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Orpheus

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Castiel grabs his robe from the bathroom, seething as he knots the cord and hurries through to the front room. Gabriel is still knocking hard, and when Cas finally opens the door, his brother rushes in like he's expecting armed resistance.

'Jesus, Cassie!' he says, and grabs him in for a rough, angry hug. He pulls back, gripping Castiel's shoulders, raking him with his gaze. 'What the hell happened to you last night? Are you all right? Do I need to kill someone?'

'Gabriel!' Cas steps away from him, struggling to keep his temper under control. 'Explain.'

Gabriel looks briefly murderous. 'Me explain? Do you even know what time it is? Where the hell have you been all day!'

'All day? It's not even noon.'

'Try two thirty, genius,' Gabe says, scathing as ever.

'I – what?' Castiel blinks, thrown. 'It can't be.' But sure enough, the wall clock confirms it: 2:34PM, which means that he and Dean slept in for longer than he thought. 'Huh. Well, I'll be damned.'

Gabriel's jaw twitches. 'You'll be damned? That's it ? I spend the morning in fear for your safety, and you'll be damned?'

'In fear for my safety? Don't be so dramatic.' Castiel laughs, but for once in his life, Gabriel remains stonefaced. 'All right, what is it? What am I missing?' And then, in sudden panic, 'Has something happened? Michael, Anna, they're not –?'

'Oh, for the love of –' Gabriel throws up his hands. 'Everyone other than you is fine.'

Castiel frowns. 'I don't understand.'

Gabriel sighs. 'Cassie, you've barely missed a day of work in your life, and when you do, you always ring in. Always, OK? But today, you didn't. The office tried to call you, but your phone is off, and when you still hadn't showed by noon, that freaked them out enough that they rang me, and I rang Luke, and he told me you left Dante's last night with one of his regular patrons.'

Gabriel pronounces the latter word like a synonym for parasites, or possibly scum. Castiel bristles. 'And?'

'And ?' His brother looks apoplectic. 'Have you ever been to Luke's club? It's practically a brothel, Cassie! It's notorious in all the wrong ways, and you met someone there, someone who knows what kind of place it is and goes there anyway, and then you vanished off the face of the fucking earth. And I thought –' and here, at last, he lowers his voice, a glint of concern in his eyes, '– I thought something awful had happened to you.'

It's such an extraordinary speech, it takes Castiel a full three seconds to parse his brother's meaning. 'You thought I'd been raped?' he says, incredulous.

'I didn't know what had happened!' Gabriel yells. 'I just knew something was wrong, and you wouldn't answer your fucking phone!'

Castiel runs a hand over his face, groaning slightly. 'The battery must be dead. It was low yesterday, and I forgot to hook it up to the charger last night. Which also explains the lack of an alarm, now I think about it.'

'Oh, well, obviously!' Gabriel stares daggers at him. 'Silly me for caring.'

Castiel squints at his brother, baffled. 'I appreciate the concern for my well-being, but I am, as Anna delights in pointing out, a grown-ass man. Did you honestly not consider that I might just be having, ah, a good time?'

Adding insult to injury, Gabriel actually laughs. 'OK, firstly, the last time you had what we normal humans refer to as a good time, I'm pretty sure we had a different President. And secondly, whatever you did last night, you don't take a morning off for someone you met at Luke's tawdry excuse for a business.'

Castiel goes very still, quiescent anger stirring. 'Oh? And why is that, Gabriel?'

'Because,' says Gabe, with acid patience, 'Dante's is frequented by exactly three types of people: users, whores, and broken souls, and by the way, that's Luke's phrase for them, not mine. That's what he thinks of his clientèle, and unless you've got some unspeakable secret kink for the stench of herpes and desperation that I don't know about, none of that exactly sounds like your bag. Which is why I assumed, not unreasonably, that if your lapse in judgement last night had lead to an unplanned absence this morning, it probably wasn't because of anything fun. So.' He crosses his arms, and looks Castiel straight in the eye. 'I'll ask you again: do I need to kill someone?'

'No,' Cas growls, 'but I might. Get out, Gabriel.'

'Not until you tell me you're all right.'

'I'm fine! Or I was, until you showed up.'

'If you're so fine, then why did you miss work?'

Castiel rolls his eyes. 'Oh, like you've never stayed out late and taken a day off? Abandon the high ground before it disintegrates under the weight of your hypocrisy, you sanctimonious ass.'

'OK, OK! Yeesh!' Gabriel pulls a face. 'Just promise me you were careful, and I'll be on my merry.'

Remembering the shower, Castiel drops his gaze, cheeks burning, and Gabriel, who had been about to turn for the door, stops dead.

'You were careful, weren't you?' And then, almost pleading, 'Tell me you didn't.'

'Gabriel –'

'Jesus fuck , Cassie!' Gabe grabs his shoulder, genuinely horrified. 'You're barebacking strangers now? Are you insane? That fucking club is a Petri dish! What, did he tell you some sob story about how he just wanted to connect with someone, really feel things properly? Did you think he was one of your strays?'

Castiel wrenches away from him, embarrassed and angry. 'There was,' he says, voice barely controlled, 'no story , and what do you mean, one of my strays?'

Gabe is visibly fuming. 'Oh, you know exactly what I mean. You're a soft touch, Cassie, always have been, and that goes for humans as well as animals. You and your fucking saviour complex, I always said it was more stupidity than kindness, and here's the proof! For fuck's sake, even Luke has more sense than to dip his wick in that cesspool, and he runs the bloody place!'

'My sex life is none of your business –'

'It is when you're endangering yourself!' Gabe snaps. 'Now go get dressed, will you? I have no desire to drag your ass to the nearest clinic when all that stands between it and the world is a dressing gown, but so help me, I will if I have to.'

'Make me,' Cas snarls, 'you overbearing, judgemental –'

'Cas.'

The single word hits him like a blow. He turns slowly, nausea churning his guts, and there's Dean, fully dressed and so unnaturally pale, he looks halfway to dead. 'It's all right,' he says, and though he's tried to scrub them away, the tear-tracks are clear on his cheeks. 'I'm going now.'

'That's him?' says Gabriel, high and shocked. 'He's still here?'

'Not for long,' says Dean, and makes for the door.

Castiel leaps to intercept him, mortification hot in his throat. 'Dean, no, please, you don't have to –'

Dean's expression is stiff with self-loathing. 'He's right, you know. I might as well be a whore. I let myself get fucked like one often enough.'

'Don't say that.' Cas grabs his arm, tries to reach him like he did in the studio, but this time, Dean pulls gently away, and Cas is too numb to stop him. 'Please, don't –'

'Bye, Cas,' Dean says, softly. He smiles a terrible, brittle smile, and the truth of it hits Castiel like a suckerpunch: Dean overheard everything , all Gabe's awful assumptions about whores and strays and Petri dishes, and now he won't stay to argue the point, because he agrees , and there's no time left in which to convince him otherwise.

'Please,' Cas says again, but it's too late: Dean shakes his head, his green eyes glassy and sad, and slips out the door like a ghost.

The latch clicks shut, and Castiel feels like he's snapped a rib. He wants to run after him, but he's terrified of doing more harm than good. Dean was defensive even before Gabe showed up and shot his mouth off, and as badly as he wants to, Castiel has no right to drag Dean back to his apartment and kiss him until he stops hating himself. If he just knew what the problem was, then maybe he'd trust himself to say the right thing, but Dean is still a stranger to him – and now, it seems, will stay that way forever.

Which leaves Cas standing there, chest tight with a grief so misplaced and inappropriate, it feels like an alien thing.

'That... wasn't what I was expecting,' says Gabriel, into the silence.

Castiel whirls on his brother, breathing hard. 'Get out, Gabe. Get the fuck out of my house.'

Contrition and defiance war on Gabriel's face, and as ever, defiance wins out. Unmoving, he lifts his chin and says, 'You still need to go to the clinic.'

The last time Castiel properly hit his brother, they were both teenagers. Gabriel had just pulled a prank which had, as sometimes happened, gone spectacularly wrong, resulting in the destruction of pretty much everything Castiel owned that was vulnerable to water. Then, he'd been scrawny, still shorter than his captain-of-the-athletics-team big brother, and too frightened of being hurt in turn to really start something dangerous.

Now, though, Cas has a good two inches on him in height, a musculature that's hard where Gabe's is soft, and nothing to hold him back.

He punches Gabriel hard in the face, savagely satisfied by how much it hurts. Gabe staggers, and Cas hits him again, and again, his fist raised for another blow when Gabriel roars and tackles his midriff, slamming them onto the couch. Cas yelps, trying to grapple his way free, but Gabe has the advantage of both leverage and momentum, and manages to grab his wrists.

'Castiel!' he shouts, so close by Cas's ear that it might as well be a slap. 'Stop it!'

'You bastard!' Castiel yanks his hands free, shoving Gabe violently to the floor. But the rage is going out of him, replaced by the discomforting realisation that bathrobes are not ideal wrestling attire; panting, he stops to cover himself, and in the pause, Gabe shuffles back on his ass and slumps against the wall. They stare at each other, mutually furious, but where Castiel is only winded, Gabriel has a bloody nose, a split lip and a blossoming black eye. He reaches up to touch his face, wincing when his fingertips come away red.

And then, because he's Gabriel, his brows arch up, and he laughs.

'Damn, Cassie. You got an arm on you these days. Must be all the masturbation.'

Castiel snorts, momentarily regressing to age eleven. 'Takes one to know one.'

They grin at each other, and then Cas remembers why they were fighting, and feels even sicker than he did before. It's not too late; he can still run after Dean, grab him before he gets past the lobby, and then tell him – what? Cas doesn't know, and he's still trying to figure it out when Gabriel says, 'Cassie?'

He lifts his head. 'Yeah?'

'I really fucked that up for you, didn't I?'

Castiel swallows against the lump in his throat. 'Yeah, Gabe. You really did.'

'You seriously picked him up at Dante's?' He almost sounds impressed.

'Yes.'

'Last night?'

'Yes.'

'And you didn't know him before that? Not even in a wistful-eyes-from-afar kind of way?'

'Not even then.'

Gabriel hesitates, licking his split lip. 'I know you've gone a while between drinks, but was it really that good? And don't even think of playing the gentlemen never tell card, either – under the circumstances, I'm entitled to a little salacious honesty.'

Castiel glares at him, but when he sees neither question nor comment was meant as bait, he tips his head back and sighs. 'You'll laugh at me.'

'You wound me, brother. Literally.' And he touches his eye again. 'C'mon. I'm defenceless, here. Though all things considered, I wouldn't say no to an ice pack. Or some actual ice, for that matter. Preferably two small cubes with that whiskey I gave you for Christmas.'

'You're incorrigible,' Castiel says.

'Yeah, well, you corrige enough for the both of us.' He hauls himself up right, limping over to the kitchen. 'You want one?'

'Yes, Gabe, I'll gladly have a glass of my whiskey. Thanks ever so.'

'Don't be such a pissant.' He grabs an ice pack from the fridge and wraps it in a tea towel, hissing as he holds it up to his eye. 'That's half your problem, you know.' He snags two glasses from the cupboard, setting them on the bench. 'Most of the time you're so tightly wound, it's like you've got a Swiss watchmaker's stamp on your ass.' The clink of ice cubes, followed by the click of a screw-cap. 'And then, when you finally do cut lose, you never know what to do with yourself.'

He flops down on the lounge, two glasses balanced expertly in one broad palm while the other hand presses the ice to his face. 'Cheers,' he mutters, and as Castiel takes his whiskey, Gabe chinks their glasses together.

'That's one half,' says Cas, grimacing as the spirit burns his throat. 'What's the other?'

'Good old fashioned repression.' Gabriel pauses, knocking back half his generous glass in a single hit, and lifts the ice pack just enough to stare at him with both eyes. 'Cassie, you're twenty-eight years old, and you still act like mom and dad will ground your ass if you don't eat all your vegetables.'

'I do not!'

'Oh, right.' Gabe rolls his eyes. 'So accountancy, you do that for the love of it? You're happy in your career of choice?'

A muscle works in Castiel's jaw. 'It's a job, Gabriel, not a higher calling. I'm... content.'

'Which would be fine,' says his brother, 'if you didn't crave passion. You know you're talented, Cassie; you must do, or that antsy perfectionist part of you that makes you check all your prints with a spirit level wouldn't dare to hang them in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I salute your pragmatism, and getting inked when the elders made you stick your degree out? Priceless. I mean, the look on mom's face when you showed her? I laughed for a week.' He chuckles, and despite himself, Castiel does, too. 'But still, I always figured you'd quit the corporate stuff. You know, just stick it out long enough to get some savings, then switch over to art. Except you never have, and frankly, it's starting to warp you.'

'Frankly,' says Cas, 'feel free to go fuck yourself.'

'You know, I've tried that, and it's surprisingly difficult.' He waggles his eyebrows, and Castiel groans. 'But in all seriousness, Cassie, this guy –'

'Dean.'

'– Dean, right – are you sure this isn't just some libido-induced delirium? Because there's nothing wrong with that, if it is. I mean, I fall in lust all the time, and believe me, it is frequently worth it.'

Sighing, Castiel sips his whiskey. 'Gabe, if you laugh, I'm never trusting you again.'

Gabriel holds up a hand. 'On my honour as a Jedi.'

'Fine.' Cas rolls the glass in his hands, obscurely nervous. 'Yes, the sex was good. I mean, it was very, very good. And yes, it's been a while, too, but it wasn't that – it's why it was good in the first place.' He shakes his head, frustrated. 'People talk about good sex like it's this mechanical process, like it's something you should be able to replicate under lab conditions, but try to reduce it down to composite movements, Insert Tab A into Slot B, and all you get is, I don't know, genital Tetris, or a pornographer's Ikea catalogue, and – goddamit, Gabriel, you promised you wouldn't laugh!'

His brother is almost choking, whiskey spraying over his lap from a literal spit-take. 'Genital Tetris !' he cackles. 'I'm sorry, Cassie, but Jesus Christ. I'm not made of stone!' He wipes his mouth, his good eye bright with merriment. 'More to the point, I'm laughing with you, not at you.' And then, when Castiel still remains silent, 'Oh, don't sulk. I'm listening!'

'I know,' Castiel grouches. 'That's the problem.' He makes a face, and gives in. 'The point being, really good sex is more than the sum of its parts. Like art, in a way. There isn't always a logic to why it works, but when it does, you know – it's personal, alchemical, not something you can mistake. And with Dean, I just... I thought, when I saw him, I thought he was so beautiful, and I know how shallow that sounds, but I kept on thinking it – about him , I mean, him as a person, not him as a body – and I couldn't breathe, Gabe, I woke up next to him and I couldn't breathe.'He drops his gaze. 'He felt it, too. Or at least, I thought he did.'

His hands are shaking around the glass, and he can feel Gabe judging him, which, thanks to the peculiarities of their relationship, is simultaneously mortifying and comforting.

'All right,' says Gabriel, after a moment. 'So it was good sex. So you want to see him again, you think he feels the same, and somehow I made that not happen by, what, impugning his honour?'

'Not that,' says Castiel, quietly. 'You triggered him, I think.'

'I what?'

'Triggering, it's when –'

'I know what triggering is,' says Gabriel, sharply. 'Explain how it happened here.'

Castiel sucks in breath. 'Everything you said about Dante's, about the people who go there, it's what he thinks of himself. When I said he could stay last night, he asked outright if I wanted to hurt him.' His voice cracks. 'He came here thinking I'd hurt him, Gabriel. Not because he likes pain, but because he thinks he deserves it. I don't know why. I wish I did. But I didn't know how to ask him that, and even if I had done, I didn't have the right.'

'Shit.' Gabriel lowers the ice pack, raises his whiskey, and drinks. 'That is profoundly messed up.'

'I know.'

'Still, I was right about one thing.'

'Oh?'

'He's definitely one of your strays.'

Castiel's head jerks up. 'He is not –'

'Cassie!' Gabriel shoots him an irritated look, wincing as he replaces the ice pack. 'You met him at Dante's, he clearly has issues, and all you've done so far is sit here and rhapsodise about how special he is and how you want to help him. If that's not you investing in a stray, then I don't know what is.' He sighs, and the sting goes out of his tone. 'But that doesn't mean you're wrong to want to try. People have built more from less, after all.' And then he grins, the sly fox-smirk that is quintessentially Gabriel, and says, 'Plus, he's totally hot.'

'Gabriel –' Cas growls warningly.

'What, like I don't have eyes? Stray or not, you're punching above your weight.'

'Gabriel!'

'Does he have a last name?' Gabe asks, the change in topic catching Cas off guard.

'What? Oh. Winchester. Dean Winchester.'

Gabriel nods thoughtfully. 'Well, at least that's something. It would've been much harder to try and track him down if all you had to go on was Dean. I'm assuming, of course, that you never got his number?'

'I didn't,' says Castiel – wary now, because Gabriel's assistance never comes without a price. 'You're really going to help me?'

'Against my better judgement, I'm really going to help you.' Gabriel lifts the ice pack again, eyeing him sternly. 'But only if you come to the clinic with me.'

'There's no need –'

'Castiel.' Gabe sets down his empty glass. 'As touching as I find your romantic idealism, and as much as I'd like to believe your Winchester's sexual history is as pure as the driven snow, Dante's is still the kind of place where you can get hepatitis from the bar mats, so yes, there is a need.' He slaps Cas on the shoulder. 'Now go put some pants on, would you?'

And with that, Gabriel rises, carrying his empty glass into the kitchen. Castiel stays seated, staring at the apartment door, a sudden lump in his throat.

'Gabe?'

'Yeah?'

He turns in his seat, uncertain gaze fixed on his brother. 'What if you find him, and he doesn't want to see me?'

Gabriel is only two years Castiel's senior, but in that moment, his smile is eternal and ageless. 'Then you learn one of life's great lessons, kiddo – that sometimes, the ones you want most don't want you back.'