Chapter 7 of my Wincestiel fic The Rhyme Between Lost and Most is up today, and the lovely @pumpcidraws did some gorgeous Castiel art for it! I am obsessed with the details in this one, his hair, the clothing folds, just all of it. Everything in this chapter is pretty spoiler-y, but I think this excerpt is just vague enough to make you go 👀🤔
“Well, I’ll take Fear and Loathing over you throwing up blood any day. As long as it’s not bat country, right?” Dean says, and while he’s trying to keep it light, his forehead is wrinkled in worry.
“No bat country. It’s niiiiice,” Sam says, laughing like he’s stoned out of his mind.
“It must be the grace,” Cas says, and his voice sounds a little echoey, further away than it actually is. “If humans ingest it, it can be… psychoactive. Me using the power generated from it to heal Sam is quite a bit different than him directly taking grace into his blood. The pure energy of it can be overwhelming.”
“I love you, Cas. I don’t know why I haven’t said it before. I do though. You know that, right? We should tell our friends we love them all the time,” Sam says, turning his head in Cas’s direction. He wants to reach for Cas’s hand, but both of his arms are hooked up to cannulas. Even in his drugged state, he knows better than to move too much.
“Thank you, Sam. It’s… really lovely to hear that,” Cas says, and when his cheeks go pink, Sam wants to kiss him.
God, they should all kiss. All the time. Lie in a puddle of threaded limbs in bed and kiss and touch and—
“Dean loves you too, you know. He’s just kind of a dick about it. When he yells at you, it’s because he cares enough to do it. I know that sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but you have to remember what our dad was like,” Sam says, and the resulting uncomfortable eye contact between Dean and Cas lets Sam’s intoxicated brain know he needs to shut up.
The room gets quiet for a while, the next dose administered.
“Time to drink a little something, Sammy. Don’t want you passing out.” Dean tilts a cup of orange juice to Sam’s mouth, and Sam takes a few swallows.
The cold, sugary-fresh bite of it is so good. It reminds Sam of that hunt they went on in Florida when he was ten years old.
“Dean, do you remember that time in Florida? When we snuck onto the orange grove and stole all those oranges, as many as we could carry? The lady at the front desk gave you one of those old school plastic juicers shaped like a lemon, and you kept making us fresh squeezed juice. By the time dad got back, the whole motel room was sticky. The pulp, the juice, it kept flying everywhere,” Sam says, and he doesn’t remember feeling desire back then, not like he would only a couple of years later, but right now, the memory is clearer than it’s ever been. It’s like he’s standing on one side of a glass partition and looking in, watching the whole thing unfold from a new perspective, no longer hindered by the blind spot of being in a body, eyes unable to see his own part in it.
Sam sees the juice dripping down his brother’s arm, and he wants to lick it off, to drink from his hands, to get on his knees and let Dean squeeze an orange in his fist up above, the juice dripping down into Sam’s eager mouth.
God, Dean was beautiful even then, wasn’t he? Backlit by the Florida sun, small hands sticky with orange juice, sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned forearms, the muscle just beginning to peek through, the fine blonde hairs there, his sun-kissed nose dotted with freckles.
