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Dean Winchester is a cocky son of a bitch.
Dean knows this. Dean used that as the foundation on which he's built his entire reputation. There are demons in the Eighth Circle that still whisper of his surety with a blade, the easy, almost loving way he wielded fire and spear and pain. Angels have forced their prophets' hands to pen tales of his hubris, the swagger in his gait, the presumption in his voice when speaking with the Lord's own. He tried to commission something that said as much, but the clerk at Fast Signs just stared blankly at him like he was the insane one and said, "Pretty sure we can't do that in neon, sir. Or at all."
Point is, Dean Winchester is as cocksure as the year is long, so when Jeremy Kamler brought his Paleolithic piece of shit Oldsmobile into the shop, complaining of a leak, Dean rubbed his hands together, smiled wide, and said, "Don't you worry, Mr. Kamler. This is nothin'."
It turned out to be a little more than nothin'.
Oil lines aren't supposed to fucking do that.
Covered head to toe in Castrol GTX High Mileage, he sits on a goddamn hand towel the entire ride home, eyes flickering from the road to the seat every two seconds, waiting to see the first blush of a stain in his baby's leather. He'll have to replace the whole interior if any of that shit gets into the seat and he'd sooner sell his soul.
By the time he sees the light pillars at the end of the driveway, there's an oyster shell-shaped stain in the leather by his knee and he's two seconds away from pulling to the side of the road to have a good cry. It just isn't fair. If this is what going legit gets him, he'll happily go back to ganking demons and hustling drunk frat boys at pool.
He can't be bothered to open the garage door, parking the Impala in front of it and practically ducking and rolling out. He turns and surveys the oil stain, which looks like Cthulhu took a piss on the seat. It's going to take a lot of time, energy, and corn starch to get that fucker out.
Sighing, he abandons it and squelches his way into the house, mindfully kicking off his shoes on the front step like a good husband. He made the mistake of tracking muddy snow into the foyer once.
Once.
He finds Cas on the sofa, papers and textbooks strewn about the coffee table like the worst tablecloth ever, all his considerable focus on making some poor kid's essay bleed. There's a knife's slash of red ink across one stubbly cheek, and Dean swallows down the need to lick it away. After a moment's consideration, he coughs it back up and files it away for later. He's fifty-three, not dead.
"A shower. My—and yours and Crowley's and Abbadon's—kingdom for a fucking shower," Dean grumbles.
Cas doesn't look up, just rumbles in absent agreement. "Mary's in the bathroom."
"Mary!" Dean hollers, knowing damn well his voice reaches the bathroom in the next room. "Hurry it up, kiddo—Pops is kind of a mess!"
No reply. Typical.
"Sam called," Cas mutters, writing something in the margins that will undoubtedly make some poor kid cry in his dorm shower tomorrow night.
Dean pulls at his shirt, which sticks uncomfortably to his skin. "Oh yeah? What'd he have to say?"
"He wanted to talk to Mary about Jessica's birthday."
"… And? That it?"
"No." Cas taps his finger over a thick paragraph. "Why do my students insist on filling their papers with clichés and irrelevant quotations?"
Dean snorts. "I'm no expert, but that seems like a tactic right out of Bullshitting 101."
"Do they think I don't know what they are attempting to do?" Cas makes a face. "I am more well-versed in subterfuge than anyone."
Snapping his fingers and pointing at Cas, Dean acknowledges the point, because, wow, understatement of the fucking decade. He bounces on his feet, a shiver crawling up his spine, and peers around the doorway to where the bathroom is. He hasn't heard a door open yet.
"What else did Sam have to say?"
"He invited me to have dinner with him, Naomi, and Jessica."
Dean smirks. "You mean invited us."
"No, just me." Cas scratches a line through sentence after sentence until it looks like the page has been highlighted in blood.
Dean squints. "This is why your RateMyProfessor score is so low."
"And yet my enrollment is the highest the university has ever seen. How extraordinary," Cas says, and Dean roll his eyes at the faux wonderment in his voice. Someone took to sarcasm a little too well.
"Wait." Because wait a goddamn minute. "Sam invited you to dinner but not me?"
"Am I supposed to know the connection Miley Cyrus has to Catholic Dogma?" Cas inquires, a wrinkle appearing between his brows, and normally Dean would find that utterly charming, but right now? He's pissed.
"Why wasn't I invited?"
Cas tosses the essay on top of a small pile of them and reaches for another one, a goddamn grading machine. For someone who was once employed to judge others, he certainly found the right calling. "Do you remember the last time you two got together?"
Yes. "No."
"With the Nerf guns and the brush fire? You shot Jessica's cat with a BB gun."
"By accident! It shouldn't have been walking there! That's no reason to be disinvited from—"
"You salted and burned Naomi's father's ashes, 'just in case'."
"… Mary, get your ass out of there! I need the bathroom more than you!"
"That's what I thought." Cas makes a thoughtful sound as he scans the first page of the new essay. "Dare I ask how this—" He gestures toward Dean without looking away from the paper "—happened?"
"Oil line. I had it under control," Dean says.
"Clearly."
Enough of this bullshit. He stalks across the living room floor as quickly as he can and banks left as soon as he clears the archway, throwing open the bathroom door and—
"GET OUT!" A wild-eyed creature with marshmallow fluff smeared around its top lip screams, lunging for him, painted nails digging into his chest and pushing him back. "GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!"
The door slams shut in his face.
Dazed, he toddles back into the living room just in time to see Cas drop the essay onto the pile and reach for another. "Cas, why the fuck is Colonel Sanders in our bathroom?"
At this, Cas lifts his head. "Mary is bleaching her mustache."
There is a reply to that. A serious one. He can't for the life of him figure out what the fuck it is, so he just stares.
"Dean," Cas prompts.
"Sorry, the most surreal thing just came out of your mouth," Dean says faintly. "I'm just waiting for the world to re-adjust. Mary is what?"
Cas drops the latest essay onto the table and sits back with a sigh. Not for the first time, Dean wonders if Cas knew exactly what he was giving up when he decided to stay on Earth with him. Angels deal with a lot of shit, but Dean's pretty sure this isn't supposed to rank. "Mary is under the impression that the hair on her upper lip is darker than it should be, and is taking steps to remedy this."
"No, I understand what bleaching a mustache is. What I don't understand is why she thinks she—She's beautiful the way she is! She doesn't have a mustache, and even if she did—"
"Don't," Cas says, holding up a hand. "I've already been through this with her. I see nothing wrong with it if it will put her at ease. The box said it is a mild formula."
Dean grips the bridge of his nose and rubs. Between the stench of the oil and his fifteen-year old daughter thinking she's Dick Dastardly, he's going to have a headache for days. "Why now?"
Cas purses his lips thoughtfully. "You will not be angry when I tell you."
Dean freezes. "Is that a statement or an order?"
"A boy from her class—"
"Yeah, no. Mary! You can wash that shit off because the answer is abso-fucking-lutely not!" Dean shouts, and a thunderous expression clouds Cas's face.
"She is fifteen."
"I know exactly how old she is," Dean snaps. "And I also know what fifteen-year old boys are like. I was one myself at some point, and you know what I was doing at that age?"
"Having sexual congress with older women in the back seat of your father's car."
"I—" Well, he's not wrong, and he can hear his father laughing about it, congratulating him, and never once sounding actually proud. "The point is, all fifteen-year olds want one thing!"
"Our daughter is fifteen." Cas says, and crap, he's using his Angel of God voice. Cas knows how hot it makes Dean, the little cheater.
"What's your point?" Dean pauses, dizzy with anger and oil, and whips around to shout at the doorway, "Hurry it up, Mary! I'm absorbing this shit into my bloodstream!"
"My point," there is nothing good in Cas's tone, "is perhaps she wishes to have sex."
"That's your point?! That's the worst fucking point! You are the worst parent, and that's coming from someone whose dad won that award 25 years in a row."
"Allow me to allay your fears by telling you that Mary does not feel ready for sex, a fact she has confided in me, but also allow me to remind you that Mary is a young woman who knows her own self." If Dean were anyone else, he'd be pants-shittingly terrified of the rumble underlying the words. "She does not need either of us giving her cause to doubt or feel shame about her feelings. If she wants to grant this boy a couple of hours of her time, then she will. I've already spoken to Jamal's parents, and his mother is driving them to and from the movies. They are meeting up with friends there. I've been told this is a normal outing for humans at this age."
Somewhere in Dean's brain, a bomb drops, and all thoughts disappear into the expanding white of the blast.
Defeated, he moves to sit next to Cas on the couch.
"No," Cas says, pointedly looking at Dean's oil-covered everything, and Dean rolls his eyes and crosses his arms.
They're at an impasse, a tableau they made famous throughout their years together, and they both wait until something gives.
Cas licks the visible dryness from his lips, a pause, and the fight drops out of his shoulders. "When we… when we decided to give up the Hunt and left the world to turn as it will, we agreed we would do this the—the normal way. You would be a normal man, with a normal occupation, with a normal house and a normal brother, and I would attempt to follow to the best of my ability. And when we decided to welcome a child into our lives, we agreed they would have a normal life, completely free from our pasts. We are neither of us who we were, Dean."
Dean sighs and drops his arms to his sides. Fuck. "We're still who we were, Cas. We're just… more than that now. We've fucked up a lot of things. I just don't want this to be one of them."
Cas says nothing for a long moment. "You're not him."
"I know—"
"No, you don't," Cas says firmly, quietly, with the force of the Heavenly Host behind it. "But I am telling you now, Dean: you will never be in the running for that award."
It's not the words that make him believe it, or even the way they're delivered. It's the look in Cas's eyes that does it—it's the same one Dean saw all those years ago in a barn in Pontiac, Illinois, when some douchebag claiming to be an angel got right up in his face and whispered, You don't think you deserve to be saved. It was a look that knew him right down to whatever was at his core and still deemed him worthy.
It's the look that helped Dean find the words to ask Cas to stay, with me, forever, and assured him he was doing the right thing. The wanted thing. That Cas even voiced a yes was just ice cream on the pie.
Whatever Cas sees on his face is enough to make that look fade into something else, something more recently familiar—something Dean's worked hard to earn. "And that is the last we will speak of this."
"Thanks, Cas," he murmurs, and doesn't say I love you. He doesn't need to.
It wins him a smile. "Go and shower, Dean, if you ever want me to touch you again."
He laughs and runs a hand through his hair—or tries to. His fingers get caught.
"Pops? Bathroom's free."
She had no mustache to begin with and she still has no mustache, but she doesn't look like she's going to try and claw his face off. His little girl smiles at him and the light of the room catches on the nothing on her upper lip. She's wearing his old Physical Graffiti t-shirt (the one that shrank in the dryer) and she looks happy.
The dust in his brain clears, and he grins. "Hey there, Wilford Brimley, lookin' good."
Mary makes a face. "I don't know who that is, but I'm guessing that was a crack at my mustache."
"You don't have a mustache."
"Not anymore," she agrees cheerfully, then immediately sobers. The facial muscles on this kid are out of this world. "Pops, look… you don't need to… I'm not going to…"
He sighs through his teeth and reaches out to lay a hand on her shoulder, which she dodges.
"Pops, you're gross. No."
Right. Forgot. At this point, he and the oil are one. "Kiddo, you know I'd do anything for you, up to and including being a rational dad. Go out and have fun tonight, okay?"
He glances over at Cas, who stares at him with something dark and burning in his eyes. He's going to get such a blowjob later on. Nothing turns Cas's crank more than when he's being a dad.
Mary smiles and presses a kiss to her fingers, which then brush against his soiled cheek. "Thanks, pops."
"And if this kid breaks your heart?"
She bounces on her feet. "Oh, pops, if he breaks my heart no angel in any part of Heaven will be able to fix what I do to him."
Even Cas beams at that.
"'Atta girl," Dean murmurs. "What are you seeing?"
"FOgO. You know, the one about the android and the dog? They played Lynyrd Skynyrd in the trailer," she says, and he has no clue what she's talking about, but it sounds terrible and he really wants to see it. So long as the dog doesn't die, of course.
"Well, let me know how it is," he says. "I'd kiss you but—"
"But I'd kill you if you got oil on me, so… go shower. You reek." She laughs as she says it, and he loves her so much. He 's in his living room, covered in oil, with his kid brother finally happy, his little girl all grown up in his old t-shirt, and his husband, angel, protector, Cas grading mediocre essays from his Faith, Doubt, and Fanaticism class.
Dean Winchester's a cocky son of a bitch, a doer of great and terrible things, many of which should be written in gold ink on stone, but the only thing he wants to brag about is this. This, right here, completely justifies being a little bit of a conceited prick.
There's a knock at the door, a two good, solid rappings, and Mary bounces with a squeal. "Oh my god, he's here! How do I look?"
He smiles, glances at Cas, who winks at him, and says, cocky, proudly, "Pretty and awesome. You get that from me."