Chapter Text
The tide lapped at his toes, reached out and retreated, like the first twenty times he tried to hold Crowley’s hand.
He did, finally, during a Charmed rerun they frustratedly spoke over, Crowley scratching behind Juliet’s ear when she hopped onto the sofa beside him. Castiel finally worked up the courage to brush their knuckles, and Crowley took his hand, kissed the back of it, and laced their fingers for the duration of the show. It wasn’t as cute when his arm was being flung about while Crowley ranted the inaccuracy of a depicted demon summoning. Quite the conversation that was.
The ocean tickled his heels, gently, like a child tugging his coattails. Cas inhaled, closed his eyes, tasted salt on the sides of his tongue. “Tell me again.”
Crowley stood not far off, hands in the pockets of his trousers to keep them warm. “You heard me.”
He looked to the lake. “She hasn’t.”
With a deep sigh, he leaned against the tidal wall. “You’re the romantic; I really had expected you to keep track of anniversaries, and all that.” Castiel was a dreamer, never quite certain is he was awake, reading star charts from their reflection off the water. “Old Scottish tradition. You pay a maiden’s father in sheep or what-have-you, take a year to test-drive the girl. Either marry the woman, or send her home with a couple bastard kids to feed.”
“You told me your craft was secular Satanic.”
A moment of silence rang out across the waves. “I told you a lot of things.”
Conversationally, Cas continued with a cock of his head, “You said we were as serious as we were going to get.”
“By all standards, we’re as intimate as two separate sacks of meat can be; no reason to get the bloody public involved.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because it’s been a year and a day since you moved in, and my mother will have my head if we don’t at least handfast,” he snapped.
Castiel met his narrowed gaze, looking rather like a small dog that knew better than to bar tiny teeth. Feet in the water, he held out his hand.
Crowley balanced by the wall, using his free hand to hook around the back of his loafers in turn, and leave them in a nice line beside Cas’s “abbhorent” sandals. (He woke him up in the middle of the night; what had he expected him to wear?)
The sand was store-bought, the lake man-made, but the water held him steady as Crowley joined in the ankle-height surf. He grimaces at the wetness, how the sand would stick to his soles and clog up the drain of the shower, he’d need the Bentley detailed again— and Cas took his hand, and every screaming bird in the suburban walking trail shut their mouths. Two men standing in a Pennsylvania lake, locked in a handshake, with hearts beating out their chests. The moon wasn’t full, because the Roman calendar and lunar have never quite agreed, but it certainly looked that way, beaming down on them in something like a smile.
“Isn’t there a ribbon?” Castiel asked.
Crowley swallowed, to keep from clearing his throat. “That’s Gardnerian bollocks. Old English, it just meant a handshake, and Scottish used the word for—”
“Marriage.”
He didn’t have to look so smug about it; Crowley tugged, and the other man stumbled as they walked, hand-in-hand, back to their belongings. “If you must force Western interpretations on an ancient custom… something like that.”
By all intents, nothing changed that night, but it crept into Castiel’s mind that the birds didn’t bother him quite so much, that Grace lost interest in the kitchen herbs, that the Milligans moved to Indiana quite suddenly. Crowley scoffed at the accusation he was somehow involved, feigning apathy to the fact he’d been trying for years, but they still up and left on their own. Things were quiet. Comfortable in each others’ company. Perfectly content as they were, forevermore.
A few weeks later, they sign the license and are legally married.
You know. For the taxes.