I apologize for the unannounced hiatus. I haven't been having a great month, and mental health needs to come before fanfictioning. Updates might be irregular for a while, but I promise I'm not giving up on this story. I will finish it come hell or high water. It just might take me a little longer than usual.

Warnings: This chapter contains discussion of child neglect, child abuse, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, and suicide. Be safe.

Many thanks to podothedruid, NeteleJala, Damaged Emerald, Eyum daRelmera, gnbrules, RandomFangirl, and Kansas1979 for taking the time to leave reviews.

And once again, I cannot thank Eyum daRelmera enough for all her help, advice (both taken and ignored), and emotional support. I promise to protect you from the pitchfork wielding minions, hon. =)

Chapter Nineteen

On Monday nights, once Claire was in bed, it usually wasn't long before Castiel and Dean retreated to the privacy of what Castiel was quickly coming to think of as their room, and clothes came off. Tonight Castiel felt hollowed out, scraped raw inside, and the thought of sex made him more exhausted than excited, but at the same time the idea of sleeping alone made him a little panicky. He needed the comfort of Dean's arms even more than usual tonight. With any other man he would have worried that asking for a night of platonic cuddling this early in the relationship would be interpreted as losing interest, but this was Dean, so he knew that the chances of this triggering an argument were basically nil.

When he came back from tucking Claire in, he found Dean in the kitchen adding a generous dollop of honey to a steaming cup of tea. The scents of chamomile and lavender hung in the air. He didn't have to ask who it was for. Dean derisively referred to tea as 'hippie leaf water', but when he found out that Castiel often enjoyed a cup in the evenings before bed, he had interrogated the young woman whose family shop supplied the restaurant, pestering her with questions about different blends and the advantages of loose leaf versus bags until she broke down and gave him a crash course.

Dean wordlessly handed Castiel the cup. Castiel took a sip and hummed with pleasure as the flavors unfolded on his tongue. Sweet and floral without being cloying.

"Good?" Dean asked.

"Perfect. You're going to spoil me for the supermarket stuff."

Dean smiled. "Well, if you insist on drinking leaf water, I'm damn well gonna make sure it's the best leaf water I can afford to buy for you."

Castiel was becoming more fluent in Dean Winchester every day, and he knew that what he was really saying was, I like taking care of you. So let me.

"I, um… Do you mind if we don't… do anything tonight? I'm kind of worn out."

"Of course," Dean said immediately. "I get it. It must have been pretty draining talking about all that stuff with Claire."

Even though Castiel had been ninety-nine percent sure that would be Dean's answer, he still felt a surge of relief and gratitude as he was reminded yet again of why he loved this man so much.

"Do you still want me to stay over, or would you rather have the bed to yourself tonight?"

"No," he blurted out. "I mean, no, I don't want you to leave," he clarified a little more calmly. I don't ever want you to leave.

"Okay." Sensing Castiel's lingering panic, Dean rubbed his arm soothingly. "How about we watch something while you drink your tea, and then we'll go to bed."

They settled in with some old rom-com, but Castiel quickly lost the thread of the plot. He seemed to be very bad at watching movies with Dean. He always got distracted by something. Usually it was Dean, but this time, it was the unspoken other half of the story sitting in his chest like a stone. He had come very close to telling Dean everything the day Claire got sent home for fighting, but in the end he had wanted to make love more than he had wanted to talk, and afterward he had been reluctant to ruin the post-coital bliss. Now though…

He felt like the carefully selected pieces he had shared with Claire had dragged all of the rest of it to the surface with them. It was as easy as it would ever be to finally get it all out in the open. He paused the movie.

Dean turned to look at him but didn't say anything. He could tell that Castiel was working up the courage to say something, and he just waited, tracing idle patterns on Castiel's shoulders, grounding him with soft touches as Castiel navigated the dark, twisting labyrinth of his own mind.

"My mother was seventeen when she got pregnant with me and Jimmy," he began with no preamble, ripping off the band-aid. "We never knew who our father was. I don't know if he didn't want to be part of our lives or if she never told him about us, but his name isn't even listed on our birth certificates.

"We… had a rather unsettled childhood even before Mama died. Sometimes we lived with our grandmother, but she and Mama would fight, and then Mama would leave to go stay with friends… or the boyfriend of the month. Sometimes she took us with her, and sometimes… sometimes she took us places she really shouldn't have."

Dean tensed, his hand squeezing Castiel's shoulder a little harder. "Cas, were you…" He didn't seem able to make himself say the words.

"Not that I recall," Castiel said, staring intently at the texture of Dean's jeans. "I suppose it could have happened when I was too young to remember it, or I blocked it out. But I think I prefer not knowing. I saw plenty of sex though, both on TV and, um… live, of course. By the time I was six I had a pretty good idea of how it worked, though I didn't understand how anyone could enjoy it."

"Jesus," Dean muttered.

"It wasn't all bad. I had Jimmy. We were very close back then. And Babi, our grandmother, did her best to give us a normal childhood whenever she got the chance. I think she would have fought for custody of us, but her health was poor. She had arthritis and diabetes. She couldn't keep up with two little kids on her own, and she was afraid that if she reported Mama to CPS, we'd get taken away and she'd never see us again. Which is, of course, exactly what happened when Mama died."

Dean held him tighter, and Castiel burrowed into his shoulder, muffling the words a little as though that would make the memory any less painful. "She overdosed on sleeping pills. It was ruled an accident since there was no note, but I've always wondered if maybe she did it on purpose."

He took a shuddering breath and pressed on, eager to get the rest of the story over with so he could fall asleep in Dean's arms and stop thinking for a while. "The first home they put us in wasn't so bad. They were nice people, and Jimmy and I were kept together. They even let us share a room so we wouldn't be scared at night. But then the father lost his job, and they had to move out of state to find another one, so back into the system we went, and the next place… wasn't good. That's where I got these." He touched the cigarette burns on his chest. They were currently hidden by his shirt, but Dean would know what he meant. He probably knew Castiel's body better than he knew his own by now.

"And that was how it went for the next eight years. Some places were better than others, but nothing lasted long, and I learned not to get my hopes up. Jimmy and I weren't often in the same home, especially as we got older. It's rare to find a foster family willing to take on two teenage boys, and I had gotten a reputation as a challenging child. Not undeserved. I was… I was very angry."

Castiel glanced at Dean to see if this phased him at all, but of course Dean just looked back, completely non-judgmental. He had stood by his brother through a murder charge. Teenage anger management issues weren't going to make him turn his back on Castiel.

"After I aged out of the system," Castiel went on, putting his head back down on Dean's shoulder and cuddling into the other man again, "I was placed in a… a kind of halfway house for foster kids. There was free counseling and they helped us figure out what we wanted to do with our adult lives. The fact that they had to spend most of their time repairing the damage the system had done to us was an irony no one ever pointed out. We were just grateful to have a support system and not be thrown out into the world with no safety net and no family to run home to. One of the social workers, a man named Cain Adams, found out that I liked cooking, so he suggested I apply to culinary schools, and… well, the rest is history I guess."

They were both silent for a while, Dean rubbing Castiel's back, his face pressed to Castiel's forehead in a kind of drawn out kiss. Castiel hadn't really expected to feel better for talking about it. He'd just wanted to get it over with so that he wasn't keeping secrets from Dean anymore. But he was surprised to find that he did feel a bit better. The pain wasn't gone, but the infection had been purged, and he could finally begin to heal.

He slowly became aware that Dean's shirt was damp under his cheek. He'd been crying without realizing it. "Sorry," he said, lifting his head. "I got you all wet."

"Don't worry about it." Dean stroked his cheek, and there was sadness in those green eyes, but still no pity. "Cas, I… would it make you feel any better if I said I'd like to kill everyone who ever hurt you?"

Castiel gave a watery laugh. "Maybe. A little."

"Well, I would. And I'd also like to give this Cain guy a hug."

"That one I might actually be able to arrange. I keep in touch with him."

After a little more quiet cuddling, Dean said, "You want to finish the movie?"

Castiel looked at the screen and realized he couldn't remember what the story was supposed to be about or the names of any of the characters. "Can we just go to bed?"

"Sure."

They brushed their teeth together in the apartment's tiny bathroom, stripped down to t-shirts and boxers, and climbed into bed on their usual sides, promptly meeting in the middle and resuming their cuddling. No one watching them move around each other with the easy familiarity of an old married couple would have believed that they'd been together for less than two months.

Just before he drifted off, Castiel heard Dean murmur, "I love you so much, Cas. You have no idea. And I'm never going to let anyone hurt you ever again. I promise."

"I love you too," Castiel mumbled, and he fell asleep feeling truly, completely safe and loved, maybe for the first time in his life.