"Ya'll want that drink topped up?" Bobby asked.

"Give 'er a splash, Bobby, thanks," Dean said.

"I'm glad one of you boys was finally able to bring somebody home for Thanksgiving, even if you're missing out on my famous beer-marinated turkey," his uncle said, giving himself a second helping.

"Gina has a really good reason not to celebrate the colonization of her land," Sam said. "I think your turkey tastes even better the next day, so it's perfect that we're going to do it all over again tomorrow."

Sam's Navajo girlfriend's got him all political, was the look their uncle shot in Dean's direction.

Which was also Cas' direction.

"I don't see the sheriff here, either, but she's coming on the same Angel Train as Gina," Dean said through Castiel's control of his mouth. "You got the final list of who else you want us to piggyback on over here from the res?"

"Now that you have twice the juice, I guess you could bring a whole bunch of people pretty quick," Bobby mused, considering revising the guest list for the big day-after-Thanksgiving dinner they had planned.

"I can't believe he was really serious about having us over for Thanksgiving in one body," Dean thought to Cas from within the privacy of their one body. "That day when we went public with everything, back at that motel, I didn't think we'd make it."

"I'm very glad we did," Castiel said to him, lifting more whiskey and orange juice to their lips.

"This is my first Thanksgiving," the angel said aloud. "Though I did once attend a harvest celebration in Rome that was similar."

"Hey, I can't wait for you to compare notes with Gina tomorrow," Sam said excitedly. "You'll know stuff she's never even heard of about her culture. Our culture," he amended, proudly. He still couldn't believe it when he sat with some of the leaders at the tribal gatherings, but Sam had played a key role invoking and negotiating with some of the oldest gods during the apocalypse, and that apparently meant a lot.

"Don't let Darla hear you say that," Dean said. "Besides, I'm still her favorite Winchester."

"'Cause the two of you are such bitches when you get together," Sam retorted. He'd been burned several times over the last time he'd been with the two of them, a few weeks ago.

"Don't knock it till you try it," Dean forced through Cas' control of his mouth before the angel was able to decode the double entendre. He was loving every second of having his mate inside of him, Cas' will owning every one of his muscles.

"Please pass the potatoes," choked out their uncle.

The two Winchesters enjoyed a big belly laugh at Bobby's evident discomfort at certain particulars, which paled in comparison to Castiel's embarrassment at any discussion of their relationship's details. The angel's embarrassment was fighting with Dean's laughter on their face.

"Damn, Dean, I bet making Cas say freaky shit never gets old," his brother said.

"He has veto power when he really wants it. The other day we went to the beach in Brazil and I tried to make him say—"

"Yes, the weather in Brazil was very nice," Castiel broke in to avoid the catcall Dean had tried to make him utter. Now that Dean was back to his usual cocky self, the fact that he had a much larger romantic field to play had the angel policing certain appreciative responses he felt welling up in the best vessel he'd ever worn.

More than once after things became complicated with Dean, Castiel had worried that it was all downhill after those two days during which they had become a couple, and then, briefly, a singular being in some crucial way. Perhaps their getting together was merely Heaven's way of righting things after the official scripts had been changed with Dean's refusal of the Archangel Michael.

After Las Vegas, something had always been wrong between him and Dean. Cas' soul painfully registered this feeling, which made his soul reach out more desperately to Dean's. Now that he had a soul, and were more alike than ever, shouldn't they be moving closer rather than farther away?

"Remember when I was so freaked out about those soul-sandwiches made by the Jimi-god?" Dean's thoughts flowed smoothly into Cas'. "I didn't want anyone in here with us, but I don't think it works exactly like that."

Cas sensed the new note that was Etienne's influence trill through Dean's molecular activity.

It didn't bother him anymore.

Because that was Dean, too.

"Oh, so you mean it's like the wave-particle duality theory," was the metaphor the angel had used when Dean was finally able to explain where Cas kept getting tripped up in their relationship.

It was not the first time that Cas had made a reference that Dean hadn't understood. When the angel first resurrected him, he'd dropped many Shakespeare quotations before realizing that the narrow set of refresher books on human culture that Heaven sent field officers every so often were woefully out of date.

"Nah, Sam got 'em sometimes. I was always thinking about getting some supernatural action for myself instead of paying attention in English class."

"What you understood and I did not, it's a concept Einstein dealt with, Dean. He, too, did not do well in school. It makes me frustrated when you refuse to accept you might be somewhat intelligent," Cas thought in one of their lightning-fast exchanges over the same neural network. Then he said aloud. "Sometimes Dean can be rather irritating. Might I try some of that cranberry sauce?"

The rule was, everything at Bobby's Thanksgiving dinner had some form of alcohol in it. Sam and Dean had caught Bobby doctoring every single one of his dishes with a little extra kick. The only thing they couldn't figure out was the mashed potatoes, but both of them had experienced eating leftover potatoes and getting a buzz off them. The cranberry sauce slid down easy—a requirement when the two were sharing one vessel—and delivered a nice soothing shot of vodka and triple sec all the way down.

"You're becoming a lush," Dean thought at him.

"No way I'd share a noggin with him for five minutes, and he's family," Bobby snorted. "How you two don't spontaneously combust from sheer obstinacy I'll never understand."

"Any one of my brother's faults you can name, I can tell you a way to deal with it," Sam leaned forward eagerly, glad to share his painfully acquired brotherly coping skills. "When he gets wound up—"

Dean retreated to a part of his brain while Cas assumed his earnest note-taking posture before Sam and Bobby's stories of Dean-wrangling. It was weird how easy it was for them to flow in and out of each other's thoughts, but it was so right. When he first was fused into Cas' vessel back in Hell, he was so far gone he felt more like a rapidly scattering mist than a person.

The closest he could pinpoint it was that he'd been in Hell and found a door. It was a beckoning light that he gravitated towards. The nausea he felt for what he'd let himself become, what he glimpsed through Etienne's eyes with their kiss, was so intense he would do anything to get away from it. All the torture felt good at first because it was justice. If he screamed and struggled against his bonds it wasn't to avoid the whip, but because he wanted to take it up himself, wanted worse.

But what was going on his mind was more painful still.

"What kind of a bastard turns his friends into disposable sex toys?" was one thought that beat his brain bloody, but it still kept replaying the disintegration of Argus, his favorite S/M buddy, in slow motion. "Cas took me back after I cheated on him big time with Adonis, and then I can't be content with him?" was another.

The promise was of stillness. Sometimes in the worst of the torments, he attained a moment when all of him stilled. There was the music that they used kept his virtues more or less quiet, which was a blessing because truth, beauty, temperance-these things had nothing to do with Hell and the contrast was jarring. But the torture sometimes made his mind and his body and everything else disappear for a moment. These blips were so wonderful he would have called them like Heaven, but he knew too much now to think of the place that should have been his home as a paradise.

He started courting these moments of release, and while that was happening, he stopped caring what was going on with his body that he couldn't be at peace in anymore for some reason. At first he had some awareness that Valac was really into being with him, in a less businesslike way than last time.

But that didn't matter, because this time Dean was as focused on his torture sessions as your average smack addict was serious about his fix.

It didn't take long for him to get really excited about the visits of the head demon. No one else was allowed near him this time, and so he could sense the whiff of Valac's particular sulfuric bouquet all the way down his private corridor. It caused his heart to quicken, this harbinger of stillness approaching. His first time in Hell he'd had Betty his imaginary bottle to evoke boozy good times, but Valac was a fix on two cloven hooves and man, oh, man what addictive personality doesn't want their frosty beer to come up to them and pour itself down their throat?

"Come here little bitch, and take what you really like," his top-shelf-whiskey forgetfulness would say to him, and Dean took it any way he could. By the time he was searching out for any part of himself that wasn't a collapsed vein, he was doing the equivalent of taking in the pain by shooting it between his toes.

Then came the solitary times when he was forced to dry out so he could soak up more smacks again. Hell had this sort of thing figured out down to the exact science so as to make best use of their torturers' time.

Despite himself, his beaten mind would inevitably pick itself up and begin to wander at the pace of a crawl.

He watched the process enough times to really understand how an addict works. The demon razed his mind to a smooth surface, but it didn't last. Everything he was hiding from, which was basically everything he'd done to Cas, gradually grew back until it scraped him raw.

"Dean Winchester, you emotionally stunted bastard. You thought it was the job that kept you from getting close to somebody, but you're a toxic mess that destroys everyone he gets close to. Cas knew who he was before he met you, and now you gave him the ability to feel all the shit in the universe, plus all the crap you unloaded on him. Good thing you got yourself quarantined downstairs and can't hurt him anymore."

Valac made it all stop for a little while. Gradually, his mind stopped speaking to himself so pointedly, the thoughts coming from all over as if from outside his brain like the times he'd smoked pot. He found out later he was actually tuning in to Etienne's mental wanderings, but at the time it was like getting snatches of an audio book or something. He heard the Nephilim's memories of searching for Balthazar after his memory had been wiped away, and on some level he started to understand.

Etienne fell apart, he got possessed by any evil spirit he could dredge up, was thrown into an asylum for attacking people on the streets because they didn't understand. All because he had an angel-shaped hole inside of him, left by this intimate coexistence with an alien life form. He wasn't sure what it was like for the average vessel, who he'd heard existed in a kind of suspended animation while the angel was using them. But between his Spanish friend and Balthazar some essential veil had dropped and it was not the clean transaction it was meant to be. It destroyed Etienne.

Dean had been trying to fill his own angel-shaped hole left after Cas was taken away so abruptly. What would it have been like for them if they could have felt their bond develop gradually, with no separations or spells or outside pressures? They might be like the Ten: two fully realized beings working in concert for the greater good. But nothing had ever been a straight path for Dean, not even when he was exclusively straight.

His early life had him buffeted on both sides by his father's and brother's fates, and the only thing he had ever recognized as "self' was something lopsided and thirsty inside him that steered him towards fistfights and demon-ganking. Even all those girls were never a destination in themselves, but symptoms of a wanderlust more than a lust. Dean always wanted to get lost in someone, something bigger than himself, and his family's huge vendetta had done nicely for a long time. He never really had to live for himself until his first time in Hell.

Now on his third time, Dean was able to put together some patterns. Cas thought of it as something that Crowley did to him, but being a bottom here in this rock-bottom had been as natural as falling off a bar stool, something he'd done so many times when he'd slowly turned to whiskey-flavored jelly in some roadhouse somewhere in America. By the time your muscles start splaying of their own accord, you're no longer in control of your own show, and damn if that didn't hit the spot sometimes. After that point of being shitfaced, it didn't matter whether you fucked or fought, because anything scratched that itch for contact.

He remembered comparing fucking to ganking and how weird Sam thought that was, but there was something to it. Dean was great at hunting, he was made for it and not much else, and it must have to do with courting your quarry and dancing with it until the death, poltergeist goo optional. "You just have a hands-on intelligence," his father had said to him when yet one more school tried to do something about how many grade levels he'd fallen behind.

Oh yeah, Dean loved the hands-on approach.

"Valac! Valac!" he was vaguely aware of himself screaming. He kept losing parts of himself and then seeing them all milling around like an army without a general: organs, bones, nerves, memories, angelic body, feelings. What he was really trying to say was, keep it comin', fuck yeah, I can drink anyone under the table. When he was literally on the floor soused in Montana or Maine, when the room was spinning was he only looking up the skirts of the barmaids or were his eyes wandering even then?

It was hard to put together the two halves of his life, pre- and post-Cas, these two Deans with such different tastes. Maybe that was what he had been trying to do with the Limbo women who pierced his ears and brushed his hair and taught him how to cross his legs. Now that he had enjoyed quite a few men's bodies wielded by Cas, it made him want to understand what women had felt with him, to try to bridge the gap between giving and receiving. Come to think of it, his first time in Hell being the first time he'd had to be a passive recipient-of pain, in that case.

Damn if all this could have been prevented by kissing Davin Windham back! He could have been like that Other Dean who, if he fucked up his own apocalypse, got it back on track without the entire universe thinking he was a putz.

"Totally not professional," he'd heard his father's voice saying to him every day since the big fight. "Lost your focus like no son of mine would. Should've stuck to women instead of becoming a whiny bitch in the middle of battle. Lucky your brother was pulling both your weights this time." That shit hurt, worse than the real looks of disappointment Dean saw from everyone in the Cause, worse even than the Khan's muttered goodbye when his final destiny had been discharged.

He thought back to his first sneaking sips of his father's liquor. Raised in a teetotaling family, his dad had acquired regular drinking habits only some years after his vendetta against the Yellow-Eyed Demon had cooled into a sticky nostalgia for his original clear anger. Not having his own teen drinking memories to fall back on, his dad didn't see any reason to trace a ten-year-old experimenting with whiskey to later problems.

The occasional drink his father turned a blind eye to, if he noticed at all, so Dean snuck a little here and there, and it helped him go back and focus on his responsibilities as the family anchor. Davin had been the first sign that there was something powerful in him that was being ignored, but that incident soon was coated over by all the other places and faces. All those girls…

They hadn't been exactly suffering in bed, he was gratified to realize at some point. He'd talked with a couple of the angels he'd seen at the Hell's Kitchen club, the ones he could blackmail if he wanted to so he could be sure his questions would go no further. He asked whether they had had sex both in a male vessel and a female one, and if so, how the two experiences compared.

"As you know, there is no gender among angels" one had said. "Your culture could just as easily call us all 'she' by default. So we think less in those terms than in the vessel-marking and other angelic measures of proximity."

"When it comes down to it, we think more in terms of giver and receiver," another had said, fresh from a torture session that left all his virtues limp. "With so little communication forthcoming from above, angels have forgotten what it is like to be—inspired-from without."

Inspiration. That must be what Dean felt when he and Cas were messing around, and it's not like he'd ever been a slouch between the sheets. Damn, it was good, but why wasn't damn good, enough?

The times when he happened upon a girl in a bar and went back to her place to find her really kinky in the bedroom, he'd been all for it. It was a game, some new edge to push. But what he'd been doing with Etienne and the other Limbo-dwellers, that had been seeking an edge and deliberately cutting himself on it. They had centuries of combined experience with Hell's best techniques for distraction. To forget, to forget—what? The public failure of his first real love affair? Committing the ultimate hunter's sin, which was to go into a fight on auto pilot? Seeing Adonis nearly get torn apart?

Adonis. He tried not to think of this person he should have been smarter than to fall in love with, but the smart, strong Greek man had hit the spot when he needed it. His double's boyfriend had filled that angel-shaped space in him, which probably was just a space that always existed and Cas flooded with a sun's worth of presence. But Adonis completed him too.

And how.

He was a perfect fit for some other need, as the destined lover for another Dean in another world not too dissimilar from his.

I want. I want. I want. Something in him had said no matter how many times Cas had tried to please him in a new body.

Angels were pretty quick studies, by the way.

Having a soul speeded all that up with Cas' new empathy. When did Dean start feeling weird about that extra presence within the angel's fire? His own new angelic body was the one he'd had to learn what to do with so it wasn't milling around awkwardly while his body was getting to the crucial moment. But their accidental Nephilism had merely made Dean "more."

It had made Cas different.

Where the all-angel Castiel had been pulled through their bonding process, resisting all the way, the new, ensouled Cas would stare at him with two sets of eyes after they were done, trying to assure himself that Dean was happy, that he wouldn't wander again. Cas needed things now, needed Dean, and this was exactly the situation he'd tried to prevent with women: disappointing someone.

"Don't disappoint me, son," his father had said before each fight once he started hunting. Before he went out with a girl so he would think twice before getting her pregnant. "I'm disappointed in you, Dean," his father would say with an averted gaze if he let something happen to Sam or partied too much.

Dean Winchester was not supposed to be a disappointment to anyone in their high-stakes hunter world. Once he found out the whole universe was watching him, waiting for him to screw up, the big Winchester destiny became one great big Dad. Just like his father used to watch his every move, magnifying tiny inconsistencies in the way he held his weapon or fired a shot so that his nearly superhuman marksmanship—better than his own ex-Marine father's—was always overshadowed by an infinitesimal list to the right within the bull's eye.

"People are counting on you to do better than that, son, to push yourself past what you think you can do, because if this was about thinking, well, shit, who would have thought a Windigo was real?"

If this was about thinking, they'd find someone else to do the job, Dean filled in. Having been so young when all this crap happened to their family, his mind never learned to fight the weird, which is what his father was trying to do with his crusade against the chaos that had claimed his wife. Not like Sam, who thought this whole family vendetta didn't stand up to what his good mind decided it wanted for itself.

Dean could track nasties, gank ghosts and anticipate the motives of spirits like Mr. and Mrs. Rain because he had instinct. And instinct wasn't something you earned so you couldn't be proud of it. Sam earned everything he did with the Navajo, and getting in with those folks was pretty hard. Even with their gods, Dean's instinct had shown itself to be a poor substitute for Sam's smarts and commitment. He was Little Brother, now and forever, who, in most versions of the myths, was the one who collected bits of flesh and blood from the older brother's kills. Kind of like the way Dean was rolling around in the shards of his life, his mind, and sometimes, his flesh itself.

Commitment. Was all this, ending up in Hell with his different parts talking to each other until he had to tell his shins to keep it down so his collarbones could have their say for a change, was it about fear of the commitment he used to joke about as a greater threat than a werewolf and a shapeshifter combined? Dean Winchester was famous for his wandering eye, after all.

Dean's eye had never stopped wandering, in fact. He'd stopped paying attention to it for awhile when he came to New York, but it had gone on undressing even more people than ever before. He still looked at chicks. They still made him hot, but he liked imagining a guy thrown in there, too, him watching and being watched. And the guys. Oh man, there were a lot of men to look at in the gay Mecca of the east coast. It was easy to have whole conversation with the right kind of guy, just using their eyes. What would it be like if we-? was all transmitted with the flick of an iris.

Each one of these involuntary daydreams was proof that he didn't deserve Cas. The angel did everything but bend over backwards to make his partner feel cared for, and he would have done that, too, if that was Dean's bent these days.

"What? What was it?" Dean's mouth shrieked somewhere while he got his injection of torture somewhere that hadn't lost all feeling yet. Why did he fuck up everything he ever tried to do?

A long string of images of him getting fed up doing the right thing and ending up on the barroom floor or on the wrong end of somebody's fist came to him. It was always the forbidden, calling to him, two girls at once, or a woman who he knew would clean out all his cash while he was asleep, or playing around with handcuffs and the silver chain he carried in case he stumbled on a werewolf, hitting on a girl whose boyfriend was the size of Toledo, messing with hunter women, though his dad warned him about creating bad karma in that community. As soon as part of him told him he shouldn't do it, he felt an irresistible compulsion to do it. Like the many times going on a bender the night before making his appearance as a buttoned-up FBI agent before a grisly crime scene. Improv was hard, don't let anyone kid you otherwise, but again, it relied on instinct so it didn't really count as anything other than him squeaking through life by the seat of his pants.

"You got the gift of the gab," his father had said when he started contributing to the family lie-telling business early on. But his father battered his way through situations because of the smoldering intensity of his mission. His wasn't merely gab, but the truth.

"Jeez, I never realized how much I still compared myself to him," one part of Dean's brain said to an audience of the body parts that hadn't disappeared in some fog. "I thought by doing this thing Dad could never understand, the Big Taboo of going gay on top of an even bigger taboo nobody predicted enough to name, I would stop being owned by him." After all, isn't that they way kissing boys worked for the Other Dean? And Cas had stopped being the good soldier boy he'd been for millennia, just by taking the forbidden step of falling in love with a human.

But Dean was never able to stop pushing things. Sam always said so. "You stopped caring about hunting a while back, brother, but you still take the dumbest risks because you can't let anything go."

It was true. Even now, downstairs, he was worrying at these stones that had gotten inside his mental shoe, scraping against the brain as it rattled in his skull. "Why?" he heard his voice muttering somewhere.

"Shut up, you're the one that fucks everything up, questioning everything."

"No, you're the one who fucks it up, by being allergic to thinking."

He was led around Hell like a prize poodle and all he could think was that it felt so weird to have all his muscles moving in concert when he felt like each bit of himself wanted to go in different directions. He watched his feet in case they started skittering out from underneath him like two crabs going in opposite directions.

On these excursions the demons were poking him and staring, saying something he didn't catch. "They've never seen such a failure as you," said one sector of his brain, which was carved up like a turkey in different occupied zones.

"They've never seen a person go guano like this, man."

"Dude, you are screwed once your arms walk away from your hands, your ass walks away from your legs, because you're going to be tortured in fifty different places at once, each section of Hell with their own piece of Winchester to flog. You're a real pass-around-Patty, isn't that the way you like it? They'll pass you out as prizes for the best fingernail-remover and most creative user of the melon-baller. And the underworld is a big place."

He really saw how big it was this time around. There was no way to see all of Heaven at once—at least, none of the angels claimed to have seen it all. And each person's salvation was by its nature somewhat private. But the halls and galleries full of people alone in their pain that Dean saw as he was walked on his crab-feet by Valac's leash, there were millions of them. Or maybe there seemed to be more because everything started looking the same which made it multiply. He got lost looking at the bubbles in the reconstituted orange juice Valac had to wheedle him into drinking several times a day.

Once he brought him ice cream. Of course it wouldn't be Hell if you could have Haagen Dazs, but the king of Hell went so far as to obtain one of those freeze dried tubes of ice cream they made for astronauts. He'd watched with bated breath while Dean stared at the tube, unable to make his arms obey his command to move. Valac had ended up feeding it to him on a spoon. It didn't taste like anything, but he acted like it did.

Dean smiled in thanks because he felt sorry for this person who still expected something of him, he wasn't sure what. The demon contorted his face in what they both supposed was a smile back. Hosting a material being was difficult for Hell, where any liquid couldn't remain healthful for longer than a few minutes. Dean saw the books on human nutrition mixed in with manuals on caring for your first puppy that Valac brought in the room sometimes and flipped through, frowning. For a while the demon had him in cedar chips as if he were a hamster, with a little ball with a bell in it to play with.

It made him ashamed, now, to think of how many hours he batted that ball around as if it were the most miraculous thing he'd ever seen. If he'd had a tail he would have wagged it.

Sometimes Dean was dressed up in his tunic and posed on a velvet seat the head demon confided he stole from a high-end escort service. When his tormentor attached the feathered wings and compared him with a picture he kept locked up, Dean felt vaguely content that he could make anyone that happy. He was good for something after all.

That idea disappeared when he thought he heard Etienne. It made him sure he was crazy because the tiny Spaniard was dead by now. Body and soul dead, because of him.

"I'm so sorry, Balthazar," he whispered with lips that would barely move. The angel, for all his show of not caring about anyone, had really been there for him when his angelic body first began developing. Balthazar was too smart to let Etienne see him watching, like Cas did, but Dean knew the angel was fiercely protective of his regained love.

"Oh man, Dean, you got somebody's true love disintegrated after he waited over a century to get him back? That's cold, dude, how can you look at yourself?"

Valac brought the mirror over to show how long his hair had gotten, to let him see what he looked like in the latest chiffon and feather outfit that seemed to be the Hell-equivalent of kinky lingerie. All Dean could do was to stare stupidly at the face he was told was his. But he didn't recognize anything. Beyond the red hair that hung part way to his shoulders, the empty blue eyes, the thin features and the makeup Valac was experimenting with, he couldn't believe that this person who looked like a drag queen junkie was the one who had once been destined for a starring role in the Apocalypse.

When Cas finally came for him, the light had spilled out from under the door and was slipping towards him like a bright puddle. To dissolve, to think no more. He sat very still, barely breathing, waiting for the stillness to become complete.

A violent jolt messed it all up.

"I'm going to find my arms somewhere and throttle whoever made the whole rusty machine start up again!" he cursed, searching for where his limbs had gotten to.

The large Slavic man with blonde hair cut short to his skull stepped into the room and stared at him.

Dean stared back. "You never seen human Jell-o before? Move it along, buddy" he tried to transmit to his lips but they sort of squirmed around and lost interest.

Castiel. He heard the name Castiel. It took a superhuman amount of effort to put together the sudden jump-start to his system with the stranger's face and Cas.

Cas.

Only Cas would be so naive as to give him another chance.

He heard Cas' voice join all the other sounds of his toes and his knees and his memories and his Dad's stern voice and Etienne and all the other ingredients in the soup that was on a sluggish boil in his skull.

He had no idea what Cas was trying to say, either out loud or in his head. His brain was stuck on this one fact-Cas was here, he was here-his angelic eyes suddenly flew open and saw Cas in his entirety, shrunk into the right size to fit into his hamster-nest.

Remember my ball, I want to take my ball with me, he was trying to transmit, but it must not have gotten through and then he was being squashed into this random Russian dude.

What the-? was all he could think over and over while he melted into his own little piece of Heaven, the angel Castiel. And then he didn't think anything for a long time because he slipped into a blissful sleep.

When he woke up inside Cas, his questions bubbled in his small corner of the huge, old entity that was his lover. It was like he'd been given his own cubbyhole in the New York Public Library. Millennia of memories and facts and skills were neatly shelved and stretched farther than Dean's battered mind could comprehend.

He slept again and resumed the thought upon waking.

Dean had made some subtle inquiries about the likelihood of Cas being able to fit into him as a vessel again, and everyone told him the same thing. Jamming two souls into one body, which is what ensouled angels like Cas did now, was hard enough. Balthazar was the only changed one who seemed to exist comfortably in the same vessel long term, these days. But an angelic body into another, slightly smaller one? Plus two souls? There was simply nowhere to put everything, Balthazar had told him once, and his original lessons on angel anatomy still made more sense to Dean than anything he'd read in the couple of Enochian treatises he'd tried to decode on the subject.

He roamed around inside Cas when he felt well enough, and thought of something he'd heard on some late-night nature program, that a stegosaurus had a separate nerve center to control its legs, like a brain-outpost because the main brain was so far away. He could sense his body staying in one place somewhere in Cas' huge civilization, but Dean's consciousness was definitely moving around, peeking into different memories that he couldn't make sense of at all because they came at him in a riot of sounds and shapes that couldn't be decoded without the angel's awareness. But the different files seemed to govern themselves, closing doors when he was done looking through the contents. "Make yourself at home," was what he sensed from this region of Cas, but Cas himself was somewhere else, and he spent unknown hours reassembling his sense of self in this warm place.

"There you are," Castiel finally said, or a version of his angelic body did. "I was looking for you."

"I've been dating a stegosaurus all this time," was all Dean could say before falling into sync with Cas' thoughts, which moved totally differently than his own, in some way.

"You want to know how I fit you in here. As you can see, there's a lot of room," the angel said.

"I'll say," Dean said, still not over the sheer volume he'd been intimate with. He'd barely scratched the surface. "How do you remember anything? It's like the biggest library in the world down there."

"I've never thought about it. What would you like me to remember?"

"The dinosaurs," Dean said at random.

After five minutes of having his fragile mind blown watching actual brontosaurii and pterodactyls, Dean said, "Hey, Cas, you still here?"

In a few moments he heard a response from somewhere, "Yes, I'm actually working at the moment, but let me know when you find another section that interests you."

After some time of exploring how his stegosaur-boyfriend worked, Dean called out. "Hey, you know, I've figured it all out. If you can take a sec away from your official business."

The area of Cas' awareness where he was located shone a little brighter, and after a long while, he saw Cas' image of himself again. "I can talk to you while I participate in these dull maneuvers, but I'd rather talk face to face, if that's all right. It's hard to find you in here."

Before Dean could protest, he was extricated from Cas' body.

"That was not nearly as easy as going in," Dean's body collapsed on the couch in Cas' room, and he cursed at realizing he was still wearing some filmy negligee. "Can you find me something to wear that doesn't make me look like demon-bait? I can't move."

His wounds had healed while he was inside Cas, but he was "Insanely hungry. Protein shake, on the couch, stat." The angel bustled around their space and helped Dean into the jeans and shirt that swam on him they were so big. "Don't let me see how terrible I look," he begged as he slurped down a shake and then some orange juice laced with liquid vitamins. "Was I like in a medically induced coma in you or something?"

"That's one way of thinking of it. I suddenly understood that you had been nostalgic for the closeness we felt in Las Vegas, that you wanted to be part of a whole with me. Then I saw how you could fit in quite easily." Cas' eyes did that x-ray scanner thing they did sometimes. "You might benefit from intravenous nutrition."

"Whatever, I don't care where you take me, but let me say this. You're right, but you're half-right."

"About the IV treatment?" The angel was puzzled.

"No, about me wanting to be part of a whole. Yes, that's what it took a couple months of Hellfire to make clear to me, but there's another side to it. I'm not whole, for starters. I've never felt at peace with myself, so when you came in and then left it's like the hole I tried to plug up with sex and booze and fighting, it got bigger by a thousand. And anything I did was like a drop in the bucket; it could never fill that space where you were. Hell, from what I saw in sector 412-B, second shelf of your first millennium, you really are that big."

"I'm sorry, I should have known," Cas apologized automatically.

Dean made a frustrated noise. "How could you? Have you ever used a vessel with an addictive personality before? That was my whole thing, I don't know what it was for Etienne."

"What does he have to do with this?" the angel asked frostily.

"This is the second part, Cas. Look at me." The angel was wearing another big Russian, this one dark-haired, and the angelic eyes stared at him through the light green irises. "You hold on awfully tight. Hey, I'm not saying don't hold on," Dean positioned Cas' vessel-arm around his shoulder and panted from the effort. "But from what I saw inside of you, there's so much of you after several millennia, that you can't keep track of it all with your main consciousness. You'd go nuts. You wouldn't be able to focus on the present."

Dean rested for a moment. He hated being this weak. "The big you, Cas that's seeing new things and interacting with the outside world and the you that remembers the French Revolution, they're both you, but you can't really explain how you keep all yourself together. Believe me, I've been watching myself come apart at the seams, so I know it's not easy keeping little me together, much less somebody as old as you"

"You've not made an issue of the age difference in the past," Cas interjected irritably.

"This is what I mean, Thursday." The nickname worked its usual magic. "You like, pounce on the slightest thing as either proof that things are going well, or things are going to shit. I never thought I would be giving anyone lessons in being laid back, but you've got to accept that I'm different every day, and believe it or not, you are too. Even if you weren't shaped by new experiences, you have trillions of old ones in the hopper, waiting to come up."

He looked at the scowl facing him. "Is this a cultural difference between angels and humans, or something? Because I'm sure that I've heard Bobby talking about some of his weird Asian esoteric studies, and there's some paradox in Buddhism or Taoism or one of those isms. Like the universe is in a grain of sand and the grain of sand is in the universe? All I mean is, I'm going to change, so you got to go with the flow, the all of me, and hope that most of the pieces of me are pretty good, too. Fuck, they can't get worse than they've been."

He made a wry face. "We haven't talked about it, but I'll grow older until I die at some point, and then we'll keep our thing going in Heaven. But not if you keep holding on to some image of me—maybe the one you rescued from Hell, or the one from Las Vegas or the one you missed when you were in Heaven-and comparing everything I do to that. I'm always going to be a disappointment, then, and I've learned the hard way that I'll do basically anything to avoid disappointing someone. Even being a demon's Barbie doll." He put his hair behind his ears. "You've never said—do you hate this?"

"I like it when it's combed, so let's get you in the show—"

Castiel stared at the woefully thin slice of a Dean Winchester on the couch.

The slice cleared his throat. "Hello? I'm having my first serious relationship talk of my life, not sure if you had any of those somewhere in your archives."

"I should have understood this right when you started explaining it, Forgive me, Dean, for missing your reference to the wave-particle duality theory."

It was Dean's turn to stare. "Huh?"

Then he fainted.

He woke up in a hospital bed with an IV and some worried-looking man he had to close his eyes to recognize as Cas. "This is getting really confusing, you switching vessels so much," he complained.

"I had an idea about that," the man smiled. "Why don't we stick with one for awhile?"

"Do I get to pick?" Dean asked eagerly.

"Certainly," Castiel said. "When you're well enough."

Upon his discharge from the hospital, Dean was waiting for Cas outside and began scanning the street for likely looking collaborators, when he felt an odd sensation.

He felt whole.

"How did you do that?" he asked while Cas walked them towards the subway.

"The metaphor you used was actually literally true. There was an 'angel-shaped hole,' a way that I could fit in, your new angelic body notwithstanding. I have my theories as to—"

"There's places I want to take you!" Dean struggled to take control. Everything was so much more, so much deeper and more satisfying when he and Cas shared it together.

"I'm not sure about some of those ideas," Castiel thought back at him as he waded through the good times Dean wanted them to have in this body. "You're not nearly well enough for most of that."

Dean was lost in the possibilities….

"Dean. Dean."

Castiel's thoughts flowed insistently at Dean, recalling him to the Thanksgiving dinner at Bobby's. "I'm not participating if you're still badmouthing me," Dean said to the table.

"They want to hear the story of how the angelic mission concluded. You always say I leave out all the important parts, so I need your help."

"But I was just starting to reminisce about some of the things we shared in this body," Dean thought, and he felt their body react even more to the memories.

"Stop that! We have tonight to be a shameless tart," Cas said. He'd been studying human dirty-talk but claimed it was harder than differential calculus.

"Oh all right." They followed Bobby and Sam out to the parlor. "I remember being as stuffed as you guys look."

"This was just a warm-up," Bobby said tipsily. "Tomorrow is the true gourmet's test."

"I'll supervise the hungover kitchen duties for Thanksgiving part II, brother, if you promise to keep yourself checked in while you carry Gina and everybody."

"I'm here, I'm awake," Dean said as they stretched their legs before the fire. "Whatever Cas tells you, I was the one who figured it out."

They smiled together with one mouth, and began the story.