Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dean hates praying because he hates being on his knees. It’s as simple as that most days. Nostalgia is nothing but a flashback, and he hates being reminded of when he was a kid. So he stays on his feet, always. Even when he’s yanked out of Hell straight into a dirt nap, even when he watches the wings unfold behind the force in front of him, even when his brother uses the words “faith” and “proof” in the same damn sentence, he won’t get down on his knees. He won’t. He talks to angels while leaning against walls and with his nose stuck in the air and with his foot on the pedal, but he does not lower himself.

“What’s so embarrassing about crying during sex?” Cas asked seriously, his angelic confusion pouring off of him after Sam and Dean told him about the Mystery Spot through slow and clunky explanations filled with Sam’s silences.

“It’s a rookie mistake,” Dean said before he could think to stop himself, and Sam’s open mouth slammed shut like a door closed by a drunk. Dean’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.

Sometimes the bunker feels like a relief. No rent to pay, no boundaries to cross, a guaranteed roof over their heads every day.

Sometimes, when Sam is cooking some awful vegetarian version of breakfast and Cas sits at the dining table in low-hanging boxers and Dean’s shirt, the bunker feels like another place that can be burned.

It’s seeing Cas that reminds him of his dream last night. He doesn’t bother to call them nightmares anymore—there’s no point. There are the dreams where he wakes up in a sweat but can function throughout the day, and there are the dreams where he wakes up screaming that haunt him until he drinks himself back to bed, and there’s nothing in between.

Dean thinks it’s going to be the latter today.

He walks into the kitchen. Sam nods at him before returning his focus to his task. Cas smiles up at him and without thinking, or maybe while thinking too much, thinking about the sound of Cas’s heavy footsteps his mind rang with last night, Dean smirks at him and leans down for a heavy kiss that surprises Cas with its intensity. When Dean pulls away to sit down, he places a hand just a little too-high on Cas’s leg, making his angel turn red.

There. The dream can’t be real. It won’t be. Not if Dean keeps Cas happy.

Dean’s really good at keeping people happy.

See, Dean’s got a knack. Maybe he’s just always been overly empathetic, and maybe it comes from reading his drunk father’s eyes for the sake of survival, but he knows people. He knows how to piss them off and by extension he knows how to make them happy enough not to kill him. It worked great when he needed to feed Sam. Even when he lost his pudgy kid cheeks, which is when a lot of boys find themselves unwanted and unfuckable, he was so good he became a hot commodity in every back alley he ended up in.

It’s been a long time since he got on his knees for money, but not all that long since he’s gotten on his knees to please, whether he wanted to or not.

The problem is that Cas wants them both to be “in the mood” before they have sex. And it drives Dean up the goddamn wall, because what kind of sex life is that? He may act like he’ll fuck anything that moves but in reality, his libido is depressingly low. He’s “in the mood” about once every other week which is just… sad. And Cas, fresh to the pleasures of the human body and the joys of sex, surely wants it more often than that. But he waits for Dean to initiate because Dean’s kind of fucked up and Cas has a sneaking suspicion that if he started something then Dean wouldn’t stop him.

Which. Whatever. The truth of that statement doesn’t really matter because Cas doesn’t need to worry about that. Dean worries about sex. That’s just how it is. That’s not his partner’s job.

“Fuck,” she sighed, breathless and happy. “You're a goddamn pro.”

And maybe she didn’t mean the double entendre, but it made Dean tense nonetheless and his body start to burn. He stood before he even thought about it, dressing quickly in dirty clothes, but he’d had dirtier so he didn’t care.

“You don’t waste time, do you?” she asked with an eyebrow quirked, and he shook his head.

“Life on the road.” Life on the street corner.

It felt weird leaving the motel room without money stuffed into his pocket, but just because he acted like he was being paid didn’t mean he was anymore. Now he just made himself miserable for free.

Dean probably shouldn’t have been so relieved when he came out of Hell with a new body. A new, untouched body. The scars weren’t what mattered to him—it was the old fingerprints that had been wiped clean. He watched the woman walk away and smiled to himself and said, “Man, it is time to right some wrongs.”

Because there’d been a lot of wrongs left lingering on his body when he died.

“Come again?” Sam asked, and Dean stalled for just a moment, cleansing the words in his head to be good enough for his brother to hear. In an ideal universe Dean would take their childhood to the grave, and Sam wouldn’t have to know a single thing about it.

“Well, look at me. I mean, I came back from the furnace without any of my old scars. No bullet wounds, knife cuts, none of the off-angled fingers from all the breaks. My hide is as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Which leads me to conclude, sadly,” he tacked on the last word for his brother’s benefit, “that my virginity is intact.”

He was supposed to be upset. Humiliated, emasculated, whatever. But fuck, he was ecstatic. A chance to do it over. A chance to want it.

“What?” Sam demanded.

“I have been rehymenated.”

He knew that’s not actually how anatomy works—he did pass eighth grade health—but he’d always privately thought of it as popping his cherry. There had been a lot of blood, after all.

People are supposed to be nervous about losing their virginity, but Dean Winchester had been downright afraid. It was time to fix it.

“Dean. You have been overly affectionate towards me this morning,” Cas states with his brows pulled tight. Embarrassed, Dean pulls his socked foot back from where he’d been teasing Cas’s ankle with it.

“What, a guy can’t show a little interest in his partner?”

“You do not appear to be interested in sex today.”

Dean feels a pit form in his stomach and he looks away briefly before forcing himself to meet Cas’s eyes. “I’ve been coming onto you all morning,” he argues. 

“You haven’t smiled once while you did it.”

When Dean helped Charlie flirt her way past a guard, Sam couldn’t stop laughing. And he didn’t say it because he’d trained himself to be quiet, but he wanted to whip around to Sammy and shout, “You don’t get to fucking laugh, you’re the reason I learned how to do this.”

He hadn’t even let it get past kissing before he broke down. His body pressing Cas’s against the wall, both of them flushed red and Cas’s throat wet from Dean’s tongue and then, very suddenly, from Dean’s tears as he tucked himself under Cas’s chin and sobbed.

“Dean?” Cas asked, startled. “Dean, are you okay?”

Dean wrapped Cas’s coat in his fists, trying to convince himself he could have this, trying to convince himself that maybe he didn’t have to tell Cas, he could just keep the two of them here forever, frozen.

“I have to tell you something,” he murmured instead, and never let it be said that Dean Winchester was a coward. “I have to… before we take this anywhere Cas, I have to tell you…”

And several clunky sentences spread out over an hour and half later, he does. How he got fucked for the first time at the age of thirteen and was able to buy Sam his first proper Christmas present. How even when he got older, his baby face kept guys coming. How if he said “no,” they’d pay him extra and he wasn’t even performing, he just got tips for voicing his own fear and sickness. How it actually was possible to get hard while crying. How even now he still can’t get pushed up against a wall or get on his knees and have someone on top of him without vomiting.

“You have a right to know what you’re getting into,” he told Cas quietly. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t sleep with you and not… warn you.”

“Warn me,” Cas repeated robotically. “Warn me? About what?”

“That in bed I’m… that I’ve been… I’m giving you an out, Cas.”

“Okay.” Cas nodded decisively, still processing what Dean was saying. “I’m not taking it.”

“It’s alright if you need time to decide. Figure out what you’re feeling.”

“Dean.” The severity one Cas’s voice drew Dean’s eyes to his. “I am feeling a lot of things at the moment. Nearly blinding rage is one of them. Not at you,” he clarified when Dean flinched. “Never at you. At the people who did this to you. I hate them. You did not deserve it. You did not deserve it. And I’m feeling honored. That you would trust me with this. Thank you.”

“For telling you I used whore myself out?”

“For choosing me as someone you consider safe to hold these traumas.”

Dean swallowed at that, his throat tightening.

“But I am not feeling repulsion. If you do not want to do something, we will not do it. If you do not want to perform oral sex—”

“—You can just say I can’t blow you—”

“Then I do not want you to. My happiness and your happiness, your love and my love, they’ve been nearly one in the same for a very long time. If we do not both want something, then I cease to want it all together.”

They didn’t kiss again for another two weeks and the guilt ate Dean up but in that moment he rested his head against Cas’s and he remembered how to breathe.

Sam doesn’t wake up screaming anymore. He still gets nightmares, of course—he’s lived a constant cycle of them for how many years now?—but he wakes up with a silent jolt and can take in his surroundings quickly. Tonight it’s the Bunker’s library; he’d fallen asleep reading lore. He stands up and cracks every joint in his body because chairs are significantly worse than motel beds when it comes to his back, and begins to close the books around him.

It’s not until he’s halfway to his room that he hears muffled sounds from the kitchen.

Checking his phone he finds it's well past midnight and well before the normal time Dean manages to drag himself out of bed, which means he’s not cooking. And Cas doesn’t really sleep, but whenever he wanders at night he very rarely ends up in the kitchen. It’s all just molecules now. So Sam creeps his way to the kitchen door and finds—

Both of them. Together. Sitting on the tile with a trash can in front of them, clearly full of vomit from what Sam can smell. Dean’s got a sleeve of Saltines on his legs and Cas is holding a glass of ice water and Dean’s face, red and puffy, is buried in Cas’s undershirt, which is all the angel is wearing. He clears his throat, startling the both of them.

“Sam,” Dean coughs out, sitting up straight like their father called for attention.

“Are you alright?” Sam asks, walking in further and gesturing to the trash can. “Not feeling good?”

“Sure,” Dean mutters, adjusting to distance himself from Cas.

“Stomach flu?” Sam tries to lighten the mood. “Or is the garbage you eat finally getting to you?”

Dean waves him off and tries to stand, his legs shaking and his hand holding the crackers while he readjusts clearly about to give. Cas stands immediately to help him, and Sam reaches out an arm, but he flinches away from both of them. Cas withdraws immediately, but Sam keeps going.

“C’mon. You couldn’t walk a straight line right now. Let Cas and I—”

“Don’t touch me,” he growls, jerking away from Sam’s hands the moment they make contact. They both freeze at his reaction, Dean’s eyes darting away. “I can manage fine on my own.”

“If you’re sick—”

“It was just a dream,” he hisses like a confession of weakness.

“You… threw up from a nightmare?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m good now. Just need to hit the sack.”

Sam’s careful not to touch him again, but he cuts him off before he can try to run to his room. “Dean this is serious.”

“You were never supposed to find out, just drop it Sam,” he says, backing up a little towards Cas.

“I was never supposed to find out what? That you’re having nightmares?”

“No,” Dean growls. “That’s not… you just… you don’t need to worry about me.”

Sam rolls his eyes and grits his teeth. “Jesus Christ, Dean, I’m all grown up now. I’m not the five-year-old who needs you to cut the crust off my sandwiches. We’ve been actual, genuine Hell. Why do you still feel like you have to protect me?”

Dean clenches the kitchen counter angrily. “Maybe I’m not protecting you, Sam! Maybe…” he sucks in a breath between his teeth. “Maybe I’m protecting the me that exists in your head. Maybe I just need one fucking person to see me the way you do.”

The siren didn’t even want to fuck him. Jesus, how insane is that? Dean met a creature meant to be the literal embodiment of desire, a creature who had come to every other man as a woman desperate for them, and what had he gotten? A guy who just wanted to spend time with him. A guy who wanted to hear about his interests and talk about good music and liked Baby. All he wanted was someone he didn’t have to fuck and he didn’t have to raise.

“You know,” Dean says in the middle of a Dr. Sexy episode with his knees pulled up to his chest, “there’s places to go to… talk.”

Cas nods. “Yes.”

“You don’t know what I mean, do you?” he asks, smiling a little. Cas shakes his head but watches intently.

“About when I was younger. And… sex. And whatever.”

“Like the sexual addiction seminar you attended for the dragon case.”

Dean decides to never think about his life too intensely, especially not events that can produce sentences like that.

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Do you want to attend one?”

Dean shakes his head instinctively. “No, of course not. I was just… throwing it out there.”

He turns to focus back on Dr. Sexy, but Cas takes a deep breath and he knows he has something to say.

“I love you,” Cas starts, and Dean nods because tonight, and more nights than not recently, he believes him. “And I will always love you. But sometimes I miss the other angels.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Dean says somberly.

“And I can tell you about Babylon and the Mayans and the Iroquois, but that doesn’t mean you lived with and watched those civilizations like I did.”

“No, of course not.”

“And I know you love me.”

“Always, Cas. Always.”

“But that doesn’t mean that sometimes… you need people who have been through what you have. I mean, it’s why you like it when you’re invited to hunter gatherings, isn’t it? Because there are people like you?”

Dean curls in on himself a little tighter and turns the TV up. But he reaches for Cas’s hand and squeezes gently.

And later, happily and with a real smile on his face, Dean lays on his side and kisses him to sleep.

Sam wakes up to find his alarm unplugged and his brother standing awkwardly by the end of his bed with a tray in his hands. A tray stacked with waffles and syrup and fruit and a glass of milk.

“It’s that almond shit you like,” he mutters, and he sets it down on the bedside table.

Sam, still shaking the sleep from his eyes, pushes his tangled morning hair to the side. He looks carefully at his brother before picking up the tray and setting it in his lap.

The action seems to settle some of Dean’s tension, and he sits down at the end of the bed, still keeping his distance from Sam.

“I’m gonna be busy now on Tuesday nights,” he tells him abruptly, and Sam nods.

“Okay…”

“Seven to eight.”

“Date night?”

Dean actually laughs at that, and it doesn’t even sound like the forced kind. “No, not quite.”

For a long time they sit in silence, Sam eating and Dean staring at the wall. When Sam’s almost finished, Dean turns back to him.

“Sam, I have to tell you something. And you have to understand that I’m never gonna tell you all of it. And I don’t know if I’ll ever use the right words for it, or even be able to say it clearer than I’m going to. It’s just… it’s not who I am. But I trust you. So I want to tell you this.”

“Anything, Dean. You can tell me anything.” Sam leans forward, but he’s careful not to invade his space. Dean chose where he was for a reason, chose for Sam to be laying down and Dean sitting up straight away from him.

“You might already suspect. You might not. I got no fucking clue, Sammy.”

“Okay.”

He takes in a deep breath. A shuddering, whole body breath. And as he releases the weight of air from his lungs, he starts.

“Dad wasn’t good with money. Not just at keeping it, but knowing how much shit was. I think mom handled a lot of the groceries and the kid stuff. And when she… well, it fell on me. And sometimes Dad would just leave me a twenty and I’d have to find a way to make that work for us for three weeks. Three weeks, Sam.” He looks into his brother’s eyes, trying to convey the kind of pressure this puts on a twelve-year-old. Sam, for a moment, feels like he could choke on it.

“And twenty dollars doesn’t cover three weeks. Not when we need to eat. Not when one of us had a growth spurt. And so…”

His grip on the comforter is white, but he doesn’t look away for a moment. “I did what I had to do to keep us alive. Alright? I did what I had to. Legal jobs, they weren’t looking for a thirteen-year-old who’s skills began and ended with a shotgun. But some jobs didn’t… require skills. At least, not if you’re young enough.”

Sam thinks he might be sick. He thinks about the trash can in the kitchen weeks ago, Dean’s hands against the tile of the floor and the way he reacted to touch like he’d been burned.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Sam nods mutely.

“When you figure out how to talk again, I don’t want to hear any apologies. No pity. None of that shit. You got it? Because I’m past it now. Years past it. And I found…” he shrugs, finally breaking eye contact. “There’s this thing on Tuesday nights. Group session for… people like me. Who’ve been like me. And I’m aiming to get help. I wanted to tell you that. I wanted to tell you I’m gonna work on getting better.”

He stands, patting Sam’s knee like a father in a TV show, and pointedly looks at his plate. “Finish that, would ya? I spent all morning making it.”

The first time they had kissed after Dean told Cas about his childhood, Cas had pulled Dean against him, pressing himself against the wall. He kept one hand on the back of Dean’s neck, rubbing soft circles, and Dean had slid his hands under Cas’s coat to wrap around his waist.

It ended with the two of them fully clothed in Dean’s bed, Dean sobbing from relief, and he thought maybe crying wasn’t as shit as he remembered. It was almost cathartic.

“Dean,” Cas murmured into his hair. “You’re safe.”