Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“If you ever find yourself a stranger to your own heart, I hope you find your way back and remember that things change and you will also.”

Zaim Ricochet

***

“So, what do you want me to get for you? What’s your best case scenario here?”

It was an enthusiastic red-head asking him this. Her name was Charlie. She was a lawyer and this was her office and he had never, ever thought he’d be sitting here, being asked these questions. By another Omega. Since when did Omegas get to go become lawyers?

Seventeen years ago, he’d said forever with a smile on his face and later that night, let the Alpha who supposedly loved him put the scar on the side of his neck, marking him forever. He’d already consulted a cosmetic surgeon about getting it removed but it couldn’t be done. The wound had been too deep, the scar tissue grown into the gland itself. To remove the scar could only be done by removing the gland and that brought another whole host of health complications with it. Not that his health wasn’t already held together with rubber bands and Bondo.

“I. I don’t know,” Dean said and he felt like he could barely breathe again, like all oxygen had fled the room and though his lungs filled, they didn’t bring the sweet relief of breath to him. His head felt swimmy and he hand to put his head down on his knees to stop himself from passing out. Again. Charlie must have been used to it, because after a moment, there was a gentle tap on his shoulder and when he looked up, she had a glass of ice water for him and a box of Kleenex. “I don’t know. I just got out of the hospital. I nearly died. I never thought I would be here in this kind of office. I thought mating was forever, you know. I believed in it.”

“Pining syndrome?”

Dean nodded.

“Did you end up with significant permanent damage of any kind?”

Dean nodded. Not that he’d worked ever in his life, but the doctors had told him it was unlikely he’d ever be strong enough to work again. He’d been told they would provide any documentation he would need to get on permanent disability.

“They call it stress cardiomyopathy,” Dean said. “Broken Heart Syndrome.”

“You were pretty blindsided then? No warning signs. No chance to prepare yourself?”

“I thought we were fine. I’m not as young as I used to be, but I always did my best to be everything for him. To keep myself pretty and thin. I loved him. I didn’t expect him to love me when we first mated, but I thought he did. I thought it meant something to him. I thought I meant something to him,” Dean said. His heart clenched in his chest again, wildly painful, but just a kind of angina, the doctors had told him. Probably not fatal. He fumbled around with his medicine bottle for his medication, fast acting tablet that melted under his tongue and provided temporary relief. They said it would get better with time. It hadn’t yet in the six months since Michael had first abandoned him, but the doctors claimed it would.

“Will we be able to get your medical records to use in the case?” The red head asked him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dean said. He pushed the single Manila folder he’d brought with him, the only record he thought he would need- his mating contract. “I came to the mating with nothing and I walk away with nothing. It’s all right there.”

Charlie flipped through the pages quickly, skimming. Then she set it aside, as if it was only so much trash. She explained, “This is a particularly shitty version of these things, but it’s still just so much garbage. Judges hate when Alphas abandon Omegas. They hate when they do it in a way that harms the Omega irreparably. They especially hate it when they abandon children, but you said there were no children. Even so, he is not allowed, by law, to abandon you with nothing.”

“But the mating contract,” Dean protested.

“Let’s take it as read that it will get tossed and figure out what you want to walk away with. My nickname around the office is the Housekeeper for a good reason and it’s not because I’m so tidy. Is that one of the things you want? Because I can get the house for you, no problem.”

Dean thought about Michael’s big house on Rodeo where they had lived the last ten years, keeping it spotless and ready for Michael’s guests at any time. It had been a point of pride that he could have the place ready for even the most distinguished guest so long as Michael told him by three in the afternoon. They had entertained a former president once. Bishops. The CEO of Sucrocorp, Dean standing behind Michael, the perfect trophy Omega.

“No, I don’t want the house,” he said. It would be a relief to be free of the unending routine of work that kept it in top condition. Even with hired help, it was a huge endeavor. He didn’t have the will or energy to entertain prelates or politicians any longer. Most days, he was doing pretty good if he could get out of bed. He wouldn’t be here in this office today if Sam hadn’t chivvied and cajoled him out bed.

“Okay then. We’ll force a sale and get you fifty-percent equity,” she said. “Alimony of, say, twenty percent of his yearly income. Settlement of fifty percent of the net worth increase for the years you were mated. Any vacation properties or significant pieces of personal property you’d want to keep? Like art? Or cars? Did he leave you with a car even?”

“You don’t understand. The only thing I get is him not taking anything from me. It’s all in there. His lawyer said the mating contract is iron-clad. I’m only talking to you because Sam had a hissy fit and wouldn’t let me just sign and get the divorce over with.”

“Your brother’s a good man and I’m glad he didn’t let you sign,” Charlie said. “There’s a reason they tried to railroad you into signing their settlement and divorce agreement. Let’s be clear. This.”

She brandished the mating agreement. Sort of. She held it up between two fingers by the corner, as if it were some kind of loathsome thing.

“This is crap. This is garbage. This is not legally binding on you. And they know that. Sam knew that without even reading it. That’s why they tried to railroad you into a crap settlement. You deserve what I’m going to ask for you, Dean. It’s what the law allows at a minimum and I would be a shitty lawyer if I didn’t go and get it for you. I can probably get better if you let me. Now, is there any jointly owned property you particularly want?”

Dean tried to trust her. She and Sam had gone to law school together. Dean hadn’t understood why Sam couldn’t just represent him, but when asked, Sam had blathered on and on about ethical considerations and conflicts of interest. Then he’d promised to get Dean the best damn divorce lawyer he knew and that he would pay for it himself if Dean just held off on signing the divorce papers. He could trust Sam, so that meant by a chain of association, he could probably trust this Charlie. Dean didn’t want alimony or settlements or a house, though. He just wanted to be free to go lick his wounds in the corner.

He just wanted to curl up asleep somewhere and never wake up again. Just wanted it to be over and the pain to slip into sweet, empty oblivion. He’d learned, in his time in the various hospital wards, not to say that, because they interpreted it as “suicidal ideation” and it got him another big jolt of the Alphy-toscin and period of taper-off and a higher dose of the anti-depressants. And more forced nesting sessions with his family Alpha, i.e. Sam. If he had to cuddle many more times with his nose in Sam’s armpit, he was going to off himself for real.

But he listened to Charlie now. She said he got something. He could ask for something.

“There’s a car,” Dean said, softly, hardly believing he was asking for something. “It’s a classic. ‘67 Impala. Was an inheritance. From Dad. Supposed to be mine, but Michael said it had to be titled to him. Said Omegas couldn’t be on the title of cars in this state so I signed it over to him.”

“That’s just not true. You can own a car. You could always own property. He lied to you. We’ll get you that ‘67 Impala,” Charlie said.

“I don’t want alimony,” Dean said, feeling a little bolder, because she’d said she could get the Impala for him. “I don’t want to be waiting around for his check every month. I want to be done. I want it to be over with.”

“I can do that, if that’s what you want,” she said, cautiously. He could almost hear her say that she would advise against it. “I know you just want this done, but would you let me get everything you’re allowed by law?”

“I don’t know if you can,” Dean said. Michael’s lawyers were not just the best in town, but family who would go to bat for him. Dean wasn’t exactly sure which of the Shurleys were the two managing partners, but neither was Michael. She was quiet for a minute.

“Do you trust Sam and me?” She asked in a little bit.

“I trust Sam.”

Not her fault. He didn’t know her yet. His trust in her was only through his trust in Sam.

“Do you know what Sam told me?” She asked. Dean shook his head. “Sam said I should cut the bastard until he bleeds. Any way I can. Every penny I can get from him.”

A little spark lit in Dean’s chest. A little hope. Maybe just the dim remnants of a fire that had once burned bright and hot inside of him but that had been banked and buried in the ashes.

“Sam is the one paying your bill,” Dean said. “So I guess that means you do what he tells you to.”

***

Sam saw Dean into the car, checked again that Garth, the driver/all around care assistant he’d recently hired, knew that Dean had to be not just returned home, but actually seen into the house, settled on the sofa with his nesting materials and comfort items and, preferably, a meal that Dean was supervised into eating. Dean was alarmingly skinny these days, not even wanting to eat pie or burgers or any of his usual favorites. Then supervised while he took his medications. Actually swallowed them, didn’t just palm them.

Anthony, the first driver Sam had tried to employ, had just dropped Dean off at the front of the house one day after a doctor’s appointment and driven off to do some of the errands that were, admittedly, on Sam’s list. Then when he was done, Anthony had pulled directly into the back entrance, dropped off the shopping in the kitchen and gone home. When Sam had returned home that evening after work, he’d found Dean still on the front stoop, nearly hypothermic and catatonic. That had been a set back that led to a week in the ICU, more time in the step down unit, then finally, a couple months in-patient care for his mental state. It was partly Sam’s fault. He hadn’t gotten Dean his own set of keys to the house. Not because he thought Dean couldn’t be trusted, but just because he didn’t think Dean would be going anywhere without being driven. Dean had just been too fragile. Sam had kicked himself because that was how Michael had done it. He’d sent Dean out shopping and by the time Dean had returned, the locks on the house had been changed. A small bag of personal effects with an explanatory note had been left on the porch for Dean. Sam had, completely by accident, traumatized Dean again in exactly the way that bastard had.

Sam’s personal theory on that, something that he’d seen bandied about on the worst corners of the internet, was that if you could shock an Omega mate you wanted to replace badly enough, you might get lucky and they’d die from the shock and pining sickness. No divorce settlement to pay and you came out looking like a tragic, grieving widower, a far better look than being the bastard replacing a faithful mate with a newer model.

Sam had never seen Dean like this before. Not even after the miscarriages. He knew that Dean, for all Michael’s faults, had loved the Alpha, but he hadn’t thought it would be like this.

It wasn’t at all that Sam minded setting Dean up in the spare bedroom with the plan to take care of him for the rest of Dean’s life. Thank God there was the money to care for him. Sam would have wanted that, wanted his brother around. It was what was expected of the situation anyway- if a rejected Omega survived, they went back to family. But it had hurt to see his once vibrant, funny, even obnoxious brother slowly fade over the years of his mating to Michael, then, when he’d finally reached the state of calm, serene passivity that was little different from ghost hood, be discarded in so vile a way. Dean had gone from acceptance to acquiescence to a passivity as hopeless as the grave.

Sam did tax work and estate planning. Wealth management. That kind of thing, but that was always family law adjacent anyway, so he’d asked around the office and people he’d graduated with. Everyone was said it was hard to beat Adler, Shurley and Shurley, but there was a new rising star who did sometimes- Bradbury, McLeod and Freely. He had to be sure to get either Charlie Bradbury or Fergus McLeod, that Bradbury was brilliant, but if she didn’t have time, it was like McLeod could make a deal with the devil himself. It turned out he and Charlie were at Stanford Law together, at overlapping times, not the same class, and that she was about pissing her pants eager to take on Adler, Shurley and Shurley head on. It was a match made in heaven as far as Sam was concerned. He’d paid the retainer without a second thought.

“So, what do you think?” He asked Charlie as he settled down into her office.

“You feel guilty,” she said.

“Dean gave the mating price he got for signing that thing to me,” Sam said. It hadn’t been big by any means. But it had, supplemented with student loans, been enough to put him through college, then law school. Compared to what a proper division, even of just the community property gained during the mating, never mind what Michael had come into the mating with, the settlement had been an pittance, a handful of beans. By sheer force of will, Sam had turned them into magic beans and climbed the vines right out of the poverty they’d been raised in.

“I mean, I could support him for the rest of his life. But I want him to be independent. Have his own life.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing that might get in the way of us winning? I know you said there was the miscarriages, but no one will blame Dean for that. No infidelity on Dean’s part? Nothing like that?”

“You scented him. That’s not a betraying Omega, that is one that’s been betrayed in the worst possible way. As far as I’m concerned, Michael tried to kill Dean. As his reward for the seventeen years Dean gave Michael everything.”

“Seventeen years?! How old was Dean when he mated? He’s what, thirty-two?”

“Thirty-four. Dean was seventeen. That mating contract should be invalidated for that alone.”

“Son of a bitch!” Charlie said.

“Just. Don’t push Dean into going after that house. Michael’s already moved the replacement in,” Sam said.

“Replacement?”

“Michael has already mated again. A twenty year old Omega. You can hardly call him a man. He looks like a boy still to me. The kid’s pregnant. Honestly, he probably was pregnant already before the bond was broken. That’s why Michael is pushing so hard for the divorce to happen fast. So he can get married again and make it legal.”

“I know you said not to push, but I’m going to eviscerate him. I’m getting him that house so he can have the pleasure of burning it to the ground if he wants.” Charlie blew a stray lock of red hair off her forehead. “I know too many Alphas like that. The mate appliance is malfunctioning a little, so get a shiny new one and send the old one off to the dump. Look. There’s one more thing that might help.”

Charlie pushed a flier at Sam. “Omega Only,” it read at the top. “Omegas helping Omegas overcome Traumatic Bond Disruption Syndrome.”

“A Pining Sickness support group? Yeah, Dean’s not going to go for that. At least not the Dean I used to know.”

“Sam, I mean this in the kindest of all possible ways, but the Dean you used to know is dead. Some Alpha broke him because it was a more expedient way to get rid of him than a planned, therapeutically lead uncoupling. You’ve gathered the pieces into a big pile. You’ve given the pieces a bottle of glue. These people can help the pieces glue themselves back together into a person in a way that you can’t. That’s something you can’t do for him.”

“Omega only? Is that even fair? I mean, think about how many times it’s some Omega being unfaithful, turning an Alpha all but feral with Alpha Rage Syndrome. Don’t they need help too? Shouldn’t there just be a unmating support group?”

For a minute, Charlie looked like she wanted to punch him and he wondered what he’d said wrong. Then she sighed and pulled out another, differently colored flyer. ‘Alphas helping Alphas. Lay your rage to rest.”

“Satisfied? In any case, our issues are different. Why should an Omega put their recovery on hold to help an Alpha? Because you know the moment you let an Alpha in, it will become all about the Alphas.”

Well, he didn’t know if he agreed about that, but he took the flyer for the Omega group, promised to give it to Dean and went back to work.

Chapter Text

The next week, when he could get out of bed again, he let himself be bundled up, taken to what he assumed was some kind of medical or therapy appointment. He didn’t know. He just went where Sam told him to go and he suffered through the time until he could go back to the sofa.

He wondered what he would have done if Sam didn’t have money, if there’d been no driver/assistant to take him places, no one to pay Charlie. No way he could just give up on life because he would starve on the streets if he did. Only maybe he would have starved on the streets. Died in the hospital because people with money, even though they weren’t supposed to, got better care than those who didn’t have it. Maybe he’d be dead already except for Sam’s care and Sam’s money? Maybe that would have been for the best anyway, because he’d be at rest, hopefully at peace of some kind.

It wasn’t a medical appointment. He got a little suspicious when Garth pulled into a church parking lot. Even more suspicious when Garth helped him out of the car and led him to the side door and into what looked like a church social hall. Garth took him to a door of a meeting room and said, “I can’t go in with you, but I’ll be waiting out in the parking lot in an hour to take you home.”

“Take me home now then,” Dean said, looking at the sign on the door. Omegas helping Omegas. “Not doing this touchy-feely, self-help yoga crap.”

Garth giggled just a little. “Sam said you’d say exactly that. He also said to tell you that you have to try at least one meeting before giving up.”

At that moment, another Omega paused, waiting, because Dean and Garth were blocking the door to the meeting room. He didn’t say anything, just stared down at his shoes. He was thick around the middle, but swathed in an enormous burgundy hoodie, so it was impossible to tell for sure if he was pregnant or not. If not, he was pretty chunky. His hair was tousled, as if barely acquainted with a comb. Garth stepped aside, though Dean didn’t. When the strange Omega looked up, his eyes were beautiful. Haunted, but the irises were deep blue. He was haggard, tired. He smelled like he hadn’t washed in a long time, though hard to tell if that was just actual not washing or if his natural scent had gone sour.

Dean shouldn’t be judgmental. Dean knew he looked worse than that. He was wearing the same kind of multi layered outfit, huge on him, because most of what he wore was Sam’s. Only they hung like a scarecrow on Dean because he was skinny. At least the clothes were clean, because Sam made sure laundry was done, or rather, he paid Garth to do it. Dean only smelled of good things- of grass and lemon and laundry, because Sam or Garth had forced him to bathe and gotten the good scented soap and lotion. They made Dean change clothes regularly. Dean didn’t smell like anything on his own. His scent glands had gone more or less off-line, part of his condition.

“I’m sorry. Were you going to the meeting?” The Omega asked. “It’s about to start. I would like to enter the room please.”

“One meeting and Sam will get off my back about it?” Dean asked Garth.

“Just one,” Garth said. “If you can’t do it for you, do it for him, because he worries about you.”

“Fine,” Dean said and he brushed past the hoodie wearing possibly pregnant guy and walked into the room. It was exactly what you would expect from a meeting room in a church basement from the beige, cracked vinyl composite tiles to the pinned up construction paper projects pinned up on bulletin boards clearly indicating that on Sundays, this room was used as a Sunday school for young grade school kids. Maybe kindergarteners. Tiny desks and chairs suited to little bodies were pushed to the side for now and in the center of the room was a circle of metal folding chairs. He couldn’t help but think of how if Emma had lived, some day she’d would have been about the right size for those chairs. If she lived, he wouldn’t be here to see that though. He’d be with Michael, at home, she’d be sleeping in the nursery he’d decorated so carefully, the easy affection they’d shared before the miscarriages had started.

The oxygen fled the room again and he couldn’t breathe and the angina was back. He felt dizzy, then the black was rising, his vision dimming, and he was about to collapse. Except suddenly someone was at his elbow and leading him to one of the folding chairs, helping him to sit down. Cold metal hit the back of his knees then his ass found a solid surface. He started digging in his pockets, but he couldn’t find his little bottle of medication that would open up the tight squeezed blood vessels in his heart. People were clustered around, not too close, as if they knew that being too close was too much. Then he found the bottle but could only fumble at the lid despite it being one of those easy open kind, so soft, gentle hands took it from him and in a moment, a pill was shook out onto his hand. Dean took the pill like he was supposed to and the great wave of pain stilled eventually.

A cup of tea was pressed into his hands and though he didn’t want the hot, weak leaf water, he held it in his hands because the heat leached through the cup and his hands were cold. His whole body was cold and he wished he’d been wearing a thick layer like burgundy hoodie guy, not just a couple of t-shirts and a flannel.

“Better now?” Hoodie guy asked. Dean nodded. Sometimes, after an attack, the words fled and he couldn’t say anything for hours. Not every time, but he wasn’t willing to risk the attempt yet. If he didn’t try talking, he wasn’t going to fail at talking. “I remember when I was in the acute stages. It was awful. Don’t try and talk. Just breathe. Breathe and remember that you’re here in the present and that he can’t hurt you any more than he already has. You’ve become a stranger to your own heart, but you can find your way back to it. Things change and you will too.”

Dean knew his case of the pining sickness was one of the worst the doctors had ever seen. Not that he was going out making new Omega acquaintances often and comparing stories, but the docs had said things. Mostly to Sam, but he couldn’t help overhearing them talk about him. Dean thought maybe it just hadn’t been bad enough. That if it had been bad enough, he wouldn’t have to be here still, suffering like this.

“One minute at a time,” hoodie guy said. “Fifteen breaths.”

Dean didn’t try to ask, but he scowled at the guy, wondering what the hell he meant by that.

“You know a lot of people say, take things one day at a time,” Hoodie Guy said. “It didn’t help. Not at all. The thought of having to live a whole day, even a whole hour. I couldn’t do it. But one minute? I can stand anything for a minute. Fifteen breaths in an average minute. Breathe fifteen times and then do it again.”

Dean looked around them. He was sitting down on one of the metal folding chairs in the circle. It wasn’t full, but there were maybe nine people here now, a good, round number. He hadn’t read the sign outside fully, but this was a group for people like him, who had their bonds broken traumatically and had gotten sick from it. Hoodie Guy was one of them. He said he remembered the acute stages, which meant he’d gotten better maybe. What could his Alpha possibly have gotten rid of him for though? He was beautiful and younger than Dean. And had an apparently functioning uterus, unlike Dean who was broken in every way.

“How far along?” He looked down at Hoodie Guy’s middle section, hoping he’d get the question.

“Oh, I’m not anymore,” the Omega said and his eyes glistened then threatened to overflow with tears. “My Jack was born over a year ago. Ah. I guess I’m just still fat from it.”

Dean ached for him because it sounded like something had happened. He’d have the baby with him here otherwise, wouldn’t he?

“He wasn’t okay?” Dean asked, cautiously. His voice sounded slow, achy and creaky, even to himself.

“My Jack is perfect and healthy and wonderful and his father has full legal and physical custody,” Hoodie Guy said. “And I don’t even have visitation.”

Son of a bitch. It was bad enough his Emma was dead, but if she were alive and fucking Michael had her and was keeping her from Dean? He couldn’t think about that. Fucking Alphas got everything and Omegas got the shortest fucking end of the stick. No doubt they’d said the Omega wasn’t a fit parent because of health issues. Never mind those issues were caused by the Alpha parent. He wished he could give this guy Charlie’s help, but no doubt if the guy could afford to hire a lawyer, he would have. He kind of looked like he was lucky not to be homeless. Dean didn’t have an answer, so he reached out and squeezed Hoodie Guy’s hand. He winced internally at how weak his grip was. He’d never been Alpha strong, but he’d once been big and strong for an Omega.

“I’m Castiel, by the way,” Hoodie Guy, now Castiel, said.

“Dean,” he said, not so much that he wanted to share his name, but it was an exchange, a trade.

After that, a woman came in, brown hair, bangs. She was Omega, one of the rare women Omegas, the only one in the room at the moment. She took a place in the circle of chairs and somehow, that became the the head of it. She was dressed in a gray pantsuit, held her head up high, and she was the picture of health, of vitality, in a room full of sad sacks like Dean and Cas. He kind of hated her, just for that.

“Hello,” she said with a soft smile. “My name is Hannah, for those who don’t know. I see a couple of new faces here tonight. I’m a psychologist and a board certified uncoupling counselor, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I’m one of you. Seven years ago, my mate broke our bond when he fell in love with another. Like you, I suffered enormous mental and physical consequences. When I found my way to recovery, I decided I would help others who were going through what I went through. We’re here to help each other.”

Dean found himself drifting off, unable to pay much attention to the cheerful, chipper counselor lady. He’d been willing to sit here, in this room for an hour, because he’d be doing it for Sam. That didn’t mean he had to force himself to pay attention or do anything else but keep his butt in the chair. Honestly, he thought maybe the little bit of kindness that Castiel had shown him had done more good for him than anything she could possibly say.

But then Cas was talking and Dean couldn’t help but listen.

“I thought I was making progress,” he said. He paused a moment and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I did all the work. I found myself a job. An apartment of my own. It even has two bedrooms, not that I can really afford the extra cost. Some of you have been here with me as I’ve been working on that, getting it all put into place. I was sure. So sure I would get at least visitation. But no. The judge denied me again. Not even supervised visitation. Said that I’m not stable enough to even consider it at this time, that he was afraid I would hurt him. The only thing keeping me going is the thought that if I let myself relapse, I’ll never get to the kind of stability I need to see my son again.”

Fuck. He just wanted to do something for Cas. He didn’t know what. He didn’t know how. He thought that some days, if he just managed to keep breathing, that was about all he could do. But for the first time since it had happened, he wanted to do something. Maybe he could tell Sam? Maybe Sam knew about free legal aid that could help someone like Cas?

All around the room, the other people said what he supposed were encouraging things. That Cas could do it, that the judge hadn’t dismissed it entirely. He just had to keep going, that they knew he’d be able to prove stability soon, he was doing so well. Dean could tell that the words were ringing hollow to Cas, that each reassurance was just another heap of dirt on the pile. Finally, at least they moved on before Cas started with the tears again.

Finally, Hannah pinned her eyes on Dean and said, “You’re new to us. I’m happy you’re here, because that means you’re making steps to recovery. Would you like this chance to share anything with us?”

Dean shook his head and then realized he was the only one who hadn’t shared anything. It was an exchange. A trade. That was the way society worked. You got, so you had to give.

“Not much. My Alpha changed the locks on me and moved a new Omega in and I’m such a weak ass bitch about it I was in and out of the hospital for months afterwards. Just got out a few weeks ago.”

After that, he got a lot of people telling him he had to be gentle with himself, kind to himself. As if Dean weren’t already treated like some fragile, glass ornament, wrapped up in storage for a holiday season that would never come. As if Sam didn’t wear white gloves around him and all but hand feed him. But he knew the truth- that he was trash and he’d been thrown out like he was trash for good reason. He was used up, all potential wasted.

People called him an Omega. He still scented like an Omega, still had the hormone spikes, the vulnerabilities of one. Still looked like an Omega, or so people said. But he wasn’t really an Omega any more, was he? Not when there was no chance, when all the parts that had made him Omega had been ripped out by surgery. All these Omegas around him, most of them were pretty young. They could recover, find a new mate to have babies with. Even Cas probably still had a chance to have another baby. Not Dean.

Then the group time was over and it was time to go. He figured Garth would come down at get him when he was back, so he, carefully, slowly helped clean up the room. He wasn’t much use. He couldn’t fold the heavy metal chairs or lift them onto their wheeled storage rack, but he moved the little kid sized plastic chairs back to their spots. Then, when order was returned to the room, he walked up the church basement steps with Cas, neither of them speaking. Garth still wasn’t there.

Dean’s phone rang, which was weird, because no one ever called him on it though Sam insisted he had to have it.

“Hey, so, can you hang tight for just a little while,” Sam said, without prelude. “Garth was in a bit of a fender bender. He’s not hurt and it was totally not his fault, but he’s sorting out the car. I’m coming for you though. Can you hold on for maybe twenty minutes. I’m coming from work.”

“Got nothing better to do,” Dean said.

Cas had been listening, so he said, “I’ll stay with you until your ride is here. I walk. My apartment isn’t far from here.”

A couple of those old fashioned bench style picnic tables were clustered near the back door of the church, beside the parking lot. They took a seat to wait.

“So, what’s your story, Cas?” Dean asked.

Cas had seemed eager enough to spill his guts during the group session, and he was just as eager to speak now, to tell his story.

“When I got pregnant, My Alpha, Luke, accused me of cheating, said it couldn’t possibly be his. He said he had a vasectomy. He never told me about it. He’d been on an extended work trip when he had it done,” Cas said, not looking up. “I was devastated, of course. But I had the baby to live for, so it wasn’t too bad. It was hard, of course, but I knew that the baby couldn’t be from anyone but him. After several months, just before the baby was born, the courts ordered a paternity test and it was his child. Like I’d said it was. It turns out the vasectomy kind of fixed itself somehow or wasn’t done properly in the first place and he wasn’t shooting blanks. He took me back but the trust was broken. We couldn’t reconcile and I didn’t handle it well. Traumatic Bond Disruption Induced Psychosis with a heavy dose of postpartum depression.”

That had to be like a punch to your gut, your Alpha accusing you of cheating like that. As if an Omega could do that. As if his Alpha couldn’t have smelled for sure that Cas wasn’t sneaking around. Then to treat him like that. Basically, that Alpha stole Cas’s baby and drove him crazy while he was at it.

Cas seemed to get what Dean was thinking, because he said, “Oh, there was no doubt that at the time, I was a danger to myself and others. Not to my Jack. Never to my Jack, but I thought Luke was Satan himself incarnate. Literally.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about Satan, but this guy sounds like a great big bag of dicks,” Dean said. In some ways, this felt almost good, being angry for someone. To have something to think about besides himself.

“I was treated. Once I was treated for the bond disruption, the rest of my recovery started falling into place. I no longer have to be medicated for the psychosis,” Cas said, but he pulled the arms of the hoodie down over his hands and he seemed to shrink a little into it. He kind of shivered even though the day wasn’t that cold.

“What was that you said? One minute at a time,” Dean said.

“Fifteen breaths,” Cas said. “In and out. Then do it again.”

“Broken heart syndrome. That’s what happened to me,” Dean said, using the colloquial name that the doctors had told him not to use because it was inaccurate or something. Dean couldn’t think of a more accurate word for what he was- broken. They called it acute stress cardiomyopathy or something like that, but that was clinical. It distanced you from the truth of what happened. That was the truth of things- Michael had broken his heart. Life had broken his heart. He was about to say something more but Sam’s suck ass Prius pulled into the lot. Dean got up from the table.

“You’ll be here next week?” Cas asked.

Even though he had intended only to come the one time, just enough to make Sam shut up, Dean found himself saying, “Yeah. I can ask Sam if we can give you a ride home.”

“No, the neighborhood is safe enough and its good for me to get a little exercise,” Cas said, patting his thickened middle.

Your body was never quite the same again once it had been used to carry a baby for nine months, they said. Not that Dean knew. He’d never gone more than five months, always lost the baby, and now there was no hope of it at all ever again. He hadn’t been eating as much as he used to these days, so he kind of had the opposite of Cas’s problem. He was a limp, deflated balloon. He didn’t meet the clinical requirement for anorexia, or so the doctors said, but he was skinny to the point that it obviously worried Sam. Who would have thought him, Dean Winchester, didn’t want to eat? He’d spent so much of his life reining his appetite in, so he kept the slender, willowy figure that Michael liked him to have.

“Trade phone numbers?” Cas asked, holding up his phone. “I like texting. Emojis. I promise I won’t bother you more than once a day, but it can be good, having a support person out there.”

They traded numbers while Sam waited by his stupid little sedan. Cas’s number and first text now in his phone, Dean made his way over to Sam. He pulled open the passenger door before Sam could round the car and open it for him. He might have been infirm, but Dean was still capable of opening his own damn car door.

“You suck,” he said, as he took his seat, slamming the door behind him. Sam. “Blindsiding me with the touchy-feely self help yoga crap like that.”

“Looks like you made a friend,” Sam said, as they drove away, trying to sound cheerful and positive, like Dean had gone to kindergarten for the first time or something.

For a minute, again, Dean couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand the fact that he’d have to struggle and go to support groups and therapy and make friends. He’d have to get better. For Sam’s sake, especially after all Sam had done and was doing for him. He’d gotten just enough better to recognize now that he couldn’t die because of Sam. But it was hard, so damn hard when all he wanted to do was lie down and rest forever. Give up on it all.

“Why didn’t you just let me die?” He asked bitterly, not for the first time. “Why didn’t you let me go?”

Normally, Sam would say something like, ‘because you’re my brother and I need you,’ or words that meant the same thing. They were driving past some kind of park but in the near darkness, he could that there were fields of flowers. They’d shine bright like jewels in the midday sun. Now though, there were just hints that they were there, a glow, smattering of color in the shadows.

Today Sam said, “Because you deserve it. You deserve to be free and alive and happy.”

Being trash blowing in the wind wasn’t freedom though. Maybe it might look like it, but it wasn’t the same. Dean didn’t say anything.

“I talked to Charlie today,” Sam said. “Michael’s people have come with an offer. It’s a quarter of the community property split. She says to tell you you shouldn’t even consider it for a minute. But she has to let you know about the offer.”

“Can’t we just take it, so we can be done with this?”

“No, we can’t,” Sam said. “I’m paying for Charlie’s expertise and she says we shouldn’t.”

Well, that was that.

Not the next morning, but the morning after that, when he was forced back into existence by the simple fact that he woke up again, he was greeted by a text on his phone. Cas, the weird, chunky little guy from the support group yesterday had sent him a message.

“Good morning. The sky is blue and it’s a new day. I will be okay. I have no choice.😳”

Like he’d said, the guy was weird. Dean wasn’t sure that emoji meant what Cas thought it did.

Dean texted back, “I suppose you’re going to tell me it gets better.”

It was read. Then there were several minutes of radio silence, but he finally got a text that said, “It gets better: vague, passive, door-matty. No. Time will inevitably put our ex-mates into the ground.😤”

Well, that was kind of ominous.

Chapter Text

Dean wandered through his days like a lost soul wandered through the wilderness. There were few bright spots to be found. A lot of pitfalls though.

Garth’s wife Bess, brought her daughter, Gertie, over one day and let Dean hold the baby. He’d asked to hold the baby, wanted to do it. He’d asked Garth if he could meet this Bess and Gertie that Garth was always talking about so Garth had brought them over one day. At first, that had felt good, so pure and good. Right up until the moment he started feeling the tears drip down his cheeks and he had to had the baby back to Bess before he drowned in them.

There were his therapy sessions with Pam Barnes. Admittedly, he didn’t talk most of the time. He couldn’t somehow, not about Michael or the divorce and unmating or any of that. Nor about the miscarriages. Pam was patient and she didn’t force him. If he needed to sit in silence, that’s what they did. If he could talk, he talked about other, older, more manageable sorrows, like his Dad’s death or the even older sorrow of his mom’s death when he was a kid. “You’ll get there,” Pam assured him. “There’s no expiration date on grief.”

Mostly though, it was just barren sand and shifting, drifting dunes to be climbed and sometimes, just sitting at the bottom, looking up and thinking there was no possible way you could make it, so you just stopped and let the wind howl around you. He let himself be shuffled from medical appointment to home and the occasional trip to Charlie’s office to fill out forms or talk to Charlie. Or the day he had to go do a deposition as part of the divorce case.

“Are you ready for this?” Charlie asked. Dean was sitting in an office.

Not Charlie’s office with the cute plastic big headed figures that seemed to be pop culture figures. He thought one was Princess Leia. Michael was more a symphony and opera goer than a movie goer, but Dean had seen the Star Wars movie once on the television late one night when Michael had apparently forgotten to set the password. Those rare times when Dean had had unfettered access to all the pop culture that cable television could bring him were rare and treasured. Michael didn’t like it when Dean ‘subjected himself to such trash,’ but Dean loved movies when he could watch them.

“I have to come back later and do it again if I say no,” Dean said, looking around at the anonymous office, no spark of personality, nothing but beige walls and low pile carpet. There was a chair for him to sit in at a desk.

“Yes, unfortunately, but it’s an important part of the case. I hate that you have to do this, and if I could stop it happening, I would,” Charlie said. “I’ll be here. Michael’s attorney will be here too, like I said, but I’ll do my best to object to any questions that are too terrible. And Sam will be here for your back up.”

Someone came in and set up a video camera that would be focused on Dean as he talked. And Sam finally arrived, flustering in, talking about this meeting had gone over and he was sorry. He wore his suit and tie, hair brushed back from his forehead neatly. He stood close to Dean, enough that Dean could get that family Alpha scent in his nose, but not quite so close they were touching.

“Hey, you doing okay?” Sam asked. “Garth got you here okay? You took your meds? You just tell me if you need the deposition to stop. Any time.”

“Sammy, you’re mother henning me,” Dean snapped, but he was glad that Sam was there. Not that he’d admit it in a million years.

Not long after that, an old, bald guy that Dean recognized from the Firm parties he’d gone to with Michael. Zachariah Adler. As in the Adler of the Adler, Shurley and Shurley. They were pulling out the big guns to protect Michael now that Dean had gotten a lawyer of his own. The lawyers that they’d brought around before, to get him to sign the original divorce settlement, had just been some junior associates.

The first thing Adler did was object to Sam being there, called him a non-party or something.

“As an Omega, my client is allowed to have his family Alpha present. That’s irrefutable,” Charlie said.

“Dean Shurley’s legal Alpha of record is Michael Shurley,” Adler said.

“You mean the Alpha that has initiated these divorce proceedings. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but that is the point here, isn’t it? Mr. Shurley wants to be removed from his position as Alpha of record. Didn’t Michael Shurley file an affidavit of non-responsibility in relation to another case having to do with my client’s medical bills? In any case, Sam Winchester, brother to and family Alpha of the deponent will be present unless you’d care to pause the proceedings and get a court order.”

After all of that kerfluffle and a lot of huffing and puffing on Adler’s side, it was finally settled. Sam would stay. Dean wondered, if Michael was actually obliged to pay the hospital bills. Sam had paid. Dean knew that Sam had paid. They had to be pretty big. Dean had been in and out of the hospital for months, including a nice long stay in the ICU a couple of times and another shorter stay in the looney bin, until he’d mostly gotten a handle on the wanting to be dead thing, or at least had learned how to lie about that better. Sam hadn’t complained even a little bit about how much Dean had to be costing him, but if Michael was the one who should be on the hook for them, that was a different story. Another case though? Was Sam suing Michael to recover the money?

Dean was sworn in by someone, then it all began.

“Can you explain where or how you met Michael Shurley?” He was asked.

“There was a guy. I don’t know if he’s still around. Called himself a matchmaker. Liked to be called Metatron, but everyone just called him Marv. Like I said, he was a matchmaker. A mating broker, basically. I was young and looking for a mating contract that would have a decent settlement, so I could take care of my brother. Marv introduced me to Michael.”

With the prompting of other questions, he explained how he was only sixteen when his father died in some kind of bar fight with another Alpha, how there wasn’t any family, any Alpha that was older than him, just Sam and him. That yes, there had been a foster family but that was a really bad situation, especially for a young Omega like he’d been. No one asked, so he didn’t say how it had been the social worker that had introduced him to Marv and encouraged him to get a mating contract. He talked about meeting Michael and how amazing it had seemed at the time. How after a few months courtship, he’d been offered the mating contract.

“What was your living situation at the time?” Charlie asked. “Since you said you weren’t living with the foster family you were placed with.”

“We weren’t homeless, if that’s what you mean,” Dean said. “We had the Impala and most nights, we could scrape together enough for a motel room.”

Technically, they did have an address, the foster care family. They couldn’t stay there though, because the oldest Alpha son was very insistent when it came to the Omegas in his family’s care. Yeah, he was a rapist bastard. Dean had the one and only coin of his purity to leverage at that point, so no, he wasn’t going to let that Alpha steal it. It worked out okay. They didn’t actually stay with Fergusons but Sam had an address he could give to his school. The Ferguson’s didn’t object because they could collect their check from the state without actually having to do anything for it. Once he’d gotten the mating contract, he’d sent Sam to a boarding school. Not that he’d wanted to, but it was somewhere safe for Sam.

“You admit that you were using your mating to leverage yourself for financial gain,” Zachariah said.

Dean stared at the man. Of course he had. Wasn’t that the whole point of an arranged, contracted mating? Michael had had no success at that point finding a love match and Dean had had something Michael valued, which was to say he was a virgin and, Dean hadn’t minded saying so, at that point in his life, he’d been a real fox. He was the shattered, broken remains of the young Omega he’d been now, but back then? He had been so, so pretty. And he had smelled fresh and sweet and pure. He’d seen a picture of his younger self the other day and could hardly believe it was him and not some model from a magazine ad.

After an awkward, silent moment, that was obviously driving Zachariah mad, the lawyer lost his cool and said, “You need to answer the question.”

Dean felt like maybe something in his head was broken, like he was so out of step with the world around him that he didn’t know how to interact with it. What he eventually ended up saying was, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t actually a question.”

“Do you admit to seeking financial gain in your mating contract?”

“It wasn’t a love match,” Dean said. “It was arranged. I didn’t force or trick him into anything. Michael made promises to me. I made promises to him. I kept my promises as best I could.”

Charlie asked, voice soft, but clear, focused “How old were you, Dean? When you made those promises? When you signed the contract you were offered?”

“Seventeen,” Dean said.

There were a couple of very soft gasps in the room, one from the woman running the video camera, who was someone who worked for Charlie, maybe a paralegal or something, and even Adler himself seemed shocked silent or something. The lawyer started flipping through his notes, as if he’d missed something important.

Charlie asked another question, the same, soft, even tone to her voice, “Did you have a lawyer of your own to look over the contract before you signed it? Someone to represent you alone?”

Dean frowned, remembering back to the day. It had been in an office much like this one, at Michael’s firm. Michael had had one of the older Shurleys with him, maybe his father Charles or maybe it had been Raphael, one of Michael’s brothers. Dean had had no one with him, not even Sam. It had been the middle of a weekday and Sam was in high school back then. They’d fought that morning, him and Sam, because Sam hadn’t wanted him to do it, but Dean didn’t see as he had an different choice.

“There were some lawyers present. I’m pretty sure none of them were mine. Michael’s father was there, some other people. They told me the contract was standard, all above board. Look, even if I did get up front money out of the deal, I earned that. I took good care of him and his house for so long. I did everything he ever asked of me.”

Adler looked up from his notes and said to Charlie, “I’m calling a recess. I need to speak with my client. Does half an hour sound right to you?”

“Take all the time you need,” Charlie said and then when he and his people had walked out of the office, she muttered, “The facts won’t change to suit your narrative no matter how much time you take.”

Eventually, they reconvened and while Adler seemed calm again, something had changed. The Alpha seemed to lose some of the arrogance he’d walked in with. You could scent it on him, or at least Dean could. He wondered if Charlie could. She was Omega, so she had to be skilled at reading Alpha scent. You got good at that. It was a survival skill.

Dean was back in the hot seat and Zacariah was badgering him about the miscarriages, something about how could he not expect an Alpha to not want children. Yeah, he was right about that. Childbearing wise, Dean had turned out to be a dud. He couldn’t help but think that if Michael hadn’t insisted on waiting so late, they might have had a better chance. There’d been ten, long years of mating before Michael decided they should try for their first. Dean didn’t say that, because he didn’t know it for a fact.

What he did say was, “I did my best and sometimes, that’s just not good enough, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t have done to give Michael a baby.”

Zach hit at him again with another question about how Dean couldn’t have the children that Michael deserved or something like that. It seemed like Zach was trying to get him to admit that it was Dean’s fault that the pregnancies all ended. Maybe it was, but it was it was nothing Dean had done consciously. No, he’d have done anything to keep those babies. If will power and want and love had been enough, then he wouldn’t be here, he’d be at home with his kids.

It got to the point that Sam was finding it hard to keep his seat, that he was fighting against protective Alpha instincts. Apparently Sam wasn’t supposed to be able to say anything to Zach. His role was ‘support’ only, and apparently that was limited to moral support. Dean didn’t realize he was crying again, not until Sam put some tissues into his hand. Then Dean felt the tear drip down his cheek, then the other.

Finally, Zach seemed to give up, realize he wasn’t going to get the admission from Dean of being at fault for the divorce and unmating. Anyway, he was back in Charlie’s hands again.

“Can you tell me what happened on October 25 of last year,” she asked. She looked him in the eye. She’d warned him that she was going to have to ask him these questions in advance. She’d tried to prepare him. They’d practiced so things weren’t a surprise, that it would not be as much of an emotional pitfall as it could have been.

It seemed an innocent enough question. Except it was the day when life as he knew it had ended. The day he’d died and became a dead man walking. He had become a zombie person, a heap of shards in the shape of an Omega.

“Uh, it was a Saturday and unless there’s some kind of event in the afternoon, I would have spend most of the day at the beauty salon,” Dean said.

Zachariah snorted, derisive, looking up at Dean at the same time. Yeah, well, Dean was no great beauty now, but at the time it was a regular thing for him. Something Michael asked of him.

“When was the last time you were even inside a beauty salon?” Zach asked, scoffing as if the assumed answer was never.

“October 25 of last year,” Dean said. “Like I said, I went to the salon. Michael had me go every Saturday just about. Afterward, he specifically mentioned wanting me to go shopping for new outfits. That made sense. A lot of my clothes didn’t fit very well. I had lost a lot of weight. After.”

Dean couldn’t continue, thinking about after the surgery, he’d slipped over the boundary from willowy and slender to outright skinny. Well, people of Michael’s social class liked a skinny Omega, so long as it wasn’t too skinny, just it would be better if he’d had clothes that fit. Dean hadn’t had any reason to think it would be different than any other Saturday. He’d bought one of those vest outfits Michael liked to see him in- not too masculine. Just the perfect Omega middle ground.

Dean could see Adler about to ask another, probing, prodding question, but Charlie took control of the moment, “So it was just an ordinary Saturday for you?”

“Yes. Just another day. I thought I would be going to the Opera Gala with Michael that night,” Dean said. He really hadn’t been thinking of anything other than wondering if the vest outfit he had bought that day would be dressy enough when the car service had dropped him off at the front door of the big house on Rodeo.

“So you went shopping, and returned home. What then?”

They’d gone over it, what he was supposed to say, but the words left him for a while as he thought about the vast yawning chasm that separated his life then from his half life now. The great cliff he had fallen over. How it had felt to become unmoored. He felt an echo of it now, that feeling of stepping out into nothing, of falling. Maybe it hadn’t been the best mating, but he’d been someone’s. Been Michael’s. Right up to the moment where he was no longer.

Then he felt Sam’s hand laid gently on his shoulder, not saying anything, just there by his side. He could talk again, give his story to them.

“There was a suit case on the front porch and there was an envelope taped to the handle,” Dean said. “Sam kept the note. I think he gave it to you already. Said that Michael would be going away for a while and he’d already called Sam to come pick me up, take me home to his house. That I wouldn’t be coming back. I tried my keys and Michael had had the locks changed while I was out. I don’t know. My head went swimmy and I couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember a lot clearly after that for a while. I woke up in a hospital bed with a tube down my throat.”

His whole chest ached to have to relive the moment when he had felt the bond falter, then disappear, when he’d tried the door and his key no longer fit. There were just no words deep or hard enough for that sense of loss, like something that had been half of him had been sheared off at that moment when he realized that Michael didn’t want him any longer. When his world ended. When he realized he would never step into the big house again. He had been Michael’s mate until that moment but had been nothing afterwards.

There were more questions, so many more questions. Endless seeming amounts of them. He was exhausted and wrung out when they got to the end. The people from the office started packing things up and clearing out. Dean didn’t rise up from his seat, but just sat there, unable to focus or even just exist without hurting. At the support group the other day, someone had talked about something they’d called brain fog and that was the perfect description for what Dean felt right now, like he was surrounded by fog, unable to see further than just his own hands maybe. Sam had been talking with Charlie, but saw that Dean was about on the edge of collapse.

“Hey, I’m proud of you,” Sam said, coming to Dean’s side again. Dean could smell his brother- homey, warm, good but also kind of like a school locker room, like sweat and musk and funk. It was what Dean needed at the moment though, to attach his feet back to the earth. “You did good. Let’s get you home.”

Chapter Text

Sam got Dean home and set up on the sofa with the book he was reading and a blanket. Sam tried to make him eat something, a sandwich, but Dean’s stomach was having none of it. He choked down some of the meal replacement shake that Sam eventually ended up bringing him instead before Sam finally gave up.

For some reason, Dean’s mind kept going back to when he was much younger and Dad was still alive and had still somehow managed to keep it together mostly. Yeah, Dean had to take care of Sam, mostly, but Dad would come home sometimes, with food, with money gotten somehow. On those nights, when Dad got home late, they’d watch a movie together. Usually one of Dad’s favorites- an old Western, something with Alpha cowboys doing what a man’s gotta do, that kind of thing. His mind couldn’t focus on the book he’d been reading and he wished, more than anything, that he was just back in that motel room, with Dad, watching one of those old cowboy movies, pretending that maybe he’d be the one riding that open range.

Sam didn’t have a TV in his house anywhere. Not like he was hoarding one to himself in his bedroom or his study. He just didn’t have one. Maybe he was too busy to have gotten around to it or something.

Dean said something, for the first time, about wanting to watch one of those old movies he used to watch with Dad. It was stupid, wasn’t it? That he was just about crying right now, thinking about how he would have given anything to be with Dad for a little while, just to do that. Just to sit silently, side by side with him. Not that Dad had been a good family Alpha or even a good man He tried his best, but his best had a crap job. He still loved and missed his Dad though, especially at this moment. Stupid to be caught up on that when he had so many other problems and stuff to cry about.

“They probably don’t even play that old stuff on the TV anymore,” Dean said. “Not that you have a TV, but even if you did, I probably couldn’t find a movie like that to watch.”

Sam seemed to startle a little, as if he just realized something, like he’d forgotten something important. “But you can. Any time,” Sam said. “I’ll be right back.”

Sam came back with a laptop computer. He typed stuff into it for a while, then handed the device to Dean. Up on the screen were rows of little pictures like mini movie posters and the logo ‘Netflix’.

“I set your password to Impala67,” Sam explained after he’d shown Dean how to scroll through the listings. They’d settled on a John Wayne movie Dean had never watched before called ‘True Grit.’ “I don’t know why I didn’t think to get you Netflix before. I can get you set up with Amazon prime video, Hulu, whatever. Did you maybe want a TV in your room? I could get that set up for you. Probably too late tonight. I’ll go call Garth, tell him to get something tomorrow, just to get you started.”

Sam got up from the sofa again, reaching for his phone, going to call someone, set something up. He was always doing that, always trying to buy some kind of something or another for Dean. Always spending his money on Dean, who didn’t need it, didn’t want him to waste the money that had been so hard earned. Anyway, at this moment, it wasn’t anything money could buy that Dean needed.

“No, just sit with me for a while,” Dean said. “If you’ve got to go do work, that’s fine, but maybe watch the movie with me for a while?”

It was his dad he wanted so bad at that moment, but Dad was gone beyond the cares of this Earth and had been for years. Sam, who was so much like Dad in so many ways, would have to do. A substitute.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, setting himself down on the other end of the sofa, the laptop on the coffee table in front of them. He showed Dean how to start and stop the movie and then to toggle it so it showed up on the full screen like it was a little mini television. Maybe Sam would let him borrow this lap top from time to time. He didn’t need a full TV of his own. Meanwhile, the movie started to play.

Dean drifted off not long after Mattie had started chasing after Rooster Cogburn, driving her horse across the river to do it. When he woke up, it was full dark outside. Sam was gone, but Dean could see that the door to Sam’s study was open and the light was on. Sam was typing something rapidly. Dean could even hear the key clicks. On the screen, Netflix was asking, “Are you still watching?”

And there was a message on the phone waiting, from Cas. One of those picture image things he liked to send.

It was a picture of a parakeet with a doll sized cup on its head and some words, something about if you’re having a bad day, look at this. He shook his head. Then he wrote back, because Cas had been amusing and kind and maybe a little wise.

“Some days, not even a birdie tea party gone wrong is enough to make things better,” he wrote.

He didn’t get a text back. Instead, he got a call from first person besides Sam, Charlie or Garth to call him on this phone. The screen said “Cas- Hoodie Guy”. Not sure if he was up to it, he answered anyway.

“Dean. I called as soon as I got your reply,” Cas said, sounding worried, his voice gravelly. How did an Omega even ever have a voice that deep? “What can I do to help? Anything.”

“Nah, I’m fine. It’s fine,” Dean said, even though he wasn’t and it wasn’t.

“I had no idea it was that bad,” Cas answered. “Are you some place safe? Are you in danger? Do you need me to come get you?”

It wasn’t that there was anything manic about all of that. It seemed urgent and caring though. Dean was touched that Cas seemed to be willing to drop everything and come help, even if Dean didn’t need it.

“No, really, it’s fine,” Dean protested.

“Dean, you know as well as I do that when an Omega says something is fine, it’s not,” Cas said. “The scale is great, good, not so bad, this sucks and I hate it, I would rather die and lastly, everything’s fine.”

Cas might have understood Dean better than Dean had thought.

“Yeah, well, I just spent the day getting interrogated by my ex-mate’s lawyer, trying to get me to admit that Michael tossing me out was somehow my fault,” Dean said, thinking again about how it had felt to be on the hot seat, how it felt like Charlie and Sam couldn’t protect him and that they were more thinking about how to prove a point than anything.

“Oh, the deposition?” Cas said. “You’re home now though? Someplace quiet and safe?”

“I’m at Sam’s house, so, close enough.”

“Good. Have you drunk some water? Recently?”

Dean tried to remember. Maybe sips between the sips of the meal replacement, to help wash it down. He looked over at the coffee table. Sam had left a water bottle and Dean’s pill sorter next to the lap top.

“It’s not that it really helps anything but being dehydrated just makes everything feel worse,” Cas said.

“Yeah, there’s a water bottle here. I’ll drink some,” Dean promised.

“You can rest and nest? Even just a couple of blankets and pillows?” Cas asked. “Sam doesn’t stop you?”

Dean wasn’t even sure why he was listening to Cas or how this wasn’t irritating as hell, like it was when Sam tried to do the same thing to him. Or the doctors and therapists. Maybe it was just the thought that Cas had been where Dean was now. He had to know what would help and what wouldn’t.

“Yeah, I can. I am, sort of,” Dean said. It was just a blanket on the couch, but that was something. He thought about heading up to his room, to the walk in closet where he kept a secret pile of soft, warm things that he could turn into a nest. Not that he thought Sam would take that away from him, but he couldn’t make it obvious anyway. Too many times, his nest had been taken from him, by Dad, by Michael.

“Good. Do that for now. I’m sending you something. Hold on.”

Very soon after, a text came through his phone. It looked like it was maybe something he’d sent to someone before. No way he could have typed out all of that just in a moment while still talking to Dean.

The Rules (how to get through your worst days)

1. Breathe.
2. Drink some water.
3. Rest. Grief and loss are hard work.
4. When you’re done resting, move. A little walk, even just around the house, helps.
5. Get outside. Even just outside of the house. Cry on a tree’s shoulder because the tree will ask nothing of you in return.
6. Eat something. It doesn’t matter what it is right now. Just something.
7. Tend something that needs tending. A pet. A plant. Anything. I don’t know why it helps, but it does.
8. Shower. You deserve care.
9. Read. The right words will put you in a better place.
10. If you can’t follow all these rules, that’s okay too. Do what you can. Ask for help with some of them if you need it. Or just skip them for now.

“Did you get it?” Cas asked.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Thanks, Buddy.”

He stood up from the sofa, gathering the blanket Sam had left him with earlier. He couldn’t help but think of the times that his Dad had deliberately limited him to only the blankets you could find in a motel room, leaving behind any others because ‘there wasn’t enough room in the car, quit being a baby, Dean.’

“I’m just going up to my room,” Dean explained. Then, when he reached the stairs, out of ear shot of Sam, he said. “I’ve got nesting stuff in the closet in my room. Cas, why do I still miss him?”

“Who? Your ex?”

“No. I mean, yes, I do. Or maybe I just miss the Alpha I thought he was. But my Dad. I miss him so bad tonight, but he wasn’t. I mean, if he were here, he’d just tell me to buck up and take it like a man,” Dean said.

Cas didn’t respond for a while, but he said, “It’s hard not to miss them, even when they hurt you. You love him, even when his version of love wasn’t actually love. It’s so complicated. Any little crumb seems so big when that’s all you’re given. It’s okay to admit that you need that kind of love your father should have given you. You deserve it.”

“I gotta hang up now,” Dean said. “I don’t have enough breath in me to climb the stairs and talk at the same time.”

Dean looked at the stair lift thing that Sam had installed when Dean had first come home from the hospital, when stairs were a simple impossibility. He’d refused to use it as soon as he could put one foot on a step and haul himself up. Even if it took multiple stops to rest along the way. He was stronger now, but Sam hadn’t had it taken away. These days, Dean could usually make it up in two stages, resting at the middle landing for a while. Might take him four stops tonight. He was feeling weak and aches and just plain tired. Not taking Cas’s advise to rest might not be an option tonight.

“It is safe for you?” Cas asked. “To take the stairs, that is?”

“Yeah. Might take me a while, but I’m good.”

“There’s no shame in taking help and care when you need it. No need to punish yourself for being weak. Especially after days like you’ve had. If you don’t rest now, reliving your worst moments for the benefit of the lawyers could set you back in your recovery.”

Dean looked at the chair life. Sam had gotten it to make it possible for Dean to be in his home and get out of the rehab hospital. It had been one of the conditions that Dean could get out- either a first floor bedroom, no steps, of one of those things or an elevator.

“There’s a thing,” Dean said. “Chairlift. I don’t need it most of the time. I’m getting better. I can take steps now.”

“Are you looking for permission? Someone to tell you it’s okay to be weak sometimes when you think you’ve got to be strong? It’s okay. Take the chairlift this time.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Dean said.

“Sometimes, when you want to be weak, it’s okay to be weak,” Cas said and it sounded like a promise. “Let someone carry you sometimes.”

***

It was a Saturday and Sam was at home and he would not be ignored. He knocked at the door and called through it until Dean was forced to get out of bed to open the door to him, just so he would stop.

“Good, you’re up,” Sam said, looking stupidly chipper. He had one of those green smoothie juice things in his hand, had sucked down nearly half of it already. He was dressed in his running clothes, so he’d gone out on his run. At least he didn’t try to force Dean on a run. The doctors had advised against that. A little mild walking at this point, not anything so hard as running.

“You’ve been running already,” Dean said. “I suppose that’s one way to make sure the rest of your day can’t get any worse.”

Sam made a face at him, but there was kind of a smile behind it, as if he was glad to see Dean had some snark in left in him.

“So, I thought we’d go buy you some more clothes that fit,” Sam said. “And that aren’t more or less pajamas. Maybe get you a haircut.”

Dean was still wearing the oversized layers of flannel and Henley and t-shirts with sweat pants that he’d put on after coming home from the deposition. He’d slept in them, wore them all the next day, then slept in them again. Didn’t make them pajamas. But maybe Sam had a point.

Once, Dean had dressed well and stylishly all the time. Michael demanded it. If Dean was out in public, that was a reflection on Michael. What Dean wore meant something. It suddenly occurred to Dean- in some ways, even thought they were brothers, he was his brother’s Omega. When he went out in public, he was a reflection on Sam. Dean didn’t give a shit what he looked like, there was no point, but if Sam cared, then maybe Dean had it in him to do that for Sam. He could dress up all those years for Michael, so now he could do it for Sam. It wasn’t quite the same. And yet, it was

Of course, he didn’t have any of those clothes any more, the designer suits, the pretty vest and pants outfits. Apparently Michael didn’t consider them to be Dean’s personal property, but marital property, which he claimed Dean was owned no part of. Dean wondered if the new Omega was wearing them now. The only clothes Dean had brought with him from his old life were the ones Michael had put in the suit case and the one fancy outfit he’d bought that day. They were hanging in the big walk in closet, but Dean hadn’t even touched any of them since then. He wore Sam’s clothes, mostly.

The flannel he was wearing had been stolen from Sam’s laundry, as had the layers of t-shirts under it. Everything that he wore was Sam’s, he realized, down to the underwear. They were underwear meant for a well endowed Alpha, with a pouch thing to keep your junk sweat free or something. Mostly empty when Dean wore them. He still had all his exterior junk, but compared to an Alpha, an Omega was always going to be pretty tiny.

“You just want your flannel shirt back,” Dean said, shambling down the hallway to the kitchen. If he had to be awake and out of bed, at the very least the universe owed him some coffee or something. He scrubbed at his head while he walked, realizing for the first time, how long his hair had gotten. Almost as long as Sam’s. He touched his beard and it was long and thicker than he thought. “And maybe you’re right about the hair.”

When he came back later that day with a couple of shopping bags of things that Sam had gotten for him, it occurred to him that he’d never texted to Cas at all during the day, even though Cas had sent him an image thing earlier.

“Sorry. Sam took me out shopping and for a hair cut.”

Then he took a picture of himself. Sam had taught him that, how to use the phone camera to take a ‘selfie’. He sent the picture of himself to Cas. He wasn’t sure he looked much happier than he did before, but at least he was less shaggy, a little more like the self that he recognized.

“Looking fine🥳💛✔️,” he received in a moment. “Good self-care moment!👍”

“Not for me. For Sammy. Can’t let him be the family Alpha to an Omega he should be ashamed of.”

A long time passed after it was read, but when he got an answer, it was a block of text, a big word vomit of it.

“Hey, if you can’t do this stuff for yourself, that’s fine. It’s okay if some days, the only reason you’re still alive is because there’s someone out there who would be sad if you’re dead. Believe me, I’ve been there. I really have. So, you can can take care of yourself for someone. But as Omegas, we’re always someone’s. Someone’s mate. Someone’s son. Someone’s mother. Someone’s brother. What if you recognized that you were someone? Someone who deserves care.”

What the hell was he supposed to say to that?

After a long time Dean texted back, “Who out there would be sad if you weren’t around?”

He got a pretty quick response. “Perhaps someday in the future, Jack, but I think he’s too young to know yet. My brother Gabriel and my two Guinea Pigs, Mounds and Almond Joy.”

Then just after, “Gabe named them. Not me.”

The next week, he dug in his heels about going to the support group, but then Garth showed up ready to take him there. Dean had stayed in bed all day until just before time, watching stupid TV, not even anything he liked, just blathering trash. Garth carried Dean’s daily pill dispenser and he held it out to Dean. Dean automatically searched the side table to the bed in the guest room where it should have been, but it wasn’t there. Sam must have snuck in while Dean was still asleep, during the time of day that Sam got ready to go to work and Dean was still fast asleep, under the influence of his sleeping pill.

“Sam says you don’t have to go to the support group,” Garth said. “He says you do have to get out of bed and come take your pills in the kitchen.”

But then Garth handed Dean the pill case. “I don’t agree with that. You’re not going to get better if you’re not allowed to make your own choices. But don’t narc on me to your brother. I can’t afford to lose this job. I’m afraid I’m on thin ice after totaling his car.”

“I won’t let him fire you,” Dean said, sitting up in bed, then finding his feet. “I got to say, buddy, compared to the rest of the people that Sam hired to help me out, you don’t suck.”

Dean found himself wrapped in stick-like arms, pressed against a body that was thin as a rail, skinnier than he was. For the first time, he was close enough to scent that Garth, unlikely as it seemed, was as Alpha as they came. Like, he must roll on a heavy dose of scent suppressants every morning, but you got it when you got close. Part of him wondered what the hell Sam was thinking, hiring an Alpha as a caretaker for Dean, but then, as you scented closer, all you got was safe and kind.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time,” Garth said.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” Dean said, finding himself still wrapped up in Garth. Garth let him go.

“You up for lunch before we go?” Garth asked. “Sam wants me to feed you one of those green smoothie things but I know you hate them.”

Dean had been choking them and the meal replacement shakes down for months, whenever Sam put one in his hands and demanded it of him. It wasn’t like there was any pleasure to be had from food anyway. It was there to keep him alive, nothing more. Why not do what Sam wanted?

He put on some of the clothes Sam had bought him the other day. He went to the kitchen and choked down the Sammy approved green smoothie while Garth read the paper, or rather, read the funny pages. Garth chortled, then outright laughed. Said, “Oh, Marmaduke, you’re crazy.”

Maybe he ought to take that back about Garth not totally sucking. Especially when Garth pushed the pill divider at him by way of a hint. Dean took his damn pills, even though he didn’t want to.

Now when he went to the support group, he knew what he was getting into at least. He sat down in the circle with the other sad sacks, thinking he probably wouldn’t hate them all so much if they didn’t remind him of himself. When it was his turn to talk, he didn’t say much, just that he’d taken his medications every day that week without hiding them under his tongue, spitting them out later and flushing them down the toilet. It was something to say. People told him that was progress, that he was doing good.

Later, he found himself sitting on the picnic table again with Cas waiting for his ride.

“Why Almond Joy and Mounds?” He asked Cas. “Your brother like candy or something?”

Cas smiled just a little, a quirk of one corner of his mouth, then he said. “Well, they were both rescues from the animal shelter. Almond Joy is an intact male and Mounds was already neutered when I adopted him.”

It took Dean a moment to get the joke. He laughed. Laughed for the first time in a long time. Maybe it was just a slight chuckle, not the whole hearted guffaw Garth had had himself over Marmaduke earlier in the day, but it was something. Cas was smiling a little bigger, pleased he’d made Dean laugh.

“Thanks, Cas,” Dean said. “I needed that.”

Then, it was time to go.

Chapter Text

Dean Winchester had been unstuck in time. At least that’s what it had felt like. Not like in the book, where he went time traveling all over the place. Unstuck in time like no one minute was any different than any other gray, unwanted minute. It had all meant nothing but gray and pain and more nothingness. It didn’t matter if it was days or weeks or months that passed him by. It had been like the wheels of his internal clock didn’t catch cog to cog anymore and they just spun and spun. The hands of the clock didn't move, didn’t tell time

And then. The miracle. He had become stuck in time again. The cog caught, the hands on the face moved. He was back in time again. He wasn’t sure exactly when it happened, much less why. But there was time and a schedule. There were days. They had beginnings and middles and ends. They added up with other days and became weeks. Maybe it was just that he had the support group on that particular day and therapy with Pam on the other. Maybe the antidepressants and other pills he took were beginning to work.

He kept texting with Cas. Or rather, Cas made sure to text him every morning and mostly, Dean texted back. One day, Dean wrote back, complaining about the pills, how he should have been able to do this without them. He kept thinking about his dad and what he would have said about people who needed pills and therapy and how weak they were, mentally.

Cas texted back one of those pictures with words. Memes, they were called.

Dean had never really had a proper phone with a screen that could show pictures before. When he first got mated to Michael, smart phones weren’t a thing. While he was mated to Michael, he was allowed a ‘dumb phone’ as Sam called it. No internet on it. He could make phone calls to and receive them from the numbers his Alpha approved. A lot of Alphas didn’t allow their Omegas full unchaperoned access to the internet. For their ‘protection’. Michael had been one of those Alphas.

Dean liked Ina, liked her cooking show on the TV. He’d been allowed a few, select, Michael approved channels on the cable TV, mostly shows about cooking and home decorating, so he’d gotten to watch Ina. Dean didn’t know what she was really like, of course, but she sounded kind and soft and nurturing. Comforting. Like your favorite aunt. If you had an aunt that was. Dean never had.

Then Cas added in a text, “Seriously. Please know that there is no shame in taking your prescribed medication. If your leg were broken, you would not hesitate to use the crutches that the doctors gave you so you can get around in the world. My brain is broken right now, that means I use the medication the doctors give me so I can get around in the world.”

Not sure what serotonin was, Dean looked it up on the phone. Afterwards, he still wasn’t sure what it was, other than some kind of brain chemical and having enough of it made you not depressed. He hated that he was dumb, that he didn’t understand this crap. When other people his age, Alphas and Betas, were in college, learning chemistry and biology, he’d been out on Michael’s arm, looking pretty and behaving well, with a smile plastered on his face. He’d never even graduated high school and Michael hadn’t cared about that.

He realized after a while that he owed Cas a response, that Cas might think Dean was putting anything on Cas for having to use the meds.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m not saying I shouldn’t. I think maybe they’re starting to work. Just fucking wish I weren’t broken in the first place.”

He didn’t get back any words in response, just a long string of emojis from Cas. 💛😢😢😢😢🪢☔️☂️🌅🎁💝

What the hell did that all even mean? It seemed positive? Maybe? The rain would end and the sun would come out?

Later that night, Sam found him at the kitchen table, staring at the lap top screen, not even sure what to ask Google, just staring at the white page with the little bar at the top for him to type the questions into, paralyzed to even type something in. Afraid he’d look like a dumbass to the whole internet or something. Which was stupid, because nobody knew what he was asking, did they?

“You okay, Dean?” Sam asked, brow wrinkled in worry. He hadn’t been so worried lately, and now Dean was doing it again, making him worry. “Is there something you need to know? Maybe I can help you figure out how to enter your search to get the best results?”

“Can I go back and finish high school? Or is it too late for that? That ship’s already sailed, hasn’t it?”

“You can’t go back to a regular high school, no,” Sam said. “But there are all kinds of programs for Omegas with disrupted educations. You don’t have to go back to high school because you can go right on to college. I’ve got so much information on that, but I didn’t want to bring it up yet. I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“What’s a dumbass Omega like me need to go to college for anyway? Michael was right. I’m too dumb to do anything but sit there and look pretty and I don’t even look pretty anymore,” Dean said, bitterly, knowing there was no way. He’d already cost Sam so much, between the medical care and Charlie the lawyer. “No point in you wasting your money to send me to college.”

“Dean, I would spend money send you to Disneyland every day if it would make you happy. Sending you to college isn’t even a question. Of course I will. Anything you want to study.”

***

Sam walked into Charlie’s office, latest pages of paper from this whole debacle in his hands and dropped them on her desk. These papers were only a couple of pages, but with one simple message from the world, that despite people calling him Dean’s family Alpha, legally speaking, Michael still effectively owned Dean. Sam wasn’t sure how Michael had discovered Dean was trying to enroll. Had the college sought Michael out to get his permission or something? Luckily, Sam had gotten the mail that day, hadn’t shown it to Dean.

Call it mating if you liked, but it was still effectively ownership.

And people wondered why Sam refused to mate anyone, even that sweet Omega Jess he’d met back in college. He’d really liked her. Liked her enough to push her away, so he wouldn’t fall in love with her. For all he knew, she was still probably wondering what she’d done wrong.

“We need to figure this shit out, Charlie, and get this divorce over with and settled. It can’t be legal. Or if it is, that is one screwed up law.”

Charlie read, furiously.

“That scrotum,” she said when she set the couple of pages down. “He can’t do that, can he? Doesn’t think its in the best interests of his Omega to be admitted to the program.”

“We need to get this fixed before Dean finds out. It took me weeks to just get Dean to agree to fill out the paperwork. Another two weeks to get him to agree to mail it in.”

“You should have just had him fill it out on-line,” Charlie said.

“We’re still working on that,” Sam said, thinking of how Dean would sit forever, in front of an empty screen, afraid to even type something in. Dean claimed that Michael hadn’t abused him, had never hit Dean, not even at the end, but Sam also knew that you could abuse someone and not touch one hair on their head.

“He was never allowed to have a computer or use one. Not even a smart phone. Seventeen years of that asshole telling him he was too stupid to use one and he’d break it just by touching it,” Sam said.

“This is clearly punitive,” Charlie said. “He’s punishing Dean for daring to not let himself be robbed, or better yet, not just roll over and die. I’ll start by calling his lawyers and let them know that it’s in their client’s best interest to not be such an asshat. That may be enough to get him to walk this back. They probably don’t know he did it because if they’re any good, they would have told him not to. And I’m going to ask around. See if we have any cause of action against the community college. ”

***

Sam came home one day and presented him with a small stack of papers and said, “Good news. I mean, not the greatest news. But good news.”

“What’s going on, Sammy?” Dean asked. He’d been reading, just something from Sam’s stuff. Not the stuff on the big fancy bookshelves in Sam’s study, but he had a couple of smaller book cases in one of the guest bedrooms stuffed full of paperbacks, novels mostly. Dean had figured Sam wouldn’t care too much if he messed up the already battered paperbacks and Sam had confirmed that yes, Dean could read any book in the house that he wanted. Or did he want Sam to go with him to the bookstore and get stuff, because Sam was always up for a trip to the bookstore. Even so, Dean still fought hard against his urgent need to hide that he was reading.

Right now, he was reading this old story called the Odyssey that was about a guy just trying to get home. He could relate to that, on some level.

“There was hearing today,” Sam said. “The court ordered temporary separation and spousal support. It’s not the permanent divorce and settlement, but it’s a start. The legal separation means Michael doesn’t have any say any more if you want to do something. You should get your first check soon. It’ll go through the courts, so you don’t have to deal with Michael. I’m your official family Alpha for now. There’s one more thing. It’s not great though.”

Sam passed over the last piece of paper. It was a car title, signing over a ‘67 Impala to him.

“This is great,” Dean said. “Where is she? Where’s my Baby?”

“The car will be delivered later today, but it’s not in great condition. I, uh, don’t know if it can be fixed. I’ve already got calls out to some restoration specialists. But be prepared. Michael’s angry that we haven’t settled yet and he took the anger out on the car.”

Sam warned him, but Dean still wasn’t prepared. She looked like she’d been lent to someone who drove her in a demolition derby. All of her glass was gone, sprays of shattered glass still festooning the interior. A whole quarter panel was missing and the bumper was crunched up like an empty aluminum can. More than that, someone, probably Michael, had taken a can of neon orange spray paint and sprayed horrible shit all over her, like cunt, bitch and gold-digging whore. All over in big, horrible ugly letters.

Once, he would have crumpled, collapsed, shut down. This time, he just got angry. That asshole he’d been mated to had taken his anger out on a thing of beauty. For the first time, there wasn’t some part of him that didn’t miss Michael, didn’t want him back. Those last, lingering crumbs of love were killed. Someone who would do a thing like that was ugly deep down in their soul.

He leaned into the empty window and looked again at all the shattered glass. At least Michael hadn’t taken a knife to the seat leather or anything like that. “I’m sorry, Baby,” Dean said. “I should never have let him get his hands on you.”

“We’re fixing this, Sam,” Dean said. He didn’t know when. Didn’t even know how. How could you fix that kind of damage and make a thing beautiful and whole again?

“You got any black spray paint?” Dean asked. He figured, the paint would have to be redone completely anyway, but there was no way he could let a lady like her sit around with that shit written on her. She didn’t deserve what Michael had done to her.

“No, but I’ll go out and get it if you want.”

Sam took lots of pictures first, documenting everything, he said. Then he handed Dean one of the cans of spray paint and they got to work, making her solid black again, covering the horrible slurs. It was just a patch, just temporary, but three hours after she came home, the Impala was looking more like herself a little, though still crumpled and broken. Just like him. Dean thought he could rest a little easier.

That night, after Sam had gone to bed, Dean sat himself in front of the computer and, not caring that he might look like an idiot, asked google, ‘how do I learn how to fix cars?’

***

He was sitting at the tables outside of the church after group with Cas, because that’s what they did now. Dean thought maybe the fifteen, twenty minutes where he got to talk to Cas probably did him more good than the whole rest of the support group. Cas was easy to talk to, despite being a weird, dopey guy. A weird, chunky, dopey guy in a purple striped knit shirt, carrying a bright blue vest with a name badge on it that said, ‘Steve’.

“I thought your name was Cas,” Dean said, pointing to the badge.

“It is. It’s easier to go by an assumed name at work,” Cas said. “Castiel is too unique. When I started out using my own name, I got a handful of on-line stalkers. Even as my current, fluffy, lumpy self, I attract too much of the wrong kind of attention from Alphas.”

“So, not thinking about getting back out there? Finding yourself another mate?”

“No, I’ll never be with an Alpha ever again, sexually or romantically,” Cas said. “It wasn’t really my choice to mate with Luke. It was an arranged mating I didn’t want. Now that I have a choice, I won’t be with an Alpha.”

“Get you a nice Beta that won’t care that you’re Omega?” Dean asked.

“No, Betas hold no appeal to me either,” Cas said, fiddling with his Gas’n’Sip name-tag.

“No Alphas, no Betas,” Dean asked, shaking his head. “Not even going to try and have another kid?”

Cas looked up from this name tag, distraught. Dean had been ham fisted, wandered into the land mine field again without looking where he was going. “No, I couldn’t bear that. Not again. Never again,” Cas said. “The hormones mess up my brain. The postpartum depression. My own brain wanted to kill me.”

“I can’t,” Dean whispered. That was how the deal went. You got a little. You gave a little. Cas had given Dean some of his pain, so Dean could share some of his now. “The last miscarriage. They had to cut out my uterus because the bleeding wouldn’t stop but they took all of them. My Omega parts.”

Cas squeezed Dean’s hand. “Total hysterectomy?”

“It didn’t have to be,” Dean said. Something he’d never even told Sam. “Michael told them just to take the rest while they were in there. He didn’t want to bother with my heats any more if I was that useless. Some of my pills are hormones but I guess they can’t make it so I have a heat ever again.”

Dean wasn’t even sure Michael knew that he knew. Dean was supposed to be doped up completely on painkillers when Michael was having that conversation with the doctors. He didn’t know that the nurse who’d come around earlier while he was gone had looked at Dean’s order for pain killers and not given it to him. Slipped the dose of narcotics into her pocket and said, “You won’t care. Omegas don’t really feel pain anyway. Not like the rest of us.”

He could see Cas start to feel miserable for him, an empathy common to Omegas and part of why he never really talked about it.

“It’s better this way,” Dean said. “It is. Really. I did my best to be the best Omega I could be, but I’m tired of pretending. Tired of the act. Did I tell you, I’m starting school on Monday? Gonna learn to fix cars. It’s not really something Omegas are supposed to do, but I don’t have much Omega left in me anyway after they cut it out of me.”

“There is more to being Omega than the ability to make babies. It’s not something determined by what you do or how you dress or how you talk. If you don’t have heats, you’re still an Omega. It’s not even determined by what organs you have or don’t have. Being Omega can’t be taken away by some Alpha making decisions for you that lead to unnecessary surgery. That’s something your ex can’t take from you, no matter what.”

Then, the solemn moment was over. Even as Cas’s words were still rumbling around in Dean’s head, hitting thoughts and bouncing around like pool balls on a table, Cas’s stomach rumbled. And then Dean got a text from Sam.

“Gotta work late. Not coming home for dinner. Do not skip eating. Garth will narc on you, he promised.”

“Looks like my dinner plans have fallen through,” Dean said. “Sam’s working late. You got plans?”

“There’s new jar of peanut butter at home and a fresh loaf of bread. I think I have some jelly left too,” Cas said, a smile on his face, as if it were the best thing he could hope for. Dean knew that Cas didn’t have a lot of money, despite having two jobs. He paid rent on a two bedroom apartment in hopes of one day being able to bring his son home to it. Most abandoned Omegas were not like Dean, with a vengeful Alpha brother trying to right some of the wrongs. More of them were like Cas, lucky to be scraping by.

“Why don’t you come out with me? We’ll get something from the diner,” Dean said. “Burger or something. I got Garth to be chaperone.”

Yeah, no doubt there was something waiting at home, but he didn’t think he could invite someone over to Sam’s house without asking first. But he could take someone out to eat. He had money now. He’d never wanted to spend any of the pocket money Sam had given him before. That wasn’t his to spend. Sometimes, Sam acted disappointed that Dean hadn’t spent it, that it didn’t deplete itself from Dean’s wallet, so he’d taken to pulling some out of the wallet every now and then and tucking it away in an envelope he kept under his mattress. One day, he’d give it all back to Sam.

“I don’t…” Cas started.

“I got my first alimony payment this week,” Dean said. “It’s on me. Or rather, on Michael I suppose.”

They ended up in a diner down the street from the church, Garth sitting in the next booth over, leaving them alone for the most part. Cas had ordered a burger so Dean had followed suite. It had been years, probably. He remembered loving them as a teenage, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you ate at Michael’s house. Omegas ate salads and maybe a small piece of fish. Fruit. Sam had tried to tempt Dean into eating enough by offering him burgers before, something always stopped Dean from allowing himself that kind of food. He thought maybe he’d give it a try again. Cas seemed pretty happy with his choice. He’d even said so with a big grin on his face as he chewed, then shoved another bite into his face.

Dean had a few bites of his, but it was too much- too heavy, too juicy, too much for him to process, so he put the burger down and picked at the fruit cup his burger had come with. Cas ended up polishing it off for him when Garth wasn’t looking. Cas could probably use the meal and in the unlikely situation where Dean actually felt hungry later, there was food at home.

They talked about this and that. Dean talked about getting Baby back and what Michael had done to her and how he was going to fix his car. Cas talked about his second job, the early morning one at the coffee shop, how he wished he could get more shifts, because with the tips, it was far more per hour than the Gas-n-Sip.

Afterwards, Cas said, “I live only about two blocks from here. Did you want to come up and meet Almond Joy and Mounds?”

“Yeah, why not?”

So they went, Garth offering to hang around the neighborhood until Dean was ready to go. Cas lived upstairs from a pizza place. Dean didn’t know how he could stand it, the scent of pizza cooking drifting upstairs all evening.

“They’re very nice. They sometimes let me have a pizza that would otherwise be thrown out, like when they make the wrong thing,” Cas explained as they walked upstairs. “Sometimes, it’s a little strange tasting. Like they gave me an olive and pineapple pizza last week. But its free food. I guess that partly explains why I haven’t lost the baby weight yet. Too much free pizza.”

The hallway was worn and dreary, but apartment itself was nicer than Dean expected from the building. Homey. Sparsely furnished, but everything seemed chosen and placed with care, even if it was older, a little worn out, obviously second hand. Cas flicked on the lights and Dean looked around. No pictures of Jack. Maybe it just hurt too much to see him all the time. There was a door, obviously the second bedroom, but the door was closed and Cas didn’t offer to show him. That was probably the nursery that Cas had carefully put together, that had never once been used.

“Now that I’ve got money, I should probably move out, get my own place. Not sure I can though. Be on my own. I think I’d be scared to be alone. I never lived on my own before,” Dean admitted. You could admit shit like that to Cas, because he was a good guy and he never talked about your shit to anyone else. He just sat and listened and didn’t judge.

“You have to be brave,” Cas said, as he led them to a bedroom with an open door. There was a small bed, maybe a double, and a lot of the rest of the room was given over to an enclosure that was obviously for the pigs. The grid fence thing was about knee high and there were lots of little structures for the animals to hide and stuff that looked like wood chips for them to dig in.

When the small, furry animals noticed them entering the room, the light snapping on, the started squealing, surprisingly loudly, piercingly. Cas looked their enclosure over, sighed and grabbed a bag of dried grass stuff and started putting into some kind of holder. It seemed like there was plenty of the stuff scattered on the floor near the feeder already, but maybe they only wanted the stuff from the feeder?

“It’s easy to be brave when you’re a big, bad Alpha, top of the food chain,” Cas said. “But one of these little guys? That’s real bravery. A two pound furry meat potato with no offensive or defensive capabilities but still willing to scream and shout at the ape creature a hundred times bigger than him when dinner is a little late.”

The pigs started chewing on the hay. “The orange and white with the smooth hair is Almond Joy. The one with all the cowlicks is Mounds.”

It was kind of oddly soothing, the little noises they made as they ate and dug around in the hay, like, ‘wheek, wheek, wheek,” and little chuffing and purring noises. If only life were that easy, that all his problems would go away if someone dumped a lot of hay in his room. They seemed happy enough though.

Later, when the pigs had a chance to get at the hay, Cas went away to the kitchen and started cutting up vegetable, lettuce, carrots, peppers. That kind of stuff. Broccoli. Dean got the feeling that the Guinea Pigs ate better than the human most of the time.

“Vegetables are good for them, just like they are for humans,” Cas said when he had a small bowl for each of the pigs of what was basically a salad. “Are you taking care of yourself? Getting enough sleep, drinking enough water? Enough time out in the sunlight?”

“No, not really,” Dean admitted as he watched Cas feed the little creatures their salads. There was a lot more happy wheeking and chewing sounds. Life must be pretty simple for the pigs- wait until the big ape creature brings you hay and salad. Stay safe in the cage. “But at least I’m trying to now. I wasn’t even trying before.”

“Here. Hold still,” Cas said, and out of nowhere, a fleece throw blanket was laid over Dean’s lap, then Cas gently lifted Mounds, the one with all the cowlicks, out of the enclosure and laid him on Dean’s lap. Dean was frozen still, afraid if he moved, even a little, the living dust mop would be hurled from Dean’s lap to his doom. Cas put some of the veggies on the throw blanket so Mounds could continue his meal.

“Do you want to move out on your own?” Cas asked. “Not what you think you should do. What you want to do.”

“No, not really,” Dean said. “But I’ve been a burden on Sam long enough. Why don’t you live with your brother? Let him take care of you?”

“Ah, yeah, he’s kind of living in Norway at the moment,” Cas said. “Or is it Iceland? I forget. It’s very far away and very cold. He offered to fly me out, take me in once I got out of the hospital. I refused.”

“You’ll never get your kid back if you’re in Norway.”

“I miss him. Them both really,” Cas said. He was stroking Mounds delicately with one finger, in the direction of the cowlick. The Guinea Pig seemed deliriously happy with this whole arrangement, squeaking and gurgling along. “I wish he would come home, but his work is there. And I can’t go to him because of Jack.”

It was Dean’s turn to squeeze Cas’s hand gently, try and comfort him. He didn’t know the full story, just that at the time, Cas had been committed to a mental facility in the depths of his pining sickness induced psychosis, that he’d thought he was ‘An Angel of the Lord’ with a holy mission. It sounded like Cas had made a pretty credible attempt at killing his ex mate or something. The brain chemistry involved in the traumatic disruption of the mating bond could do some pretty weird shit to you. The stress hormones involved had literally broken Dean’s heart, done physical damage to it, so he wasn’t surprised to think that soft, harmless, goofy Cas, lover of Guinea Pigs had snapped out of reality like that and attempted murdering his ex-mate.

“You’re doing your best to get him home,” Dean said. “He belongs with you and eventually, a judge is going to see that.”

Finally, though, because Garth was waiting, which meant that Garth was waiting to go home to Bess and his little girl, Dean had to go. He left Cas, Almond Joy and Mounds with a promise to see him next week. Dean texted Garth and the car was waiting when he got down to the street.

“What a weird ass, goofy guy,” Dean said, fondly he thought, they drove away.

“You should be kind,” Garth said. “He’s fighting his own battles.”

Dean thought hard on that, then said, “Why should I be kind? I’m gonna kick ass and ride into battle at his side if I have to. Dude’s my best friend.”

Strange that. It was true even though they’d only known each other a few months and then only for short times, once a week. And their text exchanges, of course. One was waiting for him on the phone when he next looked.

“Be Kind to yourself,” it said, with a cute little picture of a mushroom shaped creature. Then the next text added, “Or Else.”

“Or else what?” He wrote back.

“Or else I’ll have to be extra kind and supportive to you until you can be.”

That was his Cas. His best friend. They really had something, they did. Some kind of profound connection that went beyond just friendship, even though they’d only known each other a couple months at that point. He really thought that more than the doctors’ care or the anti-depressants and anti-bonding drugs, more than Sam’s help, it was Cas reaching down into Dean’s personal pit of despair and offering a hand up out of it that made the difference in him getting better.

“I’m getting better,” he announced, shocked with the realization. Not fixed yet. Still broken, still with his battered heart. But better.

“Yes, you are,” Garth said.

Chapter Text

One day, Cas texted him, “Better days are coming⛅️🌞🌈.”

Then, “Whether you want them or not.”

Finally, “It’s too late to stop them now🕑🛑🚘🏍. They’re already on their way.💯💯💯💯”

Dean had learned not to question the emojis even if they didn’t always make sense. That was just Cas.

Chapter Text

One time after group, it was really warm, but not too hot. Just one of those perfect days where the air is sweet and fresh, the sky is a deeper blue, and the temperature is right at that sweet spot, where you could let go, just relax into it. For some reason, Cas had brought a blanket with him in a tote bag. Dean had shrugged when he’d first seen it. Sometimes, when things were bad, an Omega might bring comfort items with them, part of a nest, even just a blanket. Something warm and soft wrap yourself in. Just a shawl even. After they got out of group, Cas asked, “Did you want to go for a walk? There’s this park. It’s only about four blocks from here.”

So, they walked. Slowly, because Dean was still feeling the affects of his broken heart, still not up to a lot, but four blocks felt like an accomplishment. There was a hill on the way there, that he conquered and they climbed up the winding path in the park itself and eventually came to rest on a hillside. The vista spread from north to south, with the city’s twinkling lights off to the south, but they settled themselves on the blanket with a view to the north, mountains to the east, and they watched the sun fully set in the west, until the last shimmering ruby stripe faded to full purple, then deepened to indigo. They just sat and were quiet with each other, until the stars came out, the handful that were bright enough to shine over the city light pollution anyway.

“There were seven of them. I wanted to stop after the third. Michael said we had to keep trying,” Dean said. He wasn’t sure why this was coming out now, why the words were spilling out, beyond his control. “Most of them, it was hardly anything. A month. Two. Only one of them I named. Only one of them made it out of the first trimester. The last one. A girl. I named her Emma in my head. I don’t even know if Michael would have allowed the name. We didn’t talk about names. Five months. Long enough to really love her. Long enough for her to really be my kid. Not just a hope and a dream and a possibility, like the rest.

“I think about them. Maybe being out there, in the stars. Maybe that’s stupid. I don’t believe in God or Heaven or any of that,” Dean said. “But I just can’t stand the thought that they just went away to nothing. I can’t think that.”

“If there is such a thing as God, he’s got a hell of a lot things to answer for,” Cas said. “But why would it be stupid? I find that hope, that they would be among the stars, to be better than the false promise of a heaven. The universe is vaster and more grand than we can comprehend. We are made of star stuff. Every atom in that makes up you and me was forged in the heart of an exploding star. From the stars we come, to them we will some day return.”

They were quiet a while as Dean thought about that, but eventually, more spilled out of him, not really able to be contained, now that he’d started thinking about it and sharing it.

“He never let me mourn,” Dean said. “Michael. Except a little while with Emma. But the rest. He said they were nothing, just little blobs of tissue. He expected me to pick myself up as if nothing really happened and try again next time. They weren’t nothing though. They were everything.”

“He was wrong,” Cas said. “But you know that. Just make sure you’re giving yourself permission to mourn them now. You suffered great losses. Unimaginable losses. Give yourself the time. And know that it’s okay if you can’t just pick yourself up in the time you think you should be able to.”

Dean had known that he was allowed to mourn his babies. Especially the last ones, especially Emma. It sounded like permission. Not from Cas, but from the world itself. And like it was like he finally heard that permission. A band in his chest loosened and he could breathe more deeply, but with the breathing came tears. Not sobbing, just soft, fast wet streaks down his face. Cas pulled him close, so they were sitting side by side, Cas’s arm around his shoulder and he was leaning on Cas, supported by him. Cas didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. They stayed there a long time together, on the side of the hill, looking out over the world.

Chapter Text

Dean, of course, because life sucked, didn’t get to start with the automotive classes. There was like, math and shit he had to take first, sort of general education requirements. He hadn’t finished high school and anyway, the world had moved on since he’d dropped out of high school. Technology had gone crazy. Computers were a thing now. When he was in school, all the computers were big boxes with even bigger monitors that had to sit on special desks. Computers now were little shiny rectangles that could fit in your pocket and show you just about anything on a tiny screen that was built right in. With a camera, video camera and music player built right in too. When Sam said he was going to get Dean his own computer, Dean hadn’t been expecting something half an inch tall, but with a big, beautiful screen built right in, with a keyboard too. Computers now were things you carried around with you in backpacks and pockets. And you could do classes entirely on computer now.

He’d been explaining all of this to Cas, how much it mystified him to be dropped right into the modern age after being kept innocent of it for so long. Somehow the topic shifted back to school. Dean asked, “Did you think about it, going back to school? Getting a college degree?”

“I’m not sure how much more college would do me any good,” Cas said. “I have my PhD already.”

Cas who felt he was lucky to work at the Gas-n-Sip had a PhD? He was Doctor Castiel?

“From before I was mated,” Cas said, seeing the confusion on Dean’s face. “Not a particularly practical or useful field. I studied Archaeology, focusing on the Middle East, at around the time that the New Testament would have been written. Roman times. I was on a dig near Galilee, on a fellowship, when my father died. He’d always encouraged me to follow my dreams. I came home for the funeral and never went back, never finished my fellowship. My Aunt Naomi, my father’s sister, hated what I did, who I was, that I had been allowed so much freedom and schooling. She arranged for me to be mated. I’d never been treated poorly by my family before. My passport was taken. My accounts frozen. Gabe tried to help but there was nothing he could do, legally. My father had never updated his will or his head of household papers, so my aunt was my family Alpha then.”

“Jesus,” Dean said.

That was just the way it was. Omegas were not fully adults in the eyes of the law, not in the same way an Alpha was. Sometimes, you had a situation where you could almost forget that. The Alpha that was the head of your household was totally hands off, like how Dad had pretty much checked out by the time Dean had gotten mated. Or Sam who had only taken charge of Dean because Dean had needed it. Or you could have a family Alpha that would arrange a mating for you against your will, which would wreck your life and any semblance of independence you had. There was such a thing as an emancipated Omega, but that mostly only happened when there wasn’t an Alpha relative that could be found to step up, because the government didn’t want the responsibility. Dean had never been an emancipated Omega. When Dad died, the state technically had his guardianship, because he was a minor. Then there was Michael. Now there was Sam.

“It was to one of the professors in my department. It was thought to be a very good match for me,” Cas said. “At least the research I’d completed went to good use and I could help him with his work. He published a book that I mostly wrote. Everyone was told that I typed it for him, which I suppose was true, if not the complete truth. So long as I didn’t claim any of the credit, things were fine. For years they were fine. I wasn’t the professor, like I’d dreamed of, but I was the professor’s wife. Everything was fine. Until he told me to stop using my birth control after coming home from a research trip. I thought we were trying for a baby, but we didn’t really talk about it. We didn’t ever really talk at all. Our happiness was predicated on my not talking and just doing what he said.”

Spoiler alert, Dean thought, Cas’s mating had not been fine. Probably not ever.

No wonder that in his break from reality, Cas had seen his Alpha at Satan himself. Because he kind of was. This Alpha had sucked Cas dry, like an orange that had been juiced. Like a vampire.

“But you could pick up where you left off, right? Teach at some other college or something.”

“It’s a small, specialized field. There aren’t a lot of jobs in the first place,” Cas said. “I’d say there’s probably nobody in it who hasn’t heard my ex-mate tell the story of how I snapped one day and stabbed him. And even if they hadn’t, the job would still go to someone with a freshly minted PhD and recent research. Who wasn’t Omega.”

“But, you’re smart. Not like me. I’m just a dumbass who didn’t even finish high school,” he said.

“Not having the opportunity is not the same. I prefer unschooled. Less dumb, less ass,” Cas said. “You’re neither. You were telling me about how you were reading Slaughterhouse Five the other week and honestly, your insights seemed more keen than my college professor when I read it in undergrad.”

It was starting to get cold, sitting out at the tables. It had been summer when Dean had started attending the support group, but now it was deep into the fall. It was full dark when the support group time was over and while the crickets still sang their mating songs, you could tell those days were drawing to a close. The leaves on the trees made that rustling sound they made only in the Fall, as if they were already on their way out, ready for their tumble to the ground.

“Garth isn’t normally this late picking you up,” Cas said. He was wrapped up in his burgundy hoodie and layers but Dean could see that he was about to start shivering underneath it. Dean was already feeling kind of chilled himself. He’d put back on a little healthy weight, but he was still under insulated.

“Garth’s night off,” Dean said. “Sam’s supposed to be here. He’s probably working late. Doing important lawyer stuff.”

“Why don’t we walk to my place. See if the pizza place has anything they’re about to throw out,” Cas said. “Sam could pick you up from there.”

“I could buy the pizza this time and then we don’t have to get potluck,” Dean offered. He’d let Cas feed him free pizza from the place downstairs and sometimes. It was okay, but the last time it had had broccoli on it. Who the hell put broccoli on pizza? Except Sam, who had outright loved the leftovers Cas had sent home with him and wanted to know where they’d come from. “It’s my turn anyway.”

So they walked the few blocks to Cas’s place while Dean texted Sam the plan and the address. Got nothing back.

“I don’t miss him any more,” Dean said. “Not even a little.”

Cas knew exactly who Dean meant. See, that was the thing that Sam and Charlie and, even Cas to some extent, had never understood. Dean had loved Michael. Or thought he had. He had thought they’d had a good life together. He’d loved the stern expression on the man’s face, his steady temper. He’d loved the way that Michael would look him over with an admiring glance, and then pull Dean into his arms. Dean had surrendered to his mating and found it had been a soft landing and an easy oblivion. It had been easy to be a submissive, even obedient Omega. It had been good for many years, at least until Michael had decided he was ready for babies and then it turned out that Dean couldn’t do the one damn thing he was supposed to be good for. But before then, he’d thought Michael loved him and he had loved the Alpha back.

They stopped at the pizza place, put in an order for meatlover’s pizza that Dean paid for. Since Sam wouldn’t let Dean pay for even part of household expenses and had paid Dean’s tuition in advance, even bought Dean’s clothing, there was nothing for Dean to spend his money that he got from the support payments on. He might as well buy pizza for his friend.

Upstair, Cas got to slicing up vegetables for his little piggies right away, while Dean sat at the rickety kitchen table. “I always thought I loved him,” Dean said. “I always thought we were happy. I thought life was good, until the miscarriages started happening. Even then, there were times. You know, it was up, it was down. But I look back on my life and it’s all just such a blur in hindsight. Like this big, fluffy cloud or something. I mean, the cloud gradually turned into a thunderstorm. Life’s not like that now.”

“You’re finally almost fully detoxed from it,’ Cas said. “Finally kicked the addiction.”

“To what?”

“To Alphas. To their come, specifically,” Cas said, slivering a carrot into small sticks. “Nobody talks about it, but Alpha semen has a lot of stuff in it besides sperm. Mood elevating chemicals. Endorphins. Alpha-tocsin. Serotonin. Opiate like compounds. Getting Alpha ejaculate, delivered right into the very absorptive tissues of the Omega channel keeps Omegas very happy and docile. You would have received Alpha-tocsin treatment in the hospital, been weaned off it very carefully?”

“Well, yeah. That’s part of the standard treatment, isn’t it?”

“It’s a hell of a drug to come off of without medically supervised tapering,” Cas said. He gathered up his pigs’ veggies into their little bowl and Dean and he headed into Cas’s bedroom, where they lived in the enclosure. The two small animals began their chorus of wheek, wheek, wheek the instant they realized he was bringing them their favorite treats. He and Cas both ended up with one of the pigs on their laps, feeding them crisp vegetables. He had Mounds this time, Cas had Almond Joy.

“You think I was addicted to sex with Michael?” Dean asked. Because what Cas was saying seemed pretty implausible. Yeah, Alphas made more come than Betas, but the difference was like a teaspoon of come for Betas and a tablespoon for Alphas. There was just no way that there could be enough other stuff in there to keep Dean drugged. Like, addicted for seventeen years. But Michael had never once used a condom on Dean. Dean had had to get an IUD at Michael’s insistence, until Michael felt ready to try for kids.

“You always felt pretty happy when you were mated, right? So long as you were having sex regularly that is. Always craved intimacy with your mate? Always happy to do what he told you to do? Maybe you always felt this sense of well being, even if the facts of your life didn’t justify that sense? Maybe you think back to your mated life and it’s just this big happy, hazy blur?”

Holy hell. Cas had just described Dean’s life like he’d lived it himself. Michael and he always had plenty of sex, right to the very end of their time together, even to the point of Michael insisting on it as soon as possible after Dean got the hysterectomy, even before Dean felt fully healed. He had a sudden, clear memory of one of those times, how painful it had been during, there had even been some bleeding, but then afterwards, the pain had gone away and he’d been glad they’d done it, had felt happy that at least they could still have that. He remembered the doctor clearing him for sex long before Dean thought he could have been healed, advising that it was the best thing for him, that nothing else would do him as much good as letting himself be loved by his mate. Fuck. Were the doctors in on it too?

“Son of a bitch!” Dean said. “Nobody ever said anything. Nobody ever told me.”

“Dean, our whole society is built around keeping Omegas happy and at home, having babies and centering their lives around Alphas,” Cas said. “Of course no one is going to say anything. Not directly. They might say, oh, an Omega needs an Alpha to feel happy and fulfilled.”

“Like seriously, there are feel good brain chemicals he was using on me?”

“You feel kind of like you’re going crazy, don’t you? Seeing the world differently for the first time, now that you’ve been shoved out of the dominant narrative. Anyway, you can see why I refuse to get mated again.”

“I mean, there’s no point for me to get mated again, with the baby making equipment gone and me not even being pretty any more,” Dean said. He knew he wasn’t. He had a mirror. Could barely look at himself in it, but he had this morning. He was starting to get wrinkles- one between the eyes, fine crow’s lines around the eyes. He was still pretty gaunt, kind of haunted looking, like he’d seen too many things. “But you, you’re pretty. You’re younger than me. You could still get a good mate if you wanted.”

“I think I’m actually older than you, not younger. Anyway, I don’t think there’s an Alpha out there in the world that would be a good mate for me,” Cas said. Then he stood up, put Almond Joy back in the enclosure. “We should go down for the pizza. I’ll be ready by now.”

Guinea pigs put safely away, they ate pizza sitting on Cas’s ugly, plaid sofa, listening to music that Dean played on his phone. Cas didn’t have a television yet. Probably had better things to spend his money on. It was a good time. They didn’t talk about any more heavy stuff. The night went on longer and longer and there still wasn’t any word from Sam, until they both sort of fell asleep on the sofa, sitting up.

In the middle of the night, Cas shook his shoulder and said, “I’m going to my bed. Did you want to come? It’s a lot more comfortable than this hideous thing.”

Dean checked his phone again. No messages from Sam. Somehow, that didn’t bother him like he thought it would. He was here, with Cas, safe, warm. He didn’t need an Alpha for that. It seemed like a really good idea to follow Cas to his bedroom. He didn’t miss Michael. He really didn’t. But he missed having someone in bed with him, someone to wrap his arms around and hold tight. Someone warm and so that he wouldn’t wake alone. Scenting Sam did not count.

Castiel’s bed was small and they both had to squeeze in, their two bodies kept colliding, but somehow, it was also perfect, because Cas smelled so good to him now. Cas seemed bigger, stronger and more comforting when they were alone together like this. It wasn’t at all like when he went to be with Michael, but it was better. It was dark and quiet. The past was gone and couldn’t hurt them any longer. There was only the gentle present, settling around them, wrapping them in comfort. Cas smelled good, really good. The unwashed grunge smell Dean noticed the first time they’d met was just gone. Cas now smelled like grass and wildflowers, like fresh meadows and spring. Like new beginnings. They drifted back to sleep together.

When Dean woke in the morning, he was the little spoon. Cas was nestled up to Dean’s back, an arm thrown over Dean’s shoulder. The sun was streaming into the bedroom, still relatively early though. It didn’t feel wrong or odd or strange to wake up like this. It was the happiest he could remember being since the days of Michael.

No. The happiest he could ever remember.

If Michael had drugged Dean, even if it was naturally with semen, like Cas said, then Dean had to consider and reconsider everything about his relationship with Michael. Had he ever been happy with the man? Was any of that real? It was a shame you couldn’t make another Omega your mate, because he wanted this feeling he had waking with Cas wrapped around him every morning. It felt real, whole and true in a way that his life with Michael had never been, now that he looked back on it with clear and open eyes.

Dean’s phone buzzed from he’d placed it on the dresser on the other side of the room. He had to pull himself out of Cas’s warm bed to answer it. It was Sam. He walked out of the bedroom and the short distance to the living room, wishing he was still back under the covers, feeling Cas’s body heat. Cas’s apartment was not the warmest place.

“Dean, thank God. You’re okay,” Sam started, not even a hello first. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I forgot it was Garth’s night off. I was working. I fell asleep at my desk. Just woke up a little bit ago. I’d turned my phone to do not disturb.

“Yeah, I’m fine, Sam,” Dean said. “I spent the night at Cas’s place. On the couch.”

He wasn’t sure why he lied about that. Maybe just because he wanted to keep that moment of waking up in the bed, the peace and sweetness of it, just to himself and Cas, not make it something to be shared and dissected. Not something, yet another something, of himself that he had to give up to an Alpha, even if it was just his brother.

“I’ll come by and pick you up right now,” Sam promised.

“Yeah, that’d be great. I think Cas has work this morning,” Dean said. “Don’t want to get in his way. I sent his address earlier. You got that?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a few. I’m on my way out the door now. I’m so sorry. I would never abandon you on purpose. You know that, right?”

“I’m fine, Sammy. I’m not fragile anymore. Maybe I oughta get driving lessons,” Dean said. “Omegas can get that provisional license, right?”

They’d have to figure out something else they could pay Garth to do. Maybe Garth could do all the normal driving around, but Dean could still drive on his own at times when Garth wasn’t available. But Dean had realized last night, sitting around waiting for Sam that it was something he wanted. It was a freedom he’d never had in his mating, just being able to get in a car and go some place. Any place. Michael had always had a driver for Dean and the driver took his orders from Michael, not Dean. Maybe Dean could drive Garth around with him, because it could be helpful having an Alpha around as chaperone, keeping the worst of the other Alpha assholes away.

“Yes, of course,” Sam said. “We’ll get you your license and get the Impala fixed up for you. Get you a car you can use until she’s ready for you.”

But then Cas had woken up and wandered out of the bedroom, dressed in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt which seemed practically naked compared to how he normally dressed. He was sleepy, yawning, and his hair was sticking up all over the place in a way that put Dean in mind of Mounds and all his cowlicks. Cas was soft, pillowy, Dean thought. Cas wasn’t actually as chunky as he looked like in all his layers, but he was still on the pudgy side for an Omega. It was, frankly, adorable and made Dean feel all melty and soft in his chest to see him that way. He had the momentary urge to kiss Cas, which that wasn’t right, was it? Why would he want to kiss another Omega?

“I gotta go, Sam,” Dean said. “I’ll see you in a few.”

Cas called out from the kitchen, “Do you drink coffee? Unfortunately, I don’t really have anything to offer you for breakfast besides leftover pizza.”

Dean followed Cas at least to the doorway of the tiny kitchen. Cas was fussing with a can of coffee and the basket to maker with a concentration that was so intense as to be almost ferocious, as if the filters sticking together were enemies standing between him and his hot brewed delicious drug.

“Don’t worry about me,” Dean said. “Sam will be here in a few.”

But Cas had the maker switched on by then and before Sam showed up, Dean had a mug in front of him. Cas spent part of the morning, apparently, doing needle work. Embroidery or something. He pulled stitch after stitch into fabric, spelling out the words, “Maybe swearing will help.”

Maybe it would.

Chapter Text

The next day, Dean was shuffling around Sam’s house, feeling a little lost, rattling around in the big house like a marble in a tin can. He’d done his homework for school for a while. He’d read about as much as he could stand. The television seemed like just more blathering to him and he couldn’t even settle down to watch a movie, flipping through screen after screen of Netflix menus, not seeing a damn thing that caught his attention, not even the old season’s of that Dr. Sexy show. He had about ten seasons to get through before he’d be caught up. It was a guilty pleasure, but it failed to capture his attention today.

He was wondering why Sam had never taken a mate. Yeah, Sam was always working, like lawyers did, but that had never stopped Michael from taking a mate. Sam could have had an Omega and enough kids to fill this place up, easily, but he didn’t. Instead, Sam had quiet order and neat, well-decorated rooms. Big bookcases full of fancy leather bound books. And a house that was empty except for he and Dean.

It was a Saturday morning and Dean had nothing in particular planned. It used to be that Saturday was his big salon day. The car service would take him and drop him off to be made up pretty. Sometimes Michael drove him. Dean would get a manicure, never anything gaudy or long, of course, but shaped and just past his finger tips, a French manicure that was exactly the right shade for his skin. They’d do any touch-ups needed to Dean’s highlights. Michael didn’t want him blonde, not a real blond anyway, but just that natural, sun-kissed look that was impossible to achieve without hours in a salon chair.

After the highlights, there was careful, time consuming hair removal of any hair under his eyes, including the hair on his junk, which Dean was not sad to give that immensely painful beauty ritual up in the slightest. The beard he’d sported now grew in thicker than he would have thought possible after years of facial waxing. It had started growing almost on accident, while he was in the worst of his sickness, but when he got haircuts, the barbers always tried to get him to shave it, convince him that Omegas should never have beards, even if he wasn’t going to do the rest of the hair removal. He clung to his new beard like it was a life preserver.

Then, hairless, there would be facial treatments, masks that tingled, even burned. His skin treated, soft and dewy, then, came the make up. Michael had liked him to wear it, but liked the extra natural look. So much effort and layers to make him look like he wasn’t wearing any makeup, but still be poreless, flawless and almost inhuman. The whole process, the dyeing, the waxing, and all of that, took all day, ten hours without a break, usually leaving him just enough time to get home, get dressed in the outfit Michael picked out. He’d be fainting with hunger, but have no time to eat before he had to go. Social propriety dictated that once he was at whatever dinner or party they were going to, Dean should just pick at his food, eat hardly enough to sustain a child, much less an adult.

He used to think that Michael was proud of him, that he loved having a beautiful Omega to stand next to, that he insisted on the high maintenance grooming because he wanted Dean to be his best, his most beautiful self. Now, he was starting to realize that what Michael had seen him as was a status accessory, a walking, occasionally talking, human-shaped version of the Rolex that was found on his wrist. Talking, but never too loud or opinionated. He always had to smile, be pretty, be sweet.

So, no, no more salon days for Dean. Maybe ever. He was keeping his beard. Fuck waxing. Fuck being beautiful. What had it ever gotten him besides a literally broken heart?

He wandered the house until he found Sam, in his home office, staring at the computer screen and stretching in his chair. The door was open, so he stood at the entrance until Sam looked his way.

“Hey, did you need something?” Sam asked.

“Nah, just seeing how you’re doing,” Dean said.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I mean, if I died and went right to hell, it would take me a week to figure out I’m not just at work, but that’s the job, you know? But how are you doing today? Did you want me to see if Garth would come in and drive you to somewhere? I’m stuck here in front of this computer but there’s no reason you have to be.”

Dean tried not to be angry. He understood why Sam was extra protective. Why Dean wasn’t normally allowed out on his own. It was for his protection, because even as invisible as he was as a middle-aged, broken Omega, there were Alphas who were gonna be assholes to unaccompanied Omegas out in public places. Before, Dean had been fragile, unable to even care if he would have hurt, unable to care that he didn’t care. But he was getting better and Sam was still wrapping him up in cotton and shielding him from the world.

“Did you know?” Dean asked. It had been hard to find. No one talked about it directly almost. Oblique references only. Seemed like the worst, hardest parts about traumatic mating disruption was, in fact, Omegas being forced to get clean from their literal addiction to their mates. Not everything, of course. Dean’s Broken Heart Syndrome had other root causes, but something called cortisol was a big contributor. It sure wasn’t helped by his unwilling detox. Cas’s mental illness too, had other causes, but worsened by having to kick his Alpha.

It was like it was some kind of open secret that everyone had agreed to keep from the Omegas, but since he knew what he was looking for, he found it in all the talk about ‘Alpha-tocsin dependency’ and shit like that.

“Know what?”

“About Alpha come. About how it makes us Omegas into addicts.”

Sam looked down at the desk, head down, lips pressed together, ashamed. “Yeah. Every Alpha knows. Nobody talks about, but we know. Why do you think I’m celibate? At least until I meet a Beta woman that will have me.”

Sam wasn’t just too busy? This not even dating thing was a choice?

“You don’t? Not ever? You’re not just unlucky in love?”

“During college, we had to take this philosophy and ethics class. As a class paper, I wrote about Alphas and Omegas. I couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that it is physically, mentally and spiritually impossible for an Alpha and an Omega to have a sexual relationship that meets my personal standards for ethical. Condom use every time helps some, but not perfectly. So I opted out completely. Some of us Alphas do. I’ve dated a couple of Beta women but I haven’t met someone for the long term.”

“Is this because you feel guilty?” Dean asked. “Because don’t. Maybe I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, marrying Michael, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat to get the money to send you to college like I did.”

“It’s not that,” Sam said. “I mean, that’s some of it. No one should have to do what you did.”

“I don’t regret it. Not a minute,” Dean said. “It’s just. I’m glad you were here catch me when I fell.”

****

It wasn’t always easy. Progress wasn’t always a linear progression from bad to better. There were days when he couldn’t make himself get out of bed. Days when everything seemed hopeless and he couldn’t make his mind wrap around the simple math problems he was faced with for his school work. Times when he should have been doing school work, but all he could do was sit in front of the computer and stare at the screen, losing time.

He complained about it to Cas one day in a text, that why was he still doing that, wasn’t he getting better, it had been over a year now. Cas texted back, “The journey forward includes movement through darkness and despair, but you are still gathering strength. No one tells you that, but it’s part of the path.”

Another time, he was feeling particularly broken, particularly shattered. It was mid December, a time when he’d almost always had a heat, back when he could still have them, before the operation. He’d always thought he’d been one of the lucky ones, only got them on the twice yearly cycle and not one with every season, but he’d have taken them once a month if he could just get them back now. He remembered a couple of Christmases where he’d been freshly pregnant, before the inevitable tragedy and how happy he and Michael had been. All gone now- the mate, the possibilities. When Cas had texted him some bland encouragement, Dean had texted back, “I don’t know why you even bother talking with me. Just a broken Omega. Broken. That’s all I am. You shouldn’t talk to me. Just block me or something already.”

There was a brief moment of radio silence when Dean feared that Cas was taken him up on it, but then the message came, “A disco ball is hundreds of pieces of broken mirror put together to make magical ball of light, YOU ARE NOT BROKEN, YOU ARE A DISCO BALL.🌞🤩😍😄”

Then came one of those animated pictures of a disco ball sparkling and throwing off its little dots and rays of light. It was kind of beautiful, how it reflected the light and glittered, how it threw light back at all kind of crazy angles.

Then, from Cas, “Sorry. Have to get back to work. 😭😣Break over.”

At least Dean didn’t have to spend his days arguing with a boss over if he deserved a break or not. But a magical ball of light he was not. Especially not on that day. It was nice that he had a friend that thought he was though

Chapter Text

One day, Dean got a text from Cas. It just said, “Saw my ex at a court date. He called me ugly and lumpy. He’d just tried to bury me.”

A little later, the second part: “I guess he doesn’t know this means I’m a potato.🍠🌱🌿”

Then there was a picture of a verdant, lush vining plant with bright green heart shaped leaves that a little bit of image searching revealed to be a sweet potato plant. They were really kind of pretty, in a way.

Yes. His friend was a weird, nerdy little guy but nothing could keep him down, could it?

Chapter Text

Other days, though. They were good. Some of them really good. For all that he bitched about his classes, he got three As and a B and got that B only because he couldn’t turn in a paper for his English class. He couldn’t even finish the book it was supposed to be about. They were made to read this book called, “The Omega in the Attic.” It was told from the point of view of a Beta woman, trying to marry an Alpha man. With, you guessed it, a former Omega mate that he kept in the attic. Yeah, it was supposedly a classic. All about how the Beta’s life had become undone by all the secrets. The Omega burned down the house eventually. And died. The Beta, in the end, married the Alpha. He only knew that because he read the summary on the internet.

He complained about his grade, his only B, to Cas. They no longer had to wait after for Garth or Sam to show up. Dean had a license. Dean had a car. Well. A truck. Sam had bought him this big Ford pickup. So, Dean drove Cas back to his place and then, after an hour or two at Cas’s place, hanging with Cas and the pigs, drove himself home. Garth still drove him other places in Sam’s car, but for one evening a week, Dean had something like freedom and Garth got a night off.

“Oh, yes. That story. Supposedly a classic work of literature,” Cas said as they fed the mini pigs their veggies. Cas had recently discovered how much the piggies loved cucumbers, so they had discs of cucumbers at the moment.

“Classic work of bullshit if you ask me.”

“Well, certainly one that they should reconsider having it read in a program meant to assist Omegas with educations that were interrupted by early matings that ended badly,” Cas said. “It could be triggering for many of them.”

“I was not triggered by it,” Dean insisted. “It was just a bunch of bullshit. And it was a regular English lit class, not one of the special program classes.”

“I’m not saying you were triggered by it,” Cas said. “But there well might be Omegas who are. I read it years ago, before I was even mated, but I can’t imagine trying to read it now. He tried to keep me, you know. When my symptoms started. He didn’t want me as a mate anymore, but he wanted to keep me around for the work I could do for him. Tend his child. Keep his house. Write articles and translate ancient scripts. Entertain his colleagues. So, he kept me inside the house. He thought he could break the bond, but not let me go. He hired a caretaker for me even. He even kept me in the attic, which admittedly was nicely converted to a bedroom with an en suite, but still.”

“Jesus,” Dean said. Whatever it was Cas had done to this Alpha asshole, it hadn’t been bad enough. “You didn’t burn down the house did you?”

Cas shook his head. “No, that might have hurt Jack. I was always lucid enough not to do that, even at my worst.”

“Any luck talking the judge into a Christmas visitation?” Dean asked, hoping it would bring the conversation around to something good, something that would make Cas happy. Dean figured part of his duties as friend was to not let Cas fall down that memory hole to the bad places. Cas had recently submitted another petition for visitation. This time, with a real lawyer. He’d asked Charlie and to his surprise, she’d agreed to represent Cas. Pro Bono she called it. She’d said she did work sometimes for something she called the Omega Legal Defense fund. They could cover some of the costs and she gave some of her time to the organization. So, they got Cas all set up with that. Dean had tried to stay out of the details, just gave Cas her number. The hearing had been earlier today, but Cas hadn’t talked about it, either to Dean or to the group. Dean understood. Sometimes, you had to keep the good things close to your vest.

“I almost don’t want to talk about it, in case I jinx it or something,” Cas said, but he was smiling and it was radiant. Like he was that angel he thought he’d been. He was smiling so big that his gums showed and his whole face glowed with happiness. “I got supervised visitation. Once a week. Starting an hour at a time. Maybe more, depending on how Jack adapts. I get to see my baby.”

Something about the moment. Dean was not a huggy, touchy-freely kind of guy. He never had been, but he reached out, pulled Cas into a hug and pulled him close.

And kissed him.

He didn’t know he why did that. Omegas didn’t kiss other Omegas. Even if they did Cas wouldn’t want him. Dean was a used up sad wraith of a man. At best, he was learning to have a half life. A life after. He was learning to get by and go on and maybe he might have some happy moments sometimes, but he wasn’t the kind of person that got a happy ever after. He’d just have to learn to settle for an after.

Dean tried to pull away, to push Cas away, to start letting the apologies fall from his lips and hope that Cas wouldn’t get mad and end their friendship because Dean was some kind of pervert who didn’t know how to act appropriately. Except, he couldn’t push himself away because Cas was holding on tight, not letting him go.

And kissing him back.

Holy crap. Dean was being kissed. And he liked it. More than that. It stirred up feelings that ran deep and slow. It didn’t cause his heart to pound or hammer fast and hard. It was a feeling that ached and yearned exquisitely painful from his core, from the parts of him that he thought were dead. Universes collided. Paradigms realigned themselves. Reality itself was being re-written in his heart. Secrets that had always been buried were raised from the graves they’d laid in for longer than Dean could remember. Understanding pushed shoots to the surface and roots down deep in the earth.

He was in love. With Cas.

Like he had never been in love with Michael. He felt exactly about another Omega how he was supposed to feel about his Alpha but never had. Like he thought he had but didn’t really. Cas would hate him. Cas hadn’t meant anything by kissing back.

Finally, they broke apart even though it felt like wrenching himself away from the source of everything good and wonderful.

“Cas, I’m. Sorry. I didn’t mean. You hate me now. I get that.”

But Cas didn’t look at Dean like he hated him at all. He had a happy smile on his face and though they weren’t kissing any longer, he had refused to let go of Dean’s hands. They were sitting next to each other on the bed, holding hands and looking at each other. With the Guinea Pigs still on their laps.

“How could you think that?” Cas asked. “I think we need to hold back on a full relationship for now. Neither of us is fully divorced yet from our former mates. But I love you and I’m daring to hope you actually meant what that kiss implies and that you love me back.”

“But Omegas don’t. Not with each other,” Dean said. “I can’t do that to you, even if I could. Me, I’m used up. No Alpha would want me like this anyway. But you. You’re still pretty and you could make more babies and find you a good Alpha and have a good life.”

“Dean, even if I wanted that, I couldn’t have it.”

Dean thought maybe Cas might be sensitive about the baby weight or something. “You could though. You deserve better than me, even if it could happen. Even if Omegas could do mate stuff with each other.”

“Don’t tell me what you think I deserve, because I know what I want. In any case, I am not attracted to Alphas at all. Even taking out all the trauma and the abuse. Before I was forced to mate Luke, I dated Omegas. Omegas certainly do do that with each other and it can be wonderful. I’m gay and Omegasexual.”

“You’ve had sex with another Omega?”

Cas nodded. Why did he have to be so damn beautiful, with those deep blue eyes and that hair that curled just a little, hardly tamed by brush or comb. His thick, dark stubble, because while Cas did shave, he didn’t do it often enough or something. Dean couldn’t help but think of that one morning after he’d accidentally spent the night. How it had felt to gently come to wakefulness in Cas’s bed, surrounded by the scent of him, bodies pressed together- warm and peaceful. He couldn’t have that though. They didn’t get to have those kinds of things.

“And you want to have it with me?”

“If that’s something you would want, yes.”

Dean sat with that a moment. Just like his therapist was always telling him. Sit with it for a while. Think. Allow yourself to feel. Maybe it’s uncomfortable for a while and that’s okay. He thought it would feel perverted, the thought of kissing Cas and doing more than that with him. It didn’t. It felt exciting. Thrilling. New. But not perverted. But dangerous. It was strange, how shameless Cas was. And how he was looking at Dean, like he was happy just to be here, to look at Dean and to love him. And Dean, he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t get people looking at him like that. Like he was some kind of beautiful something.

No. Not something. Michael always looked at him like he was a beautiful something.

Cas, he was looking at Dean like he was someone.

Dean couldn’t get comfortable with it, even though he tried. Even though he wanted to get there, he couldn’t see how. Omegas mated to Alphas, at the Alpha’s decision and pleasure and when Omegas were no longer desired by the Alpha, that was the Alpha’s decision and pleasure too. It was just the way that the universe worked.

“We can’t. No Alpha is going to stand for it.”

“Dean, we have been discarded. Thrown away. Made invisible. Unseen and unwanted. And at this time and at this moment, what that makes us is free. Maybe it’s not the truest, best kind of freedom, but it’s a place where I can live and breathe and be true to myself as much as I can. It’s a little place for a little life, but it is something and if you want, we can be here together, once we’re fully free from the Alphas that control us.”

“I don’t know, Cas. I. I have to go,” Dean said, because this was too big and too much. He couldn’t sit with this. He couldn’t allow himself to feel this. He lifted up the Guinea Pig from his lap and carefully, because he wasn’t gonna hurt some innocent creature, put it in Cas’s lap. And he fled, ignominiously, into the night. Got into his Ford pick up and drove right back to Sam’s house.

He thought, sometimes, about just getting on the road and driving. To the next state, the next town, the next little middle of nowhere. They’d spent their childhood mostly on the road like that. That was a kind of freedom too. In the car, in his truck, no one knew he was an Omega. He was just a guy, driving a car. But no car drove forever. He’d have to stop sometimes, for food, fuel. That would be where he was vulnerable, in danger. Maybe he would do it anyway, once he’d fixed up his Baby. Set off on a road trip, see the country, all the little towns and drive in and bad motels.

Before long, he pulled into the truck’s parking space. The Impala was sleeping under a tarp in the nearby garage. He wasn’t ready for her yet. He still had to learn what could be done for her. A strange and ugly, battered Chevelle was parked in the guest spot. It seemed oddly familiar though. He remembered soon enough where he’d seen it before. It had been years and years since he’d seen the car. They hadn’t been able to keep in touch with its owner.

There’d been harsh words, delivered in righteous anger, loud, but far enough off that Dean hadn’t heard the words, only the fury behind them on both sides. Dad had parted ways with Bobby, who had been almost like a parent to them, on and off. Then, not long after, Dad was gone and it was just Dean, trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do and how he was going to take care of Sam. They hadn’t had Bobby’s number even, not that they could have asked someone to take them in like that. Dean had done what he’d had to do, but he’d always missed visiting Bobby’s house, missed the gruff but caring man.

Dean hurried inside, taking the back door. Putting his key in the lock, turning it. He still never quite trusted that it would open until the key turned and the lock clicked open.

Sam and Bobby were sitting at the kitchen table, brown bottles of beer open in front of them. Bobby was just like Dean remembered, down to the same damn battered ball cap and insulated, army green vest. Bobby noticed him first and stood up, crossed the room at speed. Took Dean into his arms and hugged him.

“Bobby?” Dean asked, as if trying to encapsulate every question into one- why they’d had to leave all those years ago, what that fight had been about, where had Bobby been all that time, why hadn’t he found them, why had it been so long? Dean was crying, but so was Bobby. And the scent. Dean didn’t know why he had never known? Had Bobby worn scent blockers all the time when they were younger? He’d always thought Bobby was a Beta. But he wasn’t. Bobby was Omega. Just like Dean. Not mated, never mated to an Alpha. The skin on the side of his neck was scarless, never broken. Dean remembered that Bobby had been married to a woman once. She’d died long before he’d come into their lives, but Dean remembered seeing the pictures.

“Are you okay, Dean?” Sam asked. “I thought you’d be happy to see Bobby again.”

“I am,” he protested. “Just a little surprised.”

“You’re home early from your date.”

“What is this? Twenty questions. It wasn’t a date. I’m not dating Cas,” Dean protested. “He’s an Omega too.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?” Bobby asked, as they were sitting down again. He sipped on his beer and asked, “You want one? They’re in the fridge.”

“Dean can’t drink alcohol with a couple of the medications he’s on,” Sam explained.”

Dean, though he’d gotten a lot better over the months since getting out of the hospital, was still on a whole bunch of meds- the antidepressant combo, the anti-anxiety meds, the heart meds, the hormone replacements. Sam was right. Drinking was out of the question.

“You know, they’d never find Michael’s body on my back forty,” Bobby said, conversationally. “Sam was telling me about what happened.”

Bobby’s voice was low and level and for a minute there, Dean thought he was serious. Then he thought Bobby was joking, in that quiet way he had. Then Dean realized that while Bobby was joking, he was also deadly serious.

“I think I get more in the divorce settlement than if I’m the widow,” Dean said. The mating contract possibly was still valid until the divorce was final and it gave him a somewhat comfortable income- at the discretion of the trustees, during Dean’s lifetime, but because Dean had never managed to have a child, most of Michael’s money would go to the family, as things stood.

“Huh, reason to keep him alive for now I guess. Take him for all he’s worth,” Bobby said. Sipped his beer.

“Did you eat, Dean?” Sam asked.

“Stop mother henning me,” Dean snapped.

“So, that’s a no,” Sam said. “Bobby and I were about to call for a pizza or something. You want in?”

Dean shook his head. He didn’t want to eat. The thought sounded nauseating, his stomach churning. He’d been supposed to eat pizza with Cas. Cas. He’d bolted from Cas and Cas probably hated him now, he thought. But how? How could an Omega be with an Omega and not be with an Alpha if he was able? But Bobby was an Omega and never been mated to an Alpha as far as Dean knew.

All he knew was that if Bobby weren’t here, he’d have bolted right into his room, into the nest he’d built in the big walk in closet. That was something Michael had never understood- his need for a comfort nest. He called it primitive and other, worse names. He called Dean subhuman once after Dean had built himself a nest after one of the harder miscarriages. Any time Michael found Dean had built a nest in the house, he tore it apart. Threw away the nesting materials even sometimes. At least Sam just pretended he didn’t see Dean nesting.

Bobby seemed to see something in Dean’s blank stare and silence. He looked at Sam, “Why don’t you make a pick up order somewhere, Sam. Me and Dean have old times to catch up on.”

“But I can have anything you want delivered,” Sam protested.

“I’m sure you can, son,” Bobby said, in a certain tone, some kind of non-verbal communication between Sam and Bobby going on.

“Okay, yeah. I’ll go get burgers or something,” Sam agreed. “I’ll make a supply run.”

***

On an impulse, Sam drove past the Church where Dean went to his support group, where he’d met Cas, then into the somewhat seedy down town area where Cas lived over a pizza place.

Something had happened tonight. Something had shaken Dean up like nothing else had since maybe the time he’d been accidentally locked out of Sam’s house. Only Bobby being there seemed to allow Dean to keep it together.

Dean had been doing so well. Getting out of bed every day, even on days when he wasn’t forced out by appointments. Taking care of himself- showering, brushing his teeth, combing his hair. Getting dressed. He was hardly ever seen hiding in the nest that Sam pretended not to notice in the closest, the one that he carefully disassembled so it just looked like a pile of extra bedding whenever he had to go out. He’d even started dating, in a minor way, spending time with this Cas person after the support group, going out to dinner, hanging out with him. Cas seemed to be good for Dean and made him happy. What had happened tonight? Dean had said they weren’t dating. Maybe Dean had misunderstood the situation and this Cas person had set him straight about it in a blunt kind of way? This Cas didn’t feel that way or maybe he believed that Omegas couldn’t be with Omegas? Dean had mentioned something about that, about how ‘he’s an Omega too.’

Before he’d even actually decided what he was doing, he’d parked. He was going to ring the buzzer to Castiel’s apartment, but noticed that the street level door was pretty much open. He walked in. It was not a terribly nice building, the tile floors of the little foyer all grubby, pizza smell saturating the residential part of the building. Not unclean. Nothing he saw would stop him from getting a pizza at the place out front, but it was all worn out, cheap to start with and used hard.

He took the stairs up. The carpet covering them was threadbare, the paint on the hand rail worn away. He hadn’t any idea that his brother’s boyfriend or at least his best friend he had a crush on was struggling so much. He’d known that Cas had two jobs and an ex that sounded almost as assholish as Michael. And Guinea Pigs. Dean had mentioned those. And a son he wasn’t allowed to see. Sam had only seen Cas at a distance, knew that he was kind of pudgy and soft in the middle from never having lost the baby weight.

Sam knocked on the door. 2B, the one with the alley view apparently. It took a moment, but a tousled Omega man wrapped in an old Army wool blanket answered the door. He looked kind of wrecked, honestly. But handsome. He hadn’t realized how seriously gorgeous Cas was, even with the extra weight. Dean had never mentioned anything about that. But Castiel’s eyes were deep blue and everything about him was soft and lovely. If he didn’t know that Dean was obviously gone on this Omega, Sam would have let himself want. Not given in it, of course, but it was okay to want and never have sometimes.

“You’re Castiel?” Sam asked.

The man nodded slowly, so Sam continued, “Whatever you said to Dean tonight or whatever you’re doing to him, you need to stop, because he’d been making really good progress and he came home tonight just wrecked. I don’t know how much you know, what he told you, but someone else breaking his heart right now could literally kill him. He’s. I don’t know what you said, but he’s wrecked.”

“I told him that I loved him,” Castiel said. “That’s all. I realize now he wasn’t ready to hear that, but I can’t regret speaking my truth. I love him, so if that means that I can never have him, I’m still happy to know I love him. I can find another support group to go to if he doesn’t want to see me again.”

Of course. That made far more fucking sense than this Castiel saying he could never be with Dean. You assume certain things, that people would grow and learn that things are different than what they grew up with, but a lot of the time, the programming was deep down, and when had been done by John Winchester to an impressionable young Omega, it would last. John had always had a lot of things to say about people who went outside the norms, about Alphas who didn’t want an Omega as their first choice, about Omegas who wouldn’t take an Alpha, about Betas who were ‘too bossy’.

“Is Dean okay? I wouldn’t do anything that would harm him knowingly. More than anyone I know how fragile his heart must be. I thought. I thought he might reciprocate my feelings.”

He did. He did so much, Sam realized. There was something special about this Omega and he could see what Dean saw and why Dean hardly said anything about the man. That was how you could tell how much of a treasure Dean found him. Dean had hoarded Cas, all the little details, all the moments. It was a long established coping method- if you didn’t want Dad to deliberately take something away, you pretended you didn’t want it, didn’t like it. It was at that moment that Sam decided that he would do everything in his power to let Dean know he could have Cas, that the world didn’t have to be the way he’d been taught to see it by their father, and had that viewpoint hammered in by Michael so many times over the years. If Sam could. He’d do anything in his power to make his brother happy. It was the least he could do. His brother had literally sold himself, body and soul, so that Sam could succeed.

“I think he’s going to be fine,” Sam said. “It’s just. Well, our Dad. He raised Dean to believe a lot of messed up things about how an Omega is supposed to be and what an Omega is allowed to do. I’m sorry I said those things. He is fragile and hurting, but I can’t lay that at your feet. Don’t go to a different group. Just be patient with him.”

“I can do that,” Cas promised.

Chapter Text

“Sam says you’ve had kind of a rough go of it,” Bobby said when the door had shut behind Sam. Dean shrugged. What was there to say, really? The details weren’t important. He’d been thrown away like trash, and apparently, it was true that he was trash, worth being thrown away. Unnatural. An Omega that couldn’t even fall in love with an Alpha, but had to go fall in love with another Omega.

“I’m getting better,” Dean finally managed. “I kicked my Alpha. Not dying anymore.”

“Glad to hear it,” Bobby said. “I wish Sam had tracked me down sooner. Could have been there for you at the worst of it.”

There was something he always wanted to know. Something that maybe made a little more sense or maybe was more confusing now that he understood Bobby was an Omega. “Bobby, why did we have to leave and not come back? What did you and Dad fight about? Was it because he wouldn’t mate you?”

“Other way around, Kiddo,” Bobby said, fiddling with his bottle. “I loved you kids like you were my own, but your Dad said if I was going to act like your mom, well, I’d have to lie down and take his bite on my neck and all that entailed. I wouldn’t do that for an Alpha I loved, so I sure as Hell wasn’t going to do it for an Alpha I could hardly tolerate.”

Then, he added, “But if I’d have known he was going to take you two boys and never come back, I’d have done it for your sake. You and Sam.”

“Bobby, no,” Dean said.

“Maybe if I’d been around, you wouldn’t have felt you had to sell yourself to that son of a bitch. Or maybe your Dad would still be alive if he had someone to take care of him.”

“I did what I had to and I don’t regret it for a minute. Even if Michael dropped me like a load of trash when there was no more blood left to suck out of me,” Dean said. “I’m used up and worthless now, but it got Sam to where he needed to go. I’m glad I could do that for him. I went through Hell for him and I’d do it again.”

“And you don’t think you were worth getting to where you needed to go? Someone should have been there for you,” Bobby said, grabbing Dean by the upper arms, half like a hug, half like he wanted to shake some damn sense into Dean. Seeing the tears running down the crusty old man’s face was shocking. Dean had never seen him like that. “I should have been there. You were my boy. Doesn’t matter we weren’t blood. You were my boys and you shouldn’t have had to walk through Hell. I’d have walked through Hell for you.”

Thanks to his brother and to Cas, he was crawling out of the Hell he had been dumped into. For a minute, he thought about what Cas had said, that they had been discarded and that made them free. Cas was wrong. He was free, not because Michael had tossed him in the trash, but because the people around him decided he was worth something (even if they were wrong). They were lifting him up. Cas. Sam. Bobby now. Even Charlie his lawyer.

“I got by fine, Bobby,” Dean said. “Getting better all the time. And I’m glad you didn’t have take Dad’s bite.”

“So, Sam says that no good ex of yours wrecked the Impala,” Bobby said, clearly changing the subject. They were both, Dean thought, at the limits of their ability to talk about stuff. At least stuff that truly mattered.

“Yeah. I’ve started school. Gonna learn to fix cars so I can fix her,” Dean said. “Might be a while though before I learn enough. They’re making me take all these basic math classes first though.”

“I got a 67 in the yard, should be good for a lot of parts you’ll need. Power train is completely shot, but the body’s mint. I got it set aside for you. When you get your court stuff settled, you ought to bring your Baby out to mine and we can get to work on her. You can learn to fix a car hands on too.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course I mean that,” Bobby said. “Now, tell me about this Cas you’re not dating.”

“He’s just a friend. Why do people think we’re dating?” Dean said. “Bobby, you were married. I saw pictures of Karen. Was she Alpha? She never…”

It was rare, but not unheard of for a woman to be an Alpha. Dean didn’t finish his question, not verbally, but he touched the side of his neck where the scar from Michael’s bite still lingered, still marked him as ruined. As someone who had been bought like a shiny new thing, marked up like you’d put your laundry tag on a shirt, then tossed aside when he wasn’t useful anymore. He thought maybe when he looked at his neck in the mirror, it wasn’t as visible as it used to be, but whenever he felt it, it was like a big knot- permanent and disfiguring.

“She was Omega too,” Bobby said. “I used to do a good job hiding as a Beta. I’m not much of an Omega, never been the delicate princess type even when I was young. Never been accused of being pretty. All I had to do was slap on some scent blockers. These day, can’t find it in me to give a shit what people think of me being Omega, so I don’t bother. Back then, I had to pass as a Beta enough to get us a marriage license. Now, it wouldn’t matter. Even in South Dakota an Omega can marry an Omega.”

“People say Alphas and Omegas are meant to go together, like a lock and key,” Dean said.

“Just because there’s a key doesn’t mean it goes into a lock.”

“It can just hang out on a key chain with the other keys all its life?” Dean asked, bitterly.

Bobby brought out a big key chain he kept in his pants pocket. It was loaded with different keys, dozens of them, “Ah, hell, I don’t remember what half of these unlock. Ain’t used most of ‘em for years. Probably don’t have most of the locks still. Why don’t we go take a look at that Impala of yours, see if it’s as bad as Sam says. Sam don’t know jack about cars.”

A short while later, they were standing in front of the Impala in the third bay of Sam’s garage. Bobby whistled as he looked at Baby, took off his hat and peered at the wrecked car. “Well, that’s bad,” he said. “But it ain’t nothing that can’t be fixed with enough work. The frame still seems sound enough. I’ve got that 67 set aside for the body parts.”

“You’re sure, Bobby?” Dean asked.

“Nothing’s sure in this life, but it’s a pretty good bet.”

Later that night, they had pizza, which Dean recognized as coming from the pizza place Cas lived over. After, Bobby had found his way to one of the guest rooms, Dean retreated to his bedroom, thinking he might watch some Netflix. Tombstone was back on streaming. It wasn’t one of the movies he’d ever watched with his father, but it reminded him of them. Sam followed Dean though, obviously itching to talk about something, when all Dean wanted was to pull out his pile of blankets from the closet, arrange them carefully on his bed and retreat into the warm, soft comfort of it. Sam, at least, stayed out of the room, just talking from the hallway.

“Hey, so I hope you don’t mind that I sprang Bobby on you like this,” Sam said. “I didn’t know he was going to get in his car and drive across half the country as soon as I gave him our contact information.”

Sam obviously had no idea how strong an Omega would feel about his kids. Even about the kids that weren’t his kids, but that his inner Omega had decided were. Dean didn’t doubt for one minute that Bobby really would have walked through Hell if he thought it would keep Dean out of there. He would have done the same for any of his babies if they’d survived. If someone called Dean and told him that they had one of his babies, Dean would have gotten in his truck and driven across the country to get there, close as non-stop as he could have managed.

“How’d you find him?” Dean asked. Dean wouldn’t have known where to start.

“I’m just sorry it took me so long,” Sam said, leaning on the door frame. “I didn’t remember his last name or even the town that the junkyard was in. I think I was maybe ten when Dad and Bobby had that right and he hauled us out of there. But you know how we found Dad’s old notebook in the Impala, in that secret compartment in the trunk?”

That was something he hadn’t known until they’d gotten Baby back, that there was a false bottom to the trunk. There hadn’t been anything in there except a couple of old shoe boxes of cassette tapes and this leather notebook thing that had turned out to be some kind of journal Dad had kept. It was mostly filled with cryptic dates and numbers, disappointingly, something that had made Sam scratch his head and wonder out loud if Dad had been doing some small scale drug dealing or something. Inside there’d been a handful of old postcards, not used, a matchbook cover or two from bars scattered across the country, some photos, one of Dean, Sam and Dad sitting on the car, another of Dean and his mom. Both of those were propped on Dean’s bedside table now.

“Yeah.”

“Well, there was an old business card hidden in the back. For Singer Salvage in Sioux Falls. Robert Singer was the owner. I took a chance and called. It was our Bobby. So, you’re doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” Dean said. “Peachy.”

Sam looked down at his feet for a moment, as if he were gathering up to make some big pronouncement or make a big speech and then Dean would find himself subjected to it and then they’d have to hug it out. Or worse, he’d find himself having to snuggle and scent his family Alpha again, which, really, he’d done enough of that in the last several months to last him a whole lifetime.

“I just wanted to say how proud of you I am, how many strides you’ve made to recovery,” Sam said, finally. “I know the doctors and the drugs and all of that helped, but none of that would have mattered if you hadn’t dug in your heels and decided to live. And I saw the report you printed out of your grades. It’s fantastic, Dean. If you want to transfer to a full university, any time, I’d be happy to pay for that too. Any place you can get in.”

Dean thought about the past semester, how the classes all seemed to much easier to do than his horrible last semester of high school. But a real university? It was one thing to get good grades in a little rinky-dink community college. He was about to say something like that, but then, there it was. The thing Sam was obviously itching to slide on into the conversation. The thing Dean didn’t want to hear or talk about ever.

“And if you want to get in any kind of relationship with someone else, I’ll back you. I know as your family Alpha, I technically have the power to forbid that kind of thing. The law give me veto power if you were to want to mate again. But I want you to know that I would never dream of doing that. I don’t think it’s right that I should have that kind of say in your life. You find someone you want to date, anyone, I’m good with that. Or I should say, I don’t think it’s something that should be any of my business one way or another. I’d just be happy for you if you find someone that makes you happy. Anyone. A Beta. Even another Alpha, if you want walk in with eyes open this time. Or an Omega. Just so long as it makes you happy. You know I’m not like Dad.”

“I know that, Sammy,” Dean said, a complicated swirl of emotions rising up inside him. Something like hope, but there was fear and yes, even anger. Anger that it should be something that Sam had any say about at all, because it was a different thing entirely for Sam to chose not to exercise his control over Dean than for him not to have it at all. “I’m not dating Cas. I’m not dating anyone. Since you, know, actually still kind of married and mated to my asshole ex.”

“You won’t always be though,” Sam said. “What I want more than anything is for you to be free and happy.”

Good luck with that. Omegas didn’t get to be truly free. Just discarded. Just unwanted.

“Well, good talk,” Dean said, wishing more than anything that Sam would just go away. Dean motioned to the TV with his remote. “This Netflix isn’t going to watch itself.”

After Sam had gone to bed or maybe just back downstairs to his office, Dean texted Cas.

“You hate me for running away. I’m a coward.”

A few moments later, came the reply, “I could never hate you💕💞💛💛💛🤗🤗🤗.”

Then, a moment or so later, “I could find another group to go to if you’re no longer comfortable around me.”

“No, Cas, I need you,” Dean texted back. “I need to talk to you every week and feed your Guinea pigs. Hang out and just be normal. I need to get your crazy emoji texts.”

Then, because he didn’t know how else to breach the subject, he wrote, “My Uncle Bobby found us again. He raised us, more than my Dad ever did. I never knew he was Omega too. He was married. To another Omega. I didn’t know it could be done. I didn’t think that kind of thing could even happen.”

“Sam thought we were dating already and he says he’d never interfere with my relationships. He’s kind of the one with the vote on that. He said he’d be cool with me dating an Omega. It’s just. I’ve got a lot to think about. A lot of things to process.”

Dean added, “I just crawled out of seventeen years of a hell that I didn’t even know was hell until I could suddenly breathe again. And the first face I saw, the first face I really saw was yours. I don’t know if what I feel is real or it’s just relief.”

“Whatever you feel, whatever is your truth, I support you fully. My love is unconditional,” Cas wrote back immediately. “First and foremost before any other feelings, I am your friend.💛 🤗 I hope we can stay friends. The piggies would miss you too if you stopped visiting.🐹🐹😢”

“Can’t disappoint the piggies,” Dean texted back. “See you next week at group and our regular night afterwards?”

“Of course. I always look forward to seeing you.”

Cas sent a picture. One of those meme things he liked so well.

Dean shook his head, smiling in spite of himself.

Chapter Text

Michael was tall, dark. Thick, dark eyebrows punctuating his forehead. Dark hair brushed across his forehead. Still just as handsome as Dean remembered him. He really looked so much like Dad had when he was younger. All Dean could really see now was the hardness to his dark eyes. Had the set of his jaw and mouth always been that cruel? He’d always thought that Michael looked at him with fond regard, but now, all Dean could see was anger. His scent was bitter and sharp too. Had he always smelled like that? Like pine tar soap and hot asphalt in the sun? Dean didn’t remember what he had smelled like back when they were mated. How was that possible? You knew your mate, their scent settled on you like the atmosphere around you. The bond started with a scent bond.

This was it. The last day he would ever have to see Michael. They were signing the final papers, then the judge would pretty much rubber stamp it and it would be over.

Charlie had come to him with a settlement not long ago, saying, “This is about as good as it gets. I didn’t get you the house, but I got a forced sale and a fifty percent equity payout in cash. I got you that vacation cottage on the coast up north. There’s a separate settlement to cover your health care costs, both past and going forward. No alimony, but a big, upfront cash settlement in lieu of that. It doesn’t touch his family money, but it’s big. It leaves him, at least temporarily, broke as a joke. He’s lucky we didn’t sue him for grievous bodily harm and take the story about how he forced a seventeen year old to sign a ruinous mating contract to the state bar. His lawyers know that. That’s still on the table until the deal is done, if it has to be. Here.”

She’d pushed the paper to him across the wood of her desk. He picked it up and read. He’d been shocked. He’d known Michael had been more than comfortable, but fuck. Michael had been rich and Dean didn’t even really know how rich. And so much of that was going to be Dean’s now. The settlement was in the millions. Sam had looked at it and started babbling about tax consequences, but that if Dean allowed him and his firm management of it, Sam could grow it. Dean would be more than independent, more than taken care of, he could do whatever he wanted. He could live the life he used to lead, just without Michael.

“I should take it?” He’d asked. He’d never expected this much. Had no idea there was that much to expect. He’d thought Michael was a well to do lawyer with family money coming to him eventually, not like this. “I don’t need this much.”

“Yes, you should take it,” Charlie had said. So he did.

Now he’d been sitting in a room in the courthouse pen poised, ready to sign a boat load of papers and have them notarized. Get this over with so he could start thinking about the future and what he wanted it to be. In a way, he was stuck in time until this was done.

When Michael walked in, handsome bastard that he was. Dean couldn’t help but think of the past- of the way Michael would look at him and raise and eyebrow and Dean knew that he was wanted in that certain way, that sometime soon, Michael would take him to bed and together, they would fall on each other and drive each other to the edge. Because even when it had been bad, when it had been painful, the sex had been good. Or rather, he recognized now, the high had made everything else fall out of focus. He’d been a junkie, Dean thought. This was his dealer. He was clean now. He didn’t want it, didn’t even want to have to see his dealer.

He’d thought it would be hard, seeing him again. He thought, once, that he would have done anything to just get back to where he’d been- the pampered mate- the trophy mate, spun around the room proudly on Michael’s arm. Michael looking at him like he was a treasure. Now he just wanted this to be over with.

“You’re looking well,” Michael said, but angrily, as if that was just another one of Dean’s flaws and faults it was his duty as Alpha to point out. “You should shave. It’s unnatural for an Omega to have a beard.”

Anger didn’t sit on Michael well. He was still handsome, but he looked older, more tired than Dean ever remembered. He sounded bitter. Whatever life had brought him after kicking the mate that should have been his forever out in the cold to die, it hadn’t made him happy.

Dean didn’t look up. He said, voice as cold as he could make it, “You got anything to say to me, say it to my lawyer.”

“No, you’re still my mate for now,” Michael said. “And I will say what I want to you. I don’t have to sign, you know. I could still make you come home to me. Put you in your place.”

He couldn’t, could he? They had legal separation already and that meant Michael couldn’t control him, couldn’t force him to do anything. Once, Dean would have given anything to go home. Now he saw that home as the cage that it was. The trap. It was a glittery, comfortable cage, but it was still a cage. Michael didn’t say it outright but what he was saying was that he still owned Dean. Dean didn’t say anything, just looked down at his papers and started signing them. Dean thought this was a done deal, but he supposed a settlement wasn’t settled until all the forms were signed.

Charlie was about to speak up when Adler, Michael’s lawyer, came over, put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and led him away, saying, “No. Not another word to them. Don’t make it any worse. We ended up with Judge Hanscum and if we take this to trial, she would hand you your balls on a platter.”

“Damn right she would,” Charlie muttered when they were out of hearing range. “You got off easy, asshat.”

Then, when they were further off, Charlie added, as if she could see that Dean wasn’t sure Michael wasn’t right, “And he’s wrong. He can’t make you go back to him. We have legal separation already. He has no more say on what you do than some random stranger. You know, it really proves that for a rich Alpha, it’s all about privilege and having your life just handed to you. Besides being a shitty person, he’s a shit lawyer.”

Across the room, Michael glowered as he signed papers. Once, Dean would have done anything to placate that glower. It’d been one of his unspoken jobs to soothe Michael’s moods. He’d talked about that with Cas, who called it doing emotional labor. He didn’t have to do it any longer. Michael’s shitty mood was nothing to do with him. He felt kind of sorry for that Omega Michael had now, because he’d known Michael on days where he’d been delivered a defeat and while Michael never once hit Dean, the whole house would sink into the miasma of his foul mood. Only sometimes he would yell and break things. Another thing he’d talked about with Cas, that breaking things in anger was still a kind of domestic violence, showing that it was a person he actually wanted to break. Dean was done, though. He was out of it.

Eventually, everything was done and Michael must have finished with his part, because suddenly, it was over and Michael was gone. Dean was handed a piece of paper that said he was a single man. An unmated man with a very large settlement that he didn’t deserve, but that he would take anyway.

“So, that’s it. We’re done?” He asked, because Charlie and Sam hadn’t gotten up. They still hand another, smaller pile of papers with them.

“Not quite,” Sam said. “I had Charlie prepare some other papers. If you don’t want to do this, that’s fine too. I don’t want you to think I’m in any way kicking you out, or abandoning you. You can continue to live with me for as long as you want. That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what is this about?” Dean asked, confused by Sam’s little, nervous speech.

So Charlie slowly, with a small, happy smile presented the papers to Dean. Dean looked, read the top of the page. “Petition for the removal of guardianship of Dean M. Shurley and Revocation of Family Alpha Claim.”

“Sam?” Dean asked, confused. “What’s going on?”

“I did what I had to do so Michael couldn’t hurt you more, but in no world is is it right that I’ve got some kind of control and ownership over my big brother,” Sam said. “Emancipation papers. If you need me to stay your legal guardian, if that’s what you want, I will, but that should be a decision you make, not me.”

“You’re cutting me loose?” Dean asked, hands shaking a little as he held those thin pieces of paper that contained his legal personhood. He knew that Cas was considered an emancipated Omega with no guardian or family Alpha, but that was because he’d been abandoned. Once, it was mandatory that an Omega have a guardian, an Alpha of some kind. Now, it was customary and recommended, because Omegas supposedly needed protection from other Alphas. So much had changed since the time Dean had been young and mated to Michael.

“He’s not doing anything,” Charlie said. “This is you. This is your decision. And it was me that told him this needed to be done. He’s not going to deny this. But this is all your decision.”

“If I do this, am I safe?” He asked Charlie. He thought he might be right to be worried about that. He had a lot of money coming to him and he didn’t know what the hell to do about that.

“Are you worried about the settlement? Because I can hook you up with a lawyer who is not Sam, who can set that all up into a trust with professional trustees and everything.”

“Dean, you will always be my brother. I will always love you and always be there for you, but I don’t want to be your Alpha,” Sam said. “I want you to not need an Alpha.”

“You’re not kicking me out of your house? Because, you let me get kind of a sweet set up going there, Sammy,” Dean said. Maybe that was his hesitation more than anything. Sam’s house had been a soft place to land when he’d fallen. It was comfortable and easy. Restful and quiet. Sam worked a lot, but he worked so often in the home office. Dean got used to being surrounded in Sam’s warm, steady, not fully pleasant, but familiar scent.

“Never,” Sam promised. “I hope you keep living with me for a while, even if you don’t have to. I like having you around. Your room will always be your room.”

“So, where do I sign? Do I have to sign something?” Dean asked.

A while later, he stepped out of the court room into the sunshine and the rest of his life, feeling lighter than he had ever remembered feeling. He was free. Not just of Michael. He was a legal adult, with all the worries and problems that entailed. He still was going to go home to his brother’s house, but not with his brother as his family Alpha.

Dean let the sun shine on his face for a while, warming him to the core, like he was some solar charging station. He couldn’t help but remember some meme that Cas had sent him a while back about about being sure to get out in the sun and drink some water, because people were complicated houseplants or something like that.

Maybe he ought to do that. Go to the beach and sit by the shore for a while, sand in his toes, face in the sun. Oh, he’d gone on vacation with Michael plenty of times to places with beaches, but they were more working trips for Dean, in a way. Go stand next to Michael. Look extra pretty, which was harder because the resort dress code was skimpier and more casual, but more casual in exactly the right way and sexier, but somehow not make him look like a slut. His hair was impossible to keep looking perfect in the wind off the ocean. Michael hated the actual beach. Any vacations they’d taken were about networking and partying with the ‘right’ people. No, Dean wanted to go to sit on actual sand, wearing a tacky, loose shirt and sunglasses, Sam by his side if he could. Sam probably couldn’t, because of work. He thought about asking Cas along and that was really a pretty nice thought.

“What now?” He asked Sam. Actually, Dean had plans, things already decided on and put into motion, but he had two weeks before any of those started.

“Anything you want.”

I want to see Cas, Dean thought. What he said was, “I’ve got group tonight, so I’ll do that. Don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow though.”

Later that night he went out with Cas to that one diner, after group, after he’d been congratulated on the divorce, after he’d listened to everyone’s stories, especially to Cas who’d just seen Jack yesterday for the first time and was ebullient, yet, also melancholy. It must just about have ripped his heart out to have to hand his kid back to that asshole father and ex-mate after holding him for so brief a time. And Jack had been shy at first, hardly remembering his own parent, but then once he’d gotten a chance to scent Cas, he remembered or some instinct had kicked in and he’d clung on tight, screaming at the separation when it was time to go. He squeezed Cas’s hand and he wanted to give the man a tight hug.

“I feel guilty,” Dean said, after a while. He’d gotten, not just more than he wanted, but more than he’d ever thought to ask for in the first place. Cas so far had gotten nothing more than the short end of the stick.

“Don’t be,” Cas reassured him. “You deserve it. That Alpha put you through Hell. As far as I’m concerned, he made a credible attempt to murder you in hopes of not having to pay any kind of settlement or alimony.”

“Not that. I’m happy to relieve that bastard of every cent I can,” Dean said, thinking back to the place he’d been months ago, barely shambling through existence, just wanting the divorce to be over. “But you and all the other Omegas that have ended up worse off rather than better. You don’t have a family Alpha right here, ready to go to the mats for you like Sammy was for me. I’m sure Gabe is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but he’s off in Sweden or something.”

“Norway,” Cas said. “I asked, last time we talked. He offered to come home but I told him to stay. He’s doing important work in documentary film making. Some sort of deal came through, so he afford to send more money. So I can pay my lawyer now.”

“You getting any closer to your divorce? Satan’s got to pay alimony at least, right?”

“That’s one of our sticking points at the moment. I’m willing to waive alimony if he gives me my book back,” Cas said, tracing a pattern on the worn linoleum of the tabletop. “Co-authorship credit in the next edition at least. I mean, he didn’t do any writing relating to that book other than signing his name on the checks. It’s not a lot of money now, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

“Damn right it is,” Dean said.

“And for him, that could be a big deal. That book was kind of the thing that secured tenure and if he has to admit he was claiming sole authorship when that wasn’t true, there might be consequences,” Cas explained and then the waitress brought out their burgers and there was no more talk for a while, just two guys eating their dinner. Dean finished more than half of his before shoving it over to Cas and counted it a small victory.

After dinner, they went up to Cas’s apartment to see the pigs and feed them their dinner. The wheek wheek wheek sound of their happiness at fresh food was now familiar though it still made a little warm spot in his heart to hear.

“Hey, Buddy,” Dean said, scooping Almond Joy out of the enclosure as Cas brought in the little bowls of cut up vegetables. “I’m going to miss these little guys when I’m gone.”

“You’re always welcome to visit,” Cas said. “You know I always appreciate our talks and our time together. I know it was inappropriate of me to kiss you but I hoped we’d gotten past that.”

Cas looked so heartbroken that Dean felt like almost as much of a dick as Michael was. He just wished he didn’t feel he had to do this or that he could take Cas with or something. A new city, a new environment would do him a lot of good too, except it would take him away from Jack, the one person that really, truly mattered in all of this.

“No, it’s not that,” Dean said. “My uncle Bobby asked me to come stay with him in South Dakota while I decide what I want to do with myself. He’s going to help me fix up Baby. I don’t want to leave you here alone, but I think I’ve gotta go. At least for a while. Learn how to live again. You’re my best friend. I need you, but I need this too.”

Cas relaxed a little, put on a smile that Dean knew was put on. “We can always keep texting,” he said.

“If it weren’t for you needing to be near Jack, I’d ask you to come with me,” Dean said. He put his hand on Cas’s and he squeezed gently. “And I’m coming back some day.”

Then, as much as he dared. “And when I get back, if you haven’t forgotten about me by then or gotten over me, we’ll talk about where you and me stand. I want to be with you. I want us to be happy together, but I don’t think I can do that until I figure out what happy is on my own first.”

Chapter Text

He went to South Dakota. He went to go stay with Bobby. He had Baby shipped to Singer Salvage in Sioux Falls ahead of him, so she was waiting when he got there. She was in rough shape still, no work done on her since they’d covered up the bright orange graffiti with the black spray paint. Dean hadn’t been able to bear looking at her in her broken state, since he couldn’t do anything about it.

When Dean got there, Bobby led him up a small room on the second floor of the ramshackle house, surrounded by acres of cars in various states of decay and ruin. The house seemed smaller and shabbier than what he remembered from being there as a kid, when Bobby’s house seemed like the place some impossibly rich person lived, because it was so much bigger than the motel rooms and rented shacks where they usually stayed. Here, now, Dean’s room was smaller than the walk in closet in his room at Sam’s house. There was a twin sized bed and an old, boxy television that looked like it might have been around since Dean was a kid. The main decoration the room had was stacks of books everywhere. Old books. New books. Any kind you could think of.

Bobby seemed almost hesitant and said, “I know it’s not exactly what you’re used to, but I hope it’ll do for now.”

He could have bought his own, nice house in Sioux Falls. He could have just paid a professional restorer to get his Baby back to her best self. He could have lived the same style of life he’d had when he was with Michael, with a big beautiful house and shopping for designer clothes to fill his days. He had that kind of money now. He didn’t want that. That much he knew for sure. He was in a house where the kitchen had last been remodeled maybe in the fifties and some of the windows were boarded up. It didn’t matter. He’d never felt more at home.

“It’s perfect, Bobby,” Dean said as he tossed his bag onto the room’s only chair.

“Well, you look like you’re about wiped out,” Bobby said. “I’ll let you get some rest. TV sort of works. Plenty to read around. If you find a weapon assume it’s loaded or sharp. I’ll call you for dinner.”

Traveling there had been nerve wracking and exhausting. He hadn’t actually flown anywhere since before the last miscarriage. Even before then, he sometimes had had to drug himself with anti-anxiety medicines to do it, so he’d definitely done it now. Garth flew out with him, flew back the very same day, so as to get back to Bess and the family. Dean had extracted a promise from Sam not to fire Garth while Dean was gone. Sam needed someone to take care of him too. And Garth? He was good people. Dean didn’t know how Garth had done it round trip in a single day. Dean was exhausted just from the one way trip, so he laid down in the little bed and rested.

The sheets were clean and soft. Bobby had left a heap of folded blankets at the foot of the bed, a mix of textures- soft ones, fuzzy ones. Wooly blankets. A light cotton blanket. Some of them Dean recognized as the ones on his bed when they’d stayed here as kids. Dean unfolded and heaped and piled, and tucked, until it was all just so and he got into his nest and feel asleep. He it was dark when he woke and he checked his phone. It was late at night, Bobby apparently letting hims sleep through dinner, and there was a message from Garth, letting Dean know he’d gotten home safe to Bess. Nothing from Cas.

Even though the memes and the emojis were Cas’s thing, not his, he poked around on his phone until he found something he thought would make Cas smile and he sent it.

Then he wrote, “I hope that made you laugh or at least smile. I’m tired. I spent over half a day on a plane including a pokey little commuter plane that I thought for sure would just fall out of the sky. And more than anything, I miss you already.”

Cas wrote back, not right away, but soon. His message appeared with only a single emoji. “I think that was a little too close to the truth to be strictly humorous. I miss you too. Group tonight was not the same without being able to look forward to sharing bad pizza with you.🥺”

“Maybe I should go back home,” Dean wrote. “It feels selfish being here.”

Cas wrote back immediately, “🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬💩 if you are anything but selfish right now, so help me, I will walk to Sioux Falls and kick you. You need this time. I miss you 😢 but you need to be where you are and I need to be where I am. Just. Make sure you keep texting me. Call me maybe sometime?”

“Yeah. Not tonight. Still too tired to do more than jab at a screen. But tomorrow maybe.”

His second and third day in Sioux Falls, he rested, didn’t do a damn thing but watch blurry TV on the old boxy set in his room and call Cas once a day to talk about nothing in particular.

The fourth day, he walked around the junk yard a little. Looked at the old Impala that would be donor parts for his Baby. It was painted an ugly gold beige color, but as Bobby promised, the body was in good shape, the chrome was still shiny even, and the color didn’t matter, according to Bobby. They’d be stripping down the paint and repainting her anyway. Then he walked back to the Quonset hut shelter where Baby rested now, looking about the same as he remembered, hurt, broken, but still with a heart that wouldn’t quit. But so crumpled, so battered. He almost wondered if they’d be better off pulling out the engine and stuff from Baby and putting it in the proposed donor car. But somehow, even with the heart transplant, that car wouldn’t be his Baby.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Cas,” Dean texted. He’d never shown Cas Baby, but he used his phone to take a picture of her as she was now, showing all her broken and crumpled parts. “So much has to be replaced. So much is broken. Bobby says she can be fixed but maybe the car is just dead. Will she even be the same car when I’m done?”

Cas must have been working at the coffee shop on the early morning shift, because it was a while before Dean got the message back, “Your body has died many times. Your cells come and go like the tides, dying, being made new🌊. The body you have now isn’t the one you were born into. Every 7 to 10 years, all your cells are completely replaced. And yet, somehow, your body is still you🤔.”

And then just “#deepthoughts”.

Okay. Right. Also, how did Cas know shit like that? Because when he went to go look it up on the computer, he found out it was true, that his cells were replaced all the time like Cas said.

That night, at dinner, Bobby had fired up the old kettle style charcoal grill and then presented Dean with a burger. There were oven fries and coleslaw and a salad just made out of sliced tomatoes. The food looked good. Really good.

Bobby had taken a big helping of the oven fries, a big helping of everything, but there was still plenty left. There was something just generous about this whole meal and this whole house, that Dean hadn’t felt anywhere in a long time. Maybe it was just the memories of coming here as a kid and being fed some of the only home cooked meals they ever had, Bobby taking care of them as if they were his own kids. There was just this sense of abundance on the table, in a way that not even meals at Sam’s house had. Meals at Sam’s house were so damn healthy. Food was functional in Sam’s house, as if Sam were trying to pack the maximum nutrition into the minimum amount of food, because he knew Dean would only eat a little of it, and if there was one thing Dean knew for sure, it was that nutrition did not taste any damn good.

“Maddie Parsons, down the road, brought the tomatoes over, grew them herself in her hothouse. I think she’s sweet on me or something, for all that it’ll do her any good,” Bobby said as he loaded up his plate.

Dean looked at Bobby, at how sturdy and strong he seemed, not soft and squishy at all, but still thick. Stout. The solid frame of a man who worked hard and ate hearty and maybe topped that off with a few too many beers. Dean found himself wanting to be that, wanting to have the appetite that went with that. He’d spend so many years denying himself when living with Michael that he didn’t even know when he was hungry or not. Even now, even though he hadn’t eaten since before noon and he was sitting in front of this amazing looking spread, knowing he should be hungry, he didn’t feel it. But he loaded up his plate, with a little more than he thought he should eat. He tried one of the tomatoes. Flavor burst on his tongue- sharp, sweet, bitingly acid. He wasn’t sure he could stand that much, but when he put a slice on his burger, it was perfect.

He finished a whole burger for the first time he could remember since he’d been a teenager. Bobby didn’t say anything, but somehow, he knew that Bobby noticed. Bobby went to the fridge, pulled out something.

“When you were a little squirt, you used to love pie,” Bobby said. “Karen baked a fine pie, but I never got the hang of it. So, you up for Shop-More’s finest?”

“I’ll give it a try,” Dean said. He had vague memories of eating pie here at Bobby’s, also a store bought one, but it had tasted better than anything he remembered. This was the same cherry pie Bobby had bought back then. A wedge was put in front of him and like the tomatoes, it tasted too bright, too acid, just too much, but there was a sweetness there that he found himself craving, or maybe just a memory of a craving, but it was enough that he shoved another bite into his mouth and another, willfully letting the soft cherries explode on his tongue and the sensation of sweetness overwhelm him. Before long, the whole slice was gone and he was looking at the pie. Bobby was already cutting him a second, smaller slice and Dean thought to refuse. Dean had never had seconds on dessert since he’d gone to Michael, even if he did allow himself dessert at all. Dean ate the second piece, maybe with a little hesitation, but every crumb was gone eventually. His belly hurt, maybe a little, but there was also this deep feeling of satisfaction, of satiation. Of completion. There was not so much as a thread of hunger in him anywhere.

Later that night, he felt guilty though. He texted Cas, complaining about it, not about so much that he had to worry about gaining weight, but that happy satisfied feeling had slipped away into the nagging, he shouldn’t, he didn’t deserve it feeling. He felt guilty, not even sure what for, because he sure as hell didn’t want to stay skinny for Michael anymore. Or any Alpha. He tried to text cautiously. Cas was kind of chunk and Dean didn’t want Cas to think for an instant that Dean thought he should be any other way. Food stuff. It was complicated. But he complained about eating two pieces of pie when maybe he shouldn’t even have had one.

“Let’s be perfectly clear,” Cas wrote back, soon, as if he’d been waiting around to hear from Dean. “You are flesh and blood. You need to be fed. You deserve to be fed. You deserve to have good food, as much as you want. Sometimes, even, you deserve to have too much food, so that you know when you’ve had enough.”

And when Dean didn’t respond, because he was still sitting with what Cas had said, Cas added, “Your Uncle Bobby sounds wonderful, getting you pie.🥰🥧. I kind of wish I were there with you. Tonight is leftovers for me.”

Then, because it wouldn’t be Cas without one, there was a meme sent to him.

In the end, Bobby did a lot of the work on the car. Dean just wasn’t strong enough, though he might have been once and he might one day be again, but for now, he let Bobby do all the heavy lifting, all the separating of body parts from the donor car. But Dean learned and listened. And fastened stuff with wrenches and sockets. A lot of it was fully tightened with an air wrench anyway, so, yeah, strength was needed, but not as much as he thought.

“If you can swing a wrench, you can fix a car,” Bobby had said. “The rest is just details. It’ll take a while, but you’ll get there.”

It didn’t seem like just swinging a wrench. Cars weren’t just engines in a metal shell, but complicated interconnecting systems of power and control, linkages and supports. It seemed impossible that he would ever understand how they all linked together and somehow, worked. Maybe that community college was right and he had to learn a lot of math before he could ever hope to learn about cars. Bobby wasn’t the most patient of teachers, but he was more patient than Dad had ever been.

“It’s amazing anyone even figured it out,” Dean texted Cas one day, talking about the internal combustion engine. “Basically, cars run on explosions.”

Cas texted back, “The universe itself is an explosion. 💥✨🪐That’s where we live, in the middle of an explosion that has been going on for billions of years and is so chaotic that some of it has found its way back into something we call order again and made some pretty amazing stuff. Like you. And me. And Jack.🐻💛”

“How is Jack?”

“Jack is amazing,” Cas wrote back. “He has discovered dinosaurs.🦖🦕❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 And the court has agreed to weekends with me. It’s technically 25% custody. It’s not the 50/50 I wanted but it is progress.💕💖💓😄🥳🤩”

“That’s great, buddy,” Dean wrote back. He wasn’t about to fall into Cas’s habit of emojis, but he added. “Really awesome. I’m proud of you.”

Progress on the Impala took a long time. After all, Bobby had a business to run, though Dean learned to help him with that too, as best he could. He wondered what Michael think if he could see the trophy Omega who once would spend whole days being groomed and polished with crescents of grim under his fingernails and dressed in one of Bobby’s old work coveralls. With a beard of varying lengths, depending how how often Dean remembered to trim it up. Helping some guy salvage a starter motor from an old junker, then writing up the ticket.

He wondered what Cas would think of him now. He put on, not a lot of weight, but some. He put on solidity. He grew stronger. It was no longer a struggle just to walk up the stairs to his small bedroom in Bobby’s house. He missed Cas, like an ache. Not like he would die without him there, but because he needed Cas to live, really, truly live.

He didn’t realize that he’d been there over a year until the day that Cas texted him a picture of himself and Jack to celebrate the fact that his divorce was final and he hadn’t gotten everything he wanted, but he’d gotten what he needed, like his kid on the weekends at least. The picture was Cas with Baby Jack, now toddler Jack, in a Halloween costume, dressed as a dinosaur, sort of. Both of them dressed in a costume. Maybe a stegosaurus based on the spines up and down his back. Definitely a homemade costume, obviously put together by Cas as best he could with cardboard and sweat shirts found at the thrift store, but Jack looked as pleased as punch. As did Cas. They were both adorable, with big, gummy smiles. It was Halloween. It was the end of October and winter would be coming soon. Time to be getting back home, he thought, as he touched the picture on the screen.

He suddenly realized it had been over two years, nearly two and a half since the day he’d come back from shopping to discover a small, single bag at the door with a key that didn’t work. Two years of getting his shit together and getting on with his life, even when he hadn’t wanted to. Two years. Just under two years since he sat in a lawyer’s office at his brother’s insistence. Just under two years since he met Cas and the man had reached down into Dean’s pit of despair and gripped him tight. Raised him from hell. Over a year since he’d signed his name on the dotted line that freed him from his darkest days. A year since he’d first wandered into Singer Salvage and learned to swing a wrench.

Was he healed yet? Would he ever, really be? Sometimes, he still had dark days, times he felt he couldn’t get out of bed. Most of those days he surprised himself by getting out of bed and getting on with the day anyway. Some days, he thought he would ever be happy again, but that wasn’t most days. He was patched together, he thought. Time to be getting home. Cas was free too, divorced from his devil of an ex.

“Final papers all signed?” Dean texted.

“All signed and settled. I am free. I mean, in some sense, I will never be fully free from Luke. We’re linked together by Jack, but I am free enough.”

“Did you get your book?” Dean asked.

“Yes, for all that it’s worth,” Cas texted. “🤨🤔. There was a recent reprinting with my name under his and a small biography of me. Royalties from the publisher for this year amounted to about a hundred and fifty, of which Luke still gets half and it’s failed to have much impact on his career so far. But apparently it has sparked some talk in academic circles about how often Alphas do that sort of thing, basically steal the work of Omegas working as assistant professors and grad students. So it might be worth it. Not to me, but to someone down the line maybe.”

“It’s the principle of the thing though.”

“Principles don’t pay💲my rent or fill my stomach. 😒😬”

Dean texted back, “That’s the pizza place downstairs. They give you anything weird lately?”

“Last night someone ordered a corn, ham and green olive pizza, then thought better of it. 🍕🌽🫒 😮. It was not one of the better combinations they make. 😝”

Dean couldn’t help but imagine Cas rolling his eyes at the free pizza but eating it anyway. He wished he was there to maybe buy the guy a burger instead. “Don’t ever change, Cas,” he texted back. “I miss you. I wish I could meet Jack. Would you let me do that?”

“Of course I would. 👍✔️😊💛,” Cas wrote back, almost immediately. “I miss you 😢☹️ too. Come back home.”

“Soon. Just have to finish up with Baby. She’s not quite done.”

Chapter Text

Before long, Dean and Bobby were standing in front of the Impala. She was an ugly patchwork of black and gold beige, but she was all taped up and sanded, cleaned. Prepped. Ready for the last step. They were going to start the paint today. Bobby had set up a portable spray booth. They had ventilators and spray guns run by a big compressor. They were going to spray the gray primer today. Then they had to wait twenty four hours and do a lot more prep work before they could do the real painting.

“So why do we have to paint her this ugly gray first?” Dean asked. “Can’t we just get to the real paint? Doesn’t seem right to ugly her up like that.”

“Paint’s like anything,” Bobby said. “You don’t build it on the right foundation and it’s going to fail. You pay attention to the foundation and everything else ought to work out just right. You’re impatient to get this done and get back to Cas.”

“And Sam,” Dean protested, but he knew in his heart that it was Cas he was going back to.

“Either way, you gotta slow your roll,” Bobby said. “No point in waiting so long to just screw this up. We’ll do it right. That means primer first.”

So they got to work. 3 days later, she was a masterwork, a thing of beauty again. Her paint glossy, black. Her chrome like a mirror. Her expression mean and dangerous. Her trunk big enough to hide a body in. It was time to take her for a test ride. It wasn’t that he hadn’t before. He’d slid behind the wheel and turned the key, opened up her throaty roar, drove her around the junk yard a little but he hadn’t had the heart to take her out on public roads at that point, not while she was still all banged up, or obviously a frankencar, built back up out of salvage. A lady didn’t want people to see her at her worst. Now, though, he was ready to show her off.

There wasn’t much to Sioux Falls. A couple of diners, couple of stores, some bars. A post office and a courthouse. The Sheriff’s office. He just drove to the gas station, fueled her up. There was part of him that wanted to head out to the highway and keep driving, drive off into the sunset. That wasn’t practical though. An Omega couldn’t just head out on a multi state road trip on his own, even one like Dean, who no longer looked so much like an Omega, who no longer smelled like much of an Omega. Besides, he was still taking a handful of pills a day just to keep his own brain from killing him and his heart from giving up. He might be one some of the meds forever.

He pulled off into the county park and drove to that small bridge over the little river. Stopped in the middle. Took out his phone. Took a selfie. That’s what they called it. A picture that captured his face, a good bit of Baby and the river and bridge behind him. He texted it to Cas who texted back quickly.

“Classy car,” Cas wrote. “Looking beautiful. 😍👏👏👏. And so is the car.”

Then, “I don’t know why there isn’t a black car emoji but there is a carousel horse. 🎠”

When Dean got back to Singer Salvage, Sam was there.

He and Bobby were standing out by the house, waiting for Dean. Dean all but threw himself out of the car and at Sam. They’d talked on the phone and they’d done the face time thing on the computer, when he and Bobby could make it work, but Dean hadn’t seen Sam in nearly a year. He buried his face in Sam’s neck, where the scent glands were most active. Yes. That was his brother. The scent of home and strength. Warmth and family and love. A little bit like old socks, because your family should never smell too good to you, but in a comfortable kind of way. It was sunlight and the shadowy woods and everything and walking into a house you knew and loved.

“What are you doing here?” Dean asked. “I thought you had to work. You couldn’t get away.”

Sam frowned, just a moment. “They don’t keep me chained to my desk. I can take some time. Sort of. I’ll have to put in some time at night when we stop. Bobby said the Impala was nearly ready and you wanted to drive her home. So I thought I’d road trip with you. It’s time to come home.”

Yes it was.

They took off from Bobby’s the next morning and sliding in behind the wheel was coming home, rolling out onto the high way, miles disappearing under his wheels.

When he got Baby back, they had found a couple of old box of tapes, cassette tapes, from when he was a kid, left in a secret compartment of the trunk. Since they were hidden, Michael couldn’t throw them away. Miraculously, they still played. Dean had started listening to them at Bobby’s and he’d listened to them then, on their cross country road trip. Zeppelin sang about ‘Now, I goin' to Rosedale, Take my rider by my side. Still barrelhouse, If it's on the riverside, yeah..’ and ‘Leaves are falling all around. It's time I was on my way..’ He’d forgotten how much he loved that music, how much it reminded him of his time before Michael. Dean hadn’t been allowed to play that genre of music in the house while he’d been mated to Michael, but he played it endlessly now. Dad loved that music, taught him how to love it. Dad hadn’t given Dean much in this life that was good, just an all consuming guilt about taking care of his brother and a self esteem level where you had climb a ladder to get to zero. But he’d given Dean the car and he’d given Dean that music and it just might be enough. The rest Dean could figure out on his own.

Five days of driving. Five nights in whatever motels had vacancies. It was good to be out on the road, but was better to be getting home.

Then they were home, driving into Sam’s subdivision, pulling up the driveway. Garth and Bess were in the driveway, waving. It was good to see them, but after a quick hug from Garth he couldn’t avoid, he turned back to his Baby.

“I’m going to go find Cas,” he said to Sam. “We’ve been talking, texting, but there’s some things, you just gotta say in person.”

“Yeah?” Sam asked, sounding hopeful for some reason.

“Yeah.”

Then he texted Cas, “I’m home. Are you free or at work?”

“At work now,” Cas texted back after a moment. “When is your brother getting back to the office? We miss him and are lost without him.”

“Cas wants to know when you’ll be back at work,” Dean said, puzzled.

“Oh, yeah. We hired Cas to do mail room and admin stuff for the firm. He just started a couple months ago,” Sam said. “Cas asked that we didn’t tell you right away. He didn’t want it to be awkward if it didn’t work out. It’s not really up to his education and ability level but it’s better than the gas station. He’s been amazing and is already talking about training to be a paralegal. Don’t worry, he’ll be off at five. In about an hour. Enough time for you to take a shower at get the road funk off of you.”

Dean sniffed at himself. He’d showered last night at the motel, somewhere in Nevada, but yeah, ten hours of driving had taken their toll. He thought about how Cas smelled the last time they’d been together in person, so long ago. He’d smelled so fresh and sweet. Not like sugary sweet, but like cut grass and meadows, like the air on a warm breezy day. Like a home that was well cleaned and well kept. Like his home. He wanted to scent like that for Cas. So, off to the shower he went.

He showered. He scrubbed. He washed his hair, recently cut shorter than it ever had been. He trimmed his beard short, but kept it, just neatened it up. He was just happy he could have one. Omegas weren’t supposed to have beards, but they weren’t supposed to do a lot of things and well, fuck being put into that nice display box again. He was done trying to be pretty. He looked at the side of his neck. The mating scar was still there and it probably always would be. He’d been marked forever, changed forever, but it was flattened, just a mark, not a knurl of tissue. Even if it was, it didn’t define him, it was just another step along the way that got him to where he was today.

He walked into his bedroom’s huge, walk in closet. When he had left, all of his clothes didn’t even take up one section of the ten sections available. At one point, during an appointment with Charlie, he’d explained how there had been all these clothes that Michael had bought him but wouldn’t even let him have. Charlie had offered to talk to Michael’s lawyers about the issue, stating that no judge would consider clothes, gifted to him, bought, even custom tailored, for him to be anything but personal property. Dean had said not to bother, he didn’t want them.

All those clothes were here now, filling up his closet, spreading to every rod and in every drawer he opened. He walked out, found Sam in the hallway.

“What’s with the clothes?” He asked.

“I came home one day and they were just here. Michael’s new Omega had them all delivered to you. I guess he didn’t want them and didn’t have room for them in the new, smaller house they had to buy. I had Garth and Bess get them all dry cleaned and hung up. In case there was anything you wanted. If you don’t, we’ll donate them or whatever.”

“No, I don’t want any of them,” Dean said. “Not ever going to dress like that again. Maybe we could sell em and donate the money to the Omega legal defense fund. They gotta be worth something. Michael spent a lot of money so he could have the perfect trophy Omega.”

He thought about Andy, at the group, who used to be the Omega of a wealthy man, who talked about how he would stealthily sell off all the designer gifts and clothes his Alpha bought him and hid the money, how he survived for a while on that hidden cash. Andy hadn’t been so lucky with his lawyers and hadn’t been able to get his mating contract thrown out.

Would Dean go back to group, now that he was home again? He wasn’t sure he needed it any more, but maybe he ought to go for a while anyway. Maybe if he didn’t need help, maybe he could help someone else now, pay it forward for a while. He’d had Sam set up large donations to the Omega Legal Defense fund and to Omega shelters and all of that. But there was a more personal need to pay it forward. That was a thought for another day though. It was Friday morning and group wouldn’t meet again until next Thursday. For now, though, he was going to get ready to meet up with Cas again and see where life took them. They’d made no promises to each other yet, but they had hinted at them.

He didn’t find anything in his closet he wanted to wear. He’d taken all his normal clothes with him to Bobby’s house and replaced some of them as he’d put back on the weight he’d lost. He would still be a little skinnier than the old clothes from the Michael days, but he looked more like himself. Healthier. He hoped some day he might get too big for all of the fancy designer clothes Michael had insisted on.

He dug out some t-shirts and a flannel from his bag, pulled them on with some jeans. Put on his boots. He looked at himself in the full length mirror on the closet door. His face, it was still a little haggard with a little sadness around the eyes that might never go away, but linger all his life. He was still on the skinny side, not quite fully healed yet, but despite that, he felt vibrant, ready to face the world. He’d come out the other side. He just hoped there was something good waiting there for him.

Sam was downstairs by then, hovering over his lap top, typing in an email to someone, as if he hadn’t worked at least some during every single day of his so called vacation.

“You ready?” He asked, standing up after he hit send. “I’ll take you.”

“I was going to drive.”

“Cas probably has his car today. He normally picks Jack up after work on Fridays,” Sam said.

“Cas has a car?”

“Yeah. You missed out on a lot,” Sam said. “I know you were texting Cas but you didn’t hear everything. He’s in a much better place than he was. But so are you.”

“He’s picking up Jack? Maybe I shouldn’t go. I haven’t met Jack yet,” Dean said, thinking how if he had a kid, he’d be protective as hell of him.

“He’ll want to see you,” Sam said. “I promise. Let’s go.”

In the end, they took Dean’s car, not Sam’s. Now that he had Baby back, he was going to drive her as often as he could. Besides, if Cas didn’t want Dean along to meet Jack, he didn’t want to be stuck at Sam’s office, twiddling his thumbs until Sam took him home. Sam was an Alpha. He could get one of those Uber things or whatever, without even a thought about his safety.

They got up to Sam’s office just past five and Cas was waiting outside already. He was still chubby, which was just fine by Dean. Maybe the ‘baby weight’ had settled in and was going to stay a while. Dean couldn’t help but think about that one time they’d slept together in Cas’s bed and how comforting it was to be snuggled up to Cas’s soft body like that. He looked just right the way he did, solid, substantial. Dean wanted to be there again, in Cas’s bed. Maybe he would be soon.

Cas no longer wore the once ever present burgundy hoodie, but a navy blue buttoned sweater thing over a pink shirt and jeans. His hair seemed to have made an acquaintance with a comb. It was now just exuberant rather than a whole hearted mess. In any case, once Dean stepped out of the car, Cas smiled, the joy of seeing Dean lighting up his eyes. He was radiant. Beautiful. They hurried to greet each other.

“It’s been too damn long,” Dean said as he found himself wrapped up in Cas’s arms, Cas’s face pressed up against his neck, sniffing, drinking in Dean’s odor.

“Your own scent. It’s back,” Cas said, pressing his nose into Dean’s neck again.

Then they were turning their faces towards each other and pressing lips together. Softly at first. Being gentle and tender with each other as if acknowledging that they were the delicate, breakable things they were, glued together at the seams, once shattered and now mended.

It was like the last tentative seams and joins fused together, making him stronger. Acknowledging that he loved Cas, feeling that Cas loved him back was helping to make him completely whole again. Not that he wasn’t whole on his own, but this love that was flooding through him, rising in his heart, was somehow solidifying him, shoring up his seams and flaws. And Cas. Well, he hoped that he could one day become the man that Cas seemed to see in him.

“Don’t ever go away that long again,” Cas said, touching Dean’s chest, just lightly laying a hand over where Dean’s heart beat, stronger and more sure than it had in years.

“I won’t,” Dean promised. “Do you have to go get your kid? You get him the whole weekend, right?”

“Yes,” Cas said, smiling. “I should go. Are you coming with? Jack is so excited to meet you.”

“He is? You’ll let me meet him for real?”

“He’s very excited about meeting my best friend,” Cas said. “He’s seen so many pictures of the Impala. I’ve shown him almost all of the photos you sent me from Sioux Falls. Especially the car. He loves the car.”

“Just best friend?”

“Best friend and so much more. If I ever marry again, it will be to the man I call my best friend. I deserve no less than that.”

Cas now had a car, like Sam said, and it was a car that bore all the marks of Sam helping Cas pick it out. It was sensible, got good gas mileage, no doubt. It was a small, bright blue Ford hatchback with a child seat in the back center. There was a stuffed animal in the backseat next to the car seat, a brown teddy bear with blue overalls and a red t-shirt.

Cas caught Deal looking and said, “Marvelous Marvin the talking bear.”

Then Cas frowned. “Or rather, Marvin the third. My ex threw out Marvin the first because apparently my scent had permeated the bear and Luke found that traumatic. So, Jack has Marvin the Second for his time with his father and Marvin the Third for his time with me.”

“The kid’s not allowed to have a scent item of yours?”

Dean was horrified. That you’d let a kid, a young one still practically a baby, just go around all week without some item that scented of his absent parent.

“I will concede Luke’s point that my scent is traumatic to him,” Cas said. “After all, I did stab him and attempt to kill him. I was not in my right mind at the time, but that doesn’t make that night less of a trauma for all concerned.”

The drove through the city, Dean following Cas, who drove like a bit of a grandma. They stopped in a neighborhood near the university, where the houses were older, smaller, but mostly still very well tended. Lots of gardens and neatly painted white picket fences around colorful bungalows and Victorian style cottages. They parked and Cas walked up to one of the Victorians, slightly bigger than the other houses, but the yard wasn’t colorful with flowers. Or really anything but cropped close green lawn. Freshly sodded, from the look of it.The house could have used a little work- a bit of paint mostly. It just kind of had the feel of a place lived in by someone who just didn’t give a damn about any of that.

Cas sighed heavily and a weighty sorrow burdened his expression as he looked at the house. That must be the house where he’d lived with Luke, where Jack had been born. The house where Luke had tried to keep him locked up.

“The garden used to be so beautiful,” Cas said. “He tore it all out when I had to leave. Too much work, he said. I had a wildflower garden. For the pollinators, you know. The bees. They’re in trouble and can use any help we can give them. A wildflower garden can make a difference to them. Of course, I can’t garden in the apartment. I miss this neighborhood. The apartment is not the neighborhood where I want to raise Jack.”

For the first time, Dean thought of wanting to live somewhere besides Sam’s house. A place of his own. No. a place of their own. Maybe he should have had Charlie fight for the house for him. He had a moment of doubt about that, then realized the massive house on Rodeo would never have felt like home enough. It would be too big, too formal. He would never be comfortable. No, maybe a house in a neighborhood like this, with the bright, cozy little bungalows and cottages, with enough lawn for a garden for the bees. Cas deserved to be among the wildflowers. He deserved to be someplace where he could garden and be happy. Not a shitty little apartment over a pizza place. Even a pizza place owned by someone kind hearted enough to feed Cas for nothing most nights.

He could do it. He could buy a house for them. He had the money. And he might not be up to it fully for a while, but he could make it into a home for them. He knew how to do that. Had been a homemaker all his adult life until his unmating. Would Cas want that with him some day?

As Cas waited at the gate, the front door burst open and a tiny ball of energy threw himself across the porch and down the steps. An Alpha followed him out, more slowly. The Alpha was handsome in the same kind of way as Michael was, with a twist to his mouth, like a sneer was a habitual expression. He was blonde with kind of close cropped spiky hair and a short beard. Wrinkles furrowed his forehead deeply and he looked hard, not a bit of softness to him. This must be Luke. The ex. He was obviously at least a decade older than Cas, maybe more and not even half as handsome as an amazing Omega like Cas deserved.

The toddler raced down the path and made it to the gate before Luke finished crossing the porch.

“Om! Om!” The kid said, poking his fingers through the slats of the gate. He was trying to climb up and over the fence.

“Jack, please wait just a moment,” Cas said, with a forced calmness. You could tell he was aching to pull the kid into his arms. Why didn’t he just open the gate for the kid. “Your father will open the gate in a moment. You know I’m not allowed onto the property.”

Luke sauntered with deliberate, even malicious slowness down the garden path, lingering on each step.

“Well, well, look at you,” he said when he was just a few feet away. “All nice and dressed up for your little office job. Must be boring though, doing nothing but getting coffee for all the jerkwad, asshole lawyers.”
“I’m an administrative assistant,” Cas said, firmly. “I do not get anyone coffee.”

“You know, the most recent dig came up with some really interesting partial manuscripts. The juiciest fragments you can imagine. Probably from Babylon originally, but found in the Jezreel Valley. Maybe you could take a look. Keep your hand in. Not let your translation skills get rusty.”

“No.”

“You don’t even want to take a look?”

“No. I don’t,” Cas said, even more firmly. “You are no longer entitled to my labor, be it intellectual, emotional or physical.”

“Ah, c’mon, no one has a knack with translating that ancient Aramaic like you. I’d credit you in the article,” Luke said. Cas did not relent, not a bit. He was angry, adamant. “Cassie, Baby, you know your brain is wasted, answering emails for those lawyers.”

“It’s called a boundary, and you’re in the middle of trampling all over it. I said no and I owe no further explanation than that,” Cas said. “I believe my time with Jack has officially begun, three minutes ago. Please open the gate and then we’ll be on our way.”

This Luke asshole made a big production about opening the gate, but then looked up, noticed Dean for the first time. He got an ugly look on his face. “Who’s this?” He demanded, hand still on the gate, Jack scrabbling, trying to push his little body through the small gap. What kind of asshole wouldn’t let a kid get to his Omega parent, that he was obviously wanting to get to?

“This is my friend, Dean. I promised Jack he could meet my friend. Now, if you’ll excuse us. I’m sure Jack is hungry and I would like to take him home and make him dinner.”

“Friend. Sure. Just a friend,” Luke said, with gross smirk on his face. “I don’t want my son around your perverted…”

“Dean is a friend. Are we going to have to revert to a professional third party to facilitate drop off again? Because I will not hesitate and the court order is that you pay for that,” Cas said, so Luke opened the gate wide enough for Jack to actually get out.

“You know, maybe you ought to ask your friend there for diet tips,” Luke said, looking Dean over head to toe in the condescending, evaluating way that Alphas did. Trying to mentally rate just how fuckable Dean was. He seemed to like what he saw and that pissed Dean off. This asshat just pissed him off in general. Luke added, “He looks good. Maybe he could help you could trim off a little of the baby weight. I mean, the baby’s over three years old. Don’t you think it’s time? I’m just thinking about your health.”

Jack ran to Cas, who ignored Luke completely. Cas picked the toddler up and said, “Say goodbye to your father, Jack.”

“Goodbye, Sir,” Jack said, voice high as a chipmunks, serious and sweet. Some kids were taught to call their Alpha parent Sir. Dean had called his dad Sir.

“Bye, Jackie boy,” Luke called. “I’ll see you Tuesday morning. Auntie Dagon is going to pick you up from preschool on Monday and watch you. I’ll be home from work after your bedtime.”

They walked away, back to Cas’s bright blue econobox. Jack insisted on walking on his own, even though Cas looked like he wanted to hold on to his baby forever and never let him go.

“Aunt Dagon’s mean,” Jack whispered. “Won’t play with me.”

Cas said, “I know you would rather play with someone but you can read your books quietly or watch that show about the Ponies you like. And for now, once we’ve had dinner, I will play with you as much as you like. Jack, this is my friend, Dean.”

Jack, like kids were, was suddenly shy, hiding himself behind Cas’s legs as they walked, but he peeked out and waved and said, “Hi, Mr. Dean.”

“Hey, Jack,” Dean said. “You can just call me Dean.”

He followed Cas back into the city, to the small, two bedroom apartment over the pizza place. It seemed cosier, more full of life. It wasn’t messy, but there were toys in a couple of baskets on the floor and the door to the second bedroom was open. In Jack’s room, there was a toddler sized bed, low down on the floor and more toys. Jack ran inside, dragging his Marvin bear on the floor behind him. Once inside, he pulled more blankets out of a big basket and dragged them exactingly into a rough circle on the toddler size bed, moving them around here and there until he was satisfied and settled in with his Marvin and a final blanket over him.

“I’m going to make dinner. It’ll be ready in half an hour. I’ll give you a five minute and a two minute alert, okay?”

Jack just nodded.

“Is he?” Dean asked, following Cas into the small and outdated, but clean kitchen. Cas got out a lot of vegetables and Dean feared that it was going to be a healthy dinner. He almost offered to pay for pizza from downstairs. Maybe they were mostly for the mini pigs, hopefully.

“He presented Omega from birth, like me, yes,” Cas said. “He’s nesting.”

“It’s good you let him,” Dean said. “I was born unpresented and I think Dad thought maybe if he stopped me from acting like an Omega, he could stop be from becoming an Omega.”

The thing was, even if his body had been born as neither one clear thing or another, it had been there all along. In some ways, biology couldn’t be denied, no matter what John Winchester thought. That was one of the things he’d worked on with Pam during their face time sessions. He’d talked about it with Cas some too. There had probably been a lot of selfish reasons John had denied him and Dean would never know for sure the exact causes.

“I could never deny him that. I used to think I was doing something wrong, when his first instinct when he gets home is to nest like that. Then I realized he was doing it because he felt safe here, with me. This is his home, so his nest is here. I can’t get a clear answer from Jack, but I get the feeling that Luke does everything he can to stop Jack from nesting. I know he did it with me, especially when I needed it the most. And, no, the judge didn’t seem to think that was abusive. But the judge was an Alpha too.”

Dean thought about how Michael would too, the times his nest was ripped apart, even thrown out. Fuck yeah that was abusive behavior.

“I think they want to keep us off balance. Want us to depend on them for safety and comfort and not find it in ourselves,” Dean said.

“They get jealous of anything that doesn’t center them in our lives,” Cas said. “Even after they’ve de-centered us. You see how angry Luke is that I wouldn’t drop everything to work on his project.”

“I’m not going to cause any problems for you, am I? Hanging around you when you’ve got Jack,” Dean asked, thinking of how ugly Luke had acted. Dean had just barely wrapped his head around the idea of an Omega being with another Omega as being okay. He knew that more and more people were okay with that too these days, but some weren’t and sometimes, the people that weren’t okay with it had power over you.

“No, not at all,” Cas said. “Luke’s anger at me has nothing to do with you. He’d be horrible to you if you were another Alpha or anyone at all. It’s because he can’t control me anymore. I don’t think he ever reckoned that breaking our bond would go both ways. That freeing himself from me means that I was freed from him.”

“What’s with the whole you can’t open the gate thing?”

“Luke still has a restraining order against me,” Cas said, shaking his head. “I’m not allowed to be within so many feet of the house. Outside the gate is fine, even just touching it is not. It’s fine. I did stab him after all. He is allowed to have his boundaries, even if he puts them up just to make my life difficult. As you can see, he doesn’t fear me and he’s more of a danger to me than I have ever been to him. I just wish he wouldn’t have that woman babysit, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“That Dagon person?” Dean asked. “She’s not hurting Jack, is she?”

“Not physically, certainly. I gather she just makes Jack be quiet while she works,” Cas said. “She’s not even a relation though. She’s a grad student who seems to want to be more. Maybe is more. I don’t care about that. She’s more than welcome to him. I just wish he wouldn’t make her into some kind of pseudo stepmother.

“I have no idea what he does on Monday nights, but if he can’t care for Jack himself, why shouldn’t I? It starts to feel more like Luke will do anything to deny me time, not that he wants more time with Jack for his own sake.”

“He’s an ass,” Dean said, softly, mindful of little ears not far away.

“You are not wrong,” Cas said.

“I’m sorry you have to co-parent with Satan.”

Then there was the sound of little feet and Jack was right there, Marvin dragged along with him. “Om? Can I show Mr. Dean the piggies?”

Cas had just finished up chopping up the broccoli, kale and other leafy green things. There were a few sticks of red pepper and carrots sliced up too. He scooped this all into a small bowl and handed it to Jack. “Maybe Dean would like to help you feed them their veggies?”

So Dean found himself dragged into Cas’s bedroom. The Guinea pig enclosure seemed to have gotten even more elaborate with a second level that had a ramp and another tunnel thing. There were three of them now, a dark brown smooth coated one having been added to the little herd. The pigs started wheeking like crazy when the kid walked in. Jack solemnly said, “The piggies are very delicate and it’s easy to hurt them, so we don’t pick them up. Only Om can pick them up.”

It was so easy to hear Cas echoed in that high voice that Dean almost ached and yet, there was a warm feeling there growing in his chest. He couldn’t help but thinking about how Emma, if she’d survived, would be a little older than Jack, but still a good age for a playmate for Jack. He supervised as Jack placed the food in the enclosure with deliberation, explaining how the piggies would only eat vegetables and the hay. When the kale, lettuce and carrot feast was set upon by the pigs, Jack took the bag of hay from its basket and started adding wispy handfuls to the mini hay rack in the enclosure.

“That’s Ammon’ Joy, ‘n that one is Mounds,” Jack said. “And this is Kit Kat.”

“I didn’t get to meet Kit Kat yet,” Dean said. “He’s cute.”

“Maybe Om will let us pet them after dinner,” Jack said, finally, when the piggies were taken care of. He sounded wistful and looked at the little balls of fluff having their feast of leaves, making that happy wheek, wheek, wheek sound.

“He just might, Kiddo. Especially if we ask nice,” Dean agreed. He wanted to pick one up and let Jack pet it, but he was afraid himself of hurting the little dudes. Besides, they weren’t his pets. Jack and he satisfied themselves with watching the romaine, kale and red pepper chunks disappear.

The evening went so fast. Dinner, thankfully, hadn’t been the salad Dean had been anticipating, but grilled cheese and tomato soup, with sliced, raw red peppers on the side. Not exactly a gourmet feast, but serviceable, comforting. Easy for Jack to eat. For Dean too. The grilled cheese was a little darker than Dean liked, close to burned, but crunchy and good, the cheese gooey and melty. The soup was just from a can with milk added, but that was the best kind if you asked Dean. Just like his mom used to make.

After a while, Cas just stopped eating to look at Dean with a smile on his face. “It’s good to see you eat. You put on a little weight even.”

“So did you and it looks good on you,” Dean said. Not much, but now that Cas had taken off the cardigan jacket thing, it was clear he was definitely a little rounder than he’d been before.

“I got back in the habit of eating regular, non-pizza meals, now that I can afford it,” Cas said.

After dinner, there was clean up. There was time for Cas to supervise a brief time with the piggies on laps. There was an elaborate make believe session where Marvin rescued another smaller bear from Dean and Cas, who were supposed to be dragons or something. At the end of the night, just before bedtime, Jack asked to go for a ride in the Impala.

“Sorry, no can do, Kiddo,” Dean said. “I don’t have a kid seat in the back. Gotta keep you safe.”

Of course, they never had car seats in the back of the Impala back when he and Sam were little kids. It had been the mid eighties and people were just starting to use those things regularly. There hadn’t been laws about it yet. He remembered holding Sam on his lap in the back seat of the Impala until Sam could sit up on his own. Even after that, Dad never made them use seat belts. They’d crawl all over the back, playing with the army men or legos, until Dad would shout at them to be quiet or sit still. He ought to look and see if something could be retrofitted into the back seat for Jack.

“Awww,” Jack started in, but Cas swooped in.

“How about I read you that new book we bought last weekend,” Cas said, pulling a children’s book from the small shelf of them. It wasn’t the sort of thing Dean expected, in all fall colors and black. ‘How to Make Friends with a Ghost.’

“It looks like a good book,” Cas added, encouragingly.

“Want Mr. Dean to read it,” Jack chimed in.

Dean’s heart twinged and panged in his chest. He’d never gotten a chance to read any books to his Emma. She’d be a good age for it by now if she’d made it. But maybe if she was out there, somehow, she’d know. He could read it for her now too.

Before he knew it, all three of them were snuggled on the sofa, the same hideous plaid thing that he’d fallen asleep with Cas on once, listening to music. Jack was changed into pajamas, all rolled up in his favorite blanket, with Marvin at his side. This moment was something that Dean had once wanted so much, reading to his kid. He wondered if he would ever have even gotten it with Emma if she’d survived. Even at three, four months in, Michael had been talking about nannies and how long it would take until Dean fit back into pre-pregnancy clothes. He’d probably would have had to surrender his precious kid to a professional while he went out with Michael. He pictured how Michael probably would sneer at this small, but comfortable apartment with its second hand furniture and scent of pizza coming from below. Never mind how Dean felt comfortable and warm more here than he did any place other than Bobby’s house.

He only had to swallow one lump down his throat before he could begin, his voice sounding rough and harsh to his own ears, “If you’ve ever been frightened by a ghost, becoming friends with one might seem awfully scary but I assure you, ghosts are sweet creatures who need friends too and who better to befriend them than you…”

Jack was crashed out before long, only about ten pages into the short book. He was limp and boneless when fast sleep. Cas carried the kid gingerly to his bedroom, as if afraid of waking him up, but Jack seemed to give himself over to sleep fully and deeply, as eagerly as he did anything else. Cas tucked his kid into the nest on his bed and closed the door mostly.

They were alone together.

“So now what?” Dean asked.

“What do you want to do?” Cas said. “I have to admit that I’m tired from a long week and Jack will wake early.”

“Maybe I oughta go back to Sam’s,” Dean said. “Let you get to sleep. I don’t know if I’m ready to dive in headfirst to sleep overs.”

He wanted to stay. He ached to have all of this forever- Cas, the little family, the comfortable home, even the little pets. He didn’t think he was ready yet. They weren’t ready. A year at Bobby’s house had provided some space and time and clarity, but he wasn’t ready to get in neck deep yet. Cas cocked his head to the side and squinted slightly at Dean, then smiled slightly. Cas was beautiful, Dean thought. He’d always thought that, but now Cas glowed, even though the normal working parent exhaustion. He’d come through the other side. He was not haggard. He had found peace, serenity. Happiness. Dean hoped some day he could be part of that.

“I suppose we haven’t defined what we will be to each other yet,” Cas said. “There is no hurry. We can date. Or not. I would want you to get to know Jack slowly before we would become anything permanent to each other.”

“Yeah, of course,” Dean said. If the kid was his, he’d fight hard to keep him safe, do anything to protect him.

“So, kiss me goodnight then?” Cas asked, opening his arms. “Jack and I will be going to the farmer’s market at Palomino Park. Perhaps you might run into us there?”

Dean remembered an outing, during his earlier days of recovery, when Sam thought he could be brought back to life by being thrust into it. He’d dragged Dean to a farmer’s market in search of greens, fruits for his smoothies. It had been more than Dean could handle at the time, the crowd a cacophony, the walk from parking space to the entrance about all Dean could do at the time. It had been hot, breezy, but the kind of breeze that didn’t bring cool, just more heat. He’d all but collapsed that time. Sam had found him a bench in the shade where he could rest and bide his time while Sam made impatient forays into shopping the booths. But Dean was in a better place now. He thought he might give it a try again.

“Yeah, it’s a date,” he agreed and stepped forward into Cas’s arms. They embraced and kissed each other tenderly again, like two mended, once broken people they were, hesitant but wanting. Aching. Cas was such a solid, reassuring body, so soft and warm. He didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to go home to the big memory foam bed that would be his alone. He wanted to wedge himself into Cas’s small bed again, with the sounds of the guinea pigs chewing, moving, to reassure him in the middle of the night. He wanted to see if what he’d read about on-line, about what two Omegas could do with each other was something that could translate into two flesh and blood bodies.

They held each other close for a long time, sharing scent and body heat and Cas was the first to admit it. “I don’t want you to go home,” he said. “Or rather, I don’t want you to leave my home, because it feels like your home should be here with Jack and I. I don’t want to be sensible. I know it’s not the right way.”

“Yeah, well, there’s the right way, the wrong way and the Winchester way,” Dean said.

“The name change went through?”

“Yeah, I’m Dean Winchester again. I should go now or I never will.”

They parted reluctantly, even knowing they would see each other the next day.

Chapter Text

Dean and Cas had been dating for over six months and hadn’t yet moved on to sleepovers, hadn’t done the full on intercourse sex. Yes, there’d been heated make out sessions that left him yearning and aching, and long, lingering kisses goodnight after dates. But no sex. No naked times. Not even hands sneaking up shirts. Well, maybe a little of that, but only to feel the warm supple skin of Cas’s back, not the front part.

Even so, it had been the best six months of his life. Not just because he and Cas were dating, though that was the best part. Dean was back to school. Not to be an auto mechanic, but to figure out what he actually wanted to do with his life, what his peace and happy ever after would be. Other than ‘with Cas’ of course. He was glad he’d learned to fix his Baby and done it with Bobby’s help, but he thought maybe his life could amount to more than that. Maybe he could learn to really help people, that would be his peace and happiness. Not just contributing to the ‘right’ charities by going to the right galas and fundraisers like he had with Michael, but really, truly help people. He’d already had the lawyers set up the charitable trust and put a lot of the money he gotten from Michael into it. He’d kept enough so he could always have what he needed and a lot of what he wanted, but what he’d gotten in the settlement far, far outstripped that. Of course, one of the things he’d wanted was to help Cas win more of Jack’s custody, so he’d set aside a big sum in hopes of someday Cas being willing to accept that help. Not that he hadn’t been trying to get Cas to take the help before. He had, but Cas wouldn’t take it.

Something might happen this week, a new step in his relationship with Cas. Sam had all but shoved Cas out the door of his firm, saying that Cas had earned vacations days and he had to take them. Sam had even taken temporary custody of Almond Joy, Mounds and Kit Kat, promising to take the best of care of them. They shared more or less the same diet, so Sam and the piggies would get along fine. So, while Satan had Jack for the week, Dean and Cas were going up to the little vacation house up the coast.

He’d missed the place, hadn’t been up in years. It had been a mating gift, from Michael’s family to them. They’d spent their honeymoon there and a few other vacations when the mating was still new and sweet to them both. Michael had never wanted to go there as the years moved on, because the small town it was near was not a popular spot and because the house was small and ‘pokey’. Michael had given it up as part of their settlement without even a token protest. The house, just a little cabin really, was on the water, but in the mountains, not the fancy resort areas Michael had liked. He had it under professional management, one of those vacation rental things. He’d donated the profits to the Omega Legal Defense Fund. It was the least he could do. It’d been a pretty popular rental, but not so popular he couldn’t have the rental agency set this week aside for him and Cas.

First they had to drop off Jack though.

Which was not going as smoothly as you could hope. Jack seemed to sense that something was different this week, even though Dean had joined Cas for preschool drop off more than once and though they hadn’t discussed the getaway in Jack’s presence. At the moment, Dean watched to the side as Cas tried to dissuade Jack from bringing Marvin the fifth along with him to preschool.

Marvin the third had been disposed of by Satan when Jack had snuck him along after the weekend. Marvin the fourth disappeared when Jack brought him to his father’s house after meltdown so severe that Cas had had no choice but to let him bring the bear along, hoping Satan might relent out of love for Jack. It really, truly seemed like Satan’s hatred of Cas exceeded his love for Jack. Nothing had yet persuaded the judge into fifty-fifty custody. Alphas always complained that the courts were biased in favor of Omegas, but when Alphas fought for custody, they won, more often than not. It was a small, bitter consolation, but seeing what Cas went through with Luke. At least Dean could be well and truly done with Michael and never have to have anything to do with him again.

Finally, Marvin the fifth made his way to the back seat of the Impala, carefully locked into the small child’s seat that now sat in the middle of the back seat. That seat wasn’t used that often, but Dean liked knowing it was there, that he could transport his boyfriend’s kid around if needed. Then Cas escorted Jack into the building. Came back a moment later, looking almost defeated.

“It makes me feel like the worst parent in the world to make him leave that bear behind,” Castiel said as they each took their place in the Impala, Dean at the driver’s wheel, Cas at shotgun. “Especially when he tells me that Marvin the second doesn’t smell right. But it isn’t the expense of buying another. It’s just I want to spare him the hurt when his father throws away yet another one. It’s like Luke doesn’t understand that he’s hurting Jack far, far more than it hurts me. Or maybe that he doesn’t care.”

“Yeah, well, fifteen, sixteen years from now, your asshole ex is going to be sitting around, wondering why his son won’t talk to him,” Dean said, putting the car into gear, pulling them out into traffic. But he regretted those words, knowing full well that unless major changes happened, to the world, or to the custody arrangement, in fifteen or sixteen years, Satan could be selling Jack into a disastrous mating. He tried not to think too hard about that kind of future because it hurt too much. He loved that kid like Jack was his own.

Instead, Dean asked, “What tunes should we put on?”

When it was Sam in the passenger seat, Dean picked the music and Sam shut his cakehole, but it was Cas, so that was different. Even so, Dean was so happy when Cas said, “Perhaps we could listen to that mix tape you gifted me?”

Cas pulled out, “Dean’s top 13 Zepp traxx.” From his hoodie pocket, as if he’d put it there earlier on purpose. When he’d decided to make it, Dean hadn’t quite realized just how much the world had moved on from cassette tapes. After all, why bother with delicate roles of fragile magnetic tape encased in bulky plastic when your phone could store more than twenty shoe boxes worth of music cassettes and stream in nearly anything else in the world over invisible data signals. There was something about a cassette though. It was real and honest. When Dean had last been free, before Dad died, you made a cassette mix tape for someone you liked like that. So Dean had bought an old dual cassette deck and a pack of new old stock cassettes and made Cas a mix tape as a gift.

The dulcet tones of the music his dad had taught him to love rolled over them as they drove north through the mountains for hours. Dean worried a little. Two Omegas in a car on the road, no Alpha, but he’d taken this trip with Garth and Bess and their kid several times when getting the cabin set up for the rental. He knew he could make it there on less than a tank, even with a guzzler like his Baby, so they didn’t need to stop at any gas stations. Once they got to the small town that the cabin was near, they’d be safe enough. People in town were friendly and the cabin itself had a good security system.

It was always green around the cabin, with the woods being mostly evergreen, but it was spring, so it was extra lush, extra beautiful. The air was so damp, so new, it was like being punched in the nose with freshness or something. The cabin had been painted white recently, everything all nice and taken care of, Dean even had a garden planted in the fall, paid someone to take care of it, so that things were sprouting up all over the place, yellow, white purple flowers everywhere. Dean wasn’t much of a gardener, but he thought there might a lot of daffodils everywhere.

When they got out, Cas stared at everything, a smile stretching his face and his eyes soft and happy. Just like that heart eyes emoji Cas liked to use in his texts these days.

😍

Yeah. That one.

“It’s beautiful,” Cas said. “This is yours? All yours?”

“Yeah. Michael didn’t want it. Let’s go in,” Dean said.

After he’d punched his code into the newly installed security system and texted Sam that they’d arrived safely, no need to worry, they settled in. Put groceries in the fridge. Made lunch. Settled in. At first when planning the vacation, Dean had worried about what they would do. Vacations with Michael had always been filled with plans- people to meet, dinners to go to, resort activities of the right kind. There wasn’t any of that kind of stuff at the little cabin. Cas had reassured Dean that they didn’t need to plan anything, that they could just be together and he would be happy. Dean shouldn’t have worried. He read and Cas read and they just hung out on the bed together, shoulder to shoulder. Then they walked out and around the cabin, looking at all the daffodils.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Cas started to quote. One of Dean’s classes had them read that poem about all the daffodils and he’d complained to Cas about how cheesy and terrible it was.

“Nah, not lonely any more,” Dean said, and he turned to Cas and kissed him.

It started like all their kisses started, soft, tender and tentative, but lately, something had been welling up in Dean, something like some natural artisan spring flooding up to the surface with force, some deep waters rising in him. He wanted.

He’d never wanted when he was with Michael. He was wanted. He acquiesced, often with pleasure, but sex was something that Michael had always done to Dean and taken from Dean and Dean had been there to be the passive partner. To lie down underneath Michael and be pleasured or not as it pleased Michael.

“Should we go in?” Cas asked as they broke for breath.

“Yeah,” Dean answered, but then his real answer was to grab Cas’s hand and pull him back to the cabin, to pull the door closed behind them and set the security system so that nothing could disturb them, so they could feel safe. Dean didn’t stop until he’d dragged them to the cozy little bedroom. There was a bed, with one of those old Art Deco style walnut veneer frame. There was a shelf over the bed with some books. A couple of night stands with lamps that would glow warm yellow at night, lighting up the floral wallpaper that the cabin had come with and he’d liked too much to change. Not much else. It was a small room, half the size of the room he had at Sam’s house. Smaller than the walk in closet he’d been allocated in the big house on Rodeo. It seemed just right. He’d bought one of those old fashioned chenille bedspreads for the bed and he pulled that down now, unmaking the bed.

Dean wanted. So did Cas, because Cas kissed him again, not at all delicately now, but demanding, fierce. Dean’s cock was so hard and Cas’s was too and they made out standing in front of the bed, thrusting against each other, until the sensation was too much for Dean and he gently pushed Cas’s soft, lush body away. Just far enough away that they weren’t touching, but still close enough he could feel Cas’s breath on his face.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to go further now,” Cas said, brushing his fingers along Dean’s cheek, just barely touching.

“I do. I really, really do,” Dean said. “Can’t you feel that?”

He stepped a little closer so their cocks were touching through fabric again and Cas breathed, gasping just a little, almost a groan.

“Just, when you put it in me, be gentle with me, because it still hurts sometimes down there,” Dean said.

He’d been experimenting alone, trying to see what sex and pleasure might feel like when you removed an Alpha and their knot and addicting semen from the equation. He’d liked playing with his cock, but Michael had never liked to touch him there and didn’t like when Dean did either, so it was hard to get over the shame and aversion. He hadn’t yet managed to get to the point where he could make himself come that way. But when he’d tried to pleasure himself with a knot toy, it had just plain hurt, which hadn’t made sense to him, because the one he was trying was way smaller than Michael. The Omega specialist he saw said that it wasn’t uncommon in Omegas with bond trauma in their past, but hadn’t offered Dean any kind of solution.

Cas’s eyes got so soft, so concerned and he said, “Dean, sweetheart, we don’t have to put anything inside you at all ever, unless you want. We could just touch with hands or mouths or you could make love to me.”

Dean wasn’t sure why he’d assumed he would be the one getting done, that Cas would top him, but he had. “Oh,” he said, reaching for Cas’s shirt, to unbutton it, tug it off. “I. Yeah. I’d like that. You’re so gorgeous, Cas.”

“I don’t have the best body, but it sure does keep my internal organs in place,” Cas joked as he helped Dean unbutton the shirt.

“Cas, you’re gorgeous. Period,” Dean said as he slipped another button open on the white shirt Cas was wearing.

Dean hadn’t yet seen Cas naked and he was glad he was getting to for the first time in the daylight, sun streaming in through the sheers on the window, still bright, still warm, the bright blue of the sky just a little fuzzed by the fabric. Cas was as beautiful Dean thought he would be, his skin pale, a little rosy. Some dark hairs grew on his chest. So did tiny breasts.

“I never really had a chance to nurse Jack,” Cas said. “So my breasts didn’t grow as much as they might have.”

Cas continued to undress, until he stood naked and unashamed in front of Dean. He was plush, round. His skin was so smooth, except on his belly. A sideways scar marred his lower belly, puckered and uneven, raised and white, paler than the rest of his skin. There could be only one thing that kind of scar was from. Cas hadn’t mentioned that Jack had been born by c-section, but that was undoubtedly a c-section scar. He noticed where Dean was looking. He reached out for Dean’s hand, pulled it close in Dean was touching the scarred part of Cas’s belly.

“I’m not ashamed of that. Not at all. There was pretty bad cephalopelvic disproportion. Jack’s head was just way too big for him to be born naturally. That scar means we both lived.”

The rest of Cas’s belly showed signs of the past pregnancy too- the stretch marks, the loose skin, the general softness and fat swell of it. Something about it was so real and wonderful. Cas’s body told the story of how someone as amazing as little Jack was brought into the world.

And it made the current custody arrangement seem even more unfair somehow. Why should that asshole have anything to do with Jack? His part in making the kid was coming, making a tablespoon of goo and leaving it inside Cas, which he would have done for fun anyway. He’d been actively trying not to have a kid. Cas was the one that had born Jack, carried him inside for nine months. Resisted all the fury and will an Alpha could bring to bear on an Omega without actual physical violence when Luke demanded Cas have an abortion. Cas had made Jack almost entirely by himself and his body bore the cost of it. Cas’s body was not pretty, but it was so beautiful that Dean felt overwhelmed.

Dean was speechless at the weight of it all and more than anything, surprised how this all made his desire for Cas more, not less. Cas was silent too, though maybe looking a little worried now and Dean realized he had to say something, so that Cas didn’t think Dean was rethinking things, that Dean didn’t want him.

“You’re amazing, Cas,” Dean said. “I just don’t know how. What to do.”

“It’s okay. There aren’t any rules,” Cas said. “Just lie down with me and be with me. We can see where that takes us. Maybe we start with kissing, because I know you like kissing me.”

So they did.

Dean shed his own clothes, quickly, and slid under the covers. His own body was still slight, still bore the signs of his struggle for life. He’d gained some weight, but didn’t yet weigh as much as what Michael had considered to be Dean’s ‘ideal’ weight. It sucked, because even though he worked on it, food was not yet a pleasure nor did he always understand when his body was telling him he was hungry. He knew, intellectually, that he deserved to be nourished with food that tasted good, to eat until he was full, but there was always that impulse, to stop after the point of ‘just enough’ and to ignore the hunger.

Cas didn’t say anything, just slid in next to him, so their bodies were naked and touching for the first time. He touched Dean’s cheeks, chin, feeling the beard that grew there still, well-trimmed these days. Then their lips were touching and Dean didn’t care any longer about anything else. They shifted a little and Dean felt the welcome weight of Cas settle on him, felt Cas’s small but very, very hard cock against his thigh. He pulled Cas closer, kissing him again and again because Dean while Dean had had many kisses in his life, none of them were like this and this was what he needed. Slowly, doubt was beginning to take flight and be replaced with want and heat building in his gut. And certainty in his mind, that this was the one person he wanted to share his brief, uncertain life with. His one wild and precious life, that he had nearly lost, but found again with Cas’s help.

He slid his hand between them, brushed it lightly close to Cas’s cock, not yet touching it. He knew Cas wanted this but he had to be completely sure it was what Cas wanted. Cas had been forced into so much in his life, had so much taken from him, that Dean couldn’t have lived with himself if he took even a crumb more than was given. Dean asked, “Can I touch you there?”

“God, yes,” Cas murmured. He’d slid down a little and now his lips were touching Dean’s cheek, chin, then neck, nose on a spot just above the mating scar, lips on Dean’s neck, drinking in the scent of Dean, but not touching the scar. A similar one, not as big or horrible, marked Cas’s neck too. Cas worked his way back up, nuzzling Dean’s jawline, and he asked, “Can I touch you as well?”

Somehow, it just worked, their hands between each other, rubbing and touching gently. Cas took care of Dean, touching like no one had ever touched Dean before and it sent Dean flying.

It wasn’t like Dean had never had an orgasm before. Michael had been skilled at playing Dean’s body, like it was some kind of game to bring Dean off. It now seemed like it was something he had done for his own pleasure, getting off on getting Dean off.

Dean had never had an orgasm like that before though. Where they looked at each in the eye. Where he laughed just the moment before because the joy welling up inside him couldn’t be contained another moment, but then their hips were rocking together and it was like he was riding on a great wave out on the ocean, then falling. He came like he never had before, like it was his whole body and mind compressing to a single minute spot then exploding. When he became stuck in time again, clinging to the singularity that was Cas, panting, it was like everything in the world had changed yet again, like some great shift had happened.

“Oh. Wow,” Cas said, with a chuckle, as if he could feel it too.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “I. That was amazing.”

They kissed a while longer, snuggling, pressed close, as if they might go again. They didn’t. They drifted off and slept away the golden afternoon, waking only as the sky faded to purple. They made a simple dinned together and after eating, they went outside again. They made a fire in the fire pit that Dean had had built and they sat next to it, wrapped up against the cold night air in the same blanket, watching the flames crackle and spark. Dean had never been happy like this. He thought about something Cas had said to him the first time they met, that he was a stranger to his own heart, but that someday, he’d find his way back. That thing would change and so would he. He had found his way. He was marked up and not the same man he’d been, but he was not a stranger to himself any longer. He’d found his home in Cas and he hoped Cas had found his home with Dean.

“By the way, did I tell you? I’m finally moving out of Sam’s place,” Dean said. “It’s time. I bought a house. I hope maybe, you could start staying with me? Move in? It’s much closer to Jack and to your work. There’s a nice little yard. You could make a garden. I know I should have let you help me pick it out, but I wanted a chance once to pick out a place only on my own. If we get further, maybe want to get married one day, we’ll buy a place together.”

“Is there room for Jack to have his own room?” was all Cas asked.

“There’s an awesome room for him to have,” Dean said, then started explaining about the room under the eaves he thought Jack might like, how it looked out over the back garden, with a little window seat built right into the dormer and it had built in bookcases and everything. Cas didn’t get excited, at least not exuberantly so. He didn’t jump up or hug Dean or anything like that, but he snuggled in deeper into Dean’s side and listened raptly as Dean talked about the craftsman style bungalow he’d bought, how beautiful it was.

“Anyway, I hope maybe you’ll make it your home too,” Dean said. “You and me and Jack. Something like a little family.”

“Not like a family,” Cas said. “A family.”

If Dean were given to dopey pronouncements like that narrator of the Omega in the Attic book, he might have said, “Reader, I married him.” But he wasn’t. He was just content to know that maybe, someday, that was on the table and that he’d found, not just something good waiting for him on the other side, but something that was the best. Not just an after, but a happy ever after.

END