5. It Froze Me

As far as Castiel can tell, Dean sleeps through the night. He’s quiet, at least, and the alpha chooses to take that as a good sign. 

He hasn’t slept a wink. 

The coffee machine gurgles at him accusingly. Every time he’d closed his eyes last night, he’d seen Dean curled over a tiny spot of brown on the carpet, scraping his hands raw trying to claw it up. 

That Dean was that terrified of him even after Castiel had tried to reassure him tells him that the kid’s reaction is his fault. He’s doing an awful job at making the omega feel safe and secure. 

Predictably. 

He needs help. 

Balthazar answers the phone grumpily. “So help me God, Cassie, this better be bloody important, because I’ve only had about,” there’s a pause as he checks the time, “three hours of sleep because of that last round of intake–”

“I apologize for waking you,” he interrupts quickly, before his friend can really get going. “But I would appreciate some guidance.”

Bal sighs dramatically. He can hear the shuffle of covers being thrown back and grimaces guiltily – he’s sure that Bal was asleep in his office on the couch after a long night of paperwork and putting out fires, pulling extra hours to make up for the unusually high number of new residents they’ve taken in. These days, it seems like his head of rehab spends more time at the campus than he does at home. “Tell me what happened.”

Worrying at his lip, he braces his hand on the counter and leans forward, trying to figure out how to explain the events of last night in a way that doesn’t make him seem totally incompetent. He can’t think of one, so he just goes with the truth, clumsily spilling out the incident like a child with an overfull bucket.

Balthazar curses quietly once he’s done. “Did I not tell you to be careful? To be sure you don’t overwhelm the kid?”

“Giving him coffee is overwhelming?” Castiel asks, hysteria already creeping into his tone. “I was just… trying to make him feel welcome.”

“He’s not going to feel welcome, Castiel!” Balthazar curses again, snapping his words into the phone. “Far as he knows, you purchased him as a goddamn sex slave. Would you feel welcome?”

“Well… no,” he concedes reluctantly. “But I thought that if I…” 

“If you what? Pretended like he was a bloody house guest, he’d start to act like one?”

It sounds incredibly stupid when put plainly like that, and Castiel swallows. Some part of him, he realizes, had hoped that Dean would immediately understand that his circumstances had changed and would feel nothing but relief. Had thought, foolishly, that Dean would somehow recognize that Castiel didn’t intend to harm him. 

As though he’s given Dean any real reason to trust him thus far. He really should have known better.

“It’s not that simple,” Balthazar confirms, irritated, and Castiel’s heart sinks further. “The kid hasn’t had a damn thing to himself since he signed himself over. He’s likely not gotten a free meal even once. So you trying to give him some frivolous thing like that did nothing but ring his alarm bells.”

“I still don’t understand,” he says, his voice edging into pleading. “Shouldn’t kind gestures be welcome?”

Balthazar huffs, but his voice softens minutely. “I doubt he saw it like that. I guarantee you he thought you were trying to play him.” He pauses, tone darkening into something bitter. “Or drug him.”

Castiel pales. “I would never–” 

“I know that," Balthazar snaps, irritation returning to his sleep-rough voice. “But he has no idea who you are, and no idea what to expect from you. You keep doing shit like that and you’re going to snap his brain in half. He needs structure, some kind of dynamic that he recognizes.”

Bile churns in his gut, the coffee he’d just downed threatening to come right back up. “I’m not a slave-owner, Bal. I… I don’t know if I have that in me. He smelled so damn scared – I…” 

“He is scared,” Balthazar replies bluntly. “He has every reason to be. You own him. You’re an alpha.” 

It’s the truth, but it still stings, the reminder of his designation and everything it symbolizes to someone like Dean. He takes a breath. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to do this,” he says quietly. 

Balthazar pauses for a long moment, and Castiel tries not to hold his breath as he waits. Finally, his friend lets out a long sigh, and when he speaks again, his tone is much less hostile. “You’re not going to hurt the kid, Cassie. I know that, you know that. He’ll figure it out. But you have to give him time.”

“But how do I make it clear to him that I don’t expect…” 

“For him to act like you own him?” Balthazar snorts. “You can’t. Not right now. It would be nice if you could, but a slave like Dean is not going to be able to function without boundaries – at least not at first. You have to take it slow.”

He closes his eyes, the after-image of quivering omega in front of him on the ground. The picture hasn’t left his mind for hours. “I am not cut out for this.”

“That’s too bad,” Balthazar says bluntly, but not unkindly, “because he’s your responsibility now. I know this is outside of your tidy little comfort zone, boss-man, but there’s no one else that can help this kid right now. Are you really going to give up this quickly?”

He sighs. “No.”

“Right. So buck up, mate.” He can hear the covers shuffling again, and Balthazar yawns, likely planning on going right back to sleep after he hangs up. “Go slow, stay calm, and be as blunt and obvious as possible about your expectations. Don’t let the kid get into his own head about stuff – if you can get him to talk to you, this will go far faster.”

He nods slowly, but Bal isn’t done. “And let him process at his own pace,” he adds sleepily. “Don’t try and force him to understand, ‘cause he’ll just agree with you blindly if he thinks that’s what you want. Answer any questions he has with full transparency but don’t tell him more than he needs to know, or he’s going to get overwhelmed and shut down.”

His head is spinning. Be honest, but not too honest. Be blunt, but not too blunt. He struggles with communication on the best of days and with the most stable of people, and now he’s being tasked with protecting the fragile mental health of a person who fully expects to be hurt in the cruelest of ways. 

Before he can ask for clarification, though, the sound of Balthazar snoring saws through the line. He bites the inside of his cheek and hangs up, stuffing his phone in his pocket. 

He rubs at his forehead, stress headache pounding in earnest now. This is, without exaggeration, the worst possible thing that could be asked of him, of his bumbling people skills and woefully underdeveloped sense of empathy. His heart aches for Dean and he knows what he believes in, but he’s positive he is not the person to help him. He isn’t good enough, not like the people he’d helped to hire for this exact purpose. 

That surety doesn’t do anything but add to the anxiety he already feels. It’s taken him most of the morning to nail the source of his unease down, but he thinks he’s figured it out: 

As far as he can tell, being around an omega in distress is triggering base instincts that he’s tried long and hard to ignore. 

Restless and frustrated, keyed up for a fight that isn’t coming, Castiel feels tense even hours after Dean has left the room. He’s never been aggressive, never really been dominant, at least not that he’s noticed. But from the savage desire to rip the handlers at the auction house in half, to wanting more than anything to gather Dean into his arms last night and tell him that he was safe… These are compulsions that he’s never had before. The strength of those instinctual desires inside of him frighten him. He doesn’t want to make a mistake that will hurt the omega in his care, and he’s come close too many times already. Has already scared Dean by not catching his desire to touch in time.

Castiel sighs. He’s not hungry, but Dean needs to eat. So he mixes some pancake batter absently, heats a pan to the right temperature, and starts to cook. It’s methodical and calming. He isn’t a chef by any stretch of the definition, but he can follow precise directions better than anyone he knows. He wishes that rehabilitation came with a guide as clear cut as the one on the back of the box of batter. 

He’s so absorbed in his self-appointed task that he doesn’t notice Dean’s arrival in the kitchen until his scent registers.

Back on the tile in the same clothes he went to sleep in, Dean’s head is down, his hands behind him once again. The position doesn’t look at all comfortable. Castiel has no idea how long he’s been waiting there.

“Oh – good morning,” Castiel says belatedly, spatula in one hand. He probably looks like an idiot. 

Dean glances up at him quickly, avoiding eye contact. “Good morning, alpha.”

Something in him still swoops at the way Dean has chosen to address him, though it’s not as bad as master. It’s not ideal, certainly, but he’ll count it as an improvement, especially since the fear-scent Dean’s carried with him since he’d arrived has faded to something closer to uneasy than terrified terrified terrified. 

Taking a steadying breath, he tastes a little of Dean’s natural scent for the first time in the back of his throat. It’s omega sweet, of course, along with notes of something else that he’s too far away to identify. 

“You really don’t need to hold your arms like that,” he finally says, stifling the urge to tell Dean he doesn’t need to be on the floor at all. Boundaries, boundaries. Balthazar’s warnings buzz in his ears. 

Dean stares at him for a half second like he doesn’t understand, his expression unsettlingly blank. But the emotion that snaps in to fill the void is not relief, as Castiel had half expected – instead, it is raw fear, and he drops his hands like he’s afraid Castiel will beat him if he doesn’t. He probably is afraid of that.

Swallowing, he tries to move on and ignore the urge to soothe, aware that it might just make things worse if he brings attention to Dean’s perceived misstep. “Did you sleep alright?”

Dean’s brow furrows, the fear slowly bleeding out of his expression when Castiel doesn’t address his apparent blunder. The dark circles under his eyes tell a different story – it seems that neither of them slept very well last night – but he mumbles, “Yes, alpha,” some of the tension dropping away from his shoulders when Castiel nods. 

“Good.” He bites his lip, sort of at a loss for safe conversation topics. “Do you like pancakes?”

The omega’s confusion deepens. “I… uh,” he stutters, clearly not sure what answer Castiel expects. “I don’t know, alpha.” 

Castiel swallows at that. It’d been a stupid question, but he’s never been good at small talk. “I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t, so we’re probably safe.”

Dean doesn’t smile at his weak attempt at humor, but his shoulders do relax a little more. Castiel counts that as a victory. 

There’s a few more seconds of silence, and then Dean quietly says, “Alpha?”

“Yes, Dean?”

“Can I… Am I allowed to use the bathroom?”

His throat tightens at the meekness in the omega’s voice. “Yes, of course you are. You don’t ever have to ask me permission for that – use it as often as you like. That goes for the shower as well. The upstairs bathroom belongs to you, though you’re welcome to use the downstairs one if you wish.” 

It never would have occurred to him that Dean would think he needed permission for that, and it strikes him anew how horribly the man in front of him has been abused – and how out of his depth he is. “Do what you like, and then you can come back down to eat. If you'd like.”

The omega thanks him, then scrambles up off the floor and hurries away fast enough that Castiel realizes he’d probably only come downstairs for this reason. When he comes back, he slides down to the tile without preamble in a movement that shouldn’t be graceful, but is. Something borne from practice. It makes his heart hurt. 

“Do you want some water?”

Dean looks up at him out of the corner of his eye, nodding uneasily when Castiel doesn’t add anything else. He ends up putting the cup down on the tile within his reach rather than handing it to him. A thought occurs to him – has Dean only been drinking water when Castiel has given it to him? The omega never asked for a glass, and Castiel highly doubts that he came down in the night to get one. The image of him cupping water in his hands to drink out of the sink or shower makes his stomach twist. He’s awful at this. 

“Why don’t you just keep that glass?” he offers, once Dean takes a tentative sip. “That way you can fill it up instead of just drinking out of the sink or something whenever you get–” 

Dean drops the cup from his mouth abruptly, staring at Castiel with wide eyes. “I didn’t,” he blurts, and his voice shakes. “I didn’t drink anything, alpha. I swear.”

Castiel takes in a slow, careful breath, and lets it out just as slowly. “It is okay if you did, Dean.”

“I didn’t,” he insists, pleading. “I wouldn’t, I – I know better, I promise –” 

“Consider this,” he interrupts, before Dean’s fear can snowball into terror, “my blanket permission for you to get water whenever you are thirsty. Please keep that cup with you so you can fill it when you need to.”

Dean just stares at him, his mouth partially open. The glass is loose in his grip. “I…” he trails off, looking down at the cup. “Thank you, alpha,” he whispers. 

His throat is a little too tight to reply, so he turns back to the pancakes and lets Dean recover. 

The omega stares at him with naked confusion as he sets a plate of little pancakes in front of him, butter and syrup drenched – he’s certainly underweight enough to need the calories – and sits at the table next to him. He hates putting himself above Dean, but Bal had warned him not to make him sit at the table too soon, going on about that damn dynamic. He’s not sure how Dean will react to him trying to sit next to him on the ground after what happened last night, so he doesn’t do that either. 

Again, Dean waits for permission to eat, but afterwards the clink of forks against plates is the only sound in the kitchen. There’s an air of waiting in the air, both men in the room tense and unsure. Dean more so than him, obviously, but even Castiel feels off-kilter. He grips his fork in his hand like a weapon and tries to parse out what he’s supposed to say to convince Dean he will be safe here. 

The file that Jody had given him on the omega had been… horrific. Easily fifty pages long, front and back. Well documented misery. What had concerned Jody more than anything, though, was his discipline record. Dean had attempted to escape multiple times from various owners over the years, and had been returned nearly as often. There were countless sessions of retraining in response – easily a dozen from the time he’d entered the trade until almost five years ago. 

That’s when he’d been purchased by Hell. 

The place had a sinister reputation amongst his staff, even for a slave brothel. It was, simply put, a playground for sadists. Infamous for drug-induced heats and broken, bleeding bodies, and for a ruthless owner that went through cheap slaves like matches, Hell was an omega slave’s worst nightmare. 

Dean had been there for half a decade.

Normally, Castiel wouldn’t know anything about Dean’s former masters – purchasers were never listed on the slave’s transfer paperwork, for confidentiality reasons. But the bombing that had destroyed the brothel had been on prime time news, and an inside source at the auction house had given Jody the scoop about where Dean had been repo-ed from. The omega’s file had landed on his desk half an hour later. 

The tip had made Castiel terrified to look through the most recent entries into his file, but the documentation had, for the most part, dropped off. After his last purchase, the only notes on Dean were brief, clinical records from slave doctors, haphazardly paperclipped and folded in. Even the most superficial injuries listed had made his stomach turn, so he’d skimmed, and looked for patterns. And he’d found one. 

No more escape attempts. No more recaptures. No more retraining. Something truly awful had been done to this man behind those doors, something bad enough to break his fighting spirit.

Dean jumps when he breaks the silence, and Castiel tries and fails not to feel guilty about that. Balthazar had said to be clear about his expectations, so he thinks he should warn Dean of Pamela’s impending visit like he failed to do last night.

“In a few hours, a doctor will be here to look over your injuries. She’s very professional, and she has lots of experience with…” He clears his throat, looking away. “With slaves.”

He looks down when Dean fails to respond. The omega’s eyes are huge, his face white as a sheet, his plate clutched in his hands like a shield. “Dean?”

“I’m – I’m fine, alpha. You don’t have to – I can still work. Please," he tacks on, voice breaking. His fear scent is back full force and Castiel flinches away from it, hands clenching as his body reacts instinctively, flooding his own system with adrenaline. 

He wonders, belatedly, what exactly the slave doctors listed in the file might have done to Dean to make his scent this terrified. He’s so stupid to have not thought about it before. 

“Judging by the way your wrists alone look, I very much doubt that you’re fine,” Castiel says carefully, and although his voice is gentle, the way Dean blanches even further is enough to tell him that the omega knows he’s been caught in a lie and is terrified of the consequences. He tries to soften the blow as much as he can. “She is only coming to help you. Nothing sinister.” 

He looks down at the man, sees how his breathing has picked up and his fists are clenched. “Dean?”

The omega flinches. Castiel swallows at that, feeling something in him break when he sees Dean staring at the floor, dread clear on his face and in his scent. 

“Can you do something for me?”

“Yeah – yes, alpha.” He’s so scared. There’s something almost desperate in his voice, something Castiel prays to God he’ll never have the first-hand experience that he’d need in order to understand. 

“I just want you to tell the doctor the truth. You don’t have to worry about what I’ll think, or what you think we might want to hear. Just the truth. Can you do that?”

Dean’s face is still far too blank. “Yes, alpha.” 

The rest of his pancakes go untouched. 

He sits at the table next to Dean for the next few hours, battling with his instinct to get him up off the floor the whole time. Dean doesn’t seem to be affected at all by the same position that had given Castiel’s legs an unpleasant ache and tingle after just a few minutes last night. Instead, the omega appears to withdraw mentally, eyes unfocused and resting on an indistinct point on the kitchen floor, his breathing even and slow.  

He doesn’t realize how tight a hold Dean has on his emotions until he gets too distracted by his thoughts and his fork slips from his hand and clatters onto his plate. Dean’s flinch is so violent Castiel is worried he’s going to bolt – and so he half stands, prepared to do… something. He’s not even sure what. Instead of running, though, Dean just settles back down after a moment that’s as tight as a bowstring and closes his eyes, sweat on his brow. He leans away from Castiel, and the alpha swallows and forces himself to sit back down. 

How much practice must Dean have, to be able to shut himself off that quickly? To stay on his knees, inches from him, even though he wants to flee?

“I promise that the doctor is not going to hurt you,” he says quietly, but it’s like Dean doesn’t hear him. Maybe he doesn’t.

Castiel wants to leave, but he’s also not sure that Dean should be alone. He tries to read the paper or distract himself with his phone and tries just as unsuccessfully to not think about why Dean has been trained to kneel right next to his master’s lap, even unprompted. Tries not to think about the way Dean had nosed between his legs last night, eyes blank, or how he’d started to look like he was going to try and do the same a few minutes ago – perhaps as some sort of twisted apology for his fear? – before Castiel had pointedly scooted away. 

The doorbell announces Pamela Barnes’ arrival right on schedule, and immediately, Castiel feels more at ease. “I’ll be right back,” he says quickly, unable to escape the kitchen fast enough. Dean does not look up when he goes.

Pam has been doing this for years, far longer than Castiel has had her on his payroll. He’s glad that her work is official now, rather than out of back alleys and secretive house-calls, but it’s that experience that made her perfect for this job and convinced him she was doing it for the right reasons. 

She knows exactly what slaves expect from their “doctors”, and knows how to work around that expectation. He assumes. He’s never actually been present for an examination before, for obvious reasons, but he gathers from Balthazar’s lack of complaints that Pamela is as excellent at this part of her job as she is at the rest. 

“Where is he?” she asks him brusquely, bag in hand and glasses pushed up to her forehead haphazardly. Her beta scent is soothing and neutral, perfect for the job; it even calms Castiel down a little.

“In the kitchen. He’s been there since this morning – I, uh. Didn’t want to make him move. He’s scared.”

“Well no shit he’s scared, Novak,” she says kindly, her eyes crinkling at the corners. Her hand is warm and comforting on his shoulder. “You doing alright?”

He isn’t, but he nods – this isn’t about him. Pamela gives him a sympathetic look anyway. “Let’s go take a look at him.”