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When Dean finally comes home, the knots in his shoulders aching and his skin still layered in dust, he finds Cas waiting up for him at the kitchen table. Without a word, Cas nudges the vacant chair out with his foot, sliding an unopened beer across the counter in a silent invitation.
Dean huffs out a small breath, feigning bemusement but actually pretty endeared. “You didn’t have to wait up for me.”
“I don’t sleep,” Cas reminds him, ever the wordsmith.
“Right.” Dean plunks down with a sigh, his duffel hitting the floor in a thud. He opens the beer. He gets the sense Cas would’ve waited up for him anyway, reaffirmed by the fact that Cas inches closer to him in the seat. Their arms almost touching. Some subterranean ripple, shifting the flow of air in the room. It’s the first moment of stillness, Dean realizes, since before the case. Since the telephone booth. Since Cas lying stiff and clay-like and marble-cold in the dirt. Dean swallows beer, tasting acid in the carbonation.
“How are you holding up?” Dean asks to break the silence, not just for niceties’ sake. He maps Cas’ expression anxiously, searching for any tics that may suggest something off. The tired swoops seem like they’re etched deeper than when Dean remembers.
“I’m okay,” Cas says, his voice hushed even though there’s no chance they’ll be interrupted. He rolls his empty beer bottle between his palms in slow minute movements, like sticks lighting an ember. He offers a wry smile. “Although I suppose I wouldn’t know if I weren’t.”
They’re quiet another moment. Dean tracks Cas’ features silently, the animated movements that ground his aliveness. For one wild, unsteadying moment, Dean wonders if he’s hallucinating again, his grief conjuring a mirage too tempting to refuse. Then he blinks, his reality reorients, and it’s Cas again, eyes cast down. Mouth slightly parted. Messing with a beer bottle. Dean shudders out a breath, shaken, and grapples for the first topic that comes to mind.
“So what was it like?” he asks. “The empty, I mean.”
“Dark,” is Cas’ flat reply.
Dean narrows his eyes in half-assed irritation.
“And empty,” Cas adds.
“Thanks for the visual, Shakespeare.” Dean shifts in his seat with a creak, shuffling his hands between his knees. “How exactly did you get out?”
“I bargained.”
“With the void?” Dean says, skeptical.
“More or less.”
Dean sighs and leans back, sensing Cas’ reticence to talk about it. There’s another beat of silence where they’re just staring at each other—some open wound that won’t close. Then Cas speaks again, again in those quiet tones. There’s an uncharacteristic fissure in his voice—a fault-line in the familiar steady thrum, waiting to crack.
“When I was in the empty…I want to lie to you; to say I was noble in my motives to get out. That I clawed my way back to earth to keep fighting; to stop the next apocalypse, to square off against God and Lucifer. Justice, revenge, sacrifice. But all I could think about was this.” Cas’ gaze drifts up to meet his, hesitant but unmistakably sincere. “Coming back to you.”
The air decompresses from Dean’s chest at the confession, and the feeling sits heavily on the room, bearing down like an invisible anvil.
“You know I prayed to you,” Dean says. His throat feels raw. Like asphalt. “I kept praying to you. I didn’t know if you’d hear me, but I…I bargained with God, I threatened him, I just—” He closes his eyes. “All the other times, after you…after you died, or left, I could always feel that you were coming back. Even if I tried like hell not to. Maybe some sixth sense I got in hell, I don’t know. But this time…” Dean feels his jaw clench, and his voice drops into a hoarse whisper. “Nothing. Radio silence. Like some cord in my chest got ripped out. You were…you were up in smoke. Literally, up in smoke. And I knew it was the end. That I had to say goodbye. That all the things that we didn’t…”
The leaden, teeming silence again. Brimmed with the ghosts of unsaid things. He closes his eyes, unable to look Cas in the eye. Knowing it’ll give it all away.
He’s somehow shocked to feel the feather-light brush of a hand on his face, then a firmer press. Cas’ touch is healing, but it always has an asphyxiating effect on him. Like even the barest touch from him could stop his beating heart in its tracks.
“I feel it still,” Cas says, and when Dean looks at him, his eyes are closed as though in pain. His brow furrows into a small delta of lines. His palm fits to Dean’s cheek like an open flame.
“What?” Dean says, although he thinks he might know.
“Your longing.” Cas is so quiet, like speaking the words aloud will shatter the firmaments of every constructed thing between them. “Sometimes it’s like a forest fire; it burns down everything inside of me. Sometimes it’s a flood, sorrow and hurt and filling every last corner. I can’t…” Again, that uncharacteristic shake. “I can’t tell it apart from my own anymore.”
Dean’s response hitches in his throat. He feels like it should humiliate him, the knowledge that all the burnings he tries to douse flare up inside Cas too, leaving his insides exposed. But all he can ask is, “What about now?”
Cas’ eyes flicker slowly open to meet Dean’s gaze. “It’s an entire ocean.”
Suddenly, the distance from Cas is too, too, too far; a handful of inches unwound like a spool of thread into dimensions after dimensions. Hell, purgatory, heaven. The empty. Cas in the Continental in Nevada on the phone. Hours in bed, staring at his dim phone screen glassy-eyed until he nodded off, following the tiny red pinpoint of Cas’ GPS as it crossed the map. Following him where he won’t be followed.
Dean’s hand flits to open on Cas’ knee. Starfish-like, pressing down. Cas twitches, then takes a shuddering breath, like the touch is an electric shock.
Before he can reconsider the words, Dean says, “I thought I was going to die without you.”
Despite the tension, Cas manages a remonstrative half-glare. “I would’ve hunted your soul down and kicked your ass back to earth.”
The response surprises him; Dean wrings out a laughing sound. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Cas’ hand leaves his face, spreading across the open hearth of his heart. Pounding away like a jackhammer. Burning him up into ash. Cas’ eyes flicker to his mouth, just like they had at the telephone booth by the bar. Hazed in blue neon. Illuminated.
Cas clenches his eyes shut again as though in nerve-rending pain. A convulsion seems to rack through him. “Dean, can you just…all of this inside me, I’m not equipped to…”
Dean finally leans forward, a pulse beating fast behind his eyes. Like a live fuse. He kisses Cas, this odd human-shaped creature he can’t stand to be without. Cas starts, then presses back. Gives back, pouring into him. His thumbs on Dean’s jaw, holding him steady.
For a moment, Dean can taste the saltwater.