should take those last fifty or so steps. Castiel had walked away and wasn't answering his calls. Castiel obviously didn't want to talk to him. On the other hand, Dean wanted answers. He wanted to know what he had done.

'At what cost?'

Dean heard it clear as day. At what cost? Not 'Hello, friend who isn't Balthazar' or 'Nice to hear from you again,' but 'At what cost?' What was the cost? Did Castiel have something to do with the construction accidents after all? No, Dean didn't believe that.

The next word out of Castiel's mouth was a forceful 'No.' It was in need of an exclamation point, but Castiel didn't scream it or shout it; he merely enunciated it clearly into the phone. Dean inched slowly closer, bumping into other people. He was in a park he had not known existed. Then again, there were probably a lot of parks in California he wasn't aware of. He was not a park person.

The answer following that, Dean couldn't hear, because a flock of pigeons flew away. It was a miracle he could hear Castiel at all from this distance. It was that low and gravelly voice, Dean thought.

'... plan this?' Dean could make out. Who was Castiel talking to? The snatches of conversation were driving Dean crazy. It was already difficult to glean the meaning of a talk if you could hear only one side, but if that one side wasn't complete the meaning got muddled even more. Dean suspected that was what was happening to him. He stopped in his tracks as Castiel got up from the bench. His gaze slid over Dean, but he didn't see him.

That hurt a bit. Don't be a smuck, Dean told himself. He's focused on his conversation, not on his surroundings. Castiel turned, so Dean saw his striking profile. People crowded around them. Mothers with prams, teenagers with skateboards, men in suits with ties and black briefcases; the noise fluctuated. Sometimes it was so loud that Dean was surprised he could hear himself and there were brief pauses when Dean could hear Castiel as if he was standing right next to him.

'And what about Dean?' Castiel asked. Now he sounded angry. What about Dean? What about me? Dean was finding it harder and harder to not walk up to Castiel and shake an answer out of him.

'No,' Castiel snapped, only to revise his answer a second later to a hesitant, 'I don't know.'

Now Dean could see Castiel's face. The colour had drained from it and the pain was back. This time it was even worse than before and Dean struggled not to avert his eyes, but to remain looking at it.

Castiel calmly listened to what the person on the other side of the line had to say and then spoke one word - 'once' – and dropped his phone in the trashcan. The gesture frightened Dean. It was so irrevocable. People didn't do that. You needed to transfer numbers to your new phone and sometimes you could trade in your old phone for a new one. Sure, characters in films did that. The police or criminals were after them and they knew their phone could be traced. Or they wanted to leave their old life behind.

What does Castiel mean by throwing his phone away? What does Castiel want, Dean wondered as he walked towards Castiel. It started out as a walk, which turned into a trot, which morphed into a sprint. Castiel was standing on the pavement. He looked both ways. Dean saw his face. It was neither distracted nor absentminded. It was determined. It wasn't as if he was looking but not seeing, like he had not seen Dean when he was on the phone.

That was the moment Dean realised that all his fears were not crazy. Castiel had indeed never intended to come back to him.

Dean tried to call out, but, like these things always worked, – or rather didn't work – he couldn't. A pathetic croaking sound escaped his throat. It was barely enough for Dean to hear, so Castiel definitely didn't hear it. There was a bus. Castiel stepped in front of it. Tires screeched. Dean felt his heart hurt like it hadn't hurt before as he watched the bus hit Castiel.

What did Castiel want? Castiel wanted to leave life in its entirety behind.