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Your Hold-Me-Down is My Design
2081 words
R
It takes an hour more to make Castiel scream. By then his back is a map of raw stripes and he’s trembling, and Mike knows that light under his skin isn’t his imagination. When Castiel screams, breaking through something, the building shakes. It’s like the world threatening to come down.
No one asks them to leave. Probably no one even knows it was them.
In the end: Mike stepping back, letting Neil move in and remove the cuffs, take Castiel’s weight against his own, help him to the bed. Mike catches a glimpse of Castiel’s face, isn’t sure if what he sees there is a smile.
Isn’t sure it’s not.
~
"Tell me about what you and Neil do."
Later. Just the two of them. They were supposed to have said goodnight hours ago but somehow that never happened, and then somehow they both ended up on a rooftop, Castiel's shirt still off and the red lines across his back oddly bright in the skyglow. If Mike looks just the right way they seem to have a luminescence of their own.
He wonders, if he were really to cut there, even a little, if Castiel would bleed light.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because I am curious. Of course. I want to understand all the dimensions of this experience." He feels Castiel's gaze like the weight of a hand. "You say it was not about sex for Dean. I understand that that's not true for you." He pauses, seeming to weigh something. "Or for Neil."
Mike lets out a long breath and suddenly wishes for a cigarette. "It's complicated."
"Please try. I will not interrupt. I also promise not to be judgmental. Yours and Neil's sexual proclivities are none of my concern so long as they bring you both pleasure."
That last said with a little less than total conviction, but he's not going to press the issue. Castiel is terrible at lying. He knew that already but it's always a little interesting to be reminded of it.
Castiel isn't the only one coming to an understanding of things.
"You think it might not be over for him," he says quietly. "That's what this is about. He wanted you to understand, so you think it might not be over."
He's not touching Castiel but he can almost feel him stiffen. "I don't know what I think."
Bad liar.
Mike tells him.
~
All the serious conversations about this happen at night. Or seem to. There haven't been all that many until lately. Dean is still awkward, Dean is finding his words, and Mike sits with him in the dark and waits for them to come. It's a hot night and the city smells like asphalt and beer and car exhaust. Good smells, simple. The two of them keep to the shadows, hunting without hunting, ending in the trees and a lack of light.
“Maybe I shouldn't have.”
“Stop it.” Mike fingers his knife, thinks of flowing light. Anyway, it's happening. “It's done.”
“He's.” Dean moves his hands vaguely. Hunting or no hunting, tonight they killed two vampires and his fingers and knuckles are painted with streaks of dry, flaking blood. “Volatile.”
“What he is,” Mike says meditatively, picking at a piece of torn flesh under one fingernail with the point of the blade, “is a quick study.”
Dean reaches out, closes a hand over Mike's and stills him. In the distance, in the trees, something screams and falls silent again. “I don't know if I can.”
Mike waits for a moment. There are things he wishes he could say, things he wishes he could put into words, but words are entirely inadequate for what Castiel is, and that at least is something he's sure Dean understands. What it's like. The sounds he made. The way he swayed with the blows, arched into them, looking like they might lift him off his feet. Like he was being beaten into flight. Glistening, shining. Beautiful.
Dean has seen him like that, in other times, other places, Mike knows. But this is still something else.
“You don't have to do anything,” Mike says. “You should just see.”
~
Other things.
Castiel doesn’t have a favorite thing. Castiel has no idea what he likes, if he likes anything. Castiel is an open bowl into which sensation flows, and he never seems to be entirely full. Castiel gives every indication of being fascinated by something he still doesn’t entirely understand.
Castiel doesn’t much care to talk about it, after the first time. So Mike talks. Mike fills in gaps, details. Mike tells stories about Dean, about specific things he remembers, things he holds close. The first night, what it took to get the screams. Nights after when they came easier. What brought out the tears, how he looked tasting his own blood, how it was when he begged. Mike delivers these fragments in a kind of reverie, entirely disconnected from what he’s doing with his own hands to Castiel’s skin and flesh and what he might be doing to his mind. Because another thing he’s aware of is that these words and these images may be blows worse than any others he’s delivering. That these truths might be worse than a lash. That they might bruise.
But they’re both here. And this doesn’t feel like a place for holding anything back, let alone lying.
He’s not demanding everything of Castiel. None of this is his to demand. He knows he’s a proxy. He’s filling a space until someone else can get here.
~
They’re both there the first time.
Dean is silent. Mike has no idea what he’s thinking, enjoys the ambiguity. Stands close to the door, Neil by his side, and watches what appears for all the world to be a standoff. Castiel is naked, shivering in the chains, untouched tonight. Stretched out and presented. A gift.
The truth is that Mike would very much like to know what prompted this, why it started at all. But he also knows that it really isn’t a lot of his business.
Dean steps forward, clears his throat, meets Mike’s gaze. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides. What’s behind is gaze isn’t anger, at least not exactly.
He’d said he couldn’t. Not again. Mike had wanted to tell him, then, not to be so sure.
“Get out,” Dean says, low and hard. In the center of the room, Castiel lets out a loose, hot sound.
Mike and Neil go. They leave the bag. Back at home, Neil shoves a balled-up washcloth into Mike’s mouth to muffle his cries and fucks him into the mattress. Both of their imaginations are in crazed overdrive. Neither of them needs to talk about it.
~
Dean had insisted it wasn’t about sex for him. As far as it goes, Mike believes him.
Didn’t say much of anything about the future.
Anyway, the next day Castiel is walking with a slight limp. Neil can’t stop grinning.
~
But there’s more.
There are some things that still need careful introducing. Some elements that are unstable enough that they need to be approached with the help of certain rituals. Because here’s how it is:
“I still don’t fully understand.”
Castiel is on the bed again, hands clasped in his lap, and Mike is crouched in front of him, and it’s just like the first time except it also doesn’t really feel like that at all. As always, Neil is watching, supervising. Every move Mike makes is with silently asked-for and received permission. But this feels like – once again – uncharted territory.
“What don’t you understand?”
“I believe I understand some of what he felt. Some of what he was seeking. He has…” Even in the dimness Castiel’s flush is sudden and deep. “He has assisted me with that part. But what I don’t understand…”
He reaches over into the back, curls his hand around the crop and lifts it out. He hefts it slightly, testing the feel of it in his hand.
“I don’t fully understand what it was like for you.”
~
Neil doesn’t have to make him beg. He knows what to do. He doesn’t know, nor does he feel any particular need to, what exactly Dean has been assisting Castiel with. But if submission hasn’t yet come up as an idea…
When Neil pushes him to his knees he doesn’t care who’s watching. It’s perfect simplicity.
And of course the answer was always going to be yes.
~
It’s easy to make him scream. It’s easy because he always wants to scream, hungers for it, exults in it in a way he’s not sure Dean ever did. Not then.
Now might be another story.
Castiel turns out to be a master of the art of the impact. Yes, a very quick study. Mike twists in the chains and yells and is so close to laughing as his skin burns and burns. He can’t see Neil, can’t see much of anything; his good eye is fading in and out. Endorphins hum through him, sweet and warm. His fingers are going pleasantly numb.
They move on a rotating basis, just like he always has. Tool to tool. Castiel warms up the skin, paints with stripes, lays tracks down across him. Locomotives of pain charge across him and it’s fucking wonderful.
Until it stops, and Castiel is panting in front of him, face twisted and vaguely confused. Mike lifts his head. The corners of his mouth are tugging upward into a loose smile. He can’t help it, it always feels so good by this point. He wonders if he’s hard. Wonders if he cares.
“What?”
“I should not enjoy this,” Castiel murmurs, staring down at the cane in his hand. “I’m causing you pain. I should want to stop. What does this say about me?”
“What does it say about me,” Mike croaks, the words slow and faintly slurred, “that I don’t want you to?”
Castiel stares at him, appearing to be at a loss. “I don’t know what to do now,” he says. “I don’t wish to permanently damage you.”
“So don’t.” Neil, standing at his elbow, fixing Mike with a speculative eye. Mike looks back at him, and there’s a pleasant tension there. Neil has plans here. Neil has ideas. Mike has a safeword and he’s not sure what the hell it would take to get him to use it. “What can you do to him that I couldn’t? That no one could?”
Castiel stands silent for another few moments. He’s thinking so hard it feels like the entire room is thinking with him. It’s more than deliberation, Mike realizes. It’s fixing on something as a possibility and then trying to decide if it’s a catastrophically bad idea.
“You really do enjoy this?”
“I love it.” Breathless, abruptly needy. Not a tremendous amount of shame. “Cas, please.”
“I can do one thing.” Castiel steps forward, one hand extended. “You must promise to not be very angry with me if you find it too unpleasant.”
Go for it he’s starting to say and then Castiel splits him open.
He doesn’t know if he’s screaming. He doesn’t know anything. The pain is massive, mind-bending; it wipes out everything else, renders everything outside it unimportant. It tears its way into every muscle, rips through his nerves, pierces every cell wall. There’s nothing between him and the pain; he is the pain.
And in the center of the pain is a sweet, soft little center of nothing at all.
When it’s over it’s sudden and jarring and he hangs on the chains, great sobbing breaths forcing their way out of his throat. Neil is in front of him, pulling him close, whispering soothing things to him. Castiel is behind, staring again, and what’s on his face…
Mike smiles the whole way home.
~
Neither of them is there for the second round. Neither of them gets any details. Neither of them asks for any. If there’s such a thing as sacred anymore, where this is concerned, this fits the bill. If it was for Mike once it’s not his anymore, and both he and Neil understand on some level that their role in this is finished, and that’s fine. The circle is closed. That’s good.
Neil has him on his back with his legs spread and his arms pinned over his head and he’s coming his fucking brain out when the power goes out.
Again.
He and Neil are still laughing when they fall asleep.
2081 words
R
It takes an hour more to make Castiel scream. By then his back is a map of raw stripes and he’s trembling, and Mike knows that light under his skin isn’t his imagination. When Castiel screams, breaking through something, the building shakes. It’s like the world threatening to come down.
No one asks them to leave. Probably no one even knows it was them.
In the end: Mike stepping back, letting Neil move in and remove the cuffs, take Castiel’s weight against his own, help him to the bed. Mike catches a glimpse of Castiel’s face, isn’t sure if what he sees there is a smile.
Isn’t sure it’s not.
"Tell me about what you and Neil do."
Later. Just the two of them. They were supposed to have said goodnight hours ago but somehow that never happened, and then somehow they both ended up on a rooftop, Castiel's shirt still off and the red lines across his back oddly bright in the skyglow. If Mike looks just the right way they seem to have a luminescence of their own.
He wonders, if he were really to cut there, even a little, if Castiel would bleed light.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because I am curious. Of course. I want to understand all the dimensions of this experience." He feels Castiel's gaze like the weight of a hand. "You say it was not about sex for Dean. I understand that that's not true for you." He pauses, seeming to weigh something. "Or for Neil."
Mike lets out a long breath and suddenly wishes for a cigarette. "It's complicated."
"Please try. I will not interrupt. I also promise not to be judgmental. Yours and Neil's sexual proclivities are none of my concern so long as they bring you both pleasure."
That last said with a little less than total conviction, but he's not going to press the issue. Castiel is terrible at lying. He knew that already but it's always a little interesting to be reminded of it.
Castiel isn't the only one coming to an understanding of things.
"You think it might not be over for him," he says quietly. "That's what this is about. He wanted you to understand, so you think it might not be over."
He's not touching Castiel but he can almost feel him stiffen. "I don't know what I think."
Bad liar.
Mike tells him.
All the serious conversations about this happen at night. Or seem to. There haven't been all that many until lately. Dean is still awkward, Dean is finding his words, and Mike sits with him in the dark and waits for them to come. It's a hot night and the city smells like asphalt and beer and car exhaust. Good smells, simple. The two of them keep to the shadows, hunting without hunting, ending in the trees and a lack of light.
“Maybe I shouldn't have.”
“Stop it.” Mike fingers his knife, thinks of flowing light. Anyway, it's happening. “It's done.”
“He's.” Dean moves his hands vaguely. Hunting or no hunting, tonight they killed two vampires and his fingers and knuckles are painted with streaks of dry, flaking blood. “Volatile.”
“What he is,” Mike says meditatively, picking at a piece of torn flesh under one fingernail with the point of the blade, “is a quick study.”
Dean reaches out, closes a hand over Mike's and stills him. In the distance, in the trees, something screams and falls silent again. “I don't know if I can.”
Mike waits for a moment. There are things he wishes he could say, things he wishes he could put into words, but words are entirely inadequate for what Castiel is, and that at least is something he's sure Dean understands. What it's like. The sounds he made. The way he swayed with the blows, arched into them, looking like they might lift him off his feet. Like he was being beaten into flight. Glistening, shining. Beautiful.
Dean has seen him like that, in other times, other places, Mike knows. But this is still something else.
“You don't have to do anything,” Mike says. “You should just see.”
Other things.
Castiel doesn’t have a favorite thing. Castiel has no idea what he likes, if he likes anything. Castiel is an open bowl into which sensation flows, and he never seems to be entirely full. Castiel gives every indication of being fascinated by something he still doesn’t entirely understand.
Castiel doesn’t much care to talk about it, after the first time. So Mike talks. Mike fills in gaps, details. Mike tells stories about Dean, about specific things he remembers, things he holds close. The first night, what it took to get the screams. Nights after when they came easier. What brought out the tears, how he looked tasting his own blood, how it was when he begged. Mike delivers these fragments in a kind of reverie, entirely disconnected from what he’s doing with his own hands to Castiel’s skin and flesh and what he might be doing to his mind. Because another thing he’s aware of is that these words and these images may be blows worse than any others he’s delivering. That these truths might be worse than a lash. That they might bruise.
But they’re both here. And this doesn’t feel like a place for holding anything back, let alone lying.
He’s not demanding everything of Castiel. None of this is his to demand. He knows he’s a proxy. He’s filling a space until someone else can get here.
They’re both there the first time.
Dean is silent. Mike has no idea what he’s thinking, enjoys the ambiguity. Stands close to the door, Neil by his side, and watches what appears for all the world to be a standoff. Castiel is naked, shivering in the chains, untouched tonight. Stretched out and presented. A gift.
The truth is that Mike would very much like to know what prompted this, why it started at all. But he also knows that it really isn’t a lot of his business.
Dean steps forward, clears his throat, meets Mike’s gaze. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides. What’s behind is gaze isn’t anger, at least not exactly.
He’d said he couldn’t. Not again. Mike had wanted to tell him, then, not to be so sure.
“Get out,” Dean says, low and hard. In the center of the room, Castiel lets out a loose, hot sound.
Mike and Neil go. They leave the bag. Back at home, Neil shoves a balled-up washcloth into Mike’s mouth to muffle his cries and fucks him into the mattress. Both of their imaginations are in crazed overdrive. Neither of them needs to talk about it.
Dean had insisted it wasn’t about sex for him. As far as it goes, Mike believes him.
Didn’t say much of anything about the future.
Anyway, the next day Castiel is walking with a slight limp. Neil can’t stop grinning.
But there’s more.
There are some things that still need careful introducing. Some elements that are unstable enough that they need to be approached with the help of certain rituals. Because here’s how it is:
“I still don’t fully understand.”
Castiel is on the bed again, hands clasped in his lap, and Mike is crouched in front of him, and it’s just like the first time except it also doesn’t really feel like that at all. As always, Neil is watching, supervising. Every move Mike makes is with silently asked-for and received permission. But this feels like – once again – uncharted territory.
“What don’t you understand?”
“I believe I understand some of what he felt. Some of what he was seeking. He has…” Even in the dimness Castiel’s flush is sudden and deep. “He has assisted me with that part. But what I don’t understand…”
He reaches over into the back, curls his hand around the crop and lifts it out. He hefts it slightly, testing the feel of it in his hand.
“I don’t fully understand what it was like for you.”
Neil doesn’t have to make him beg. He knows what to do. He doesn’t know, nor does he feel any particular need to, what exactly Dean has been assisting Castiel with. But if submission hasn’t yet come up as an idea…
When Neil pushes him to his knees he doesn’t care who’s watching. It’s perfect simplicity.
And of course the answer was always going to be yes.
It’s easy to make him scream. It’s easy because he always wants to scream, hungers for it, exults in it in a way he’s not sure Dean ever did. Not then.
Now might be another story.
Castiel turns out to be a master of the art of the impact. Yes, a very quick study. Mike twists in the chains and yells and is so close to laughing as his skin burns and burns. He can’t see Neil, can’t see much of anything; his good eye is fading in and out. Endorphins hum through him, sweet and warm. His fingers are going pleasantly numb.
They move on a rotating basis, just like he always has. Tool to tool. Castiel warms up the skin, paints with stripes, lays tracks down across him. Locomotives of pain charge across him and it’s fucking wonderful.
Until it stops, and Castiel is panting in front of him, face twisted and vaguely confused. Mike lifts his head. The corners of his mouth are tugging upward into a loose smile. He can’t help it, it always feels so good by this point. He wonders if he’s hard. Wonders if he cares.
“What?”
“I should not enjoy this,” Castiel murmurs, staring down at the cane in his hand. “I’m causing you pain. I should want to stop. What does this say about me?”
“What does it say about me,” Mike croaks, the words slow and faintly slurred, “that I don’t want you to?”
Castiel stares at him, appearing to be at a loss. “I don’t know what to do now,” he says. “I don’t wish to permanently damage you.”
“So don’t.” Neil, standing at his elbow, fixing Mike with a speculative eye. Mike looks back at him, and there’s a pleasant tension there. Neil has plans here. Neil has ideas. Mike has a safeword and he’s not sure what the hell it would take to get him to use it. “What can you do to him that I couldn’t? That no one could?”
Castiel stands silent for another few moments. He’s thinking so hard it feels like the entire room is thinking with him. It’s more than deliberation, Mike realizes. It’s fixing on something as a possibility and then trying to decide if it’s a catastrophically bad idea.
“You really do enjoy this?”
“I love it.” Breathless, abruptly needy. Not a tremendous amount of shame. “Cas, please.”
“I can do one thing.” Castiel steps forward, one hand extended. “You must promise to not be very angry with me if you find it too unpleasant.”
Go for it he’s starting to say and then Castiel splits him open.
He doesn’t know if he’s screaming. He doesn’t know anything. The pain is massive, mind-bending; it wipes out everything else, renders everything outside it unimportant. It tears its way into every muscle, rips through his nerves, pierces every cell wall. There’s nothing between him and the pain; he is the pain.
And in the center of the pain is a sweet, soft little center of nothing at all.
When it’s over it’s sudden and jarring and he hangs on the chains, great sobbing breaths forcing their way out of his throat. Neil is in front of him, pulling him close, whispering soothing things to him. Castiel is behind, staring again, and what’s on his face…
Mike smiles the whole way home.
Neither of them is there for the second round. Neither of them gets any details. Neither of them asks for any. If there’s such a thing as sacred anymore, where this is concerned, this fits the bill. If it was for Mike once it’s not his anymore, and both he and Neil understand on some level that their role in this is finished, and that’s fine. The circle is closed. That’s good.
Neil has him on his back with his legs spread and his arms pinned over his head and he’s coming his fucking brain out when the power goes out.
Again.
He and Neil are still laughing when they fall asleep.
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Jesus.