#ellispark

Cas drives. Dean didn’t stop him. Dean didn’t even try to stop him, and that’s what’s worse. A decade of fighting alongside one another, years and years of mutual trust and respect and what Cas believed was love, undone with a few words. Dean laid the blame for everything that goes wrong in their lives at his feet. Why does that something always seem to be you? He has made mistakes — numerous and vast mistakes. Cas has lied to Dean, spilled the blood of his brothers, taken up the mantle of God and found himself, again and again, so incredibly unworthy. But Dean has always been there, even in his anger. For a man with no faith, Cas knows Dean believed in him. Not anymore. Not anymore, and for what? Maybe Cas should have, could have said something about his suspicions about Jack, but what good would it have done? What would it have changed? It’s unfair — Dean’s judgment and his inability to see past his own grief to even briefly consider Cas’s; Sam’s silence in the midst of his brother’s growing anger; the Winchesters’ constant need for his powers outweighing their concern for him as their supposed “brother.” They are not fair to him. Belphegor was right. He’s their tool, and it’s a lesson he’s learned the hard way. And when a tool is no longer useful, it’s discarded. Cas drives aimlessly, endlessly, trying to outrun his own thoughts. By some mistake he makes it to I-70 and follows it past Topeka, skirting Lawrence with his hands tight on the wheel. He breaks off onto I-49 in Kansas City because he feels he needs to put at least one state between himself and Dean before he can rest. He drives on until the plains of Kansas give way to the softly rolling hills of Missouri and Arkansas, and he does not stop. He has an idea that he might drive and drive, only pausing for gas, and never stay in one place. He might become a permanent wanderer, a watcher on the outskirts of humanity the way he was meant to be before he got too involved. Before he fell in love.

“Dean —”

“I know, I know. You’re a big boy, you can take care of yourself,” Dean interrupts. “But let me help, Cas, Jesus. You don’t have to do everything alone. You have me. I...”

“You love me?”

It feels, for a moment, like Dean’s in a vacuum and all the air has just been sucked out. He’s not sure if he can remember how to breathe. He looks at Cas, too long for someone driving a car down a highway, and sees his own shock mirrored on Cas’s face.

“I only meant —” Cas starts, and Dean says “Of course I do,” before he can stop himself.

Silence follows.

Dean turns back to the road and counts in his head, a habit left over from when he was a kid and just starting to hunt. John Winchester would say, You hear me fire, you stay in hiding for five seconds, come around the back and shoot. Got it, boy? And Dean would nod, Yes sir, and count in his head. One. Beat. Two. Beat. Three. Beat. Four. Beat. Five.

He does it now.

One. I told him I loved him.

Two. He didn’t say anything back.

Three. But he asked.

Four. What just happened?

Five. What does this change?

It’s definitely been longer than five seconds when Cas speaks.

“Of course,” Cas repeats after Dean, and nods like yes, he just wanted to confirm it. “We’re... brothers.”

He says it like it’s something he almost forgot, like those words alone weren’t near impossible for Dean to squeeze out. Like he doesn’t understand the type of love Dean actually wants to offer up, and it sure ain’t brotherly love. Sam does not equal Cas; Cas does not equal Sam. Dean has always felt intense love for both but never quite worked out how it wasn’t the same. Never let himself think about how it wasn’t the same. Shoved those feelings in the cabinet of “Things Dean Winchester Doesn’t Think About.”

Dean’s starting to hate that damn cabinet.

He knows rationally that he can’t expect Cas to see past his bullshit and his ‘I need you’s and ‘we’re family’s to pick up on the real truth. Cas is a friggin’ alien who’s worn a human suit for all of eight years, and Dean, certified homo sapien since 1979, only figured it out like two days ago. He needs to explain it to Cas.

But if he explains, and Cas still rejects him, it would kill him. He knows it.

He thinks of the soft, fond smile Cas gave Lisa, and rejection definitely seems like a plausible response.

Besides, doesn’t Cas deserve better than him anyway? Dean’s a mess, and he knows it. It would just be wrong to expect Cas to continue blindly following the Winchesters forever, never getting a chance to experience a real life. A good life. Because no life with Dean could ever be good. He makes the people around him hurt, always.