Mint and apricots

36. The favor

"Gabriel Hale, the Gabriel with whom Sam has been spending his Sunday afternoons for a few weeks now," Castiel clarified for Dean, who had stood his ground and kept his eyes on him from the doorway, with his arms firmly crossed, "is a patient of mine. He has been for a long time. When he began his therapy sessions with me, he was nineteen. I was twenty-three."

Castiel zoned out for a moment as he thought back to the last year of his master's degree and remembered how, at the time, he had just started doing pro bono work to learn the ropes, as his university professors said, and do good, as his family had taught him and as the priest preached in church every Sunday morning. But these were details of his life that his husband already knew well.

"It is the only case I began to deal with at that time that I still follow nowadays," the psychotherapist specified, and Dean raised his eyebrows with his typical of resentment wary attitude.

"He has been needing therapy for twelve years straight?"

Cas had to hold a bitter smile back, because Dean could have mistaken the disenchantment towards some members of the community for mockery against him.

"He didn't even start with me. Before graduation, he relied on his school counselor for a long time," he told him, knowing that his partner would have required a decent amount of information about the person they were talking about before he could consider him worthy to help Sam. "Gabriel has been seeing a psychotherapist regularly since he was thirteen, to be precise. And yes, even though we've been able to decrease the number of meetings required to make him feel good, he still needs me once in a while. When we started, we met once a week. Now, about every three months I call him and we decide together if it is time to meet for a chat."

Cas stopped there, and Dean, though curious as a monkey, refrained from asking uncomfortable questions about why this guy was in need of so much counseling. It was none of his business and, after all, he had more urgent reasons for which to press his husband.

"Tell me what else is behind that phone call," he commanded in a tone that had nothing to envy to the one with which John Winchester had tried, for years, to break the stubborn will of his youngest son.

Cas shuddered, as if for a moment he had allowed himself to relax and Dean's return to drill sergeant mode was so sudden it alarmed him. His husband saw him pick up the pieces of his own self-control with a slow, deep breath, as he crossed his hand on the desk, and then there was no room in his attention span for anything other than those shocking blue irises that reflected the man's mortified soul.

"For you to understand, it will be necessary to take a step back," Cas considered. "Remember December the 27th?"

Dean snorted, annoyed.

"You'll have to be more specific than that."

Zero collaboration. Fabulous, Castiel thought with a heartbroken sigh, preparing himself for the inevitable explosion that would have followed the discovery.

"On December 27, three days after having yet another fight with you and staying away from home for hours in the snow, Sam... Sam went back to Luc, Dean."

It was worse than Cas had predicted. It was much worse, because Dean didn't scream. No, Dean looked at him as if Castiel had stripped him of all certainty, as if he had just thrown him to the ground and raged against his exhausted body after having sworn to protect him from all harm.

"What?" he hissed, barely audible, and his inability to breathe normally again made his husband's heart shiver.

"They met in a coffee shop," Cas forced himself to go on, knowing he had to tell him the whole truth. "They made up."