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fic: tomorrow (dean/castiel, r)
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Tomorrow
Supernatural. Dean/Castiel. R.
5x04verse. Dean and Cas take a break from searching for this Camp Chitaqua they've heard so much about. ~2000 words
When Dean wakes up, Cas has taken all of the blankets and wrapped them around himself.
It's another bad habit. When Cas was an angel, he had all sorts of annoying habits, and the delicacies of the human condition have only imbued him with more. He's constantly hungry. He grumbles about food more than Dean does, and he constantly fidgets; he picks at his wounds, even after Dean yells at him about infection. Cas responds to his irritation with glaring, like a child. All the discomforts of being human are new to him and he doesn't know how to weather them with grace, so to speak.
Winter is coming and Cas gets cold more easily.
"Cas," Dean grunts, pulling at the pile of blankets. It doesn't budge. "Cas, you selfish fuck, gimme some."
Cas gives nothing, deeply asleep.
Dean yawns and gets up to kneel beside Cas, and then very carefully begins to unwrap him. He finds the edges of the blanket and slowly pulls, untucking them from its complicated folds layer by layer until he can see the angel underneath. Cas snores softly, rolled into a ball and still dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt they hoisted from the remains of a Goodwill a few towns back. He looks so unlike the warrior of god he claimed to be when Dean first met him, and it makes Dean's heart ache with something he doesn't want to examine.
Dean settles down next to him, lying close, and his presence seems to reach through Cas's subconscious because Cas unfolds himself and turns to curl against Dean. A hand rests on Dean's stomach, and Dean also turns to face him, fitting them together, then he gathers the blankets around them, tight and warm as he can. Dean closes his eyes with the tickle of Cas's hair against his cheek, and then he goes back to sleep.
+
The house they are in has long been abandoned. Dean could have been able to tell by the thick layer of dust, but mostly he can tell by the dried bloodstains on the floor and the broken window in the front hall. There are leaves blown in all over the place.
"We'll stay here for now," Dean announced. Cas had already wandered into the living room, looking around at the remains of someone else's life - the titles on the bookshelf, the matryoshka dolls on the mantle, the dead flowers in the vase. He wiped the grime off the mirror over the fireplace and frowned at what he saw.
That was three days - four days? - ago, and Dean is still saying they'll take off first next thing morning, for real this time. Stories about this so-called Camp Chitaqua have been sustaining them on the road; a carrot at the end of a stick, taking on mythic proportions. A promised land of running water and organized militias and hot food. The plan is to get there before the first snowfall, but this house in the woods, soft corner of the earth tucked away from civilization - and therefore from the downfall of civilization - is so very hard to leave.
Dean wakes up as the sun goes down, and he is alone in bed.
He rubs his eyes as he shuffles out of the bedroom and to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He passes framed cross-stitching of flowers on the wall and a photograph of a girl in graduation robes, grinning at the camera. He's named her Rose. Looks like a Rose. In his mind, Rose went to some Ivy League university and majored in apocalypse survival, so she's probably doing okay right now, somewhere out there. There have to be people out there who are okay. There have to be.
The bathroom door is ajar and Cas is already in it, leaning against the sink and frowning at his reflection. He looks like shit. Hell, they both look like shit. Sallow skin, bags under their eyes, new scars. Hair grown long and hands gone twitchy.
"Need to piss," Dean mumbles, unzipping in front of the toilet.
"Are humans always like this?" Cas wonders aloud.
"What, pissing?"
"No." He sounds frustrated. Dean steals a sidelong glance, and Cas looks halfway between anger and giving up. "Yes. No, that's just part of it. Part of this." He looks at his hands like they offend him.
This again.
Dean flushes or tries to, forgetting that the water doesn't work. Water rarely works anywhere. "Don't knock it 'til you've tried it."
"I am," Cas snaps. "Don't be inane. I have no choice but to try it."
Dean wipes his hands on his jeans and catches Cas's eyes in the mirror. The blue of his irises seems too pale these days, washed out and sickly, unless that's just the approaching winter in the air. It leeches the color from everything. You have to fight twice as hard to stay present, to stay safe. You have to remind yourself that there are reasons to hang on.
Dean says, "Try again."
+
"We'll stay here for now," Dean said that first day, and then he shuffled into the first bedroom he saw and collapsed on the bed. The next time he opened his eyes, it was next morning.
On the road, they don't sleep for more than a few hours at a time. He couldn't remember the last time he slept so long or so well, and then he immediately swore because he hadn't set any salt lines or devil's traps before he passed out, hadn't checked to secure the doors and windows, and he could've died. They both could've died, god fucking damn it.
"It's fine," Cas said.
Cas was slumped in a wicker chair across the room, legs stretched out and fingers interlaced on his stomach. He looked at Dean with a bleary kind of watchfulness, like he too just woke up, probably when Dean yelled 'fuck'.
"I secured the perimeters," Cas continued. "As much as they could be secured."
"Did you sleep there all night?" Dean asked, and yes, of course he did. There was probably at least one more bedroom in this house and that couch downstairs looked perfectly serviceable, but the guy chose to bunk up here with him in a chair that looked like it went for three dollars at a garage sale.
Dean watched Cas watching him and weighed various scenarios in his mind, measured the shape of past actions with the ache of the here and now. This thing between them was still new, fragile with the need for refuge and rarefied with the kind of clarity that comes with last chances and things left unsaid.
Dean said, "Cas."
"What?"
Every time they fell into this, it still felt like one of them might break apart.
Dean said, "C'mere."
Cas rose from the chair and approached the bed, then propped his knee hesitantly on the edge of the mattress. Dean knew it wasn't like Cas couldn't read the roughness in his voice, and it wasn't like Cas didn't want it himself, but Cas never made the first move. He always approached Dean carefully, as if approaching a skittish animal poised for flight, which was stupid. Where would Dean go? Where would he want to go? Cas was beginning to shake off several millenia's worth of being a soldier, but in this one thing he still wanted to be beckoned and called.
Dean said, "C'mere," again, and Cas crawled over Dean's body and let Dean pull him down for a kiss.
The first time they did this, Dean tried to talk him through it, but Cas was inexperienced and had superhuman strength, which was a painful combination. When Cas saw that he had hurt Dean, he was immediately remorseful, and from then on it took a fair amount of commanding to get across that gentleness was the last thing Dean wanted. Cas was careful, but Dean didn't need this kind of hesitation and he didn't want this kind of tenderness. Dean didn't have the patience to let others be so gentle with him, not anymore.
When they got their shirts off, he ran his fingers over Cas's ribs, how sharply they were outlined against his skin. Cas was so warm; his body was always so warm, and maybe it was whatever remnants of grace he still had in there, keeping mortality at bay. Dean wanted to wrap himself around that heat, keep it from guttering out, keep himself warm too, but instead he dug his fingers into the sheets as he commanded harder through gritted teeth, and Cas obliged. Harder, he said, and Cas pushed down on the small of Dean's back and angled his thrusts until Dean said nothing but a stream of breathless cursing and then a wordless moan as the orgasm shuddered through him.
Cas kept fucking him, and Dean relished the hunger of his movements. His body didn't find it pleasurable anymore at this point, but Dean wanted it anyway, wanted this; he liked the way this would leave bruises later, and the way Cas came, slowing his thrusts but thrusting harder, so that every roll of his hips had Dean crying out. It was its own kind of pleasure.
Through all this, Cas stayed silent. He never made a sound, except at the end when they were spent and tangled around each other, reluctant to leave the glow of the post-coital haze. Cas said, "Dean," very softly, like a prayer. It was the only thing he said that sounded like a prayer anymore.
+
There's canned food in the cupboards, bags of chips and pretzels in the pantry, and a few liter bottles of soda in the broken fridge, along with a new ecosystem growing out of what used to be potato salad or possibly meatloaf. They move the soda to the pantry. Ecosystem aside, Dean figures the food can last them two more days, though what they should really do is save it all. They should put the food in the trunk of the Impala where they keep everything important and drive off into the sunset, but it's so easy to stay still after months of running on fumes and losing more battles than they win.
"Cream of chicken," Cas says, holding up the can in his left hand, then holds up the can in his right. "Cream of mushroom."
Dean says, "You pick."
They eat dinner in the living room with their guns on the table and their minds on Camp Chitaqua. From the rumors, Cas thinks it could be in Kentucky but Dean's pretty sure it should be closer to the coast than that. Didn't that guy back in Cedar Rapids say it wasn't that far from I-95? One thing's sure: they've got a ways to go. They can't just stay here.
"You keep saying that," Cas says. His spoon makes nails-on-chalkboard noises as he scrapes the bowl.
"I mean it this time," Dean says, and if Cas had replied that Dean keeps saying that too, he wouldn't be wrong, but Cas doesn't say anything. Instead he just takes their bowls and puts them in the sink, and Dean hears the creak of the steps as Cas goes upstairs.
Dean stays downstairs for a while, shadowboxing with his thoughts and indulging in whatever's left in his flask. There are so many things he can't escape, and solitude dredges up every last one of them. Dean doesn't fight it, and when he's had enough of missing Sam and wondering if he should say yes to Michael, he pushes himself to his feet and goes upstairs too.
They'll leave tomorrow. For real this time.
The door to their bedroom is ajar, and Cas is already curled up under the covers, breathing too shallowly to be asleep. Dean toes off his boots, then shrugs off his jacket as he pads to the bed.
Tomorrow, for sure.
ricketyhands as part of the dc_summerlovin challenge, but um, I accidentally autumnlovin'd? I hope you like it, ricketyhands! Thank you to
switchbladesis for betareading.Tomorrow
Supernatural. Dean/Castiel. R.
5x04verse. Dean and Cas take a break from searching for this Camp Chitaqua they've heard so much about. ~2000 words
When Dean wakes up, Cas has taken all of the blankets and wrapped them around himself.
It's another bad habit. When Cas was an angel, he had all sorts of annoying habits, and the delicacies of the human condition have only imbued him with more. He's constantly hungry. He grumbles about food more than Dean does, and he constantly fidgets; he picks at his wounds, even after Dean yells at him about infection. Cas responds to his irritation with glaring, like a child. All the discomforts of being human are new to him and he doesn't know how to weather them with grace, so to speak.
Winter is coming and Cas gets cold more easily.
"Cas," Dean grunts, pulling at the pile of blankets. It doesn't budge. "Cas, you selfish fuck, gimme some."
Cas gives nothing, deeply asleep.
Dean yawns and gets up to kneel beside Cas, and then very carefully begins to unwrap him. He finds the edges of the blanket and slowly pulls, untucking them from its complicated folds layer by layer until he can see the angel underneath. Cas snores softly, rolled into a ball and still dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt they hoisted from the remains of a Goodwill a few towns back. He looks so unlike the warrior of god he claimed to be when Dean first met him, and it makes Dean's heart ache with something he doesn't want to examine.
Dean settles down next to him, lying close, and his presence seems to reach through Cas's subconscious because Cas unfolds himself and turns to curl against Dean. A hand rests on Dean's stomach, and Dean also turns to face him, fitting them together, then he gathers the blankets around them, tight and warm as he can. Dean closes his eyes with the tickle of Cas's hair against his cheek, and then he goes back to sleep.
+
The house they are in has long been abandoned. Dean could have been able to tell by the thick layer of dust, but mostly he can tell by the dried bloodstains on the floor and the broken window in the front hall. There are leaves blown in all over the place.
"We'll stay here for now," Dean announced. Cas had already wandered into the living room, looking around at the remains of someone else's life - the titles on the bookshelf, the matryoshka dolls on the mantle, the dead flowers in the vase. He wiped the grime off the mirror over the fireplace and frowned at what he saw.
That was three days - four days? - ago, and Dean is still saying they'll take off first next thing morning, for real this time. Stories about this so-called Camp Chitaqua have been sustaining them on the road; a carrot at the end of a stick, taking on mythic proportions. A promised land of running water and organized militias and hot food. The plan is to get there before the first snowfall, but this house in the woods, soft corner of the earth tucked away from civilization - and therefore from the downfall of civilization - is so very hard to leave.
Dean wakes up as the sun goes down, and he is alone in bed.
He rubs his eyes as he shuffles out of the bedroom and to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He passes framed cross-stitching of flowers on the wall and a photograph of a girl in graduation robes, grinning at the camera. He's named her Rose. Looks like a Rose. In his mind, Rose went to some Ivy League university and majored in apocalypse survival, so she's probably doing okay right now, somewhere out there. There have to be people out there who are okay. There have to be.
The bathroom door is ajar and Cas is already in it, leaning against the sink and frowning at his reflection. He looks like shit. Hell, they both look like shit. Sallow skin, bags under their eyes, new scars. Hair grown long and hands gone twitchy.
"Need to piss," Dean mumbles, unzipping in front of the toilet.
"Are humans always like this?" Cas wonders aloud.
"What, pissing?"
"No." He sounds frustrated. Dean steals a sidelong glance, and Cas looks halfway between anger and giving up. "Yes. No, that's just part of it. Part of this." He looks at his hands like they offend him.
This again.
Dean flushes or tries to, forgetting that the water doesn't work. Water rarely works anywhere. "Don't knock it 'til you've tried it."
"I am," Cas snaps. "Don't be inane. I have no choice but to try it."
Dean wipes his hands on his jeans and catches Cas's eyes in the mirror. The blue of his irises seems too pale these days, washed out and sickly, unless that's just the approaching winter in the air. It leeches the color from everything. You have to fight twice as hard to stay present, to stay safe. You have to remind yourself that there are reasons to hang on.
Dean says, "Try again."
+
"We'll stay here for now," Dean said that first day, and then he shuffled into the first bedroom he saw and collapsed on the bed. The next time he opened his eyes, it was next morning.
On the road, they don't sleep for more than a few hours at a time. He couldn't remember the last time he slept so long or so well, and then he immediately swore because he hadn't set any salt lines or devil's traps before he passed out, hadn't checked to secure the doors and windows, and he could've died. They both could've died, god fucking damn it.
"It's fine," Cas said.
Cas was slumped in a wicker chair across the room, legs stretched out and fingers interlaced on his stomach. He looked at Dean with a bleary kind of watchfulness, like he too just woke up, probably when Dean yelled 'fuck'.
"I secured the perimeters," Cas continued. "As much as they could be secured."
"Did you sleep there all night?" Dean asked, and yes, of course he did. There was probably at least one more bedroom in this house and that couch downstairs looked perfectly serviceable, but the guy chose to bunk up here with him in a chair that looked like it went for three dollars at a garage sale.
Dean watched Cas watching him and weighed various scenarios in his mind, measured the shape of past actions with the ache of the here and now. This thing between them was still new, fragile with the need for refuge and rarefied with the kind of clarity that comes with last chances and things left unsaid.
Dean said, "Cas."
"What?"
Every time they fell into this, it still felt like one of them might break apart.
Dean said, "C'mere."
Cas rose from the chair and approached the bed, then propped his knee hesitantly on the edge of the mattress. Dean knew it wasn't like Cas couldn't read the roughness in his voice, and it wasn't like Cas didn't want it himself, but Cas never made the first move. He always approached Dean carefully, as if approaching a skittish animal poised for flight, which was stupid. Where would Dean go? Where would he want to go? Cas was beginning to shake off several millenia's worth of being a soldier, but in this one thing he still wanted to be beckoned and called.
Dean said, "C'mere," again, and Cas crawled over Dean's body and let Dean pull him down for a kiss.
The first time they did this, Dean tried to talk him through it, but Cas was inexperienced and had superhuman strength, which was a painful combination. When Cas saw that he had hurt Dean, he was immediately remorseful, and from then on it took a fair amount of commanding to get across that gentleness was the last thing Dean wanted. Cas was careful, but Dean didn't need this kind of hesitation and he didn't want this kind of tenderness. Dean didn't have the patience to let others be so gentle with him, not anymore.
When they got their shirts off, he ran his fingers over Cas's ribs, how sharply they were outlined against his skin. Cas was so warm; his body was always so warm, and maybe it was whatever remnants of grace he still had in there, keeping mortality at bay. Dean wanted to wrap himself around that heat, keep it from guttering out, keep himself warm too, but instead he dug his fingers into the sheets as he commanded harder through gritted teeth, and Cas obliged. Harder, he said, and Cas pushed down on the small of Dean's back and angled his thrusts until Dean said nothing but a stream of breathless cursing and then a wordless moan as the orgasm shuddered through him.
Cas kept fucking him, and Dean relished the hunger of his movements. His body didn't find it pleasurable anymore at this point, but Dean wanted it anyway, wanted this; he liked the way this would leave bruises later, and the way Cas came, slowing his thrusts but thrusting harder, so that every roll of his hips had Dean crying out. It was its own kind of pleasure.
Through all this, Cas stayed silent. He never made a sound, except at the end when they were spent and tangled around each other, reluctant to leave the glow of the post-coital haze. Cas said, "Dean," very softly, like a prayer. It was the only thing he said that sounded like a prayer anymore.
+
There's canned food in the cupboards, bags of chips and pretzels in the pantry, and a few liter bottles of soda in the broken fridge, along with a new ecosystem growing out of what used to be potato salad or possibly meatloaf. They move the soda to the pantry. Ecosystem aside, Dean figures the food can last them two more days, though what they should really do is save it all. They should put the food in the trunk of the Impala where they keep everything important and drive off into the sunset, but it's so easy to stay still after months of running on fumes and losing more battles than they win.
"Cream of chicken," Cas says, holding up the can in his left hand, then holds up the can in his right. "Cream of mushroom."
Dean says, "You pick."
They eat dinner in the living room with their guns on the table and their minds on Camp Chitaqua. From the rumors, Cas thinks it could be in Kentucky but Dean's pretty sure it should be closer to the coast than that. Didn't that guy back in Cedar Rapids say it wasn't that far from I-95? One thing's sure: they've got a ways to go. They can't just stay here.
"You keep saying that," Cas says. His spoon makes nails-on-chalkboard noises as he scrapes the bowl.
"I mean it this time," Dean says, and if Cas had replied that Dean keeps saying that too, he wouldn't be wrong, but Cas doesn't say anything. Instead he just takes their bowls and puts them in the sink, and Dean hears the creak of the steps as Cas goes upstairs.
Dean stays downstairs for a while, shadowboxing with his thoughts and indulging in whatever's left in his flask. There are so many things he can't escape, and solitude dredges up every last one of them. Dean doesn't fight it, and when he's had enough of missing Sam and wondering if he should say yes to Michael, he pushes himself to his feet and goes upstairs too.
They'll leave tomorrow. For real this time.
The door to their bedroom is ajar, and Cas is already curled up under the covers, breathing too shallowly to be asleep. Dean toes off his boots, then shrugs off his jacket as he pads to the bed.
Tomorrow, for sure.