The Year of Redemption

Chapter 19: Sanctuary

Still soaked and dripping with water, Cas and Dean hauled all of their stuff a little ways away from the river. Dean retrieved a knife and picked up a stone from the ground. He laid their fish on a large rock that was about waist-high. One-by-one, he knocked them unconscious with the stone and then cleaned them, cutting off their heads, tails, and fins, removing their guts, and then skinning them. He made a pile of meat and a pile of guts off to the side of the rock. When he had finished cleaning all of his fish, he handed the knife to Cas, who had been watching uncertainly from the side.

"You caught it, you clean it," Dean told him, putting the knife in his hands. Castiel rolled up his sleeves and stood over his fish. It was only barely alive by this point, but Dean knocked it unconscious anyways. Castiel fiddled with the knife, unsure how to proceed. Dean positioned himself behind Cas, folding his right hand over the angel's and grabbing Cas's left arm with his other hand.

Castiel was momentarily distracted by the closeness of Dean's body pressed up against his back, the hunter's face breathing in and out just above the angel's shoulder. Cas could feel Dean's breath hot on his cheek.

"Here," Dean said, shaking Cas from his reverie. "Hold the fish with this hand." Dean moved Castiel's left arm forward, and Cas placed his hand on top of the fish. "Now, put the knife just under the fin right here," he continued, moving Cas's right hand so that the knife slid under the fin by the fish's head. "You're going to have to use a strong sawing motion to cut its head off." He began pushing down on Cas's hand and moving it back and forth. Castiel applied more pressure to the knife, struggling to cut through the fish's thick spine. Dark red blood spurted from the fish's neck, and there was a cracking sound when they finally cut all the way through it's spine. They continued to saw back-and-forth until the head was clean off and a huge pile of blood had formed on the rock. Dean threw the head in the pile of guts on the side.

They flipped the fish and cut the tail off, then went through and removed all of the fins and sliced open the stomach. The whole time, Dean was giving Cas instructions over his shoulder and holding the angel's hands and arms, closely directing them to the correct positions and motions. If we weren't dismembering a fish, this whole thing might be a more intimate, even romantic, encounter, Castiel mused, his human side briefly taking over. All of a sudden, Dean stuck Cas's hand into the fish's stomach, straight into all of its guts. "You've gotta kind of scrape all those out," he said.

"That is disgusting," Cas replied, but obediently started extracting the fish's guts and adding them to Dean's increasingly large pile of fish parts. They almost doubled the size of the pile.

Castiel held up his bloody hands when he was done. "Now we look as though we have just committed mass murder."

Dean glanced over at the pile of fish meat. "We have," he stated. "Here." He grabbed a towel and draped it over one of Castiel's hands, wiping the blood off for him. Dean did the same thing to Cas's other hand, then cleaned off the blade and the handle of the knife as well. "We still need to skin it," he said, giving the knife back to Cas and moving the fish to an as-yet unbloodied part of the rock.

Dean stood behind Cas again, pressed up against the angel's back, his face leaning over Castiel's shoulder. "You have to find the very corner of the skin," he said, and Castiel crouched down to inspect the fish closer. Dean kept his face right beside Cas's, their cheeks brushing. "Slide the blade of the knife right between the skin and the fish meat at that corner," he instructed in a soft voice, as if this was a very delicate procedure and any unnecessary volume would disrupt it.

With Dean's help, Cas used the knife to remove the corner of skin from the fish. "Now grab the skin with your hand and start peeling it back while you hold the fish meat down with this hand." Dean pressed down on the fish with Castiel's right hand, and Cas started pulling the skin off with his left. After every few inches of skin that Castiel pulled off, he and Dean removed their hands and placed them back a little farther down the length of the fish. "Awesome," Dean commented when they were done. He flipped the fish over. "Now, again," he said.