Chapter Text
“Dean?”
The archangel’s heart leapt at the sound of his name in the real Cas’s voice, groggy and dazed and beautiful - but it was quickly followed by his stomach caving in and his nose exploding with pain under the Shadow’s fist and knee, respectively.
“Dean!”
“Don’t. Move. Castiel,” the Shadow snarled, holding Dean up on his knees with one hand fisted in his hair. “Or I’ll tear his wings off one at a time.”
“His - wings?” Rage, confusion, and disbelief wrestled across Cas’s face. He leaned off the edge of the throne, brimming with tension and white-knuckling the chair arms.
“Heya, Cas,” Dean grinned under his bleeding nose. Seeing Cas awake and alive (sort of) sent euphoria bubbling up from his chest to his brain, outweighing the pain until his fractured nose felt more like a papercut.
And hey, that was fucking cool: with a minor flex of power, Dean healed the broken cartilage and erased the blood from his face.
“We beat Chuck, Jack is God now, and he made me an archangel. Pretty sweet feathers, huh?” Yeah, he preened, flaring all his wings out to show them off, but like he was gonna have this kind of equipment and not show off for Cas?
Cas looked shocked and gutted at the same time. “And you… died?”
“Nope,” Dean said cheerfully. “Came to get you back.”
“Not that this isn’t a touching little reunion,” the Empty bit out, yanking Dean’s head back to a harsh angle, “but all the go-getter attitude in the world doesn’t change the fact that Castiel belongs to me.” Its mouth spread in a sinister Cheshire smile. “He agreed to be mine.”
“Yeah, the thing about that is,” Dean said, and shoved back up on his feet, all in the same movement bashing his rocklike head into the Shadow’s stolen skull. It cried out and stumbled back. “I never agreed to it.”
Taking a deep breath, Dean turned and met wide blue eyes. “And he was mine a long time before he was yours.”
Cas’s face softened into the most tender look Dean had ever seen, and after more than a decade of staring at that face, he could read the tiny flickers swimming beneath the stoic surface: the surprise, the wonder, the hope, the terror of hoping.
Dean was smiling back, warmth unfolding in his chest, and unprepared for the iron grip that latched around his throat.
“Do you think that means anything to me, you pathetic mongrel?” the Shadow said, its voice quiet the way a knife is quiet. “Do you really think I will let him go just because you waltz in here and claim him as yours?”
“No,” Dean choked out, grabbing onto the arm lifting him onto his toes. “I think you’re going to let him go because if you don’t, I’ll come back.”
The Shadow’s lips thinned and its fingers tightened.
Dean grinned recklessly. “I’ll come back, again and again and again, for as long as I’m alive. And if I die, then Sam will come. If Sam fails, then Claire will come. Then Eileen, then Charlie, then Bobby, then Jody, then Donna, then Garth. Because Cas is family and we are never going to stop coming for him.”
His eyes cut over, finding Cas standing just beyond arm’s reach with tears in his eyes. Dean looked back steadily as he swore, “We’ll wake you up a thousand times until you give him back.”
“Dean,” Cas whispered.
The Shadow was seething, its mouth trembling with rage. “You little fucking -”
“And,” Dean said, then had to look away with a twinge of guilt. “I can guarantee that Cas will never bother you again if you let him go.”
An endless minute passed of the Shadow glaring with icy, savage contempt, before it finally threw Dean aside with a growl. “Fine,” it hissed as Dean stumbled into Cas. “He’s more trouble than he’s worth. Just get out.”
Dean felt strong arms catch him, and for just a second he forgot about the dangerously pissed off cosmic entity as he looked up and met Cas’s eyes from inches away. The angel was staring at him with something like awe, with a hope that wasn’t quite so afraid to be.
Cas opened his mouth to speak, and Dean wanted to do this, he did, but they really couldn’t do it here.
Straightening up, Dean shook out his right arm to let the angel blade slide down into his palm. “Cas,” he said, resolute and only a little apologetic. “Trust me?”
Castiel frowned. “Of course,” he answered, shaking his head. “What -”
“It’s gonna be okay,” Dean promised softly. “Just trust me.”
Green and blue met and held as as Dean lifted the angel blade and carefully - so fucking carefully - sliced a thin, shallow incision across the middle of Cas’s throat. The angel’s eyes widened, but he didn’t object when Dean lifted a small vial with his other hand and collected the glowing river of Cas’s Grace as it poured out between the edges of his skin.
As Castiel became human before his eyes, at his own hands, Dean curled all six wings around him in a protective cocoon. The rustling of his feathers was the only sound in this nothingness, a faint susurrus as they closed in like living shields. With one hand, Dean flicked the vial shut and slid it back into his pocket, while his other brushed over Cas’s neck, quickly sealing up the cleft skin.
“Hold on,” Dean said, and wrapped both hands around Cas’s shoulders.
Like Jack had said, the Empty spit out anything human. Dean was lucky enough to hitch a ride.
They landed in a grassy tundra that Dean somehow knew was in the middle of outer Mongolia.
“Uh, hang on,” he said.
A flap of his wings, and this time they made it to Lebanon.
Dean looked around, saw the bunker entrance nearby, and finally relaxed.
That was, until he realized he was still clutching a human Cas, whose stare really hadn’t lost any of its intensity with its mortality.
Awkwardly, Dean dropped his hands. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “I didn’t want to take your Grace without asking, but I figured that if it got you out of there you wouldn’t -”
“Dean, it’s okay,” Cas interrupted gently. “It’s - it’s okay.”
Dean let out a deep exhale, and actually relaxed this time. “Okay. That’s - that’s good.”
They stared at each other, a mountain of words built up between them too tall to climb. Dean wanted to say so many things, there was a fucking library of things Dean wanted to say to Cas, but where the hell could he start?
This - maybe this, he could do.
Sliding his angel blade out again, Dean flipped it in his palm and held it out to Cas hilt-first. “My turn,” he said, and tilted his head back to expose his throat.
Cas’s mouth fell open, and his eyes flicked from the blade to Dean’s face. “Dean,” he protested, “you’re an archangel. I could sense how powerful you are. Are you sure you -”
“I don’t care about the power, Cas.” Dean glanced over his shoulder to check out his awesome wings one more time, admiring their emerald iridescence in the sunlight, and then let them fade from corporeality. “It was just a means to an end. All I want…”
Dean’s throat went tight and his eyes stung, but he lifted his head to meet Cas’s watchful gaze. “All I want is a normal life.” He breathed out. “With you.”
Cas sucked in a breath just shy of a gasp. “Dean,” he whispered. “Do you…”
Smiling softly, Dean wrapped his hand around Cas’s on the angel blade, guiding it up to his throat and pressing in until the flesh parted. He produced another vial, which Cas clumsily took and rushed to hold in place, worry in his expression as the Grace drained out.
Dean felt himself deflate not unlike a balloon, the vastness shrinking and the energy leaking away until he felt almost normal again. It was - different, a few left-behind pieces stuck to the walls of his soul and some of his foundations cracked into new, broader shapes he wouldn’t have recognized this morning, changes he wouldn’t have known he needed.
When he opened his eyes, Dean was human.
He watched Cas gape at the vial cradled in his palm, watched as he looked up and saw the Dean he knew looking back.
“Hey, Cas,” Dean murmured.
Cas’s bottom lip quivered. “You - you did all this -”
“For you,” Dean said, unflinching. A fond smile curved up his mouth. “Did you really think I’d let you get the last word like that?”
The former angel laughed, wet and aching with relief. His shining eyes studied Dean’s face, so clearly searching with barely-leashed desperation, not knowing how to ask.
Dean shuffled closer and raised his hands to meticulously frame them around Cas’s jaw, gentle and deliberate and decidedly unplatontic. He looked over the familiar, revered lines of this face and stopped to just bask in the fact that Cas was back, alive, here, real and solid under his hands. Gazing at him with love in his eyes that was the same human as it had been celestial.
It wasn’t quite as easy to say as it had been earlier, but it wasn’t as hard as he’d imagined.
“I love you, Cas,” Dean whispered. “I love you so fucking much.”
Tears spilled down Cas’s cheeks, and so much joy lit up his face that Dean could barely breathe. Maybe he shed a few tears too, that was okay.
“And you were right,” he croaked past the knot in his throat and the love in his chest, “but I think happiness is in the having too. I want.” Dean’s breath was shuddering in his lungs. “I want to be happy with you.”
Cas was the brave one again, then, doing the hard work of leaning in the last tiny, infinite space between them and gracelessly, ardently crushing their mouths together. A whimper came out of Dean’s throat that he didn’t even have the heart to deny, not when he was busy slinging his arms around Cas’s ribs and parting his lips to finally learn what his angel tasted like.
They only broke apart when they drifted too far to one side and nearly went down in a tangle of limbs; they laughed, eyes crinkling and hearts racing.
Dean was smiling as he reached up to touch Cas’s face, to brush the hair back from his forehead.
“Let’s go home.”
***
Even after it was all said and done (and a lot had been said and done), it wasn’t like them to use an abundance of words when a handful would do just as well.
“Stay with me, Cas,” Dean said, his voice rough with emotion.
Cas smiled and his eyes sparkled. “I will.”
Dean’s hands were shaking as he slid the ring onto Cas’s finger.
“Stay with me, Dean.” The words were clear and strong and infinitely tender.
Ah, fuck it. Dean was allowed to cry at his own wedding. “I will.”
Dean’s hands were still shaking as Cas pushed the ring over his knuckle, as his thumb stroked across the silver band that pressed the words I love you into Dean’s skin.
Sam was smiling like a maniac as he looked between the two of them. “I now pronounce you husband and husband.”
Applause broke out from the crowd gathered in the field behind the bunker. Bobby was there, as were Charlie and Stevie; Garth had flown in with Bess and the twins; Rowena had made the trip all the way topside; Jody and Donna had driven down with all their girls; Eileen was there, the diamond on her finger glittering as she clapped; even Jack stood off to one side, smiling happily.
Cheers and whistles nearly drowned out Sam’s shout of, “You may now kiss your groom!” but Dean didn’t let that stop him from lunging forward with a wolfish grin, seizing a yelping Cas in his arms and dipping him backwards to kiss the living daylights out of him.
The glowing vials around their necks clinked together between them.