Lying beside you
Here in the dark
Feeling your heartbeat with mine
Softly you whisper
You're so sincere
How could our love be so blind
We sailed on together
We drifted apart
And here you are
By my side

- "Open Arms," Journey

Castiel is sweeping a hand up and down Dean's side, wrapped around him loosely, his head pillowed on Dean's chest now that they're separated and Cas has twisted to face him. Eventually he's going to need to clean himself up, and they probably need to wash the sheets, but Dean's still not ready to move yet, comfortable precisely where he is. His brain's kick-started again at very least, though. So that's something.

When Dean clears his throat, Cas's hand stops for a moment, signaling that he's paying attention, but he doesn't lift his head from Dean's chest. "If that was all some Omega thing, some sort of hard-wired submissive. . . whatever. . . Don't tell me."

Dean can feel Cas laugh more than he can hear it, and Dean's being sandpapered by Cas's cheek but he's gotten used to that by now, come to accept it as part of the Castiel package. His hand resumes caressing Dean's skin, and he shakes his head slightly as he brushes his thumb gently over what was probably going to turn into a pretty distinctive bruise on Dean's hip. "Understanding that I have comparatively limited experience in the matter. . . so far as I can tell that was just really good sex, Dean."

Dean snorts in amusement, tightening his arm around Cas's back and dropping a kiss into his rumpled hair. "Damn right it was. But the sex is always good, so don't sell us short."

"Really really good." Castiel deadpans, clarifying for the sake of not insulting the rest of their intercourse, and earning himself a light swat on the ass for his trouble.

"No one likes a smug smartass, Cas. . ."

"Clearly that's not true. We tolerate each other perfectly well."

Dean guffaws, and Cas turns his face into Dean's skin, pressing a kiss to the thrumming heartbeat beneath his cheek and smiling, pleased as always when someone actually catches and appreciates his humor. He likes starting the day out like this, even if he does get the feeling that he's declaring war on the rest of the day the moment he steps foot out of their bedroom. It's surprising that the two of them don't suffer from some sort of emotional whiplash, given how quickly they swing from some of the lowest points of their relationship to the highest. He can feel Dean steeling himself for it, too, for having to get up out of the bed and face their families and the trial nonsense. Despite himself he tightens his arm around Dean, tangling their legs together to keep him from getting up yet.

He can't decide if it's childish, the need to try and hide from the world, or particularly Alpha, the need to keep his mate in bed with him all day. . . but either way he knows he can't indulge in it forever. He just wants a few more minutes.

"C'mon, Cas. I gotta clean up, and I need to take a piss." Dean rolls his eyes at Cas's disgruntled huff, trying to peel Cas off of him. "Yeah, well, someone likes to knot me first thing in the fucking morning. . ."

"Are we calling it 'the fucking morning' as an official, designated time period for that activity now?"

"Why are you planning on penciling into your schedule? 'Booked until 8AM daily for sex'?" Dean's retorts are lightning fast, and Cas is a little envious of that. "Man I've done a number on you, between the nymphomania and the cussing."

He never used to use profanity, that much is true. Dean's rubbing off on him, he's almost sounding comfortable in it now. He knows that being with Dean is affecting him, loosening up his mannerisms a little when they're alone like this—Dean's easy banter and his teasing are infectious, and he can't help trying to match it in his own way. He's still painfully awkward at times. . . his testimony would have been disastrous without Sam to guide it, and he knows that. And come to think of it, he's still fairly certain he's terrified of Ellen Harvelle. But Dean he's already more comfortable around than he is his own brothers, particularly in recent years.

"If we're going out today, I need another shower. You're making breakfast. Don't burn the place down."

Dean presses a kiss to his forehead affectionately and then jabs him in the shoulder to get Cas to release him, a mess of contradictions even at the best of times, and Cas lets him go with a puff of laughter. As the shower comes on, Cas reluctantly throws on as little clothing as he can get away with if their families suddenly decide to descend, and meanders towards the kitchen and his first addiction.

He needs coffee. The very thought leaves him yawning as he blearily starts eggs in the pan, determined to get it right this time. He dumps a stick of butter into the pan to melt and runs water into the carafe, before the living room catches his attention, out of the corner of his eye.

He knows what this is. He knows what this means. He suspected the outcome of this investigation before he ever handed the receipt to Dean, because it's what he would do. Were he John Winchester, given the opportunity and the funds, knowing his motivation, he would have murdered Dean's tormentor and never looked back.

He knows he shouldn't invade, should wait for Dean to explain it to him in his usual terse way about this, but his mouth has gone dry, the world has dropped out from beneath him, and he finds himself drawn across the room with his eyes fixed on a single point in the web of information.

xXx

It's not until he smells smoke over the pungent scent of his own soaps that Dean remembers why Castiel meandering through the apartment this morning before Dean was a bad idea. He thought he'd have time to head him off, to explain and break it to him easier. He shouldn't have put it off, run from everything again. Cursing quietly, suds sliding into his eyes, Dean rinses as quickly as he can and slings a towel around his hips, jogging into the living room on bare feet.

It's bizarre, Castiel looking painfully domestic in his white boxers and one of Dean's old t-shirts with bed hair, standing in front of a case-wall of Dean's worst nightmare. Dean can see the corded muscles in Cas's arms as he stands with one of the pages in his clenched fingers, jaw tense, a cold sort of fury rolling off of him and his breathing metronome steady, obvious as he controls himself. It's a complete 180 from the sweet, sappy, slightly dorky man who had just been curled up in Dean's bed with him, who laughed quietly at his own terrible jokes.

"My brother's picture is on this wall." It's not an accusation aimed at Dean, but he flinches anyway.

Lucifer's smirking face, posed in front of a shelf of legal books, has lines from the crappy printer streaking through it. Map pins had been driven through the edges of the picture, and now strings hang limply from other images and receipts and documents, and the edges of the page in Cas's hand are ragged from him tearing it free without trying to unpin it first.

". . .shit."

"Why is my brother on this wall, Dean." This air of potential violence around Castiel isn't even aimed at Dean, and it's more than a little scary. He should have warned Cas, but he was desperately trying not to think about it, trying not to see the blue of Lucifer's eyes on that page and think of the fact that they obviously both got that trait from their shared father. He tried not to react to it around Charlie, who hadn't made the connection at all given their last names.

Dean clears his throat, and his voice is bitter but steady when he speaks. "Small world these days. Turns out there's a law firm famous for getting people like Alastair out of jail. . ."

A firm that would tell Alastair to pay for Dean like a whore, and keep him out of jail for the crime of abducting him and facilitating hundreds of rapes. Who saw Castiel's name in conjunction with Dean's and flew across the country to dissuade his little brother from associating with Dean. Who knew his 'training' well enough to contemptuously spit it at him in Castiel's apartment.

Who had kept Alastair out of jail before, and made Dean's abduction possible, and who'd quietly accessed all of the records of Alastair's disappearance, according to Charlie's own sleuthing. Who treated Omegas as beneath him, a tool for sex or procreation, just like his father before him.

Who was paid in money earned by Dean on his knees begging to die rather than be drugged into his heats again and again. Who, for all Dean knew, may have also been paid in favors from Alastair and his pets up to and including Dean, who would never remember his face. Lucifer, who treated Dean as subhuman at best, who deliberately used the words pet and whore and toy and begging for it.

No matter whether or not he ever took advantage of his client's 'property' while protecting his ability to keep them as slaves, Lucifer knew. He knew all along. Dean knows there's some bad blood between Lucifer and Castiel, and he suspects it was at the heart of the apparent brawl between brothers at Jimmy's funeral. But this has pushed everything far beyond what he saw when Lucifer broke into Castiel's apartment.

The paper crumples in Castiel's fist and he stalks out of the room silently, simmering with anger and hatred.

Taking a moment to turn off the stove before they burn the place down around them, Dean eventually follows him at a safe distance, stopping outside of their bedroom door as Cas finishes yanking on clothing and snatches up his cell phone.

"Who're you calling?"

Cas's fingers curl around the phone, the paper copy of his brother's picture tattered and crumpled on the floor at his feet, and he doesn't know. He hasn't thought that far ahead.

The problem with premeditated murder is you have to put thought into it first, and he's not there yet.

He can't think, his thoughts are on a loop. His entire last conversation with Lucifer is playing through his mind, catching all the nuances he didn't know to look for yet, the look on his brother's face, Lucifer's behavior towards Dean. He can taste bile, hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, and he can't look at Dean.

Lucifer is his family. His family helped do this to Dean. Lucifer probably masterminded the check that tore Dean's life even further apart.

"I'm going to kill him." It comes out distant, cold, certain.

"And what's that gonna help, Cas? We'll just be back to you going to jail, and this time it won't be a few months at stake."

Dean brought him a sandwich and held his hand in the courtroom, even knowing this already. He slept with him, handed his trust completely over to someone who's family thought that about him. It had been so easy to look at the men who attacked Dean and think of them as the enemy, as poor representations of society. Violent, evil men who had harmed Dean, raised by hateful, bigoted families to look down on Dean.

Lucifer helped raise him. Lucifer handed him his first drink. Lucifer tried to buy him time with a prostitute when he presented as Alpha as they knew he would. Did he do that just for him because he seemed disinterested in sex, or did he give the same 'gift' to any of their other brothers? Did any of them not turn him down? God, that Omega could have been anyone. A few years later and it could have been Dean. Even then, it was probably someone in exactly the same forced position as Dean, one way or the other. It may have been an earlier one of Alastair's victims, reciprocity for the young new attorney who represented him. He can't remember faces. He didn't sleep with anyone, he'd been bothered by it all, but he just left. Left them there, and he never even considered that they might be in danger.

He's going to be sick.

Dean sighs, padding into the room on bare feet and resting a hand on Cas's tensed shoulder, ducking down to catch his eyes, to force him to meet Dean's stare. "It's not your fault, Cas."

It's a hollow comfort, but he doesn't shy away from Dean when he wraps his arms around Cas's shoulders, pulling him into a one-sided hug. It doesn't change the facts. He's no better than any of them. Another rich Alpha asshole who never even thought about it beyond himself.

He's part of the problem.

xXx

Cas is subdued on the ride, staring out the window blankly, one hand clenched in a fist on his knee and the other caught by Dean's any time he doesn't need his own to drive. He's pretty sure keeping Castiel calm is a useless endeavor, but it doesn't mean he won't try anyway.

He doesn't know what's going through Cas's head, apart from the apparent sudden fratricidal tendencies, but something about discovering Lucifer's part in Alastair's racket floored Cas entirely. Dean wishes he could say the same, but all it did for him was make it all click, the final missing piece in a puzzle. He's an eternal pessimist—he's pretty sure his first thought was a bitter of course.

He had been more worried about whether or not Alastair was still drawing air, about whether his father'd become a murderer for him, to wonder about the tangential information.

Castiel follows him a few steps behind, pace slow and mind clearly still busy, as they head into the hotel. This time, instead of Sam alone in the breakfast room, Charlie is chatting animatedly to him while scrolling on the computer and scooping granola into her mouth, and Gabriel sits at the table with his head on his fist, looking hung over and disgusted with the idea of mornings where people want to talk to him after he had free shots all night, and now enough donuts on his plate to feed an army.

Sam greets Dean with a hug, and he doesn't quite control the wince when his brother slaps one of his gargantuan hands to Dean's shoulder, right over the bite mark Cas left behind. He notices the stiff gait in which Dean tries to go past him as well. Which would have been fine if Castiel hadn't narrowed his eyes on Gabriel, gaze sharpening as he lands on something he can use, every muscle tensing again like he's ready to fight already. If he didn't smell like sex and aggression, prowling past a trained observer who's been on the lookout for people who might hurt his brother. Who knew Cas was capable of violence and no longer had a legal threat to force him to behave.

Sam's hand closes around Dean's arm, dragging him back to his side, and Charlie stops with her spoon caught between her lips, hand poised over the keyboard and eyebrows both rising sharply with alarm as the entire mood of the breakfast changes.

"Dean. . ."

"Woah! Hands off the merchandise, Sam! I'm fine. It's not what you. . ."

A chair scrapes the floor loudly as Castiel seats himself directly beside his brother, blue eyes focused and intent, words coming out clipped and sharp between his teeth. "You told me Lucifer is how you knew where to find me. Tell me everything he said."

Charlie, quick to catch on, puts two and two together about the last names at last, disbanding the idea of coincidence that had Gabriel sharing a last name with Lucifer. "Wait, what. . .? No."

Gabriel blinks, chewing his bite of donut slowly and swallowing heavily, looking around the room at all of them, the only one completely out of the loop with no idea why he's being interrogated, or why Sam is acting like Cas is a threat, or why Charlie is staring at him in horror. Dean's in a room full of twitchy, defensive, confused and upset Alphas.

In short, breakfast is a clusterfuck from the very start.