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Sam stood in a field at the edge of something so horrifically deep, so fundamentally terrifying that words like Pit and Cage became meaningless even as metaphors, looked at his brother who was love-family-frustration-friendship sitting in front of the car that was home-safety-happiness -- and jumped, dragging two archangels down with him.
When he landed, he was back on Earth, like he'd never left. Well, almost. He quickly learned that his resurrection had taken about a week, that he'd had an extended family of hunters hidden in the shadows all along, that Dean had fulfilled his promise to test drive a normal life, and that Sam's own thinking had never been more organized nor his decisions easier to make. Hell, though unremembered, was remarkably clarifying. Samuel had work for him to do, work that Sam was uniquely qualified for, and Sam briefly considered collecting Dean.
No. Dean would fuss over the apparently unanswerable hows and whys; better to leave him in relative safety until he was needed.
***
The problem with leaving Dean with Lisa and Ben was that Dean tended to become attached. He should have remembered that. Dean's insistence on returning to them between jobs was inconvenient; his obsession with checking his phone for messages from them while they were working had the potential to become disruptive.
Then Dean summoned up Castiel like it was nothing, Castiel abandoned a war in Heaven to answer him and put it down to their 'more profound bond,' and Sam thought, well, there's the solution.
***
They were in one of those in between times between the research and the hunt, when Sam's thoughts turned to letting off a little steam. That would be easier if he weren't sharing a room with a brother who considered Sam the next best thing to celibate and tended to freak out over any deviation from his memory of normal. But maybe if Dean wanted the room to himself, Sam wouldn't have to come up with a hunting-related excuse to stay out all night.
"What do you think of Castiel?"
"What do I think of him?" Dean gave him a weird look. "I dunno. He's less of a dick than most angels?"
Sam scratched get Dean to talk about his feelings off the list. It had seemed like a long shot.
***
It had taken more than a little maneuvering -- Castiel was both cagier now and busier, and Sam hadn't even known whether it would work given Cas's renewed connection to Heaven -- but Sam had managed to get Cas intoxicated and Dean two beers past 'happy.' He smiled to himself as he let himself out of the room with the stated intent of buying pizza and the actual intent of taking up the waitress from lunch on her offer.
He let himself back in in the morning, bearing coffee and whistling. Dean snarled and pulled the pillow over his head. Sam studied him for a moment. The hangover was expected, but Sam had thought the endorphins would balance it out a bit more. Five minutes later, Dean flailed his way upright and grabbed for his share of the caffeine. Fully dressed.
Sam suspected things had not gone as planned. He put on his best innocent-curiosity face. "Wow, Dean, you were really drunk last night."
"It was only a couple beers," Dean told his coffee.
"And Cas had most of a liquor store."
Dean snickered, then winced. "He was wasted. Never not funny."
Sam waited, but nothing else seemed forthcoming. "And then you... went to sleep."
He looked at him blankly. "Yeah, well, it was pretty late."
Sam scratched get them drunk together off the list. He'd had hopes for that one.
***
After Castiel got done scrabbling around inside him for his soul, Sam deeply and sincerely hoped that his hangover had been a thousand times worse than Dean's. Then he stepped up his efforts to get Dean and Castiel involved. Sure, he didn't owe Cas any favors, but he figured distracting them with each other would buy him some breathing room.
***
Convincing Dean that he would actually die if he didn't get laid immediately hadn't been nearly as difficult as it should have been. Sam suspected he'd been waiting for that particular curse to strike since he hit puberty. When he'd suggested maybe they should call on a little heavenly assistance, however, Dean had laughed until he snorted and gasped out something incomprehensible about a brothel. The response was so unexpected that Dean had staggered out the door before Sam could launch into his prepared explanation of why Castiel was the logical choice.
Sam hesitated, then crossed out fake(?) curse. He probably wouldn't get better results if he tracked down a witch and forced her to cast the real curse, and if either Dean or Cas figured out he was behind it, he'd wind up in Bobby's little prison-slash-safe-room before he'd regained consciousness.
***
"When you said you and Dean have a 'profound bond,'" Sam asked, watching Cas's reaction out of the corner of his eye.
"We have a bond. It's special."
Sam gave up on the sidelong look and just stared. "I still can't tell if you know you're making a double entendre."
Castiel glanced at him and said, "The hall's clear." Then he vanished.
Sam crossed ask about their profound bond off the list and moved into position.
***
Sam looked at his list of failures.
get Dean to talk about his feelings
send Castiel into the bathroom while Dean is in the shower He'd tried that a couple times, actually. Not that he'd expected better results after the initial failure -- it was just entertaining.
get them drunk together
Florence Nightingale had been doomed from the start, in retrospect. Cas didn't so much nurse Dean back to health as fix him whenever he was too broken to help hunt celestial nukes.
ask about their profound bond
fake(?) curse
send them into a gay bar for intel The less said, the better.
In the end, not one of his plans had worked, from the simplest to the most Machiavellian, and Sam couldn't understand why. If Castiel had proven to be above base human needs, he might have accepted it. Maybe other angels were above them, but the way Cas looked at Dean sometimes was decidedly nonplatonic -- plus this particular angel was capable of getting turned on by cheap porn. And Dean was -- well, Dean was Dean, and usually pretty easy. And yet, they kept slipping past each other, skittering away from Sam's every attempt to push them together, like a pair of magnets with the same charge.
Sam's motivation had evolved from managing Dean, to not wanting to back down from a challenge, to something approaching a compulsion to prove himself right. One of his plans should have worked by now, and yet he was down to his last resort.
He let himself into the motel room. Cas was sitting with Dean on one of the beds. Absolutely nothing interesting was going on. "Oh, for-- Would you two just fucking fuck already?"
Dean made a choking noise. Castiel tipped his head -- maybe it was curiosity, maybe he'd been hanging out with owls. Sam didn't care.
"You like him. He likes you. You'd feel better and be more focused if you were having sex regularly. I don't understand why this is so difficult."
"You can't just say stuff like that!"
Oh, good, Dean found his voice. Sam rolled his eyes. "I'm not supposed to say stuff like that. Doesn't make it untrue, and it doesn't mean I didn't think it before."
"'Before?' You mean when you had a soul?"
Sam made a moue of distaste but nodded agreement.
"Did you even stop to think that maybe you had a reason for not saying shit like that?"
Mostly because it really hadn't occurred to him, though it should have. Souls cluttered up one's thought process. He put on a thinking face. "I didn't want to embarrass you," he suggested, tone rising at the end. Dean bought his stories better when he sounded uncertain about past emotions. "Anyway, how is this about me? We're talking about you two."
"We're really not," Dean growled, but his eyes darted to Cas, who had turned his owlish gaze to Dean.
"Hm," Cas said, eyes falling to Dean's lips. Dean swallowed which wasn't at all the same as backing away.
Sam beamed. Finally. "Great! I'm going out, back later. Much later." He ducked out the door, stood on the concrete sidewalk outside for a moment, considering. He could walk into town (hearing the Impala start up would bring Dean running), but the night clerk of this little no-tell motel had been a cute brunette -- and with any luck she'd be getting off about now. Time to ask about the motel's amenities and see where flirting got him.