The petting was nice as rhetorical questions came his way. If it weren’t for being someone he loved and valued, be might’ve felt guilty over working himself to the bone and then some. But love was a powerful thing—a pair of comforting arms and strong, yet true, words. Julian nodded for the obvious that, yes, he was grown and his skills had saved more lives than lost them. Treatment plans in his oncology field, too, saved many that might’ve taken to a terminal state.
Julian swayed his head, pressing it gently into his thumb and what fingers curled behind his ear. He rubbed Castiel’s chest, trying to bring a trickle of warm, spring green to dance across the skin. The last time he indulged in his hobbies or discovered a new one? Probably back in Darrington, during his month-long break from work.
He decided to answer any, rhetorical or no. “Not since Darrington. I—just bury myself in work. It’s almost easier that way, than to take time out of my day and get into my hobbies. I get a little anxious that, with free time, I could be doing more for my patients.” A doctor that needed to practice what he preached. Julian sucked in a breath with knit eyebrows, “I keep telling patients that doing hobbies and taking breaks from their work is important: why shouldn’t I do the same?” Because it was hard, leaving anxiety to fester and do worse. Hard didn’t mean impossible; only, for him, more work. Wasn’t it worth it?
“Why indeed? They are human, aschaobza,” Castiel said, switching to the Enochian term for demigod, subconsciously – ah-es-kah-ah-oh-bah-zod-ah – as he left his eyes closed and went back to working his hand through Julian’s hair, palm broad and sliding against that sandy hair while his fingers dipped into it. “You can’t hold the reapers at bay forever, no matter how hard you work. You can’t save everyone, no matter how much you burn yourself up. And it will be a very– I suppose sad existence, if you don’t figure out how to balance it.”
Cas didn’t honestly have much room to talk; like Julian, he tended to define his entire existence on what he was able to do. He didn’t even begin to understand the concept of being worthy of happiness or pleasure just because he was living thing. But he didn’t tend to really measure himself – an angel, a seraph, a celestial – anything on the same level as he did the terrestrials. And from his position, Julian’s whole life just seemed designed to dishearten the demigod; he didn’t explore his Olympian heritage, he chased the ghost of the woman he couldn’t save, or the approval of a family who seemed to not realize what a treasure he was.
“There is only so much work has a right to ask of you,” he concluded, pressing another kiss to Julian’s brow, settling down more. Castiel was drowsy, some; he had been living ‘rough’ for about four days now, and while that was not bad, sleeping on bare ground and in hay lofts was nothing as good as a bed. “Only so much you can do, when helping mortals. You have been good, you don’t need to keep proving it.”