Who: Dean Winchester & Cas What: Dean tries settling into his new apartment. Cas got there first. It gets sticky, and not in the fun way. When: Friday, May 23rd, during the day Where: Dean & Cas's apartment, Potts Tower Warnings:SPOILERS FOR SPN FINALE. And some feels. Some sad feels. Some crabby feels. Some not-heterosexual feels. You know, the good stuff.
Dean had no idea that he was sharing this shiny new apartment until he was trapped in it. Because why the fuck not, apparently.
He already knew that he hadn't been assigned to live with Sam, because Sammy was shacked up in a one-bedroom with his space-themed girlfriend. Living alone was for the best at this point, and he wasn't going into it bereft; his brother had kept everything that he'd owned the last time he was here, so moving in was really moving in. There were boxes of clothes he hadn't bought, photographs he hadn't been there to take, and it was all … really depressing, actually. It helped fill up the space, but it still felt like being in someone else's territory.
When he found the amulet that Sam had given him as a child (and that he'd thrown away years later, never expecting to see it again), he slipped it on and tucked it under his shirt, grateful there was no one around to see him do it.
Then he wandered right into a goddamn devil's trap in the middle of the kitchen. Having left his cell phone in the other room, there was nothing to do but pace around the perimeter.
By the time Cas finally showed up, Dean had managed to move some kitchen furniture around and turn on the faucet (by breaking one of the knobs, oops) with his new powers, but had yet to do anything useful in the process.
"Well, look what I caught." While the faucet was on, Cas had come in through the front door unnoticed, wielding a plastic shopping bag in one hand and an iced coffee in the other. He'd been out exploring the city, wandering and seeing what he could see, slipping into interesting doorways and chatting with the locals. He'd actually signed a few autographs and taken several photographs with people who kept asking him if he was someone else, and he'd just kind of … rolled with it.
He leaned against the door frame, taking a sip of coffee through his straw. His expression softened. "Hey, baby."
Dean's first instinct was to tense up. His last interaction with Castiel back home hadn't been great, and then for all he knew, Cas was locked away in Heaven, trying to buy him some time. He and Sam had tried to lock him up even before he'd gone totally off the deep end, and Dean turned expecting to see the angel he knew, with a sad, tired expression.
That wasn't what he got. He'd actually forgotten for a few moments which version of Cas he was dealing with, and not seeing the face he recognized didn't make him sad so much as it made him angry.
"Let me out, you son of a bitch."
Cas leaned back a little when Dean turned. He didn't have the full perception that he'd had of an angel, but he got just a hazy enough picture of Dean's new face beyond what was now a vessel. His heart cracked.
He covered the sick feeling in his gut with a chuckle. "Look how lucky we are. The powers that be saw fit to put us in a room together because they thought we'd like it. Isn't that nice?"
"Like a hole in the head," Dean said with a snarl. "Let me out. This isn't funny."
Cas's mouth twitched, like he wanted to smile but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He relented, pulling out a pocket knife from his jeans and crouching down so he could scratch away at the trap. "So, long time no see. For you, anyway."
"Should've been longer." Dean stalked out of the sigil. He was already so over this devil's trap bullshit. No wonder demons hated them so much (other than how often he and Sam liked to make them dead). "Is this seriously your place or did you come in here and lay this thing down just to fuck with me?"
"Please. I'm not that rude." Cas wandered off like a bored cat, tossing his bag down onto the kitchen counter and heading back into the living room. "I got here first. New place, I scoped it out. I warded it. I didn't know I'd be sharing my abode with an infant demon."
"I'm not an infant," Dean said petulantly, and immediately went about not helping his case by walking right past the broken faucet and telekinetically shoving over a chair for good measure. He'd always been the growling, snappish sort of person, but seeing Cas had him in the kind of rage that reminded him of being sixteen again, undirected and nebulous.
"You're a baby demon. It's going to take you a while to figure yourself out. Watch it. Step to your left or you'll get trapped again." Cas was on something, but he usually was. It was hard to tell how he'd behave if he was sober, and it wasn't like Dean actually knew what to look for. He'd only been in Cas's timeline for … what, a day? Two?
"God damn it!"
Too late.
Cas glanced over his shoulder, then slowly pushed a chair into the trap so Dean could at least have a seat while he was in it.
This Cas was such a dick. Instead of sitting in the chair, Dean turned it over and snapped the leg off, before prying at the wood until he exposed a sharp splinter. Then he plopped down on the floor and started scraping, determined to get his own damn self out instead of asking for more help.
Cas stared at him, and then just sort of chuckled and wandered away so he could plop down onto the couch with his coffee. "Who the hell is Misha Collins?"
Dean almost said 'I don't know' until he remembered: "He played you on TV in another reality. I guess he's not dead here."
"No shit?" Cas glanced over, surprised. He was just high enough (or had seen his own fair share of weird stuff) to not even question it. He settled back in, sighing. "That explains so much."
"I'm played by some fruity bastard named Jensen. Who the fuck is named Jensen? It sounds like a stripper name." This floor was going to be ruined by the end of the day. The wood wasn't nearly as sharp as a pocket knife, but he was slowly wearing through the edge of the trap, now with more fervor thanks to that horrible memory of being Jensen goddamn Ackles that one time.
"You know, I've never met a stripper named Jensen. I've met a stripper named Misha." Setting his coffee down, he rolled over onto his belly and tugged a throw pillow under his chin. He was glad he was flying, or else looking at Dean would be too hard.
This Dean had no memory of the last five years -- at least, not the way Cas remembered them. He was, apparently, the real Dean Winchester, while the Dean Cas knew was the same up to a point, and then splintered off into an aborted timeline. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered. Their deaths didn't matter. And here he thought the universe was cruel and careless before.
"Mark of Cain," he murmured, watching Dean carefully. His entire tone had shifted and he was quiet. Sad. "What were you thinking."
"I was thinking that the world was screwed. Abaddon needed to die. Metatron needed to die. And someone had to man up and do something about it before we all wound up dead. It almost worked, so don't give me that look like you feel sorry for me." The chair leg made a particularly sickening scrape across the floor. "I don't need your pity."
"Oh, for fuck's sake, here." Cas rolled his eyes and slid the pocket knife over to him. He clearly wasn't concerned about Dean being dangerous -- or at least that the addition of a pocket knife would actually make him more dangerous.
"You said almost worked. It didn't work," he said, and there was a surprising amount of viciousness behind it. "No, Dean, it didn't work. You grabbed a weapon that you thought would solve all your problems for you and you still got killed. You pushed your allies away and you went in alone and you died."
"I did what I had to!" Dean snapped. He snatched up the pocket knife and cut through the last parts bits of the sigil to break it. When he stood, he added, "I did it for Sam. For you. I had things to make up for, and if I had to chance to keep both of you from sacrificing more than you already have, I was gonna take it. I killed Abaddon. I would have killed Metatron if you hadn't gotten yourself locked up in Heaven -- and that's my fault, too, I should have been there to help you and I fucked that up. I paid for it, and now I'm the one in this mess, so: Shut. Up. I don't want to hear it."
Cas should have asked what the hell Dean was talking about, with killing Metatron. How did he come into this, and why was he even worth killing? He needed to catch up, he needed to know what happened in Dean's timeline, but right now he was so full of emotion over what his Dean had done that he felt like he'd break.
And he did, but instead of snapping it was more like a crumble, and he flippantly settled down with his head on the pillow. "Fine, have it your way."
"If I had my way, you wouldn't even be here." Even at his worst (Cas's version of Dean aside), he was usually more sensitive than this. Must've been the stress. Or the demon thing. "I don't want you, I need the real you, who isn't some batfuck drunken stoner."
Cas glanced up, his eyes dark -- and for a moment, he was alarmingly like the Castiel that Dean knew. Only five years separated them, and while they'd been the most crucial five years of Castiel's existence, it didn't erase thousands of years of history. "I don't want you, either."
"No, you want the crazy bitch who put you in a meat grinder and got ganked by the Devil." Dean was only just barely keeping himself from tearing down the apartment with his hands, just to have something to hurt. It was almost ironic that he held back, not because he wanted to be "better", but because he didn't want it to come down on Sam's head if he fucked it up so quickly.
Cas didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to admit that Dean was right, that his Dean really had put him in danger on purpose, really had fed him to the wolves and let him die. He didn't want to think that his Dean was actually capable of letting him go that easy. Because they had something. They needed each other. Cas had spent almost every day for the last five years at Dean's side, trying to hold him together while he broke into pieces. That meant something. That was worth something. Dean wasn't going to throw all that away, wasn't going to make him demon bait while he made one last-ditch effort to kill the Devil.
"That crazy bitch is you, Dean." Cas pushed himself off the couch and stalked over, putting himself up in Dean's space despite the fact that Dean looked ready to tear something apart. "Five years different, but it's you. We're all the same, life just hit us differently. You're the one who took on the Mark of Cain and turned yourself into this."
"I would never do that to you," Dean insisted, his jaw tight. "I'm this, and I would never do it. You tell yourself whatever helps you sleep at night." It was almost weird to know that he still had feelings. He wouldn't say that it made him warm up to demons in general, but his mind was still his own. It was just keyed up, aggressive, easier to wound, but it was his.
I would never do that to you. It stung more than it should have, like knifing Cas in the gut. He was uninjured now, but he remembered being torn apart, remembered how it felt to die, remembered wondering if Dean knew what he'd thrown them all into. Deep down, he knew Dean had done it on purpose. He was too far gone, and Cas could only keep him together for so long.
He stared Dean down, and for a few seconds he really did seem like himself, but then he broke into a humorless, sarcastic little chuckle and turned away. "I tell myself our bed's stuffed with something softer than rusty springs, that's how I sleep at night."
Dean squinted, which was actually a weird expression when his eyes had no color. He still hadn't figured out how to change them back yet, and it meant that he was harder to read for the time being. A few long moments passed, getting some distance between them before it dawned on him.
"You were fucking him."
Cas sighed heavily, the end of a laugh, and he lifted his head. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said flippantly. Another time, with another person, he'd have admitted to it. He wasn't ashamed of it, but here he was looking at Dean, knowing what every inch of his body looked like, having touched every part of him for years, and Dean had no idea. Better to minimize the damage.
"Don't bullshit me. You were, weren't you?" Dean wasn't as horrified (or frankly, as surprised) as he probably should have been. Could've been the low amount of fucks he had to give, could've been the disconnect he felt between himself and the Cas he knew, or maybe the last five years really had changed him, but it didn't seem as weird as it should have. "He was fucking around on you right near the end. And that orgy, you were waiting for him to come home. You were just being a dick, and---fuck, and you were pissing him off by being nice to me. He wasn't just cranky that the ghost of Christmas past was dogging him, he was jealous."
And Cas's Dean had every reason to be jealous. Past-Dean came in and was a glimpse of who he'd been five years ago, before Sam said yes, before Dean broke, and Cas had liked it.
Cas, however, didn't seem all that amused that Dean was giving him the rundown, and he just tucked his hands into his pockets. "Do you feel better?"
Dean didn't really know what to think or what to say once he'd finished. It was a lot more to deal with than he'd expected; he didn't want to use the L word, didn't really want a rundown of their relationship. He didn't want to think about what it meant about his own version of Cas when that one wasn't even here.
"...Whatever." He opted to shrug it off instead.
If Cas was genuinely hurt, it didn't show. He was either too high, or he'd weathered Dean's temper and moods for so long that it barely even registered. He'd deal with his feelings in private, but not in front of Dean.
So he stretched, arching his back and rolling his shoulders until he heard a satisfying pop. "I'm going to take a nap. Scream if you get caught in a devil's trap and can't get out."
"I'm sure you'd love that." The snide comment came out almost without Dean's permission, and he wasn't as sorry as he should've been.
Cas was already on his way to his bedroom, and he spun on his heel to look back at Dean. "No, Dean, what I'd love is to find you safe and unbroken. But no one's answering prayers these days." Bringing the spin full circle, he continued on his way and left.
"Yeah," Dean said, to no one in particular now that Cas had walked away. "Guess not."