He collapsed somewhere between a bar and a pharmacy. He wasn't sure where exactly he wanted to go first, he just knew that his body had finally shut down on him.
He couldn't remember the last time he had gotten a good night's rest. If he was even more honest with himself, he couldn't remember the last time he even blinked.
He stared up at the cloudy sky with dry blue eyes, wide awake even though his body was completely drained of energy. He just… he just couldn't sleep. It wasn't even that he was on the sidewalk, about a half mile away from his apartment.
He tried to shut his eyes, but they wouldn't cooperate. He was afraid of the darkness behind his eyelids. He was terrified of what he would see in the shadows of his mind. And that fear, that terror, overrode everything else.
The bar's door opened and shut, the sound of keys jiggling reaching him. A pause.
And then a man walked right past him, head turned towards the street away from him.
He wanted to be angry. He risked his life almost everyday at sea to save people and yet he was ignored in his time of need? What, did he look homeless? Did he look too needy to help, like he would take advantage of whatever aide he was given? He knew his trench coat wasn't the cleanest, but that didn't officially make him a charity case to be politely ignored.
But he couldn't get angry. The man, he wasn't just looking towards the street, he was looking down. He was broad, yet he hunched into himself, a limp in his step. There were bruises on his right triceps, like someone had forcefully grabbed him some days ago.
He couldn't get angry because he was looking at another broken man. But this one… he wasn't losing anyone else's life. He was losing his own.
He could see it, right there in his body language as he walked by. At some point, he thought that maybe the stranger would have stopped to help him, had it been a different time or under different influences. Maybe he'd be passionate about it, like Castiel had once been.
Right now, though, he wasn't fierce or helpful. It was their time, same influences, both past and present and maybe some future, and they couldn't turn back the clock to change that.
The stranger trudged past him, the embodiment of a shattered spirit.
He couldn't hold it against him to leave him behind.
Except, just before he turned the corner, he looked back.
He had never before seen such green eyes. Even in the dark of the late night (or was it early morning?), with only the few street lamps to light the way, he could tell their hue from where he lied. They glistened and glowed a deep, deep green.
Yes, that stranger had once been a very passionate man. He could see it in the man's eyes. But he could also see the scars there, crisscrossing and swarming till they were lifeless with loss.
He wondered just how powerful the stranger's gaze would be if he hadn't been broken, like a stallion forced to be a mount. Not tamed or understood, but just saddled and ridden till he had lost the will to fight and just did as he was told.
He saw those green, green eyes for just a moment, a moment that felt to him like an eternity, and then the stranger swiveled around, curled deeper into himself, and turned the corner.
No one found him till two hours later.
~ :: ~
He saw the bluest eyes ever. They were encompassing, dark and pale at the same time. Through the distance and blackness between them, he had been able to discern the cerulean shades of the stranger's piercing gaze.
And not piercing like Michael's either, though just as all-knowing. No, his eyes, they hadn't struck the slightest fear in Dean or even the smallest urge to submit or revolt or do both at the same time. They had seen him, looked into him, and he had known that he had had no secrets. Not from that man, the stranger who had been on the ground near his bar.
A large part of him that had once been strong had told him to help that man. Wasn't that the kind of person he was, no matter the years of torment?
And then he had remembered Michael, his Master, and his entire being had let loose a dying groan as he had turned away.
He had to get to Michael.
He had to forget those eyes, too. Or else Michael would know that he was thinking of another man and that his heart was going unusually fast. He would know that, for a moment, Dean had fantasized about helping the man.
A small, small part of him had even envisioned kissing the whiskery-chinned fellow.
He had to hope that Michael wouldn't catch that thought above all the other thoughts.
When he got home, his Master was in the bedroom. He was strewn naked across the bed and a girl was bound to the bed next to him, hot fury and shame in her features. She was naked, covered in bruises, blood, and semen.
Michael introduced her as Ruby. Dean vaguely remembered her from the messaging machine some days ago. She must have been a good hider, if she was only now getting her the punishment meant for her.
And then Uriel and Zachariah came out of the bathroom. One of them took Ruby out and Dean heard her scream before an eerie silence descended.
Michael stretched and sat up in the bed. Uriel and Zachariah waited patiently at his side. Because Michael was their leader and they were just like Dean, even if they thought they weren't.
They were all Michael's bitches.
"Little one," his Master rumbled tonelessly, "pleasure us." Like he hadn't ignored Dean for over ten hours. Like foursomes was nothing.
Like Dean was his little marionette to control. But, wait…
He was.
He stripped and so did the two lackeys.
The rest of the night and morning, he carefully decided to blank out from his mind. The entire time, instead, he imagined blue, blue, blue eyes.
Like the calm sea or the midnight sky with all the stars and moon illuminating the darkness. Like… like… salvation, maybe. Something that had burned itself right into Dean's very soul.
Michael must have somehow caught onto his disloyalty.
It would maybe take a month for the rope burns around his throat to heal.
~ :: ~
A week after the foursome, he opened the bar again.
No one asked about the marks. He didn't talk about them.
Michael came in after another three hours and he kept him company, winning over the crowds with his golden aura and his loving treatment of his gay, 'troubled' lover, as he liked to point out whenever he did a particularly bad job on Dean.
Everyone knew Dean wasn't one for self-mutilating. That didn't mean Michael couldn't sweet-talk them to think otherwise long enough to forget to report him. He stayed for about an hour and then he left, promising to come back around closing. Which, he was careful to add, soft and low, would be at 2 at night sharp. Not a second later.
Dean had, in a whisper so no one would overhear, said, "Yes, Master."
The blue-eyed stranger came in sometime around midnight. He took a seat at the bar, stuck in a bubble of silence. Everyone around him seemed not to notice him, like he was invisible.
Frankly, Dean couldn't even take his eyes off him for three minutes at a time. Every time he looked up, the stranger was looking right back at him. That blue gaze, it was focused each time on a new cut or the burn marks. At one point, Dean looked over his shoulder to see the man eyeing his limp.
The time read 1:40 when he kicked out the patrons. He wanted to be gone by 2. No later than that. But there was still clean-up to do and he had to count the drawer… He had to go to the basement and restock on cups and bourbon.
Except the stranger was still in his seat as Dean turned away from the door, already locked. The stranger was freaky silent. For all his watching, how hadn't Dean figured out that he hadn't left?
The stranger, now the center of his complete attention with all other customers gone, slid off his stool and came right into his personal space. Dean pressed into the door behind him, terrified.
The stranger cupped his cheek, his palm and fingers callus. He said, voice rough and husky, like the perfect bedroom voice, "Hello, My name is Castiel."
He swallowed thickly, scared of this 'Castiel'. Just like Michael, he could destroy him in a second. He waited for it.
"I…" Castiel's eyes narrowed as he considered his next words carefully. "I want to…"
He waited on baited breath. He could be destroyed or remade. He could be anything or nothing, it all just depended on what was next to stumble over those firmly pressed lips.
Michael could be damned. If only Castiel would say something. If only Castiel would look at him with those blue, blue, blue eyes and say something with that overpowering gaze. Like lust or want or need or love or anger or sorrow… anything.
There were thoughts boiling in their cerulean depths, so many thoughts and not all of them seeming to connect right.
"I want to tell you that your eyes are beautiful," he settled for finally. Dean went limp and Castiel looked away, obviously frustrated with himself. Some confidence must have been floating around in the air because he stood up a bit straighter, straighter than he had already been, and he met Dean's gaze again. The liquid state of his glower washed over Dean, making him weak, baring him and then cleaning him from the inside out. It was painful and suffocating to be on the other end of that stare, but he would give anything to not have to look away.
"And I think they would look so much more beautiful if they weren't broken." Castiel grinned slightly and the expression was so strained that Dean knew he wasn't the only broken one.
He wasn't sure why he let the man kiss him. Maybe it was because he was deceptively strong, so he had no choice? Maybe it was because of that first fantasy of a small, innocent kiss that would bloom into something not ugly or hurtful. No matter the reason why, he was doing it.
He was kissing Castiel back, the man's chapped lips on his and their tongues sought each other out with tentative licks and wet caresses. There was no battle for control, not even the slightest inkling of a fight as their mouths broke apart and then came back together.
"I want to save you," Castiel groaned as they parted again, eyes like burning blue fires and yet so still so very dead, "but you have to save me too."
It took him a moment to realize that all of his weight was balanced precariously on Castiel's thigh. He wasn't grinding down because, as much as he wanted the man, his body didn't want sex. "I can't… I don't…" How could he say that he couldn't save anyone? That that was actually how he got into this whole mess? "I can't," he choked eventually.
"You can. You just have to stop me, Dean, that's all you have to do."
How did Castiel know his name? Oh, right, he'd been in the bar the entire night. More than one person had called for the bartender by name.
Wait… "Stop you… from what?"
The man reached into the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a bottle of pain meds, a small baggy of coke, and a packet of Ecstasy. He put these all in Dean's hand and the Winchester couldn't even bring himself to be disgusted that he was dealing with a druggy.
He was so much lower than Castiel still. The man would never fall as low as Dean had.
He looked up into blue eyes carefully. "Why?"
"Thirty-two."
"Thirty-two?"
"Lives I will never get the chance of saving again."
The clock above the booths said he had five minutes before Michael would be waiting for him.
He grabbed Castiel's hand and forced himself to stand. With eyes trained on the blue-eyed stranger (was he still a stranger?), Dean led him to the woman's bathroom.
It was cleaner than the guy's, though still just narrowly acceptable. He threw in the packet and baggy, then emptied the bottle into the toilet.
They both watched it all swirl away.
By the time Michael came by, Castiel had already snuck Dean out through the front door, his trench coat stretched to enfold the younger man like a wing.
They watched on the news as Ellen's bar, the Harvelle's Roadhouse, burned to the ground the very next morning.
Castiel held Dean as he cried.
He wasn't strong enough to get angry yet. Only desperate.
