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hells-plaid-angel · 3 months

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Dean had expected it to hurt. He'd expected it to be something cruel and invasive. He was ready for a knife-slicing skin-from-bone kind of sensation. He'd lived a life where pain was familiar. What he hadn't expected was for it to feel so painless. No. Not just painless. It felt as though he were being held by the universe. Incomprehensible.

He was getting ahead of himself. Context mattered.

His thoughts flowed in odd directions. Maybe that was the way things were going to be from now on. Were the thoughts his own? It was quiet. He hadn't expected it to be quiet.

There was no sound of breathing from the two dead bodies and no cars for miles. He'd even lost the familiar static hum that'd accompanied pure silence since he was in his mid-twenties. Blame the loud music. Blame the gunfire. Blame God. Dean had.

If he focused, he could hear the wind through the dry grass. The world hadn't stopped turning. Not yet. Something had happened.

He needed to stay on track. What the hell had happened?

Dean Winchester's life had the habit of changing in the blink of an eye. They were on a hunt in Nebraska, looking for a lady in white. Men had gone missing along the highways, only to show up hundreds of miles away dehydrated, dying and raving about a disappearing woman. Simple open-and-shut case, right?

If Sammy had been there, maybe he would have picked up that something was a miss. He'd probably tell Dean not to be so goddamn cocksure about everything. He'd have been right.

Sam wasn't there. Sam was on a hunt with Eileen, which left Cas and Dean. Hell, Cas should've known the pieces weren't adding up, but they'd both been distracted.

Dean definitely goddamn knew better.

The whole mess was his fault. Always was. Living with Dean gave you the kind of luck people got when they lost a lucky rabbit's foot. His existence was a bad omen and he kept making it Cas' problem.

They'd packed their guns full of rock salt, ready to dig up some bones and get the show on the road when they'd realised how badly they'd misjudged the situation. It wasn't a ghost. It was a goddamn witch.

She'd been using magic to puppet the local men. The poor suckers who didn't pull over to 'help' her would find themselves with the sudden urge to pull over their car and walk Interstate 80 to oblivion.

He hated witches on principle. Of all the ghosts, ghouls and creatures that went bump in the night, witches were where the Winchesters always had the most trouble. The hunt was no exception. He let her get too close. Close enough to slip a hex bag in his pocket.

His mind didn't go blank as he'd expected it might. Instead, it felt as though he'd let go of the Impala's wheel, leaned back and expected the car to drive itself.

His body moved without his permission. Cas was close. Too goddamn close. Cas always had the habit of standing too goddamn close to Dean.

He knew what his body wanted to do, but he couldn't stop it. Dean knew his destiny was to be a puppet to the will of 'God' and the angels, but it wasn't something he let himself linger on. All those in the Winchester family seemed doomed by their own brand of destiny. It didn't do well to dwell. Dean Winchester was not a fatalist.

He felt himself turn on his heels, pull Cas close and fill his chest with rock-salt bullets. Of course, it hadn't worked. Cas was made of stronger stuff than that, but when Dean felt his hand slip into Cas' coat pocket to grab his angel blade, he knew they were screwed to oblivion.

After a lifetime of hunting, Dean had honed the art of quick decision making. In the space of a heartbeat, three things became apparent. They were ambushed. If he didn't do something quickly Cas was going to die. He wouldn't survive the angels' death.

He'd known it in the primal part of his brain that knew to fear strange shadows in the dark. Cas' death, the eternal sleep, would see Dean tugging at his coattails because his death had always been a slow-acting poison to the eldest Winchester boy.

The angel always managed to return from the dead before death had its hooks in Dean, but he knew without Cas he'd last a year. He wasn't his father, who'd lived over two decades while poisoned and rotting with the loss of his mother. In the end, he'd become more rage than man. Like the ghosts they'd hunted, John had been left with nothing save the burning need for revenge.

In the safety of his own mind, Dean would admit he was made of softer stuff than his father. He wouldn't cling to life by the skin of his teeth. He'd rather bite a bullet and save everyone the trouble. But Cas wasn't dead yet. There was still time.

Dean thought quickly, his mind was struck with a startling sense of clarity and certainty he'd never before felt. He knew of a way to save Cas. After all, Dean was the perfect vessel for an archangel. Of course, he could save Cas. Maybe not the body of Jimmy Novak, though he would mourn that body in a complicated way he didn't wish to dwell on. Maybe it could be saved. Dean didn't know. The body wasn't important. Cas was what mattered.

Dean hadn't grown up with permanence. Everything in his life was transient. He'd spent his formative years being raised like the dead in haunted cemeteries, like God's son for the slaughter. He knew the one constant in his life was change.

But that wasn't entirely true. Another thing had been a constant. His body, beaten and broken as it was, had stayed the course throughout his life. It had aged and changed but Dean could count on it to hold strong. It was the one thing he could almost call his. But he couldn't stop it from moving with the witches' will. If he didn't stop it, Cas would die. Cas wouldn't stop Dean from killing him.

Dean knew Cas almost as well as he knew himself. He couldn't stop his hand, but he could clench and unclench his jaw. The witch was focused on hurting Cas. The classic rules for pickpockets and street magicians held true. If she was busy looking in one direction, that meant she'd left herself open.

If it were anyone else, he wouldn't offer it, couldn't offer it. But it was Cas. Cas was an exception to so many of Dean's rules.

"Cas," Dean choked through gritted teeth in the breath before the angel blade found a new home between his friend's ribs.

"Castiel, come in."

Dean watched as a flicker of reluctant knowing crossed Cas' face. The angel knew what Dean meant. Of course he did. Cas knew Dean better than Dean knew himself.

For the horror of a heartbeat, Dean thought Cas was going to say no. Instead, the world exploded in heat and light. It was like being engulfed by the sun, yet instead of burning alive, he felt warm, swallowed by light. It was like being held by the universe. Of course. Dean remembered what had happened.

All was silent. Both Cas' body and the witch lay slumped over the side of the road. The woman's body was riddled with witch-killing bullets. It was only then Dean's eyes shifted to the gun in his hand. He couldn't recall getting them from the trunk of the Impala. Then again, maybe he hadn't.

"Cas?" Dean breathed life into the silence.

"Hello, Dean."

The voice that replied felt as though it came from the base of Dean's skull. It was as though someone was grinding dry gravel against his eardrums. The voice was both apart from him and a part of him.

The body of Jimmy Novak lay dead and unmoving in the dirt. Yet he'd heard Cas' voice clear.

Dean watched as his left hand rested on his right forearm, unbidden.

"I'm here. I'm sorry," Cas' deep timbre rattled.

Dean was overcome with a sense of deep sorrow and regret. He felt wrong in his body, but the way the sensation hit was unfamiliar to him. They weren't Dean's emotions, they were Cas'.

If he were being honest, Dean hadn't expected to have any control of his body. He'd expected to be shoved below the surface of his consciousness for as long as Cas needed to walk around in his meat suit. He hadn't spared a thought for how the whole 'vessel of an angel of God' thing worked, considering he'd spent his life running from the possibility of it. He couldn't help but think Cas was giving him a longer leash than Micheal would.

"Don't be. I'd rather this than the alternative. Let's just get your body in the car, drive back to the bunker and work out what the hell we do from here." This was his mess. He'd clean it up.

"Dean. I believe you're being unnecessarily hard on yourself," Cas chastised, causing Dean to still. How did Cas — shit. This sharing-a-body thing was going to screw him over big time.

"Cas, do me a favour. If you're going to be playing house in my body, quit reading my mind," Dean mumbled, bending over to pick the body up from the dirt.

He was careful with the angel's old vessel, scooping it carefully into his arms and cradling it to his chest until he could prop him up in the Impala's back seat. He fixed the guy's stupid goddamn tie while he was at it and felt a twinge of... what? Fondness. It was an ache so deep Dean felt it in his marrow.

God in hell. Dean had never felt something quite like that. He'd been under the impression that Cas, along with the other angels, wasn't able to feel the same way humans did, but that odd ache made him want to drive himself off a bridge. How could Cas stand that? What the hell was that?

"I apologise. I'm trying to keep a barrier between us, but... it's difficult." Cas wasn't just feeling his emotions, he was feeling Cas' as well.

Dean needed to separate them quickly, but to do that he'd need to make sure Cas could get back to his old body. His eyes flickered to the spreading inkwell of blood seeping through the body's white shirt. That was how Dean had to think of it. It was 'the body' not Cas' body. Cas wasn't dead. Cas was with him. He felt the familiar spread of warmth in his chest. He shook thoughts of death from his mind and climbed into the driver's seat.

"As the driver, does this mean I get to choose the music?" Cas asked, rattling a laugh free from Dean's chest.

"Nice try, Cas. I'm still driving. You just sit back and look pretty."

"As I'm in your vessel, it won't be a hard task," Cas rebuked, and Dean knew in his gut the angel was entirely serious.

They were so screwed.

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