Chapter Text
Christmas needs to get out of his face.
Seriously, the shops started chucking this stuff at him halfway through September (and when did Christmas decorations wind up displayed alongside Halloween decorations, anyway?), and now it’s inescapable. There’s Christmas toilet roll, he’s seen so many pictures of Santa he’s engrained on his eyeballs and he can’t even get a damn coffee without someone putting a cinnamon stick in it and calling it a Christmas Special. Every program on TV involves someone in a Santa hat and now some bright spark has sprung up tinsel in the few places in the hospital it’s considered sanitary. There’s even a Christmas tree in freaking the break room.
He would like to set fire to it, but he doesn’t think it’s worth losing his job over some overly-festive inspired hatred of plastic plants.
The last few weeks of work have been awful, largely because his semi-truce with Cas tumbled approximately seventy hours after it was formed, when Cas found him helping Tessa’s boyfriend surprise her with a stupidly large bouquet of flowers. So, yeah, maybe it looked like Dean was just randomly stood outside Tessa’s room holding some freaking roses, which may have seemed a tad inappropriate, but once the actual cause of the whole unfortunate stream of events, it would have been nice to have Cas back off instead of lay into him about prioritising patients and some shit that barely made sense, anyway. The whole thing resulted in Dean taking his break outside to have a smoke, which he hadn’t done for a while but hey, it was nearly freaking Christmas. Apparently, Cas also thought he had a right to bitch at Dean about smoking, too, which was so much of a joke that he’d suggested him putting it in a cracker and shoving it up his ass.
(Jo had later assured him that this was actually pretty funny, even if Cas didn’t exactly appreciate the joke). Whatever.
Sam drove out to spend Christmas with his girlfriend Jess this morning, which was kinda stupidly serious for the amount of time they’ve been together and was completely Dean‘s fault. If he hadn’t ostentatiously told Sam, right after he heard the first Christmas song being played in Walmart in October, that they were not doing Christmas this year, then Sam probably wouldn’t have got his fast track ticket to meeting the parents.
Jess was nice. He’d met her a bunch of times and he respected the fact that, rather than try and talk Dean out of cancelling Christmas, she just accepted it and asked if Sam was required to skip it too. Course, then he’d asked Sam whether or not he’d told her the truth ( ‘of course, Dean, I’m not you’) which led to a big argument Dean didn’t want to go over, in even in his head, and Dean angrily telling him that of course he wasn’t punishing Sam by forcing him to sit at home and opt out of the festivities, too, even though there was something significantly more depressing about skipping Christmas alone ( ‘but you get me a present, Sam, and I’ll punch you in the damn face’).
And now, course, he’s got to deal with a mopey Sam calling him from a service station.
“Did Jo tell you when my break was?” Dean demands, slamming open his locker to find that Benny is the third person today to ignore his no present rule. He hasn’t wrapped it, obviously knowing that Dean just categorically wouldn’t open it, but he’s shoved five rolls of reindeer patterned toilet roll in his locker.
“Yes, Dean,” Sam says, sounding half frustrated and half sad, “look, can’t you just drive out to Jess’ after work? Her parents say you’re more than welcome.”
“No,” Dean says, gruffly, as one of the rolls of toilet roll falls out of his locker and hits him in the face. It unravels over his shoulder, spinning down onto the floor and out of reach. Damn.
“Why?”
Yeah, Sam’s definitely been crying.
“For one, I finish at nine. By the time I drove out there, it’d be freaking Boxing Day, Sammy. Secondly, I told you months ago I don’t want anything to do with this god damn holiday, okay? Why’s everyone gotta be so damn persistent about it?”
“Because it’s Christmas,”
“That’s a shitty argument,” Dean says, losing his battle with the freaking reindeer toilet roll due to the levels of aggression he’s putting into trying to roll it up again. “I’m fine, Sam.”
“Have you called Ben?”
“No,” Dean says, slamming a fist against next door’s locker. Another toilet roll falls out.
“You know he’d want to hear from you,” Sam says, voice coaxing and soft and all the things Dean doesn’t want to listen to, right now.
“Well Lisa sure as hell doesn’t,” Dean counters, “this isn’t damn Love Actually, Sam. I’m not wasting my break talking about my feelings.”
“So you have feelings, then, about Christmas? Only, you’ve refused to talk about it, so I don’t know.”
“Sam,” Dean spits, throwing the toilet roll that won’t roll up at the wall because, damn, the whole point of avoiding today is to put off some of these conversations for as long as possible, “last Christmas, I got a ten minute phone call from you from rehab. Dad did a freaking runner, right before we were supposed to exchange gifts. And then Lisa told me that if I didn’t get my head out of my ass and stop working so damn much, we were done.”
Sam spent the ten minutes on the phone yelling at Dean about all the shitty Christmases they’d had growing up and refusing to talk to Dad, because they were trying to wean him off the drugs and he was crashing and nasty. He’d known full well that his Dad was driving drunk down the highway somewhere in Dean’s car, and it wasn’t exactly a festive highlight. At that point, he’d still been keeping up the lie to Lisa that everything in his life was a-okay (no druggie brother or drunk, partially absentee-father), so it just about figured that she was pissed about him working a half shift on Christmas Day. He’d wound up sitting out on Lisa’s porch wondering why the hell he even bothered.
“And this year,” Dean says, “Dad’s dead and, let’s be honest about this Sam, that’s the only reason you’re not high right now. If you want to hop aboard the festive train and pretend that this year hasn’t sucked ass, you feel free. But, either way, my Christmas is going to involve getting good and drunk.”
Someone clears their throat behind him. Dean turns around, still tangled up in reindeer toilet roll, to find him facing down Castiel of all people.
“I hope you’re meaning after your shift,” Cas says, mildly.
“Sam, I’ve got to go –”
“– Dean,” Sam says, and he’s really crying now. Shit.
“– Sammy, I’ll call you after work. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Dean, I’m not going to, I … Dean, will you just –”
“Bye,” Dean says, firmly, and hangs up. Cas is still stood in the doorway to the break room in that stupid lab coat, and he’s like ninety percent sure that Cas heard most of that conversation. At least the bit about his high brother and his dead father, at any rate, which is plenty enough to be going alone with. “What?”
“Is there room for another in your drinking plans?” Cas asks.
“Sorry?”
“Getting ‘good and drunk’ sounds very appealing,” Cas says, and Dean’s staring at him because what, sorry? “Providing, of course, you do mean after your shift.”
“Well, shit Cas,” Dean says, blind sighted, “spending Christmas day drinking with a guy you spend most of your time yelling at is only marginally less depressing than drinking alone.”
“But it is… marginally less depressing,”
“Well, no where’s going to be open,” Dean hedges, struggling to find any decent kind of excuse because, well that’s pretty logical. He’d spent the past few months counting on the fact that Sam would be being miserably and not thinking about Christmas, too, but now Sam has run off to his bright, happy future with Jess (and isn’t that what he always does? Right up to the point where it’s not so bright and happy?) and he’s completely alone in his crusade of misery.
“I have an apartment.”
Cas did, on the whole, make Thanksgiving about a hundred times more bearable than it could have been.
“I don’t think you’ll have enough alcohol,” Dean says, “Anyway, I don’t trust you not to have a Christmas tree dying in some corner of the room.”
“My brother did put tinsel above my television,” Cas admits, as if this is some grave sin, “but that seems about on a level with your, ah, reindeer toilet roll.”
“Don’t,” Dean says, picking up the ball (without bothering to roll it up, this time) and throwing it aggressively in the direction of the bin, “if a guy says no presents, how hard is that to follow through on? It’s pretty damn easy just not to buy dumb crap like this.”
He pauses for a moment and looks at Cas, finding himself already kind of irritated that the man can be so hot and cold, and so freaking attractive whilst being such a pain in the neck. He’s a frustrating enigma of coolness and being overly friendly and zero social skills, but he gets under skin so easily. He’s like a damn catheter, pumping whatever mood Cas happens to be in straight into his bloodstream.
“You can come drink at mine, if you want,” Dean settles on, finally without really being sure why. “I have the complete Dr Sexy box set, and we both know you’re a big fan.”
Cas smiles.
*
As it turns out, he and Cas are once again the only ones who volunteered to work the full Christmas day (Missouri gave him a look like she wanted to give him Christmas off just to spite him, but the hospital needs to be fully functioning despite the earth shattering nature of Christmas, so he wound up working all day as requested), which means the rest of the day is mostly full of people cheerfully working half shifts before going home to celebrate Christmas with their family.
That, or moodily working their unrequested full day shift, knowing that at least they get the whole of Boxing Day off tomorrow; Missouri’s policy.
“Dean,” Jo says, finding him on his ward with her coat and scarf already on, “you sure you don’t want that present I got you?”
“Jo,” Dean sighs, frustration mixing with the desire to cry. He loves Jo, he does. She’s like a sister and Ellen has always been like a mother to him, but the women are damn interfering. At least Bobby, who grouched and got mad and told Dean he was an idjit, and not to bother him when he wound up lonely and depressed (which of course, he didn’t mean for a second), dropped it and let him get on with it. “I said no.”
“Alright, Winchester, I got it,” Jo says, reaching forward to kiss his cheek and squeeze his shoulder for a second. “Have a truly miserable Christmas. I’ll have a drink for your Dad for you.”
“Have several,” Dean comments, turning away to flick through a pile of patient’s records with a grimace, “in fact, drink everything.”
“Play nice, Dean. Call if you need to.”
“I’m fine, Jo, leave it.”
“And if you drunk dial Lisa, I’ll bust your ass.”
“I’d like to see you try, Joanna Beth,” Dean mutters back, just because he knows full well that Jo can and would happily mess him up good and proper, should sufficient reason arise. Jo was bad ass and awesome long before she became a surgeon, but he thinks cutting people open and fixing their insides has made even more awesome; he’s learnt, over the last decade of his life, that people’s insides are messed up in all kinds of ways. Being able to fix some of that, even the shallower, physical problems, is pretty damn impressive.
“That’s another thing about Christmas,” Dean says to Cas, once he’s watched Jo leave, “I’m pretty sure no one ever got soppy about their exes at Christmas until all those soppy Christmas songs told them too.”
“I’ll refrain from quoting Wham, then.” Cas says, picking up a chart and making to head towards one of the patient’s beds. Dean’s pretty much heading down the ward, anyway, and finds himself unconsciously falling into step with him.
“Like, what other song is dragged out every year to be replayed to death?”
“Thriller?” Castiel suggests.
“Oh god,” Dean mutters, pausing at mouth of the corridor to shake his head. He mostly wants to hate all kind of celebration, because they all mark the painful first-year-without which mark the first of the rest of his life stretching on without, but it’s kinda hard to muster up any hatred of Halloween.
“Deano,” Ash says, sidling over from a conversation with Garth to slap him in the shoulder, “I am afraid we have a situation vis a vis the mistletoe.” He jerks a thumb upwards, to the mistletoe that some shit eater has stuck up on the ceiling. Probably Garth. It’s always Garth.
“Are you serious?” Dean asks, glancing at Cas for a second because awkward. “This is a hospital.”
Garth has his stupid puppet on one of his hands, which means he’s probably just been telling some six year old that they have cancer (and he does not understand how Garth can do it and still pull out a smile) or that they’re sick in a way that they won’t get better from. “Don’t kill Christmas, Dean,” Garth says, via the puppet.
Today, the puppet also has a Christmas hat pinned on top of it’s head. Garth probably made it himself. He’s that sort of guy.
Dean makes a grab for the puppet, because it’s marginally better than thinking about mistletoe and Castiel and the fact that they’re about to sort of spend a second major holiday together, even though they spend half their time snapping at each other.
*
Dean’s pretty sure that Cas isn’t actually going to come to his apartment to get drunk together on Christmas Day. It was probably some throw away comment that he didn’t really mean. He’s probably going to be spending the evening with any one of his numerous brothers and not think about Dean, alone in his apartment, once. That’s the logical thing to happen, anyway, because they’re not even friends.
Still, he’s leant against the side of the Impala smoking, just to see if Cas is actually going to make good on their plans.
Christmas has gotten under his skin, exactly like Bobby said it would, and he needs a distraction from all the vaguely happy years with Sam and Dad (and the few with his mother, too). There were tense arguments that were occasionally put aside for the day and occasionally blew up, and there were really shitty Christmases like last one… but there were a few highlights, in amongst the gloom. The problem is, that’s what life is like; there’s a bunch of crap stuff and a bunch of good stuff, and he doesn’t see why he has to be so fixated on remember particular Christmases.
It’s just Christmas. Why does it have to be so important?
“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, appearing at the front of his car. He’s swapped his white lab coat for this weird tan trench coat that Dean’s pretty sure he’s seen Cas wear before, but he still manages to make it look good. If in a dorky, very bible school kind of way.
He’s a little bit screwed, really, because trench coats just shouldn’t be attractive. Especially not guys trench coats to other guys who are pretty much straight, but for a few choice exceptions.
Whatever.
“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, smiling a bit because he’s actually pretty glad that Cas isn’t going home to his loving family, even if it makes him a selfish dick. “Get in.”
Cas obliges in silence and is very particular about his seat belt, which sort of throws Dean for a minute before he remembers that Cas has seen the results of as many car accidents as he has. It’s probable he didn’t lose a father to a car accident eleven months ago, but knowing how many people wind up bleeding out on the pavements is probably enough.
A drunk driver and a drugged driver find each other on the highway, neither survives. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but Dean’s living out the punch line and it’s not all that funny. He’s pretty glad they found each other, because if John Winchester had taken out someone sober he’s not sure he could live with the guilt. There are silver linings, too, because the fact that their father’s death was the result of a mixture of the influence of alcohol and the influence of drugs was just about enough to scare Sam into taking rehab seriously.
“I live a couple of blocks away,” Dean says, to fill in the empty space, “so, you’re not going to see your brother for Christmas?”
“He’s visiting our parents,” Cas says, without further elaboration, “and your brother is…?”
“Visiting his girlfriend and her family,” Dean says. He sort of wants to ask whether or not Cas got an invite to the big family Christmas, but then Cas could ask the same question back.
He leaves it and starts bitching about what a tax Christmas lights are on the environment, as if he doesn’t drive a car which eats gas by the galleon and actually gives a shit about that sort of thing.
*
“– and Carol singers,” Dean says, somewhere between his third drink and his forth, “those little shits make more money per hour than I do. Not you, hotshot Doctor,”
The whole thing started off pretty freaking awkward, but now Dean’s put Dr Sexy on for background noise and they’ve drank enough alcohol that it’s easy to pretend that it’s not awkward, the whole thing has become a lot more pleasant. Actually, he’s struck by the fact that he’s actually having a really good time wallowing in his own misery, which is a pretty new phenomenon.
“Yes,” Cas agrees, “maybe in another ten years I’ll be able to pay back my semi-estranged parents for putting me through medical school.”
Dean laughs because the whole thing is just awful and true.
There’s something entirely too entertaining in indulging in talking about all the things that are wrong with life even though it’s Christmas. His reflex reaction to people shoving messages of good cheer and peace-among-men down his throat is to remember that good people die young, and anyone can get cancer, and some people can’t be saved. It’s nice to have someone else acknowledge that there’s something fucked about the way the world works.
You get into a world of debt just to save people lives, and open yourself off for being sued in the process. It’s a mad world.
“Oh, man, I put Sammy through the first couple of years at Stanford,” Dean grimaces, “you gotta win the lottery to fulfil your super smart potential, I swear.”
“Or perhaps engage in a lot of carol singing,” Cas says, smiling slightly.
“Okay, so,” Dean says, pouring them both another shot of cheap vodka, because it’s just that kind of night, “worst Christmas?”
“It’s a tie,” Cas says, considering his shot, “the year my father left us for his pregnant girlfriend a week before Christmas and the year my youngest brother accidentally outed me as gay, and I was chucked out.”
“Ouch,” Dean says, his brain working double time in an attempt to process this new information. Shitty father, unaccepting family, gay… his brain sticks on the gay thing for a little bit too long. It’s one thing have a weird slightly gay crush on Cas, which he admitted to himself a long time ago, but it’s another thing entirely when Cas is sat on his couch, downing a shot of vodka, and gay. As in, not some off limits vague fantasy, but an almost viable possibility.
“None of it stuck,” Cas says, “Father came back and my mother turned up on my doorstep in tears several months later. Still, I refuse to join them on Christmas as a matter of principle.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, mulling it over, “Can’t really blame you. I dunno what my father would have done if he knew I…” Dean stops, because he doesn’t even know how the rest of that sentence goes. Sorting out the whole sexuality thing hasn’t every really cropped up on his radar, just because he’s had other things to be dealing with, but really he doesn’t even know.
He’s not sure if he cares or not, either.
“Anyway,” Dean says, interrupting himself just to change the subject, “my worst Christmas is probably a tie, too. Between two years after Sam went to Stanford and last year.”
“What happened?”
“Ah,” Dean says, pausing to work out which details to filter out, “Sam and Dad had this big argument, so Sam refuses to come home from Stanford. So I drove us halfway up to California till Dad told me why they’d been arguing, in the first place,” Cas doesn’t prompt him, so he’s sure that he could skip on the details if he really want to, but Cas was honest. “Dad goes and tells me that he found a bunch of… well, needles and crap in Sam’s room last time he visited. Sam told him it was all Ruby’s, his at the time junkie girlfriend. And, well, I think you got most of the story of last year eavesdropping earlier.”
“I apologise,”
Honestly, Dean probably shouldn’t have been talking about it in the break room anyway.
“Whatever,” Dean says, “so you’ve had, what, twenty five Christmases? How’s this one ranking?”
“It’s probably in my top ten,
“Out of…?” Dean asks, because, well… this whole drinking event pretty much happened because he was curious. Cas stares at him for a moment, all blue eyes and serious expression, as if he’s seriously trying to work out where Dean’s going with this one.
“Thirty two,” Cas says, pouring himself another drink. “Yourself?”
“Thirty four,” Dean says, “bottom fifteen.”
“Any other night,” Cas begins, “going home and having an early night wouldn’t have bothered me.”
“Right,” Dean agrees, “but that’s like, the curse of Christmas. It’s like… Christmas puts so much pressure on everyone to be having a good time, so whenever your life hasn’t just fallen off a Hallmark card it winds up making everyone feel shitty. And everyone’s so aware of the fact that they’re supposed to be having a really good time, that they get stressed out about it. I just think…” Dean trails off, distracted by the television.
It’s the episode of Dr Sexy where Dr Sexy himself has a kind of a gay crisis with this hot male nurse, and it’s just got to the bit where Dr Sexy has realised that the hot male nurse is openly gay and Dr Sexy doesn’t really know what to do about that. It’s one of his favourite episodes, despite the fact that there were complaints from all angles about just about everything. Some people seemed to think that Dr Sexy having a sexuality crisis undermined the guy’s sheer sexy manliness, but Dean always thought that was dumb because it was the cowboy boots that made Dr Sexy sexy, not the number of woman he charmed. Other people were annoyed that the nurse was portrayed as preying on the supposedly straight guy, even though he’s pretty sure that didn’t happen either; they just happened to stand too close to each other all the time, and have inappropriate eye sex over cancer patients and generally just had a chemistry thing (that later translated into them having a quickie in the lift, which tended to happen a lot in Dr Sexy).
Cas is giving him a did you just get distracted from a somewhat profound thought by Dr Sexy look, but Dean kinda feels like he’s having an epiphany here.
People don’t just invite themselves over to slightly hostile colleague’s apartments on Christmas Day for no reason, whether or not they’re having a shitty Christmas. It’s just not done. You sit at home alone and you deal, because Christmas operates on compounding whatever emotion you’re feeling and magnifying it to stupid degrees. But, they have like… like a thing where the lose their temper at each other and don’t get on very well, but then Cas apologises and Dean actually really likes the guy, even though he frustrates him.
And none of it makes a lick of sense.
Cas is still staring at him.
Dean finishes his vodka and coke and sets it down on the floor, not breaking eye contact (do they ever, anyway?).
Then he pretty much decides to fuck it, because it’s Christmas and that seems to be a decent excuse for everything else, so why not just lean forward and kiss Cas like that’s a perfectly normal thing to do? Technically, they were like awkwardly stood under a sprig of inconveniently placed mistletoe earlier, so if Cas completely rejects him he can brush off the awkward and say he was squaring a mistletoe debt. No big deal.
Except, instead of completely rejecting him Cas’ fingers tangle up in Dean’s shirt, pulling him closer, and bringing their lips back together in a mesh of heat and need Dean’s pretty sure he was expecting.
And Christmas gets slightly better after that.