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It’s almost six weeks after that hospital phone call that Dean finally sees Cas again. He’s been mentally preparing himself that Cas isn’t going to look the same: he’s human now (as if the body will be physically warped from the enormity of that transition), but he’s also been held captive by angels. Dean has tried hard to stop himself from picturing what they might be doing to him. He’s kept the predominant vision in his mind of a Cas who is alive.
And he isn’t wrong.
Cas stares up at him and Sam and Charlie (who’s breathing heavily, shakily, right by his ear). His blue eyes are a washed out hue, not even brightened by the contrast of the dull iron bars he’s peering through. The ex-angel is crouched in what looks like a huge kennel for one of those short-haired, bad-tempered type dogs. A Rottweiler or Great Dane. There’s a plastic water bottle with a small tube tied with wire to the top of the cage. Something a hamster or parrot would sip from. Patches of beige trench coat and white shirt fabric are stuck so tightly with the grime all over Cas’ body that it looks like his clothes have melted into his skin.
Dean almost topples the cage over in his frantic attempt to get Cas out of there.
Charlie is trying her best not to cry when she slips an arm around Cas’ waist to steady him as he crawls out. Dean figures he probably hasn’t walked in weeks; he’s trying to stand as firm and proud as he can, but his ankles are protesting the reality of the situation.
All three of them end up supporting him in a strange sideways gait back to the car, like some fucked-up three-legged race.
Sam grabs a water bottle and a towel and Dean skims his hands over Cas’ body, looking for open wounds or infected lesions. He’s so severely underweight that Dean is afraid to press on his protruding bones and hurt him. Dean exhales slightly when he finds no noticeable injuries (bruises litter his body like weeds in a garden, but he’s not bleeding anywhere). They can skip a stop at the hospital and take him straight back to the Bunker. Back home.
Charlie sits in the backseat and unwraps a piece of cold French toast from the diner that morning and rips off small pieces to give Cas. Something Sam said about not letting him eat or drink too much at first or it’ll be a shock to his system. Cas figures each morsel of bread between his dirty fingertips before slowly pushing it between his teeth.
The angels who did this are nowhere to be seen. Dean temporarily puts out the fire in his chest that’s burning for justice. They’ll find the bastards when Cas is strong enough to eviscerate them with his own two hands.
+
Charlie makes chicken soup from scratch, with a whole real chicken. Dean is almost fascinated to watch her pull the rubbery skin off the bulb-shaped legs and crack the ribcage open with a knife. Sam adds cilantro, diced potatoes, carrots and celery to the stock. Dean gazes at the magical process for a few moments longer before going to see if Cas is finished his shower.
Cas is sitting on the edge of the bed in the infirmary, wearing just his boxers, elbows on his knees.
Dean tries hard not to react visibly to the sight of his emaciated body. Cas’ ribs stick out from under his skin like metal wires. His toes look more like a Halloween costume fixture than actual toes. There’s no amount of loose fabric from oversized t shirts and sweat pants that can hide the way his collarbone juts out or the sunken hollows around his eyes.
He feels so small when Dean helps him pull a sweater over his head. Like Dean could move too brusquely and his entire skeleton would collapse. “I’m sorry,” Dean murmurs over the swish of knitted strands.
Cas pulls the sweater sleeves over his wrists and then leans into Dean. His elbows burrow into Dean’s belly like the hilt of a sword ramming into his gut. (It’s hard to breathe.) Dean hugs him closer anyways.
They all sit and watch him try the chicken soup. Like it’s some potion that will cure all, the way storybook grandmothers always promised it would.
Cas grimaces and holds his nose while slurping the first spoonful. Charlie laughs softly and tells him its just smoke from the heat. It won’t hurt him. He doesn’t look very appeased but he lowers his hand for the next sip. His expression relaxes slightly and he says he likes the smell of the cilantro. Sam smiles hopefully.
Then Cas’ lips suddenly curl upwards and his eyes wide in horror. Before Dean can ask why he’s shoving back the chair and spitting something out on the table before stumbling backwards. His knees are knocking into each other hard, hands fumbling frantically against the wall he’s sliding down.
The three of them jump up at the same time. Charlie grabs the bowl, exclaiming how there’s nothing wrong with it. Sam goes to Cas’ side to help steady him and Dean stares at the offending thing sitting in a pool of thick saliva next to the spoon.
It’s just a chicken bone.
+
Cas keeps biting his lower lip. Dean doesn’t know if it’s a new habit or not (he never got to see human Cas before the weeks of torture). He tells Cas to stop whenever he sees it, but it clearly happens when he’s not around, and frequently, because Cas’ lip is starting to look like a discolored strip of raw meat and dark blood stains.
Charlie buys different flavors of lip balm online and has Cas try each one to find the kind he likes.
“Put it on whenever you feel like biting your lips,” she says, buying several extra tubes of Burt’s Bees so he can put one in each pocket of his clothes.
She keeps buying things for him. She tells Dean she doesn’t know what it’s like to be human for the first time, but it’s gotta require lots of things you never needed before. Dean doesn’t think miniature hand sanitizers, waterproof phone covers, or a matching pillowcase and duvet set is going to help Cas forget that he was tortured for weeks by his own siblings, but he lets her do it anyways.
Sam reads books on dieting and How to Help Your Ex-Angel With a Very Picky Appetite Gain Weight.
Foods Cas refuses to eat include chicken wings, hamburgers, hamburgers, hot dogs, and hamburgers.
Dean tries not to be frustrated with Cas. It’s only been a few weeks. A few weeks of watching at Cas’ haunted figure wobbling around the Bunker and knowing there’s nothing he can do to fix it. He can’t even cook for him, which is normally his winning move in mother-henning the infirm back to life.
Foods Cas likes to eat includes cereal, milk, and bread. Chocolate bars and French fries were soundly rejected.
Dean wonders if part of the angel’s torture was to give Cas the best fast food ever so he’d develop an aversion to it for the rest of his life.
+
By the time Cas joins them for a hunt for the first time he’s starting to look a little less ghostly. He still isn’t gaining weight and stamina at the speed Dean wishes he was. At least his cheekbones are less sharp and his neck has stopped looking like a series of dark valleys. Sam claims his homemade hummus has worked wonders, and Charlie sites the electric hand massage ball she got for him. Dean thinks that the half-burgers Cas has started to reluctantly eat are the real x factor here.
Until he catches sight of Cas vomiting next to the dumpsters, in the middle of having lunch at a diner.
There’s two ways to vomit: one, arm clenched around the stomach, body lurching with every hurl, is the kind when your body is trying to rid itself of poison. Two, carefully positioned so as not to sully your clothes, neat wiping around the mouth with a prepared napkin, is when you’ve decided you want something out of your body. And you don’t want anyone else to know that.
What Cas is doing falls into the latter. They ordered burgers and fries. Nothing that would warrant such a fast and immediate digestive reaction.
Cas rinses his mouth with a small water bottle from his pocket and looks around before heading inside. He’s done this before.
Dean realizes, with a sick thud in his stomach, that Cas must be eating the burgers to appease him. To make Dean stop worrying about him. (What other foods does Cas vomit up? The organic granola? The waffles with jam?) He doesn’t understand why. He’s had his own loss of appetite after Hell, after Purgatory, but he knew that he needed to eat to survive. Surely Cas must understand that.
There’s still half a plate of lunch left for Dean but he can’t stomach it anymore. He goes and waits in the car instead of joining the rest of them in the diner. He watches Sam and Charlie and Cas laughing and gesturing and doesn’t know how to tell them, how to break a dark cloud over their tenuously cleared skies. Cas isn’t getting better; he’s just getting smarter about hiding it.
Sam and Charlie are talking to the manager when Cas comes out of the diner first. He slides into the passenger seat and pulls out a tube of lip balm. He smears a generous circle around his lips and then hands it to Dean.
“Sam said she’d give me twenty dollars if I got you to put it on,” Cas says, eyes solemn but bright.
Dean gives him a small laugh and reluctantly takes the tube. They’ve been trying to add some levity to the rituals of care, to make Cas feel like being fragile isn’t a burden and can be as much a part of life as sleeping, showering, and shaving.
“Fine, better take a picture for evidence then, cuz-” he pauses, throat catching slightly. He’s uncapped the lip balm and is staring at the tube that’s stained with blood all along rim. Cas is still biting his lips.
He looks up at Cas, who is now holding his phone in front of his face. Under the black line of the phone Dean can see his jaw working minutely.
Dean traces the blood-smeared balm over his own lips and manages a weak grin for Cas to snap the photo and collect his twenty dollars. He wipes it off with the back of his hand the minute Cas turns away.
+
They go after another lead on Metatron and it ends up being a trap. Metatron seems to find entertainment from toying with them. Last time it was a room set up like a prom scene from a straight-to-dvd chick flick movie: gaudy streamers, plastic bowls of stale chips, handmade sign proclaiming “Welcome to Heaven on Earth.”
This time it’s a barbecue. A full grill set up, ribs slathered in pepper sauce and gray smoke billowing from hot charcoals. There’s a table with a checkered cloth beside and red plastic cups of warm beer.
Dean stuffs the angel blade into the back of his pocket and rolls his eyes. “What a fucking dick,” he sighs. “Let’s get out of here, Cas.”
(He stops.) “Cas?”
Cas is backpedaling away furiously, like a tiger has just appeared from the mist. The ex-angel has one hand clamped over his mouth, bulging eyes peering over the squeeze of his fingers. His elbows ram into the wall as he stumbles further back. Then he’s sliding down to the ground, legs flopping out from under him. He’s shaking so violently that his shoulders knock into Dean’s flailing hands like the head of a hammer.
Dean drags him out of the room and into the car. They’ve driven for over five miles before Cas finally stops trembling.
Maybe the room was poisoned with toxic gas. Dean tries to figure it out in his mind and nothing makes sense. Because Cas is just as human as him and he didn’t feel anything wrong being in there.
(All he gets for questioning Cas is a small, wispy, “he knows.”)
Cas’ face is still pinched in breathless terror and he’s huddled in his seat like something is going to attack him. Dean forgoes the plan to drive through the night and stops at the nearest motel. At this hour all he can find for dinner are cold ham sandwiches from the Gas n Sip.
“Sorry,” he says around a mouthful. “I know this tastes like ass.”
Cas doesn’t reply. He doesn’t make eye contact with him for the rest of the evening.
That night Dean lies on the hard mattress of the ratty room and listens the gasping, guttural sounds of Cas vomiting in the bathroom.
+
“Eating disorders can be part of…PTSD. It’s, um, actually not uncommon.” Sam begins. Charlie is nodding already. Dean sighs. They’re all sitting in his room while Cas is doing his laundry (he’s particular about handwashing his shirts and socks). They chose this time to discuss it so he wouldn’t overhear them.
“Can he see someone who can help him, like a diet specialist or trauma therapist?” Charlie asks.
Dean stares at her pointedly. “Sure. There’s probably a directory for counselors of ex-angels in the phone book.”
“I’m just-” she blows out a stream of air. “I’m just-we don’t know how to deal with this, Dean. I don’t. Do you?” Her question is pointed at both Sam and Dean, who shake their heads at the same time.
Sam fumbles with the laptop on his knees. “I’ve been trying to study some stuff, but without knowing what caused it-the trigger incident-it’s hard to know what-um-”
“Do you want to interrogate him? Cuz I sure don’t.” Dean crosses his arms.
Charlie scrunches up her nose. “Look, I don’t know much about angels. Could it be biological? Maybe they just aren’t wired to eat.”
Dean wants to say yes. It’d be simpler then. A conversation they could have openly, without guilt or the deep lacerations of unhealed wounds. But he’s seen the way Cas is, and he’s seen similar behavior in his brother and himself when they got back from Hell. It’s not about biology. It’s a coping mechanism. Coping with what, he doesn’t know.
Metatron and the trap and Cas’ trembling confession of “he knows” comes back to him.
“No,” he says quietly. “It’s…I’m pretty sure it’s from what they did to him.”
The worst part is that he’s scared shitless of finding out exactly what Cas endured. (It’s a selfish fear, he knows. It scares him anyways.)
+
Dean’s passing by the library where Charlie and Cas are eating yogurt bowls. Charlie says they’re called “smoothie bowls” and Dean doesn’t see the point of eating a smoothie in a slower way. (straws exist for a reason.) Whatever the name Cas seems to like them with the same intensity that he seems to hate Dean’s burgers. He’s watching Dean move across the room now, eyebrows drawn and nose twitching. Like the slightly seared patty and three squirts of ketchup have personally wronged him.
Dean pauses to return the stare and Cas averts his gaze quickly. His throat pulses as if suppressing a gag.
“Hey.” Charlie’s voice draws Cas’ attention to her. She ghosts a finger over his lower lip. “Are those teeth marks?”
Cas dips the spoon back in the bowl, folding thick creamy white over purple blueberry jam.
“Cas.” Her voice tightens with concern. “Is the chapstick not working? I can get you a different flavor.”
Dean moves slightly further down the hall, out of sight from them but where he can still see Cas. Maybe he’ll open up to Charlie. Maybe it’s easier to unsheathe your soul to someone you know less, rather than the opposite.
Charlie puts a hand on his wrist. “Cas. You know you can talk about it, if you want. To me, or any of us.”
Cas lets go of the spoon. The silver handle winks before sliding down under the smoothie waves. “Charlie, I-”
Dean holds his breath.
The ex-angel puts his elbows on the table and wrings his hands together. His teeth tuck back the corner of his lip and Charlie thumbs at his chin, gently pulling it back out.
“I can’t…” he closes his eyes for a second. “Charlie, I can’t tell you without fracturing.”
It takes a few seconds for her to reply. “You mean like, falling apart? That’s okay, you know. No one’s put together all the time. Especially not anyone under this roof,” she laughs. “We just glue back on all our pieces on every morning.”
“Yes, but I do believe I have some say in how and when I shatter.” He plucks the spoon from the depths of the bowl, yogurt-smeared and all, and fishes up another mouthful of blueberry and oats. “I won’t be that today. I won’t.”
Tears suddenly burn behind Dean’s eyes and he quickly folds himself around the corner of the hallway. The plate in his hand is shaking, the burger buns sliding off the slick greasy meat, and he has to bite down on his lip to silence his rapid breathing. Between trying to keep himself together and not drop his fucking lunch in the middle of the hall he wonders how long Cas is determined to hold the shards of himself as a whole (and what’s going to happen when the spiderweb glass finally splinters?)
+
They don’t realize that it’s angels. There’d been reports of children going missing; Dean had guessed demons, Sam went with ghouls, and Charlie and Cas both insisted on shifters. Angels usually go for something more theatrical, more religious than teenagers disappearing from an abandoned cabin in the woods.
Charlie and Sam tracked the last missing girl to a warehouse near a construction site on the outskirts of the town. Cas and Dean are meant to go in from the front, the other two from the back. Dean’s selected the threat elimination mission for his duo, with retrieve and rescue for his brother and Charlie.
The second Dean steps into the warehouse he realizes it’s a trap. His mind explains it to him in slow-motion, like a videotape showing footage on delay. His arms are being pinned behind him and his weapons ripped off and thrown aside and a blade nestled under his throat and there’s the unmistakable rigid posture of another angel at the right. Dean’s voice finally catches up to the action and he releases a breathless “Cas, don’t-” at the exact moment that Cas enters the room.
The other angel releases his jaw in a slow, wide smile.
Cas retreats immediately. Not bodily-he’s still standing there, blade raised in his right hand, one foot in front of the other-but his shoulders shrivel up and his entire face contracts like a pressure ball being squeezed. His knees wobble and he sways slightly, the same way he did in Metatron’s trap. In the diner after vomiting. When he found the bone in the chicken soup.
“Cas-ti-el,” the angel hums softly and Cas flinches like he’s been cut.
“Malachi. You’ve been abducting children,” Cas spits out. “For vessels? Children?”
“Not for vessels. You really are a dupe.” Malachi cracks his neck from side to side. “To get your attention, of course. And you came, didn’t you? Looks like the doggie misses his master.”
Dean opens his mouth to fire a shotgun’s worth of swears and bad nicknames, only to have the angel behind him ram a fist into his gut. His lungs scream fire and he doubles over, wheezing and drooling over his own chin.
“Don’t hurt him,” he hears Cas say.
“Oh, but I will. Unless you come along quietly.” Dean raises his head to see Malachi hooking a finger in Cas’ direction and beckoning. “I’ll do it to him otherwise. I’m sure he’ll enjoy the same services we offered you.”
“Cas, don’t-” Dean chokes out before another blow connects against his ribcage. He tastes blood and stars in his mouth.
“Dean. Shut up.” At first he thinks Malachi is the one who’s talking. The way it sounds so flat, so emotionless. Then he pulls himself up and realizes that Cas is one who called his name like that, the way you might address a piece of furniture.
Cas has become granite. His expression has changed to one of absolute immovability. (It’s somehow more terrifying than the petrified look of fear he had on before.) He can tell that Cas has decided to do something, but what that is he doesn’t know, and the cold, slow crawl of sweat down his spine already tells him that it’s going to be awful.
Cas walks over calmly and picks up Dean’s scattered gun from the floor.
Malachi smiles toothlessly. “You can’t hurt me with that.”
Cas gives him a dispassionate glance. “I know.” He pulls the hammer back and lifts the muzzle to rest right below his chin.
Dean starts shouting even before he gets a third and fourth punch in the stomach. He doesn’t have the air to reach Cas but he’s opening and closing his mouth anyways, working little aborted pants of desperation to gasp out stop stop cas no don’t no-
“You’ll never do that to me again,” Cas says evenly, looking at Malachi. “Even you don’t have the power to reassemble the pieces of my brain once I blow them out.”
Dean wrenches back and forth in his captor’s grip, burning bracelets of red around his wrists, and still he pulls. Malachi marches over and kicks Dean’s ankle, toppling him to the ground, then slams a foot over his chest before he can get up.
“I’ll kill him,” Malachi barks, but there’s a hesitancy in his voice. (He doesn’t want Dean, after all. He wants Cas.)
Cas blinks. He’s trying not to look at Dean. His jaw tightens, imperceptibly. “You will never do it again,” he repeats, raising a finger to the trigger. “I’ll die first.”
Dean is going to watch Cas blow his brains out. He feels like the floor is suffocating him, entombing him. He can’t breathe or move or think beyond the fact that the wall he’s currently gazing at upside down is going to be splattered with chunks of his best friend’s brain in a matter of seconds.
Then God shows up in the form of Dean’s kid brother and his redheaded sister (basically).
Heat, white and sizzling, washes over his face as Malachi roars above him with the tip of a blade protruding from his chest. Sam pulls it out in one deft motion and then gives Dean an arm to grab and pull himself up. Dean looks for Cas first--he’s at Charlie’s side, the gun that was in his hand now lying on the floor again--and then Dean takes the blade from Sam’s hand and goes after the other angel. Probably just an unimportant goon, but Dean is too full of rage right now not to tackle the fleeing angel to the ground and drive a blade through her skull. He didn’t get to carve whimpers out of Malachi; he didn’t get to draw revenge in red lines over that disgusting, smirking face. He stabs the dead angel one more time for good measure before shoving the corpse away.
“Cas,” Dean finally exhales, turning around. “Cas-god, jesus fucking-” he stops when Charlie silences him with a look. Cas is still rooted in the exact same place he was before. The same spot where he planned to put a bullet through his head. His eyes are glassy and he’s clearly not been responding to Charlie’s attempts to pull him away.
“Cas?” Dean doesn’t know if he was just bluffing as a distraction strategy, or if he really intended to pull the trigger. The terrible truth is Dean knows that someone can brutalize and violate you so excruciatingly that you made a promise to yourself if there was ever a chance of it happening again, you’d kill yourself first. No hesitation. He knows the feeling, and it’s regurgitating through him now like a cold river of dread.
Cas lurches slightly and then he stumbles forward. Sam and Charlie flank him on either sides, hands hovering to catch him if he falls, and instead Cas quickens his pace. He stomps over to Dean, yanks the angel blade from his hand, and then drops down in front of Malachi’s body.
The squelching sound of the blade being sucked in and out of flesh jolts Dean into action.
“Cas, Cas.” He hooks his arms under Cas’ and drags him backward. “He’s dead, I swear, he’ll never hurt you again. None of them will.”
Cas squirms out of his grip and charges over to the body again. He goes to his knees, right beside the line of its chest. Then he’s raising the blade in both hands and bringing it down so hard that there are specks of skin and charred black blood flying everywhere.
Dean moves to stop him when Sam puts a hand to his chest.
What? Dean raises his eyebrows irritably.
Sam’s brow furrows. I don’t know, his expression says. But also, maybe he needs this.
“Guys?” Charlie whispers at his right and Dean gestures weakly with his hand. Maybe Cas does need this.
Cas is stabbing furiously, eyes wide and mouth twisted in a knot. Dean’s actually never seen the inside of a dead angel vessel before. There’s no flowing blood-the organs come spilling out in black, deformed lumps and there’s crumbs of ash and soot all over the place. Cas’ face is poka-dotted with black flecks, then he reaches for the limp arm and starts sawing off the fingers, one at a time.
Dean looks away briefly. (He’s had his own ways of letting loose pent up anger but he’s never diced up a dead guy’s fingers like mincing meat for a pie.)
“I didn’t know-I didn’t know the body could get hungry so rapidly.” Cas is talking. Dean turns back to face him. Cas is still there on his knees, blade whipping through the air, Malachi’s thumb and forefinger being sliced rapid succession. “They had me and they didn’t give me any food and I thought I could survive. I didn’t know-the loss of composure. The sleepless. The insanity. The hunger was all I could think of.”
Dean sinks slowly to the ground, crossing his legs to sit. Sam and Charlie follow suit. Cas doesn’t react at all. Dean wonders if he even realizes that he’s speaking aloud.
“The first time they gave the meat to me, all I wanted was for the hunger to end. They cut off my fingers days before to stop me from picking the lock. I was halfway through eating the meat when I realized what it was.” Malachi’s fingernails go flying. Dean tastes bile in the back of his throat because he’s figured out what Cas is going to say next (denies it vehemently in his mind until the words hit the air like a grenade.)
“It was my own fingers.” Cas stabs Malachi’s palm and grinds the blade back and forth, ripping the lines of skin and spurting ash in a tiny fountain. “They laughed. They-they healed my fingers. And then they cut them off. And cooked them and I took it and-I was so hungry. They did it again and again and again and-”
Beside Dean Charlie lets out a small, choked sob.
Cas pulls the blade out and sets it aside to scoop up the chopped pieces of Malachi’s fingers. He holds them in the palm of his hand, staring at them while his teeth chew up and down his lower lip. “I would eat it all, sometimes including the bones. They would tease me-it smelled like warmth, like nourishment, and-I would beg for pieces of my own body and they’d deny me. Until I begged harder.”
Dean closes his eyes for a second because if he doesn’t he’s going to explode.
“I still taste it all the time,” Cas whispers. “I smell it in my clothes. In my dreams I am on fire, and I am eating myself bite by bite until there’s nothing left and no one is coming to save me.”
His fingers open and the lumps of flesh and burnt skin pour down between them. “It’s never going to stop. My weakness then is my weakness now and forever. You don’t understand, I would die before I ever-if I ever-if they ever-I ever-ever-”
He’s hyperventilating. Dean watches, too numb to move, as Cas raises his hands over his face and screams into his own palms. Sam scrambles over, pulling his arms apart by the wrists, and Charlie crawls next to him, too, and they’re counting and breathing and counting and breathing and Dean remains frozen, like every muscle inside his body has been uprooted and cast away and he is one giant hollow.
Cas and Sam and Charlie blur away. He thinks they’re going to the car. Maybe unzipping reality and stepping out of it because this one is too fucked to be in anymore. He is alive in a world where that happened to Cas for weeks and it’s been happening in Cas’ memories for months and-
(he feels his knuckles scrape across the floor)
and they defiled the most basic human experience from him-the love of being fed-
(his shoes fly off his feet like frightened pigeons)
and Cas was sitting in that cage thinking that Dean would never-
(he hears someone pulling curses from his lungs)
and then Sam is grabbing him, pining his arms to his side, and murmuring, “hey, hey, Dean. Dean.”
“Sammy,” he mumbles. The warehouses straightens his view. He’s standing there in socked feet, fists bloody from beating the floor. “Sammy.” I don’t know what to do.
“Yeah.” I know. I’m scared, too. Sam’s eyes are puffy and red like he’s been crying. “Cas is-uh-Charlie’s getting him cleaned up. I-I-um, cleared out the car. There were some-some wrappers from lunch. In and Out.” His brother looks almost pale. “And um. Threw out the bag of peanuts. I thought-maybe the crunching sound…”
The bones. Suddenly Cas’ aversion to anything crunchy like chocolate bars and french fries makes sense. “Okay.” Dean sags into Sam’s arms for a moment. He doesn’t care that his little brother is holding him together right now. He just needs to inhale and not feel like it’s fire. “Okay.”
+
Cas sleeps in the backseat next to Charlie. No one turns on the radio. They’re all listening silently to what Cas told them, on repeat, again and again. Dean remembers Cas’ panicked “he knows” about Metatron and the trap and his stomach lurches again. Metatron must have known what Malachi did to Cas and not only let it happen, but taunted Cas with it. Once they find that slimey scribe Dean is going to douse him in oil and let Cas light the match to deep fry him.
They’ve been driving for several hours when Dean finally notices that he’s hungry. There’s a roadside diner they could stop at, but Dean keeps going. No more places that reek of pork oil and meat fats. If he has to wait until they reach a bigger town with a nicer restaurant than so be it. Cas was starved and forced to cannibalize for weeks. He can endure for an hour or two.
By the time they pull into a parking lot across from Panera Bread, Cas is awake. He’s the last to step out of the car, and when Dean unbuckles his seat belt Cas scoots forward and rests a hand on his elbow.
“I-Dean.” His head is still lowered, his voice so small it’s hard to hear. “Dean, I’m sorry.”
For trying to kill myself in front of you, he doesn’t need to add.
Dean smooths a thumb over Cas’ bony fingers. He waits for Cas to look up at him. “I would have done the same.”
Cas wets his lip and nods slightly. Dean is about to join Sam and Charlie outside when he pauses. “And for the record, Cas, I’ve never thought of you as weak. Not now, not ever.”
He squeezes Cas’ hand one more time before getting out of the seat.
Panera Bread smells like fresh coffee grounds and sliced bread. Dean realizes, as they slide into the cushioned seats, that this is first time inside one of these places. Sam orders from them sometimes, and Dean’s snitched from his takeout occasionally, but he’s never been at a table here. It’s nice in a way that almost makes him feel uncomfortable.
Without discussion Sam, Dean, and Charlie all order meatless options from the menu. Sam asks for the Greek salad, Charlie gets an avocado, egg white and spinach sandwich, and Cas chooses the baja bowl. Dean takes a Mediterranean sandwich that from the description sounds like a bouquet of rabbit food between two slices of bread. He adds a strawberry banana smoothie, hoping the sweetness will make it easier to swallow, and is disappointed to find the smoothie tastes like actual fruit and not whipped cream and sugar.
He’ll get used to this. If he’s craving actual food (meat, red fucking meat) he can go and pick up some fast food. The Bunker should be a meat-free zone. Maybe he can learn to cook something else, like potato soup or pie. Pie should be free of angelic trauma interference. Sam can get some berries and whatnot from the farmer’s market he’s always trying to convince Dean to stop by. (There’s also frozen pie crusts and filing, okay. He can make lazy day pies too.)
Cas is halfway through eating those sticky green chunks (avocados are an abomination, Dean won’t change his mind on that) when he looks around at all of them and his expression shifts. He puts his fork down slowly and gestures. “You-” he shakes his head. His eyes are shining. “You.” He stops again. He’s realized that they’re not eating anything with meat.
“Yeah,” Sam says gently, trying for a small smile at Cas.
Cas’ eyes widen and he opens his mouth and then closes it. He pushes his bowl back, folding his arms on the table. He puts his head down, forehead braced against his arm, and starts to cry.
Dean wants to say something but there’s a mountain of emotion in his throat right now. Charlie’s eyes are watering and Sam’s nose is getting red and fuck-Dean leans over and puts an arm around his elbow and Cas immediately curls into him. He plasters his face against his chest, a widening wet spot on his shirt, and keeps crying with his whole body. Dean rubs the sharp angles of his shoulder blades and whispers into his hair "yeah.” (He can hear Sam and Charlie scooting their chairs over to join the circle.) “Yeah.”
+
You are a church
of broken glass
and hallelujahs.
You are haunted
like every other holy thing.
What tried to destroy you
didn't have the strength.
Still you stand.
Sturdy and smelling of smoke.
- "Mantra", Clementine Von Radics