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"I feel like an animal, and animals don't know sin, do they?"
The killer turned out to be a shapeshifter, not a spirit. But beyond that mistaken assumption, the hunt had gone well. By the time they reconvene and locate a motel room for the night, it's only late afternoon and their injuries are small and few.
Blood stains the cuff of Cas's jacket, tacky and drying slowly. Sitting on the edge of the motel bed, he picks idly at it, scratching at the flecks of brown against blue so as not to pick at the tape stretched and itching over the skin of his hand. Dean had placed a square of gauze over the cut on his palm—incurred from a wayward grip on the sharp corner of the crumbling brick wall of the apartment building, not when from the shapeshifter slashed at him with the dropped knife—in the parking lot after they arrived at the motel. Cas had let him, though only after Dean had first seen to his own injuries and finished taping his broken pinkie finger to his unbroken ring finger, and then submitted to resting his head against Dean's shoulder when Dean slid his injured hand under Cas's jacket and pressed against his spin and drew him close for a hug.
The physicality is nice, not as new as it once was, platonic and reassuring. In the parking lot, the solidity of Dean's body against his had been a comfort. The land scrapes flat along the north-eastern edge of Arizona, with sharp, cloudless skies and the mountains hazy along the distant horizon. The sun beats down heavily from dawn until dusk, baking the earth. It creates a gold, dusty heat—the same heat and dust that had soaked into Dean's black t-shirt and smudged the side of his neck. Cas had snugged his mouth there and watched over Dean's shoulder from behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses as Sam had exited the motel office after booking them a room for the night.
A very different kind of heat lingers between them.
It took Cas a few weeks to interpret it. He noticed the change in Sam right away. It was hard to miss: the way Sam's gaze lingered and then flickered away as soon as Cas tried to meet his gaze; the flare of Sam's nostrils and diffident tension in his body when Cas came near. It's different than the tension Sam develops when Cas touches Dean.
It's interesting.
The change took place after Cas told Sam about his experience with Lucifer, the knowledge Lucifer gave him.
It's that carnality Cas sees in Sam now, from time to time, thrumming like a new pulse. In his body beats a reply, something animal, hungry. It's new. It's fascinating.
Dean, he suspects, hasn't noticed. Even if Dean has, Cas can't bring himself to care. Dean's opinion matters greatly to him in most things (more than it ever should have). But there are some things—some things are none of Dean's business.
Dean's actions now are the sort that allow Cas to believe that Dean thinks nothing of the mounting tension between him and Sam. Losing rock-paper-scissors to Sam seems to be a common occurrence in Dean's life. Yet Dean still whines as though he never expected to lose, and jovially mocks Sam's food order, and ruffles Cas's hair as he walks passed him on the way out the door. The hunt had gone well, after all.
If Dean suspected, surely he wouldn't leave Cas and Sam alone in the room together. Surely he wouldn't be whistling as he left to go buy dinner for the three of them.
Cas watches Dean through the window as he crosses the parking lot towards the Impala, and then glances in Sam's direction. They haven't had a chance to be alone before now. If Dean wasn't there, then it was Bobby, by nature of the three of them living at his house between hunts. The few moments at gas stations or diners couldn't count; neither could the times they teamed up to cover an area on a hunt. There were always other people, then, other concerns that required attention—the lingering awareness that Dean could be back at any moment. Eastern Arizona, however, is desolate. They were lucky to find this motel; the nearest food place is a forty minute drive along the highway. Dean won't be back for nearly two hours.
As he watches Sam, Cas can feel his heart beat in the hollow of his chest, the call of something wild and unknown.
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I could have sex with Cas.
First it was weird, and then it became something like a luxury, that he had that choice the way he had no choice with Dean, and at some point after that, it had become-- almost helpful.
He and Dean were trying not to have sex, but there's so much stress and tension in their lives right now, and that has always been their shelter from stress and tension, the familiarity and home of each other's bodies, and it was difficult. Sometimes a hug would go on too long, and Sam could smell Dean in his nostrils, or they'd have a stupid moment on the couch, laughing in a three-beers kind of way, and Sam would feel that familiar gutclench of love for his brother, would want so badly to slide into his space and suck him off. But he'd remember-- he could have sex with Cas. And he'd pull back from the hug, let the laughter just be laughter. Maybe he wouldn't need that from Dean if he could have it from somebody else.
And then-- then it changed again. Because Cas isn't stupid, for all that he sometimes seems astonishingly oblivious, and sometimes when he caught Sam staring, he would stare right back. He's still got those unnerving angel-eyes, but sometimes, sometimes now there was something hot and raw and intent in them. What, Sam doesn't know. If Cas is just looking at him and thinking of Lucifer fucking him in his alternate universe, he doesn't know. But it's there, and Sam thinks, I could have sex with Cas, and something vicious and victorious would roar in his chest, a rush like he remembers demon blood giving. It feels like power, because he could have that, if he wanted. Something that's only his, not Dean's.
So that's where he is now, and it's getting harder and harder to just think, I could have sex with Cas, and be content with that. He wants to strangle Dean when the idiot books a single room for the three of them. He's not sure whether it's genuine thoughtlessness, or just Dean's determined insistence that everything is gonna be fine, like they're not all screwed up eight ways to Sunday.
'Two beds?' he hisses at Dean as they head down the shabby hallway, but Dean gives him this look like he doesn't know what Sam's bitching about, even though there's no way he couldn't, and rolls his eyes.
'Dude, chill. We're all gonna sleep, nothing's gonna happen.'
And Sam really, really doesn't want to have an argument about this in a motel corridor, so he shuts up.
It's probably a good thing Dean gets landed with going for food, otherwise they might have ended up having the argument in a motel room instead. Or only possibly a good thing, because as the door closes behind Dean, Sam is suddenly, acutely aware that he and Cas are alone together.
I could have sex with Cas.
He could have that, and have it now, and fuck Dean for thinking this was going to work without complications, he could have Cas while Dean's off getting them food and Dean would never know. The thought is dizzying. Cas is thinking it too, if the stare he's levelling at Sam is any indication, and Sam's heartbeat ratchets up into his throat, suddenly hectic.
'I'm, uh,' he says thickly, to break the silence, 'I'm gonna take a shower quick. I'm all--' he waves a vague hand at himself, encompassing the bloodstains and the monster goop sticking his hair together, and ducks into the ensuite.
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But for all that he can never take for granted the ease with which both Sam and Dean fulfill physical habits, he isn't, and has never been, naive. He has watched humanity since they crawled out of the oceans and lakes, the hairless apes, God's most favoured children. In half a million years, he finds it easy to identify two of the primal interactions humans engage in.
War—and sex. Love. Lust.
He thinks that may be the term for the tension between him and Sam Winchester. It may be the cause behind the air in the room seemingly to thicken in the now oppressive quiet of the motel room. He thinks it's the reason why Sam's voice sounds so different than usual, low and full, and why his heart seems to beat faster. Why he has become hyper-aware suddenly of the sensation of his skin—not just the foreign body of the tape tugging across the back of his hand, but the way his clothes drape across his shoulders and chest, the sweat from the sun sticking his shirt between his shoulder blades, the prickle of hair on his arms and trailed across his lower abdomen and—between his legs.
Skin is the largest organ of the human body; there is so much of it. It wants to be touched.
"Sam."
His voice also sounds different, deeper, and hoarse. He doesn't know what he means to say, only that he does not want Sam Winchester to leave the room. The sensation he feels now is new, different than how he felt around Lucifer, different even from how he used to feel around Dean, when this body first began to reveal what had existed only as pure thought and emotion before. It is not—strictly speaking, comfortable, this sensation. There is an edge to it that Cas associates with the anxiety before heading into battle, an anticipation that needs to be soothed or else harnessed into action, lest it become panic.
Cas has always been a good solider, not a blunt tool, but a sharp-edged weapon. Precise, efficient action on the battle field has kept him alive far longer than he ever should have been.
He swallows, lips parting around a soft, shallow exhale of apprehension. "May I join you?"
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It's just his name, but the way Cas says it, it sounds like it's weighted with a book's worth of words.
Fuck, he hasn't got laid in way too long.
Sam swallows, and turns in the doorway to face Cas. He's breathing hard through his nose, but he hasn't remembered to close his mouth all the way. And then Cas speaks again, and that righteous, triumphant thing in Sam's gut flares, high and hot and ravenous, feeling like it's stretching his skin from the inside, making it thin and sensitive.
A smile twitches around Sam's lips, open-mouthed, fighting between hunger and abashment. But why abashment? Why really? Somewhere inside Sam, he's managed to convince himself that taking what he wants, doing what he wants, is bad for him. It's always ended badly; Dean, Stanford, Ruby. So he prevaricates and resists and represses. In his more self-reflective moments, Sam is aware of this.
He's aware of it now.
Drawing a breath that broadens his chest under his dirty t-shirt, he tells abashment to go fuck itself, and meets Cas's eyes. The piercing blue of them jitters down Sam's spine.
'Yeah,' he says roughly, a little awkwardly, and then he smiles, feeling selfish and daring and free. 'I would-- really like that, if you did.'