Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Trudging into the bunker after winning the biggest fight they’ve ever had to face should probably feel more satisfying than this. More freeing. More ceremonious. But Dean’s feet feel like anvils, and his heart feels leaden, and that ‘weight of the world’ sense that’s always sat on his shoulders hasn’t left him one bit. 

Sam’s feeling it, too. Dean can tell. The heft of melancholy has a way of winding up in his shoulders and slumping his posture. Dean’s known it as a sign that his brother was feeling down or upset since they were kids. 

They don’t talk about it. Not really. 

The extent of it:

They perch themselves on the edge of the table at which they’ve spent countless hours over the last near-decade researching and debating and arguing—the table that harbors memories all across the spectrum, from painful to deeply sentimental, its wood branded brazenly with the Winchesters’ initials, Jack’s name, Castiel’s name… 

And they share a beer in the stifling silence. 

“It’s pretty quiet.”

Dean hums in halfhearted agreement, gaze affixed to the bottle in his hand. “To everyone we lost along the way,” he murmurs. 

They drink to that. 

Then, because Sam is Sam, and if there’s anything that man is capable of, it’s finding light in endless vacuums of darkness: “you know, with Chuck not writing our story anymore, we get to write our own—just you and me going wherever the story takes us. Just us…” 

Dean doesn’t miss the somber note in Sam’s voice as he tacks on the emphasis of ‘just us.’ Perhaps it’s Sam’s way of inviting Dean to speak on the obvious elephant in the room—the emptiness filling the space their family and friends used to occupy. 

But, where Sam is Sam, Dean is Dean, and he’s not touching that shit with a ten-foot cattle prod. Not now. Maybe not ever. 

So Dean pulls in a deep breath and declares, “finally free,” because it’s true; it’s something good they can both cling to. 

It’s effectively Dean’s way of shutting down any attempts to pry open the Pandora’s Box of festering loneliness and bitterness left in the wake of Chuck. He knows it’s not the right way to deal with things, but what the hell is he supposed to tell Sam? 

That he’s more than a little salty about Jack’s departure? Fat chance. It’s not like the kid left out of malicious intent; Sam would probably think Dean’s being immature and unreasonable. And Dean knows that, but it’s also not his fault that he feels some type of way about his rugrat fucking off to be one with the wind and trees or whatever. Like father, like son a-fucking-pparently. Cas disappeared so often Dean actually wonders if they spent more time apart than in each other’s presence in all the time they were acquainted.

Is he supposed to tell Sam that it wasn’t because his phone got lost in the fight with Billy that he didn’t answer his calls after Chuck poofed the entire world’s population? Is he supposed to fess up to the fact that it was actually because Cas had just dropped a nuclear bomb on him in the form of reverent praise of Dean’s character and sealed it with the kiss of “I love you” before kicking the fucking bucket for good? Is Dean supposed to admit that, when his brother was frantically calling him thinking he was dead, he didn’t pick up the damn phone because he didn’t know what the fuck to do with himself other than to curl up in a fetal position on the dungeon floor in a whirlwind of confusion and rage and despair, cry, and pray to an angel who couldn’t hear him anymore? 

Yeah, right. 

Is he supposed to put it all together for Sam? Lay it all at his feet to be picked at and prodded and analyzed? Is he supposed to hammer the final nail in the coffin and tell Sam that he doesn’t just resent that Jack left, but that there’s a small, ugly part of him that hates the kid for fucking off before he could demand that Cas be brought back? More-so for fucking off without even coming up with the idea himself? Cas loved Jack more than anyone else ever did—cherished him as his own without a second thought—and Jack didn’t think for one damn second that he deserved to be brought back for it? Sure, Cas was taken by the Empty, and that’s a little more complicated of a rescue mission than restoring souls that are floating around in the veil, but Jack is God now, and he was just a days-old nephilim the first time he helped Cas escape the Empty. Jack can do this one little thing. Dean knows it. He knows Jack knows it. 

Is he supposed to tell Sam that the same ugly part of him that hates Jack also sincerely hopes that the new God can hear every miserable, nasty thought stirring in his head right now? 

Yeah, no. Dean’s taking this shit to the grave. It’s best for everyone involved. 

When he leaves his perch on the table and saunters around the bend to head toward his room, he can feel Sam’s sad little puppy-eyes staring after him. At least something about this new life feels familiar. 

『✯』

Dean’s no stranger to jolting out of his sleep in the middle of the night. Nightmares, hyper-vigilance, the nebulous sense that a gun’s pointed at him—you name it, he’s probably woken up because of it. 

The bunker is built to withstand atomic-level magical threats, all concrete and lead and every warding sigil under the sun, so sound doesn’t typically carry through to his room unless a disturbance is particularly raucous.

This time, though, he hears… Something. He thinks. It sounded sharp and loud in his dream. Not like an explosion or gunshot, but it’s hauled him out of Neverland all the same. 

It takes a solid several seconds of blinking the REM sleep blearily out of his eyes and aiming his Glock at nothing but empty darkness for him to register precisely what it is that’d roused him from slumber. 

Laughter. Boisterous, joyous, belonging to more than one person. What the hell? 

Maybe some of the hunters that got dusted and revived again came by to celebrate. If that’s the case, Dean’s neither in the mood nor willing to join the festivities at what he’s pretty sure is an absolutely ungodly hour of the morning. 

Just as he’s willing his achy joints to cooperate so he can reach the lamp on his bedside table, the door to his room is suddenly chucked open, bright light from the hallway flooding in and searing his retinas. 

“Whoa— hey!” he barks out in complaint, raising an arm up to shield his stinging eyes. He didn’t get to catch a glimpse of who’d rudely barged into his room, but Dean’s so desensitized to threats against his life at this rate that he would’ve made the same whiny-ass complaint even if it were a demon standing in his doorway. 

“Dean, what the hell are you doing? Get out here!” 

Sam. Dean should’ve figured. Only a younger brother could hold such little regard for an elder’s delicate, light-sensitive, and mildly hungover eyeballs. 

“Why? What’s going on?” Dean grumbles, wilting into the warmth of his bed. Evidently, he’s not very keen on parting with it at the moment. 

“Just do it. Come on.” Sam makes sure to yank the covers fully off the bed before retreating out of the room and down the hall to the tune of Dean’s colorful curses. “And put some clothes on!” he adds, voice muffled by the distance. 

“Bitch!” Dean calls after him, then groans in protest for absolutely no one around to hear. 

For another minute or so, he just lies on his now coverless bed, a lazy, mostly naked star spotlit by the fluorescence of the outside corridor, and contemplates the ceiling. Listens to the continued laughter and chatter echoing through the bunker… 

A grim frown weighs on his lips, resignation in the depth of his long-suffering exhale. 

Look—it’s great that everyone Chuck snapped away is back. Dean’s not going to deny that. He’s happy about it, in fact. Elated. In theory. Buried somewhere under all the grief and loneliness and unresolved baggage he can’t bring himself to even peek into, perhaps. 

Really, he’s not in any place to be entertaining people at the moment. It’s fucked up, and he knows it, but he honestly doesn’t think he can look at all these people without being supremely disappointed that one particular face isn’t among them. That’s not fair to them. That’s not fair to anybody. 

“Dean! Come on, dude, don’t make me get the spray bottle!” Sam threatens from afar—the kitchen from the sound of it. 

Dean deflates, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth. Fine. 

He can do this. Make a brief appearance, force a smile, then retire back to his room to return to his regularly-scheduled wallowing.

Deciding his dead-guy robe is going to have to suffice enough for the definition of ‘clothes,’ he rolls his boxer-clad ass inelegantly out of bed, wraps himself up in worn gray fibers, stuffs his feet into some slippers, and shuffles off toward the kitchen. 

He’s about to round the corner when he nearly trips over something big and fluffy and mop-like that comes barreling out to the hallway. “What the—?” He staggers back a pace, blinking owlishly at the unmistakable form of a shaggy dog bouncing around his ankles, tail wagging in excitement like Dean’s someone it recognizes. 

It takes a second, but it eventually processes in Dean’s brain. This dog— Miracle, Dean had called him for the whole entire minute and handful of change he’d known him—is the same one from the deserted convenience store. The one Chuck left behind just to poof him away too and shatter the final fraction of hope Dean had in him. 

“Hey, buddy.” Dean crouches down to greet him, delving his hands into thick, wiry fur and letting the dog plant slobbery licks all over his face—objectively gross, but he finds he doesn’t very much care. Once Miracle’s apparently gotten his fill, he bounds back into the kitchen to mingle with the others. 

Alone again, and with a heart just a hair lighter than it’s been lately, Dean muses to himself, “where did you come from…?” 

No one but Sam and Dean knew about that dog. 

No one but… 

“There you are!” Sam pokes his head out from the kitchen, brows furrowed as he finds Dean knelt on the ground. “Why are you down there?” 

“The, uh… Dog,” Dean says intelligently, knees cracking on his way up from the floor. “How’s he here, by the way?” 

Just like that, Sam’s confusion vanishes, a beaming smile swooping in to assume its place on his face. “Dude, that’s what I’ve been trying to haul your ass out here for! Jack stopped by to—” 

And that’s the precise instant in time when Dean tunes out everything else Sam says. 

Jack. 

Jack stopped by. But why? Didn’t he just get done giving them hollow platitudes about how he’s ‘in everything’ and implying they’ll never see him again less than twenty-four hours ago? Is that not what the primary takeaway of that conversation and his subsequent vanishing act was? 

Dean’s heart is flip-flopping around in his chest, all erratic and frenzied. Whether it’s out of panic, thrill, happiness, or whatever-the-fuck-else, he has no way of knowing. 

When he tunes back into reality, Sam is dragging him the final few steps into the kitchen and presenting him to the crowd like he’s a long-awaited special guest on a late-night talk show. And ‘crowd’ is only somewhat of an exaggeration. Dean counts eight familiar faces, all of them smiling, eyes lit up with life, beers in-hand. 

Jody, Alex, Claire, Donna, Kaia, Bobby, Eileen—even Charlie. And not alternate-universe Charlie either. This one has the same short hair and goofy graphic tee shirt with a clown on it that… That his Charlie did when he found her gored and bloody in that motel bathtub all those years ago. 

“Hey, there he is! The man of the hour,” Jody says cheerily, striding right over to wrap him up in a hug. 

Dean is properly thrown off his axis, tilted completely over on his head, but he still manages to rally enough to reciprocate the hug with a smile and some kind words. Everyone’s lined up single-file to get hugs and greetings of their own from him. One after another—Claire, then Alex, then Donna, then Eileen, then Kaia, then Bobby (apocalypse world Bobby, but still—he’s good people), and finally… 

“It’s been a while, huh?” Charlie’s looking up at him with all the same sunniness she once radiated, though her smile’s tinged faintly with uncertainty, almost like she doesn’t know if Dean’s mad at her. 

And genuinely, for the life of him, Dean can’t imagine why she’d ever think he would be, but then he remembers how things were left between them five years ago—when Dean found out Sam had been lying to him about burning The Book of the Damned and had enlisted Charlie’s help to decode it, swearing her to secrecy. 

The last thing Charlie knew about Dean before she was murdered was that he absolutely, under no circumstance, wanted her anywhere near that book. No doubt, with her being as wickedly smart as she is, she knew just how pissed off he was when he learned the truth. 

Dean feels like he’s lived a million lifetimes since then. In a way, it almost feels too distant to be worth dredging back up from the depths of his memory. Especially since Charlie is standing here, in the flesh, right in front of him. What’s the point in rehashing all that grief that’s long been buried when she’s right here now? 

“C’mere,” he says, grinning so brightly that his cheeks ache with it and reaching out to tug her into a snug embrace. God, she smells just like she used to as well. All warm apples and cinnamon like Dean’s favorite pie. 

She smells like home. And though there’s a heaviness to his heart he doesn’t think will ever go away—hardened iron inhabiting the space he’s always kept reserved for ocean-blue eyes and Heaven-forsaking loyalty and companionship beyond the bounds of any other—he thinks… He can breathe a little easier. See a bit of light in the gloom, if only just a speck. 

“You’re not—?” 

“No, kiddo,” Dean says before Charlie can finish her question, because he already knows what she was about to ask. “Never. It wasn’t your fault. You were just trying to help me. It’s okay.” 

He feels her nod against his chest, presses a kiss to her hair. When they pull apart, her eyes are misty, and Dean’s just letting his own tears flow free. Fuck it— he deserves a chick-flick moment as a treat after everything it’s taken to get here. Although, he can’t say he’s un grateful that it seems everyone else has returned to their spirited conversations; he’d rather not have a legitimate audience to this. 

Honestly—what a picture he must make. Dead-guy robe, fuzzy slippers, disastrous bedhead, facial hair a few days past due for a shave, fucking tears and snot leaking out of his face. Jesus Christ… 

To preserve at least a shred of his dignity, he does take care to wipe his nose before it verges on genuinely gross territory. 

“So, uh—” he clears his throat, sniffs wetly— “it’s my understanding you may have met Jack?” 

“Oh, yeah! Golden retriever-looking boy with the Bieber hair? He brought all of us here.” 

Despite himself, Dean huffs a laugh at that. “Yep, that’s him.” 

“He popped into my Heaven out of nowhere and asked if I wanted to see you guys again. And you have no idea how happy I was to hear that, because, just between you and me, Heaven was getting pretty boring. I mean—there are only so many times I can relive the first day we all LARPed together before it starts to feel hella stale.” 

Dean’s frowning again. He doesn’t mean to be. Charlie seems perfectly content with her choice, but… He didn’t consider before that her being here means she had to leave Heaven. A place that he thinks Jack probably had plans to improve. She might not have had to relive the same memories for very much longer anyway. 

“Dude—” Charlie lays a friendly punch to his arm, a playful but clearly reprimanding glint in her eyes— “don’t go all sad and sulky on me now. I can practically see you preparing to self-flagellate in there.” 

“Sorry…”

“In case you didn’t notice, my death was pretty freakin’ untimely. I had a lot more living I wanted to do. And I wanted to do it with you and Sam. This is a win-win, Dean!” 

Dean has a few arguments he could voice to that, but he’s almost certain they fall under the category of self-flagellation, so he elects to dismiss them. 

Letting a small smile ease back onto his face, he asks, “so if Jack brought everyone here, where is he now?” 

“Hmm, don’t know.” Charlie shrugs. “He disappeared a bit ago. Said something about, uh… ‘The Empty,’ was it? I’m not entirely sure, so don’t shoot the messenger.” 

Dean’s leaden heart—heavy with iron and grief and loathing and resentment—promptly drops out of his ass, his mind tumbling over itself until it screeches to a halt. It feels like he winds up gawking at Charlie for an eternity, but in reality, only a second or two must’ve passed, because she’s carrying on like she hadn’t just upended Dean’s very carefully-constructed calm affect. 

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know where Castiel is, would you? I feel like I owe the poor guy an apology for running out on him and getting myself killed on his watch.” 

Dean’s head is filled with nothing but white noise, static, blankness. His vision tunnels around the edges. He may have even stopped breathing. 

Castiel, Castiel, Castiel… The only thing that rings clearly through the unstructured noise. 

Dean’s been avoiding the topic, ever since Sam found him cried-dry on the dungeon floor. A few times, Sam tried to bring it up, and Dean shot it down immediately each time. Not like Sam’s concerned glances full of pity were much of an improvement, but Dean has been taking solace in not having to acknowledge, explicitly and out-loud, that Cas is gone. 

He could keep it to himself, hoard it as the only one who remembers. The only one who saw… 

Cas died for him. And it ain’t the fucking first time, but it was pretty damn set in stone that this time was the last and final. Cas knew it would be; that’s why he let it all go, aired everything out for Dean to see the one and only time he’d ever get the chance to. 

And Dean—he just stood there. Cas went and laid everything bare just to get nothing from Dean in return, and then he fucking died. 

Cas dying has always been a thing that hits Dean hard. He drinks, he kills things to take the edge off, he isolates himself, he stops taking care of himself and his space. He knows it. Sam knows it. Anyone with eyes and half a brain cell's-worth of deductive reasoning knows it. 

But what the fuck is he supposed to do with himself this time? It was hard enough before, when Cas was this untouchable, celestial presence beyond human comprehension—a thing so other that Dean could rationalize his lack of personal boundaries, unyielding shows of faith in the Righteous Man who quite literally broke everything, and constant self-sacrifice in the name of Winchester as nothing more than the steadfast nature of an angel. A servant without a worthy god to kneel before so he found the next best thing: the human embodiment of an audacious middle finger to God Himself. 

Dean couldn’t have been more wrong. He knows that now. He knew it the second those three dreadful words drifted off of Cas’ quivering, tear-stained lips. 

He’s left to pick up the pieces like all the times before, only now… 

He’s also left with the worst fucking question that anyone who’s just experienced a most profound loss can possibly be stuck pondering:

What if…?  

What if Dean hadn’t allowed himself to fall victim so easily to this false idea of Cas’ otherness? How different would things have been between them? Where would they have wound up together? 

What if Dean hadn’t just stood there as Cas was swallowed whole by unearthly darkness and taken away forever? Could he have jumped in after him? Would he have jumped in after him, knowing what it was, once and for all, that Cas truly felt for him? 

What if Dean had fucking said something? Beyond just a fruitless plea for Cas to not let himself be taken. Said he loves Cas back, better yet? Let Cas go knowing his devotion wasn’t as one-sided as it seemed? Given him the knowledge that, if things had gone just a little differently, his ‘true happiness’ wouldn’t have been nearly as unattainable as he thought? Would the ensuing despair of realizing he was going to die just in time for Dean Winchester to wake the fuck up and reciprocate marr his pathetic excuse for a moment of true happiness badly enough to make the Empty retreat altogether and spare him for another day? 

Dean will never know. Because when Cas was lying at his feet, stripped of all his parts that made him seem so other and professing emotions only one imbued with the spirit of humanity could express, Dean just stood there. And said nothing worth hearing. 

There’s no coming back from that. No reconciling. He may as well have let Cas die all alone, and he will never, ever forgive himself for that—

Wait. 

He’s spiraling. 

He’s losing himself in tidal wave after tidal wave of Cas-related regret at the mere mention of his name, but he’s almost entirely skipped over the part where Charlie said Jack had ventured off to the Empty. 

There’s… There’s only one reason he’d do that, right? 

…Right? 

Slowly, he wrestles himself out of his cavernous pit of misery, and again, time must’ve been warped in his mindscape, because Charlie only looks mildly worried when he comes to. Something tells him she’d be a hell of a lot more horrified if he’d retreated inward for as long as it felt like he did. 

“Dean, you okay?” Charlie’s got her hand on his shoulder now, a cautious grip. “Did I say something wrong?” 

“Um—I, uh…” Super eloquent. He can’t be blamed, though. It feels like he’s operating with only a third of a brain, the rest scattered on the floor in a million withered chunks. 

Saved by the bell—rescued from having to say aloud what he’s been vehemently avoiding saying aloud since the day it happened—something like a hearty gust of air breezes through the kitchen, accompanied by an oh-so familiar sound that makes shivers crawl up his spine and goosebumps erupt all over his skin. 

A great beat of wings. The subtle whistle of air curving around long, sturdy feathers. 

Something that Dean came to realize about angels after over ten years of knowing their existence is that each one’s wings sound different in flight. Most wouldn’t notice, he doesn’t think. Call him a paranoid fucker, but the last thing he’d ever wanted was to be skewered on the end of an angel blade just because he mistook a fluttering wing chorus behind him as belonging to Cas. 

Every angel’s wings make unique sounds. Gabriel’s sounded smooth, languid, like knives through butter. Michael’s sounded loud, grand, like a thunder clap announcing the presence of a hurricane. Balthazar’s sounded with a hint of chaos, like a plastic garden pinwheel in a windstorm. 

And Cas…

Cas’ wings sounded like the powerful crash of ocean waves on a shoreline, strong, fierce, but yielding in the absence of the force of wind. Sometimes, maybe more often than not after he truly began to sever ties with Heaven, his wings sounded less like the powerful crash of a wave and more like the gentle lap of water by a quiet pier. Notes of calm. Notes of liberty. 

Dean hasn’t heard Cas’ wings in years, and yet, just now, the sound of them was truly undeniable. 

The room has gone hauntingly quiet, and as Dean scans his gaze over his congregation of friends, he sees that everyone’s either staring at him or something behind him. 

At some point between the moment Charlie mentioned Cas’ name and when he checked back into the here-and-now, Dean’s heart had found its way back to its rightful place in his chest, and it’s stuttering and pounding violently. His ears roar with the rush of blood in the silence, breaths coming short and trembling. 

Gulping down the sudden lump that’d formed in his throat, he turns toward the kitchen entryway. 

And there, standing beside a very pleased-looking Jack, is Cas—trenchcoat, tie, and all. Not a scratch on him. Not a hair out of place. His vessel might even look a touch younger… Full of life just like everyone else in the room. He’s juiced-up, too, if his wings have been restored. 

Contentment is etched into his features, complete with a peaceful little upward curl of full lips. “Hello, Dean,” he says, voice pitched low like it always ever has been, but softened around the gravelly edges, as though the utterance is a secret only for Dean to hear. 

For an embarrassing amount of time, he’s sure, Dean makes the same damn mistake he did before—he just stands there, feet rooted to the ground, staring, not saying a word. His thoughts spin up into a torrential vortex, racing by at a million miles a second. 

Cas died.

Cas sacrificed himself.

Cas left Dean all alone with a confession neither of them would ever be able to act on or reconcile with—because Cas fucking died. 

Cas didn’t know what his true happiness could look like because the one thing he ever wholeheartedly wanted was something he ‘knew he couldn’t have.’ 

Cas told Dean he loved him, and that’s when the Empty came to take him away. 

Cas’ moment of true happiness was getting to tell Dean he loved him and simply letting himself feel it, because he knew it was the only time he’d ever have the privilege to. 

Now—Cas is back. 

Cas is here.

Cas is alive. 

And suddenly Dean is saddled with a whole other kind of weight in his heart. A metric ton of uncertainty and nerves, because…

While Cas was wrong for thinking what he wanted was something he couldn’t have in almost every way, Dean doesn’t know if he was right in the one really important way that matters. 

Cas is back, and Dean knows less about what to do with himself now than he did when Cas was dead. 

“Uh, Dean?” Charlie shakes his shoulder lightly, once again reeling him out of his cesspool of a mind. “I think I speak for everyone when I say: am I missing something here?” 

Dean’s so fucking out of it. Truly. He glances around the room, and everyone looks about as confused as Charlie sounds. The only person who doesn’t is Sam; of course, that’s because he’s also the only person in attendance other than Dean who’s aware that Cas had died. He’s just standing off in a corner with Eileen and watching Dean like he fucking knows the wretched streams of consciousness flowing through his head. 

He probably does. 

“Um,” Dean manages finally, “I’ll fill you in later. Just…” He trails off, resetting his gaze on Cas. 

The angel’s eyes are patient, forgiving. No one knows Dean better than the man who quite literally dragged his ass out of Hell and stitched him back together atom-by-atom, cell-by-cell, limb-by-limb. There’s always been an ever-present awareness of that fact in the back of Dean’s mind; there are things Cas knows about him that even Sam doesn’t… Things especially Sam doesn’t. 

That’s why Cas doesn’t look the least bit puzzled or hurt or annoyed by Dean’s present state of paralysis. He knows better than anyone how words like the ones he’d used his final breaths to speak freely would affect the likes of Dean Winchester. 

Self-loathing, self-effacing, self-reproaching, self-denying of any and all things good—Dean Winchester. 

He knows that Dean’s go-to strategy for processing those words in Cas’ absence would’ve been to avoid processing them at all, and he’d largely get away with it too. 

But in Cas’ presence, Dean is instead forced to reckon with what he’d been told, and that sort of thing just ain’t in his fucked-up nature. That, Cas understands flawlessly. 

That is why Cas waits. 

Waits for Dean to come to him. The olive branch of his resurrection has been extended; all Dean has to do is grab hold of it. 

Easier said than done, but beyond all the abject muck of wariness and incertitude and doubt, there lies a plain and simple truth that reigns supreme over everything else: Cas is his best fucking friend. His closest confidant besides Sam—in some ways more-so than Sam. This is exactly what Dean wanted, and his heart is fucking soaring with it. Certainly enough, once Dean takes stock of it, that it finally kicks his ass into gear. 

He bids his feet to carry him across the distance between them and, not a single word spoken, falls into Cas’ arms, latching on tight, face buried against his shoulder. Cas is warm, and solid, and alive, and Dean soaks—no, breathes it in with all the greed of the deadly sin itself. 

Their surroundings seem to fade around them. For just this one moment, suspended in stillness and serenity Dean doesn’t think he’s ever felt before in his life, it’s only them. Him and Cas, Cas and him, both alive and kicking because of and in spite of each other.

Already, things feel different; Cas is hugging him back with a certain tenderness he didn’t used to, like Dean’s something truly precious, and make no mistake—it scares Dean shitless. In fact, he’s bound to do something exceptionally stupid about it within the next several hours. But for now, he’s just happy Cas is here to hug him at all. 

Cas is the first to pull away, which actually takes Dean by surprise. Call him crazy, but he’d think a guy who just confessed his undying love would be a little more reluctant to put any kind of distance between himself and the object of his affections (no, Dean is absolutely not put out by this—shut up). 

Nevertheless, Dean tries not to let his surprise—or his completely confounding urge to pout like a toddler—show on his face. Not when he has a new batch of tears brewing as it is; there’s only a fixed amount of pathetic he’s willing to look. 

Apparently, they stay peering at each other like that—some inches apart, off in their own universe—long enough that the rest of the room grows tired of involuntarily being made spectators at the world championship of staring contests. 

Claire’s the one to break the silence. 

“Okay, seriously, guys—what is this? I feel like I’m watching a scene right out of a corny Hallmark movie.” 

Mutterings of agreement among the others do wonders to clue Dean into just how fucking weird he’s being about all of this. Stiffly, he takes a step back, ducking his head and rubbing self-consciously at the back of his neck. 

All the while, Cas’ brows knit with confusion as he studies the kitchen’s occupants. “I take it you didn’t tell them?” 

“Uh…” Dean shakes his head, coughing awkwardly in a poor attempt to veil the strain in his voice as he admits, “no. Sam and Jack are the only others who know.” And even then, they don’t know the whole story. 

Although, Jack’s all omniscient now. There’s a potential that he knows the whole story without ever having to be told. 

The thought makes Dean’s skin itch… 

Also— fuck. Jack. Dean owes that kid a huge apology and the world’s greatest fishing trip after this. His internal monologue has been terribly unkind to the new God, and that’s putting it lightly. 

“Ah. I see.” Cas nods in understanding, then, in trademark Cas-fashion, he bluntly announces to the room, “I was briefly dead after sacrificing myself to the Empty to save Dean from Billy.” 

And aside from the ‘I was briefly dead’ part, everything about what he just said clearly flies straight over everyone’s heads, earning him a handful of blank stares and a few tipsy shrugs of acceptance. 

Dean supposes he can just be thankful that Cas had omitted some of the most key details of how his death came to be. The last thing he needs—while he’s busy teetering on the fence between cruel, existential panic and the urge to dive headfirst into uncharted waters and see if he has any chance of learning how to swim re: Cas loving him—is for everyone else around him to perceive him before he gets the chance to perceive himself. And he means really perceive himself—shuck away all the layers of shame and self-hatred to determine if he sees even a shadow of what Cas sees in him. 

From there, everyone resumes their jovial chats. Sam comes over to hug Cas, praise Jack for a job well-done; he offers Jack a beer, but he turns it down. Dean expects his reasoning to be that he has to leave and do God things, but instead, shockingly, he peels off to socialize with the others. 

Dean makes a mental note to catch him later, if for no other reason than to get a better understanding of his intentions, since it’s become obvious that Dean totally misinterpreted what Jack had said before he left earlier. 

That, or… Maybe Jack really did hear all those vile things Dean was thinking about him, and this is his way of asking forgiveness… 

Yikes. 

Dean reduces himself to a wallflower for a bit, eyes following Cas as he moves about the kitchen, greets Charlie, briefly becomes fascinated by the dog… Eventually he gets wrapped up in a discussion with Claire, though Dean can’t quite piece together the content of it; all he knows is that, whatever it is, it has them leaning in toward each other all hush-hush-like and tossing occasional glances Dean’s away, which is more than a little unnerving.

“So…” Charlie sidles up to him, offering over a beer. 

Dean accepts it, but it’s mostly just a prop in his hand. He doesn’t think having alcohol swimming around in his veins will do him any favors in his futile efforts to decode Cas and Claire’s suspicious conversation from across the room. 

“Care to share why Castiel coming back from the dead is making you way more squirrelly than any of the eight other people here who also came back from the dead?” 

Dean’s body goes wire-taut with dread. Charlie’s too fucking discerning for him to successfully skate past this without disclosing anything. She’d back off if he asked her to, but… There’s some nebulous part of him that feels like she might just be the exact right person to talk to about this. 

Not that Dean has any intention of spilling the beans entirely. But he can afford to give an inch. For her, and her only.

“Cas said some things,” he concedes quietly. “Before he died, he… Made me realize I miscalculated some pretty big shit about him.” He shrugs faintly, casting his gaze down to his feet. “Practically beat me over the head with how fucking stupid I’ve been.” 

Charlie hums and nudges his side lightheartedly. “Something tells me that wasn’t his intention,” she says. “You have a totally infuriating knack for coloring things with all your self-punishing markers.” 

Dean can’t help but snort at that. Well, he thinks, that’s certainly an inventive way of putting it. He takes a sizable swig of his beer, having given up on trying to eavesdrop on Cas and Claire altogether. 

“Tell me if I’m flying a little too close to the sun here,” Charlie begins carefully, and though Dean doesn’t much like the sound of that, he nods for her to continue. “It’s just… You know I read all the Supernatural books, even the unpublished ones—” 

The scowl that twists up Dean’s face is entirely visceral. Those damn books are a constant reminder of how Chuck puppeteered his and Sam’s lives, played with them like they were inanimate dolls in a fantasy land. He has half a mind to cut Charlie off right then and there, but he ultimately settles to endure it, mostly for curiosity’s sake because he can’t imagine what the hell the books have to do with him and his emotional constipation regarding Cas. 

“—and at risk of poking a very grumpy bear, I’m gonna say there’s a reason I made a point of calling Cas ‘helpful and dreamy’ when you took me to buy boring fed clothes at the mall, and it wasn’t exactly for my benefit considering he’s a dude. Or… Vaguely adjacent to one, I guess. Wait—do angels even have a gender—?”

“Charlie.” 

She stops, blinks at him, and Dean must look especially bewildered at her ramblings if her sheepish grin is any indication. “Yeah?” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” His face is hot— shit, is he actually blushing? Dean fucking Winchester does not blush. 

“I’m just saying…” Charlie breathes a sigh and takes a couple seconds to re-center herself. “Same recognizes same, Dean. Technically, I didn’t need the books to clock it; you were a little too good at helping me flirt my way past that security guard way back when we met. But the books definitely solidified it with all the… Everything between you and Cas. Oh, and also—” 

“Alright!” Dean grits out hastily, pinching the bridge of his nose and trying for some deep breaths before he does something dramatic like scream or spontaneously combust out of sheer mortification. “Yeah, kiddo, I’d say you’ve actually flung yourself into the sun on this one.” 

This is precisely what he was afraid of. He’s being perceived. He’s not ready to be perceived. Not like this. And what’s worse is that it’s the fucking books that aided in him being so nakedly perceived. 

Maybe it was a mistake leaving Chuck alive after all. Dean would quite like to have a go at him right about now. 

“Right. Sorry. I should’ve known that would light a fuse.” 

“It’s fine,” Dean mumbles, lifting the cold bottle of beer up to his cheek in the hopes that it’d calm the flush blooming under his skin. Against his better judgment, he looks over to where he last saw Cas and Claire conspiring, only to find Claire has run off somewhere with Kaia, and Cas is now doing that thing where he just… Quietly observes Dean from afar, like he’s some wildlife documenter studying a rare, exotic animal. 

It’s been a long time since Dean’s let that particular quirk of Cas’ get under his skin, but given that Charlie just recited a five-paragraph essay complete with supporting evidence and a thesis statement on the utterly non-platonic tension between him and Cas, Dean’s a little fucking ruffled about being stared at. 

“Hey, Dean?” Charlie says after some time. She sounds softer now, more solemn. 

Dean coaches himself through another deep breath and meets her large, doe-eyes. “Hmm?” 

“I understand all of this is a lot to handle, and you’ll probably need a lot of time to orient yourself, but… I just wanted to let you know that I’m always happy to talk if you need to,” she tells him. “I’ll always be your number-one fan, and your biggest supporter.” 

The choice of words is extremely deliberate. Dean can tell. And while it does make him feel spotlit and perceived all over again, he can’t possibly bring himself to be upset about it. Charlie’s probably the single most compassionate and empathetic person Dean knows. If he’s truthful with himself—and he’s going to have to be if any headway on the Cas front is going to be made—he’ll need someone other than himself to turn to as he attempts to navigate this. 

It can’t be Sam. At least, not right away. Dean has his reasons, and a whole lot of them have to do with the fact that he practically raised the kid. It ain’t Sam’s responsibility to pave the path for him. Especially not this path. 

Cas will inevitably be a part of it, because duh. But Dean needs someone on the outside to keep his perspective fresh and clear. 

If Bobby were his Bobby, maybe. But, as much as Dean’s come to enjoy apocalypse world Bobby’s company, he’s unequivocally not the man who took up the mantle of being his father when John failed at it. This Bobby doesn’t know him like that. It is what it is. 

Jody and Donna are great, but they’re more like… Second cousins to him. Family, for sure, but too distant for them to lend a helping hand in as arduous a task as detangling the messy threads of his comically damaged psyche. 

Dean likes Eileen a lot, but she’s way too close to Sam. She might snitch. 

As for the rest of them—Claire, Alex, Kaia, and Jack—they’re effectively his kids. Ain’t nothing trashier than a parent dumping his baggage on his kids. 

Charlie is the one and only person that makes sense for this. She knows him well— definitely too well, but that’s neither here nor there. She tells things like they are; she won’t sugarcoat shit that ought to be told to him straight. And in every way except by blood, she is Dean’s sister. 

So, regardless of his present discomfort and reflexive resistance to entertain this subject, he gives just one more inch. 

“I know,” he says. “But just between you and me: I’m not afraid of going unsupported in the way you might think. I’m too damn old and tired for something like that to stop me.” 

Charlie makes a thoughtful little noise, the faintest frown bowing her lips. “But you’re afraid of something else?” 

Dean gives a subtle nod, takes another swig of beer, pauses a second to organize his mess of thoughts. 

Yeah, he’s afraid of something else. A lot of somethings else. 

He’s afraid of popping the lock on the box he told himself he’d never open again over twenty years ago—the box that contains, at this point in his life, one of the most neglected facets of his being. Even deeper down, he’s afraid of the fact that he’ll actually have to communicate why it was locked up in the first place, because God knows Cas can be a dense motherfucker sometimes, and Dean won’t be able to get away with conveying his hangups in the form of vague allusions and hand-wavy metaphors. 

He’s afraid of the possibility he might drown instead of learning how to swim; he doesn’t know the first thing about being with an angel. About transitioning from friends and buddies in arms to… Whatever the fuck it is ‘Cas and him’ would be.

He’s afraid of letting himself legitimately feel for Cas what he’s willing to secretly admit he’s always known he felt; his polluted ocean of repression is fed by more than one shit-river, and frankly, he’s not looking forward to the humiliating ordeal of confessing that Cas’ whiplash between present and absent over the years sure as shit didn’t help any with Dean’s laughably fucked relationship with the concept of attachment. 

But most of all… 

“I just don’t wanna lose my best friend.”

Cas went and made things between them so, unbelievably complicated, and Dean’s not ever going to blame him for that—not when him doing so saved his life. But the reality of the matter is that complicated almost never bodes well for any kind of relationship, platonic, familial, or otherwise. 

“You won’t,” says Charlie, sending a dazzling, reassuring smile his way. 

And she sounds so sure, so confident, that Dean has no choice but to trust her intuition. He lets the unsettled tension bleed out of his neck and shoulders, managing a smile of his own. 

“Okay,” he says, offering his beer out for a cheers, which she gladly indulges, bottles clinking together. 

When Dean looks across the way again, Cas is engaged in enthusiastic conversation with Sam and Eileen, though his gaze still drifts occasionally toward Dean. Watching. Waiting. Patient. 

Something strange and warm and fluttery stirs in Dean’s gut; naturally, he washes the sensation down with the rest of his beer—

And then five more for good measure, plus a complimentary glass of whiskey because seeing straight is for losers, actually. 

He’s so fucking screwed.

『✯』

Over the next several hours, guests filter out of the kitchen to either find an empty room to crash in or hit the road to locate a nearby motel. 

Dean is decently drunk for most of it, but he’s still perfectly capable of holding conversations and sharing laughs. He does mean to make his way to Jack at some point, though he supposes it’s for the best that Jack left before he could; amber-sloshed veins don’t exactly make for good expressions of gratitude or proper apologies. Sam’s assured him that he’ll get his chance to talk to Jack, sober, soon enough; apparently the kid’s decided to be a little less ‘fart in the wind’ and more family-oriented than he’d originally said he would be. Dean’s sure the change of heart didn’t come about for no reason… 

Eventually, Sam and Eileen take their leave, but not before Sam pulls Dean aside to ask if he’s alright. 

“You’re pretty drunk, and I’m not entirely sure it’s just because you’re celebrating.” 

Dean waves him off in his typical taciturn fashion and insists he’s fine, because, in a lot of ways, he is. Certainly better than he was. He just also happens to be internally floundering over Cas, which has never been a particularly rare occurrence for him. Can a man not multitask anymore? Jeez. 

Charlie takes Sam and Eileen’s departure from the kitchen as her cue to head out as well, and once she’s laid a friendly hand on Dean’s shoulder and given him a wordless wink of encouragement, she’s gone, leaving just Cas and Dean. Even the dog has vacated the premises. 

It’s only then that Dean realizes he hasn’t said a single fucking word to Cas since he hugged him hours ago. Nevermind the fact that the words he has said to Cas were wholly empty and meaningless. 

Suddenly, he thinks being drunk right now is an enormous mistake. The smart thing would be to tell Cas he’s open to talking, just with a blood-alcohol level approximately 0.15 less than it is at the moment, and go sleep off his stupor. But some of the stupidest shit Dean’s ever done has been related to Cas in the past (see ‘tearing through Purgatory like a bat out of Hell for a whole year searching for The Angel even though he had a perfectly viable escape plan in place within days of his stay’ on page-whatever); no reason to start righting wrong habits now. 

So he pours himself another glass of whiskey, slumps down at the kitchen table, and peers hazily into Cas’ eyes where he’s sat just opposite of him. Nothing can possibly go wrong. 

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says cordially. The expression on his face is pleasant, if not a little unrevealing. 

“Hey, Cas.” Dean takes a slow sip of his whiskey, waiting until it’s slid fully down his throat before he continues on conversationally, “so you got your wings back, huh?” 

“Yes. Jack has restored the wings of all the remaining angels. He said it was inconvenient for us to have to use the one gate on Earth to travel to and from Heaven. At my request, he also allowed us to taste food as humans do.” 

Dean snorts into his glass as he goes for another sip. “You missed microwavable convenience store burritos that much?” 

“No. I missed PB&Js that much,” Cas says, completely earnest. 

Dean hums, amused but also grossly fond in a way he’d never ordinarily let slip into his demeanor. “Well, I guess that means I’ll have to cook you up something nice sometime.” 

He’s too drunk to notice it now, but later, he’ll come to understand just how flirty that sounded. 

Cas tilts his head, eyes narrowing slightly like he’s trying to solve a complex math equation, but he doesn’t comment on Dean’s proclamation. 

There’s something about the way Cas is looking at him, though… As if he’s still watching, waiting—waiting for Dean. And Dean’s drunk, but he ain’t that drunk. He knows exactly what Cas is waiting on. That’s why he’s stalling with all this small-talk. Clearly, Dean prefers his bandaids ripped off agonizingly slow, pulling hair-by-hair. 

It’s not his fault Cas fell in love with the world’s most absurdly damaged man. 

… 

Ah, fuck. Now Dean’s thinking about it. Like, really thinking about it. It’s sat its fat ass so close in front of him that he can barely see around it; matter of fact, it may as well be sitting on his face. 

Right— first order of business…

He knocks back the rest of his whiskey, pours himself some more, gulps it down. Feels it burn along its descent. Better. 

“How’d Jack bust you out of the Empty?” he asks, and it suddenly takes a monumental amount of effort to keep his words from running together incoherently. “You made a deal with it, and the damn thing’s not exactly your biggest fan. Or Jack’s.” 

You made a deal with it. Yes, a deal to be taken away in a moment of true happiness. And somehow, by some sick trick of fate, Cas telling Dean he loved him managed to qualify. It’s actually a little pathetic if Dean thinks about it; was Cas’ life truly so miserable that confessing his love was ‘true happiness’ to him? Maybe if Cas loved someone worth the trouble, it would make more sense. 

Jesus. Dean thought he had at least a few more drinks left in the bank before he’d land himself squarely in pity-party territory. This is shaping up to be a bigger mess than he bargained for. He should probably abort mission before catastrophe strikes. But his inhibitions have fucked off to Timbuktu, and Cas is sitting right here all alive and shit, and Dean’s missed him so goddamn much that gleefully jumping on this particular sword and dealing with the fallout later is starting to look like a sound investment. 

Cas is in the middle of explaining his grand escape from the Empty—something about Jack refusing to let it sleep and annoying the shit out of it so much that it agreed to spit Cas back out if they agreed never to bother it again—but Dean is hardly paying any damn attention. 

Warmth and floatiness and something saccharine sweet stirs through him, slow and smooth like honey—sentimentality, reminiscence, adoration, what-have-you. It’s there. Working all the way up from the ends of his toes to the tip of his tongue and finally spilling off his lips: 

“I’m so fucking in love with you, Cas.” 

That renders Cas eerily silent, stock-still, and gawking.

Okay, yeah, the execution was a little off and Dean could’ve at least waited until Cas was done talking, and—

Hold up. Did… Did Dean really just say he’s in love with Cas? To his face? Right this very second? 

Shit. 

The momentary burst of clarity has every muscle fiber and nerve-ending in Dean’s body seizing up with panic. His heart clenches so tight in his chest it feels like it’s imploded in on itself, stomach rolling, ears and face flaming. 

Well, he jumped on that sword alright. It’s a lot less enticing when he’s impaled and bleeding out on it. 

Fuck, how does he walk this back? He was ready, at most, to acknowledge Cas’ feelings for him and lightly, lightly commit to exploring them at a later time. He wasn’t at all ready for this. He hasn’t even gotten around to perceiving himself yet. That was step fucking one, God damn it. 

Perceive self, see if self is worthy of angelic devotion, then throw self onto angel’s sword. 

What a shitshow you’ve put on, Winchester… 

“Dean—” 

“Don’t,” Dean cuts in, a frantic edge to his voice that even the alcohol can’t smooth out. He breathes a nervous, stilted chuckle, gluing his gaze on just about everything other than Cas. “You know what? Pretend you didn’t hear that, okay?” 

There’s a part of him that knows how cruel it is to ask such a thing of Cas, who has both openly expressed his love for Dean, and never once demonstrated, at any point in their many years of acquaintance, even the faintest acumen in the field of letting things go that he doesn’t immediately comprehend. But no one’s ever called Dean the smartest navigator of interpersonal failings. 

He’s really about to be in for it, isn’t he? 

“Why would I do that?” asks Cas, and he looks so painfully confused already. 

Yep. Here we go. Dean pours himself another drink. 

“Because I’m sincerely asking you to, man. That’s why.” Not that Dean thought that utter lack of an explanation would earn him a pass, but a man can dream, no? 

Predictably, Cas does not, in fact, give him a pass. What’s not predictable is the way in which he does not give Dean a pass. 

“You do understand there is no inherent shame in homosexuality, right?” 

If Dean were any more sober, he probably would’ve spluttered out some exclamation of bewilderment or another. Why is it everyone’s automatic assumption that that is what his hangup about all of this is? Cas has no excuse to be that obtuse; the dude’s literally seen into Dean’s soul. Surely he knows that nothing about Dean’s propensity for shame is that shallow. That skin-deep. 

As it stands, however, Dean is too jelly-limbed and mush-brained to feel anything beyond exasperation as he anticipates this discussion spinning farther and farther down the drain with every word exchanged. 

All he does is drink, answer, “yeah, Cas. I know,” and mentally strap in for the ride. 

“Humans simply branded it a sin in God’s name because of one unfortunate mistranslation of scripture,” Cas adds matter-of-factly.

“I know.” 

“Actually, I’ve always found it curious how humans could have ever arrived at the conclusion that God would care about such a thing.” Wow, yep, and Cas is still talking about this— Jesus Christ. “He didn’t even care enough to maintain His post as arbiter of this world, or any of his worlds, for that matter.” 

“Most people don’t know God fucked off, Cas.”

“Yes, but that still begs the question of how they believe they could ever speak on behalf of an all-powerful being with any meaningful accuracy.” 

“S’called faith. And it’s poisonous. We know this. You, especially.” Damn, this drain is deep. The conversation’s still spinning downward. Dean can’t help but feel like he’s lost the plot on what the fuck they were talking about it in the first place. 

He takes another drink; maybe it’ll trigger a space-time paradox that’ll make this conversation make sense again. 

“Is that why you struggle to accept this part of yourself? You’ve been poisoned by others’ faith?” 

Ah. Right. That’s what they were talking about. 

This time, Dean really does splutter in bewilderment. “What? No. Cas, just—”

“Then what is it?” 

Dean had absolutely no intention going into this to even remotely touch on the ‘why’ of anything pertaining to his forcibly subdued feelings surrounding Cas, but at this point, if it gets the guy to shut up about it, Dean is very much drunk enough to say it and regret it later. 

With a curt sigh, digging his fingertips into his temples, he says, “you’re just—a dude, okay?” 

Makes perfect sense to Dean, but Cas is the type to need an entire dissertation’s-worth of elaboration and context to grasp shit like this. So, evidently, Cas does not shut up about it like Dean hoped he would. 

“I’m not following.” He squints at Dean incredulously. 

“‘Course you’re not,” Dean mutters under his breath, then inhales deeply. “Look, man—you think maybe this can wait until I have my head screwed on straight and I’m actually capable of making sense of things?” 

He expects Cas to yield; he usually does, albeit reluctantly, when a discussion reaches an impasse like this and he’s asked to back off. 

But Cas clearly isn’t getting the memo here, seeming to have reached the wrong conclusion about Dean’s request and musing aloud, “so you’re ashamed because you can’t make sense of your attractions?” 

“I’m not—” Dean thumps his forehead down on the table in frustration; this is starting to feel a lot like torture. Cas hasn’t been this bad at reading cues in years. Then again, love makes people stupid, and Cas’ sacrificial confession at the shrine of Dean’s feet told him everything he needs to know about just how stupid in-love the poor bastard is. “I’m not ashamed, Cas. Not in the way you think.” 

There’s a pause of silence in which Dean thinks he’s finally, blessedly gotten through to Cas. 

Then Cas is fucking talking. Again. 

“You said I am a… ‘ Dude,’” says Cas, as if there’s any innate meaning to be derived from the comment. 

Dean would wonder what it is he did to deserve this torment, but that would be a waste of cognition. He has a boatload of misdeeds behind him to justify being on the ass-end of this hazing ritual. 

Officially lacking the energy to bother gleaning anything from Cas’ cryptics, he just makes a lazy gesture with his hand, forehead still firmly planted on the table, and prompts, “and?” 

“Well, if it helps in any way, I am technically a being that transcends the rigid bounds of human gender and sexuality. A ‘dude’ is simply my most accurate manifestation.”

“Not helping,” Dean grumbles. 

“My apologies.” 

“You’re fine, Cas. Just…” He huffs out a withered breath and heaves his head back up from the table, blinking the spinning effect out of his vision. “Please leave it be, alright?” 

“You really want me to move past the fact that you just outright admitted to harboring feelings for me?” Uh-oh. Cas is starting to sound a little more hurt than confused now. His voice is markedly softer when he adds, “to… Loving me?”

God, Dean knows—he knows— how much of a dick he’s being. He just does not have the capacity to handle this subject with the decorum it’s owed when he’s this drunk, this scattered, this afraid. So much so that he’s stuffed it all down and resorted to the only defense mechanism he’s ever known how to employ:

Pretending to not give a damn. 

Cas and that defense mechanism have always made the worst fucking combination… 

“Yes, Cas—okay? Yes.” He means only to sound tired, but a hint of snappishness joins the party, and it makes him wince remorsefully as a reflex. “Because I’m drunk, and that’s what you do when your drunk friend of many years says some nonsense out of nowhere. You forget it ever happened.” 

Cas’ eyes thin into a glare, lip twitching, and Dean immediately knows he’s royally fucked up. It happens before Dean’s drunk ass can even process it: Cas reaches across the table to touch two fingertips roughly to Dean’s forehead. 

And with all the force of a cannonball to the stomach, Dean is struck with sobriety. The hazy swimminess of his head blips out of existence, amber looseness torn from his limbs, warmth in his chest extinguished. It’s akin to getting startled awake by a bucket of ice water being chucked in his face. 

With all his inhibitions and sense of judgment back in order, Dean is aware now more than ever how little of a right he has to be mad, but God forbid the biblical Righteous Man express a little self- righteous indignation. 

“Cas, what the hell?” he demands, straightening up in his seat, bristling. 

“You are no longer drunk,” Cas says flatly. 

“Yeah, I can feel that. Why?” 

“So we can have this conversation without running the risk of you saying things you can easily write off as ‘nonsense.’” Cas is using air-quotes. He only does that when he’s ticked off. 

Dean lets out a miserable groan and drags his hands down his face. “Cas, man—come on. Why can’t you just let this go for now?” For now. See? He’s capable of extending olive branches too. ‘For now’ implies he’s open to talking about this later. 

Cas does not read it that way. “Because your daftness is infuriating me,” he accuses. 

Dean blinks at him. “My what-now?” he asks, effectively proving Cas’ point. 

“I’m calling you a dumbass, Dean. All dumb. All ass.” 

And Dean’s nothing if not audacious. He lifts his hands up in an expression of befuddlement and mild affront, as if he didn’t completely deserve the callout. 

“When I came back, I didn’t…” Cas pauses to take a self-composing breath, averting his gaze as he appears to search for the right words in thin air. Once he’s found the will to look Dean in the eyes again, whatever irritation was written into the features of his face has bled away, and now he looks nothing short of imploring. “I never expected you to share my feelings, Dean. Like I said during our confrontation with Billy, I understood that what I wanted was something I knew I couldn’t have; I told you how I felt in spite of knowing that, because I was finally content in my privilege to feel what I did for you at all—an angel blessed with the honor of experiencing what it means to love another. I had made my peace with unrequitement as my final act of defiance in this world. So when I arrived back here, I was fully prepared to be your friend as I always have been. I was happy to be. But then…” 

Dean holds his breath, an unmoving statue before his angel yet again. Suddenly he feels like he’s right back in that dungeon, useless and worthless and hollow in the face of his most cherished friend’s imminent demise. 

Cas doesn’t complete his original thought. Instead, he shakes his head as if to rid himself of whatever it is he was going to say with a deep furrow in his brow. “I know how it must have felt for you—hearing your best friend of many years who, in every way that matters to a human, is male, confessing to having romantic feelings for you. I never would’ve said anything if the circumstances hadn’t demanded it.” 

Just like when Dean was thoroughly trashed, he feels lost. He finds himself unable to infer where Cas is taking this. A minute ago, he was calling Dean a dumbass, pretty visibly upset and hurt by his foolishness. Now it almost feels like he’s apologizing to Dean. 

“I was waiting for you to come to me if and when you felt ready, and I expected you’d simply want to move past my confession and remain friends.” Cas presses his tongue into the inside of his cheek, gaze growing intensely distant in the beat of silence that dangles between them. “That would’ve hurt infinitely less than what you just did.”

Oh. 

Fucking ow… Dean’s heart promptly tumbles right out of his chest and crumbles to ash on the floor, icy guilt flooding his veins.

He’s so used to Cas’ unearthly ability to compartmentalize and move forward when emotions run high; maybe, shamefully, Dean’s taken advantage of it quite a few times in the past to avoid having to confront his own problems. 

Right here, right now? Cas isn’t compartmentalizing jack shit. He’s not allowing Dean to be a dick and get off scot-free.

“Do you have any idea how it feels, Dean? To watch you drink yourself stupid like you can no longer hold a regular conversation with me otherwise and hear you say something that I never thought possible—something I would’ve sacrificed myself a million times over for if I’d known it would earn me the right to hear it—only for you to immediately dismiss it as nothing more than drunken nonsense? As if it carries no weight? As if you can simply stuff it back in a box and pretend it no longer exists when the whiskey clears out? I forgive what many would consider fatal flaws of yours, Dean, because I truly do see the loving person you are beyond them and believe they’re owed grace in their own right for the brutal ways in which they were instilled in you. But just this once, I’m asking you to see me. I’m asking you to consider: if the roles were reversed, would you be anywhere near as forgiving of me for doing such a thing to you?” 

Dean is stunned speechless—what’s new about that though, right?

What is new is Cas. An angel with a penchant for stuffing down his own emotions to get a job done or maintain fair rapport with the humans in his charge—not only resurrected but seemingly born anew. He’s not hiding anymore. He’s laying it all out on the table. Not just his unfortunate enamoration for the likes of Dean Winchester, but also, woven therein, the grievances he’s accrued against Dean but suffocated under a thick blanket of stoicism for years. 

I’m asking you to see me — a plea, as though Dean’s neglected to do exactly that since their inaugural meeting. If the roles were reversed, would you be anywhere near as forgiving of me for doing such a thing to you?— a presumption, as though Cas can’t fathom a fair trial from Dean for any misdoing. 

And what chills Dean down to the core, the marrow of his bones, is the epiphany that Cas is right about that. A slideshow of memories coast past his mind’s eye in a flash—every time Cas thought he was doing the right thing and he was met with nothing more than blame and vitriol from Dean, every time Cas made an honest mistake and Dean regarded him the same way his brothers and sisters did: as the sum total of his otherness. Too angel to be human, too human to be angel, never able to satisfy either side of the aisle. 

The one true time Dean ever let it be known, freely and earnestly, that he absolved Cas of something he did, it was in Purgatory, when they were searching for the Leviathan blossom, running out of time, and Dean fell to his knees and prayed that Castiel could hear his forgiveness. Even then, how could such a gesture make up for the decade preceding it, full of condemnation and little mercy in the face of well-intentioned errors. 

Dean’s fucked up more than anybody. He said ‘yes’ to Michael, he unwittingly started the Apocalypse, he accepted the damn Mark of Cain and left corpses of the innocent in his wake, he stopped Sam from closing the gates of Hell, he pushed Jack away, he pushed Cas away—the list is endless. Yet he was forgiven for all of it by the people he loves. Unconditionally. 

The same can’t be said for Cas, and that’s perhaps one of the biggest mistakes Dean’s ever made. Though Cas has been family in his eyes for years, Dean still allowed himself to fall into the trap of believing Cas was so far removed from humanity in nature that his mistakes seemed to come too often and with too great a consequence to befit the rigid pedestal of angelic perfection Dean had placed him upon. Dean, of all people—second only to Cas in the list of subjects that Heaven has made a mission of manipulating—should’ve known early on that there is no such thing as angelic perfection. Angels, like any creature, are flawed. 

Even now, as Dean really sits to think on it, he can’t piece together when or why Cas and perfection became synonymous with one another in his mind. Cas has always been the one off the line with a crack in his chassis; that innate imperfection is precisely what punched his ticket into the Winchesters’ ever-growing spread of found family. What tethered him to Dean so irrevocably… 

“Are you going to say anything?” Cas asks, drawing Dean out of his ruminative daze. 

Dean’s eyes sting as he takes inventory of Cas—his drawn-up brows, the pleading glint in his ocean blues, the heavy frown weighing on his lips. 

Hesitant, at a loss, Dean can only give a minute shake of his head and respond lamely, “what do you want me to say, Cas?” 

It almost staggers him how much he sounds like he’s pleading now—begging Cas to guide him, help him, like he’s always done, like Dean’s always relied on him to do. Tell me what to say to make this right. Once more, an unfair demand. 

Cas inhales, expression making an abrupt shift from supplicative to stony and withdrawn. “Nothing, I suppose,” he says, rising from his seat and aiming for the kitchen’s exit before he halts in his tracks, seems to think better of it, then, turning back to look at Dean again: “how is it you can be so brave with everyone else, but you draw the line at me, Dean?” 

A coward. That’s what Cas is calling him. 

Dean is given no room to reply. In a great flurry of wind, Cas vanishes right before his eyes, flying off to God knows where. 

Dean’s stomach drops. “Cas?” He leaps up to his feet, taking a sweeping scan of the kitchen, rushing out to the empty hallway. “Cas!” 

No answer. 

Dean sinks into the nearest wall, breathing out shakily. “You fucking idiot,” he mutters, self-chastizing. 

Closing his eyes, he swallows his pride and sends out a prayer in the stifling silence:

Take your time, Cas, but don’t stay gone. Please? We can work this out.

『✯』

Cas shows up again in the early evening two days later. Sam’s in the middle of grilling a very obstinate Dean about how he managed to fuck up so badly that he chased Cas away with one conversation when the angel in question poofs into the bunker library and just… Stands there. 

Sam promptly freezes mid-interrogation, blinking at him for no less than three seconds before greeting, “hey, Cas.” It sounds more like a question than a salutation.

Cas’ face is largely blank as he glances around the library—quite obviously neglecting Dean’s presence altogether—then announces, “Claire and Kaia have commandeered my room. They threw a pillow at me.” 

Dean’s confounding blend of relief that Cas really did come back and annoyance at being ignored notwithstanding, he snorts inelegantly in amusement. “First time getting sexiled?” 

Cas finally acknowledges him with a brief look (oh, so you do know I’m here, Dean thinks dryly), and states without flourish or ceremony, “I will bide my time in the Dean-cave.” 

That established, he poofs away again. 

Dean puffs out a weary breath and takes a drink of his beer. Finding the post-departure-of-Cas silence suspicious, he returns his attention to Sam, only to be met with a pointed glare. “What?” 

Sam makes a face at that. “What do you mean ‘what?’ What did you do to him?” 

“Nothing!” Dean protests defensively. A bald-faced lie is what that is. But he’s not about to get into the trash heap that is his deep psyche and its direct correlation with his dickish treatment of Cas with his brother.

“‘Nothing,’ my ass,” Sam scoffs. “I left you alone with him shit-faced drunk two nights ago, and the next thing I know, he’s flown off and you, who were absolutely shattered when he was dead, suddenly have nothing to say about it.” 

Dean narrows his eyes at him, skeptical. “What’re you trying to say, Sammy?” 

“I’m saying you wouldn’t be so resistant to talking if it wasn’t your fault that he left, Dean.” 

He opens his mouth to make a retort, then snaps it shut again when he realizes he has no reasonable argument. Because Sam is right. Dean drove Cas away with all his moronic pussyfooting and feigned aloofness. 

Still, Dean wouldn’t be Dean if he didn’t execute a masterful deflection when his faults are thrown in his face. 

“Well, by that logic, am I to assume Eileen’s not here right now because you did some stupid shit to chase her off?” 

Sam gapes at him, dismayed at the unforeseen diss. Dean grins triumphantly. Nailed it. 

“This isn’t about me and Eileen,” Sam complains lamely. 

“It ain’t about me and Cas either. Butt out, Sam.” 

Sam breathes a long-suffering sigh, shoulders rising and falling with the heave of it. “At least tell me you’ll fix whatever you did. Cas was so happy to see you when Jack brought him back; the first thing he told me was that he was looking forward to finally watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with you—and now he can’t stand to be in the same room with you.” 

Dean tries—he really does—but he ultimately loses the fight against the wince of guilt that twists itself up on his face. He’d almost forgotten about the promise he made to Cas one night a few months back. 

He was a little buzzed, guard lowered a bit more than usual. And after he’d sat and, for a longer time than Dean would care to admit, contemplated Cas’ concentrated side-profile as he leaned in toward the flat-screen and tried to make sense of Dr. Sexy’s appeal, he declared that they needed a show to watch that was all their own. 

“Dr. Sexy’s my show, you know? How about Buffy? I’ve never seen it beyond a few glimpses I caught from Sam’s watchthrough years ago. It can be, like… Our thing. What d’ya say?”

Cas had given him one of his soft, pleasant smiles that he seems to reserve only for private moments, and said, “I would like that very much, Dean.” 

Of course, now Dean is acutely aware that ‘I would like that very much’ loosely translates to ‘I will take any excuse to spend more time with you.’ 

It’s not even that Dean was innocently blind; he just didn’t want to see what was right in front of him, and so he didn’t. He was blind by choice, yet he still had the audacity to be blindsided when Cas finally said the quiet part out-loud. 

“I love you.” And then, cruelly: “goodbye, Dean.” 

Fuck… 

Dean frowns at the etching of Castiel’s name in the mahogany surface of the table. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Will-do, Sammy.” 

『✯』

It takes another several hours for Dean to muster what little gumption he has in this endeavor and enter the cave, where Cas is perched rigidly in one of the two armchairs situated in front of the TV. The screen is black; he’s not watching anything, but a closer look lends itself to an image of Cas with his eyes closed and a pensive crease in his brow. 

Dean’s known him long enough to recognize it as the face he makes when he’s tuning into angel radio. 

“Call from the mothership?” It’s a bit of a gamble to make an attempt at humor, and with how upset Cas is, Dean should’ve expected it would fall woefully flat. 

Cas doesn’t say anything, but he does open his eyes, gluing them stubbornly ahead in a show of refusal to look at Dean. 

Tension coils up in Dean’s neck, shoulders, jaw; the awkward air he’s generated is noxiously thick. 

Right. Okay… He coaches himself through a deep breath. You can do this. Just—tell him the truth. No biggie. It’s only Cas. 

Only Cas. Dean almost scoffs at his own inner voice. When has Cas only been anything to him? Cas is infuriating, loyal, challenging, devoted, adorkable, endearing, kind of bitchy sometimes… He’s complex. He’s multi-dimensional, and not just in the ‘wavelength of celestial intent’ way. 

Cas is everything. And that’s precisely what makes this moment so, pants-shittingly terrifying. Dean’s fought demons, angels, archangels, the Darkness, fucking God himself— and none of that comes close to how scary this is. 

The reason is simple. 

He averted apocalypse after apocalypse with little to lose and a perfect willingness to give his life to make it happen. But Cas is a hell of a lot to lose if he fails here. Certainly more than Dean can handle losing. 

Never again, he vows, steeling himself. Never again will he settle to live a life without Cas in it. 

He detours briefly to close the door and lock it, then strides back over to plant himself between Cas and the TV, leaning back against the stand with crossed arms. A closed-off position, but he can’t help himself. The shit he’s about to fess up to is a secret he thought he’d be buried with. 

Cas pitches his gaze petulantly off to the side, and Dean rolls his eyes. 

“You can act like a real moody teenager sometimes, you know that?” 

Cas, still not looking at Dean, returns snarkily, “yes, well, most of my human patterns of behavior were modeled after yours.” 

Dean purses his lips at the dig, affronted, but pushes past it for the sake of amiability. “Alright, listen, Cas—”

“I must warn you, Dean: I have little patience left in me for excuses and denial-laden platitudes. If that’s all you prayed me back for, then—” 

Dean shuts him down swiftly and without room for interpretation. “That’s not what I’m here to do,” he says, firm despite the way his heart is hammering and threatening to flee his body.  

Finally, Cas looks at him, the faintest spark of hope glittering in his eyes, cautious though it is. “No?” 

Dean shakes his head. “No.” Now it’s his turn to look away, gaze falling bashfully to his feet. “Look, you know I hate chick-flick moments, but I’m saying this sober so you know I mean it…” 

Cas is staring at him; he can feel it. Those piercing blue eyes boring into him, through him. He feels completely naked, stripped bare, exposed, yet he is fully clothed, flannel, canvas jacket and all. 

Dean swallows roughly, gulping down the nerves that’d risen into his throat. “I love you, Cas.” It comes out far softer than he means for it to, and it’d embarrass him into silence if he hadn’t looked up to find Cas peering at him with so much open affection and gratitude, stealing the breath right out of Dean’s lungs. 

God, Cas is a fool. Loving someone who has to dig deep to unearth the courage to say three lousy little words. 

Dean banishes the thought— not the time for self-loathing— and forges on. “It ain’t platonic, and it ain’t brotherly either. Not that my years upon years of saying you’re like a brother to me would indicate that.” Damn it, this is already getting too real; his heart tries to strangle him into silence, submission, bounding up to his throat in a dizzying campaign to choke his voice from the cords. He grits his teeth against the feeling. “Cas, I’ve felt it for a long time. Somewhere deep down, I knew that what I felt for you wasn’t like that. But I ignored it…” His breath rattles unevenly out of him. “I ignored it until I believed it was a different feeling entirely.” 

“How come?” asks Cas. He’s gentle with it, careful, as if Dean is a wild animal primed to spook at a single note out of place. 

“It was safe.” Dean shrugs halfheartedly; his arms have gone from folded over his chest to wrapped around himself like a hug—a subconscious move to self-soothe. “Familiar to me. Loving someone like a brother is something I know how to do.” 

Not daring enough yet to drag his attention up from the floor, he imagines a puzzled look on Cas’ face, maybe a curious head-tilt as he points out, “you loved Lisa.” 

Yes. Dean did love Lisa. But there’s a pretty big key difference between her and Cas that is, evidently, the crux of the issue. 

“Loving women is also something I know how to do.”

Dean risks the barest glance Cas’ way, just in time to see the angel nodding sagely. 

“I am not a woman,” he says, so solemn it’s actually funny enough to make Dean smile—a fleeting little thing. 

“That, you are not.” 

“So loving me feels… Unsafe to you?” 

Dean’s most baser reflex is to deny it, because it’s a far cry from the whole truth. But that doesn’t negate the fact that there is an element of truth in that assessment. “It runs much, much deeper than that, but in a certain sense… Yes.” 

“I see,” Cas says mildly. 

Dean is so on-edge, so wound tight, that the simple utterance registers to him as indifference and has him getting all prickly and snippy out of nowhere. “You see?” He pins Cas with an unimpressed glare. “That’s all you have to say?” 

Two can play at the snippy game; in fact, Cas is an Olympic champion at it. 

“No, but as per usual, your brazen need to always have the final word stunts the natural ebb and flow of conversation,” he says in a plain affect. 

All Dean can do is wilt into himself, shame-faced but too pigheaded to apologize, and wait for Cas to expand on his ‘I see.’ 

“If it’s not purely the fact that my vessel is male that makes you feel insecure in your feelings, what else is there? Perhaps if I understood—” 

“That question’s got a dead end, Cas. I don’t know why,” Dean lies. Again, a reflex, only this one actually manifested to fruition. Shit. He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head at himself. 

“I think you do,” Cas says, tone even and unprovoking, though Dean’s feeling pretty damn provoked just on principle. 

“What are you, a mind-reader now?” 

“I am closely entangled with your soul, Dean. I have been since I ra—”

“Raised me from perdition—yeah, yeah, I get it. No need to remind me for the millionth time.” 

“I only mean to say I know when you are, um…” Cas pauses a second to think, and a little twinkle of mirth shines in his eyes as he concludes, “full of shit, I believe, is an apt phrase.” 

Dean huffs a weak laugh. Say what you want about Cas and his curious social quirks, but if there’s one thing he knows how to execute perfectly, it’s a spiral derailment. At least when he knows it’s happening. It’s like second nature to him—saying the right thing to mollify the angry, guarded beast always raging within Dean, searching for a fight to pick. 

Dean feels his shoulders relax, just so, even as the anxiety swarming his chest wars on. Another deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. He’s run out of rope, reaching the point in this heart-to-heart at which he has no choice but to spit it out already. 

Hey, why are you so afraid of loving Cas, Dean? 

The memories scrolling by in his mind answer the question for him. Freshly eighteen, left alone in a seedy motel with thirteen year-old Sam who hasn’t had a real meal in weeks, and they’re strapped for funds. Dean had to do what he had to do. It is what it is. No reason to dredge it all up after twenty-some years, except…

He can’t work this thing out with Cas otherwise. It shapes his entire outlook on the circumstances. Only way out is through. 

“Cas, I—uh…” He clears his throat as his voice cracks. Here goes nothing. “I’ve known since I was twelve that I was into more than just chicks. It’s not like it’s some grand revelation I’m having in my early forties.” 

Dean actually sees Cas tilt his head this time, the knit of confusion in his brow. “But I’ve never seen you—” 

“Thirst after a dude?” 

Cas nods. “Yes. Unless Dr. Sexy counts.” 

Dean snorts, tempted to let the aside spin him off on a tangent in a scheme to satisfy his very itchy inclination to evade this topic. Nevertheless, he resists. This is important, asshole. Get a grip. 

“Well, there’s a reason for that, and it ain’t your average, run-of-the-mill internalized homophobia or fear of judgment. Hell, up until a certain point, I couldn’t care less; I even had a few high school flings with some guys. It didn’t start mattering to me until…” His fingers flex into his flesh where he’s got his arms criss-crossed around himself, digging in, centering himself in the physical world so his mind doesn’t run off with him. “Until I was eighteen. Dad was off on a hunt and left Sam with me in a motel—nothing out of the ordinary there. Except he was gone for two months, and money was getting tight, fast. Hustling pool at the bar wasn’t cutting it anymore. By the time we were stone-cold broke, Sam had already gone several days without a proper meal, subsisting entirely off of snacks I managed to snag from the convenience store while the clerk wasn’t looking, and I hadn’t eaten at all in that same amount of time. I was getting desperate…” 

Dean doesn’t know when it happened, but Cas is on his feet now. He hasn’t taken any steps closer, but he’s looking like he badly wants to, fingers twitching at his sides, longing to reach. 

Dean puts it out of his head. He can’t get distracted. He’ll never be able to summon the nerve to talk about this ever again if he loses it now. This is a one-time deal. 

“So, eventually, my game at the bar was no longer to hustle pool, but—” God, he’s sweating and cold all at the same time, and his heart is racing at a nauseating pace. His tongue tries to tie itself in knots, but he won’t let it. Just say it, damn it— “to whore myself out to any lonely man with a pocket full of cash looking for a mouth to fill…” He goes quiet a moment, another onslaught of memories cropping up in rapid succession, from when he was nineteen and once again left with Sam for months and dry funds, twenty and Sam was in the ER for a busted wrist, twenty-one, put up in a motel with a skeevy manager, and better him than his kid brother, right? Dean looked young enough to pass for the guy’s type. “Wasn’t even the only time I did it,” he admits, voice hardly even a murmur. 

“Dean,” Cas says, so very delicate, doleful, that it immediately sets Dean on edge, worse than he already was. The last thing he wants out of this is suffocating sympathy. “Your father—”

“Didn’t know,” Dean interjects. “I was an adult. I made my own choices.” 

“But you were his child.” Cas finally takes his first step toward Dean, voice impassioned, eyes not glowing but surely alight with a swell of his grace. “You should’ve never been put in a position to—” 

“What’s done is done, Cas. Leave it alone.” Dean shoots him a warning glare, though he tempers it swiftly when Cas just frowns at him, all full of concern and sincere distress on his behalf. Heaving a labored sigh, he adds, “look, all this to say: that shit kinda ruined my relationship with that part of me. It made me feel unclean, dirty. I got to a point where I was just… So disgusted with myself that I didn’t even want to acknowledge it as me anymore, acknowledge that if I’d been born a little different, I probably never would’ve even thought to lower myself in dignity like that; I probably would’ve stayed on course stealing shit from convenience stores and learning how to pick pockets instead. Most people would find that more respectable, you know? More excusable…”

His throat constricts like it’s wrapped tight in barbed wire, revulsion slithering up his spine, conjuring up unpleasant goosebumps as it goes. He does his best to ignore the stifling sensation. 

“So I abandoned it—that identity of mine,” he says with an air of faux nonchalance, “‘cause that’s what you do with shit that gets all used-up and dirty—you throw it out. Spent my whole life from there burying myself in women and pretending that ruined part me didn’t exist anymore. After all, no one expects a chronic womanizer to get on his knees for men more than twice his age in filthy bar bathrooms for wadded-up fifties and maybe a hit off a joint if he asks nicely.” 

Cas looks positively horrified, and maybe even a bit angry, scornful—wouldn’t be the first time he got all bent out of shape because of John Winchester’s A+ parenting. 

Regardless, if Dean were a dog, his hackles would be raised, teeth bared in a snarl. Suddenly he feels all too cornered, all too restless, all too vulnerable, and the only thing he knows how to do about it is fight, snap at the gentle hand wanting to feed. 

“What, like you didn’t know—or at least have an inkling,” he accuses, because surely, when Cas had his hands buried in Dean’s soul, enmeshing it with his newly rebuilt body out of Hell, he saw more than his fair share of Dean’s misfortunes. 

It’s somewhat irrational, thinking this way. After all, Dean wouldn’t have had to speak it out in the open, and Cas wouldn’t be looking nearly as thrown as he is if the angel knew before this very moment. But Dean is fighting a fabricated enemy, and the enemy needs fabricated faults to justify him tearing into it. 

“I didn’t,” Cas insists, an imploring cadence to his voice that bids Dean to listen. “I do try not to dig too deep into the parts of your soul that you’ve walled off, Dean. I respect you too much to be so invasive; I respected you that much even before I knew you personally, even as I had your soul clutched to my chest on the way out of Hell.” 

And— fuck. It’s too soft. Cas is being way too yielding. Dean’s picking a fight, and Cas is hosting slam poetry night at a hipster bar. Two completely opposing energies at play. 

Dean wishes Cas would fight him back, meet him where he’s at because he’ll start spinning out of control otherwise. 

He’s death-gripping his sides, grip bruising on his lower ribs as he grits his teeth and ducks his head, putting Cas’ insufferably gentle countenance out of view. 

Cas closes the distance between them. Dean sees his fancy dress shoes enter his field of vision before he feels two warm palms cradling his face and lifting his head back up. 

Dean resists on instinct, jerking out of Cas’ grip, and Cas allows it at first, gives him a few seconds of reprieve. 

Then: 

“Dean, please let me,” he murmurs, and takes hold of Dean’s face again, much more tentatively, guiding him to meet his gaze. 

Dean does let him, but the eye-contact and the proximity and that damn fucking softness get his nerves all prickly again. “Cas—come on, don’t look at me like that, man.” It’s tough to look away when Cas is this close, so Dean settles to unfocus his eyes instead, everything around him going blessedly blurry. 

“Like what?” asks Cas, sincere as he always is. 

“Like you feel sorry for me.” 

“I don’t feel sorry for you, Dean.” 

Dean barks out a humorless laugh. “Then what? What is this?” He gestures frantically between them. “What’re you doing?” 

“I’m attempting to ground you.” 

“Why?” 

“Because you’re hyperventilating and your heart is racing. You will pass out if you don’t regain control.” 

Dean freezes—tunes back into his own body to find his chest so tight he can hardly breathe and an erratic heartbeat that threatens to shatter his sternum with the force of adrenaline it’s pumping through his system. 

Jesus, is he seriously having a panic attack right now? It’s not unheard of for him to lose his head like this, but it usually either manifests in angry outbursts or amid late-night clusters of nightmares. Not to mention, he’s not one to flip shit over a conversation with his best friend—a crazy uncomfortable conversation, but a mere conversation nonetheless. What the fuck?

That’s when Dean feels it: the familiar, tingling warmth of grace washing through him, clearing away the tight coils of panic wherever they’ve taken root. Dean goes lax against the TV stand, sucking in a slow, long inhale like he’s been starving for it and letting the air shudder out of him, agitation allayed. 

“Dean…” murmurs Cas. He doesn’t say anything more, but his worry is conveyed with picture-perfect clarity in just that one syllable, the utterance of Dean’s name. 

“I’m… I’m fine. Sorry.” Dean leans back, his face slipping out from between Cas’ hands. He tries not to miss the touch as he once again averts his gaze downward, knuckles blanching where he’s now gripping the edge of the stand. “Look, Cas—” he sighs— “I do love you. A whole fuckin’ lot. I wouldn’t be losing my shit like this if I didn’t. But I don’t know what to do with it, man. Not when I’m fucked in the head the way I am—when I’ve got shit like that in my past. Dusting off the cobwebs is one thing; removing the stains is another entirely.” 

There’s an extended pause of silence, long enough to draw Dean’s eyes hesitantly back to Cas. He’s got that sullen, resigned look on his face he always seems to get whenever Dean says or does something to hold him at arm’s length. 

“I understand,” he says finally. “I will not push you.” 

And that just doesn’t sit right with Dean, twists his stomach up in a queasy gnarl. He doesn’t know what he wanted to come of this little confessional booth moment, but with Cas standing here and in so many words saying he’ll bury the feelings that led him to sacrifice his life for Dean—

Dean doesn’t like that. That ain’t what he’s looking for. 

He shakes his head. “We can’t just leave it like this, Cas.” 

“Like what?” Cas prompts for a second time. 

“Fucking yearning and miserable. You in all your angelic glory might be able to compartmentalize something as huge as being in love with your best friend of eleven years, but I can’t. Not now that the can of worms has been busted wide-open.” 

Cas actually looks a bit put off by that; though, to anyone but Dean, he’d probably just look mildly confused. “I assure you, Dean, my ‘angelic glory’—” air-quotes; yep, he’s miffed— “as you’ve put it, makes it no less difficult. But I will do it if I must in order to maintain my presence in your life.” 

“Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying, Cas: I’m afraid that leaving things like this between us—all unresolved and shit—will drive me away from you.” 

“I… Don’t understand.” 

Okay, normally Cas’ ‘eternally-confused’ state of existence is endearing and amusing to Dean, but at this particular instant in time, it’s mostly tiring. 

Dean scrubs his hands down his face, taking a bit to rework his approach. “You called me a coward,” he says after some time. “Or… Implied it, I guess.” 

Cas grimaces at the reminder, remorse showing prominently on his frowny face. Honestly, if Dean thought Sam had a knack for kicked-puppy face, Cas has a knack for shot-puppy face, all devastation and despair. It’s like he feels simple human emotions at a fucking solar intensity compared to your average Joe. 

Maybe he does… 

“Knowing what I know now, Dean, I take that back and deeply apologize—”

“No-no-no, stop that.” Dean shuts him down immediately, still highly pity-averse. “That’s not the point I’m making, Cas. I’m saying I’m done being a coward. I don’t know how, and it scares me shitless because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing or how I’ll even begin to navigate the ratmaze that is my metric ton of baggage, but I’m gonna face this shit head-on.” In favor of maintaining his confident affect, he pretends that declaration doesn’t make his mouth run dry as a damn bone. He’s faced monsters and the end of the world head-on. Why not a deeply non-platonic relationship with his (sort of) male best friend? Easy as pie, right?

Cas squints and tilts his head. He does that shit at least ten times a day; Dean counted once.  

But nevermind that. 

Dean’s on a mission, and he’s trying not to be a damn coward about it. So he rolls his eyes and reaches out to haul Cas in by the front of his coat, fingers curled up in the lapels. Cas’ eyes go comically round, stunned, his arms not daring to raise even an inch up from his sides. No one ever said the angel was an opportunist; he stays standing rigidly before Dean, mere inches apart, just close enough for their bodies to exchange heat, and not so much as a fingertip strays into Dean’s space. 

Something about that makes Dean’s heart do stupid shit in his chest. Whatever. He can muse on that later. 

“I’m saying I’m willing to take this slow, Cas,” he says, and he really does mean it. Glacially, agonizingly slow, probably with plenty of setbacks and Dean Winchester-typical foolishness. But he means it. Whole hog. In a non- euphemistic context, that is. For now. 

…Where is he going with this again? 

Oh, right. 

“Baby steps,” he finishes. 

“Baby steps…” Cas echoes. 

“Yes.”

“What does that entail?” 

“Fuck if I know, man. I’m making this shit up as I go.” 

Cas seems to take well to this sentiment, looking thoughtful for a handful of seconds before he smiles, all sweet and agreeable. 

Dean quirks a brow at him. “What is it?” 

“We are very good at making shit up as we go.” 

Dean snorts, charmed. “Hell yeah, we are.” 

Cas falls silent, ducking his head to ponder Dean’s hands, which are still firmly wound up in the lapels of his coat. “Dean.” 

“What?” 

“You are holding me very close to you.” He looks back up to meet Dean’s gaze. “Is this part of your ‘baby steps’?” 

The gears in Dean’s brain grind to a standstill. His attention dips down to take inventory of his hands, the minimal space between their chests, the faintest, faintest flutter of Cas’ breath on his lips. 

Right. Dean might’ve gotten carried away here. 

“Nope,” he chokes out, and gently pushes Cas back. But before Cas can take it as a true gesture of rejection (befuddlement and hurt are already starting to kindle in his eyes), Dean takes his hand instead. Safer. More innocent. Just like middle school all over again, where holding hands on the playground was the epitome of dating. 

Dating. Is that what’s happening? 

Dean evicts the thought expeditiously, lest his delicately grace-rebalanced emotions start spiraling out of control again. 

Baby steps. That’s what he’s committing to. And he’s making it up as he goes, so he figures the first idea that pops into his head is about as good as any.

“This is,” he says, making a point of raising up their joined hands, then leading Cas off toward the door. “Step one: Buffy nights. You, me, my bed, and some campy-ass TV.” 

It takes until they’re out in the hallway heading toward Dean’s room for Cas to answer, “I am amenable to this plan.” 

Dean scoffs, lighthearted but a little irked by the lack of ceremony in Cas’ voice. “Try to sound less enthusiastic, why don’t you,” he quips. 

“Frankly, Dean, I fear that if I state my true enthusiasm, it will break your newfound resolve to follow through with this.” 

Stopping just outside his room, Dean turns to face Cas, fixing him with an earnest stare. “Tell me how you really feel, man. I promise I won’t break. Scout’s honor.” Not really a promise he can reasonably make, given that he quite literally broke just a few minutes ago, but it’s the thought that counts. 

“Okay.” Cas still looks unsure, a little wary. However, when he looks into Dean’s eyes, there must be something in them that he takes as a sign to trust Dean’s promise, because then he’s proudly stating, “I’m very happy. I find myself struggling not to kiss you right now.” 

Dean’s breath catches in his throat, nearly sending him into a fit of coughs; he narrowly avoids the threat. He blinks, stupefied, mouth working open and closed uselessly for several seconds before he clears his throat and dons a sheepish grin. “Yeah, well, that’s definitely a few more steps down the line, sunshine. Sorry.” 

“That’s okay,” Cas says readily, and Dean swears he feels him squeeze his hand, just a hint. “I hear slow burns make the payoff sweeter.” 

Dean’s been a good little soldier through this whole ordeal—he really has—but he can no longer suppress the flush that’s been boiling up to the surface for a while now. He feels it spread all the way from his cheeks to his chest, and judging by the self-satisfied little twinkle Cas has got in his eye, he’s gone pinker than a naked mole rat. 

Cas truly is an enigma. Sometimes he’s so socially inept that he makes everyone in the room about as uncomfortable as an explosive fart during a funeral service. And then sometimes he’s… This. Mystifyingly smooth and elegantly lyrical. 

In a last-ditch effort to preserve his pride, Dean just lets out a weak, stilted laugh, throws the door to his room open, mutters, “yeah, whatever you say, Shakespeare,” and drags Cas inside with him. 

If he spends the rest of the night with Cas’ poetic waxing rattling around the confines of his skull, well that’s his own damn business. 

Chapter Text

“Really, Dean? A barbarian? Super original,” Charlie teases as she assesses the character sheet he’s been slaving over for the past three hours. “You realize the point of a roleplaying game is to be someone you’re not in real life, right?” 

Rolling his eyes and mocking her criticism under his breath, Dean reaches across the bed to snatch her sheet away. He chucks his head back with a maniacal cackle when she shrieks and fails to seize it from him. His first glance at the top of the sheet has him snorting. “Right, like you have any room to pooh-pooh my character when you’ve gone and made yourself a bard.” 

“Ever heard of vicious mockery?” Charlie manages to snag her sheet back, tucking it safely behind herself. “You only wish you could insult your enemies to death.” 

“I do that every other week. Your bard ain’t special.” 

“Yeah, insult your enemies into beating the snot out of you, more-like.” 

Dean actually fucking pouts at that, ego wounded. “Tricks them into getting in close so I can hack ‘em. It’s called strategy,” he grumbles defensively, gnawing off a chunk of his now-cold pizza and washing it down with a gulp of beer. 

“Uh-huh.” Charlie aims an indulgent grin his way, then returns to her smug perusal of his character sheet.

It’s been a little over three weeks since Jack brought everyone back and put the world to rights again. Three weeks since he and Cas became… Whatever the hell ‘he and Cas’ are. At this point in time ‘vaguely homoerotic TV-watchers’ is about the most accurate description Dean can seem to come up with. Not that the homoeroticism is something outwardly observable; it’s more of a general vibe. And it’s actually about ten parts homo to a scant part erotic. 

Every night, they hunker down in Dean’s room, load up some Buffy, and binge until Dean passes out and Cas quietly slips off into the night. That’s the homo part—just two guys sat side-by-side, fully-clothed with almost zero tension dangling in the air, watching TV. 

The part that bears any notes whatsoever of eroticism depends entirely on what Dean puts on the menu for the night. Most of the time, it’s some denomination of takeout, but occasionally, Dean will go the extra mile to cook something up for the both of them. And that’s when things have a potential to get interesting. Cas will indulge in takeout with a perfectly pleasant ‘thank you, Dean’ and that’ll be that. But when Dean prepares something for him? Suddenly a perfectly pleasant ‘thank you, Dean’ becomes a smolder-eyed and gravelly-voiced ‘this is lovely, Dean. Thank you.’ After which, of course, Dean pretends he doesn’t notice Cas staring at him like he wants to jump his bones. 

Who would’ve thought, right? Home cooking. Apparently, it’s the key to the heart of an eons-old celestial being who only recently came into the privilege of real taste buds (brief stint of humanity notwithstanding). 

Speaking of home cooking—Dean’s almost due to go skim the fat off the braised beef he’s had in the oven for the past several hours. The pizza and beer Charlie brought with her when she stopped by to help him get started with the arduous journey that is learning how to play D&D is merely an appetizer. 

See, he’s been doing this thing lately, where he ups the fanciful gourmet ante of every successive meal he feeds Cas to see if he can ignite literally any reaction from the angel beyond a heaping dose of sex-eyes. Not necessarily the smartest idea, considering Dean has no intention of acting on such a reaction for a while yet, but hey—he didn’t earn the ‘shit-stirring bastard’ badge of honor from his old Truman High PE teacher for no reason. 

Go ahead. Call him a tease. Plenty of his past flings did. But he likes to call this meddling experimentation of his a simple exercise in testing the waters. Button-pushing is one of his favorite activities, and Cas’ buttons have always been some of the most satisfying to poke at. It’s plain curiosity. That’s all. It’s not like he gets all warm and tingly inside every time Cas praises him with all that blatant want in his eyes. Shut up. 

“Hey, think we can rope Cas into this?” Charlie asks, dragging Dean out of his reverie.

It takes him a second or two to catch up, but once her question computes in his head, he’s scoffing incredulously at the notion of Castiel, ‘Angel of Misconceiving Social Convention,’ partaking in a game heavily informed by complex rules of engagement and character roleplaying. “Yeah, be my guest, kiddo, but I’m not sticking around for the many hours it would take just to get it through to him that a Dungeon Master can nix any of the published game rules they want.” 

“Oh, I think you give him much too little credit, Dean.” 

“Wanna bet?” Dean raises his brows at her in playful challenge. “Just last year, it took me a whole forty-five minutes to explain to him why restaurants don’t allow adults to order off the kid’s menu, and you wanna know what?” 

“What?” 

“He still didn’t get it in the end.” 

Charlie laughs and concedes, “alright, fair enough. But you can’t really blame a guy who literally predates the inception of capitalistic greed for not understanding certain real-world examples of it. Even if he has been hanging around on Earth for a while.” 

Dean hums, smirking fondly at the memory. “Can’t argue with you there.” At the time, it was wildly frustrating—had him about ready to put the barrel of his Glock to his head. Looking back on it now, though, he’s willing to admit he holds a great level of appreciation for Cas’ desire to thoroughly understand the workings of human society.

“Hey, how are things going, by the way?” asks Charlie, flipping through the playlist she has playing softly through her phone speaker; she eventually settles on a song she apparently prefers to the one that’d been previously playing. Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten. She’s been slowly trying to lure Dean away from songs that are half a century-old, and though Dean takes offense to the implication that his music taste is grossly outdated, he doesn’t have the heart to refuse her efforts. 

“With Cas?” 

She nods her head. “Last you told me, you two were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer together. Every night. In your room…” She casts him a suggestive, sidelong glance. “Alone.” 

Dean chokes mid-sip of his beer, scrambling for a greasy napkin to clear away what dribbles down his chin. “Hey—no, none of that. We’re just… Just watching shit.” 

Charlie cocks an incredulous brow at that. “Seriously?” 

“Yeah. Seriously.” Dean sets his beer aside to avoid any further mishaps. “Is that so hard to believe?” 

“Well, kinda, yeah.” 

He fixes her in a deadpan stare, and she lifts her hands up in surrender. 

“I’m just surprised! I mean—you can’t really deny that Dean ‘Charms a New Woman Into Bed Every Other Night’ Winchester leaving room for Jesus sounds like the start of a bad joke. Thought you’d at least have news of wandering hands by now.” 

Dean huffs and puffs, folding his arms over his chest and evading eye-contact. He thinks ‘leaving room for Jesus’ is a woeful misnomer for what he’s doing. Do let the record show that he doesn’t have any idea what the fuck he’s doing, but he sure as shit knows Jesus ain’t got a damn thing to do with it. 

What he told Cas weeks back is about the most honest statement he’s ever made about himself: he knows how to love brothers, and he knows how to love women. He doesn’t know dick about loving men, and he knows even less than dick about loving angels. So sue him for not having a clue where he’s driving this bus, okay? 

When he started this thing with Cas, the concept of ‘baby steps’ and making shit up as he goes sounded genius. Now he feels like he’s tied himself up in some grand master plan that has neither a master nor a plan. He watches Buffy with Cas every night and sometimes subtly teases him with fancy cuisine—a relative comfort zone. Okay, so what now? What are the next steps? 

The reality of things as they stand at the moment is that he already feels like he’s stagnated the progression of their… Relationship? Affair? Whatever. Something in that neighborhood. That’s not the point. 

The point is: he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to move on from vaguely homoerotic TV-watching. What’s the logical next step? What can he incorporate next that won’t send his feeble, damaged little mind running for the hills? Every time he entertains the idea of a cuddle or a kiss or—God forbid—anything third base and beyond, he finds himself spinning out for reasons he can’t even decipher. Imagining himself in those scenarios with Cas seems so fantastical it’s difficult to consider them as real possibilities. 

And sure—he’s got all that closeted bisexual baggage he’s been letting fester in the darkest reaches of his subconscious for literal decades, but he has some nebulous intuition that Cas is actually the bigger roadblock here. Not by any fault of his own, of course; it’s just that Cas is so… Cas. The amount of ups and downs and ins and outs and deaths and resurrections and betrayals and makeups and what-the-fuck-ever else their ‘bond,’ as Cas once put it, has endured over the years is more than any relationship should ever undergo. 

It’s taken until very recently for Dean to realize it, but Cas’ confession was only the inch-thick tip of the miles-deep iceberg in terms of their mutual unresolved drama. And that’s not just shocking. It’s daunting. 

So to answer Charlie’s presumptions: 

“Nah. There haven’t been any… Wandering hands, or whatever,” he mumbles, twiddling his thumbs anxiously in his lap. 

Truth be told, he’d rather not discuss this at all, but he made a fucking commitment to figuring out this whole Cas thing, and he’s (begrudgingly) going to need his designated wingwoman’s help if he intends to succeed. 

Plus, he’s been shit out of ideas for days, so he figures he’s overdue to phone a friend anyway. 

“Dean,” Charlie says, levity bled out of her voice, all caring and kind but not quite in the territory of insufferable sympathy—she knows him well. 

He gives only a noncommittal grunt in response. 

“You’re pouting.” 

Dean shoots her a glare, though it has absolutely no venom behind it. “Am not. Shut up.” 

“Denial only works when you’re not actively and visibly doing the thing you’re denying,” Charlie says cheekily, shuffling the pizza box and napkins around to make room so she can situate herself beside Dean, propped against the headboard of the bed. When Dean doesn’t acknowledge her comment and returns his attention back to his twiddling thumbs, she nudges lightly at his side. “What’s up, hm? Talk to me.” 

Dean sighs with the faintest shake of the head, tipping his face up toward the ceiling in disbelief of his circumstances. Once upon a time, he was the one everyone came to for help—the guy who was mother, father, and brother to Sam, who’s there whenever Claire or Jody or Donna call him in on a case, who once guided Charlie through the grief of finally deciding to let her mother go, who did his damnedest providing backup anywhere Cas asked of him even though his painfully human ass had no right being dragged into matters of Heaven as often as he was. And fine, maybe he is still technically that guy. But now he’s also the guy who needs help. Who needs to rely on someone other than himself to work out a problem. 

Yes, he’s asked for help before, but it was always for the sake of saving the world; that shit’s a team sport on principle. 

This small-fry business? This little league crap where the only thing at stake is a single one of his own interpersonal relationships? A little pathetic to need so much help for such a microscopic-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things problem, no? 

Self-sufficiency’s been the name of the game for Dean Winchester since his mother burned on that ceiling back in ‘83. How is he supposed to just… Turn that off? Better yet, how is supposed to turn that off without feeling weak and lesser for it? 

“I just don’t know where to go from here,” he forces himself to confess. Like pulling teeth, really. But they’re unequivocally the kind of teeth that are far beyond salvation, practically rotting out of his head—in a manner of speaking. They ought to be pulled, for his own benefit. 

“Why not?” 

Dean makes a face at that, and it must be particularly sour-looking because Charlie rushes to clarify: 

“I mean—do you have an idea in-mind of where you want to end up with Cas? What does your ideal end goal look like?” 

That’s the thing: Dean doesn’t fucking know. Maybe… Maybe, ideally, he’ll have miraculously worked through all his bullshit well enough that thinking of Cas in a truly romantic capacity no longer makes him confused and uncomfortably flustered and mildly nauseous. Maybe he’ll have gotten to a point where loving Cas feels as natural to him as loving a woman—where thinking of Cas in an explicitly sexual way feels as easy as thinking of men in general like that once did. 

Dean still remembers what it was like to just let himself pursue whoever the fuck he wanted. What it was like to flirt and fuck and fall freely, nothing standing in the way of what feels right and native to him, nothing to make what used to feel right and native instead feel wrong and foreign. He tries not to remember, actually, since dwelling on it often invites an insufferable, deep ache into his chest that doesn’t go away for days—something like grief, but not quite. Like the pain of mourning a loss, only too mild to genuinely be categorized as such. Either way, he does remember, and it does sting. 

He thinks there’s a special sort of irony in the way he spent the final few months of his high school senior year fucking around with girls exclusively in storage closets, right around the time he started to swear off his own identity. It’s not like he walked around advertising his same-sex interests before, but at the same time, he wasn’t exactly hiding it either. There was no point; he was a soldier from the age of four and beyond. Anybody who’d bother to try and pick a fight with him over it would get absolutely bodied by him in no seconds flat. Only place he kept himself tightly under wraps was around his father and, by association, Sam. Regardless, the proverbial ‘closet’ really only entered the equation when he found a real reason to be ashamed. 

If he’s being truthful, there was a small window of time during which he was slowly but surely forgiving himself for his own self-inflicted indignity. It was the best he could do with the resources (or lack thereof) at his disposal, he’d tell himself. He took care of Sammy like he was supposed to—don’t matter how he got it done. 

Then his father arrived back from his months-long hunt, the stench of whiskey rolling off of him in waves, and when he stumbled upon the sizable wad of cash Dean had amassed in his absence, he laughed all drunk and hearty and joked, “what’d you do—walk the streets?” 

And just that one comment, jesting though it was, solidified a dreadful reality in young Dean’s mind: what he did wasn’t worthy of respect. By extension, what he was wasn’t worthy of respect. Because, make no mistake, Dean absolutely picked up on the undertones of ridicule woven into his father’s words. The notion that any son of his would have any such inclination, not just to whore for money, but to whore with men, was positively preposterous to John Winchester. 

The day Dean realized that the man he spent every waking hour of his life bending over backwards to appease held a sincere contempt for a feature quite literally embedded within the atoms of his DNA, was the day Dean as he knew himself died. He became nothing beyond daddy’s blunt little instrument. As long as he was just that, he was loved. He was respected.

Enter Castiel, who saw, not a mere instrument, but all these… Things that Dean thought had died right alongside his younger self—things that earned him his angel’s love. And before that, his respect. Cas saw Dean, for everything that he was and is, and there was no condition by which Dean had to abide to be loved by him. 

It occurs to Dean then: 

“Just this once, I’m asking you to see me. ” 

All this time, Cas has been seeing Dean for who he is, has been taking Dean exactly as he is with nothing but adoration, and loving him absolutely no less for any fault or flaw. Can Dean say the same of himself? Can he say that he ever tried to understand Cas and his bizarre idiosyncracies or mannerisms and learned to love them in equal amounts as his more ‘palatable’ qualities? How many times has Dean poked fun at Cas for every little thing he did that was less than human? How many times has he mocked Cas, lighthearted though it usually was, for failing to assimilate in ways Dean (unfairly) expected of him? 

Has Dean ever really stopped to marvel at Cas for who he is at an atomic level? Has he ever done or said anything that would assure Cas he was loved for who he is? 

That’s the crux of their disconnect, isn’t it? Everything that’s gone wrong between them over the years boils down to a failure to operate on constructive wavelengths. They’re all dissonant and messy and energetically incompatible, each ripple disrupting the downstream harmony of things just a little more than the previous. The energy Cas puts into their bond is greater than Dean’s; there’s an unequal distribution of emotional labor between them. 

Now that Dean’s considering it, it seems laughably obvious. Of course he doesn’t know what the ‘next step’ is. He’s been thinking far too much along the lines of physicality and not anywhere near enough along the lines of fortifying an objectively very strained psychological connection. Evidently, it’s damn-near impossible to think of fun, sexy things when there’s a heaping bag of unresolved dirty laundry stinking up his mind’s foyer. 

Their problem isn’t a lack of love; hell, it isn’t even Dean’s grotesquely disturbed relationship with his bisexuality (though that does need a lot of work). 

It’s the fact that, while they may be reading the same book, they’re on vastly different pages from one another. And Dean, in particular, hasn’t exactly been doing much to correct that. All he’s been doing is passively sitting around with his thumb up his ass and waiting for the magical next step to fall in his lap. And he gets the sense that Cas isn’t keen on making any moves himself, because Dean is a flighty creature on the best of days; Cas will take whatever crumbs he can get. 

Dean just has to do something. No matter how small. If the next step amounts to nothing more than a millimeter’s-worth of progress in the right direction, that’s completely fine, because at least progress is being made to begin with. 

“Dean.” Charlie pokes him in the ribs, startling him out of his head. “Jeez—what’s with you and spacing out lately?” 

“Nothing. No reason.” Dean shrugs, reaching for his beer and sloshing the rest of it down in one go. 

Charlie eyes him skeptically and lifts her brows at him like she’s expecting something from him. 

“What?” he asks. 

She clicks her tongue, flicks his forehead, and demands, “spill, Winchester. What’re you thinking?” 

Dean prepares to give her some half-baked excuse, but the pointed stare she shoots his way thwarts that plan real quick. 

He sighs, thumping his head back against the headboard. “That I’m overthinking it,” he deigns to admit. 

“Dean Winchester and overthinking in the same sentence?” Charlie snorts. “Talk about fork found in kitchen.” 

Dean coolly ignores that comment; really, he lets the younger ones get away with far too much—they take advantage of it all the damn time. 

“I don’t have an ideal end goal in mind. Not yet,” he says. “But I think… I know what I wanna do next. Sorta. Kinda. Ish…” 

“I’m still hearing a lot of uncertainty here.” 

“Yeah, well, it’s the best you’re gonna get at the moment. It’s not like there’s a handbook out there for emotionally damaged alcoholics in love with their angelic best friend.” 

“Fair enough,” says Charlie. “So what’re you gonna sorta, kinda, ish, do?” 

Dean inhales deeply, opens his mouth to give his answer, then—

“About what?” A fluttering of wings announces Cas’ abrupt appearance in the middle of Dean’s room. 

Dean feels Charlie jump out of her skin beside him, but he’s become so accustomed to angels and demons popping into his field of vision whenever they damn-well please over the years that his only reaction is usually to stare— maybe utter some gruff comment or another about boundaries. 

This instance is only mildly anomalous in the sense that he wasn’t expecting Cas to show up while he was in the middle of a— very private, thank you very much—conversation about their screwy and confusing relationship. So Dean both stares, all wide-eyed like a toddler caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and flushes pink, awkward and sheepish. 

Thankfully, Cas doesn’t appear to notice it. Or, at least, he pretends not to. 

He squints studiously at nothing in particular, breathing in deep like he’s trying to discern something about the air itself. “The entire bunker is permeated with the smell of red meat and wine.” 

“Oh. Yeah, Dean’s making—”

Dean elbows Charlie, gentle but firm enough to get his point across. It’s a surprise, damn it! 

Charlie glares at him, brows furrowed, until she takes the hint and softens, nodding her understanding. 

Before Cas gets the chance to question what she was about to say, Dean clears his throat and asks, “what’re you doing here, man? I wasn’t expecting you for another hour.” 

Cas looks at him like he’s just said something nonsensical. “You prayed me here, Dean.” 

“You prayed him here?” exclaims Charlie, with a grin somewhere between elated and shit-eating. 

“What? No,” Dean denies hastily, because it’s fucking true. He narrows his eyes at Cas. “What the hell’re you talking about? I haven’t prayed to you in weeks.” 

For a few lingering seconds, the puzzled expression on Cas’ face doesn’t change. Then something like recognition glints in his eyes. “I see,” he mumbles, seemingly, in part, to himself. “Prayer and intense longing are easily mistaken. I must’ve been the object of some especially deep thought on your end.” 

Dean doesn’t know what’s worse: the fact that Cas said that so casually like it doesn’t mean anything to him or the fact that he said it in front of Charlie—the resident nuisance. 

“Oh, intense longing, ooh-la-la~” Charlie sing-songs teasingly. 

Dean thinks he’s found his answer. At least Cas’ nonchalance can easily be chalked up to his natural matter-of-fact manner; it’s already been well-established that his stoicism is more a veil for his true feelings than anything. 

Either way, Dean decides then that Charlie’s fun-poking is about as good (read: humiliating) a note as any to conclude their little playdate on. He pinches the bridge of his nose, drawing in a self-soothing breath that he hopes also doubles as a dampener of infuriating adolescent blushing. “Alright, Charlie, I hate to cut our time short, but since Cas is here now—”

“Yep, I hear you loud and clear,” she says chirpily, gathering up the pizza box, scattered napkins, and their D&D character sheets as she moves to hop off the bed. With a corny, two-fingered salute, she adds, “smell ya later, bitches,” and makes her exit, though not before she sends an overly conspicuous wink Dean’s way. 

In the initial silence following her departure, Dean watches Cas, confused as ever, pull the lapel of his coat aside and tuck his nose down toward his armpit. “I do not smell,” he says. “Angels don’t struggle with the same body odor problems humans do.” 

Dean huffs amusedly. Cas has lived among humans long enough that he can generally blend in, but there’s at least one thing he says or does every day that reminds Dean that he is strikingly not human. That there will always be quirks and peculiarities about him that make him—well… Him. 

“It’s a figure of speech, Cas. Don’t twist yourself in knots trying to make sense of it.” 

Cas nods readily, willing to accept Dean’s nuggets of wisdom as usual. Sometimes it really hits Dean—just how much Cas has relied on him to guide his understanding of humanity. Trusted him… It’s genuinely shocking that Dean’s advice and insights haven’t led Cas astray or gotten him into trouble more often; God knows most people would be hard-pressed to consider Dean a valuable role model. 

Funnily enough, the only person that’s ever vehemently denied his dismissal of the ‘role model’ title is currently standing right in front of him, gazing at him with all that softness and trust and waiting patiently to go along with whatever Dean wants to do next. 

It’s actually a little unnerving. Even a dog has a higher propensity for disobedience and rebellion. Which is awfully odd given that Cas has such a vast history of disobedience and rebellion that he’d made himself Heaven’s public enemy number one on multiple occasions. Then again, he disobeyed for Dean. He rebelled for Dean. And thus, for Dean, he’s exceptionally docile. 

Again, framed like that, it’s unnerving. 

But that’s the thing, ain’t it? The next step in Dean’s not-so-master, master plan? 

Foster equality; fairly distribute vulnerability. Dean can afford to be a little less immovable wall about this. And Cas can certainly benefit from adopting some unstoppable force every so often. Push and pull. Ebb and flow. Give and take. That’s what shit like this is all about, right? 

Right. Dean gives himself a faint nod of encouragement, then aims a pleasant, inviting smile up at Cas. “So,” he begins, “Buffy time? I’ll have to dip out for a bit in a little less than an hour to deal with the food in the oven, but we can get tonight’s marathon started in the meantime.” 

Cas bows his head—both an agreement and a concession—and, completely unnecessarily, teleports to the vacant space beside Dean on the bed. 

Dean scoffs, patting around the sheets in search of the TV remote. “You really missed those wings of yours, huh?” 

“Very much, yes.” Cas locates the remote with ease—apparently, it’d wedged itself beneath one of the pillows—and presents it to Dean, who takes it with an absentminded ‘thanks.’ “I forgot how… Confining it feels to have them bound to my vessel. So I make use of them more often than is strictly necessary to ‘stretch’ them, so-to-speak.” 

“What do you mean? It’s not like your wings ever actually disappeared. They just became unusable.” 

“They’re made of pure energy like the rest of me, Dean; the skeletal shadow you were able to see of them before was merely a visual manifestation of the amount of power the Fall burned off of them. The sudden reintroduction of so much energy to my being will take some getting-used-to. I mean—you try stuffing six atomic bombs-worth of what essentially amounts to hot stardust in a single small container that you also happen to be occupying and see how comfortable that feels.” 

If Cas’ tone were any different, Dean would think he’s being snippy with him. But years of hanging around the guy means Dean’s able to tell the subtle difference between Cas’ special brand of bitchiness and a plain, no-nonsense delivery of information. 

Still, no-nonsense delivery aside, Dean is left dumbfounded because— “wait, six? What, did you actually do the math or something?” 

Cas gives him a strange look, tilting his head. “I hardly think counting qualifies as math.” 

Dean gawks at him for no less than five whole seconds before it finally computes in his head. Eyes blown wide, he blurts out, “you have six wings now?” 

“I’ve always had six wings, Dean. Ever since Chuck promoted me to the Seraph lineage of angels.” 

“Nah—I know what I saw every time you called down the holy lightning storms, and it was a single pair of wings.” Dean doesn’t really know why he’s arguing. Surely, Cas knows his wings better than a lowly little human ever could. But Dean’s always found it more comfortable to argue than let himself feel lost and confused. Cas understands.

Patient as ever, he explains, “you saw only what made sense to your human mind. Most humans expect ‘wings’ to mean a single pair of feathered appendages, and so that is what they see. Even then, they can only perceive them in shadows, though that is usually the angel’s prerogative. The wings are arguably the only parts of an angel’s true form that a human can see without risking blindness, but our wings are also our most cherished possession. Revealing them to humans is one among our greatest social taboos.” 

“Ah, right, because we filthy hairless apes are so far beneath celestial excellence. Wouldn’t wanna tarnish the sanctity of your being with my dirty eyes,” quips Dean. And it truly is just a joke. He’s over a decade beyond the days he used to get legitimately offended by the pompous, unironically holier-than-thou attitudes of angels. Plus, Cas is many miles removed from his old angelic assholery. Dean doesn’t actually believe he’d harbor such anti-human sentiments. 

But Cas takes his little joke much more seriously than Dean intended him to. 

“I’d reveal my wings to you in a heartbeat and without question, Dean, if I knew you wanted me to,” he says, with not even a hint of insincerity in his voice. “I just figured, being a hunter and all, you’d like as few reminders as possible that you’ve fallen for a thing rather than a person. Something tells me six wings adorned with thousands of eyeballs would be… Off-putting to you.” 

Well… Dean’s not going to bother contending with that. On a surface level, it definitely does sound like something he’d be instinctively put off by. Wings are one thing—wings with eyeballs? Even the idea of that will take quite a bit of time to properly wrap his head around. 

He’s seen theoretical diagrams of Seraph anatomy in Enochian lore books before, and he’s not going to lie: shit’s terrifying. But he’s always put it out of his mind because Cas’ vessel is more than just a vessel at this rate; it’s an extension of himself. It’s his own. So much so that he had the right to say ‘yes’ to Lucifer some years ago. Why dwell on what his ‘true form’ looks like when he has a perfectly good form that, by all means, is true enough in its own right? 

That’s the least of Dean’s concerns at the moment, though. 

Don’t think he didn’t immediately catch the insecurity so potent and saturating it practically dripped off of every word Cas just spoke. 

“I think you’ve damn-well earned the title of ‘person’ after all this time, Cas,” he says. “Things ain’t got hearts as big as yours—fact they rarely ever have hearts at all.” 

Good execution. Perfect landing. Turns out Dean is capable of dispensing earnest reassurance when he actually takes the time to self-reflect and realize how much of a dick he is for never saying the nice shit he thinks out-loud. 

Cas, however, is still visibly perplexed, the tilt of his head deepening. “I don’t have a heart, Dean.” 

Dean deflates, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. Figures, really. Of course Cas chooses this precise instant to be painfully literal. 

“I’m talking about your metaphorical heart, Huggy Bear. You know—the one that allowed you to fall in love and care about all the rabble here on Earth.” 

“I do not consider humanity rabble. I admire it greatly.” 

Dean snaps his fingers in a silent, ‘bingo’-like expression, and he thinks it doesn’t at-all help the sense that Cas resembles a dog too much for comfort; it sort of feels like he’s mimicking the action of an owner using a clicker to reward desired behavior. 

Jesus, Dean has got to make better strides toward equivalent exchange in their relationship. 

More on that later, though. 

For now, he settles to lift his head, meet Cas’ befuddled gaze, and use actual words to convey his meaning. “Exactly,” he says. “You care so much you actually admire us. Heartless things don’t do that, but people do.” 

Cas nods, confusion finally melting off his face. “I see.” A tiny smile tugs at the corners of his mouth as he looks down at his lap, suddenly a perfect picture of shyness. “Thank you, Dean.” 

Dean doesn’t know what it is—the soft extension of gratitude, the peaceful, inspirited smile—but something about Cas’ bashful appearance does the hinkiest crap to Dean’s chest, heart flip-flopping, fluttering, tripping over itself, breaths shuddering ever-so-slightly. 

It’s not the first time he’s seen Cas look mildly shy, though he’ll admit that it is a rare sight. Dean’s just not used to it; that’s all. 

“Sure,” is all Dean says, because he’s about as emotionally inept as Cas is socially strange. 

They go quiet, Dean twiddling his thumbs and Cas totally content, basking, it appears, in Dean’s objectively mundane assurance (is the bar seriously so low that a few kind words have Cas giggling and kicking his feet like he just got asked to prom by the most popular guy in school?). 

Finally, when Dean can no longer stand the restless itch under his skin, he says, “thousands of eyeballs, huh?” Might as well ask, while the topic is fresh…

“I would manifest them only as markings in the feathers for your comfort if you ever asked to see my wings,” Cas promises, eyes all sparkly and soft and unguarded. 

Dean only narrowly resists the thought that his angel looks pretty like this, though the effort to do so is so great that he hasn’t any energy left to make his lame, “uh, thanks?”, sound less stiff. 

Not that Cas cares. He just nods and replies, “of course.” 

“So, can you, like… See out of all of them, or…?”

Cas smirks like he finds Dean’s curiosity both amusing and endlessly endearing. “They’re more symbolic than practical,” he says. “Unlike other angels, Seraphim are blessed with the ability to see beauty and divine truth where most cannot. I believe it is for that reason that I retracted all my faith from Heaven over time and placed it in you instead. I’ve always had faulty programming, an inbuilt predisposition to question the Host and seek enlightenment elsewhere; it is what first turned me to your guiding hands. But since acquiring my eyes, I’ve seen nothing more beautiful or true or worth following in this universe than your soul, Dean.” 

Oh. 

Cool, yeah, that’s just peachy. 

Leave it to Cas to go and one-up any sorry attempt of Dean’s at emotional connection by no less than a dozen orders of magnitude with flawless ease. 

It’s never Cas’ intention, but the guy really does make Dean look bad sometimes. Which is an especially ass-backwards talent given that he always manages to do it in moments where he’s praising Dean like he’s the greatest thing to grace the Earth since the first man. 

Dean clears his throat and tells him, “you really gotta stop saying shit like that out of nowhere, man,” if only to cover the bewildering blend of fluster, delight, and sense of inferiority currently brewing up to the surface of his skin in the form of a flush. Honestly, he doesn’t know when it became so easy for Cas to get him blushing like a schoolgirl, but he’s a little sick of it. Makes it hard for him to maintain his general aura of cool, suave unflappability. 

“Why?” 

Dean tries to think of a better way of framing it, but it really does come down to this: “‘cause you’re making me look bad.” 

Cas shakes his head. “That’s not possible. Your features are always extremely pleasing to the eye.” 

Dean sinks into himself, not exasperated but definitely a bit weary, though he’ll secretly confess to finding the particular brand of ‘Cas literalism’ that ends in him being paid a nice compliment charming. What can he say? He’s an easy girl. “Again, I’m not being literal, Cas—” 

“I’m aware,” Cas cuts in, and meets Dean gaze dead-on. “That was a deliberate flirtation. I find that praising your physical attributes is much more effective at dissuading you of your infuriating inclinations toward self-deprecation than trying to assure you of your more abstract qualities that you already don’t believe you have anyway. I can always count on you knowing you’re attractive. But also…” He slides his gaze down, slow and full of intention, then flicks his eyes back up to Dean’s face (did… Did Cas just check him out?). “I was presented the opportunity, and after years of keeping my thoughts to myself, I was glad to take advantage of it. Your soul is only one on an infinitely long list of things I find alluring about you, Dean.” 

And Dean’s mental fortitude promptly folds like a fucking lawn chair. Whatever scrap of nonchalance he had left in him has vacated the premises, and now all he’s left with is some absurd brand of abashment he hasn’t felt since he was ten years-old, receiving a bushel of wildflowers from another boy in his class at recess completely unprompted. Nevermind the fact that he didn’t realize why it got him so shy and warm inside until his bisexual epiphany struck him upside the head two years later and he came to understand that he felt the way he did because he liked the boy. 

Moral of the story is: he’s a fucking idiot. Not new information, but it remains the world’s greatest mystery how he went so long denying that his sentiments surrounding Cas were, and have always been, above and beyond romantic.

There are only three people in his entire life who’ve managed to get him feeling this fluttery, or somewhere close. That boy in the fifth grade, Cassie (fuck, that girl could slap him stupid and still have him pleading at her feet for more), and Cas. Even Lisa—whom he loved very much, don’t get him wrong—couldn’t quite tap into the shriveled, parched little cortex of Dean Winchester’s brain that threatens to reduce him to a puddle of yielding soup when hand-fed just the right flavor of nectar. 

Recess boy fed him innocent puppy-love, not that he recognized it at the time, but still—it was the pure, guileless sweetness of the gesture that just did something to little Dean’s heart, already so hardened and rough around the edges from years on the road spent bearing witness to things no child should ever have to see and growing far beyond his years as consequence. 

Cassie fed him freedom, liberation. During the day, he’d grind away at the case he was on with his father, and at night, after John had passed out at the bottom of a bottle, he’d sneak off to see Cassie and let himself succumb to her whims. She was always so good at getting him out of his head, breaking down his John Winchester Brand™ steel-reinforced walls, releasing him from the suffocating confinement of strict norms and expectations; he still thinks about it from time to time. 

And Cas… Cas feeds him shameless fucking worship. He doesn’t just say shit like “you’re pretty,” or “you’re funny.” He reaches right into Dean’s chest and caresses the heart he’s just barely holding together with dinky office staples and expired Dollar Store bandaids like it’s something to behold, admire, cherish. Cas treats the unsightly thorns in Dean’s stem like they’re beautiful, too—because they’re Dean’s, and everything of Dean’s is beautiful in the Seraph’s many eyes. How not a single one of those divine peepers of his sees anything even remotely negative about Dean is just another unknowable mystery. 

It seems so unrealistic, doesn’t it? Of all the far more idyllic phenomena in the universe, Cas is here claiming Dean in all his flimsy and flawed ‘glory’ is the most beautiful thing it has to offer. Just a few weeks ago, Dean would’ve recoiled from such a grand statement, and hell, he still feels a little fucking weird about it. He’s still hotheaded, still drinks too much, still punches first, asks questions later, still afflicted by an infernal need to hold love and care at arm’s length, still distrustful of happiness, still overall fucked-up in a way he doesn’t think anyone else in the world can possibly be. 

But something must’ve happened since he threw himself blindly into this thing with Cas. Something so subtle that it escaped his radar but so monumental it now has what once would’ve registered as impossible pills to swallow feeling like the sweetest, smoothest nectar to ever grace the desiccated receptors of the most abused and hopelessly neglected corner of his mind. 

A switch has flipped. He knows, because in this moment, as he internally flails to keep a hold on his own head, the first thought to spring to mind isn’t ‘Cas loves this idealized version of me that doesn’t exist.’ 

It’s ‘Cas loves me.’ Full stop. No modifiers. No exceptions to the rule. 

If he only loved an ‘ideal Dean,’ he wouldn’t make a point of staring, not just at, but into Dean—actively seeing all the jagged, ghastly thorns he has to offer—and capitalizing on the first opportunity he’s presented with to make sure Dean knows he sees nothing but boundless, literally infinite beauty in him. 

And really—Dean hardly knows what to do with sincere commendations in general, so what the fuck is he supposed to do with worship? It’s not usually the type of shit you repay with a plain ‘thank you.’ 

He knows Cas doesn’t say shit like this with the expectation that he’ll be rewarded, but once again, Dean is absolutely struck by the sheer magnitude of their inequity. What could he possibly offer in equal exchange to an angel who can see everything Dean is and ever was and still thinks him worthy of divine love? Of all the words that can accurately describe Dean Winchester, ‘profound’ sure as hell ain’t one of them. ‘Sappy’ even less so. 

Cas is both of those things in epic proportion, and all Dean can give him in return is—well… 

“Oh, hey, would you look at that—TV’s still paused where we left off last night. I’m just gonna—” he coughs awkwardly, feeling faint and hot all over, and glues his eyes to the flat screen across the room to avoid having to look into Cas’ obscenely intense gaze any longer— “press play now…” His voice is pitifully weak and full of air toward the end of his stupid ramblings. He squeezes his eyes shut and mentally curses himself. 

Listen—he’s doing his damn best, okay? He gave Cas some reassurance earlier—soothed an insecurity of his. That’s fucking progress, right? 

God, he’s pathetic… 

“Dean.”

“Yeah, what?” He responds too fast, too jumpy, no doubt giving rise to some hefty suspicions in the mind of his criminally astute angel. 

“I fear I may have made you uncomfortable. I can leave for a bit if you—” 

“No, don’t—” Dean’s shooting a hand out blindly to catch Cas’ arm and hold him firmly in place before he can even process he’s doing it. He feels weird as hell and uncharacteristically awkward and just—so, wildly out of his depth, but the last thing he wants is for Cas to fuck off. Frankly, he’s had his damn fill of Cas fucking off or worse, so if he has to grit his teeth as he wades through the muck of his screwy head to keep Cas here, so be it. “Just… Bear with me for a minute, alright?” 

“Always,” Cas answers, as easily as ever, and it definitely doesn’t do Dean’s screwy head any favors. 

Words seem moot at this rate. Dean sucks at words. He’s always been an ‘acting man.’ So maybe he’s looking in the wrong place for his equivalent contribution to tonight’s exchange of vulnerability. Sappy poetry and flowery prose are Cas’ realm. Dean would just look like a whole entire idiot trying to become a master of the same domain. 

Doing things. Showing his sentiments. That’s his forte. 

“Take off your stuffy fucking coat,” he says suddenly, because he sucks at words. But he has a half-baked plan, and he can’t afford to get hung-up on eloquence he doesn’t possess, lest he lose the meager spark of courage (impulse, more-like) currently fueling him. 

Cas blinks at him, an otherwise unmoving gargoyle. “What?” 

“You heard me.” 

“I did, but I can’t quite tell if your request is coming from a place of abrupt dislike for my wardrobe or something of a… Different nature.” 

Dean decidedly skates right past the suggestive undertone in Cas’ response, for obvious reasons. “Neither. Your coat’s fine.” 

“Then why call it stuffy?” 

“Because it is. But that’s not the point—” 

“I happen to like my coat very much.” 

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dean casts his head back and unleashes a miserable groan. “Jesus, this ain’t about the coat, Cas—you’re killing me here.” 

“I’m doing it entirely on purpose.” Cas dons a smile that has no right being as sweet in appearance as it is when he’s just admitted to yanking Dean’s chain for fun. 

“Why?” Dean demands. 

“Because I get the sense you’re about to request something of me that will serve as a novel addition to our relationship, and I’m stalling for time while I work to properly contain my anticipation so as to avoid coming off as overly eager.” 

Dean somehow manages to be floored by the blunt honesty, rendering him wide-eyed and speechless—which is strange considering he’s already acknowledged that Cas does words a hell of a lot better than he does. It shouldn’t surprise him how willing Cas is to communicate his thoughts so openly. 

Nonetheless, Dean stubbornly refuses to let his conviction slip away from him, so he shakes his head to rid it of the infernal distraction that is Cas’ apparent ‘eagerness’, resolutely ignoring his piercing, awaiting gaze, and says gruffly, “coat off, suit jacket off—and get rid of the tie.” 

Cas tilts his head faintly. “Why?” 

“Quit stalling for time.” 

“I’m not anymore. Now I’m genuinely asking where you’re going with this.” 

Dean rolls his eyes so hard he actually makes himself dizzy. “It’s too many layers. Just do it.” 

“I think that’s a loaded criticism coming from you.” 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” mutters Dean, pinching the bridge of his nose. Does he have to fucking beg? Dean Winchester does not beg. 

…But he does pray. Sometimes. Only a little. Not enough for it to be embarrassing, he thinks. And prayer tends to work remarkably well on Cas (at least when the guy isn’t all tangled up in Heaven’s manipulative nonsense). Perks of their ‘profound bond,’ or what-have-you.

Fine. Let’s try that, then. 

The lengths Dean will go to just to get Cas wrapped up in his arms without explicitly asking for it—truly, it’s ridiculous. 

“Please, Cas?” His voice is softened, eyes meeting Cas’ directly so he knows he’s being sincere. 

There’s a subtle but extremely significant distinction between begging and praying. Dean used to think they were one and the same; for the longest time, praying did feel like begging. And sure, in most cases, praying involves pleading for something from a divine entity, but that’s not actually what makes prayer, prayer. 

As Cas said, intense longing can often be mistaken for prayer. And that’s because true prayer is born, not from desperation, but from an intimate connection. A deep-seated desire to be seen and heard by this one, singular being; any other equally or even more capable being simply won’t do. 

Like magic, the skepticism in Cas’ eyes vanishes. Actually, he might even melt a bit; there’s some give in the muscle where Dean’s still gripping his arm that wasn’t there before. Now that Dean’s thinking about it, he’s never seen Cas’ reaction to prayer before—never been treated to the pure serenity that shines in his oceanic gaze as the sense of being revered settles with him, the softness that smooths the typically hardened and steely lines of his face as he basks in the knowledge that he’s wanted, needed, held dear in some fashion or another. Dean really only prayed to Cas whenever he went missing without another word; it’s a different experience entirely when Cas is sat right in front of him, visible adoration carved into every edge and curve of his face. 

Dean wonders if his reaction is the same regardless of whose prayer reaches his ears, or if this picture of unadulterated contentment is reserved for Dean’s prayers only. 

Signs point overwhelmingly to the latter, if the way Cas just gladly obliges Dean’s request like he wasn’t literally stalling against it several seconds ago is any indication. He shucks off his coat, folds it up neatly, sets it aside, then slips out of his suit jacket, folds that up neatly too, sets it aside, then loosens and unravels his tie—fucking folds that up too, sets it aside. So meticulous. And inconvenient, given that Dean’s resolve is very much still subject to crumbling the longer his impulsive plan goes unfulfilled. 

But sure— take your time, Cas. It’s not like Dean’s actively fighting his emotionally costive urge to retreat and shove the next ‘baby step’ off to be another day’s problem or anything. 

“Okay,” says Cas, looking again to Dean. “I’ve done as you asked. Can’t say I understand what your qualm with those specific items of clothing is though.” 

“Because ‘tax accountant chic’ ain’t the right dress code for a cuddle sesh, Cas—that’s why,” Dean grumbles, affecting his typical compensatory surliness to offset how fucking flushed and hot his face has gotten all of a sudden. Again. 

Cas’ eyebrows damn-near fly off his face with how fast they shoot up toward his hairline. He opens his mouth, clearly to question if he heard Dean right, so Dean beats him to the punch. 

“Yeah, whatever—I said what I said. Get the fuck over here already.” He waves Cas over impatiently, though Cas hesitates, staring owlishly at him. “Come on, man. Before I overthink it and change my mind.” 

“You really—”

“Yes.” 

“Are you su—”

“Yes.” 

“Okay, because I just want to make sure you’re—” 

“I am.” 

“Will you let me fini—”

“No.” 

Cas huffs, fixing Dean with a pointed glare, though it somehow manages to gleam with a hint of fondness all the while. Without another word, he shuffles himself closer, and—alright, yep, this is definitely happening now. 

Fuck, Dean thinks, as if he hasn’t been campaigning for this precise outcome. Look, it’s not like his neuroses have dulled any; he’s just determined to white-knuckle his way past them. It’s not like he doesn’t want this either. He absolutely does. Keeping Cas close has always been a secret guilty pleasure of his. Evidently, Cas has a habit of getting dead or kidnapped or tortured or brainwashed. As long as he’s close, Dean’s got him. He’s safe. He’s not off doing reckless bullshit he’d ironically always criticize the Winchesters for doing in a similar fashion. 

There’s a certain… Affirmation, Dean supposes, in not only having Cas in his line of sight, but also in having him close enough to touch. To feel. To know that he’s tangible and real and brimming with the energy of his aliveness. 

Dean’s not an idiot. He’s noticed his physical gravitation toward Cas as the years have passed. In an empty room big enough to contain hundreds, best believe he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Cas. At a crime scene, flashing their fake badges, Dean’s subconsciously plastered to Cas’ side. Sharing a spacious table at a restaurant, just the two of them, Dean will orient himself so his elbow lightly nudges Cas’ arm every other time he lifts his burger up to his mouth. 

And you know what? Sue him. He’s sure-as-shit earned the right to some passive paranoia over Cas disappearing after all the times the guy’s up and fucking died on him.

A few moments later, Dean’s sat with his legs folded up in a criss-cross and Cas pulled back toward his chest, arms wrapped snug around him. He kind of doesn’t even know how they wound up in this position; he was so fixated on his own introspections that it’s almost like he blinked and suddenly they were like this. 

He’s not complaining, despite it feeling… Objectively strange. Cas is a bit stiff in his grasp, wooden, but Dean thinks he’s just giving as good as he’s getting; Dean’s not exactly the picture of relaxation right now either. His shoulders are tense, and regardless of how close they are, there remains an awkward couple of inches between his chest and Cas’ back, like Dean hasn’t fully committed to the embrace quite yet. 

He draws in a deep breath and gently eases Cas back to close the last of the distance. The contact shouldn’t be as electrifying as it is—they’re just hugging, for fuck’s sake—but it is. Cas has always felt warm through his many thick layers, virtually a damn space heater, but now, with him dressed down to a single thin layer, he’s warmer than ever. Not hot, though. Not really. He’s scorching to the touch—inhumanly so—and yet his heat is totally pleasant, inviting. For a living embodiment of hot stardust, his energy is staggeringly well-tempered and agreeable. 

Dean leans farther into him, tentative but certainly not for lack of wanting, hooking his chin over Cas’ shoulder, letting his eyes drift shut and soaking in all that angelic warmth everywhere their bodies touch. And once it seems to register with Cas that Dean’s fully accepted their present entanglement, he relaxes in-kind, turning to putty in Dean’s arms with a long, level exhale. 

Yeah, Dean thinks, this feels right. Safe, too, surprisingly—he’s not used to feeling so secure when he’s the one wrapping someone else up in a hug and not the one being wrapped up, but here he is, completely slack against Cas’ back, breaths deep and even, heart steady. He’d be lying if he were to say there wasn’t a part of him that was at least partially convinced this would be clumsy, rigid, and unsettling at best. Surely, he would’ve found a way to fuck it up with all his skittish ambivalence, but they fall into this so easily that Dean actually entertains the notion that he may be dreaming. 

“Dean,” Cas says, voice pitched low as always but with a sort of airy tenderness Dean doesn’t think he’s ever heard from him before. 

It makes his heart jump a hair, sending it into a transient little pitter-patter behind his sternum before it settles back into its peaceful rhythm. 

“Hmm?” he hums, nestling even closer, tucking his nose into the impossibly warm skin of Cas’ neck. He smells like clean laundry and the lightest traces of Dean’s amber cologne from last night’s shoulder-to-shoulder Buffy marathon. The thought has him smiling, just so.

“You’re happy.” Not a question. Merely an observation.

“Mhmm.” 

“You enjoy this.”

“Mhmm.” 

“Did you know you were going to like it this much or is there something else that prompted this?” 

“Wanted a way to thank you,” Dean answers truthfully, much too comfy to bother with his usual bush-beating shenanigans. “‘M shit at words, so you get my elite cuddle skills instead.” 

“You’re perfectly fine at words, Dean.” 

“Not as good as you,” Dean mumbles, probably pouting; he can’t be assed to care about that at the moment. “The shit that comes outta your mouth sometimes, Cas—all that devotion and adoration and worship…” He shakes his head minutely, as best he can with his face pressed to Cas’ neck. “I can’t possibly measure up to it. This is the best I can do in return.” 

Cas sighs, a short, curt little thing. “Your talent for self-criticism truly is maddening. Is it because I’m an angel that you seem to have it ingrained in your mind that you have nothing worthwhile to offer me?” 

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.” 

“Well, it’s stupid.” 

The blunt comment startles an incredulous chuckle out of Dean. “Jeez, Cas, tell me how you really feel.” 

“As an angel, I was created for the sole purpose of worship, and I wouldn’t call it an enviable quality. It is a remnant of my programming—something installed in me to make me the ideal follower.” 

“Quite the rebel for someone made to be an ‘ideal follower,’” Dean points out. “You worship who and what you want; that’s what makes it enviable.” Huh. Maybe he’s not nearly as bad at this whole ‘words’ thing after all. Turns out he just needs to be subdued with the treat of safety and supernatural body heat—like some kind of feral street cat scoring a warm engine bay to crawl into on a bitter winter night. 

“Yes, well—you’re rather persuasive.” There’s a smile in Cas’ voice, all fond and doting. His hands move to fit over Dean’s where they’re settled against his abdomen, playing idly with his fingers. “Did you know, Dean? That you have a natural affinity for worship as well?” 

Dean’s eyes blink open at that. He lifts his head up to get a look at the side of Cas’ face, gawking. “I… Do?” Definitely news to him. Every celestial entity he’s ever encountered has ragged on him precisely for his stubborn lack of faith and worship. Including, at one point, Cas.

Cas makes a soft noise of agreement. “If you’re so concerned that you can’t measure up to my propensity for veneration, do know that I feel your devotion every second of every day, whether we’re together or apart. I don’t think you realize how much love you send my way—so much that I continuously struggle to discern where your fierce affections end and your prayers begin. They read as one and the same to me more often than not, especially as of recent.” 

“You’re saying I’ve been returning the favor this entire time without even knowing it?” 

“Yes.” 

“Oh…” Dean says intelligently. 

“That isn’t to say there haven’t been… Moments in which you sent clear disdain or resentment my way too. You tend to express emotions very intensely, and your aptitude for self-righteousness does, on occasion, drive some disproportionately nasty allocations of blame—” 

“Wow. Okay, ouch.” Dean deflates, scowling.

“But,” Cas continues, “your love and devotion have never once wavered. Even when you want to hate me, you still find it in you to love me. I imagine it’s one of the biggest reasons you’ve gotten so angry in the past.” 

“I never wanted to hate you,” Dean mumbles weakly, hiding his face once again in the crook of Cas’ neck. 

“That’s simply not true,” argues Cas, but he’s gentle about it. He pays special attention to the thin, faded scar etched across four of the five fingers on Dean’s left hand, carved into him when he’d carelessly snatched the angel blade from within Cas’ sleeve in a Mark of Cain-induced bid to take his life. Cas had looked at Dean so brokenly then, beaten and bloodied and yet his own hands were squeaky clean; he never once struck back. Fuck… “For instance, when your mother—”

And just like that, Dean’s set on-edge, pliant stupor draining out of his body. “Cas,” he warns. He doesn’t say anything more, but his message gets across just fine. 

“Case in point,” Cas says, and then strokes the pad of his thumb over Dean’s knuckles, a delicate gesture of placation that… Actually works remarkably well—has Dean melting right back into him. “You know, someday we will have to broach that subject, Dean.” 

Dean grunts in halfhearted acknowledgment. Yes, he does know they’ll have to talk it out eventually. He fell to his forty year-old knees in Purgatory and pleaded for Cas to forgive him after he essentially told him everything that’s ever gone wrong for them was his fault—including and maybe even especially Mary’s death—and while Dean meant what he said in his apologetic prayer to Cas back then, he’s still not even close to ‘over’ that whole mess yet, which is why he’s afraid of talking about it now. 

This whatever-the-fuck-it-is with Cas is fragile. If they dip their toes into the not- so-nice things that have happened between them over the years too soon, the house of cards they’re slowly building together will come toppling right down on top of them, dealing what Dean is certain would be irreparable damage. 

So he makes a mental note to add ‘critically analyze every destructive transgression they’ve committed against each other’ (mostly Dean’s against Cas, but who's counting?) to his ever-growing list of baby steps, and moves on. 

“Not today, though,” he mumbles, not meaning for his lips to graze Cas’ skin as he does, but shockingly not unsettled by it either. If anything, it feels as oddly natural as every other part of this embrace, like it belongs. 

Cas either doesn’t notice it or doesn’t think it necessary to pick apart like Dean does, because he just concurs, “not today,” and that’s that on that. 

There’s a stretch of silence during which Dean simmers back down fully, allowing that sense of peace and safety to wash over him once more. He breathes deep, close his eyes again—he could probably fall asleep like this, draped over Cas’ back, warmed down to his very core with smoldering, honey-sweet grace. 

But he still has his fucking braised beef in the oven that he’ll have to tend to in t-minus thirty minutes or so (this is the first time he’s actually peeved off that he committed to cooking instead of ordering takeout for the night; mischievous button-pushing, be damned. He’s too comfy for that shit now), and something belatedly occurs to him: 

“If you could feel my love for you this whole time, how come you didn’t know I felt the same way about you?” Not that Dean knew he felt that way about Cas—not entirely, anyway. Denial and all that. But still, it would’ve been nice if Cas had clued him the fuck in sooner. 

“You taught me how to feel, Dean. Needless to say, it is quite difficult to properly identify the nature of an emotion when your teacher adamantly resists having to look too closely at his own emotions.” 

Well. 

Alright. Can’t argue with that, Dean supposes. 

“Honestly, Cas—of all the people in the world you could’ve learned Humanity 101 from, you had to choose me? Sam was literally right there. You know, the more diplomatic and well-adjusted brother.” 

“Dean, if you keep inventing new ways to put yourself down despite knowing the answer to every perceived mystery regarding our relationship and the reasons for my attachment to you, this conversation will move in circles for an eternity,” Cas says dryly. “You know why I chose you. Quit manufacturing excuses out of thin air to doubt it.” 

Dean scoffs, amused, because that was about the nicest way Cas could’ve said ‘your self-loathing has overstayed its welcome, and I’m tired of stepping on a new one of its landmines every time I open my mouth.’ 

“Fine,” he concedes with a half-smirk. “Whatever you say, boss.” 

“Thank you.” The way Cas says it is grateful, relieved, but also a hint of grumpy like he always seems to get whenever Dean goes out of his way to test his patience. 

Gradually, Dean’s half-smirk spreads into an impish grin. “I really get under your skin sometimes, don’t I?” 

“Immensely.” 

“There must be a part of you that likes it, though, if you’ve stuck around this long.” 

“Evidently.” 

Dean hums, pleased and sing-songy, and loops his arms tighter around his angel. “You love me.” 

“Immutably.” 

And disarmed as he is, with his guard lowered more than he thinks it’s ever been, he finds it unusually easy to add, “I love you.” 

To which Cas answers in the softest, most serene of whispers, “blessedly.” 

Dean doesn’t know exactly which or how many ‘steps’ in their development this exchange has covered, but he does know they’re moving in the right direction, and that’s really all he can ask for. 

He feels a hell of a lot lighter than he did just some minutes ago. That’s for damn sure. 

Buffy stays paused and forgotten on the TV screen for as long as they sit like this, quiet and reveling, which just so happens to be as long as it takes for the imminent danger of Dean’s gourmet meal burning up in the oven to set in and he’s forced to reluctantly relinquish his hold on Cas to go deal with it. 

Dean’s idea of ‘wining and dining’ is unconventional and somewhat peculiar; that is to say: when he returns to his room, he hands Cas a glass of red wine and a plate of meticulously-staged meat and potatoes, which carries an objective, romantic undertone that he immediately undercuts by presenting the meal in a grossly unceremonious manner so as to uphold his facade of cool nonchalance (ain’t no thang, he thinks, while his ears are actively flaming magma-hot at how much ‘thang’ it actually is). Sometimes, he truly is struck by how much of a boneheaded loser he is…

Cas’ response, regardless, is predictably near-identical to what it’s been every time Dean’s fed him some good home cooking in the past couple weeks. 

“This looks incredible, Dean. Thank you.” Lovely, incredible—same difference to Dean. The one thing that is staggeringly different from Cas’ responses to his previous offerings of gourmet meals is that Cas’ eyes don’t smolder so much as they fucking sparkle. He watches Dean, not like he’s only narrowly managing to suppress the urge to kiss him all hot and nasty, but rather, like he wants to crawl right back into Dean’s arms and hold him closer than is physically possible. 

Dean’s not quite sure which reaction he prefers. On one hand, he really was hoping to see Cas fail miserably at concealing how much he clearly wants to fuck him, but on the other… There’s something endearingly innocent and pure—in a way that feeds Dean’s neglected psyche about as well as Cas’ penchant for worship—about an angel both desiring and feeling comfortable enough to make himself small in a human’s embrace. 

It’s easy to forget sometimes, really—that Cas was once this grand, unfathomable force of time and space and nature. That, in some ways, he still is. 

It’s only once they’ve both finished their plates that their Buffy marathon finally continues. And because Cas was the exact opposite of subtle about his craving for another round of Dean’s cuddles (which truly are elite, by the way; he’s honed his craft to perfection over many years. Cassie and Lisa were certainly big fans—plus, no one ever said every one-night stand has to be cold and distant) during their meal, Dean has taken it upon himself to reassume his position behind Cas, wrapping him up tight and watching the TV over his shoulder. 

Cas sinks back into him, so lax he practically rivals a puddle, and Dean can’t help but smile. 

“You’re happy,” he says, parroting Cas’ observation of Dean from earlier. 

“I am.” 

“You enjoy this.” 

Cas sighs, just a faint puff of air out his nose. Dean’s lips twitch wider into a grin, because annoying his way into Cas’ heart has always been a favored pastime of his. 

“I do,” says Cas. 

“Did you know you were going to like it this much or—”

“Is there a reason you’re repeating everything I said earlier?” 

Dean huffs a soft laugh at the mildly miffed tone in Cas’ voice, and shrugs. “Maybe I like my angel’s feathers a little ruffled.” 

He fully expects Cas to grumble something characteristically bitchy or ignore him completely, but that’s not what he gets at all. Not by any stretch of the imagination. 

Instead, with his view from behind, he sees Cas’ cheeks bunch up just so—like he’s donned one of his cloyingly sentimental smiles—and Dean can’t, for the life of him, fathom what’s got him feeling so soft and mushy all of a sudden. That is, until… 

“Your angel…” murmurs Cas, the utterance so delicate Dean might’ve mistaken it for a secret he wasn’t even meant to hear. 

But he did hear it. And it hits him like a sack of bricks upside the head: the realization that he’s actually been one hell of a sappy motherfucker this whole time—that he’s just as mawkish as Cas, only better at keeping it to himself. All the times he’s just passively thought of Cas as ‘his’ angel, and yet this is the first time he’s saying it out-loud. 

He never really noticed it before; it’s merely been a natural, subconscious thing for God knows how long. Initial epiphany aside, it doesn’t necessarily surprise Dean; years of angels and demons alike outright calling Cas his angel has kind of primed him to believe it without question. 

But it almost seems like it surprises Cas— that Dean could and does regard him as some denomination of ‘his.’ That his perpetual battle with lacking a place to truly belong has finally reached its close with the establishment of one, simple reality: though it has been awfully capricious and uncertain in the past, Cas’ place is undeniably with Dean. Always has been, despite the many circumstances they’ve been dealt and have directly dealt one another that threatened a near-certain path to mutually-assured destruction. 

The best part is that Dean can’t call it the work of fate; most people romanticize the idea of a fated soulmate, but Dean couldn’t be more revolted by the notion. Cas’ rebellion for him and their ensuing bond was the one thing about his life that wasn’t prescribed by a cruel God writing the backstory for His favorite playthings. The shit they’ve faced which, by all means, should’ve destroyed them, was overcome by way of their own determination to keep the hearth of their deep affections for one another alight. The bridges they built to traverse impossibly troubled waters were crafted brick by painstaking brick with their bare hands alone. 

So, you know what? Yeah, Cas is his angel. And Dean doesn’t even want to pretend he doesn’t mean it when he says it. 

“My angel,” he affirms. There’s a non-zero chance he might revisit this moment a little later and lose his shit over how freely affectionate he’s being right now, but for just this little instant in time, he’s utterly, and in his whole entirety, content. 

“Does this make you my human?” Cas says it like a lighthearted jest, but for once, Dean’s the one taking things literally. 

“Pretty sure I’ve been your human longer than you’ve been my angel, Cas.” Transiently, he’s once again reminded of what Cas said back in that fucking dungeon: the one thing I want is something I know I can’t have. And not for the first time, Dean is absolutely thrown by how ludicrous that belief was. Because— “you’ve always had me. Even if I had my head stuck too far up my own ass to recognize it.” 

Cas doesn’t say anything, but he reaches a hand up and back to settle atop Dean’s head, lightly scritching at his scalp, clearly a silent expression of gratitude. It’s gentle, pleasant, so much so that it has Dean’s eyelids feeling heavy in an instant. 

For the second time that night, Buffy is totally forgotten on the TV, only this time, it’s not even paused. It’s relegated to nothing more than background noise, the tune to which Dean’s consciousness steadily fades. He falls asleep, safe and warm and happy, still curled up against Cas’ back. 

『✯』

At some point overnight, Dean had wound up horizontal and nestled under the covers of his bed, and Cas had taken his leave. It’s ridiculous, and he knows it, but there’s a tiny part of him that’s disappointed Cas was gone without a trace when he woke up. It’s nothing different from the routine they’d fallen into in the past several weeks, but that’s precisely why Dean’s feeling some type of way about Cas’ ease of disappearance. Quite frankly, it took a fucking lot of thought and self-reflection and putting-aside of his usual resistance to open communication for him to let himself do and feel the things he did the night prior; surely Cas knows that, and yet—Cas left like it was all nothing to him. Like no progress was made at all. Like there’s nothing to be learned from all the times Cas has slinked off and gotten his ass handed to him while Dean was left in the dark, oftentimes until it was too late to help or save him. 

Granted, Dean supposes Cas is just respecting previously-established boundaries. It’s not like Dean’s explicitly told him he doesn’t mind having Cas stick around to ‘watch over him’ while he sleeps anymore. But still—is the guy not capable of inference? Must he be told everything? Honestly, Cas is an emotionally-crippled hunter’s worst nightmare.

(Do let it be known that Dean understands he’s being irrational; he’s working on it, okay? Not well, but he is.)

Nevertheless, a fire’s been lit under his ass, and now he’s extra determined to compel Cas to stay overnight. Not by simply telling him that he can stay—no, no; that would be far too easy, and not at all characteristic of Dean to do. 

Instead, he’s chosen to call upon his best asset as a manner of ultimate, non-verbal persuasion: being hot. Not just that, but being hot on purpose, with effort put in. It’s never led him astray before; it won’t this time either—he’s sure of it. 

The bunker’s a ghost town at the moment. Sam’s on his exhaustively long morning run, Charlie’s on a trip back to Topeka to visit her mother’s gravesite, Bobby’s busy with a werewolf case in Colorado, Jack is God, Cas is in the wind as per usual, and Claire and Kaia were supposed to have returned from their little vacation in Galveston early that morning, but according to the—very drunken, mind you—text Claire sent Dean at around four a.m., the girls have decided to extend their holiday indefinitely; Dean doesn’t think it was a joke that Claire’s typo-laden message included the phrase ‘Vegas wedding.’ He’s still debating whether he should tell Jody or not. Evidently, as a lovesick idiot himself (not that he’ll ever admit it), he’s finding it difficult to consider letting love consume one’s inhibitions after living (and dying) through an almost world-ending crisis a cause for intervention. If things go tits-up, annulments are easy enough, right? Jody doesn’t need to know right away. 

… 

Thinking better of it, Dean pauses what he’s doing to shoot a brief heads-up Jody’s way, just to be safe. 

Speaking of what Dean’s doing: 

He’s taken up residence in the big master bathroom across the hall from his room, and he’s currently hunched over the counter in front of the mirror, fingers plucking at and combing through his hair with grueling attention to detail. He’s been here for many minutes, alternating between scant splashes of water, little dashes of pomade here and there, and meticulous flourishes of the wrist to work his hair into the exact right shape. Ordinarily, he couldn’t care less, most often settling for some gel and a thirty-second blow-dry. But he’s on a mission to capture Cas’ attention so well that the slippery bastard won’t even think of leaving again. 

This is a completely normal and reasonable way of going about signaling to an angel with a long history of misinterpreting human social cues that he wants him to do something. This isn’t a ludicrous plan at all. 

Whatever. 

Dean’s so absorbed in his appearance and the fact that there’s one fucking piece of hair that just won’t do what he tells it to that he doesn’t notice Sam’s return to the bunker until he’s already standing in the bathroom doorway, his reflection in the mirror a perfect picture of bewilderment. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, his brows furrowed like he simply cannot believe his eyes. 

Dean spares him little more than a glance, wrinkling his nose at the potent stench of workout sweat now stinking up the joint. “What does it look like I’m doing?” 

“Uh…” Sam huffs, apparently amused. “I believe the term for it is ‘primping.’” 

Dean scowls at that. “I’m just fucking with my hair, Sam. Don’t go throwin’ fanciful words around for it.” 

“Right. And you’re fucking with your hair, why?” 

“Can a man not change up his look every now and again?” 

“Dean, you’ve had the same hair since you were eight.” 

Dean’s incessant hair-fluffing goes still as he’s struck with the harrowing realization that Sam is right. Refusing to give him the satisfaction though, Dean just mutters under his breath, “shut up. No, I haven’t.” 

“Ah, you’re right—you did switch it up a little when you were a demon for some reason.” In his periphery, Dean sees Sam’s eyes narrow, then blow wide open again as if something revolutionary has just occurred to him. “Wait, you’re doing your demon hair right now.” 

“What—?” Appalled at the sudden accusation, Dean exclaims, “no, I’m not!” 

“You are! It looks exactly the same.” 

Dean can’t help but take a second to really see himself in the mirror, and—yep, that’s… That’s Knight of Hell chic looking right back at him; only difference is that there isn’t the chilling presence of murder in his eyes. Which is an important distinction, but still. God damn it. 

“Well, it’s not like there are a whole lot of ways to style hair this short, Sam,” he argues, because it’s true, and he figures there’s no going back now so he might as well accept it—continue on doing what he’s doing. He resumes his fluffing with an added remark of, “not that you and your Disney princess hair would ever know.” 

Sam gives him a pointed look but otherwise lets the jab go unacknowledged. “Why do you suddenly care so much about your hair anyway? You used to say spending more than a minute on it was ‘chick behavior.’” 

Dean cringes at himself, cold judgment staring back at him in his reflection. Look, he hasn’t actively thought that way in a long-ass time. Why do you think Sam said he used to say shit like that? That, however, does not negate the harsh reality that Dean has harbored before, and in some ways still does, a handful of sentiments that many would deem ‘problematic.’ 

With the introduction of so many women in his life after spending all his formative years with no one but his father and brother as consistent company, most of his glaring compensatory macho ideals have been largely smoothed out—self-imposed estrangement from his bisexuality notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been remnants of old attitudes subconsciously informing his behavior. 

That whole ‘giving a shit about your hair is for chicks’ thing? He hasn’t thought that way outright in forever, but his lingering adherence to hypermasculine presentation was, in the not-so-distant past, very much at-odds with his otherwise progressive enlightenment. 

Weirdly enough, something interesting happened when Dean was a demon. He stopped caring about a lot of shit that he was used to having rule his life day in and day out. A lot of the big important stuff: Sam, Cas, the world, etcetera, etcetera. But also a lot of littler things too. One such thing just so happened to be his fixation with appearing as textbook masculine as possible. Physically, at least. 

Where human Dean wouldn’t have been caught dead fussing over his hair in a mirror, demon Dean actually seemed to revel in the extra time he spent shaping and perfecting it. Crowley called it, rather crudely but no less accurately, his ‘slicks and dicks’ hair, because it had a way of attracting a much broader array of people than was generally typical for Dean. It acted like some kind of paradoxical ‘Bat Signal’ to a lot more than just women. Charlie once told him that she’s noticed men, even if they’re straight, tend to get hit on by other men a lot more often when it looks like they invest in their appearance.

Along that vein, something else that’s interesting about Dean’s time as a demon is that it was the one time since his early-early twenties that one could say he ‘slipped up.’ Two of those three triplets he and Crowley played with were men, and while he still didn’t let them touch him, he can’t say he didn’t look, nor can he say he didn’t have a damn good time flirting them into bed with him. 

If he’d been left a demon much longer, he probably would’ve let go of his internalized issues entirely; the thought’s occurred to him more than once… 

“Well,” he begins, and once he resigns himself to the reality that he has no worthwhile ammunition to counter with, he settles to say lamely, “is it so hard to believe I’ve reflected and adjusted my opinions accordingly?” 

“Based on four decades-worth of observable history, yes,” quips Sam. 

Where words fail, physical threats pick up the slack nicely. Dean whirls around and chucks his dinky plastic comb in Sam’s general direction. 

Sam sidles out of the way effortlessly, the comb sailing past him, out into the hallway. “Alright! Fine, my bad,” he says, not even bothering to smother the laughter in his voice. “Still doesn’t explain what specifically brought this on.” 

Dean rolls his eyes, turning back around to keep fidgeting with his hair. “Why do you care?” 

“I don’t. I just think it’s strange is all. I mean—who are you even doing this for?” 

“I can’t do it for myself?” 

Sam makes a particularly incredulous face at that. “Dean, you’re the literal poster child of never doing anything remotely healthy for yourself.” 

“Fuck’s sake—” Dean digs his fingertips into his temples, the beginnings of a headache setting in. “Was there a sheet I accidentally wrote my name on somewhere that signed me up to be ribbed by you today?” 

“I’m just saying, dude—” Sam lifts his hands up in a surrendering gesture, which is especially peculiar given that the next thing that comes out of his mouth is, in fact, more ribbing— “the only time you bother putting any effort into yourself is when you’re trying unusually hard to impress someone. And last I checked, there’s no one around to impress.” 

“Yet,” Dean mumbles—an involuntary slip of the tongue more than anything. And great, now he’s going to have to explain what the fuck he means by that. 

“You saying you’ve got a date later today?” asks Sam, brows raised high. 

Dean’s jaw clenches and, with a half-assed shrug, he answers cryptically, “something like that.” 

Here’s the thing: 

He’s not particularly opposed to Sam knowing about him and Cas— in theory. In a perfect, ideal world, Dean would just fess up to it and move on with his day. But he is intimately familiar with how perfect and ideal this world isn’t, and he’s pretty sure Sam being in-the-know runs a damn-high risk of shit changing between all of them. Not in, like… A homophobic way or anything; Sam’s never given even the slightest indication that he has any fucked-up views like that. In actuality, Dean’s far more concerned about the prospect of Sam just— looking at him differently. 

A fact of Dean’s life, the one thing that’s remained a constant in his impossibly variable and sporadic existence: Sam looks at him like he thinks Dean is so confident in himself, so sure of the direction he’s traveling in at any given time, and that surety is all Sam’s ever seen of Dean. It doesn’t matter how many times Dean has flat-out said he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing; Sam’s always just looked at him like he does know what he’s doing—par for the course in the case of a parentified elder sibling and the younger brother he’s basically raised since he was old enough to hold a gun right. 

Dean doesn’t know how to handle the mere notion of Sam bearing witness to his awkward fumbling and panicked flailing and— God forbid— blushing abashment as he tries to navigate his way through his whatever with Cas (and repeatedly falls flat on his fucking face while doing it, too). Not only is that shit embarrassing as all hell, but it also paints a picture of him that he doesn’t think he’s ready for Sam to see yet. It demonstrates, with indisputable clarity, just how lost Dean is and always has been. 

But also—yeah, maybe the thought of Sam knowing how mortifyingly head-over-heels for their male best friend Dean is makes his skin itch. He’s working on it.

“No Buffy marathon with Cas then, I take it?” 

Dean squints at Sam’s reflection, nerves beginning to prickle. Something about the tone of Sam’s voice and the overly conspicuous way in which he’s inspecting his fingernails feels hinky as hell. “Why do I get the feeling you’re aiming for a specific answer here, Sammy?” 

Sam doesn’t even fucking answer the question. He just makes some stupid-ass face and breezes right past Dean’s suspicions like they don’t mean shit to him. “Well, I just came by to let you know I’m taking Eileen out later, and we’ll probably stay the night at her new place, so you and your… Date, I guess, will have the bunker to yourselves.” 

And then he fucks off, not even affording Dean the courtesy of an opportunity to say his piece. Dean wants to think it’s because Sam doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of his death glares. But logically, Dean knows it’s because Sam doesn’t want to be interrogated about how he managed to get back in Eileen’s good graces after he wrongly assumed, a few weeks ago, that she’d want to keep things casual between them; the poor guy’s been moping around the bunker trying to draft up a fool-proof plan to earn Eileen’s forgiveness ever since, and Dean’s been making it a personal mission of his to tease him over his much-too-convoluted idea of courtship. Kind of ironic, he thinks—as if he’s not currently partaking in a convoluted courtship ritual himself. 

It’s his job as a big brother to poke fun at his younger brother—what can he say? It’s the law. 

Dean sighs at himself in the mirror, arms dropping back to his sides. He eyes the thin piece of hair that continuously refuses to cooperate like it’s making a conscious bid to piss him off. It irks him so much he almost doesn’t pick up on the subtle tilt to his head—the very same tilt Cas often employs when he’s particularly appalled by human behavior. 

Jesus Christ. 

Dean must be abyssally in-deep if he’s started to passively adopt Cas’ mannerisms. Twelve years he’s known the guy, but a few weeks into their whatevership, and suddenly the stark line that’s always divided their distinct idiosyncrasies from one another is visibly blurring. 

He shakes his head, straightens it with purpose, and fucks with his hair some more. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders what else of Cas’ has subliminally osmosed into his brain without his knowledge… 

With any luck, Cas’ frankly impressive lack of trepidation re: expressing love and affection will rub off on Dean over time as well. 

After all, wouldn’t it be nice if, one day, Dean could get to a point where he can just say ‘stay the night so I can sleep better knowing you’re not out getting yourself hurt or worse like you so often do’ instead of trying to capitalize on his good looks to seduce Cas into sticking around like the big ol’ heaping bag of damaged goods he is? 

Dean thinks so… 

『✯』

He spends the rest of the day drinking and loafing around in the Dean cave. There was a brief handful of minutes around five in the afternoon during which he perused the news for potential cases, but after he noticed how much his face was twisted up with revulsion at just the thought of going on a hunt, he slammed his laptop shut and returned his attention to Scooby-doo. It’s a strange new development, actually: as each day ticks by, he finds himself increasingly disinclined to pick back up on handling the monsters of the week. 

Chuck had called him the ultimate killer amid his defeat, and it was like Cas, dead though he was at the time, spoke to him in that moment and assured him of the very opposite. 

Dean had said, then, “that’s not who I am,” because Cas had told him that’s not who he was, and he had no choice but to believe it. 

Ever since, the idea of constantly tracking things down to kill has left a sour taste in Dean’s mouth. 

So he loafs. And sits around the bunker like a 50’s housewife awaiting the return of her husband at the end of every day. Cas, of course, being the ‘working husband’ in this analogy definitely doesn’t service Dean’s ego nicely. Shit, he really needs to figure out what the hell he wants to do with the rest of his life. He’s not built for housewifery. Getting out and doing shit, making a difference—that’s his bread and butter. But in all honesty, he’s been seriously putting off having to have this conversation with himself. What does he want to do? How does he want to spend his final few decades now that he’s not forced by some sick deity’s narrative to stay hunting? Every time he dares to think on it, his head spins dizzyingly with all the uncertainty that comes with weighing the pros and cons of every conceivable path he can possibly take. 

He could go back to construction, but no, too menial. He could try his hand as a mechanic, but most shops would want him as a grossly underpaid apprentice first, and he’s pretty sure his authority issues would cause a hell of a lot of trouble. He could be a bartender, but for some reason, the concept of flirting for higher tips isn’t nearly as compelling to him as it once was. He could be a firefighter, but he’s not totally convinced he’d be able to pass all the background checks that’d be run on him before he could get accepted into the training academy, and actually, anything that flags on him might even incite FBI’s Most Wanted Two: Electric Boogaloo. Yeah, legally, he and Sam are dead and, with Charlie’s help, he could probably draft up a believable enough fake identity, but like… Is the risk worth it? 

At the end of the day, hunting remains the only option that makes the most sense. But even that hardly makes much sense to him anymore. He’s tired. He’s been tired for over ten—hell, twenty—nay, thirty years. Seventy, if he’s counting his time in Hell. He kept giving himself to the job because the world demanded it, but hasn’t he given enough? Hasn’t he earned the right to a normal humdrum life (as normal as a life can be with an angel who’s in love with him in it, anyway)? The only problem is that he wouldn’t know what normalcy could look like for him if it pulled down its pants and sat on his face. 

And so, to reiterate, he loafs. And drinks. And waits for Cas to come home every day. 

He’d feel infinitely more pathetic about it if not for the alcohol quite significantly hindering his ability to experience shame at the present moment. 

By the time Cas should have arrived back at the bunker, Dean is decently sloshed but still coherent (he’s learned his lesson after the night he got white girl wasted and professed his love to Cas for the first time), and Cas is fucking late. 

What gives? Cas is never late for their Buffy nights. He always poofs in at exactly seven p.m. sharp. The only time he didn’t, which just so happened to be the previous night, he was early. He’s nothing if not habitually punctual. 

But now he’s late, and it’s only Dean’s most visceral reflex to assume the worst. It’s not reasonable, and he knows it, but given the excessive amount of misadventures Cas has gotten himself caught up in in the past, Dean can’t really rule out the possibility that his dumbass angel’s gone and entrenched himself in some deep shit somehow. 

Restless and unable to keep still where he’s been lounging in his favorite armchair, he pushes himself up to pace aimlessly around the bunker, half-drunk beer in hand. It’s dead quiet. Sam took Eileen out a couple hours ago, and Cas is nowhere to be found. Not that Dean’s really looking for him. Why would he? Cas would fly right to him if he were here, no? There’s no reason to believe he’s here, just not announcing his presence. 

Dean breathes out a curt exhalation and swivels on his heels to head off toward Cas’ room. Might as well check, right? 

Surprise-surprise, when Dean gets to Cas’ door and pushes it open, there’s not so much as a trace of him inside. Dean wasn’t expecting there to be, and yet he finds his shoulders slouching with something he can only liken to disappointment. The set of his jaw is tense, too, though it’s not out of disappointment, but rather, apprehension. 

He hates it when he doesn’t know where Cas is or what he’s up to—he always has. Usually, he’s able to temper the feeling, occupy his mind with work and pretend he actually believes it when he justifies his feigned nonchalance by reasoning that Cas must be okay. That Cas can handle himself just fine. Truly, a master class in copium, because when has Cas ever disappeared and not come back at least a little more fucked up than he was before? 

Dean can’t temper it anymore. Cas hasn’t even disappeared this time. Not really. He’s just late, for God’s sake. But Dean’s feeling the brunt of this… Parasitic worry, all the same. 

He shuffles off to his own room; he could use a nap, and if he’s lucky, all this weirdness will have blown over by the time he wakes up. 

When he shoves the door open, though, he nearly leaps right out of his skin, because his room is not empty like he was anticipating it to be, and it takes him a longer amount of time to register Cas’ presence than it does for him to reach for his gun on instinct. 

“Fuck— Jesus, Cas, there you are.” He retracts his hand from where it’d flown to the grip of the glock at his hip, bringing it up instead to rub at the center of his chest and coax his pounding heart back to a steady rhythm. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were here?” 

Cas peers up at him, and it’s only then that Dean notices he’s sat on the bed, reclined against the headboard with his legs laid straight out in front of him, one crossed over the other—left side of the bed, like he belongs there, essentially ‘his’ side at this point. “I apologize for that. It appears your obvious worries couldn’t quite reach me for some reason. I would’ve come directly to you if I’d known.” 

Obvious worries. Shit, is it that apparent? Dean wonders whether it’s visible in how he looks or tangible in how his soul feels, or whatever the fuck spiritual mojo Cas uses to measure his emotions. 

“Right, yeah, it’s… It’s fine,” Dean says, voice thin. Belatedly, he catches a glimpse of what’s lying open in Cas’ lap—one of his old Busty Asian Beauties mags—and his brain promptly blows a fuse. “Uh—the fuck’re you doin’ with that, man?” 

Dean’s not even embarrassed; he’s just thoroughly perplexed. Everyone knows his taste in porn, and he’s long past the point of shame about it, but Cas has never once shown any interest beyond the pizza man. Even then, Dean’s pretty sure Cas was just intrigued by its novelty. 

“Oh.” Cas glances down at the magazine and picks it up to flip idly through the pages. “I’m finding myself curious lately.” 

Because that doesn’t sound vague and somewhat unsettling at all. 

Dean makes an impatient gesture with his hand and prompts, “of?” 

“Well, your plethora of magazines of this nature seem to suggest the qualities listed in the title are things you tend to seek in a partner, but I am neither busty, Asian, nor a beauty.” 

Oh, boy. Yep, this is going to be a doozy of a conversation. 

Dean heaves a sigh, long-suffering. “Put the magazine down, Cas.” 

Cas acquiesces, closing the magazine up and setting it aside. His gaze follows Dean as he ambles into the room, stations his bottle of beer on the nightstand, and perches on the edge of the bed. 

Dean can’t believe he’s really about to address this subject. Leave it to Cas to throw him right into the deep end when he least expects it. Good thing he’s got alcohol on his side for this one. 

“Okay, one: porn is not a good indicator of what someone seeks in a partner; it’s a good indicator of what someone seeks in a pinch to get off,” he states matter-of-factly. “Two: I’m pretty sure we’ve already discussed my decades-long stint of hypermasculinizing my identity; much as I have enjoyed those magazines over the years, the extent to which I actually got off on them was massively overblown to keep the illusion going.” Easier to admit than he thought it’d be. Hell, maybe Cas’ way with words has started to rub off on him. “And three: what the hell makes you think you ain’t a beauty?” 

Alright, well—Dean didn’t intend to be nearly that bold about it, but fuck it, honestly. He was cuddling Cas like an oversized teddy bear until he fell asleep on him just yesterday; on the grand scale of semi-closeted, ego-killing embarrassment, looping Cas in on the fact that he finds him attractive ranks incredibly low. 

And actually, Dean can’t say he feels much embarrassment at all when he’s rewarded with a sight he’s never had the privilege of witnessing before. Cas is flushed, face and neck and ears gone rosy-pink like pretty flower petals. Dean doesn’t have to wonder any longer: angels are, in fact, capable of blushing. 

Cas’ eyes flick about, looking Dean up and down with a comical amount of incredulity. “You’re drunk,” he accuses. 

Dean would be offended if not for his epic alcohol-bidden blunder weeks ago, which had the potential to drive a solid rift between them if he hadn’t narrowly been able to reconcile with Cas by the skin of his teeth. Evidently, Dean does deserve to have his actions questioned when he’s under the influence after that atrocious performance. 

“Only mildly,” he says. It’s the truth. “Not enough that you should be concerned I don’t mean what I’m saying.” 

Cas’ stare remains skeptical for several more seconds before it eventually softens into something like acceptance. Dean knows Cas can see things that regular people can’t, but he kind of hopes that his acceptance is coming from a place of trusting Dean’s word rather than one of his own angelic intuition. 

Cas gives a little nod of the head, the slightest but sweetest of flattered smiles, then turns his attention upwards, lifting a hand to hover his fingertips over the thin tendril of hair Dean couldn’t tame into place earlier and gave up trying. “Your hair’s different.” 

Dean’s stomach swoops with the flutter of butterfly wings, which isn’t exactly the vibe he was going for when he did his hair up nice with the intention of persuading Cas to stay the night. He’s supposed to be all charming and tempting and beguiling—irresistible simply because he looks too good to leave behind. 

Yet, somehow, when it finally comes time for Cas to notice the change he’s made, all he can feel is bashful. So rather than smirking and saying something witty like he usually would, he answers with an absolutely pitiful lack of charisma, “it is.” 

“Is there an occasion I’m unaware of?” 

“Not really…” Fuck, now that he’s in it, he’s left questioning how in the hell he ever thought this was going to be his Trump Card. And also, if he looks at it from certain angles, maybe squints a bit, he’s almost certain this whole ‘tempting Cas to stay’ shtick qualifies as an ass-backwards equivalent to asking Cas to move in with him. Clearing his throat awkwardly, he asks, “you like it?” Because that’s the picture of swagger right there. Holy shit, he could’ve sworn he used to have better game than this. 

In any case, Cas clearly doesn’t mind that Dean’s apparently regressed almost thirty years in his aptitude for flirtation. He responds with a smile, “I do,” and traces the uncooperative lock of hair curled over Dean’s forehead with a single fingertip before employing a warm hint of grace to coax it up into place, right where Dean was struggling so hard to get it to stay hours ago. “It softens you.” 

Dean blinks, face simmering with a heat that he’s grown woefully familiar with as of late. He’s not sure whether Cas means it as a compliment or merely a statement of fact. And if it is meant as a compliment, he can’t say he’s accustomed to softness being considered a desirable quality in a man. John Winchester sure as hell didn’t think so. “That’s supposed to be a good thing?” 

“Yes,” says Cas, smile broadening, eyes twinkling like sunglint off a seabound horizon. His fingers still linger by Dean’s temple. “Pretty…” 

Okay. Not what Dean was expecting to hear by any stretch of the imagination. And he very well can’t blurt out something desperate and stupid like ‘pretty enough to keep you here for the night?’, so he puts on a good college try at a devilish affect and quips, “you sayin’ I wasn’t pretty before?” 

For once, Cas seems to be aware his chain is being yanked and that Dean is being entirely facetious. He rolls his eyes, hand falling back to his lap; Dean misses the touch of his warm fingertips as soon as it’s lost. “I’m not walking into that trap, Dean.” 

“What trap? I’m really, deeply offended you might not have thought I was pretty before.” 

“You’re insufferable.” 

“Clearly not, since you’re still here, and suffering me very well, I might add.” Dean flashes a toothy grin, and—ah, finally, something resembling his typical roguish charm has taken hold. Better late than never, he guesses. 

Astoundingly, Cas manages to counter Dean’s jest without so much as a hint of hesitation or awkwardness. “Only because you are so pretty,” he says, with a quirk of a brow and a tilt of the mouth that looks nothing short of shit-eating. “How disconcerting it was when you once pissed me off so thoroughly—got so close to saying ‘yes’ to Michael all those years ago, nearly rendering my rebellion obsolete, like the pigheaded idiot you were—and my first thought upon seeing you beaten and bloody by my own doing was how shameful it was that I did such a thing to a face like yours.” 

Dean gawks; he surely looks dumb as hell with his jaw slack the way he can feel it is. Now, he knows it’s probably not the healthiest thing in the world to get all hot and bothered over the mention of Cas’ monumental angelic crashout that left Dean roughed up in a way that completely threw him off-kilter, but something stirs in his gut, and it definitely isn’t unpleasant. 

If it’s any comfort, he’s mostly certain it’s not the memory of violence that gets him going, but the realization that, even back then, even when Cas was still a pure, intimidating, unfathomable force, he was already so captivated by Dean. Nothing like an incomprehensibly powerful wavelength of celestial intent faltering mid-dishout of divine retribution just because he was disarmed by how beautiful he thought Dean was. 

Dean can even picture the precise moment it happened—when he was on his ass, face throbbing like it’d been throttled by a city bus, staring up at Cas’ icy countenance and daring him to do it. Finish the job. And though Cas’ stare didn’t grow any less cold, Dean remembers seeing the wound-taut wire of fury releasing its iron grip on his body—the way it bled away, and how Cas’ fists unfurled at his sides, yielding. Merciful. 

And now Dean knows it’s because Cas was taken in that very instant by his beauty. 

How’s that for a boost of self-esteem? Not that Dean needs it; as Cas said the night before, one can generally count on Dean knowing he’s attractive. It’s like… The one thing he’s ever a hundred-percent confident in. 

Still, an occasional little ego-stroke will always do him nice. 

But, as much as Dean would love to keep Cas on the topic of his dashing good looks, he can’t help but fixate on the slightly bitter tone Cas’ voice took up as he groused about Dean being a ‘pigheaded idiot.’ 

“You, uh… Don’t sound like you’re quite over that whole debacle yet.” 

“Because I’m not. Your stupidity during that time staggers me to this day.” 

Dean snorts, though he’s anything but derisive. When he thinks back on it, he really was being a petulant ass about Apocalypse Round One, even if he did believe saying ‘yes’ to Michael was the only way to win. 

Dean Winchester: testing Castiel, Angel of the Lord’s patience since ‘08. If he’d been like any other angel, that back alley beatdown probably would’ve been Dean’s last moment on Earth. 

“But at least I’m pretty,” he says, like it’s a consolation prize for all the grief he’s made Cas endure. 

“It certainly helps, yes.” 

A beat of silence passes, and it lasts just long enough for Dean to become acutely aware of how they appear to have gravitated closer as they spoke. Not so close that it to warrants a ‘red alert: abort mission now’ alarm in Dean’s head, but close enough that he can feel the faintest twinge of fatigue in his shoulder from the weight he’s bracing on his arm—the arm that’s somehow found its way of its own volition to a bracketed position over Cas’ crossed shins on the bed, hand planted on the mattress right beside them. It’s uncanny how much it resembles a subtler manifestation of the old ‘casual lean against the wall with a hand propped by your crush’s head while you’re trying to put the moves on them’ trick. Except this isn’t fucking high school, and Cas is not some little crush. And Dean is feeling anything but casual. 

He pulls his hand back, using it to rub at the back of his neck as he very deliberately casts his gaze off to the side. Smooth. Isn’t he supposed to be leveraging his flirty tricks to convince Cas to stay? What the fuck happened to Plan A? 

Charlie would likely file this balk under ‘gay panic’ if Dean were to describe it to her.

“Dean.” 

Against his better judgment, he returns his attention to Cas, who, in a shocking turn of events, is watching Dean with marked hesitation. Dean’s never seen him bite his lip before, but he’s doing it now, and it looks so very human. A breakthrough of shy nerves. 

“I’m, uh… Unsure of how I should go about asking this; I wouldn’t want to push my luck or presume anything, but…” Cas’ hands fidget in his lap, teeth worrying at his lip some more. He takes a breath, like he’s about to finish his thought, but then nothing more comes out. 

Dean’s brow scrunches with puzzlement. “But?” 

Cas continues to hesitate. Eventually, though, he rallies. “I would like to hold you tonight, if that’s alright.” He says it quietly, with an astonishing lack of confidence that makes Dean’s heart ache inexplicably. 

Jesus, how screwy is their dynamic that Cas is this wary about asking for something as innocent as a cuddle? Especially given that it was well-established less than twenty-four hours ago just how unopposed Dean is to it? 

It’s different this time, he supposes. He imagines Cas’ hangup is less about the cuddling itself, and more about how Dean feels regarding being the one held rather than holding. Cas is a thorough thinker like that, often to a detriment. Always analyzing every possible angle of a circumstance, and making up a few nonexistent angles along the way, just to be sure he’s not stepping on any unwanted toes. Just another maladaptive thing he learned from Dean. 

“That’s it?” 

Cas flinches, turning a wide-eyed, owlish gaze on Dean. “I thought you’d prefer to be the one in control of things.” 

Dean breathes a laugh hearty enough to shake his shoulders. “This ain’t a BDSM scene, Cas. It’s cuddling. But even then—” he abruptly cuts himself off the second it hits him: what his traitorous, drunk loose lips almost just let slip. Right, last thing he wants to air out at this current point in time is his bedroom preferences. Face flaring hot, he promptly reels the thought back in, and course-corrects. “You know what? Don’t worry about it. That’s all I’m trying to say. Promise I’m not gonna lose my marbles if I’m not the one behind the steering wheel from time to time.” 

Thankfully, Cas breezes straight past Dean’s slip; he either didn’t catch it, didn’t understand the implications of it, or understood them perfectly and is doing a remarkable job of pretending he didn’t.

“I feel that depends on the context,” Cas asserts. “I struggle to believe your marbles would remain entirely in order if someone else got behind Baby’s wheel.” He’s being literal as ever, but judging by the lighthearted twinkle in his eyes, it’s not because he didn’t grasp Dean’s meaning to begin with—rather, merely because he wants to make a contribution to the banter. 

Dean gladly reciprocates. “I’ll have you know I kept my marbles extraordinarily in-check when I taught Jack how to drive.” He’s damn proud of himself for that, too. Didn’t let the kid know he was internally screaming when he ground the ignition trying to start the car or jerked it to an unnecessary screeching halt or anything. But brief tangent aside, Cas has just asked to hug up on him, and Dean’s never one to pass up a good time. Down to business, then. “Anyway, alright—you know the drill: coat, suit jacket, and tie off. No one likes feeling like they’re canoodling with their divorce lawyer.” 

Cas makes a bitchy face, and Dean can’t say he doesn’t relish it. “You know, it’s times like these when I really can’t tell if you harbor a legitimate disdain for my wardrobe,” he grumbles, even as he moves to do as Dean requested. This time, he doesn’t bother wasting time folding everything up—just heaps his shed items of clothing at the foot of the bed. 

“I don’t.” Dean doesn’t. Truly. There’s always been something simultaneously hilarious and strikingly hot about Cas kicking ass in a full suit and a trenchcoat. “But really, would it kill you to put on a t-shirt and some jeans every once in a while?” 

“I don’t own a t-shirt or jeans, Dean.” 

“You are in the world’s greatest treasure trove of t-shirts and jeans, man. Take your pick.” 

Dean doesn’t even care enough anymore to ruminate on the implications ringing so very clearly in his words. Mi closet es su closet, or something like that. Warmth simmers through him, but he thinks the alcohol bears the brunt of the blame, since he doesn’t feel mortified in any capacity. 

“I—” Cas squints at him, as though searching for the answers to all of life’s complex mysteries in Dean’s face. He looks to be concentrating extra hard on organizing his response, but all he ultimately says is a flat, “okay.” 

He sounds impassive, but Dean absolutely doesn’t fail to note that he’s scored a second blooming blush from Cas—all lovely pink spreading under tan skin—and the night’s still only just begun. 

Dean smothers the urge to aim a cocky grin at Cas. He shouldn’t let his confidence get too overinflated; he’s yet to try this shit stone-cold sober, inhibitions, fully-loaded emotional constipation and all. He’s entirely coherent—deliberately so—but he’s also looser, less quick to overthink. 

One step at a time. Baby steps. That’s what this is all about. 

“So how do you wanna do this?” Dean asks. “You’re driving the bus this time; I’ll go along with whatever.” He pauses, thinks for a second, amends: “within reason. Just don’t get freaky with me. I’m not that kinda girl.” 

Not true in the slightest, but Cas doesn’t get to know shit about it for a good while yet.

Cas gives him a withering stare; all it earns him in reply is a dickish wink from Dean. He’s having too much fun with this. 

“Just get over here, you irksome creature.” Cas extends a hand out to Dean in invitation, and despite the curt tone of voice, there’s obvious mirth in the way he’s looking at him, levity. 

“Boy, Cas, you really know how set a guy’s heart aflutter.” Ironically, Dean’s humorous sarcasm falls flat, because his heart is, as a matter of fact, aflutter as he shifts to position himself right up beside Cas, tucking into the cradle of his arm. 

To his surprise, he settles in with ease, warm and cozy where he’s partially reclined against Cas’ chest, head tipped back onto his shoulder. Maybe Dean’s just drunk and happy, but he thinks this is already the best cuddling’s ever felt for him, and Cas is barely doing anything. The person makes the experience; he’s sure somebody somewhere’s said that before. A cuddle’s only as good as its benefactor; he said that, just now, in his head. 

Jesus, he’s drunk. 

Cas doesn’t say anything, but he’s just as content. Dean can tell by the way he traces delicate, admiring little circles over Dean’s chest, where his heart resides. Though, Dean knows better than to assume Cas is admiring his physical heart; he thinks the core of his soul probably resides there too. 

They’re in the middle of loading up the next episode of Buffy when Dean is struck by a laughably delayed thought. “Hey, did you seriously stand me up and poof into my room while I wasn’t here just to contemplate my old porno mags?” 

Cas goes rigid-still, and when Dean cranes his neck to catch a glimpse of his face, he looks undeniably sheepish. “I was, uh…” He avoids Dean’s gaze. “Let’s just say Anael put it in my head that we would never work on account of your… Interests. I came here to try and understand what she meant. I apologize if it was intrus—”

“Wait—woah, what?” Dean sits up out of Cas’ hold, invigorated with a burst of indignation on his angel’s behalf. “First of all, since when are you on speaking terms with Sister Jo? And second of all, what the fuck is she doing meddling in our business?”

“Jack has been convening tirelessly with the few remaining angels to have them help rebuild Heaven. The circumstances dictate that past grievances be set aside. I actually haven’t seen the angels come together like this in a long time. Like family, or something close. It’s refreshing.” Cas shrugs, picking at a loose thread in his pants in a manner Dean’s tempted to categorize as vaguely sullen. “Sometimes, though, the banter gets a little pointed. It can’t be helped with so much betrayal and discordance in our history.” 

“That still doesn’t explain why Jo cares about our…” Dean waves his hand around as if its nonsensical motions convey anything of real value. “Stuff.” Nevermind the fact that she knows about them in the first place, but he’s long-given up caring what the hell angels do or think besides Cas. Fuck ‘em. What have they ever done for either one of them but make them miserable? 

“She doesn’t,” says Cas. “She merely wanted to get under my skin for her own amusement. I’m ashamed to say it worked.” 

Sometimes, Dean does get taken aback when Cas confesses to things like this. Yes, he is infinitely more open to being vulnerable than Dean is, but that doesn’t mean he always says what’s troubling him. Not without some prying, anyway. 

Dean’s used to Cas making excuses for the angels’ treatment of him—used to watching him grin and bear all of their nasty judgments and preachy jabs. He knows why Cas does it; the crushing guilt of what he did to Heaven under the Leviathans’ influence has never quite left him (nor has his hand in the angels’ Fall to Earth years ago), and the angels sure don’t let him forget it. A part of him, even if he’s generally arrived at the conclusion that his siblings are major dicks, believes he deserves everything the angels do and say to him. So when he comes out and admits, implicitly or otherwise, that something they’ve done genuinely bothers him, it takes Dean by surprise. 

As much as Dean’s itching to throw out every curse in the book against Jo for making Cas doubt for even a single second that Dean’s not in this thing with his whole heart (especially because they’ve already got enough shit stacked against them as it is), he valiantly refrains. Something tells him it would only wig Cas out more—make him leap to minimize the issue and how it affects him. 

So… 

“Okay,” he says calmly. “But it’s not working anymore, right? I mean, I can really lay it on thick how much you interest me—” 

“Dean,” Cas interjects, like how he does whenever he’s scolding Dean for being juvenile, but his voice lacks the reprimanding quality it usually carries. He’s even smiling ever-so-slightly, though he’s trying to tamp it down. 

“But if not,” Dean says, tipping his chin down a hair to meet Cas’ eyes, “you’re good?” 

Cas ducks his head some more, once again keeping Dean out of his line of sight, but the smile he’s been fighting is let free. Third blush of the night; Dean’s on a roll. “I’m good,” he murmurs, soft yet sure. 

Finally, he chances a glance up at Dean, gaze falling not on his eyes but somewhere above them. He lifts a hand and uses it to sweep across Dean’s forehead in such a way that suggests that pesky fucking lock of hair has flown out of place again. “It really doesn’t like to stay where you put it, does it?” he muses, seemingly half to himself. 

Dean huffs, equal parts amused and fond. “You have no idea.” 

“It’s alright, I suppose.” Cas’ face brightens, all vibrant and sunny. “I think it’s cute.” 

Dean doesn’t know why that’s what does it, but it’s the first thing that night that’s managed to well and truly, thoroughly fluster him. 

Equivalent exchange, he supposes: three Cas blushes for the price of one, massive hot flash of a Dean blush. 

Cute. Dean’s been called it before, plenty of times. Typically in an ironic sense—in situations where he’s not being cute at all and is actually making a purposeful bid to piss someone off. But occasionally when he’s doing something that legitimately fits the bill. 

Cas has never called him cute before. Frankly, Dean in all his middle-aged glory didn’t think he had much left about him to be regarded as such. He’s got crow’s feet, frown lines, deep elevens carved in the center of his brow from decades of stern glares and extended periods of stress and anguish. He has old scars that haven’t aged well and an unpleasant gruffness he often defaults to after years of hardship, and he can be a massive asshole at times. Hell, depending on the day, his will to live oscillates like the world’s most violent pendulum. Cute is miles away from anything Dean would personally use to describe himself. 

Dean would try to reason that it’s just the natural conclusion an eternity-old cosmic entity would come to about something so small and fragile in comparison—as humans do with babies or tiny, furry critters—except one look at Cas’ sunny expression is more than enough to know he’s sincere as ever. 

Once again, Cas has found a way to throw Dean off his game. Not that his ‘game’ has been anything but shaky since he walked into this room some minutes ago, but still. 

All Dean can do is what he always resorts to when faced with a circumstance he can’t flirt, fuck, or fight his way past: poorly feign aloofness. He scoffs and mutters under his breath, “shut up,” all the while wedging himself into Cas’ side again, folding his arms over his chest—and now he’s the one refusing eye-contact. 

Cas is a good sport about it. Without a moment’s hesitation, he resumes his gentle tracing patterns over Dean’s heart like he never stopped to begin with and clicks through menus on the TV until he’s found their next Buffy episode. 

Dean doesn’t realize he’s entirely forgotten the asinine objective he was after until halfway through the intro. Well shit.

He casts a sidelong glance toward Cas, finding that he’s already deeply concentrated on the screen, and Dean decides then that he can just revisit it later—no biggie. For now, he’s content to recline in Cas’ arms and watch some camp late-90s TV. 

『✯』

Hours later, they’re still in just about the exact same position, only Dean’s sunken further into Cas, Cas’ other hand has migrated to where Dean’s elbow has found a home against Cas’ abdomen, and Dean is sipping at the remnants of his beer from earlier. It’s gone warm and flat, which is unfortunate, but he doesn’t much care when he’s this comfortable. 

A handful of minutes ago, they were bickering over Buffy and Angel’s relationship. Or… Actually, it was less about their relationship, and more that it served as a catalyst for bickering over Cas and Dean’s relationship.

“Ew. Skip,” Dean had said with a scowl as he snatched up the remote and fast-forwarded through the lovebirds’ first sex scene. 

“Dean?”

“What? You’re the one who brought up how weird it is that he’s a centuries-old vampire and she’s barely seventeen.” 

Cas nodded sagely, then. “Yes, I do find it… Odd.” He said it with a twist in his face that conveyed more disgust than he was saying out-loud. “Not to mention the distance between their respective ages is an added discomfort.” 

“The big issue is definitely the jailbaitiness of it all. I mean—if the age-gap were the true root of the problem, we’d also have to have a problem with our relationship.” 

Cas tilted his head in confusion.

“Dude, our age-gap is on the order of millions of years.” 

“Oh.” Cas paused a moment, then shook his head and declared, “that’s different.” 

Dean made a face. “How is that different?” 

“I hold no social authority over you. Meanwhile, even if Buffy were of-age, Angel’s much more substantial life experience would inherently assert him over her in a lot of situations.” 

“Oh, were you not ‘experiencing’ those millions of years you were alive before we met? Did I somehow not get that memo?” 

“I was experiencing them in a way that’s wholly irrelevant to you. My life as a Heavenbound angel prevented me from learning the complex intricacies of life on Earth. If anything, you hold the social power in this arrangement, having spent decades more time immersed in human life than me.” 

At that point, Dean was properly affronted. “You callin’ me old?” 

Cas shrugged. “In a backwards, figurative sense, I suppose.” 

Dean scoffed. “Well, in a literal sense, fuck you.” 

He recognized his mistake the second the words left his mouth, but it was solidified as he watched Cas’ brows knit, mouth opening to answer, hesitating, then: “at the present stage of our relationship, I think you’d probably prefer to keep that notion purely figurative as well, Dean.” 

“Fine. I’ll rephrase: literally eat shit.” All bark, no bite. Dean was really just arguing for the sake of it. Secretly, he found it entertaining. 

“You’re being petty.” 

“You called me old.” 

Cas breathed a weary sigh, pulling Dean closer to him despite his exasperation. “Apple of my eye,” he mumbled, a little like he couldn’t believe it, and it made Dean smile. 

Now, they’re quiet again, gazes trained on the TV. Dean’s got a sip or two left of his beer. He lifts the bottle up to knock it all back in one go so he can finally free up his hand, but then he goes still, eyes flicking down as he feels Cas’ hand tentatively wander over to his upper belly, a little to the right, and flatten there. There’s a soft, golden glow, and then the tingling warmth of grace spreads deep under Dean’s skin, as though to heal. 

As far as Dean’s concerned, there’s nothing to heal. Perplexed, he tips his head back to look up at Cas. “What was that for?” 

“I detected the beginnings of cirrhosis in your liver.” 

Dean blinks, looks down at his beer, contemplates it for several seconds, then shrugs and lifts the bottle back up to his lips. Shit, if he’s got a squeaky clean new liver, might as well, right? 

Cas swipes the bottle from him before he can swig from it, setting it down on the nightstand with a punctuative clink. 

“Oh, come on, Cas!” Dean protests, whinier than intended but he thinks he’s got the right this time.

“We really need to talk about your substance use issues.”

That actually shocks a laugh out of Dean. “It’s beer, Cas. Not heroin. And besides, some of my best heroics were brought to you by substances.” 

“That is concerning, Dean.” 

Dean gives him an odd look, because Cas doesn’t just sound dry and matter-of-fact; there’s a real element of troubledness in his tone. “Where’s this coming from all of a sudden?” 

“It’s not sudden. I do believe my healing of your cirrhosis is perfectly reasonable grounds for this conversation.” 

“Is it really that big of a deal? I mean—you healed me. It took three seconds to do. You can just keep doing that, no?” 

Cas levels him with a thoroughly unamused glare. “Justification of self-destructive habits aside, I’m afraid my ability to heal may not always be available to you.” 

Dean’s brow furrows. Interesting… Cas talks like he knows something Dean doesn’t. “Why’s that?”

Immediately, Cas gets cagey. He averts his gaze, his throat bobs harshly, and he answers with a suspicious lack of detail, “this new world without Chuck writing its story is an uncertain one. Anything can happen.” 

“You maybe wanna elaborate on that?” 

Cas huffs a short breath, frustrated but seemingly more by whatever nebulous circumstances are troubling him in the first place than by Dean. “I only mean to say I don’t what what the future holds. A transition of power of this caliber has never been attempted in the entire history of Heaven. There are bound to be… Hiccups.” 

“Such as?” 

Cas shakes his head, a minute movement. He’s silent, and Buffy plays on in the background. Dean doesn’t care; they can always rewind. 

With something like resignation coloring his voice, Cas relents, “I don’t know. That’s why I’m urging you to be more cautious.” 

Okay, so translation: Cas knows something’s up about Heaven, but he doesn’t know the extent to which it changes things, and the uncertainty of it bothers him greatly. 

Dean’s tempted to keep pressing, see if he can’t drag a more solid basis for Cas’ concerns out into the open, but there’s an apprehensive glint in Cas’ eyes and a heavy, dreading frown weighing on his lips that ultimately leads Dean to let it go. For now. 

Reluctantly, he concedes, “this conversation ain’t over, but… Fine.” And then, after a beat: “now, since you seem keen on holding my beer hostage, would you mind getting me a glass of water instead?” He says ‘glass of water’ mockingly, like it’s a derogatory term, and he’s rewarded with an indulgent half-smile from Cas before he teleports out of the room to oblige the request. 

Dean pouts in the ensuing silence, that niggling sense of impending disaster weaseling its way back toward the forefront of his mind. 

Now more than ever, he’s reminded exactly why he wants to keep Cas here with him, in his sights at all times. 

Any time Heaven’s up in flames, Cas is the first to burn, and Dean’s the one left with his ashes… 

『✯』

Around midnight, Dean’s eyelids start to grow heavy. Within the hour, he’s fighting sleep—a valiant effort given the innate sedation effect Cas’ body heat has on him. And twenty minutes after that, he’s struggling to keep his eyes open at all. 

He wants to sleep, but once he does, he knows Cas will leave again. In the weeks since they’ve started this routine of theirs, Cas has never not come back the next day, but now Dean knows some hush-hush shit’s going down in Heaven, and Cas coming back every day is seeming less and less like a guarantee the longer Dean ruminates on it. 

Problem is: his absurd plan to stealthily seduce Cas into staying has not worked, and enough time has passed for Dean to have grasped that— of course it hasn’t. It never fucking would have. This is Cas. Being upfront with him about wants and needs is the only way to actually get what one wants or needs out of him. Dean was just being avoidant, and it’s predictably bitten him in the ass. 

Now he has no choice but to just say that he wants Cas to stay. It should be easy, but it’s fucking not. 

“Why are you resisting sleep so stubbornly, Dean?” Cas asks out of the blue. 

Fucking figures he would. Dean can never spiral without Cas taking notice. 

“Is there something on your mind?” 

And Dean should tell him. He’s being presented with the perfect opportunity, ripe for his taking. He should just say, ‘I want you to stay tonight,’ and Cas will probably be happy to indulge him. 

Alas, however… 

“Nah, I’m just really invested in this episode,” he lies. He thinks he knows why he does it, too. It’s not about asking Cas to stay; it’s about the fact that he feels like he needs to explain why he wants him to. Because he doesn’t just want Cas to stay this one night. He wants him to stay indefinitely, and he knows how unfair that is to ask. 

Rebuilding Heaven is an astronomically more important endeavor than their romantic little dalliances. Helping Jack navigate his new post as God is also something Dean wouldn’t dream of taking away from Cas. There’ve been enough absent fathers to go around among them; he’s not about to urge Cas to keep the cycle going. 

He’s blowing this out of proportion; he understands that with shrewd discernment. It’s not like he’d be asking Cas to abandon Heaven entirely. Just… stick around at night so Cas is at least accounted for while Dean’s not awake to move Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the Empty, and the Earth to come to his rescue if he gets himself into some shit. Simple ask. Really. 

God, he feels silly. 

Cas doesn’t question him. Whether he actually believes Dean or not is a mystery. Dean doesn’t say anything more, and continues to fight sleep until it becomes unbearable and damn-near impossible. 

His eyes burn, all dry and sore, head a tinge dizzy as he teeters right on the border between consciousness and slumber. Eventually, his eyes close, and he doesn’t notice, his brain seeming to fit its own images to the scenes on TV believably enough that it’s almost like he’s still watching the show. 

With time, even the background noise from the speakers begins to fade, growing farther and farther away with each passing minute. And then, right as he feels himself plunging into the clutches of sleep, he becomes all-too-aware of a gentle shifting around him—a loss of blissful warmth, the cushion of a hand supporting his head as it’s laid down flat to a pillow, a draping of blankets over him—and, with a lurch of the heart, he’s shooting an arm out blindly to grasp ahold of Cas’ hand as it slips away from him.

“Stay,” he hears himself say, the sound of his own voice distant and fuzzy in his ears. 

There’s a transient flex of Cas’ fingers around Dean’s hand, a pause, then a soft, “I don’t sleep, Dean.” 

“Not askin’ you to.” Dean’s a bit more awake now, though his eyes are still too heavy to open. 

“You don’t like it when I watch over you.” Cas is painfully earnest; Dean’s chest aches with it. 

“Rather have you watching over me while I can’t watch over you,” Dean murmurs. He’s not sure if it makes the remotest lick of sense, but he thinks it might. This is my way of watching over you, too. 

The air is still and quiet between them for so long, Dean wonders if this conversation is even happening at all—if it’s just a conjuring of his dreams. But then Cas gives his hand another squeeze, and there’s a dip in the bed as he situates himself back in his rightful place. He’s still sat upright; Dean can tell that much when he settles his arm over his lap instead of his chest or waist like he half-expects to. This’ll do just fine, though. 

Cas’ hand finds Dean’s head again, fingers threading tenderly into his hair. Something about it feels familiar, but Dean can’t place why. 

He drifts off, happy and safe. 

For the first time since before his mother burned thirty-seven years ago, his sleep is peaceful. 

『✯』

He wakes up late the next morning, much better rested than he’s felt in decades. His right shoulder and hip ache dully in that way joints only do when they’re laid on all night. Never did Dean think he’d ever develop an appreciation for joint pain in the morning, but he’s so accustomed to tossing and turning restlessly when he sleeps that it’s actually a pleasant thing to wake up aching like an average, run-of-the-mill forty year-old who slept restfully. 

There’s a warm, solid form beside him that he’s got his arm slung around, and it takes him a handful of seconds to remember that— holy shit. He actually did it. He got Cas to stay the night. And it wasn’t because of some ridiculous plan to slinkily seduce him, but because Dean bit the bullet and used his words like a mature adult. Sure, he was mostly asleep when he did it, but that’s about as revolutionary as it gets. 

Grinning to himself, he rolls onto his back and raises his arms above his head in a huge stretch that he feels cracking through his entire spine. He’s a little surprised Cas hasn’t hit him with his signature ‘hello, Dean’ yet; surely he knows Dean’s awake by now. 

Dean finally cracks his eyes open, seeking Cas out in the relative darkness of the room; the dim lamp on his nightstand was left on overnight, but it does a piss-poor job of illuminating the shit around it. He expects Cas to still be sitting upright, but when he aims his gaze up toward the headboard, he doesn’t find Cas’ gaze staring back at him. 

Brow scrunching with puzzlement, he directs his attention lower—and there Cas is, lying on his back, head lolled a bit to the side. His eyes are gently closed, and his chest rises and falls steadily. Which…

Okay, there are a couple things off about this picture. One being that Cas only ‘breathes’ when certain humanlike expressions call for it; he can sigh and draw long-suffering inhales like nobody’s business, but passively, he doesn’t need to breathe at all. Secondly, Mr. ‘I Don’t Sleep’ is fucking sleeping. 

Well, there goes Dean’s fleeting sense of peace. 

Heart stuttering sporadically in his chest, he shoves himself up to his knees and reaches out to take Cas’ face into his hands. “Cas? Hey—come on, wake up.” Cas doesn’t budge; Dean pats firmly at his cheek to try and startle him awake. “Cas! Get up.” 

Cas still doesn’t move. 

Jesus, is he in some kind of coma or something? 

Dean gulps down the anxious lump forming in his throat and moves his hands down to grip Cas’ shoulders and shake him. “Cas!” 

Finally, Cas rouses, albeit slowly and blearily. His eyes blink open, squint against the light, blink some more. A deep crease of confusion carves itself into his brow. 

Dean puffs out a shaky breath, sitting back on his heels. “Christ, man, way to give me a fucking heart attack.” 

“Dean?” Cas looks around like he’s struggling to make sense of his surroundings. “What’s…” He lifts a fist to scrub at his eye as he pushes himself up to a sit. “What’s going on?” 

“You fell asleep,” Dean tells him. “Heavily, I might add.” 

Cas’ confusion only intensifies. “I don’t sleep.” 

“Well you just did. Hate to break it to you.” 

Cas doesn’t respond. Instead, he appears to retreat inwards, consulting with himself or—hell, maybe even other angels. Dean’s still not fully clear on how Angel Radio works, even after all these years. 

It’s eerily quiet between them for a long enough time that Dean starts to get agitated about it. He doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that Cas just got done warning him the night before that Heaven is subject to some ‘hiccups’ in the wake of Chuck’s defeat, and now Cas is sleeping like he does when he’s powered-down. Whatever the fuck ‘hiccups’ means, by the way; knowing Cas’ tendency to diminish the severity of things until shit’s not only hit the fan but splattered its mess in a mile-wide radius, it could very-well mean Jack could sneeze wrong and the entirety of Heaven would explode, or something equally as inane. 

“Cas, you gotta be honest with me here,” Dean says, intentionally keeping his tone level and hopefully unprovoking; he’s not trying to argue, only get Cas to tell him the truth. “Something’s obviously going on upstairs, and I think you know more than you’re letting on.” 

“It’s none of your concern,” mumbles Cas. He’s not being defensive; if anything, he says it absentmindedly, his thoughts diverted elsewhere.

And that was about the fastest way to trigger Dean’s propensity for indignation. “Uh—I think the fuck not. All the bullshit that’s ever happened in this world has never not been my concern. So spill.” 

That grabs Cas’ attention. He meets Dean’s expectant gaze with a grim frown. “You’re free now, Dean. Why do you insist on adhering to the fate that Chuck wrote for you?” 

Dean blinks, struck dumb by the abrupt callout. Is that what this is about? Cas isn’t telling him about Heaven because— what?— he feels he’d just be dragging Dean right back into the same old cycle of soul-crushing responsibility that Chuck kept him imprisoned in all his life? Dean might understand the sentiment and even find it sweet in its own way if not for the fact that whatever’s happening in Heaven is negatively impacting Cas, so does that not make this situation a little fucking relevant to Dean? 

Dean has personal skin in the game this time. He wouldn’t just be concerning himself with Heaven’s affairs because it was the ‘right thing to do.’ He’d be doing it selfishly and shamelessly to make sure he doesn’t lose Cas again. The circumstances are different this time. 

It’s different. 

Of course, he doesn’t get to tell Cas that, because Cas is getting out of bed, collecting his coat, jacket, and tie, and announcing, “I have to go,” before Dean gets the chance to speak his mind. 

“Wait, what?” Dean’s up on his feet in an instant, right on Cas’ heels as he slips out into the hallway. He gets the sense Cas is trying to flee from the conversation without being overtly rude; they both know the best way to piss off an already incensed Dean is for Cas to just fly off with no preamble. 

“Jack is calling all the angels back to Heaven,” Cas says, by no means a real offer of explanation. 

“Okay, and?” 

Cas doesn’t answer.

Dean swears he starts to walk faster, and it gets old real quick. By the time they’ve entered the war room, Dean’s entirely fed up. “Hey!” he reaches out, snatches Cas’ hand, and spins him back around so they’re face-to-face. “Fucking talk to me, man. At least tell me when you’ll be back.” He nearly trips over the word ‘when’ as ‘if’ tries to slip its way off his lips in its stead. 

If. Dean may be buried up to his ears in frustration and worry, but he refuses to let that insecurity glide past his defenses. Not here. Not now. 

“Soon, Dean,” Cas says, but there’s a shiftiness in his eyes that implies even he isn’t convinced by his own words. 

“How soon?” 

Cas hesitates, gaze casting downward. “I can’t be certain,” he admits. 

“Then how can you say you’ll be back soon?” 

“Dean.” The way he says it is gentle, but there’s the slightest tinge of impatience that immediately nullifies any pacifying effect the gentleness might’ve had. 

“No-no-no, you don’t get to say my name like that—like I’m the one being irrational here. Whatever’s going on, I deserve to know what it is.” 

“And you will, in time. Just—” Cas heaves a self-composing breath, and it only serves to tick Dean off more; he doesn’t even need to breathe! He’s doing it purely to show Dean that he’s working hard to maintain a calm demeanor. “Please don’t do anything reckless while I’m away.” 

Dean lets out a sharp, humorless laugh. “That’s rich, coming from the guy who goes and finds the dumbest ways to die or get fucked up every time he’s let off his leash.” 

That… Might’ve taken it too far. Dean regrets it as soon as he says it. He may be livid that Cas is keeping shit from him out of some perceived responsibility to protect Dean from throwing his freedom out the window or whatever, but chucking Cas’ misfortunes back in his face like that, and tossing in a little ‘dog on a leash’ analogy to top it off? Yeah, real asshole move there, Dean. 

Fuck, he wants to take it back. He opens his mouth to do exactly that, but then—

“I’ll be back, Dean,” says Cas, his expression unnervingly unreadable. “I promise.” 

With that, he vanishes, and Dean’s hand feels impossibly heavy where it hovers outstretched in the air, holding onto nothing. 

Cas is gone. Again. And this time, there’s no assurance that he’ll be back as soon as that evening. Not only that, but Dean has just let him go with venom as a parting gift. He entertains the idea, then, that maybe that’s why Cas has elected to slip off into the night without a word while Dean sleeps for the past several weeks: any time he announces his intent to leave, Dean has an impressive knack for throwing verbal punches or neglecting to vocalize a worthwhile goodbye at all. 

Fucking hell. Dean grits his teeth and rakes his hands back through his hair. He tries for a deep breath, but all that does is make his chest swell further with anger, because he can’t bring himself to feel anything beyond that. Anger’s a familiar devil. He knows it well. It’s easier to be angry than to worry.

“Uh…” 

Dean flinches and whirls around to find Sam, alongside Eileen—both apparently back from yesterday’s rendezvous at her place—staring at him from the library. Great. Now there’s that. 

“Everything alright?” Sam asks carefully. 

Dean doesn’t know why, but the way he delivers the question pisses him off—like Sam knows something. It makes Dean bristle. It’s bad enough that he and Cas just hosted their first official ‘lovers’ quarrel’ in front of his little brother and his girlfriend; now Sam’s making him realize it probably looked like a lovers’ quarrel too. And Dean is absolutely, positively not willing to make that a topic of discussion right now. 

So he snaps, “fuck off, Sam,” and storms off toward the kitchen. 

There, he yanks the refrigerator door open, reaching for the beer on the bottom shelf on instinct. Then he freezes, Cas’ words from the night prior echoing in his memory: “I’m afraid my ability to heal may not always be available to you.” And, “that’s why I’m urging you to be more cautious.” 

Dean scoffs and shakes his head. “Damn it…” Resentfully, he grabs the Brita pitcher Sam keeps on the top shelf, retrieves a glass from the drying rack by the sink, pours himself some water, and takes a few big gulps.

Guess he really should heed Cas’ warning now that he knows Heaven’s cooking up a new catastrophe. 

He frowns against the lip of the glass, unease prickling at his spine. Cas is gone again, and he can’t stand it. Shit like this never ends well for either of them. 

Just tell me you’ll be okay, Cas, he finds himself praying before he’s even consciously aware of it. 

There’s a faint flicker of the overhead lights a few seconds later, and he’d like to delude himself into believing it’s an affirmation. But he’s pretty sure those lights have been flickering on their own for a while. 

『✯』

On day one, Cas doesn’t answer his prayers. 

Dean spitefully keeps to his water, even as his fingers itch for a bottle.

『✯』

On day three, Dean prays again, and he’s met with more radio silence. 

He drinks his water and bitches Sam out when he asks him how he’s doing. 

『✯』

On day seven, Dean prays, only to let Cas know he thinks he’s been a major-league douchebag, and he receives no answer.

He downs three bottles of beer and a glass of whiskey. 

『✯』

On day nine, Dean doesn’t pray. His pride’s been wounded enough. 

He drinks steadily throughout the day, and sends a text full of lies about how busy he is to Charlie when she messages to see if he wants to hang out. 

Sam tries to talk to him again, but all he’s able to haul out of Dean is an additional lie that he’s doing just fine. 

『✯』

On day eleven, Dean wakes from a nightmare, full of soulful, misty blue eyes and the echoing words of “I love you” and “goodbye, Dean” ringing in his ears as darkness collapses in on him. 

He downs three glasses of whiskey before breakfast and pretends his heart doesn’t race for the rest of the day. 

『✯』

On day fifteen, Dean finds a case nearby of an exsanguinated man, his maimed wife, and their abducted children.