And our hearts unfold

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural

Pairing: Dean/Cas

-III-

"On the nature of daylight" –Max Richter

The days are numbered and the nights are long.

Castiel watches Dean Winchester sleep with a heavy feeling in his chest that makes him have to draw breath, necessary, unnecessary. In the darkness, to mortal eyes, Dean's face would not be visible but Castiel is an angel, and an angel sees it all. The lines that are starting to form from age, the freckles that make up constellations of darkness, the tanned lean lines of a body in repose.

Cas can see the way the human's brows are furrowed, can almost see the nightmares that are taking hold of him, realistic nightmares of the world ending and Sam dying and Castiel leaving. The angel wishes that he had enough left of him to erase them, to ease out those too real fears and replace them with the false comforts only dreams can offer, but he cannot. He doesn't possess the strength or the power, not anymore, not for all his will and his desperate desperation to save this, this precious but miniscule human breathing gently in the darkness before him, spread out like the sweetest sacrifice.

Lost in his thoughts, those things so new to him, as terrifying and lovely as his beating heart racing inside of him, Castiel doesn't notice the green eyes open and train on his silhouette, hunched over like invisible wings are weighing him down. And maybe they are.

"Cas?" Dean breaths out into the gentle dark space between them and knows, knows without seeing that those otherworldly blue eyes are trained on him, as always.

"You should be sleeping," is the angel's soft reply, the sound of an exhale like a sacred whisper. Dean pushes himself up on his elbows, sheets rustling and slipping down his side to his hip. Castiel's eyes flicker to the revealed chest, to the thin skin which covered the heart Castiel is so attuned to, beating a staccato rhythm in the room.

"Have you been watching me all this time? Damn Cas, you really are creepy you know."

It's meant to be a joke, Castiel knows. It's always a joke. In the bed across the room Sam rolls over in his sleep and lets out a single long breath.

"Does it bother you that I like to watch you sleep?"

Dean is quiet for a moment, shifting beneath blankets, suddenly feeling too hot. Castiel knows that Dean wishes he could see him and Castiel is grateful for the darkness; he is not sure Dean will like what he will see here, the night before the end, in Castiel's heaven drained eyes.

"I never minded it," Dean replies softly, delicately, as though he is revealing a big secret and perhaps maybe he is. Castiel never knows where he sits with Dean Winchester and it is singularly the most frustrating and fascinating thing he has ever known. Perhaps he doesn't know many things at all. For all the he was once an angel, he is just now starting to see with eyes wide open.

When Dean moves in the dark to the side to create a space next to him, Castiel feels his human heart skip a beat, feels the heaviness in his chest start to ache.

There are a thousand reasons why this should not happen but then they have already passed that threshold, haven't they? When the angel Castiel first glimpsed the burning bright soul of Dean Winchester in the pits, he knew even then where it would lead, the he was to be damned but in the loveliest form possible, in tanned skin and a smirking mouth and green, green eyes.

Lying side by side in a small sagging motel room somewhere in Georgia, an angel curls up against a man and feels for the first time the sharp spike of tears at the back of borrowed eyes that are now his eyes. And a man, with the apocalypse in the horizon, presses a wet kiss to the back of an angel's neck and for the first time reaches out to God.

Oh what good am I?

Heaven only knows. *

-III-

* Last lyrics are based on the version of "On the Nature of Daylight" that features Dinah Washington called "This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight"