It's In Your Eyes

To Die By Your Side

Castiel's POV -

"I used to sing The Boy With The Thorn In His Side." I look up at Charlie, and she just stares down into the water. When I look down, she's watching my through the reflection, impossible for me to pinpoint the emotion on her face through the ripples from the waterfall. That'll be how she wants it. It's intentional. We've been here for a while now, but I'm only just starting to open up. And I don't intend to say a word about Dean.

My past, on the other hand and to my surprise, seems desperate to tumble out, ease the pressure inside me even just that tiny bit. It'll be hard and she may not want to know, but she hasn't shushed me yet...

"When my dad was angry. When I'd be scared I'd be punished for eventually saying who I am. When I'd hide in my room away from my arguing parents. Who'd be arguing about me. And they'd both be on the same side, so neither could win or lose, and it'd just go on and on and on. And they'd both be of the mind that I was wrong, or sick, or confused."

She rests her hand atop mine, soft. This was the third night of the school year, when I'd found our hollow. And found Charlie there, willing to let me join her.

"But I wasn't any of those things. I wasn't confused. I know exactly who and what I am."

Castiel's memory -

He was the most delicate creature, strange and, in this way, enchanting. I'd fallen a little for him when I saw him. That first day he'd turned up at the school, books bundled in his arms, nothing special to most.

Because most are fools. He'd be everything to me. For a short time. For days I'd find myself watching him, studying how he moved, how his fingers worked as he wrote, or how they pinched the pages of a book before he flips the page. He didn't look up and meet my eyes. Not until a week later.

The fire drill, we lined up outside and as I followed him in his search for the right row with my gaze, he looked up and stole it. In a second he was smiling.

It wasn't till he were being informed that the drill was no drill, that a small fire has broken out in one of the science laboratories and we could go home, people taking off immediately, that I felt him behind me.

It wasn't just a 'I can sense your presence' kind of feel. It was a full on, 'I'm going to hold you by the waist and pull you against me without anyone seeing because I can' kind of feel.

"Walk home with me." He'd said to me. What could I have done but said yes, held against him, blushing furiously, teenage boy hormones screaming some nonsense, drowned out by my pounding heart which pumped and pushed the drug-like warmth around my body.

Not unlike how I feel around Dean... Maybe even less so, when I think back on it. But it did feel good and I nodded despite myself. This point I'm still working out who I am and what I want...

In the park, though, he'd done something to snap everything into place and seal it in concrete.

Pulling me off the path. Pushing me against a thick oak there. Kissing me.
Kissing me... That's all. He didn't touch me anywhere too intimate, nothing to make me freak and bolt at this brand new experience. But it had felt good, right... Just kissing him. Me.

This was the boy that brought me the truth. He was just all I cared for for a long time...

Until the fire.

We met over a fire. Why not have us be ripped apart by fire too?

I remember little bits of that night. Snippets. Just tiny snippets really. There was a lot of smoke, black and dirty, choking me. And the heat from the flames was unbearable, melting and scarring, burning me all over.

He'd died in that fire, no one ever speaking of him again.

No one told me about a funeral for him, my parents kept me hidden away in the house for a long time while my burns healed and when God was done punishing me for being an abomination. Dad had told me he'd saved me before I'd committed an even bigger sin with... With the boy I loved.

Many of my burns have not healed. They never will. They're ugly, charred and twisted skin, puckered and pink and shiny, always. They could have been much worse. There could have been many more of them. They could have been in more prominent places. But still I fear anyone ever seeing them.

I'd reached out my hand to him where we lay, pinned apart under the fallen wooden beams, some still burning madly. The last thing I'd saw before my eyes had rolled back in my head, before I'd woken up in that clean, white hospital room, alone, was him struggle to lift his hand and place it in mine.

At last it lifted, hovered for a second, then dropped. But it didn't hit mine. We were just too far away from each other. And I'd never touch him again...

Charlie's POV -

Dean looked up at me, eyes wide with pain for Castiel, a tear streaking his cheek, uncharacteristically for his usual, tight-jawed, crying-is-for-wimps expression. I told him what Castiel had told me that night, while Cas was out of the room, showering he'd said. All of it. About the nameless boy, about his love for him and his loss.

"And..." I go to continue.

"What, Charlie? How else did God 'punish' him?" Dean spits the word punish, disgusted by it all.

"Dean, you don't need to hear this. You really don't. I mean-"

"I'll tell him."

It's a tiny voice, from the doorway. Cas had never went to get that shower, had he. It's all over his blotchy, tear-dashed face. He'd listened to me recount his dark, agonising past to Dean. And from the look on his face... He didn't even hold it against me.

"Cas..." Dean chokes and sighs at once, but Cas barely looks up at him when he says it. When he says his biggest, so-called 'punishment' in that small, broken voice. But never would this be a punishment for what he is. No. Never. Just a sadistic joke on our makers part...

"I- I don't remember him..." Cas sobs, finally meeting Dean's gaze. I watch it shatter through Cas, I watch Dean's face fall in confusion and... Panic. "I can't remember his name, what he looked like. Only how I felt. I can't ever remember the first boy- the first person I ever loved..."