The crash came in April – horrid weather. It was a brusque Thursday and Dean was wandering home a bit later than usual. His mind was swimming, thinking about this and that and looping back over again. He was hunched down in his jacket and the scarf Castiel and his family had given him, slouched so much that his nose was totally obscured and it looked like he could hardly pry himself from the outfit.
He had been irritable for a good two weeks, to the point where people at work immediately quieted down when he got closer to them. It hadn't improved, and yet when pressed he refused to say much about it. It wasn't another's business.
When Castiel asked, he had told him the same line, though the other did less than back off, and instead took to looking at Dean as if he was bidding his time, waiting for him to do something that would reveal the source of restlessness.
But it was the usual things that had happened to him; work was tedious now and dragging, but he scraped by. He got a letter from Sam two weeks ago, had sent a reply not long after and promptly tried to move on to other things on his side of the country. The Depression dominated and snuck its blackened presence into all the nooks of current life; Hoover, of course, continued to get accosted for his lackadaisical attitude, and he and Castiel stayed together, through the thick and thin of it all. But there was impatience to him now, and it left him surly and awful from the moment he woke up to the moment he got into bed at night. It became a part of his schedule at this point.
As he neared his building, he saw the landlord perched on the front steps. He felt a pulse thud in his hands as they clenched inside his pockets. The landlord of his building was named Haskel Crane, a stocky man with a thick neck and fair hair, who had been more of a shaded entity in the near-year Dean had lived there. Occasionally he'd see the man standing about in the foyer, smoking a cigarette or chastising a tenant who was late in their payments. Dean assumed he was waiting for that sort of thing – since there was no way a man would be sitting outside on a day like this to simply enjoy the weather.
The atmosphere was, in a word, dead. It was stifling; the lack of wind, heat and cold sucked out of the surroundings. Even with a torrential pour that had gone on for days, it went on. Just that morning the storm clouds had cleared and left the current ashy complexion in its wake, and Dean was fed up with it already. It was nothing compared to the whirling storms before, or the tentative heat that usually came about at this time. It was like the natural world was holding its breath, and Dean was exhausted by the lack of any sort of sensation besides the lowered temperature.
As he approached the steps to the entrance, intent of going upstairs to slouch in an armchair until Castiel came home from the tailor shop, Crane stood and held a hand out, stopping Dean in his tracks.
"Winchester," he said, greeting him with a nervous smile.
"Yeah?" he asked, not sure if the dread in his gut was completely warranted. He wasn't too sure why Crane would pester him now, and the only explanation was a sickening one: as landlord, he had access to all the rooms in the house; perhaps he had taken note that two men living in a flat had just one double bed, not a cot or a sofa to split sleeping quarters – or, more pressingly, the way their clothes would sometimes remain scattered on the floor, Castiel's dress shirt and slacks or the overalls he used at the canning factory mixing in with Dean's grease-stained work uniform in piles that suggested the garments hadn't been removed systematically and dumped, instead slowly removed one by one… such evidence was harder to hide now that Castiel wasn't just visiting for a few nights out of month.
Now that nearly everyone in the country had to tighten their belts, the parties, the booze, and all the fun had went up in smoke. So did all of those lenient attitudes to people like him as well, totally scattered in the face of toiling life. Dean hadn't known this kind of fear. It was one thing to see a man, or multiple men, once. It was quite another to have one by your side with the consistency of a wife. And still yet he was staring straight at the one man who had access to the bit of square footage left where no one would care who they were and what they did. While Crane had never gone into his room after he had moved in, the thought that he had made him feel ill.
But all Crane did was go, "The boiler went out this morning." Which would have been bad news to most people, but Dean took it with a sigh of relief. To cover it up, he pulled a match and cigarette out of his pocket and lit up.
"Shit," he said as a reaction. "How'd that go?"
"The storm last night overworked all the pipes, they flooded the basement."
"So you need a new boiler and new pipes," Dean suggested, breathing in the tobacco, letting it go in a puff. "At least it didn't go during winter. How long will the cold baths last?"
Now Crane shifted uncomfortably. "It's not just that…"
"Something else burst?"
"No." he wiped a hand across his chin. "Back before everything went down the tubes, I had the money to make repairs if something broke. But now it's just enough to make sure the taxes went in normal last week. I have nothing spare."
"When will you?" The apprehension reappeared, Dean felt his gut tense.
Crane let out a heaving sigh. "Not until I raise the rent." He said gravely. And then Dean froze, cigarette halfway to his lips.
"'Scuse me?"
"It's going up by twenty. I don't know for how long. At least this season and the rest of summer."
"Eighty a month?" Dean struggled out. He nearly dropped his stick, smoke still curling up faintly from the end of his fingers. "No… You can't,"
"You think this is easy on me?" Crane interjected, testily. "This is my job at risk here."
"You do realize that there's no one in your building making more than thirty a week, right?"
Crane's face started to grow pink, out of frustration or embarrassment. Dean's expression didn't give nearly as much away. However, he could feel that usual snappiness, filling him up and topping him off from the inside out. Now his rage had a direction, after days of being aimless and ambling, he had something to aim it at, and his body went hot at the concept.
"What do you want me to do?" his landlord sputtered.
"Maybe have the goddamn foresight to get a decent set of waterworks before the economy went to hell, how 'bout that?"
"Don't get smart with me, Winchester." Crane snapped, the conversation going from politely conscious to brash in record time.
"Why not? If it'll help get some smarts into you." He crushed his cigarette with a stamp of his work boot, listening to the heel rub against the gravel. An animalistic part of him wanted to do the same thing to Crane's face; bash it in with something blunt.
"I can kick you out this second and there'll be a line down the damn block waiting to take your place." Crane leaned into Dean's face, breath full of stale beer the man had probably put down in order to get the courage to talk to his tenants like this, the yellow bastard. Dean had to hold back growling at him like a feral beast, because there was certainly a very thin line separating him from that now.
"Go 'head," he said in a rush. "Bet you I can find a place world's better than this hole. Fact," he stepped even closer to Crane, stretching himself taller and squaring his shoulders back. "Why don't you just help me haul my stuff out here, and I'll be outta your hair, bastard."
Crane cussed angrily for a moment, no message to be said, just pure rage expressed in blue words. Just when Dean was about to start another round of insults, a hand was grabbing his shoulder, pushing him away from the landlord. "Dean," Castiel hissed, voice rough and clipped like he was disciplining a child. The comparison made Dean blind again, and he shoved Castiel away.
"Get your hands off 'a me," he snarled, fists out to his sides.
"That's it," Crane said, regaining his verbal footing. "I'm taking that offer. Winchester, you're gone. I want you out of my sight now. And out of my building –" But Dean was past the point of caring – past hearing, either, as he went up to the entrance, finding the door unlocked and heaving himself up the stairs with a heavy slap of his shoes. He really wasn't acting any better than a child, a small part of him rationalized, but the logic he came up with did nothing to calm him down. By the time he got to the top floor, he slammed his key into the door and opened it with such force that it banged against the wall in the hallway, slamming shut as loudly. His anger was directionless once more, but he couldn't figure out a way to push everything back under the surface of himself. He wanted to revel in the injustice he felt; how dare he be forced to live like he was – how could the damned landlord go and swindle him out of money he had no way of sparing?
How could Castiel touch him like that – like he needed to be forcibly removed before he… before he…
His fist moved in a great swing, connecting with the window frame. Glass shattered in a high-pitched creak, and an explosion of cracked shards fell out onto the street and straight back at him. He punched the wooden frame again, again, three times, more? before there was a red stain on the wood and not a piece of glass was left connected to the wall. He was panting, sweat sticking to his hair, his neck, and he felt nothing. There was a swirl of too many thoughts, and in a way it was worse than the mindless indulgence of rage. He could feel that anger, that disappointment, except now it was facing inwards at himself, their potency more consuming than whatever the glass had done to his hand.
Through his harsh breathing he heard the door rattle behind him, and jerking around he saw Castiel standing in the open doorway. He was watching him, irises flicking this way and that to take in every minute detail of the scene before him. "Dean…" One of Castiel's hands curled, relaxed again. There was a queer expression in him, as if he wanted to grab at Dean again but couldn't risk making the motion.
Dean thought of the window, broken open. "What did you think, I was going to jump?" his fingers clenched, and he felt the sharp sting where glass had cut him, blood trickling out of the creases in his palms, welling along the tight skin of his knuckles. "Is that what you think of me?" He saw Castiel take a sharp intake of breath.
"Dean. You haven't been yourself lately," he replied carefully. He edged towards Dean as if he was walking across the glass scattered room barefoot. Dean realized he was making all the same moves a trapped animal might; trying to look threatening and unapproachable even as Castiel, like usual, ignored all social constructs and went to him anyway. He motioned for Dean to give him his bleeding hand.
Dean opened his mouth, about to say something sharp, to get Castiel away when a gesture wouldn't do the trick. Instead the other man leveled him with a withering stare. "Don't tell me your hand is fine. Stop being a child and show me." He felt an angry blush appearing on his skin, but Castiel was relentless. His hand still outstretched, his eyes still full of some sort of righteous command, as if he was a diligent leader of some sort, not a tailor.
"Show me, Dean." He said again, and Dean slowly brought his right hand up and unclasped it, letting the other man see the damage as he watched on, with pursed lips and a calculating, suspicious look.
At once, Castiel's hardness seeped from his face, and he inspected Dean's injuries with industrious care. "You still have some shards –"
"–I'm aware," Dean interrupted. Castiel glanced back up at him.
"Go, take a seat on the bed… I don't suppose you have anything for that," he said, watching Dean's retreating form.
"There's stuff in the wardrobe," Dean responded, feeling a peculiar lethargy where he had to work to say words that weren't serving the purpose of complaining – but remaining silent would have only gotten him another bit of Castiel's wrath; and as unwilling as he was, he still wished to avoid that. "Bottom drawer, right-hand side." He heard Castiel's measured steps, mixed in with the occasional harmless crunches of glass. The closet door opened, a cavity pulled out, some rummaging. Castiel paused for a long moment, until Dean demanded what was taking him so long.
"…Nothing," Castiel said with finality. He walked back with a small container, a dented metal box that was shabby and appeared military issue; it was quite possible that it was a leftover from his father's belongings, but then again their constant shuffling around made any average and austere item get lost, its memory forgotten. More importantly, inside were more than a dozen items Sam and Dean had collected and restocked over the years, even before opening, he knew that inside there were brown bottles of medicinal alcohol and rolls of bandages; a periwinkle case full of tweezers and small scissors as sharp and shiny as when they had first been purchased; a magnifying glass similar to the type a jeweler owned, a few sewing needles and thread kept sterile in a jar of cleaning solution, and a six ounce bottle of some of the strongest whiskey Dean could get his hands on. Castiel inspected it; Dean took a cursory glance inside as if to confirm that all odds and ends were in place, and Castiel sat the box on the bed and walked off to the washroom, the tap going on a moment later.
Dean eyed the old case until Castiel came back, holding two towels and smelling strongly of soap; his shirt sleeves were rolled up, and he proceeded to drag one of the table chairs over with a dull screech on the floorboards, until he sat right in front of Dean, one crisp towel sitting on his lap like an oversized napkin.
Dean put his hand into Castiel's offering one, and his friend bent his head, assessing the damage for a moment before going back to the tool kit. He set to work silently, alternating for at least a quarter of an hour between cleaning the wound with a disinfectant-soaked cloth, and picking out the shards still embedded superficially into Dean's skin. It hurt after a while, more from the concentration on such a small amount of his body than anything else. He grit his teeth through it, determined not to talk any further.
After Dean was sure Castiel was done with the bulk of the work and had started to look over the lacerated, pink skin, he asked, "Think I'll need stitches?" His wound was certainly ugly; a few of the cuts were bleeding still, slowed down by a balm Castiel had smoothed over them. His knuckles felt swollen and sore, and there would be some sort of bruise on them soon enough; everything up his arm ached, his hand mostly, but even his shoulder and neck felt pulled, as if his form hadn't been right when he had gone off – probably not, he figured, you couldn't be expected to be smart about your hitting stance if you were mad enough to take it out on a window.
"No," he supplied, still turning over Dean's hand. "Most of the cuts were shallow, merely bled a lot. There's a few…" he gestured to three deep abrasions that were still oozing. They were deep enough that Dean saw a break in the skin where a small chunk had been taken out of his flesh – when Castiel passed his fingers over the spots, one right bellow his middle knuckle, one at the base of his ring finger, and another in the middle of his palm, he had to suppress a shudder as he felt the skin of Castiel's fingers actually sink down into the crevices. They hurt the worst. "They'll heal fully in a month or so. With a scar of course, but it's better than nothing."
"I'm used to scars."
Castiel silently reached for a roll of gauze. "Do you have any leather gloves?"
"My winter ones."
"You ought to wear them for work then." Dean jutted a lip out, nodded. He would do it, of course. His reckless move could just be the cause of some god awful infection, if he wasn't smart about it. Castiel carried on playing nurse, applied more of the bitter-smelling balm that felt cold on his skin even after Castiel let it warm between his fingers for a few moments. Soon his entire right hand was nearly obscured by bandages, hot and raw, blood buzzing underneath the snug coverings.
Dean refused to look at Castiel. Instead he willed himself to feel some sense of closure, a bit of peace, after acting out like he did. But all he got in return for it was an even larger impression of uselessness than before. That, and the burden of an injured hand. It had been a split second decision that made everything that much worse, and he hated it. He hated the apartment, the cold wind brushing against his back from the new hole in the wall, the old mattress he sat on, the gentle presence beside him.
"Done." Castiel said, pulling away. He put the chair back and started gathering up the supplies. "Do you want ice?" he asked.
His hand seemed to grow hotter at the offer. "No."
Castiel went about cleaning off the bed, rolling up strips of bandages he didn't use and putting them away; he took the towels – one with some splotches of blood, another soaked in ethyl, and put them out of sight before getting the wardrobe open again to put in the box. Once more, Dean heard the doors open, a set of drawers being pulled out, then… nothing. Castiel was still behind him, not moving, perhaps kneeling or crouching, looking into the recesses of Dean's belongings at something that he had hidden away until Castiel just now had a reason to go searching.
He attempted to guess what Castiel was looking at, before it struck him like a hundred blades of ice in his belly.
The metal first aid box was shoved into a small chest, had been since Sam had left and he'd moved in. But the chest held other, more incriminating things, and Dean's blood either curled in disgust or in a desperate hunger for what he knew he had left there.
Castiel's silence told him he was still looking at something. Dean knew what it was.
"I don't take that anymore," he said, into dead space. If Castiel was startled he couldn't see it.
"I never said that you did," Castiel replied, careful as he had been.
"You seemed surprised, at least. Why? Did you think I wasn't the type?"
Castiel came back towards the bed, eyes still fixed on the closet. "A lot of types take cocaine, Dean. I didn't assume you would be…"
"What? Desperate enough?"
"I'm not trying to pick a fight with you." Castiel asserted quietly. "It caught me off guard that a person who used to be involved with that sort of thing keeps some vials in a trunk, that's all."
"That's all," Dean mimicked. "To be honest I'm surprised you didn't find those sooner."
"I'm sorry I didn't want to go through your belongings!" Castiel had shouted, his forced tepidness broken for a moment until he managed to reel it back in with a calming breath. "I thought you of all people would appreciate some privacy."
Dean scrutinized him for a bit, the fingers of his broken hand unintentionally twitching. "So why start asking questions now?" he asked.
Castiel sighed, rubbed a palm over his cheek. He would need a shave soon. "Because I wish to know you, Dean. I want to… as much as you'd let me. Which isn't a lot."
"What are you talking about?"
"You've been miserable for weeks," Castiel said in a rush. "And you won't tell me why – not a general idea, not even an excuse."
"You want me to lie to you then?"
"I want you to talk to me." He nodded towards Dean's wrapped up hand. "So that doesn't happen. I had to beg Crane to forgive you – I told him we were happy to pay the new rent." The look Dean got the moment he tried to speak up was enough to make him settle down again. "So now we're both angry, we have a broken window, a livid proprietor, and a few things to pay for with money we're not exactly abundant in. And all I'm asking you is to tell me why you wanted to hit glass in the first place, and you're treating me like some sort of monster for bothering with it all. Do you see what I'm telling you?"
Dean blinked. Castiel just let out another gust of air until he seemed to deflate. He sat down besides Dean on the bed, glancing at the other's lap.
"What does it matter to you?" Dean spoke slowly; he already knew of his stupid decision, and more or less the repercussions for it. Hearing some of Castiel's own frustration however, had hit him the hardest. The last time he had seen a flash of that was when Crowley and his circle of elites had worked the both of them over and left Castiel feeling played from start to finish. After that, Castiel had been an angel in a hundred different ways; putting up with Dean, his humor, his brash attitude, his surly behavior – Dean wondered, he feared, if the abundance of niceness had now run out, and everything after would decay. So he took a long time to swallow up every scrap of feeling until he could get an even sounding tone out of himself again. "Why do you need to know about my problems?"
"If they're bothering you this much… I think I should be aware of a few details. No one enjoys being kept in the dark."
"I can take care of myself."
"This," Castiel touched his fingers to Dean's hand. "Is not a good approach to dealing with an issue." He let his hands fold back on his lap. "You don't have to keep everything to yourself, you know. You should at least be able to talk to me about something that turns you into this."
Dean worried his lip. "It's family business." He said flippantly.
"We're family, aren't we?" Castiel sounded self-conscious. "Shouldn't we be, by now?"
Dean didn't respond.
"It's about Sam, isn't it?" Castiel asked.
"Isn't it always?"
"How does he handle you when you're like this?"
"I wouldn't put it past him to take my head and bang it into the window before I got a chance to break it all up."
"And how do you think Sam would feel, knowing that you're like this and won't tell him why?" Dean wanted to blurt out that it was different; that it was his brother, and Castiel wasn't Sam, but he didn't. He couldn't. No one would replace his brother – not Adam, not Castiel, nobody. But then again Castiel had seemed to find another niche within him.
Dean thought back to the vials, and knew that he owed Castiel a lot – more than he had given him, at least. It certainly didn't improve his mood.
"Sam and Jess are having a kid." He said grimly. Castiel was a stone beside him, obviously not sure whether to console or congratulate. In reality it was a bit of both. "Last letter he sent me, about two weeks ago, like usual. He said something wasn't quite right with Jess, they went to the doctor. The kid's probably a month, no more than two…" he was staring at the wall as he spoke, desperately wishing he could wring his hands. "And, and I'm happy for 'em, really. I am. I told Sam as much. I'm telling you as much." A restrained smile crept up onto his face and vanished just as fast. "But I'm not gonna be there in the fall."
"Does it matter?" Castiel supposed.
"'Course it matters," Dean said. "He's my brother – that's the point. How'd it be for you if you never saw Misha till now?"
"It's not as if Misha will remember if I was there for his first birthday or not." Dean snorted. Typical logic. "Then again, I'm younger. You would be the one to make sure the two of them got on just fine – that's your job. It's been your job since Sam was born, from what I can tell."
"Yeah," Dean muttered. "Just… we've just been there, the two of us. Even before Dad went, sometimes it was like we were the only pair in the world." His throat went tight as he spoke. "Now it's like we're not even in the same world. It's like half of me got ripped out, and I'm trying to feel happy about it, really I am, but I can't. Not all the way." He turned to Castiel. "Do you have any idea what it feels like?" Castiel didn't answer. His face was pensive.
"Don't understand why you care anyways," he huffed, getting out his lighter and case, anything to distract him. "Stocks have been crap since last year and you're still happy as a clam. You said you're losin' your house, too!" He attempted to flick open his lighter, but the flame caught, snuffed itself out. He repeated it again, only to get the same result with his clumsy left hand.
"We're just renting out my space," Castiel said. "I sleep on a mat in Gabriel and Anna's room, if I'm not here." He watched Dean fiddle with the lighter before he got impatient and threw it across the room.
"Fuck it," he said, watching it clatter hard against the wall and skitter across the floor. "Fucking… oh damn it all," he ambled over to reach for the lighter again, but Castiel met him there at the same moment, their fingers catching. Castiel scooped it up first, not caring to maintain Dean's pride, and straightened up again.
"Let me," he said softly, fetching Dean's cigarette and lighting it. Dean sucked on it for a moment, brows knit and head bent forward in consideration of nothing in particular. "And I do care," Castiel added. "You're not the easiest man to get along with, but I care enough that I can… More than enough, I'd say."
"You do all right, Cas." Which was a decent compliment, coming from Dean at the time. If he wasn't so riled up he would have said something fonder, or perhaps the same line in a joking manner. "It just gets to me, all this." He turned back around, fingers curling around the cigarette still stuck in his lips. "How come it doesn't get to you?"
Castiel let out a long whoosh of air, then smiled weakly. "It was not too nice, where I came from." Dean muttered his assent, but he knew the statement would be left as it was. Castiel had dodged it enough times. He sat back down.
"I'm sure," Dean said evasively, waiting for Castiel to change topics. Instead he got a curious look from the other, one that made Dean shy away a bit. Despite turning away it wasn't long before he felt fingers touching his chin, guiding him back to meet Castiel's gaze.
"Do you want to know?" he inquired. His voice was weighted, as if he had been pondering that train of thought for a while.
"About what?"
"Everything." Dean took a breath at the intense proposal he had gotten, everything else rushing away at light speed. Castiel went back to the bed, not settling next to Dean but instead up by the headboard, against the pillows. Dean slipped off his shoes and followed him, leaning on his drawn up knees.
"You don't have to," he ventured, giving Castiel one last excuse even if he longed to know for months and months at this point, wishing for the context of references, of a past Castiel had attempted to blot out.
"I want to." He supplied. "I said I would a while ago, and now seems as good a time as any. Well, better, actually. You told me something. I should tell you."
"Tit for tat's not meant to cover telling me your life story," Dean supplied. But the temptation to finally know was too much, and curiosity trumped gallantry. "But if you want to tell me, I'll listen."
"It's been on our minds most of the time," Castiel said, talking of his family. "Things are bad, but whenever one of us starts to complain, someone will always go, 'Remember how it was?' and then… this becomes bearable. Family should know the origin of each other." He concluded. He eyed the ceiling for a bit before he started speaking again.
"I was born in Russia, obviously. In or around 1898, I believe. We grew up in a farmer's village that told time more by harvest seasons than a calendar, so one can never be too sure."
"Where was it? The village?" Dean asked. Castiel didn't seem to mind the interruption.
"To be honest I couldn't even point it out on a map. It was north of Saratov, that's all, in a dead zone where there was just a lot of small farming towns all clustered. Places with no more than a hundred people – and livestock, and fields. Everyone you knew was your family, even if they weren't related, though chances were, somewhere down the line…" he shrugged, but Dean could hear the content tone of Castiel's voice when he remarked of family. He was mentally drawing himself backwards to over a decade ago, back when it was – "My Mother, Father, Anna was the eldest, then myself. And we had three younger brothers. Inias was about four years younger than I. There were also twins, two years younger than him. Alfred – we called him Alfie – and, and you'll love this, the other was named Samandriel. We called him Sam, of course."
Dean smiled instinctively. "They looked like their Father." He hesitated. "I looked like my Father." He seemed to reflect on this, so Dean jumped in with another question.
"Did you like it? The place where you were born?"
"I suppose I did; I mean it wasn't as if I had enough perspective to tell I was living more like an animal than a man should – or that it was only by dumb luck I managed to learn how to read, but I had friends. Plenty of friends, I was hardly bored. It felt like nearly half the village was full of children my age – like Gabriel, he was there too; we would all play together – and two girls about Anna and my age, Hester and Rachel, they were sisters of Balthazar. I could go on with naming them all forever. There were… so many of us."
"You were relatively happy then," Dean surmised.
"Yes, that's a good way to put it. We were all relatively happy; for the first few years of our lives." He swallowed. "Then the War started."
It was practically impossible for Castiel and his family to leave their country for anything less than a war, and Dean had already heard enough slurred conversations or written histories to know exactly how many horrible ways Castiel had ended up in America, but it didn't make him feel any more prepared to hear the retelling.
"We were isolated, of course," Castiel said after a while. "It took some weeks, we found out the Tsar was gathering up all the able-bodied for war."
"Did your Dad die in battle then?" Dean blurted. His Father had enlisted in 1916, and Dean recalled the next two years in a blur. John had left him and Sam with a friend of a friend, a Pastor, in some dead town in Minnesota. Dean had lied until everyone there thought he was a sixteen year old, and he left school not long after the tenth grade started. It was the first time he had to live from letter to letter, a relationship on correspondence; he hadn't gotten any better at it for when Sam had gone.
Castiel looked down. "I don't know." His fingers were clasped together. "When the enlisting men were getting to neighboring towns, dragging away the older children – the so called men, my Father fled. He went off with a few others in the village, promised they would return if they could. I remember waking up in the middle of the night on the floor, seeing their feet – my parent's – with a bag slung across my Father's shoulders. I asked him where he was going. I was sixteen, but I was stupid. So stupid. I thought he was going to war early, or to the city, or – I'm not sure. All he said was 'It's not our war, Castiel.'" There was a pained expression on Castiel's face when he looked at Dean again, like a wounded animal who couldn't understand why it had been hurt in the first place.
"He walked out and we never saw him again. Perhaps he would have come back, but we never knew. Once the Germans began to push out, and they and the Russians talked of splitting up land, what was left of the village was abandoned, and we moved south, closer to Odessa.
"We were lucky we had all travelled together at the same time. We lived in tenements at the outskirts of the city for a while, my family, Gabriel's and Balthazar's, too. We stayed for about nine months. Gabriel was the oldest of all of us, nineteen or twenty, but he was short enough to pass for seventeen, he didn't want to go to war. None of us did. But we were all growing up. Soon enough there would be men in uniforms coming after us, making us march to our deaths, saying that they'd shoot us if we ran away. No one from our village was willing to die for a country that crushed us with the heel of its boot, and no one in the world liked the war once they realized how easily everyone was getting killed." He took a breath. "I suppose that the people of my village were more resentful than most; we didn't enjoy being reminded that we had a regimen at all. We had been cut off, before, so far away that government was more a fairytale than the Baba… um, a witch, that is." he said, catching Dean's eye. "Some of us went back to abandoned country sides, hoping to wait out the war." His eyes glinted. "Others decided that wasn't good enough. They left."
"That was you, wasn't it?" Dean whispered.
"Me, my family, my friends. About twenty of us in total, slipping into the night. It wasn't so hard. It was warm out, the summer of 1915, and who was watching the borders to war ground? The hardest part was getting out of the city, but they hadn't gotten around to creating fortresses around large populations. We hid from a few patrols and were clear of anything and everything by morning. We thought we were lucky; we could merely walk far enough and get new lives."
"Where'd you end up?" Dean asked.
Castiel furrowed his eyes, trying to imagine his journey on a map. "It's where the southern part of Yugoslavia is now. For us it was Serbia. Just below the warring countries, we assumed." He watched Dean's concentrated look for a while. "Remembering the history lessons?" he guessed.
"The newspapers." His expression was grave, coming upon a realization. "How was the fall?"
Castiel attempted to tweak his lips, but they were trembling too much to pull off a smile. "I had never seen the dying until then – the scorch marks of a massacre; death was present, but faded. It was in other places, not… not here. Or there, rather. People died if they were old, or if they were the righteous, doing a good thing."
It was easy to see where all of this was going, and Dean slumped further in his resting place next to Castiel, trying to brace himself. "That wasn't a luxury anymore, huh?"
"It wasn't a lie we were allowed to believe, anymore." Castiel took a large breath through his nose. "When the Austrians and Germans pushed the Polish and Serbs out of their land, we went with them." He explained, patiently, coldly, as if he hadn't been there at all. "It was a death march. All the way down to Bulgaria. Three hundred miles in less than a year. Everywhere we walked, through the forests, through the flatlands, there were bodies. Shot at, stabbed, decaying from hunger, everything smelt like rotting flesh. It got on your clothes, your skin, in your hair, on your breath – even if we weren't dying, because we were all close enough to it.
"I remember bugs, millions of them, just… waves of buzzing black clouds on corpses, going through the air, engorged on all the blood." Dean swallowed, swore he could see a bloated gray face covered in flies if he closed his eyes. "But it wasn't just that. When someone died in our village – there was a funeral. A burial. Grieving. Out there, we had nothing." He looked forward, then to Dean. "Inias died first." He said bluntly; Dean knew he didn't feel as numb as his words suggested. "After a month. He died there, on a foot trail.
"We slept together, under blankets, tarps, stuck in the bushes, anywhere we could. Inias and I were under some brush one night, and it was pitch black out, and we heard something. It was a baby, just shrieking for… anything. Food, probably. Sometimes a Mother would pass and if the child had a Father, it would try to get another woman to feed it, or they would slip off from the groups to try and find a village. I told Inias to ignore it – it would stop sooner or later. But it didn't. We counted seconds. Maybe it was a few minutes, twenty, at the most, but it wouldn't stop. At some point, we heard some men get up, they were looking for the child – and someone might have started to argue with them, there were hushed voices, a strange dialect Inias and I couldn't place, especially not with all the screaming. They were talking, shouting, for no more than half a minute, maybe, this child shrieking over them without pause – until it did. Until it just stopped. The men went back to sleep, I couldn't. Inias couldn't either, we spent the rest of the night staring at each other, too scared to get out from our sleeping places to see if there had been blood.
"The next morning we walked. It was miserable out – rain and fog that froze us and covered everyone in mud. Inias kept slowing down. He was exhausted – we all were; we were all thin and disgusting, and I kept trying to grab his hand, to get him to keep going. I told him 'Two more miles, then we can get the others and rest.' But it was so hard, he started falling down, so I had to grip him 'round the waist and neck just to make sure he wouldn't go under and get trampled. I was dragging him, and my fingers would press into his stomach," Castiel reached a hand over and gently poked at the top line of Dean's ribs. "It felt like bars being hung over with cheesecloth. I mean, there was nothing –" he pulled his hand away. "He passed out. Or I thought he did. He wouldn't answer me when I called him, so I went off to the side and he was – he was gone. The worst part was that I had to leave him there. I couldn't drag his body and find everyone before nightfall. I could only – I couldn't even dig him a hole. There was nothing – no shovels, no… I just covered him in a pile of leaves and grass and tried to find anyone who was alive.
"Hester found out first. She hit me." Dean stared hard, as if expecting to see a red mark on the other's face, like the gesture had just occurred. "She blamed me, I don't think she meant it all the way, but she did. Rachel had been ill, and we were older, we were supposed to keep our younger siblings safe, and she saw that failure in me. I found out later Inias had been giving his meals to Sam and Alfie."
The nicknames were almost too mild and harmless to use in Castiel's narration. Castiel licked his lips. "It didn't save them, either." He looked dead for a moment, and just for that sparse time Dean thought he could see a different version of Castiel; a starved, young man with flat eyes and stringy hair and a dirt-smudged face. He could see someone bogged down by the weight of fresh guilt. Castiel never said that he blamed himself for Inias, for his other family, but Dean already knew. The way someone would harden their eyes just to hide that look – he knew, of course, because it was like looking into a mirror.
He couldn't think of anything to say. Dean was of mind that Castiel didn't enjoy this retelling; couldn't handle it for much longer, though at this point stopping would only mean starting again. "Do you," he began, "Do you need a minute?" he asked. "A smoke?"
Castiel sat up further, rubbed his neck, as glad for the distraction as Dean was. "…Maybe." Dean eased himself onto his feet, put his shoes back on, and went around their apartment. He went to the cupboard and dug out a box where Castiel stashed his loose tobacco. There were a few already made pieces in there. He put a pot on the stove and boiled some water. Castiel watched him silently, eyes tracking his movements as he sought a good distraction.
He gave Castiel his cigarette; let him light it himself while he walked over to the wardrobe. He went through the bottom drawer, stared at the solutions of cocaine as he opened the box of aid supplies. By tomorrow he would smash the glass containers, pour the contents down the toilet and throw out the window glass along with the cheap little vials he had bought in a bar months and months ago. The glass clunked underfoot.
He took the bottle of strong whiskey and poured a quarter of it into a cup, filled a coffee mug with the hot water, set some black tea in it, and placed both drinks on the side table where Castiel sat, smoking, holding the ashtray.
"What are those for?" he asked.
"No coffee left, and you need that more than you think." Dean pointed to the pair of glasses. He took his shoes off again and shuffled closer to Castiel's body, their shoulders and thighs lining up against each other. "Now, what happened after?" Dean said, as soon as Castiel finished smoking. "Once you got to Albania?"
"Oh, we didn't make it there. We stayed at the border between Bulgaria and Greece. We were safe from the armies at that point, but it wasn't the armies that we were the most worried about."
"Did you set up tent cities like the Hoovervilles we have now?"
"Huh, no. No tents. The… the survivors, we all found abandoned towns, half burnt buildings from the war, remnants. Things that were hollowed out either by the armies or the Serbs themselves. In any case, we had the same lack of luxuries as a tent; no heat, no running water."
"Never fun," Dean commented. "It was hardly a battleground, but we've had to train-hop, Sam and me – Dad, too. Go weeks without a decent wash. It's not much compared to you," he amended. "But. Well, I can imagine." Castiel nodded absently at that, and went on.
Dean was both parts intrigued and horrified in what he was hearing. Castiel recounted everything, any aspect that had come across in grating detail, from how one of the refugees gave him the blanket that their dead son had used to how they had to hunt for acorns to make brittle tasting, non-rising bread in the winter. There were occasional, wondrous stories of people he met, and still even more vile ones about how desperation and hunger robbed every morale and ethic in your body. And always, always, the times were punctuated by a body count; Inias, then Rachel in the winter. Spring brought a new round of wetness and unexpected chills and weakened immune systems; Hester broke her leg and withered away to nothing by July. By then they had strengthened their makeshift residence, and stayed through another winter, only moving when a resurface of warm weather came in 1917. By then their Mother had passed, Castiel and Anna, Alfie, and Sam were orphans, and not long after new waves of refugees robbed their hovel and forced them out, down to the borderlands. Over time the little village, Castiel's childhood, Castiel's friends, were whittled down to a few before the next year, not always due to sickness and exposure. "Refugees," Castiel said. "It's such a harmless word. You don't always realize that some of the new citizens here, the things they've done… the things I've done, just to survive."
"What did you do?" Dean asked. His throat and mouth had gone sticky as the hour drained away. It was dark out, and usually the pair of them didn't waste any time between coming home and eating dinner. But Dean didn't feel anything like hunger; instead listening to Castiel pour out his past was almost like an out of body experience. He wished Castiel felt the same as he recounted himself, but doubted it.
"We were still in Bulgaria, on the cusp of Greece. We could cross over without papers if we were careful, and I had gotten, well, careful enough, I suppose. We stationed ourselves in these alleys of vendors and gypsies, selling services. Not… well, we saw some people go to whoring, we went to begging.
"Once, a man claimed Gabriel and I took his spot. It was a place on the road, hardly a predetermined area, but he had a knife, and…" he rolled up his left sleeve, and pointed to a thin, pale scar. Dean had long noticed faded marks along Castiel's body, had traced them over with his hands, his eyes, his mouth, even – but now he settled for staring, feeling thankful that at least that skin had healed. "I had to stitch it myself. Our Father was the tailor, we were meant to take on his trade, and I was the most skilled in the group. Anna never got as much practice; in our family I suppose mending clothes wasn't women's work," he shrugged. "We were back there soon enough. Not long after, some young man came wandering by, he spoke our language, caught on to what Gabriel and I were saying. We talked a bit, back and forth. There was such a mixture of different Europeans by that time, what was frustrating was that sometimes you got close enough, but the accent alone was too much of a barrier. Anyone who spoke your language seemed a friend – most of the time they weren't, nobody was, but sometimes…" he trailed off for a moment. "Sometimes you got lucky.
"He saw my stitches, inquired about them, and I said that I fixed them myself. He asked if I had been a doctor. I wasn't – just half-decent at fixing clothes, and skin wasn't all that different, I supposed. He told me he worked in a doctor's office in town. He got this strange look on his face and we talked a bit more before he told us to come by the same place tomorrow." Dean tilted his head, still curious.
"He brought the doctor with him the next day. He said he had another possible assistant. Can you imagine that?"
"But you didn't know anything about medicine."
"Not many people in a bordering war zone did. If they had they were in the army, or they were rich enough to flee somewhere safer. The doctor was called Isaac Hein, he ran a private business in a nearby district. The young one, the assistant, Abram, said that I could stitch myself, Hein inspected the cut," he ran fingers subconsciously over his arm, "And he pestered me with a dozen questions; had I worked for a doctor? No. Was I familiar with them? Hardly. Could I read? Russian only, and even then my skills were questionable. Did I know my way around the districts? Fortunately, yes, from the border to about ten miles into Greece. I said if I could work, I just needed food and clothes for my family, I told him we walked so far, we lost so much… the doctor was not too interested in that, however." Castiel smirked. "He was something of a bitter character, but I didn't hate him. He did, after all, give me a job."
"How was that, then?" Castiel sighed.
"Very interesting. There was a lot of reading I had to do. He sent me home with medical journals to pour over all night. He had Abram teach me shallow versions of Greek to speak with the local patients, and German, and some small phrases in English. Hein and Abram had the notion that most of the world would be speaking English sooner or later," he shrugged. "Most of the medical communities on large scales spoke English or German, so it made sense."
"Lucky for you, right?" Dean said. Castiel nodded.
"It was no question that we would find somewhere to settle permanently before long, me and what was left of our family. We just didn't know where. It was only after picking through some bits of news that we were able to see a clearer picture of America. It was the usual note – it was a nation made of immigrants! Of course they would take you, they take everyone. Well, they did. And anyway, we knew we couldn't go back to Russia, and most places in Europe seemed just as wretched with war or unsettled by politics. America was worlds away from everything we'd ever known. It was perfect.
"It took another two years. I worked, I got everyone else by. Sometimes someone else would find some seasonal or shorthand work, but I was the one who held the brunt of us up. And even then it was hardly enough, but we managed, got money together for passage – whenever that came. We even befriended a few more travelers, ones from the Mediterranean. They had their own things to run from, I guess. Uriel and Raphel. Peculiar names, they kept to themselves well enough. They lost a lot of their own by that time, everyone had. They wanted to make it out, too.
"Of course it's hard enough to leave countries even if you have everything in order, Uriel and Raphael had been exiled from Greece for not having papers. We would have been as well, if we had just tried to get aboard a ship. We fled. There were no citizenship papers, no identities, nothing but the clothes on our backs and even then, the only thing that truly remained from home by then was our sewing kit."
"Like those scissors," Dean said. "With the gold-looking bird on them." Castiel seemed surprised he remembered.
"Yes. Those." He scratched his chin. "But Hein had most of the official documents needed. The trickiest part was just getting those pieces signed by him.
"I stole the papers," he admitted frankly, causing Dean to blink in surprise. "I forged his signature. He was immaculate, so it took nearly a year to get one for everyone. Balthazar, Anna, Gabriel, the twins, and myself. That was all that were left." He let his cold expression drop and instead a different look came up. A polite smile went around his mouth; it seemed almost mischievous in its amusement. "The first three I stole had already been filled in because I needed a proper template for the handwriting. It was for a Czech family."
"Oh?"
"Their first names got a bit 'smudged', but the surname stayed." Dean eyes widened in surprise.
"So that's how you became Novaks!" Castiel's smile grew a bit, and Dean slapped him on the shoulder. "You said you didn't know how that happened!"
"You can become rather impressively dumb, provided that you don't want somebody else to know a few things." he said slyly. "I found you attractive; I didn't find you trustworthy, at the time. If I gave you any form of the story, you only would have inquired further." Dean acquitted that was true; it was a bit better than some elaborate diversion he could have come up with instead.
"It does beg the question what else you weren't talking about," Dean offered. Like a horrid magic trick the room sank back to darkness, and Castiel went sullen again.
"It was, 1920. The summer, almost into fall. We were set to leave," he went in a melancholy tone. "Everything was finalized; we could travel down to the docks in a day, and move on from there. I only told our family, I didn't want to risk it."
Dean could already feel the scent of dread in the air, thick to the point of choking them. "I feel there's a catch here." He had to work to not crack his voice.
"Sam or Alfie. Or both." Castiel said. "They were teenagers, not even, they were children. They made some innocuous statement, said some dumb things while I was at work and everyone else was busy… Raphael and Uriel found out." And suddenly Dean saw how this story ended.
"I got home from the office. We had packed up every scrap we had, it was dark, and I was to walk halfway to our place and meet everyone there, but we couldn't find the twins. Anna and Balthazar and Gabriel had searched for hours, all the way into the woods, but they couldn't find them. We were losing time, and we were wandering around a nearby field, somewhere a lot of us buried bodies, made makeshift headstones marked with scarves or old jewelry. We couldn't find them." He swallowed. "Raphael and Uriel found me, though." He bit his lip and remained silent for a very long time, reaching for the scalding drink, he took a pull at it, offered Dean a bit, and put it back on the table when Dean declined.
"I don't know how," he whispered, and even though Dean was pressed right up next to him on the bed it felt like the other was miles and miles away, farther than Sam, farther than anything he could imagine. "I don't know how they managed it, but they found a gun.
"Guns were rare and rickety and unreliable. I'd shot some back home; it was another responsibility as the eldest son – to shoot off a wolf or a bear or some other animal that tried to get at our property. I was rather good at it, but the bullets would just spray once you shot them – they'd go everywhere. My aiming, I suppose, was still a remarkable thing." Dean felt his fingers twist into the sheets. In his mind, he saw a dead, sun-bleached tree rising up from the bog, a bullet placed right in the center of it. "I was by myself, maybe they were waiting for me, I don't know, I was just calling for my brothers when all of a sudden these arms were gripping me, holding me tight so I couldn't move, and there was a hand over my mouth so I wouldn't speak, and then I heard someone coming towards me, and eventually my eyes could make out his face. If a grim reaper had a face to it, it would be that. I was looking at Raphael." He swallowed. "And I was looking down the barrel of some rusty old gun.
"If I was thinking, maybe I would've realized that there was a good chance that if Raphael had fired it, he would've shot his brother, too. The gun could have been a prop, or some relic a soldier had dropped or a traveler had carried with them, I don't know. They could've bought it; the places deemed civilization were unorthodox enough to. I knew that if Raphael was there then Uriel was holding me. I knew that if they were doing all this, they must have known what happened to Sam and Alfie. I fought, got Uriel's hand off my mouth, asked them where they'd gone, why they were doing this," he wrung his hands. "But all they did was just gesture to some plot of land, about thirty feet off. The ground had been turned over a bit, and no one had died that I knew of in two, three weeks, but… I could smell the blood anyway. They weren't liars.
"They said they wanted the papers, they said that I had them, I must've taken them – they were in a little pocket I had made on the inside of my vest," he touched a hand to his chest, over his heart. "And Uriel was trying to find them and I couldn't – I wasn't about to just get killed in that field like a piece of cattle. I wasn't about to let everyone else find my body, too. The twins were gone, I promised them – we all promised them. Inias died for them and they just… they'd been the age I was when everything went to Hell.
"I threw Uriel off me. He was bigger, but we had started to eat half decent and we weren't made to sit back in a desk all day, even if I just worked on making clothes for a fair amount. Maybe, more than anything, I was just angry. So, so close to being safe and they did that." He thinned his lips. "But I rolled him off, into the mud, I dashed forward to Raphael. He fired a shot at me but the gun must have been broken, or he was too slow with it, I heard the sound but it didn't get me, the shot sounded like it veered off, and I managed to hit him across the jaw.
"It was terrible; I hadn't hit someone before. Not like that, but Raphael had – he got me in the gut, the eye, I was wild just shoving him, biting him, whatever I could do. I managed to roll both of us over. I wasn't going to win, I knew that. At any second Uriel would come and punch me and that would be it." He took a deep breath. "But I saw Raphael had dropped his gun.
"I lunged for it, dragged my chin in the dirt for the trouble. It was so far away, but I got my handle on it and started hitting him again, or trying to – with my left hand. With my right I managed to get the barrel against his jaw, here," he tapped against the jutting corner where the jaw hinged onto the skull, right below the ear. "And I shot him through. There wasn't enough room for the bullet to jerk one way or the other. He died, or bled out or… something. I stumbled away the second his hands were off me.
"Then I turned around and I saw… I saw Uriel. Standing there." Castiel's face looked as though it had been hit. "He was staring at his brother, and he looked at me, covered in dirt and… and he knew. He suddenly saw what he'd done to me, what I'd done to him. What I was going to do. He dropped to his knees and was just… begging me. Begging me with everything he had, to spare his life. He said he was sorry, he said it was Raphael's fault, he said he just wanted a safe passage, he wanted a home. He wanted what anyone else could have wanted in that moment." Castiel had been staring at the far wall for most of the talk, and Dean nearly jumped back when Castiel faced him. His eyes were resolute.
"I shot him." Castiel said. "He was sobbing. There were tears streaming down his face, he was pleading me for mercy, and I shot him in the head." He looked down at his legs, then back at the wall, and Dean realized exactly how out of his element Castiel was because this was one of the many times that night that he had evaded Dean's look, as if he couldn't bear to see it.
Dean nudged his leg into Castiel's, a more insistent press of warmth against their bodies, and hoped the other would get it, because Dean understood. He finally understood – just a little, just enough. If there was a moment of Castiel's past that he could ever comprehend, it was this one. The devastation of a dead brother; the unbidden, cold-blooded murder that came from it. Even if Sam was still alive, he knew. And more than that, there was the aftermath. It was always the same; the unspoken guilt that tore through you not like a bullet, not like a knife wound, but something larger, something worse. Something that would chase you down across an ocean, across time, in every flash of memory or mentioned name. If Castiel had a tender spot for Dean's brother especially, now he knew why.
"Balthazar found me first. Heard the shot and came running. Got me to my feet. I told him. I only ever told him – he told the others, they didn't think I was a killer. I did. He slapped me out of it, got me thinking again; we crossed the border, got enough for a one way ticket to America, and we got dumped on Ellis island in time for Winter to start up.
"We got into Sheepshead," he said with a sigh, curling in on himself. "Did dirty factory work before being employed as a tailor and assistants. Balthazar fancied himself a better gunman than a workman, and we drifted a bit, but only that much. We kept each other afloat, him and I. I don't think I could've kept on, if he wasn't pulling me for two years straight after coming here. I know you don't care for him, but Balthazar isn't my best friend for an arbitrary reason, you know."
Dean nodded thoughtfully, after a time. "And that's it?" he said.
"That's it. A year after arriving we got our shop, and I guess you can just stamp a happy ending on the whole package." Dean turned a little so he could brush his good hand across Castiel's forehead. "That's how it's supposed to go, isn't it?"
"That's how we wish it would," Dean murmured. "How did it all end up instead?"
"I don't know," he said. "Not nicely, not now."
"You've survived."
"I'm not afraid of dying, Dean." He blinked. "Not as much as I had been, in the beginning. I've seen it, I've waded through it. The thing that haunts me, the thing that I'll always remember, is how easy it was to just…" he took a breath, and his throat bobbed. "Kill them. And everyone tells me – I know you want to tell me, too – that it's not my fault; I was just doing what I had to, considering the circumstances. But so were they. We were all desperate, starving, trying to get out. The only reason I even had the chance was just… dumb luck. A coincidence –they didn't get that.
"You've killed people before," Castiel said. "But did you know them?" Dean didn't answer. "I mean, we were friends, we taught each other our languages, we shared food – they were like brothers to me. And I could've… I could have saved them, maybe, if I tried. Maybe they would have shot me in the back or maybe I would have gotten caught but I didn't even think to…" he raised his hand, wiped at his mouth, moving away from Dean's touch. "And it doesn't matter what anyone says, because I can still see their faces when I close my eyes. And I have to live with that." He looked at Dean. "I'll always have to live with that."
"I know." Dean said. He couldn't truly offer anything else. He knew, and that was all.
"That's why… just holding guns – I wish I wasn't so good at it, still. It saved my life but –"
"But at what cost?" Dean rasped out. Castiel nodded.
"…Are you glad I told you?" Castiel asked, after a moment.
"I don't know if glad's the right word," Castiel avoided Dean's eyes, until he reached over and touched Castiel's face again. "But if you want me to think that I should hate you for this… I can't. I won't. You stick by me and I've done far worse than kill two people who tried to murder my family."
"It's not a body count,"
"No, that's irrelevant. Just like what you did is irrelevant… I'll care about you no matter what you say you've done, Cas. If you think this will make me stop…" he couldn't say it. But Castiel knew. Castiel had know.
Didn't he?
Castiel brought himself to look at Dean, his expression precarious, like it could slip one way or another. "Is it fair to say that you care, then?"
"Of course Cas." He said in a breath. "I mean obviously I care about –" Was it? Did he know? He licked his lips, evidently not, if he had to ask. If Castiel had to wonder whether Dean even had some bare compassion for him, knowing everything else was out of the question. "No," he said, partly to himself. "No, that doesn't even begin to cut it."
Dean got up on his knees, shifting closer so he was more in front of the other. He grasped Castiel's hand with his unbandaged one, threaded their fingers together.
"I love you," he said. Dean felt his heart thudding away; even from the points in his hands it echoed. He felt like he was on poison.
He hadn't been raised to be sensitive, to share in sentiments like this, and hearing Castiel talk about his own past only gave the other a better reason for being standoffish to the general population. If Dean didn't know firsthand of the other's caring, selfless nature, he wouldn't even dare say what he just had. Even now it was like a mistake, and he couldn't bring himself to look at Castiel's face.
He heard Castiel say his name, creeping out from the back of his throat in a scratchy murmur. "Dean?" he went, as if he wasn't sure he had heard right.
After a few moments of badgering himself, he cautiously glanced up to look right into Castiel's eyes, swallow up the fire that was trying to scorch him from the inside, set him off like he was nothing sturdier than a box of matches.
"I love you, Castiel," he said, not feeling particularly relieved as he repeated himself. He could be brave with a gun, but words and truth like this evaded him, confused him, scared him witless. He watched to see if Castiel covered up some sort of shame in hearing Dean's admission; Castiel liked him, enjoyed his company, but…
Castiel's carefully guarded expression was ripped away in an instant. In its place he looked… well there hardly seemed a word for it, in Dean's mind. Joy, perhaps, and relief. More than that, it was as if a light had gone on within the other, flushing his face when everything previous had been monochrome and dead from the winter and remembering.
And still yet his eyes were the vibrancy of a million things – of fantastical oceans and ancient world jewels and cloudless skies and the most cherished parts of an artist's palette – but Dean had stopped comparing Castiel to other things a long time ago – he had just suddenly looked bigger and brighter than ever. He was beautiful, in a thousand different ways in that instant, and not all of them were things you could see. There was an ethereal presence to him in that moment, and Dean squeezed Castiel's fingers, too in awe to do much but suck in a breath of air as Castiel stared right into him.
"I'm sorry I didn't say anything sooner," Dean whispered, once he found his voice. "I would've, if I knew you would take it like that."
"Like what?" Castiel asked, in a far-off, dreamy tone.
Dean smiled softly, and cupped Castiel's warm cheek. His fingers were blood-flushed, the other hand still in Castiel's grip, but he couldn't look away, couldn't resist the urge to touch. "You must've had some idea, Cas."
"I was willing to think that you liked me a little bit." Castiel admitted, suddenly looking humble once more. Just like that the spirit in his eyes died down, like he dragged himself back to a colder reality than where he had found himself floating.
Dean watched him, thinning his lips into a frown as he deciphered what that meant. "In all this time…"
"There's a concept," Castiel said lightly, "of false hope. I'm sure you're familiar with it."
"But why would you bother –" Dean started, pausing as that particularly sad thought took hold over him. Castiel had been thrashed through the rough for so much of his life; perhaps he didn't have it in him to hope for something too great for himself. "….Going along with somebody who didn't want you?"
"You do a lot, for love." Castiel said. And even then Dean only began to feel more guilt – that in all the time Castiel had hoped and loved and waited for him, he had no thought of reciprocation.
"But, if I only kept you around for some sort of fling, if it didn't go beyond that, you would have stayed anyway." Castiel's face betrayed his answer. "That's not enough. You can't hang all your life on a little bit, Cas."
"Well," he went. "I suppose I'm practiced at it."
Dean took in another shaky breath. What bothered him wasn't just that Castiel had been left with a deeply hidden sense of martyrdom – of sticking by those that he thought were important at the expense of himself, because he had that same behavior in spades, and he knew it – it was the fact that if Dean had never come to love Castiel, they could very much be where they were now, with Dean using and Castiel endlessly giving, until he eventually found a better prospect in someone else. If Castiel was Dean's first – first significant, at least, how would he be when Dean let him go? He mentally shuddered at the thought, brushing his thumb along Castiel's cheekbone a few times.
It was easy enough, to be a horrible person. A selfish, narrow-sighted, unfeeling person, since he was all those things himself, most of the time. In fact, he didn't know if he was better because of Castiel, or if he was merely better to Castiel. All he knew for certain was that the type of perpetual suffering Castiel had grown used to seemed like a special form of disproportional languish, and he'd do anything to right it.
"You don't have a need for that sort of living anymore," Dean whispered, edging forward. He pressed soft kisses to Castiel's mouth and neck, embracing the warmth and a man who deserved so much more than what he had gotten in life. "I love you, Castiel," he murmured again, right against his lips. And of course a decade of unfortunate events couldn't be undone in a moment, but it didn't mean Dean wasn't going to try.
He could hear him say it, that Wonderfully quiet, "I love you, Dean," as they pressed together. Perhaps it was overly romantic, cliché most likely, but he could hardly give a damn about that when it was all undeniably true. They were affectionate in looks, in gestures. Words were playthings, mostly. Words were the things that helped you lie and hurt, and he doubted either of them would resort to sweet nothings after this.
But for now, it was nice, to put himself next to Castiel, hold him, be held, and not think of the window or the landlord or Bulgaria or dead family or guilt. For now it was them, and when he felt Castiel's lips at his temple, his cheek, the corner of his mouth, Castiel was more alive than he'd been for most of his life. And Dean couldn't say he felt any different.
xxxx
A/N: You know those stories where the author goes on unannounced hiatuses where you suddenly fear for the story's life? Doesn't that suck? Yeah. Luckily I will be releasing a destiel fic that took a month to write because it's so long, and hopefully that will soften this dry spell. So watch out for a story called 'Making Plans' in the next week. Moreover, let me reiterate that this story has eaten up consecutive weeks of my life; nothing less than my death or long-term incapacitation will stop this story from being written. But on to things that matter.
Castiel's back-story was largely inspired due to a teacher I had a few years ago, and the stories he told us about his grandfather who lived in Eastern Europe during World War One. One of the less-known tragedies occurred when in October of 1915 Germans and Austro-Hungarians pushed against the miniscule Serbian army, which also forced thousands of Serbian civilians towards Albania and Greece. In the unlikely chance that they survived, many of them were able to escape from Greek islands. The details of the grandfather's past helped shape Castiel's own story; such as using acorns to make bread, and getting transfer papers from a doctor's office, though most of the specific information was changed. Another point made was that the grandfather arrived in America in time for the Great Depression, and he worked in the same horrible conditions as the Novaks do in this story. But, due to the lack of starvation, rape and murder that was previously seen, he had no problem holding work and providing for his family. Thinking of these events had been one of the very first plot ideas I had for this story, and it's nice to finally write it all down. Also, we got ourselves a love confession. Finally.