Summary: It's a split second choice - probably the only one they have left. But Dean makes it, because it's Cas lying there, bound and beaten, with a bomb strapped to his chest counting down all their deaths. How bad could it be, saying yes to an angel? Season 12 AU

A/N: So this marks the end of the official story. There will be one more chapter after this that is an epilogue of sorts. Thanks to all who've read, followed/faved, and commented!

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Cohabitation

Chapter 5

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

In the end, they did call Crowley in. It took another week of rest to talk Cas into it, what with the angel being very reluctant to get in bed with the demon once again, but Sam and Dean had worked with him several times more recently than Cas had, and felt at least alright about calling the King of Hell for a favor. Granted, they hadn't royally screwed him six years ago but…well, Dean had gone demon-dear-john on him and Sam had definitely tried to kill him at least once during that fiasco (and vice versa), so it wasn't like any of them were perfect.

But, in the last two years he'd put his own hide on the chopping block trying to help Cas evict Lucifer (which may have been more about saving his own skin against the devil than saving Cas, but, eh, he was a demon, after all). And he had saved Cas's life when he'd been a sure-goner against Ramiel and his spear. So, at least currently, the King of Hell was on Dean's good side. As much as a king of hell could be.

"Well, well, isn't this ironic." Crowley was staring at Dean with way too much amusement, as the hunter's face switched from Dean's deadpan glare to Cas's exact same deadpan glare. Sam hadn't even noticed there was a switch to see, but to the demon it was clear as day and funny as hell. "All that talk about destiny and saying no, and it finally happens because your pet angel needs a transfusion. Oh, if only Heaven had known one little bomb was all it would take."

"Stow it, Crowley," Dean snapped, crossing his arms over his chest both defensively and protectively. "Can you help or not?"

"Not," Crowley conceded with hardly an apologetic tone, though he did tilt his head towards them in some sort of acknowledgement. When Dean's look hardened, the king of Hell shrugged, and that at least did seem conciliatory. "Sorry, boys, your kitten's too banged up. The years have not been kind to that tattered ball of grace, and that I can't change. He may strengthen over time, but there's nothing I can do to help it along. Only another angel could."

'No,' Cas growled so fiercely that Dean physically frowned. He didn't have to ask; flashes of memory of Crowley standing over him, a vial of white light in his hand, and another brother's death on his conscience, was all Dean needed to understand what it was the demon was suggesting. And…yeah, okay, he wasn't exactly a fan of the majority of angels out there, but he could see where Cas was coming from, refusing to murder another of his brothers to prolong his own life.

Not to mention, Dean was really not up for adding a third party crasher to this little sharing-shindig they had going on. Two was one too many already.

When Dean said as much, Cas's voice backing his own, Crowley just shrugged again. "For the best, probably. Even that would be a temporary fix, at most. It might get kitten out of his squirrel-shaped shell, but it's entirely possible the additional grace would fight for control as soon as it was outside the buffer of a vessel. And with how weak our little angel is, I wouldn't put betting odds on him. Sorry, boys, your options are nil."

Sam let out a bone-weary sigh, and Dean scrubbed his fingers through his hair. Alright, well, it had always been a long shot to start with. They were just back to plan A: figure it out the hard way.

"This, though." Crowley's face lit with delight as he turned away from the two hunters and gestured with open arms at the golem. The Cas look-alike still stood there, blue eyes open wide but registering nothing. Crowley clucked his tongue cheerfully. "This I could have fun with."

Dean slapped his hand away before he could poke the arm of the golem, giving him a look that promised pain. Crowley backed off, hands raised, and told the hunter he was absolutely no fun at all.

"So, there's nothing?" Sam asked, trying one last attempt to both refocus them and dig into Crowley's near limitless resources. But the demon just shrugged his black-clad shoulders.

"Maybe with a soul deal-"

All three of them said no at once, Dean's and Cas's coming out as a weird mix of both their voices. Crowley looked amused and insulted at the same time, but ultimately just clucked his tongue again.

"Well, then, not my monkeys and all that." The demon cast one last amused glance at the stock-still golem before he headed for exit, hands in his pockets. "Call me if something changes. Including your minds."

The bunker door slammed shut behind him, and Sam and Dean exchanged a glance between them. Time to cover all their bases and call Rowena, make sure Crowley hadn't missed – or purposefully omitted – any options.

-o-o-o-

"Sorry, lads, but there's not much I can do. I'm just a humble witch, after all."

Dean snorted at the phone, open on the table and set on speaker, but he didn't think Rowena was actually lying. Blowing smoke out of her ass, absolutely, but she probably didn't have an option for helping them out. Otherwise she'd be talking price.

"Alright, thanks, Rowena." Sam, the far more diplomatic of the two, reached across the table and hit the end button. Dean gripped the back of the chair he was leaning on top of and sighed in frustration. Sam spared him a worried, sympathetic look. "We'll figure something else out."

"Maybe we won't." Dean rubbed at his tightly clenched eyes, fighting off the irritation and the headache that came with it. At his brother's glance – worried he was giving up – Dean tossed his arms out. "Maybe this is how it is. Cas is stuck in here and I-" he sighed. He might not have known what he was signing up for when he'd said yes, but he wouldn't take it back. Cas was alive, and that was worth a million years of having no privacy or secrets. "I can figure out how to make that work."

Sam could hear Dean's unspoken words, and Cas didn't need the younger Winchester's years of experience to interpret what Dean didn't say. Not anymore.

"Okay." The younger Winchester took a deep breath and offered an encouraging smile. Because he believed in those two, more than he believed in anyone else in his life. They would figure it out because they had to, and he would be there for them along the (undoubtedly rocky) way. "Okay. I'm not giving up, but we'll figure it out. Either way. It'll be okay."

"Yeah," Dean tried to believe it. It helped that the angel inside his head was bolstering them with his own confidence, even if it was as shaky as Dean's. Still, it was twice the confidence he'd have had otherwise. "It will."

-o-o-o-

They agreed to move Cas's golem to the dungeon after the unanimous decision that it couldn't stay in the library and it was way too creepy to keep activated. Sam, in a stroke of absolute genius, halted Dean before he could remove the scroll.

"Wait, we should move him first." Green eyes blinked his way, hand already inside the golem's now open-mouth (and oh, but did Sam wish he had a camera. Because the golem, for all intent and purposes, sure looked like Cas). "We should be able to tell him to follow us to the dungeon. Then we can take the scroll out."

As Dean glanced between his brother and the golem, Sam shrugged self-consciously. "It'll be easier than figuring out how to move two hundred pounds of hardened clay."

Dean pulled his hand out of Golem-Cas's mouth like he'd been electrocuted and told his brother he was a genius. They hadn't exactly had the woman sculpt the Cas-look-alike on anything but a wooden palate covered in now-clay-soaked canvas.

Sam stepped in front of the Golem, nerves a little jittery (this was the first golem they had ever made, and the legends did have a tendency of going not-so-well for the creators) and took a deep breath.

"Follow us," he commanded and the golem shifted his head ever so slightly to stare directly at Sam. Without a 'soul' (which was really just clever spellwork) or Cas's grace in there, the golem probably couldn't talk; it was the equivalent of him not having a brain, only basic programing. Still, as Sam took a few deliberate steps back, the golem followed, shuffling forward with a great weight that didn't match Cas's lithe frame.

"Awesome," Dean muttered, his voice caught between actually finding this cool and finding it incredibly creepy. "He's not gonna murder us in our sleep at all."

'Especially not after saying it aloud for him to hear,' Cas added, oh-so-helpfully, and Dean grumbled to him to shut the hell up.

Sam turned and headed out of the dungeon, the golem following while Dean pulled up the rear. He was armed and ready to hunt this thing down if it so much as moved wrong, but Golem-Cas just followed after Sam quietly as they escorted it through the bunker and down to the dungeon. Sam instructed it to stand in the corner, which it did without question, and then open its mouth.

Pulling the scroll out immediately triggered the red wave of words to wash over Golem-Cas's skin once more. Similar to its creation, the words faded and with them all the color and life from skin and fabric until only grey clay remained.

Dean poked the thing's arm, but his finger encountered only hardened, slightly tacky clay and he gave Sam a, 'maybe this is okay?' look.

"It's still creepy," he grumbled, turning and heading out of the dungeon. Sam shook his head, placing the scroll on the nearest surface and following his brothers out. They shut the trick bookcase doors and Dean went ahead and locked them up right because he could and there was no way he was sleeping in the bunker with a creepy non-living statue of Cas hanging out in the dungeon unattended. So lock it was.

And maybe – hopefully – they'd be back for it in a couple of weeks or a month or two once Cas strengthened up.

-o-o-o-

It was longer than that, time passing without any new ideas, new solutions or spells, or anything to help Cas get back to a body of his own. It wasn't so much that Sam was losing hope as it was that he was increasingly disappointed in himself for not having found a way out for his two brothers. He'd been so sure he could solve this for them.

They, on the other hand, seemed to be going the opposite direction of settling right down into this. Dean, particularly. The caretaker personality of the three of them, he put on his super hero cape (made mostly out of guilt and weighing a metric ton) and brute forced his way through. Which mean, yeah, a whole ton of ugly and misunderstandings, but Sam supposed one good thing to come out of sharing head space with someone was that misunderstandings couldn't last very long. It was hard to not be on the same page when you could hear each other reading that page aloud.

But Dean was trying. Trying to be less aggravated at having no space when it came to his best friend (he ultimately decided that a lack of mental space wasn't so different from having no personal space, and he'd gotten over that eventually, hadn't he?). The lack of privacy still rankled Dean more than anything else, and the over-abundance of emotion he could neither block on the incoming or hide on the outgoing was a constant source of drainage on Cas. But they were learning. Dean was learning not to have so many miscommunications or accidental triggerings of every guilt ridden memory either of them had ever had. That was a bit more of a struggle for them, which just drove home all the more how emotionally inhibited the two of them really were (which meant admitting Sam was right, which Dean hated doing). He also spent a not insignificant amount of his allotted patience (of which, he could admit, there wasn't as much as there should be), trying to push Cas to the forefront for at least a quarter of the time he spent awake, and insisting the angel could have the four hours that he regularly slept through the night, since he seemed to sleep anyway whether or not the angel took his body for a stroll.

Cas was slower to go all in, particularly on that last one. Despite Dean's first reassurance, then aggravated re-reassurance, and finally all-out irritation because assurances (no matter the number of "re"s in front) just weren't cutting it, Castiel was adamant that he not impede on Dean's free will (Dean's translation: stubborn, mule-headed, standoffish, jerk just to be a jerk- you get the idea). Even if that free will was to offer his body for the angel's use. Which, after about a week of cycling between "you can impede Cas, I'm asking you to impede" and "no, you don't really want me to", the hunter had finally exploded in all-out epic shouting match which he, of course, couldn't keep inside his head (he wasn't very good about keeping his thoughts in his head on the average day, let alone when he was having an actual conversation with someone, let alone let alone when he was having an argument with that someone). So Sam got woken up from a dead sleep by a one-sided argument that had him racing into the library, gun drawn.

Which was, apparently, enough to finally convince Cas that not taking his fair share of the physical control over Dean's body was causing more harm than good.

Finally. Sheesh.

Things had calmed down a bit since that day. Castiel was still shy about taking the reins, but his confidence grew each week that their tentative understanding with one another didn't shatter and Dean really didn't seem to mind (well, most of the time. There were still occasions, but the important thing was that they were learning to work through those). Dean took the majority of the driver's seat most days, but he was learning to hand over control on a more regular basis and Cas was slowly starting to take the wheel, even doing so on more spontaneous occasions, with less guilt and obligation.

Sam walked into the kitchen three months after they'd almost lost Cas to that bomb, to find the angel in his brother's body cooking. He knew it was Cas because he always held himself stiff and rigid. Dean was a loose goose compared to when the angel was in control, and he'd complained on multiple occasions how his back muscles hurt from standing so friggin upright hours on end. Sam mostly ignored all of those times, since better posture was a good thing.

"Morning, Cas," he greeted as he crossed the room and headed for the coffee. His role in all of this had been to act completely normal anytime Cas was in control.

"Good morning, Sam." Cas's focus was entirely on the slowly cooking eggs, spatula at the ready. Sam wanted to laugh at how serious he looked, but refrained.

"Yeah, morning sunshine."

Sam blinked as Dean's voice returned to normal from the deeper tone it always took when Cas was the one speaking. His posture didn't change from the statue-like rigidity Cas held. Pleasant surprise pooled in Sam's gut as he realized the two of them really were getting better at sharing.

"Is Dean teaching you how to cook?" Not that Cas hadn't tried on previous occasions, but microwaving a burrito was about as masterful as the poor guy had ever gotten. And Dean had gone through several fire extinguishers and a couple smoke alarms before finally calling it quits on teaching him.

"I suggested having breakfast and coffee prepared for when he woke up," Cas answered, voice switching back to the deep, gravely version that had frankly been so weird to hear those first couple weeks. "It was apparently incentive enough to try teaching me again."

"I was hoping there'd be muscle memory or something," Dean said, voice switching back. This time his body followed through, loosening as he turned to look at Sam, waving the spatula about in a much more animated (much more Dean) way. "Not so much. This is our third try."

He pointed the spatula down at the eggs with a sardonic look, which shifted quickly into the more stoic planes of Cas's control.

"The first was not entirely my fault."

"I told you medium heat."

"I turned it to medium heat."

"Yeah, well, you can't trust what the stove says, you have to gauge it yourself."

"Information that would have been helpful before the eggs were burning."

Sam's laughter interrupted their conversation which was, to be honest, utterly dizzying but also highly entertaining. He couldn't help it; the worry that had been building for months and only slowly ebbing away with each not-totally-disastrous encounter like this, finally let go of his gut completely. For the first time in months, Sam thought maybe they'd actually get through this.

"It is good to hear you laugh, Sam."

The younger Winchester bit back the last of his chuckles, sobering somewhat at the sincerity in Cas's voice. Sam offered a smile, though it was a heavier one than he'd meant. It was true, wasn't it, that he'd spent so much time worrying about the two of them that he'd probably stopped taking such good care of himself.

"Did you want to braid his hair next, Cas?"

Sam bit back another chuckle as his brother grumbled under his breath about sleepovers and heart-to-hearts, but he could see the slight warmth to Dean's cheeks and knew the good natured muttering was his older brother's way of expressing exactly what Cas had put into actual words.

"Thanks, Cas," he said, a little emphasis on the angel's name just to rub it in. Sure enough, Dean grumbled more. "It feels good to laugh."

"You worry too much," the two of them said at the exact same time, Dean's voice coming out in a weird mix of octaves that left Sam grinning again. It was Dean in full control – often the result when Cas felt like he'd stepped on toes – who waved the spatula and turned back to the stove. "Alright, already, enough chick-flick moment. You're gonna burn the eggs, Cas. Again."

Which sparked a second round of bickering and this time Sam could hear Cas's own amusement in his switches. So Sam didn't bother trying to hide how entertaining it was.

"It's like living with a schizo."

"Hey," Dean was back, pointing the spatula at him after having successfully flipped the last egg. "We take personal offense to that. Schizo's have voices in their heads. What we have is way more like multiple personality disorder."

Sam raised an eyebrow at the both of them.

"What," his brother baulked, turning back to the poke their breakfast unnecessarily, "I read."

"You have a millennia old angel in your head feeding you information," Sam countered.

Dean nodded whole heartedly, peeling the eggs off the pan with care. "I have a walking encyclopedia up here, Sammy."

He turned around, waving the spatula at his head while sliding a plate full of food across the island counter to where his brother was sitting. As Sam caught the plate before it could go too far and slide right off the counter, the older Winchester straightened suddenly, a brilliant gleam in his eye that was entirely Dean.

"Hey, we should go on Jeopardy!"

Sam shook his head, because of course that's where his TV-obsessed brother would jump to, and dug into his breakfast. The eggs weren't half bad, probably because they were only half made by Cas. The angel-hunter combo joined him at the island a moment later with their own plate and Sam sat back, marveling at how this was somehow working.

Oh, he was sure they weren't completely out of the woods yet. Bad days were still a given, and it wasn't like they'd figured out hunting or interaction with anyone outside the bunker. But maybe, just maybe they'd get there.

He went back to his food with a smile on his face as he listened to his brother teach an angel about answering a question with another question because it was the only way to win a game about questions. And also how he was absolutely serious about this, they were talking big bucks here! (Not to mention, the ladies loved the smart ones - to which Sam choked on his coffee and asked if he could get that in writing). It did not take long for Cas to come out and say, for Sam's benefit since the two could absolutely be having this monumentally important conversation silently between themselves, that responding in the form of a question was a needlessly complicated and ultimately pointless requirement for a game. And that, yes, women most certainly did love the smart ones more.

Which led to all-out war, and also the three of them spending the rest of the morning watching re-runs of Jeopardy. Dean might have had a point afterall; Cas knew almost every answer.