I could blow up the whole goddamn world with this thing.

Title: Worth
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG
Genre: A little fluffy, a little angsty. Mostly gen, pre-slash.
Summary: Castiel reconstructs Dean's body. Set before S4.
Warnings: None.
Word Count: 531



Castiel reconstructs Dean's body at a painstaking pace. It might have happened in the span of a second to an observer, but Castiel hesitated each tiny step of the way to insure there would be no flaws. He tries not to think about how he was not asked to do this. The gentle care that he places in this work is only acceptable if he is following orders. But no, he was told to raise him, to give him something to live in, not to perfect it with the kind of intensity he is using now.

After what could have been many months, or even many years as Castiel cannot measure this time the way a human would, he finishes the internal organs. He stretches the portion of his own being that he had set aside to forge Dean's new body contemplatively between his hands (this, however painful, he had been ordered to do, but he is not entirely convinced he wouldn't have done so even if offered an alternative). Physically, he knows Dean intimately. He can accurately place every freckle on his face, every fleck in his eye, the length of each strand of hair. He also knows the scars. He frowns a bit and decides that Dean doesn't need any more scars than necessary.

The words that first charged Castiel with this task ring in his head. He remembers the uncertainty and confusion with which he received the orders. He did not question them but he struggled to understand them. Still, he went and suffered the pain of nearly forty years fighting his way to the depths of hell. Part of him had expected to come upon his charge and come the closest he had ever been to feeling hatred. He was startled by just how much he had misjudged the situation. He came upon Dean Winchester, soul tarnished, covered in layers of dried blood and human excrement as well as things that had no name anywhere but the Pit.

Dean had swung out at him with the knife he'd been using to cut underneath a woman's cuticles until he could pull out her fingernails with his hands. Castiel, as tarnished as Dean was himself, had first taken this to mean he was unrecognizable as what he truly was. He assumed that Dean had perceived him as hostile, but the look in Dean's eyes clarified his feelings. Not me. Why me? His vision darted to the poor woman he'd been torturing, around at the other souls on the rack. Dean didn't find himself worthy.

Castiel did not understand emotion well enough to name the feeling that came over him at that realization. He reached forward with his right hand to clutch Dean's shoulder while his left came around the other's shoulders, Castiel folding himself protectively over this lost soul.

He came to Dean's shoulder, unblemished, and felt his right hand pulse with the memory. In a bout of foreign selfishness, he threads together darker, raised skin in the shape of his hand. He is not sure whether the small piece of his grace fusing to that flesh was intentional or not, but he can't bring himself to undo it.