Autobiography of Black

You cannot plan a hunt without studying the stars. They hang in the bleak blackness, ever present, ever watchful. The position of the planets can tell you which sigils to draw and which hex bags to pack. It will tell you the type of creature most likely in the center of the whole mess; the full moon is inclined to draw both witches and werewolves. (Dean has always loved the night sky. It was a constant. It did not matter what his father had said nor which sorry motel room he had been shepherded to. The stars stayed with him, ever immutable and unchanging.)

Dean watches the stars without realizing it. His eyes drift up from the black asphalt road or up through a borrowed window. Up, up, always up. He can pick out constellations and favorites. (He’d learned them from a book once, he’d been six years old.) He knows the white light of the International Space Station. He knows the bright ones are planets, usually Mars, sometimes Venus. On clear nights, if he is very lucky, he can even pick out Jupiter. He wonders what it is like out there, out past the mountains, higher than atmosphere. He could ask, but this wonder is something that he feels strange about and private. So he keeps it quiet, he does not ask. Cas, have you ever been to the moon? What is it like out there in the sky?

He would like to go to the sky. The world has felt smaller lately. It has been hard to breathe.

It is late. It is dark. All the lights are long since out. He sits on the bed (grey cotton coverlet, memory foam mattress), draws his hand over his face and pulls the exhaustion from his skin. A mirror opposite shows him as he is, from the slumped shoulders to the faded flannel shirt. His eyes close. His stag-colored hair is growing long and beginning to curl behind his ears. He looks at it with annoyance. He needs a cut. The cheekbones are still wide and high, skin as forgettably tan it ever would be. The skin is softer now around his neck and his jaw. He frowns and fumbles for his reading glasses in the side table. When they are on, he can see the fine lines crosshatching around his aphid-green eyes, casting a net around his mouth. Age makes ruins of us all; he wonders how much of it he’ll get to see.

It is September. He is thirty-nine years old. What a fucking joke.

Castiel had fallen two months ago. At the time, Dean hadn’t been quite sure of what to expect. It is so easy to make promises of support, to pledge undying friendship. The follow-through, he finds, is much harder. It’s not that he doesn’t want to. It’s not that Castiel isn’t his best friend (“ profound bond”, what the actual fuck, Cas? ). Dean is both strangely comfortable and uncomfortable. The other man is so constant, so present, so proximate . He’s always around the bunker now, on the edges of every room wearing Dean’s old Black Sabbath t-shirt and filling in the gaps of silence with facts about bees, about metallurgy, about the discovery of coffee. (“ You learned it from the goats. ”) Dean is edgy as a wildcat when Castiel is near. He bites off the end of Cas’ sentences and finds they are more than he can chew.

Living with a breathing encyclopedia is exhausting. Dean had snapped at him to get a job. Castiel had gone out every day for the next two weeks looking for work. He had come home, grinning madly and carrying W-4 wage paperwork, with a job as a bakery apprentice.

“But you don’t know how to bake, Cas,” he had protested. Disquiet had climbed up his legs from the linoleum floor. He hadn’t actually wanted Castiel to look for work. It was just that the air in his lungs had seemed idle. Had been hot, uncomfortable, sticky. It had seemed like something to say. (He has wanted to take it back as soon as he’d suggested it. It wasn’t what he’d meant . His tongue is misshapen in his mouth, the words are always all wrong.)

Cas sets down the bag on the counter. That damnable tie ever askew. At least the trenchcoat had been ironed before the interview. “The owner said it wouldn’t be a problem. He promised he can train me on the job. He’s looking for commitment and enthusiasm, Dean. I can do that.” Of course Cas could do that, of course he could. Castiel is nothing but enthusiasm and undying devotion. (Dean changes the subject.)

“Will you teach me how to make a pie?” Cas asks, “It would be good to practice.”

Yes, Dean can teach this. He doesn’t even need to reach for a recipe; he knows how to make a crust by heart. Three parts flour, two parts fat, one part water (all recipes are ratios, he is good with numbers). He cuts the cold butter in by hand, working it into the flour until it balls up into pearls. You cannot make a pie without love and this is done by touch. It is done by hand (by his hands, which are wide and sunbrowned and scarred).

Teaching humanity to a supernatural being (though now already more human than celestial) is a surreal task. Castiel tackles the list of basic necessities pragmatically. He knows that he must eat, that much he has mastered. Dean tries to explain to him that food is a language beyond necessity, that feeding yourself is not like showering. Castiel had never eaten anything beyond ambrosia until he had met Dean, he cannot taste his own history (stretching back, back through his ancestors) through his tongue. Dean can. He knows the flavor of cheap motel coffee and off-brand Wonderbread and it tastes just like the close of a door, it tastes like days of waiting, of scratchy comforters and channel surfing, of listening for John Winchester’s key. He knows what the milk tastes like at the bottom of the cereal bowl. Dean can feed this to Castiel and Cas might agree that it is delicious. But the angel will never understand that it’s so much more , that the flavor of cereal milk is the flavor of childhood and innocence and Saturday morning cartoons. He doesn’t understand that food is not only nutrition, that every time Dean cooks for him, he tells another piece of the story.

Dean has never been particularly good with words.

Teach me how to bake, Castiel had said. Jesus , Dean wonders, does he have any idea what that means? (Dean will do it, he blusters yet refuses Castiel nothing.)

He will give in. He always does.

Dean can teach Castiel to bake. How to cook. Dean has had very little consistency in his life. He knows he isn’t particularly good at many things. He has a GED to his name and a handful of scattered, abandoned college courses. He is a failure at many things, good only for car mechanics and spare hard rock trivia, but not at this. He clings to this. This is something he is instinctively good at. He knows the exact tipping point of salt. When to add, when to subtract. He knows when to tend, when to pull away. He knows, deep in the marrow of his bones (it is encoded there, he is sure, under his sigil-carved ribs) exactly how much give a steak should have before he pulls it from the carbonsteel pan. In another life, he thinks, in a life without monsters, he would have been a cook.

In the beginning, there is salt. Salt is a constant in human history, it is integral to the development of civilization, so it is no surprise that it is the beginning of Dean’s own story. It started before he knew the sun. In utero, his mother slicking up her finger with anchovy paste and sucking it from her own knuckles. The jar of cornichons that she would dip into stoneground dijon mustard and eat one by one like french fries. He was a part of her then, attached tenderly by cord and caul, and the salt ran through from her to his forming body. He would always crave salt (he craves many things). He would teeth on giant soft pretzels wearing salt crystals as big as the flecks of light in his eyes. “Salt,” he tells Castiel as they mix dry ingredients together for the pie crust, “is in all recipes. Even pie.” He had promised Castiel that it would work and had added the half-teaspoon to the flour. (Cas nods, always believes him, wide-eyed and trusting.)

“Am I doing this right?” The crust is troubled beneath Cas’ rolling pin. Dean can tell it already. It’s too hard still, having been freshly taken from the freezer. The crust, light yellow and pale and full of the promise of 82% butterfat, is tearing beneath the wooden rolling pin. Cas frowns heavily. Dean watches him put the work in with the rolling pin (the broad shoulders digging in, straining, pulling from his now very-human-strength).

“Nah, you gotta let it relax a bit more. Let it thaw for a few more minutes. When you can press your finger in and it gives, that’s when you can roll ‘er out.”

Sam pokes his head into the kitchen (dusted with flour, on the floor, on the counters, in Castiel’s blacknet hair), “What are you guys doing?” Dean brushes the flour from the front of his shirt, wiping away the stray thoughts.

“I’m teaching Cas how to be human, Sammy,” Dean grins, “The first lesson is pie.”

Sam smirks, digging a water bottle out of the bottom of the refrigerator. He knows Sam is rolling his eyes, although he cannot see them. “Of course it is. What kind are you guys going to make?” Castiel looks back and forth between the two brothers, digging dough out from his fingernails.

“Come on, Sam,” Dean waggles his brows and grins, wide and white and always-too-much, “we’re gonna do my specialty .” There is no question, there had only ever been one option for the first thing Dean would teach Castiel to make. Dean had cut his teeth on the macerated lemons and million-layered flaky, buttery crust of his mother’s shaker lemon pie. It had been her showpiece, simple and acidic, made with rinds and all. Invented nearly two hundred years ago by the poverty-soaked Shakers of Kentucky, little had been changed since. There was, in Dean’s very modest opinion, nothing to improve.

He can faintly remember his early childhood through that pie. The glass Pyrex bowls that had sat out for an entire day on the old butcherblock countertop, covered gently with a dishtowel, the thinly sliced lemons macerating in sugar. Dean had been fascinated by the process. He had abandoned his Matchbox cars to watch. Take a bowl and fill it with slices, cover it with dunes of white. He would check back every few hours, marveling as the sugar coaxed the liquid from the fruit. After a day there was always a thick, glossy syrup and no sugar peaks to be found. He had dipped his three-year-old fingers in (checking that his mother was not looking around corners, peering with the eyes she claimed were in the back of her head). He found it tasted of lemonade.

Two lemons, he thinks. Two cups of flour. Four eggs. (And always, always a bit of salt. For salt is flavor in all things.) He thinks of his flax-haired mother returned from the grave. It is an odd thing to have grief peeled away. This is an old hurt, he cannot relinquish it so easily. It is not fresh, it is not acute. It is something deeper. More primal, foundational. He cannot give up his grief without giving up a part of himself (it has been thirty-three years). He remembers after. Four years old, wandering into her bedroom and pressing his face to the white comforter, which smelled of her face powder, essential oils. His father, asleep in front of the television. He makes dinner for Sam and himself. He tries, dragging dining room chairs into the kitchen to reach the top shelves, triumphant with flour and sugar. He bakes cakes in Tupperware in the microwave or tears at celery for watery, salted soups. For him, this becomes normal.

His mother, returned from the grave. He loves her. (He feels better when she is away. This is the surreal bit, wrapped up in a blanket of humiliation. He chafes when she is near; he has built a life in the spaces where she is not.)

Later, they sit outside on a park bench, sharing the pie and feet dipping into the cool, wet late-summer grass. Dean studies Cas, who is beautiful. (Dean sometimes thinks that his own face is alright, mostly he thinks it’s strange. Always, though, always is Castiel beautiful.) His eyes skate over the skin like Kansas wheat, like sand, like butter pecan ice cream. The strong Roman nose. Eyes the color of stained glass, inlaid lapis lazuli tile, and lashed with long insect legs. Hair as dark as a cave, as dark as wolves. Dean craves to be near this man, who strangely straddles gentleness and iron. (He has seen him defy Heaven; he has watched him cradle a kitten.) He wants to know everything that is Castiel but doesn’t know where to start. If Cas had been born a man, Dean could ask about family. Instead, he looks at the angel’s vessel and wonders where it came from. This had been Jimmy Novak, he knows, but he doesn’t know much else. Where did Jimmy’s blood come from? Where did his ancestors come through? Did they put their bags down at Ellis Island? Novak is a Slavic surname. (Dean knows, he looked it up.) It is common in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Poland. It is a name for newness and rebirth, meaning newcomer or stranger . In that, for Cas, a stranger in a strange land, it fits him unsettlingly well. (Dean thinks of his own trace of Slavic blood which trails from Russia following the Siege of Leningrad. He wonders if the forebears who had made their bodies had met before, on a road perhaps, across a river.)

Dean kills a mosquito on Cas’ forearm and it glistens red. A welt rises where the insect had penetrated and Cas scratches at it, unused to the sensation.

Human , Dean thinks, sobered. Castiel has fallen now. He is human and he is ripped out of time. Once he had told Dean that he envied humans the gift of linear consciousness, the kindness of forgetting. He wonders now if Castiel still considers them gifts. (Dean is not worth this. He knows that. He looks at Castiel, clipped and wingless and reduced. He did that to one of Heaven’s own soldiers. He mutilated Castiel. All for what? His own neediness? His own pleasure? His own basic don’t leave me? Dean swallows, sick with shame. He is not worth that.)

Dean is quiet. His eyes fumble at Castiel’s back, ghosts over the glaciers of his shoulder blades. He has never seen them properly but he knows of the absence of Castiel’s great black wings. He can sense it in the air, the lack of displacement. He can read it in the way Cas carries himself now, as if he is perennially expecting their weight and always off balance. He had asked Castiel to fall, he has torn the wings from Cas’ back with his own mortal voice, with his own unexceptional hands. Gone now, forever.

“Does it feel strange?” he asks. They both know what he means. Castiel closes his eyes and nods. His voice is a snowstorm.

“They ache sometimes,” the eyes darken, low and mournful, “where they used to be.” All hurt is dull, unoriginal. There are new ways to cause hurt, mankind has invariably been very inventive, but the actual hurt deep at the core is ever old and deep. Aches always throb, lacerations always sting. Some wounds can be fatal. Same old, same old. Dean hurts in the same boring way a Roman senator might have hurt, struck by similar wounds.

Dean nods, he offers a small smile. He smiles a lot (when he is happy and when he is sad).

If food is the first unspoken human language, the second is touch. As he finds the edges of what is acceptable, what is appropriate for how he can touch Castiel, Dean realizes that he may be out of his depth.

Cas is artless with his touch. He thinks nothing of placing a hand on Dean’s knee while they speak, he stands far too close and stares him down, straight down, pupil to black pupil. It is unnerving, Dean always looks away first. Fuck, dude, you gotta learn to be human, Dean thinks. He knows, sickeningly, that he means that the former angel needs to learn shame , become fluent in discomfort, study doubt. He wishes he could pull the thoughts from his own brain. Take a scalpel and cut out the hurt. Mirrors are easier, the physical is easier. He can turn away from himself in a mirror; he cannot look away from his own thoughts. God, what the fuck, Dean.

He keeps a half-drunk bottle of whiskey in his room, stuck up on a bookshelf. He pours some into an empty glass on his nightstand. Washes down his brain.

Once, Castiel had held him. It had been a coven of witches in Bridgeport, Massachusetts (Jesus, he hates witches). He remembers very little, his body aching, copper-flavored blood pouring from the gash on his head. The bleak blackness had pressed in on him as consciousness pulsed in and out. Hello, goodbye. Castiel holding pressure on his wounds, on his knees on the hard-packed earth. It had been strange to be held. Dean is not accustomed to touch. He will never be used to it. The formative years of his life had been spent touchless and without comfort (there had been no room for contact, no room for softness in his father’s car, chasing the old man’s demons). Dean is still surprised when a hand brushes his arm, guiding him to look at something. He craves touch, he is rattled by touch. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to do, he has never been taught. He knows he is touch-starved, he aches to fill the void. (Lust is different. It’s not that he has never been touched with desire. There have been men and women. He always goes to their houses, their hotel rooms. He feels betrayed by his body’s own needs. Their arms are striped with black wiry hair or their breasts powdered with vanilla and musk. They reach for him with nameless arms that encircle his waist. White shirts that smell like sweat, like cheap imitation cologne. He hears the belt buckles jangle, the jeans slide to the floor. He feels violent then, he feels angry after. He comes home grinning and telling conquest stories. Guess who got lucky with that stripper, Sam? He takes long showers after and turns the temperature up to scorch.)

He has never told anyone about his queerness. He will not. It sits in him, equally as much a part of him as it is peculiar and wrong . He feels himself form around it as a body heals around a bullet. It will always be there, there is no way to cut it out without killing the host. Don’t tell anyone. (He doesn’t need to be told not to talk about it. It is taught when he is twelve, when his father calls a boy faggot, when his father says no son of mine. ) He watches his voice, his words. It is a careful balance. He learns how to code himself, how to inflect his words, part his hair, walk. He knows which bar names to drop and which music to mention. These pieces all add up to form a picture in a foreign language, written in deviancy and touch. This horrible queerness , that only someone else well-versed in the language might decipher. Might give a quick nod, point upstairs to the rented rooms. (Dean will go, Dean always goes.) One must always be careful.

He could tell Sam and Cas. They would not judge, he knows that. Sam would blithely accept the news, crack a wry smile, wink. He might mention something about the front desk clerk in the tight jacket. Sam has probably known all along. Dean would throw a pillow at his head, his face red with embarrassment, with awkwardness, with happy relief. Cas, well. Cas would tilt his head in that heartaching way he does when he doesn’t quite comprehend something that humans do. I do not have a gender, Dean, he would probably say, so I cannot understand what you mean. (He says nothing now. Silence is habitforming.)

On the first day, Castiel comes home smelling like granulated sugar and Italian buttercream. It is not pleasant. It is too much, discomfitingly saccharine and like the discount frosted cookies Dean used to buy for Sam from the supermarket. (He had saved for a week, had stolen dimes and quarters from his father’s jeans, wallet, coat pockets. His father wouldn’t miss these coins; his father never spoke of it.) Twenty-five years may have passed but scent is memory and it floors him. He swallows slightly, nauseous, turning his head and nose away from the sickly sweet. Castiel is covered with flour detritus and rainbow sprinkles are stuck in the folds of his nonslip sneakers. Dean watches the way his sweat-seeped shirt sticks to his back. It is uneasily compelling.

“How was it?” He asks. Castiel pauses in removing his sneakers, leaning against the wall and catching his breath. He leaves a slight chocolate fingersmudge in his wake.

“Wonderful,” he says, “and exhausting.”

“That’s great, Cas,” he says. It is great, it is . (Castiel doesn’t need him.) “Maybe I could visit you someday. See how you look decked out in an apron.”

“Oh,” Cas says. Dean’s chest tightens, he doesn’t like hearing no , not from Castiel. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m in the back and not with customers. And Dean, I had no idea what it would be like, I’m so busy .”

“Oh yeah,” he says, swallowing, “that makes sense, I guess.”

“I never stopped moving, my prep list was so long . There were so many things to do.” Castiel looks at him with anxious gulf-wide eyes (the color still mystifies Dean, they are as blue as the ocean, the high-noon sky, the cloak which wraps Mary, Mother of God). “I need to get so much faster, Dean.”

“You will, buddy, you will. Don’t worry.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, pinky finger stuck through the hole in the left. “I’ll help teach you a few things too. More than just the pie. You know, get you some extra practice.”

Castiel looks at him and Dean is constantly fascinated and disquieted by how little guile there is in his face. The other man never conceals his emotions, he has never learned to. The relief and appreciation ring clear. “That would be wonderful, Dean. Thank you.”

(It is difficult to reach the stars. Our bodies rebel against it, cling to our terrestrial lowness. At eight-thousand feet, the human body begins to panic. At sixteen-thousand, it is desperate for air in that oxygen-starved atmosphere. Above this, we can venture out for short moments and only if well-prepared. We bring our own equipment from the heavy air that is rich, that lays low by the sea. At twenty-six-thousand feet, we are in the death zone , which cannot support human life. Which we only strike into with hubris. This is the path to the stars. Dean is shivering, he cannot breathe. He climbs.)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Humanity knows this; they put it into a book. However, in the translation from Enochian to Hebrew to the Greek Septuagint, some nuance had been lost. Dean had asked about it once, long before Castiel fell (down from the sky down to the earth). He is still trying to wrap his mind around the answer.

The Beginning, as it was, so it shall be, was not simply a passing moment. It still is. The truth of the matter is that time is not, exactly, what humans think it is. We catch a glimpse of it from a passing train; we watch it like a filmstrip. Castiel (who is large, who is made up of oceans, explosions, and galaxies) can look further, does look further, is forced to look further. For Castiel, like all angels, exists in all time simultaneously. Time is non-linear. Time, instead, is like taking that very same filmstrip out of the projector and laying it flat. Castiel can see every frame, he exists in every instant.

Or he could , rather, until the fall. Dean struggles to understand. If he can go to the edge of the Universe, perhaps there he will find time laid out. (Castiel is large, he contains multitudes. Dean is so much smaller, made of lesser things. He aches to understand.)

Lebanon, Kansas is the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight states. It has a population of 221, three of those, however, are unregistered. Once, before rural flight, it had been four times the size. The bunker inhabitants do not spend much time in the center of the town itself, usually driving the twenty-odd miles to Smith Center or Red Cloud. There is not much to offer in Lebanon and the smallness digs at Dean’s shoulder blades. He has always preferred the comfort of some anonymity. In a town of two-hundred-odd, everyone knows what soda came out of the vending machine, which brand of toilet paper you prefer, waffles or pancakes.

No, if Dean’s doing the shopping, he prefers to drive. He pulls out the sunglasses, pulls down the visor. It is miles out to the nearest Walmart. The long, open road. He takes it at fifty-five miles an hour. It is smooth, unremarkable. If you head west, low hills start and begin their undulation, the promise of further, of go west, young man . Manifest destiny. If Dean goes west, he knows that eventually (as sure as a promise) the mountains will rise and the grass will grow scarce. He wants to go to them, climb their rockstrewn peaks, up and up to the stars. Take his place in the vastness. (He is sure this itch is born into all Americans, bred into their mythology. Go west, follow the sun. Dean feels the pressure of the American Dream, he is sick with the guilt of it. If you can be anything, then being nothing is a personal shame.)

He does not go west (it is too tempting, too much, too final ). Instead, he keeps east or north or south. He drives past the billboards promising fast food, promising salvation (both conveniently located at Exit 421A). The roadstands with hand-painted signs groaning with the overgrown corn crop. Dean is from the heartland, he was born here, in a city like an oasis sandwiched between farms. He knows all the corn varieties by heart. Serendipity, Buttergold, Silver Queen . ( Peaches and Cream is Castiel’s favorite. Dean knows this too, he always asks after it. He fills a paper grocery sack with the ears of bicolor corn, white and gold.) Corn is a summer food. Corn is best in August, when the crops are ripe to the point of bursting. He likes to grill the ears, dripping with salt and butter, kissed by the ghost of charcoal. (He likes the way Castiel eats an ear of corn like a typewriter. Cas, who has corn holders shaped like bumblebees. He grips them on either side by the abdomen. Start from the left to the right and back again. Cha-ching .)

There are many flavors that make up the past of Dean Winchester. Taste is memory and food is a mark of yourself, a mark of who you are and where you are from. Dean is from the heartland of America, from the Midwest, which is wheat fields and oak woods and Piggly-Wiggly. He knows the billboards on the interstates here, how Jesus Saves! is juxtaposed above Nearly Nude Dancers! America is a study in contrasts, Dean is no exception. You cannot pry Kansas from him, cannot cleave it from his bones, from his blood, from his teeth. He’s tried; he’s wanted to. He’s given up and leans into it. He is Kansas beef and Iowa corn, the taste of state fair funnel cakes. Chicago hot dogs dusted with celery salt, heavy and groaning under neon green relish and fiery sport peppers. Dean can rattle off the ingredients in hot dish, in funeral potatoes, in Skyline chili. He knows where to buy liquor on Sunday morning; he knows where the counties run dry.

He thinks of his mother, his grandparents (now nearly forgotten), long-established settlers. Like most Americans, Dean is a mix of immigration. A melting pot. The stories of his ancestors are written in recipes passed down from generation to generation. His mother had made lussekatter every year on St. Lucia’s Day as Christmas encroached and the winter pressed in. (Dean had always loved the Swedish sweet buns, flavored with saffron and currants.) His father instead makes the boys boiled dumplings bursting with potatoes and cheese, calls them vareniki , tells them of his mother’s father’s father who had come over on a ship in a storm, carrying a single bag and the weight of St. Petersburg on his shoulders. (They don’t speak much of the man who gave John Winchester’s father his name. They don’t make the puddings, the shortbread, of that nameless place in Britain that they somewhere picked up the name Winchester from. Dean doesn’t know beyond Thomas Winchester, great-grandfather, born 1901 in Pittsburgh, died 1937 of lung cancer, rotted from the heart out.)

The portrait of Dean Winchester cannot be made up without convenience stores. Shell, Sip-and-Go, BP. It cannot be completed without Hostess cakes, without Coca-Cola, without slyly slipping Twizzlers and Sour Patch Kids into his rumpled jean pockets. He is twelve years old; his fingers are quick, deft. He is good at knowing when others are watching. He comes back to the rented room in the rain and he and Sam pile on one of the beds, huddle around the green screen of the Game Boy playing A Link to the Past until they fall asleep glutted on sugar and fat, surrounded by empty cellophane wrappers and still waiting for the sound of their father’s key.

He wants to make a list of foods for Castiel to study. To hand him a rare steak, red and soft in the middle and tasting of iron, to say do you remember the smell of a gun? Taste this. (That would require words and Dean isn’t good with words. Instead, he grills the steak, carefully basted in butter and brushed with thyme. He serves it to Cas with a brusque eat up, man and a slap on the back, washing down his own meal with beer and all the words he did not say.)

He wants to study Castiel, who is new to this. They could go to a buffet. Dean would watch hungrily as Castiel piles his plate up with shrimp boiled in Old Bay, with mesclun salad and balsamic vinaigrette, a mountain of French fries. (Does he prefer to dip them in ketchup, mayonnaise, aioli, or malt vinegar? Dean does not know. It aches where he does not know. Come on, Cas, let me show you everything .) Watching Castiel discover food is addictive. He had found Cas in the kitchen, standing at the sink and snowing garlic salt on top of thickly sliced beefsteak tomatoes. The juice runs from the bones of his teeth as they cut through, from his gums, his lips, a pale, clear imitation of blood. Cas had wiped the juice from his chin with the back of his hand, had guilelessly licked it off. Dean had beat a fast retreat from the kitchen, color in his cheeks and grateful for closely-fitting boxer briefs.

What the fuck, man. Get it together.

(Some mountains are stairways to heaven. We are not that lucky here on Earth. On the dusty planet Mars, Olympus Mons reaches out, stretching rocky fingers into space. It is thirteen-and- a-half miles tall, it is two-and-a-half times the height of Everest. Its footprint at the base is the size of France. It is a staircase for the gods who come and go. It is not for humanity, who are barred from heaven until the Rapture, until Christ returns. Our mountains are smaller, they barely scrape the stars. Dean needs to find another way.)

He needs to learn how to be human . It sticks in his craw. There are some fundamental things that Dean Winchester would list as a part of humanity. If you’ve gotta wear the clay, you might as well enjoy the spoils . Food, the open road, music, and sex all headline the list of Dean Winchester’s Top Ten Reasons To Live . Most of these he can teach Cas; it’s the last one that causes some considerable consternation.

“You know, you’re - human now,” Dean says (it had sounded better in his head), “you should probably get out there more.”

Castiel quirks his head (it is not endearing, it is not ), “Out there? Do you want me to leave, Dean?”

“No!” he says, “No, no, I meant like out there out there. Like maybe dating. It’s part of being human.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll get you out there, find a nice girl.”

“I am not sure I am ...interested.”

“Oh,” he says. Oh. “Well, find you a nice guy then.” (Worse now, visions of broad shoulders and latissimus dorsi. Lay me down where all the ladders start. Dean’s imagination betrays him, he pictures stubble against his skin, a rough hand, strange trails. It had been easier a half-second before. A Castiel with preferences shifts the world. Yes, it had been easier before, when he was sexless and vast. Dean thinks of the moment that had occurred in the kitchen with the tomatoes. He shifts uncomfortably.)

“Dean,” Cas says, Dean blows past him.

“What about that Balthazar guy? From the bakery?” Castiel sighs.

“If you really feel strongly about this, Dean,” He does, oh how he does. I’m the reason you’re in this whole fucked-up mess. It’s my fault. I’ll make it better for you. I owe you one, Cas.

“Well, I mean, have you ever been with someone? You know, properly. The ol’ human horizontal tango.”

“Not exactly.”

“Fuck, man. Trust me on this.” Dean says, “How old are you, Cas?”

“About 13.82 billion years. Give or take a few millennia.” Cas says, bland as Wonderbread.

Dean gives a long whistle (he is unnerved), “Okay, so we’ll tell Balthazar you’re thirty-eight.”

Castiel’s eyes are wide as a desert. It reminds Dean somewhat uncomfortably of another time, another place as Cas had sat quietly waiting for the end of the world. “ There are two things that I know for certain, one: Bert and Ernie are gay. Two: you are not gonna die a virgin. Not on my watch,” Dean had said. He had barely known Cas then, the odd soldier-angel cast in light and many-folded Damascus steel. It’s different now, yet the same. He can read the tells better, the edging panic that contracts Cas’ pupils, the tense jaw, slightly furrowed brow, the heartbeat at the neck. Castiel looks away. “Don’t make me regret this, Dean.”

He bites his lip, his shoulders tense. A strange anger washes over him and he stinks of it. What the fuck, man? You want to help him. He is rigid as corrugated steel, as a knife, a closed door. He rolls his shoulders, tries to shake off the odd, surprising tension. He does not know where it had come from, what miserable hole it had climbed out from. God, you’re a fucked up piece of work, you know that, Dean Winchester?

“I don’t do regret,” he grins widely, winking, “I’ve never regretted a thing in my life.” (It’s not true, he regrets most things.)

Let me tell you a story about regret.

He’s a Winchester after all, they’re built of regret. (He knows second thoughts and remorse run in the family. Old Sarah Winchester had been a distant cousin. The mania had claimed her. She had hated her own firearm legacy, had mourned the deaths her Winchester rifles had caused and the ghosts it had birthed. It had buried her beneath stairways to nothing, doors to nowhere.) Regret is a part of him, a part of his body, a part of his bones and sinew. Regret knits his skin together, building the silent protein filaments of his cytoskeletons that hold cell wall to cell wall. He produces it, deep down at his core (in the nucleus, the ribosomes). He regrets Castiel’s fall. Worse, he regrets that there is a part of him that does not. He silently loves every moment of experiencing Cas as human, having him there, close and near and accessible. Because human Cas needs him and Dean could get drunk off of that. He aches when Cas leaves, he is restless until he comes back. This way, human, wingless, Cas doesn’t leave.

You’ll have to get comfy with regret, buddy, that’s part of the human experience too. His line of sight can trace the blue veins running up the other man’s long pale neck and into that dark start of a beard. He wonders suddenly what it would feel like to touch those veins, to hold the man’s heartbeat under the pads of his fingers. He starts slightly at the thought.

What the fuck? (This isn’t the first time he has had these thoughts; this is the first time these thoughts have had potential . The angel was human now, the rules had changed. He is frozen, he is wretched. This is Cas, for fuck’s sake.)

Hunting is no legacy to pass on to a child.

A parent should tell you monsters aren’t real. No, this had never happened for Dean. For Sam. Instead, he saw proof. He knew monsters were real, that demons walk among us on two feet or four. It was easier before he knew of Heaven, when he didn’t know the magnitude of what was at risk. Once, he had thought they could win. Maybe they could strip the world of vampires, that old foul Bathory blood. All monsters were born from Golgotha. Had risen, hand over claw, from that cursed soil. Dean would never have believed it. He is a skeptical man. (Love and skepticism do not mix. He knew the truth of the matter, underneath it all, underneath the soil. He lays awake until he can hear Sam’s breathing even out, safe in sleep. At a sound, he jumps in front of Sam. To take a dagger, a malediction, anything. This horrible, irritating, good-for-nothing, smooth-skinned brat that is Sam. Dean is a brother first and foremost, he would do anything for Sam.)

He is envious of the ignorant. He wants to walk through as they do, in a world without shadows. There are only shadows here, where Dean Winchester exists. He is far in the reaches of the Universe, so far away from the sun. He nudges at each shadow with the barrel of his pistol, suspicious. It is hard to be an unbeliever when the angels borrow your clothes, use the last of the shampoo, forget to turn lights out. (“ I am the one that gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition. ”)

Fucking hell, man.

When his father is gone, Dean (young still, twelve perhaps or thirteen) would take a bath with his old man’s soap. He floats in the tub, his hair soft as seaweed. He scrubs himself raw of the smell of sulfur and blood that burrows deep. It gets in your ears and under your fingernails. After, after, he wraps himself in borrowed white terrycloth towels and stands on his tiptoes to reach the drugstore cologne stored on the top part of the medicine cabinet. Old Spice. He wears it, he wears his father’s scent and the old man’s jacket like a shield and stares at himself in the mirror. It is always his face though, never the father’s. It is Dean’s own unfortunate face, with the wider, flatter planes and the grassgreen eyes. Almost, but not quite. His hands prod at his nose and he sucks in his cheeks. If only he could squish his bones to be more angular. More like his father, more like a man.

“Good shooting out there, son,” his father had said. Dean’s chest had swelled as fast as a bee sting, throat tight as an allergic reaction. He had gripped his little token, which is always hidden in his pocket. He doesn’t tell his father about it, the almadel, which is small and wax and red. It is inscribed with the names of the angels. Angels will watch over you , his mother had said. He wasn’t sure that was true, angels weren’t real. Not like monsters.

“Thanks, Dad.”

Castiel has been gone for four hours and thirty-two minutes. Not that Dean has been counting. (His eyes flick to his phone every few minutes, watching the digits tick by.) Fuck, how long does it take to eat a dinner? A couple of drinks, sure, but this long?

As he enters the kitchen, he notices the coat.

The trenchcoat is tossed casually over the back of a chair. That khaki gabardine fabric, lined with simple heathered cotton. The style is old, it has always been overlarge and never quite fit Castiel correctly. It is in Dean’s hands (compact and short-fingered) before he realizes that he has even reached for the damn thing. He wraps the old coat around himself. The faded protective charms of the fabric call out to him like the siren song to Odysseus. (He has forgotten to lash himself to the mast of the ship, he goes to the song.) He can smell the cotton, yes, but there is something more - something that smells like cedarwood and pine, ash and leather. The scent of the air. It’s the scent of Castiel himself, which Dean has only noticed occasionally and always, always from afar. He closes his eyes (he doesn’t mean to) and breathes in the other man. Goddammit, the very smell envelopes him with the feeling of being secure and protected. For a moment, he wonders if angels have scents in their true forms or if that is a purely terrestrial thing. What the fuck am I doing?

Four hours and forty-six minutes.

Forty. The weight of the word hovers over him. He will be forty years old this year. (Godwilling. He’d never thought he would make it to forty. He is still not sure that he will.) It is strange, getting older. He had thought that time would bring clarity. It does not. It brings greyness, nuance. It scares him into indecision. He hovers here, on the edge of nothing, torn between action and hope. Sam leans against the door to the kitchen, mouth pursed and arms crossed. “This is getting ridiculous,” he says.

Your face is ridiculous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam.”

“Bullshit.”

It is very late when Castiel comes home. Dean hears him through the closed bedroom door. The sound of shoes kicked off, hitting the wall. The slide of a coat. Cas stumbling slightly, balance skewed by wine. Dean listens intently, counting the seconds between steps, the space between breaths. One or two? It is just Cas, he determines, his chest unclenching tightly. Balthazar had not come home with him.

Breathe.

(You can run so far away, but space is not that forgiving. There is so much nothingness , nothing to block, nothing to get in the way. On a good night, from a clear Kansas plain with little light pollution, one can see twenty-quadrillion miles into the sky. Dean thinks this number sounds absurd but he trusts the astronomers and knows in his heart, in his blood, in his bones that it is the truth. He knows there is nowhere to hide; God knows he has tried.)

The next hunt takes him to Holland, Michigan, thirteen hours away. (“ It should be a pretty basic hunt, Cas. You’ve got work, stay here. It’s just gonna be some wham, bam, ectoplasm slam. Gank the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and call it a day. ”) It is small and full of windmills, perched on the edge of Lake Michigan. He is grateful for the reprieve. The bunker (large, labyrinthine) has felt claustrophobic. Dean has taken to wandering into the disuse. He filters through the bedrooms. When he tires, bores, he sits cross-legged on the cold concrete floors. Digs a switchblade out from his back pocket and spreads his fingers, stabbing quickly in the spaces between his body. Sometimes he misses. It doesn’t bother him.

He pauses in going through the old church records. He looks for names of the discontent, the buried (he wishes cremation were more in fashion). He looks out from the window. The grassy lawn stretches out to the treeline. Beyond it is the bridge, the river. One must be careful when walking blindly through that patch of woods. The rocks are sudden and severe and the river is far, far below. To fall is to die, to smash hundreds of feet below into the water. The water tension will not be forgiving, it will not be easy, you will not slide gently to the dark beneath. It is like crashing into concrete, hard and brutal.

On the way out, he passes a low folding table, heavy with broken Crayola and Rose Art crayons. It had been set up to distract the kids during the church service.

“What are you doing?” he asks. Four or five kids look up with round eyes and blond hair.

“Coloring,” they had xeroxed sheets of line images of the empty tomb, the Crucifixion, John the Baptist anointing Christ. Dean takes one and colors the blood red. The wax crayon crushes under his pressure. He wonders where Castiel had been during the time of Christ. In Heaven? On Earth? He doesn’t know (he needs to know everything). The bile churns, rising in his throat. Maybe Balthazar will know, maybe Castiel will tell him. Someday. He can’t stomach it any longer and leaves the building. The docks are just beyond. Past the driveways with chrysanthemums and personalized mailboxes, he walks with hands shoved into his jeans. It was strangely cold, promising an early autumn frost, and the chill paints his cheeks red. The docks are quiet, littered with only seagulls and trash. The lake is dark. Threatening. A man with a thin grey beard and sad eyes watches him. He stares absently at the water. In other times, the dead were buried here , he recalls. Buried with pottery, with the spoils of war. (He knows these things in ways he shouldn’t. He has taken the very bones and dug them up, salted the earth, laid them back to rest again.)

“You should really have a coat,” the old man says.

“I like the cold,” he shrugs.

That night, he prays feverishly. (He believes in God as he’s met the man, although he’d really rather have not.) He lists every person that needs protection, every possible catastrophe. Dear Lord, please protect us from fire, hurricanes, tsunamis, break-ins… He cannot sleep until this ritual is completed. He cannot sleep unless the blankets are fully drawn up over his shoulders. He cannot hang his feet over the side of the bed. He knows monsters are real. He moves around restlessly, settling nowhere.

In the morning, they stab a strega with an iron blade. He drives back along I-80. He doesn’t stop. (Sam doesn’t say anything, he lets Dean pick the music without complaint.)

“What kind of things do you have to do every day?” he asks. Dean has never worked in a professional kitchen but he has always been fascinated. He holds the idea close, in his chest pocket, for just in case. Just in case the demons dry up, just in case the world doesn’t end. He is envious, a bit, of Cas.

“I usually make two batches of cake.”

“Wait, what do you mean by batches ,” Dean says, “how many cakes is that?”

“176.”

“Whoa, I guess I pictured you baking like...five, maybe. You know, aprons and carefully putting frosting hearts on them and some shit like that.”

Cas laughs, “Oh, no, Dean. The cakes are all done in the 140 quart mixers. There are 88 in each batch.” There is a smudge of cake batter on the side of his face. I could lick it off. Hot blood rises in him, quick as vinegar and baking soda. “It’s so satisfying. I had not realized how good it is to work with my hands.” I can give you some work to do with your hands, he thinks suddenly and then pauses, annoyed with himself.

Instead, he nods, he understands. He has always been a kinesthetic learner. He had always preferred to learn with his body, his hands, his feet. He could read a map, sure, but it is better to drive it himself. He is a man of experience, his learning is written in doing, in hallmarks of gas stations and oddities. (Castiel is similar. Cas can absorb the entirety of humanity into his brain, downloaded there by Metatron. “But I don’t understand the context, Dean,” Cas had said, almost pleading, adrift in too much . There are things you must learn by doing.)

Castiel hums as he swirls peanut butter and black cherry preserves together, layered on thick sourdough bread. His blueveined Slavic skin, so close, smelling of cinnamon and butter, of invert glucose syrup, the rhythm of his heart matching Dean’s own. Dean watches Cas work, knowing the movements of the fallen man’s body like an extension of his own. He leans away, pressing his body into the spindle back of the chair. The wood cuts into his skin and leaves marks.

“So, nerd. How’d it go with Balthazar? You never told me.” Castiel blinks and looks up from his sandwich. Dean shifts from side-to-side, standing in the kitchen door.

“He wanted to invite you to karaoke.”

“Oh yeah, I guess that could be cool. So like, you and Balthazar and me? You wanna bring Sam too? I mean you and I know he’s pretty boring but the dude can definitely belt out some Enter Sandman if you get enough rounds. Don’t tell him I told you that though.” He winks (his nerves like a tuning fork).

“He just wanted to invite you, Dean,” Cas looks at him, his face impassive. What the actual fuck?

“The fuck - but he went out with you. ” Fury roots through his pores, he smells it in his sweat. Castiel watches him with that preternatural awareness. He puts a hand on Dean’s arm, the gentle fingers speaking Dean’s tongue. It’s okay.

“Dean-”

“Look, I don’t nail other people’s leftovers.”

“ Dean . It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested in him.”

“Shit, Cas,” Dean runs his hand through his sable hair. “I’m sorry, I can’t believe he’s such an ass.”

“Don’t worry about it.” (Dean Winchester will worry about it.)

For some unknown reason, Dean has always assumed that if you loved someone, you would know . He is, as he is in most things, wrong about that too. Now that he is aware, he realizes that it has been there forever. It had started from his shoulder, where Castiel (soldier of God) had gripped him and raised him from the Pit, burning himself into Dean’s very skin. It had begun as Castiel had remade him, had knit himself into Dean’s very chromosomes. Castiel, gravel-voiced and gravel-haired, perennially confused, enthusiastic, strong-willed. Who fell for him. (It had not been for humanity, it had not been for Sam. Castiel had pitched forth from the clouds like a comet because of Dean, because Dean asked him to.) Dean has been dancing around this for so long, deliberately not looking. The ache crawls under his skin. It undulates like a snake. Wherever he looks, Dean sees it in the gaps, in the silences, in the shadows. It is behind good morning and good night . It is in his lungs, his stomach, his fingers, his feet. He is used to unease, to disquiet, he had not realized that these were other things. He had not realized that these energies were his own two hands, aching to reach out to Castiel’s dark birdnest of hair, to card his fingers through that black Gordian knot.

It is worse now. He is never unaware of the sea-eyed man’s presence. He can feel the weight of that heavy stare across the bunker, at dinner, during hunts. He wants Cas to touch him, to learn him. (He has always wanted this, he thinks. He’s never quite realized.) He imagines those outstretched fingers (white as parchment) learning the gentle curve of his spine, the scoliosis that the school nurse had found in seventh grade. She had rapped on his vertebrae, ratatat , with her knuckles. He wants Cas to find the same strangeness, that same small secret he holds within his body (between him and God).

“You need to tell him.” Sam says. (Sam is right, Sam is always fucking right.) But Dean has been saying it all along. Castiel speaks all human languages, it’s true, but the most human of the languages are beyond him. Castiel is a man of words and Dean, well, Dean is not. (Sometimes, when he feels optimistic, he collects words in the hope that something will spark, that they will arrange themselves for him and say what he means. He is always so awkward. He keeps a note open on his phone and writes down words that might help. Parhelion, alchemy, disarticulation. He is a magpie of words, though they never form correctly for him. Instead, he sits on the pile of borrowed language like a dragon over his gold. He doesn’t tell anyone he does this, it is, in fact, embarrassing.)

I love you , he says. It is not in words; it is in a steak cooked to exactly medium-rare and crusted with black pepper, dusted with fine flecks of pink Himalayan sea salt. I need you is written in blueberries set carefully into a tart of a crushed hazelnut crust and frangipane. I want you is written in his hands, as he takes Castiel’s own and shows him how to knead bread, to develop the long strands of gluten, pound it and beat it into the Formica countertop. (Dean pulls his floured hands away quickly; Castiel pulls a towel over the dough to let it rise.)

Taste. Season. Taste. Season. Taste.

Sometimes, it feels so frustrating. It feels like he is screaming . Castiel prefers romaine lettuce and blue cheese. He likes to drink grapefruit-flavored seltzer water. His favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip. Dean has memorized these things without being told, without being asked. He silently buys them on every grocery run. He seeks out new versions, better versions of each one. (‘ Look, Cas, this gelato is mint chocolate chip. It looks pretty fancy . You should try it. ’)

Tell him , Sam had said. Dean feels quick bitterness rise in his throat. It is so simple for Sam to say that. Sam, who is graced in every respect. Sam, who things come to so easily. (Dean knows this is unfair, that this is not true , that Sam has shouldered his share of the hurt. But it feels like that sometimes and he chokes on his own frustration. In the blinding disappointment, Dean cannot see past Stanford and cannot see past Jessica. Yes, Sam may have loved and lost but Dean has never been loved at all.)

That’s not fair and you know it.

God, I’m weak. Who does this? He is uncomfortably confronted with this, this weird affection, and he is a puzzle torn apart. He is not a man who does comfort. He is not a man who does love, relationships, the apple-pie-life. He is, if you ask after a couple of drinks, barely a man. What can he give Castiel? What can he give himself? (Dean is defined by his life choices, he is a xeroxed line drawing already colored in. There are no blank spaces left. He is one part whiskey and two parts nameless one-night-stands and so he pours himself into the oil-black Impala and finds a hovel of a bar for a night with a woman named Jennifer.) Get yourself together, Dean Winchester.

He is a joke. He tells people that the one thing he likes about himself is that he lacks any pretense. No, Dean Winchester is real in a way other people are not real . (This is the worst offense. He knows that these words, ironically, are all farce, all pretense. Dean pretends to be something he is not, pretends to be hard and detached. Pretends to not want for himself, for Sam, for Cas. He pretends to not want to have never known monsters, that he would never want to own a house on a shady street with a mailbox shaped like a duck. Dean lies to everyone, including to himself.)

What if I fuck it up?

I love you. He is (nearly) forty years old, he’s never said these words before. Not like this.

“In the early days,” Castiel had once said (Cas has been unsteady since the fall, he grounds himself in facts.), “the Greeks had a hard time distinguishing blue. They called the ocean wine-dark. It wasn’t until they gave it a name then they could see blue.”

Dean had been bewildered then, how could you not see blue ? It is a primary color, children learn it from the sky, from the ocean, from alcohol-scented markers. Without it you cannot have blue raspberry, Leonardo, Optimus Prime. But he understands now. It is like love. We are clumsy and shy. We use the same awkward, too-small word love for too many things. We stuff it full, like a trash bag ready to break. Storge, agape, philia, eros. Dean loves many things: Exile on Main Street , his brother, pie, the stars, Baby. How could have known that this, this horrible thing, this dread, this creeping thing that makes his skin prickle and his face heat - was also love? I need better words.

(He would like to go to the stars, up in the black blankness of space where there is no atmosphere. He would climb the constellations two at a time like staircases. Space is a void, with no medium, no vibrato atoms, nor molecules to transfer sound or heat. It is absolute silence. He has never had a life without the voices of others. He has never known a life that was not laid claim to by others. He would like to hear the silence.)

“Dean,” Castiel says one Saturday morning in March, “I want to learn how to cook too.”

“Alright,” Dean says. He doesn’t look up from under the Impala’s hood. He pulls the long oil stick from the engine, sounding the depths. “You remember everything I taught you about baking? Forget it.”

Cooking and baking are different creatures. (Most cooks cannot bake, most bakers cannot cook.) Dean has often heard that baking is a science and cooking an art. The truth is, as it usually is, somewhere in the middle. But while the hallmark of a good baker is precision and the ability to follow a detailed recipe, to cook is to go by feel. Dean hopes he doesn’t fuck it up, he has tried to teach Sam in the past and it has always failed.

“How long should I cook the steak for?” Sam had asked.

“Until it’s done, Sammy.” It had not been what Sam wanted to hear but it was the truth. He couldn’t tell Sam that a steak should be cooked for six and a half minutes on either side. He doesn’t know how hot the stove runs, the BTUs of each burner, the thickness of the steak, the moisture in the air (the position of the stars). “Keep your eye on it,” he had said, “touch it with your finger.” Cooking is an art and it is done by feel .

It had been a strange thing, the first time he butchered a rabbit. He could see all of the bones, the muscles, the ligaments exactly as he expected them. Although the positions are different, the concepts of all mammals are the same. Muscles attach to bone, attach to fat. Cut through at the joint, slice through the cartilage. He’s butchered many things, chickens, pigs, deer - he could take apart anything. He could take apart a man, peel the silverskin away, drain the blood from the gash in the throat. It is a strange feeling. He cannot hold an animal now without the awareness of his own potential monstrosity. He knows he could break this small creature, he doesn’t want to, he is terrified. He realizes that this is how Cas has always looked at him. Every touch on his arm, every smile, has been colored through the lens of the potential ruiner. (Sometimes Dean forgets that Castiel is so much more than human. Stuffed like a sausage into a human meat suit, it does not break his habit of the wonder at humanity, at their continued buoyant survival in the face of unlikeliness. Dean is nothing but barely strewn together atoms on a rock hurtling through space. Castiel can destroy mountains with a spare thought. No wonder Castiel is always gentle, no wonder he is always terrified.)

Fuck, I love you. (Sometimes love isn’t enough.) I don’t want to love you like this. I didn’t expect to. I want you to want me and only me. I want you to feel like if I leave you will never be able to breathe again. I want to be the air in your lungs, the oxygen in your bloodstream, the electrical impulses firing from one nerve to another. I want to be needed and necessary. (He is hot and jealous suddenly. He hates that Cas had gone out with Balthazar, despite that Dean was the one who had pushed him to go. He wonders if they had kissed? Brushed fingers, brushed noses. Had Balthazar unknotted the blue tie, eased that buttoned shirt off of Cas’ shoulders, exposed that wide field of unbroken skin to the sky? He is furious that he could not mark Cas first , as Armstrong’s boot had done to the moon.) How can I give myself to someone else? He had been whole, but Castiel had held him once. Had pressed his fingers into Dean’s skin and it did not bounce back. How can he show himself when he still has the other man’s indentation on his shoulders, waist, wrists? When Cas’ breath is still on his breath? He still finds Cas’ own hairs growing from his scalp. The old philosophers say that all men are reborn throughout the centuries, always with the same lover on the other side. The good lives are the ones where we find each other.

Dean has never been lucky before (Castiel has never been reborn).

He starts coming around to the bakery at the end of Cas’ shifts. The counter staff smirk and seat him at the long Formica countertop. Sometimes, he almost likes it. If this had been any other time he would wink and leave AC/DC lyrics with his tip, scrawled on a napkin. When you smile I see stars in the sky. This isn’t that time. He is antsy, he watches the clock. He waits. Castiel is nearby, somewhere beyond that wall. Perhaps covered in flour, butter, sugar. He realizes that he has very little idea of what a working bakery is like.

Castiel comes out. He smiles, dusting his hands off on a towel. He tucks the towel back into his apron. “Hello Dean,” that voice like Perdition itself, Dean would sell his soul, “Do you want to see the back?” He pushes the Cuban sandwich away, pickles sticking out and mustard staining the bread, half-finished.

“Sure.”

He watches Cas’ hands work as he slices parsnips for the fall special. Peels them, cuts out the pulp of the core. Borrowed hands, Jimmy’s hands. It is an uncomfortable knowledge that Dean is tied to his own body and doomed to its fate. Dean is corporeal, Castiel is not. (Castiel is human now, the rules have changed.) I want you to touch me. The knowledge is hot and fast and it galls him. Those hands, (Cas’ hands, Jimmy’s hands) he wants those hands. That skin. That mouth, that tongue. He wants Cas to touch him like bread dough, working knuckles and fingertips into his own dust and clay. Castiel is so much more than human and it is a creeping, base thing the way that Dean wants him. He wants Cas, he realizes, in a very human way. I want to fuck you until you forget your name. Shame licks up through him, hot as smoke. Dean shifts awkwardly, wondering if everyone can tell his thoughts by the shift of his hips, his slightly accelerated breathing. Maybe Cas can smell it on him, this sick want. He would be kind about it, maybe not mention it at all. ( Desire is a human trait, Dean. There is nothing to be ashamed of. He can hear it in Cas’ voice. I am not human; I do not experience it, no.)

(Castiel is human now.)

“My shift’s over,” Cas says. He dries his hands on his apron, pieces of Jerusalem artichoke still stuck under his nail. Dean thinks of Bob Dylan. His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean.

“I’ll walk home with you,” he says.

Together, they make dinner. They thaw pork tenderloin, roast Yukon Gold potatoes. He slices a rolled pile of sage leaves to add to a brown butter vinaigrette. Awareness dawns first, as he feels the knife press into his index finger, nail and skin. It does not hurt. It does not bleed. He quickly cleans the wound and holds his hand under running cool water. The pain blooms after a few seconds. As he bandages the cut finger, the bright red blood slithers out. Clean the knife, clean the board. Get a new pile of sage.

“Are you okay?” Castiel’s brow is furrowed, voice gentle.

“Yeah, yeah dude. I’m fine.” Dean looks up. Castiel hovers awkwardly, bending over Dean’s cut hand. His body heat is radiant, like the sun, like a nuclear reactor. It flushes from his body, where he has taken Dean’s hand to inspect it.

Dean’s hand flashes up to Cas’ arm, stopping him. Their eyes connect, light to dark. (Cas’ like galaxies, Dean’s like collapsed stars.) Dean wonders for a brief moment how he could have missed this all this time. The pupils (barely visible against the dark irises) blown wide with want and fear, the hitch in the breath, Cas is both solid and shaking below the light touch. The other man looks from Dean’s eyes to his lips and back again, tongue darting out to lick his own.

The smoke alarm blares. The moment dissolves. Dean grits his teeth. You know I can’t let you slide through my hands. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.

He drives through the small town, past the intersection of Main and Superior where the Shopco and the Feed and Tractor stores perch. Past the old BP station with its sunweathered sign. Past the women who sit on salmon-colored pleather seats at the salon, the newly-built high school. He pulls his jacket tight over his skin. He thinks of Cas, who had come home last night delighted, his pockets full of meringue cookies and tulip bulbs.

He can smell heaven before he puts his key into the front door. Heaven smells suspiciously of beef.

As he walks into the room, it hits him intensely as a freight train. His mouth is watering, saliva pooling under his tongue, in his cheeks. It is savory and delicious and rich and god, fuck, he needs a piece of whatever that magic is right now. He drops his bag on the table, doesn’t even bother with the coat. Castiel steps out of the kitchen when he hears the noise. He wipes his hands on a dishtowel, runs them through his dark hair.

“I was hoping you’d be back soon,” Cas says.

“Oh my god, Cas, what the hell is that? It smells amazing.”

Cas grins (wide as a Cheshire cat, earnest, transcendent), “Come and see, I wanted to make something for you.”

The bunker is not an elegant place but Castiel has made something beautiful. Dean’s chest aches at the sight. There are a handful of lit jar candles, the mismatched fabric napkins are carefully washed and folded at the table settings. Most nights they eat in front of the television or, if in here, by casually grabbing a plate and a fork. But Cas has set out the plates already, choosing the unchipped ones. He had set the silverware out. Castiel is smiling (it is wonderful) and uncaps a pilsner, cold and thick with condensation. He hands it to Dean. “Cas,” Dean says, “what is all this?”

“It’s burgers,” Cas says, his hand waving over the two all-beef patties resting on the rack. “I wanted to make them exactly the way you said you liked them. I’ve been practicing.” The blackhaired man bites his lip, looking up at Dean with tractor beam eyes. “I bought chuck and sirloin and ground them. And I made sure there was twenty-five percent fat. I baked the pretzel buns yesterday. You didn’t tell me which kind you preferred but you always order the pretzel buns when we’re out, so I had to guess. And you usually go for cheddar and bacon and caramelized onions, so I got all those. The onions took an hour and a half, Dean. An hour and a half !” Dean watches him, fascinated. Castiel is rambling , his face open and excited and his hands fly from point to point to illustrate as he speaks. Dean’s own chest is heaving, he feels the hot rush of air as he breathes rapidly in and out, in and out. Castiel’s own energy pours into his own self, his own body, and it crackles in the air.

“Cas, this -” he pauses, he doesn’t know what to say, what this is. He’ll try. He swears he’ll try. (Castiel is a man of words, Dean is not.) “this is amazing. This is something else, man.”

The sky-colored eyes focus on him, nearly black with blown-wide pupils. Ringed in dark. Castiel looks almost fearful. His voice is low and quiet when he continues. “I know you said that food means something, Dean. You always make food for others when you want to show that you care. I wanted to do that for you.”

There is a moment where Dean’s eyes close. One mississippi, two mississippi. He hesitates on inaction. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood. Path one, open his eyes and say thank you. Sit down at the table, eat the fucking burger, talk about Dr. Sexy and whether or not Han shot first. Path two? He is terrified of the left-hand path. That one is the truth, finally, spit out from his lips. He isn’t ready. He needs his wordpile, he desperately needs to sit and think about how to say what it is that he needs to say. (Under it all, he knows that the words he needs are very simple and known by every child. He can borrow them from the past, take them from the mouths of every person who has lived before him. I love you. I love you. I love you .) He isn’t ready.

Castiel looks away. The slightest flush creeping up his pale neck, rounding his Adam’s apple, up through the forest of his stubble, alighting on the bridge of his straight nose, his cheekbones. Dean suddenly knows. He still needs to hear it. But his heart knows, his body knows. He feels like flying. And he knows without a shadow of a doubt that Cas will never say anything. He will flush and turn away now (look there, at the man’s shoulders turning, his stance adjusting, already ready to leave) and never speak of this again. Eyes, wide and dark as the Atlantic. (Dean is drowning in them. He had forgotten that the color of the hottest fires, the innermost core of a flame, is blue. There is no ice here.)

But Castiel is looking at him (eyes like Neptune) and shifting his weight anxiously from side to side. Suddenly Dean feels so foolish and he is aching , he is nervous , he is terrified . He wants, God, how he wants . He is not good with the language of words, so he reaches for one he does know (dusty and unused, sitting there on a shelf). “Cas,” he steps closer, watching the man’s breath hitch, the pupils tracking Dean’s every movement. Castiel’s hands are twitching, clenching at the unfortunate dishtowel over and over. Dean’s wide, ragged-nail hands come up and cup either side of Castiel’s face. He thrills to the rough dark beard like sandpaper under his fingers. Cas’ heart beats in between the arches and loops of his fingerprints. God, he wants this. Castiel, best friend; Castiel, Angel of the Lord. He doesn’t deserve this (he will reach for it anyway). He closes his eyes, hesitant, and touches his mouth to Castiel’s dry lips. Oh. Castiel stretches into him like Dean is a feast, dropping the towel forgotten on the floor. His arms come up, wrap around Dean’s neck and hold him there, tight against Cas’ long chest. He swells against Dean, his mouth parting and tongue darting. Oh god, oh god, oh god. In this moment, stars are born and die. Dean is remade. He can taste the lager on Castiel’s breath, the hint of salt. He licks his own spit from Cas’ lips.

They rest foreheads on one another. Dean looks at Cas, galaxies look back. This close, he is like a beloved monster, like a Cyclops. “Dean,” Cas says in a voice of gravel and broken glass (Dean is glad Cas speaks first, he is unsteady.), “I think that this is what I was trying to say.”

Dean laughs. It roars out of him like a broken dam, like the snowmelt down a river. It is loud, disastrous, there is so much relief. Why was this so hard? “Just keep making me food, Cas,” he says. He winks (he is terror-drenched, shaking). He draws one finger over the planes of Cas’ face, tracing the nasal bridge, the zygomatic arch, the philtrum. He had been terrified of the weight of this moment, he had not expected to find it light as angel food cake and stuffed with joy.

“Dean, shut up and kiss me.” Dean goes willingly into the sun.

(Black holes are a dangerous place for matter. He thinks of Castiel, strange as a black hole at the center of a galaxy. They are rich and dense. Matter is pulled in by an incredibly strong gravitational attraction. The astronomers had written time and time again that going into a black hole is not like falling. It is not unwanted. The matter that heads for that black heart goes joyfully like metal to a magnet. He had always wondered what the distinction was with a black hole, how something could fall in willingly. How can you be complicit in your own sublimation? But he goes to the sidereal center that is Castiel, his focal point, his magnet, his gravity centered to that other force, and knows that he will be pulled in and absorbed. He doesn’t, he finds, really mind.)

Castiel looks at him, “I was there in the beginning,” he says, “I was there when the first stars were named. I know which ones died to make you, Dean. I could see everything, even the hydrogen in your blood, and I know the stars it came from.” His lips nestle next to Dean’s thigh. Each word blows a gust of air across and Dean shivers.

“Have you done this before?” Dean asks. Cas shakes his head, relief wells up inside the hunter. He is like fire slipping into bed. His careful hands had shut the door, eyes swept the peripheral, the unlit room. Dean’s legs sway, he tries to catch his breath.

Tell me you love me. It hurts like a hunger, gnawing. Dean cups his hands, holds them out, hoping to receive the words. It is surreal, these words, the least original combination of human language. When it is said, breathed into the spaces between us, I love you is always a quotation. It has always been borrowed from another person’s lips. Yet, he craves it. Every human needs it. We cling to these words, spoken from hot mouths on a cold rock. We pile into them like a lifeboat from a shipwreck. Tell me, Cas.

I love you. I am out of air. (He is a coward. He cannot say the words until he is sure of their mirror. He cannot reach out to cross the chasm, cannot trust himself to fall, until he is sure that the arms to catch him are there, waiting on the other side.)

Cas lays naked on the bed, shameless, filthy, radiant. Dean is a sinner. He is average, forgettable. His sins are hardly noteworthy, he goes to his greatest blasphemy. Fuck, I need you. Sparks, a vandalism of light. His head pushes back, back into the sweat-soaked pillow (dripping down his back, behind his ears, Castiel licks it away). An impudent tongue tracing the lines of his throat, batting against his larynx. Dean’s hands are desperate for something, his body doesn’t know what so he grasps at anything, compulsively clutching at Castiel’s bicep, his forearms, around his waist. God, this beautiful creature flung out of the sky, this being of light. Dean swallows the light, swallows Castiel down into where Cas is hard and he is soft. Cas cries out with a shout. Dean is starving. He feasts on Cas, the heavy cock in his mouth, the curls at his nose. (He looks up at Cas, flipped over now, who has his eyes closed tightly, who is keening, whining, whispering oh my god, holy fuck, dean, god, dean, please, please, please. He has never heard Cas blaspheme before; he nearly comes there and then against Cas’ thigh.)

I did this to him. I’m doing this to him. Holy fucking shit, Cas, you’re so stupid fuckin’ gorgeous. Castiel, beautiful, dangerous as lightning. (Dean cannot look away.) They cleave together (cleaved once apart), the children of the sun trying, like all men do, to fix that dull, primeval hurt and put themselves back together. Cas, stormeyed and nighthaired, tenses and cries out, his hands wrenching at Dean’s scalp. (Dean doesn’t know the words Cas speaks in that gutteral voice. He has never been good with language. He studies the other unspoken vernacular written beneath the words, etched into stone tablets with sweat and stick and need.)

“What if you hate me?”

“Never, Dean.”

He makes a mistake once. “What if I fuck it up, Cas?”

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Trust me.” Dean’s face registers a low horror, “What do you know , Cas?”

“I just believe in you.” (Castiel has gotten good at half-truths; Dean knows Cas has gone to the end of time.)

The sheets tangle between their legs, Dean breathes in and out. “What happens to me?” Castiel tenses his jaw and closes his eyes. Dean knows how to calm him, he traces road maps and escape routes on Cas’ skin, leaves a trail of goosebumps in his wake.

“I cannot tell you the future.” But Dean can watch the way he gives in, Dean is desperate to know and Cas knows that. Cas can read his desperation in the sweat on his skin. (Castiel has never been good at rules.)

“Please, Cas. I gotta - I gotta know .”

“You will go to the stars, Dean.” That hand, with black-haired knuckles and short, always perfectly-clipped fingernails, combs through Dean’s hair. “I will sit in those stars and I will watch them shine.” Cas’ chest is ragged, Dean knows he is remembering the future. Castiel has seen the end, seen the future, seen Dean’s own death. Castiel carries that hurt through the past. Dean understands a bit more about the kindness of forgetting. He lays a kiss on the angel’s shoulder, at the join of neck and trapezius. No, stop, look away. Paint it black.

“It’ll be okay, Cas,” he says, running his hands over and over and over the other man’s shoulder, smooth as silk. “I’m sorry.” It is the sorry that is heavy. A sorry that cannot promise change.

“I won’t do well,” Cas whispers, “I will be okay eventually. It depends on time.” Dean wishes he was younger. Why couldn’t you have gotten over your shit sooner? I could have loved you longer. If he had been younger, he could have spent more time with Castiel. Time is cruel, time is indifferent. (He is nearly forty. His neck hurts if he sleeps poorly, his cholesterol is high. His hangovers last two days.) I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.

When Dean dies (for the last time), he will have lived nearly 24,598 days. Castiel will inhabit a tornado in the southwest corner of Kansas. He will touch down and tear grass by roots from the ground. He lifts a trailer and smashes it against a transformer, which explodes in a hail of glittering electric sparks. He wrenches water mains from the ground and pulls ovens from their walls. Castiel wants to ruin the world, if only for an instant. (In 7.9 billion years, the sun will do this for him as it finally enters its red dwarf phase. It balloons, absorbing Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. He will sigh. He still has nine-hundred and ninety-two billion years to wait before his own end.)

“Cas,” Dean says. I love you. We can make no promises, you belong to Heaven. To the end of the world. I belong to the Earth. But right now, I will belong to you. “is there an end?”

Castiel closes his eyes. Dean watches the slight movement beneath the eyelids. He knows this is the look of concentration, of remembrance of things not yet past. “Yes, Dean,” he breathes (eyelashes slightly damp, he has no shame), “There is an end.” It is far, it is remote, perched at the distal end of time. It is God’s greatest mercy. If you cannot trust in death, then put your faith instead in obliteration.

“Cas,” he swallows. “I gotta tell you,” Get it out, get it out, get it out. Break it down into manageable pieces. Mise en place. “I might never say this again but it’s always gonna be true, alright?” Closes his eyes, tugs on the safety tether (he is out, walking among the asteroids), “I love you.”

Have you ever seen the sun? Castiel is the sun, his light shines into Dean’s dark places, scares away the shadows. Hunts the monsters. Shitfuck, you’ll ruin me. Dean knows he will never be able to not smudge Castiel in the future. He wants to come to the man’s bed covered in cinnamon dust, covered in motor oil. He wants to roll in the white flannel sheets and come away like an artist. He wants the sheets to be soaked through with him, his history, his own self, his sweat. He wants to rip his shame out by the root and leave it there, buried, under the bed. Castiel, breaker of stars, reaches for him. His hands trail down Dean’s chest, his stomach, lower still. Dean bites off a moan. Every time is the first time. I will climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit.

(The strangest word in the English language is syzygy. It is the direct, straight-line configuration of celestial bodies. Dean lays over Castiel, each waiting for their breath to even, their pulses to stabilize. Their hearts lined up in something like syzygy, ready to be read like the stars.)

The universe, all of it, from the earth to the Milky Way to the Virgo Supercluster, was formed from a singular explosion. The very existence of matter is drawn from the bones of dying stars, scavenged from the corpses of supernovae. He is living as all men do, his life is a brief interlude to a molecule. He will, like all men, someday return to the stars. One day, in another lifetime perhaps or in another universe (this time he is the angel and Castiel is human), he and Cas can try again when they are each elements (perhaps hydrogen, perhaps helium). They will see each other again across the face of a faraway sun, both points along its circumference and radiating light out at 186,282 miles per second. There is a book open in Cas’ lap. “What are you reading?” he asks. Tell me a story.

“I am reading,” the former angel says (he is tucked back into the leather couch, a knit blanket thrown about his ever-cold feet), “about the heavens.”

“Tell me,” he says quietly. I want to hear you. Cas arches one cast-iron eyebrow, the ghost of a smile on his mouth. His voice is rich and dark as the sky, as the ocean, and crowded with rust. He clears his throat.

“‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the oxygen in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff,” Cas reads. Hope (that awful, unbearable promise, that thing with feathers) fills his chest. He translates into things he knows, thinking of cakes and cookies and doughnuts dipped in a galaxy mirror glaze. He will teach Cas to make this, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week. They have time enough for now. Dean closes his eyes and floats off in the wine-deep. Whether it is space or the ocean dark, he does not know.

Shaker Lemon Pie
(Winchester Family Recipe)

Crust
315 grams all-purpose flour
15 grams granulated sugar
5 grams kosher salt
225 grams unsalted butter, very cold

Filling

2 large Meyer lemons
2 cups granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
4 large eggs plus 1 egg white
4 tablespoons butter, melted
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Coarse or pearl sugar, to dust

Make the crust first.
Set out your ingredients, plus a ¼ cup of very cold water. Whisk the flour, sugar, and salt together in a medium mixing bowl. Cut the butter in with either a pastry blender or a food processor. Slowly add the ice cold water until it begins to come together and looks shaggy, like pearls and like peas. You will likely not need all of it, it will depend on the day, the moisture in the air. Finish with your hands, bringing the dough together into a firm disc. Wrap in plastic, chill for at least thirty minutes.

Make the filling next.
Wash and dry lemons. Zest the lemons, ideally using a microplane. Slice as thin as possible. If you have a mandolin, now is the time to use it. Fill a large, non-reactive bowl with the slices and zest. Pick out any seeds if they’ve fallen in. Toss with the sugar and salt. Cover, let macerate for at least twenty-four hours.

Preheat the oven to 425 F. Roll half of the rested, relaxed crust out on a floured surface with a floured rolling pin until 1/8th inch thick. It should fill a 9-inch pie pan. Roll the other half to do the same, set aside. Mix the lemon macerated mixture with butter, four eggs, and flour. Combine well. Pour into prepared pie shell. Layer the second pie crust over the top, trim to ¼ inch overhang and crimp as you like. Beat the last egg white until frothy as a storm sea. Brush over the pie shell, dust with coarse or pearl sugar. Vent the crust by cutting slits in the top.

Bake for 25 minutes. Reduce to 350 F. Bake an additional 20 minutes or until crust is golden brown.

Cool completely.

Eat.

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