Chapter Text
It has never occurred to Castiel that there may be, on Dean’s side, a bad time for his arrival; but this, a tangle of wrapped limbs, slick mouths and warm moans, braced against the wall and glimmering faintly under the moonlight, this the angel never expected to see.
They’re round the back of the house – the one isolated in the woods, the one that got a bad rap decades ago and the villagers let the forest swallow it, hoping nature could blanket their fears of the place and what happened here. Sam has pressed Dean against the wooden boards, one hand slipped under the cloth of his shirt.
“Sam... Sammy...”
“Dean, oh, Dean...” Sam’s gasping, Dean’s breathing hard, words pushed between kisses, tongues sliding between mouths.
Castiel frowns at the paleness of Dean’s exposed skin, the clink of belts and the scent of sex drifting on the wind. Dean shivers, throws his head back, and his eyes open, staring up at the sky. “Sam,” he moans, rests his head on his brother’s shoulder, and Castiel remembers to leave just as Dean’s gaze crosses the clearing, eyes flickering toward the trees.
*
Castiel thinks about this for a while, standing on a cliff overlooking the sea. Humans breathe like the ebb of the tide, he thinks, but the sea is slower.
He remembers the Bible in its original languages, the purity of the Word of God poured into a dusty glass and passed down through years and teachings, like genes, like memes and disease. Champagne cannot bubble in a perfectly clean glass, he thinks; just so, the Word of God would be lost in a flawless vessel.
And yet... and yet. Castiel wonders if it is the effervescence, the rush of the ripcurl, if it is the flushed wonder at the workings of the world that Dean craves. It is, he thinks, an exothermic reaction, potassium and water, sin and the sacrosanct.
Dean’s flame burns brighter every day.
He is a glass bubbling over, a wave crashing on the sand.
*
Castiel goes back. It is some hours later. They’re in a motel, the kind they run to like rats from stepping-stones of ships sinking, slipping to shore.
He sees Sam’s lean arms tangling around Dean’s bunched muscles, but quiescent, clinging, asleep. Dean, though, Dean whose dreams take him to dark places, shudders, sits up and stares.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, hand unconsciously going to Sam’s head, caressing, clutching it to his chest. Castiel can tell, without quite knowing how, that this is regular activity, by the way Sam shifts, mutters, and rests again.
“I was going to ask you the same.” Castiel examines the bed (sheets: tangled) and Sam (vulnerable, breathing regularly, tresses sticking to his forehead) and Dean’s face, lit in strips as cheap streetlight filters through the motel blinds.
“Don’t get on my ass about duty at this hour,” Dean frowns. “I ought to be sleeping...” he stops, abashed, adjusts the sheet around his brother, and Castiel wonders what Dean is feeling. Whether it is shock, or shame, or surety. “It’s too hot to sleep.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Castiel sees the wary calculation in Dean’s face, the thoughts frothing from the millwheel in his mind. “What are you doing, Dean?”
Once, Dean would have snapped, would have let quick vulgarities trip off his tongue, defensive as a mousetrap. Now, he looks down, at the hand resting on Sam’s shoulder, at Sam’s arm draped across his chest. He meets Castiel’s eyes, and Castiel feels a – spark, a candle flame flickering to life in his mind. “My brother,” Dean says sadly, and Castiel wonders if Dean intended the sinful potential of that remark, or if his thoughts have taken him somewhere else. “He’s all I have, Cas.”
“You have hope,” Castiel feels the need to point out. “And a job to do.”
Dean’s jaw clenches, he looks away. “I know.” Then his face lightens, and Castiel recognises Dean’s fool-in-the-face-of-doom grin shining up at him. “But they’re not corporeal, you know?”
Castiel raises his eyebrows.
“Ah, ask Jimmy about it,” Dean grouses, running fingers through his hair. “And go away, I can’t sleep when I’m being watched.”
“Yes you can,” Castiel replies without thinking. Dean blinks, eyebrows rising.
“Right, whatever. When I know I’m being watched.” Dean leans back, breathes out. Then says, “Cas? You’re kind of creepy, but… thank you.”
For what? For watching, for not judging, for leaving again? Castiel says, “You’re welcome. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Sometimes you sound almost human,” Dean replies with exaggerated affection, a yawn stretching the end of his words. “Night, Cas.”
Castiel thinks it is appropriate to say “Good night.”
*
Castiel is intrigued to discover that there is a next time to this covert observation. Jimmy, in the back of his mind, radiates complete unsurprise.
Sam is spread across the motel bed, hands clutching at the covers as he convulses. His knee is between him and Dean’s chest, and Dean is balanced on his elbows, one hand cupped under Sam’s neck, leaning down and kissing him, slow and sensual.
“Dean,” Sam shudders, a hand lifting to press against the small of Dean’s back, keening, needy, “please...”
Dean tilts Sam’s head back, and that’s when his hot, bright eyes lock on Castiel”s. He laughs, suddenly, and Sam shifts underneath him. “You bastard, Dean,” Sam bites out, his throat golden where it’s exposed.
“You don’t mean that,” Dean mutters, teeth closing over Sam’s earlobe, tongue flicking over the soft cartilage. His face is open, quizzical, his eyebrow rising. What question he’s asking Castiel, the angel isn’t sure. And then Dean grins, dazzling, and he does something because Sam’s suddenly stretched back, a low, hot moan ripping slowly up from inside, like silk parting slowly along a reel, like the slow moments before a tree falls in a forest.
Castiel knew that Dean had a perverse sense of humour, but this... Dean slides, so slowly, in and out of his brother, irony and sanctity and abomination, and he watches the angel watching them as Sam, all oblivious on the crest of sensation, gasps out pieces of words and half-promises and his brother’s name as he comes.
All that Castiel really notices is that his collar is too tight, that he hadn’t been aware of his clothes at all before this, and that Jimmy definitely shouldn’t be deeply amused, and shouldn’t be thinking of glasses bubbling over.