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“I don’t understand,” Cas says, staring at the apple in his hand suspiciously.
“It’s really not that complicated,” Sam smirks, sitting forward on the edge of the armchair like an overexcited puppy, “You just twist the stalk until it snaps off, saying a letter for each turn, and whichever letter it stops at, that’s the first letter of your soulmate’s name!”
Dean snorts from next to Cas on the couch and Sam shoots him a withering glare. Dean rolls his eyes but keeps silent. It is kind of funny to see Cas staring at the apple like it holds all the secrets of the universe.
“Do all humans do this?” Cas asks, wide eyed and Sam nods enthusiastically. Dean has to hold back another snort, he remembers everyone doing this back when they were kids, an 8 year old Sam insisting that ‘it’s really real, Dean!’ and thrusting apples into his hands every few weeks. Dean hopes Sam doesn’t still believe in it and that this is some kind of ‘rite of passage’ thing he’s pulling, but he’s starting to look way too excited for Dean’s liking.
When Cas lifts a tentative hand to the stalk, Sam leans forward even more and Dean wonders, not for the first time, how the hell they’re even related.
Cas shoots a glance at Dean as his fingers grasp the stalk and Dean tries to hide his amusement at the whole charade. He lifts his hand in a rather sarcastic thumbs up, but something about that relaxes Cas’s shoulders a little and he turns back to the apple with an alarming amount of concentration.
He twists once, twice, three times and then, with a sharp inhale of breath, the stalk snaps off on the fourth turn.
Cas’s mouth falls open and Sam leans forward even more to punch him playfully on the shoulder with a grin, “D! How about that, Cas?” he shoots a smug smirk at Dean over the top of Cas’s head and Dean suddenly doesn’t find any of this funny at all, “I wonder… who do we know whose name starts with a D?”
Dean glares at him venomously and opens his mouth to tell him to shut the hell up when Cas finally speaks. “But,” he says slowly, wonder lacing his voice in a way that makes Dean more than a little uncomfortable, “How did it know?”
Sam hasn’t stopped smirking at Dean across the room and so he doesn’t miss the treacherous way Dean’s cheeks light up at the comment. It’s ridiculous. This whole thing. It’s a stupid game that kids play when they have a crush and want to believe it’s destiny or whatever. And it’s not even like D is an uncommon letter. Cas probably knows a lot of Ds. Dean just wants Sam to stop looking at him like that.
“I told you Cas,” Sam says, smiling innocently when Cas looks up at him, “It’s a thing.”
“Oh for the love of – ” Dean starts, but Sam cuts him off by throwing another apple at Dean’s head. Dean catches it and Cas finally turns wide, innocent eyes on him.
“Will you do it too, Dean?” he asks, an unreadable, open expression on his face that makes Dean feel weird and hot under the collar.
“Cas, man, it’s not really – ”
“Please?” he says, almost hopeful, and Dean doesn’t really understand what’s happening here except that Cas is looking worryingly like Sam the way he’s leaning excitedly forward in his seat and Sam is lounging back in his chair with the world’s biggest shit-eating grin on his face.
Dean sends Sam what he hopes is a detailed death warning with his eyes and tries to ignore how little resistance he has to Cas looking at him like that.
“Fine,” he sighs and raises his eyes to the ceiling. Cas is staring unwaveringly at his hands and Dean tries very hard to ignore them both as he grasps the stalk roughly. He only makes it three turns before it’s snapping off and Dean wants to sink through the fucking floor.
He doesn’t dare look at Sam because he knows he doesn’t want to see the smug look on his face. He does hear the soft gasp from his right though, so he’s careful to plaster a casual mask over his heated cheeks before he leans back nonchalantly against the couch and throws the apple back at Sam with a great deal of unnecessary force.
Sam catches it easily and grins.
“C!” he shouts, and Dean laments the fact he wasn’t born with laser vision, “How about that!”
“Shut up, Sam,” Dean bites through gritted teeth and determinedly does not catch Cas’s eye, even though he can feel him staring a hole through the side of his face.
“What?” his brother says, the picture of innocence, “I’m just trying to help you guys find your soulmates! So let’s think about this,” he says, tapping his chin exaggeratedly with a finger, “Your soulmate begins with a C, Cas’s soulmate begins with a D… do either of you have any ideas?”
There are 348 ways in which Dean wants to murder his little brother right now and it annoys him that he can’t decide which would be the most painful.
“Dean,” Cas says quietly from next to him and Dean turns to glare at him too.
“What?” he snaps and the wide smile that had somehow, inexplicably, found its way onto Cas’s lips slips slightly. Dean refuses to feel at all guilty about that.
“I just,” Cas says, “I just thought this might mean – ”
Dean cuts him off with a laugh, a little hysterical, “Oh my God, Cas, have you lost your mind? It doesn’t mean a damn thing!” Cas’s smile falls completely and Sam’s expression turns stormy, “It’s just some stupid game that kids play at school, not a fucking prophecy!”
The silence that follows is probably up there in the top ten of awkward silences Dean has ever sat through but he refuses to feel guilty for that either. This is Sam’s fault for spreading malicious lies.
“Oh,” Cas says eventually, shoulders slumping, “This was a practical joke?” he asks, turning to Sam.
Sam looks murderously at Dean before turning to grimace at Cas, “Uh, yeah. Sorry buddy.”
“Right,” Cas says, placing the apple gently on the table in front of them before standing. He laughs, a little forced and wooden, “Good one, Sam. You really had me.”
And Sam is glaring so hard at Dean that Dean almost feels like he’s about to spontaneously burst into flames but it’s the way that Cas leaves, head down and very carefully not looking at Dean once, that makes him feel like the smallest person in the world.
It takes a long, painful minute for Sam to stop glaring and actually say something.
“You know, that was a dick move, even for you.”
Dean finally tears his eyes away from where Cas had been sitting and blinks.
“He likes me back.”
Sam rolls his eyes so hard it probably hurts, “Oh you think, Sherlock? Jesus, Dean, if I have to watch you two make eyes at each other one more time I’m gonna fucking push your heads together myself.”
Dean stares at Sam. Had he really been that obvious?
“Oh, I’m sorry, did you think you were being subtle?” Sam snorts, “Now please, for the love of God, go do something about it before I resort to more drastic measures.”
He throws the apple back at Dean, hitting him squarely in the chest, and leaves the room with a huff, slamming the door pointedly behind him.
Dean sits staring at the door for approximately five seconds before he’s leaping off the couch. And you know what? Screw it. Don’t let anybody say Dean Winchester can’t be romantic when he wants to be.
When he gets to Cas’s door it’s been almost half an hour since the apple fiasco and Dean’s slightly out of breath from running all the way back from the field half a mile away. He takes a moment to steady himself, holding the threads of his heart together like balloon strings to stop it floating away, and opens the door.
Cas is sitting on the edge of his bed, staring blankly at the pages of an open book. He looks up at the sound of the door opening and there’s a kind of wary resignation in Cas’s eyes that reminds Dean that he’d been kind of a massive dick.
He coughs.
“Uh, hi Cas. Can I come in?”
Cas frowns, “You are in, Dean.”
Dean huffs a laugh and rolls his eyes, shutting the door behind him, “Yeah I guess I am. Look buddy,” he says, excitement teetering dangerously close to nervousness now that those blue eyes look at him so intently, “I just wanted to apologise. For earlier. I was, uh,” he rubs the back of his neck and moves forward, “That was out of line, man.”
Cas sighs and stands up, turning away from Dean and shrugging, “You’ve nothing to apologise for, Dean. It’s not your fault I believed Sam’s prank.”
“No, but,” Dean wishes he’d planned this out a little better, “I shouldn’t have – I mean I – son of a bitch, Cas, you should just tell me when I’m being an oblivious asshole, you know.”
Cas turns to look at him then, almost nervous, shoulders hunched as if bracing himself. He looks like he’s not quite sure what to say and Dean steps forward before he can figure it out.
“Hey, uh, I know I said the apple thing was bullshit,” he says, reaching into his pocket to curl his fingers around what he’d spent the last half hour looking for, “but I thought I could show you something that actually works?”
Dean reaches a hand out towards him and opens his palm. Cas looks at the small, perfectly white flower in Dean’s hand for a long moment before looking back up at Dean, his head tilted.
“That’s a daisy.”
Dean rolls his eyes, “Yeah. You know what daisies do?”
“Not much,” Cas says, still frowning, “Although I believe they can be used as a potherb – ”
“Cas,” Dean whines, closing his eyes briefly, “Look, I planned a whole thing here. Will youplease just let me tell you about the damn daisy?”
Cas closes his mouth guiltily and nods, and Dean sighs. He takes another step until he can take one of Cas’s hands in his free one, and turn Cas’s palm upwards to place the daisy there. Cas’s breathing sounds shallow from this close and Dean gives his hand a small squeeze before he lets go.
“Well, legend has it that if you’re unsure about how your – ” Dean coughs, “How someone feels about you, you should pull off the petals one by one. And for each one you say ‘he loves me’ or ‘he loves me not’ and whichever one falls on the last petal is the one that’s true.”
Dean thanks whoever’s listening that Sam isn’t in the room right now. He’s a hundred percent sure that he’s blushing like a teenager and he knows this is cheesy as hell but the way Cas is looking at him… Well, Dean kind of feels like he’s losing his grasp on the balloons in his chest. There’s still wariness there, a slight sadness that suggests Cas is half expecting this to be another cruel joke or thoughtless rejection, but there’s hope there too and a tentative spark of understanding.
Cas’s hands are shaking a little when he reaches down to pull off the first petal, and his gaze rests unwavering and wide-eyed on the flower in his hands, but Dean doesn’t take his eyes off Cas’s face. Cas’s voice is low and quiet as he recites the words and he’s moving slowly enough that it’s clear he’s nervous about reaching the last one.
Dean has to make a conscious effort not to bounce up and down on his feet as he watches. He knows what the last one will be, he counted the petals meticulously to make sure this would work out, but time is moving slowly enough that’s he’s beginning to second guess himself; starting to worry that he’d counted wrong or that Cas doesn’t actually feel the same at all or that they’d be ambushed by a pack of rabid werewolves before he even reaches the end.
Cas’s breath hitches.
He stares at the last petal for several seconds before he plucks it off and cradles it in his palm.
“He loves me,” he says, and looks up.
Dean is looking back through his eyelashes, heart struggling wildly against the threads keeping it grounded, and he really hopes Cas gets what he was trying to say here because he really doesn’t think –
Cas kisses him. And Dean lets go of his heart strings altogether.