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Castiel is falling.
One minute he’d been swerving his broom away from a determined bludger, reaching out a long-fingered hand for the golden blur in front of him and the next, he’s plummeting to the earth, the screams of the crowd almost drowned out by the roaring of air in his ears. The ground is looming closer and closer by the second, and the wings he’s always imagined stretching out from his back when he flies are dissolving feather by feather as he falls.
Thankfully, he passes out before he hits the ground.
When Castiel opens his eyes the first thing he sees is green. Huh, he thinks, grass. And then he closes them again.
The second time Castiel blinks them open, the green is still there, only this time he can feel the air on his face and the strong arms around his back. He startles a little and the arms tighten, holding him close to a warm chest and drawing his focus to the green of the eyes looking down at him.
Eyes, he thinks and he startles again. He’d know those eyes anywhere.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Dean says, voice shaky and arms like a vice around him, “I got you, Cas, I got you.”
It’s then that Castiel finally manages to tear his gaze away and lift his head from Dean’s shoulder. The ground is still moving towards him, but slower now, promising safety rather than doom. Dean has a muscled arm under his knees and another around his back, thighs clamped tightly around his Impala 67 to keep them upright.
Castiel gasps and his hands fly up to grip Dean’s shirt in white-knuckled fingers. The boy laughs rather breathlessly, “No one ever tell you not to look down?”
Castiel doesn’t understand why anyone would have told him such a thing, but he’s still breathing a bit too hard to answer. It’s a testament to how close he felt to dying that for once it’s not the thought of Dean Winchester touching me making him breathless.
They land rather inelegantly, Dean’s hands still full of shaky Hufflepuff and Castiel’s still tangled desperately in the red and gold scarf around Dean’s neck. Dean leans forward gently and lays Castiel on the soft grass, and Castiel feels the loss of Dean’s arm around his back more keenly than his dissolved wings. He shivers just a little and Dean, with all the chivalry of a true Gryffindor, unwraps the scarf from around his neck, and carefully tucks it around Castiel’s. Castiel shivers again at the feeling of warm fingers brushing his skin and he smiles, gaze not leaving Dean’s face even as Madame Moseley looms in his periphery and levitates him onto a stretcher.
Castiel passes out again somewhere between the pitch and the hospital wing and it’s just as he’s slipping into comforting darkness that he smiles.
He called me Cas.
*
When Castiel wakes up an hour later he sees three pairs of eyes staring down at him and he feels ridiculous for being disappointed that none of them are green.
“You gave us quite the scare, Cassie,” Balthazar says, arms folded across his chest, “It would be very selfish of you to die, you know.”
Castiel rolls his eyes and sits up, frowning as Madame Moseley presses a foul looking potion into his hands.
“Thank you for your concern, Balthazar. I’m very sorry if I’ve inconvenienced you.”
Anna snorts from his other side and comes forward to rest a hand on his shoulder.
“How are you feeling?”
Castiel smiles. His little sister, at least, can be trusted to show some sympathy.
“I am perfectly healthy, Anna, thank you.”
“Excuse me,” drawls the matron beside him, “Are you the professional in this room or am I?”
“Um,”
“You’re damn right, ‘um’,” she tsks before he can say anything more and Castiel ducks his head. She turns to Anna, “He’s perfectly healthy, Miss Novak, nothing to worry about. He’s just a little shaken from the fall is all. Thank Merlin Winchester was paying attention.”
At the mention of Dean, Castiel blushes and Balthazar, supportive big brother that he is, snorts.
Castiel shoots him a half-hearted glare and Madame Moseley rolls her eyes, “Alright Miss Novak, Mr Novak, out with you. And send in that Winchester boy on your way out will you? Before he wears a hole in the stone from all his pacing.”
She winks at Castiel and bustles out through a back door, leaving him with a faster heartbeat than when he woke up and two identical smirks on his siblings’ faces.
“We’re going to want details later, Cassie,” Balthazar grins, wiggling his eyebrows at him before he turns to leave and Anna giggles as she waves goodbye.
The door doesn’t even swing all the way closed before it’s creaking open again and Castiel’s heart rate climbs even higher as Dean Winchester peers around it.
“Um,” he says, shuffling into the room holding Castiel’s Angel 3000 carefully against his chest, “Hi. I brought your broomstick back.”
He looks nervous, Castiel observes, and when he gets close enough to lie the broomstick down next to his legs, Castiel can see the dusting of pink across his cheekbones.
Castiel likes to look at Dean. He always has, ever since their first year when the scrawny boy with the green eyes tried to punch Uriel in the face for making fun of his backwards tie. He looked at Dean in second year too, when those eyes met his over piles of old books or steaming cauldrons. He looked at Dean even more in third year when the warmth in his chest at the sight of him started to make sense and he barely stopped looking at Dean in fourth and fifth year, when his beater’s shoulders started to fill out his Quidditch uniform and his voice got lower.
Castiel watches Dean like he used to watch the bees in his garden, like centaurs watch the stars in the sky, and every time their eyes met, every smile they’d shared, had felt like meteor showers, as sweet as honey.
Dean looks at him now, nervous and blushing and rubbing at the back of his neck and it isn’t until his shoulders slump and he starts to back away that Castiel realises he hasn’t said anything.
“You caught me,” he says, and Dean’s eyes meet his again.
“Well, yeah. Someone had to save your sorry ass,” he smiles, and Castiel tilts his head.
“I don’t understand,” he says, “You hit that bludger at me in the first place.”
Dean sighs, “Actually that was Benny, and I’m gonna kick his ass for that later,” he says, more to himself than to Castiel, “I told him to leave you alone today.”
Castiel frowns, “Why? I’m not on your team.”
Dean definitely blushes this time and he shrugs, “Yeah well. You’ve had a cold all week. Didn’t want you to die just because you’re too stubborn to miss a game.”
Castiel gapes at him.
“You – you noticed?”
Dean looks up at him through long eyelashes and shrugs again, “Course I noticed, Cas.”
Castiel feels the heat all the way to his ears. He smiles, small and happy, “You’ve never called me ‘Cas’ before.”
Dean frowns, “I haven’t?”
Castiel shakes his head, “It’s usually just ‘Novak’.”
“Oh,” Dean says, looking genuinely sorry, “We should change that.”
Cas smiles even wider and Dean smiles back, full lips pulling up at the corners in a way that makes it hard not to stare.
“So,” Dean coughs, drawing Cas’s attention back to his eyes, “Any chance this taught you not to fly when you’re sick?”
Cas chuckles low in his throat and thinks that if Dean Winchester catching him mid-air, strong arms holding him against a solid, warm chest, was his reward, he hasn’t learnt any such thing. He pushes the thought down before he can say it out loud and instead raises an eyebrow.
“Dean, you played through a broken leg last year.”
Dean looks surprised. “How do you know about that?”
Cas leans his head back against the headboard and meets Dean’s eyes, “I notice you too, you know.”
When Dean smiles this time it’s brighter than Cas has ever seen it, brighter than the grin he wore when his little brother got sorted into Ravenclaw or the laughs he’s shared with his friends. He smiles so wide that Cas can see it even after he turns his face up and away, the emotion behind it shining through the relaxed muscles of Dean’s body and the way his skin flushes.
“Thank you,” Cas says, drawing Dean’s embarrassed smile back to him, softening it and making it his, “For saving me, and for – ” for noticing me, for caring about me, for making me feel warm, “For everything.”
Dean nods gently as if he heard every unspoken word. “No problem, Cas.”
He smiles again and reaches out to touch the scarf still around Cas’s neck. “Keep it,” he says, fingers trailing over it to graze Cas’s shoulder just briefly before pulling away, “Colours look good on you.”
He winks once, affectionate and happy, and backs away.
“No more falling though, you hear?” he says, raising a finger to point playfully at him as he walks backwards towards the door.
And Cas thinks it’s probably something to do with the fact that he’s still reeling from Dean’s fingers trailing across his shoulder, or that his blood’s still pumping too loud from Dean winking at him fondly only a second ago, but Cas’s mouth moves before his brain has a chance to catch up.
“What if it’s for you?” he says, smile giddy on his face.
And then he freezes. All the blood that had been pumping too fast and too loudly around his body rushes to his face, his eyes wide and horrified. Please let me not have said that out loud.
And Dean stops in his tracks, stares at Cas for all of two seconds, and then bursts into incredulous laughter.
“Oh no,” Cas breathes, slapping his hands over his heated face with a groan as Dean throws his head back and clutches his stomach, “Oh Merlin, can we pretend I didn’t just say that?”
“Nope!” Dean says happily, laughter still laced in the lines on his face and Cas peeks through his fingers when he feels Dean’s presence back beside him, “No take backs!”
Dean reaches forward and pulls a hand away from Cas’s face, threading his calloused fingers through Cas’s own and crouching down beside him until blue hesitantly meets green. He smiles at Cas then, all soft and full of promises.
“And in answer to your question, don’t worry about it,” Dean leans forward and his smiling lips kiss a supernova onto Cas’s cheek, “I’ll catch you.”