Work Text:
Sam wakes up with Dean’s face pressed to his neck and Cas’s arm slung over his hip from behind. He sighs and stares at the ceiling as his eyes adjust to the mid-morning light, giving himself a minute or two before turning on his side to face Cas, whom he obviously knows is awake. The movement dislodges Dean’s face, and he snorts and mutters something in his sleep before resuming his soft snoring. “Cas,” Sam begins, “Why’re you in my bed?” Cas gazes owlishly at him, raising his eyebrows as if to say Isn’t that obvious?
“Dean’s in your bed, too,” Cas helpfully points out.
“Yeah, and I’ll get to that in a sec, but. You don’t sleep.”
"Correct."
Sam huffs a partly-amused breath. "I mean. It’s kinda weird to share a bed with someone who doesn’t sleep. What’d you do all night?"
"Watch you, mostly," Cas replies, completely without shame. Sam looks away awkwardly, clearing his throat. "Um. Okay, could you maybe…not? It’s nothing personal, it’s just, I need my privacy." Cas seems conflicted, his mouth turning slightly downward as he considers. "I understand, and I would never dream of disrespecting your boundaries, but…" His eyes flick past Sam’s shoulder, and Sam suddenly gets it. He sighs again, thinking that this odd competitiveness that Dean and Cas have recently struck up around him is getting to be really tiresome.
Sam sits up further and gently shakes Dean until his eyes snap open and he gives Sam a belligerent look. “What,” he grouches, shoving his face into a pillow. “You’re awfully cranky for someone who was drooling on my neck a couple minutes ago,” Sam quips, hiding a smile when Dean visibly tenses as he remembers that he spent the night in his brother’s bed.
“Why’d y’wake me up?” Dean asks in a muffled voice.
" ‘Cause this bed-sharing thing is a little…too much. I don’t know how you guys ended up here without me noticing, but I’d prefer that you didn’t turn it into a habit." Dean heaves himself up laboriously and fixes Sam with a stubborn stare. "Cas started it. I happened to come in here after you fell asleep and he was like, hanging all over you, and I had to be here to make sure he didn’t assault you in your sleep, or whatever.”
"I would never!" Cas interjects, affronted. "Don’t try to act all chaste," Dean scoffs, "You can barely keep it in your pants around him."
"Says the man who forced himself on his brother last week," Cas retorts, and Dean turns red to the tips of his ears, presumably remembering kissing Sam on his birthday. Sam still doesn’t know exactly why that kiss happened, but he’s been assuming that it was some sort of dare, some kind of show of gutsiness that was meant to set Cas back on his heels. He’s tried not to think too much about it beyond that, to cram it into the ever-expanding pit of unresolved questions in his mind, but Dean is looking so agitated right now that Sam has to revel in it.
“Dude. Are you blushing?” Sam asks, leaning in for a closer look and making Dean scramble backward, bringing a hand up to cover his face. “I am not,” Dean says testily, “It’s just fucking hot in here, that’s all.” Sam grins openly at him, unable to hide his amusement, because when was the last time he saw Dean get this embarrassed? Of course he’s gonna milk it for all it’s worth.
“It baffles me how much you seem to regress in age at moments like these,” Cas snorts, addressing Dean while absently putting a hand at Sam’s elbow, “You’re like a schoolgirl with a crush. It’s unbecoming for one of your licentiousness.” Dean frowns, eyes focused on the spot where Cas and Sam are touching. ”Yeah, well. At least I don’t go around spewing love poems all over the place like I’m a desperate sleaze.” Cas bristles, fingers tightening over Sam’s arm, and Sam is once again at a loss as to what they’re fighting about. It’s become a staple of his daily life as of the last couple of days, but he decides right then and there that he wants to put an end to it.
"Okay, guys. I wasn’t gonna ask because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but. What the hell are you talking about? What’s got you so pissed at each other?" Cas looks up at him, eyebrows tugging upward incredulously. "You really don’t know?"
"Man, how dim are you?" Dean adds, smirking the slightest bit when Sam looks offended. "It’s not like we’ve been trying to be subtle. Like, at all."
Cas nods, and it figures that when they’d finally agree with each other on something for the first time in days, Sam would be completely in the dark about it. “So what is it? Tell me, already.”
"Um," Dean’s bluster disappears, and he shifts his gaze to the ceiling, throat bobbing nervously. "Sam," Cas says, directing Sam’s attention with a soft touch to his jaw, "What did you interpret all of our comments over the past week, all of our uncharacteristic gestures, to mean?" Sam blinks, trying to ignore how nice Cas’s fingers feel as they slide over his skin. He supposes that’s one of the uncharacteristic gestures Cas is referring to. “Oh, I dunno. I thought maybe, you were trying to one-up each other? To see who could make me the most uncomfortable, that kind of thing.” Cas retracts his hand, face working through a series of unreadable expressions before it settles on upset. “We’ve been making you uncomfortable? Why didn’t you...”
Sam hurries to amend his statement, noting that both Cas and Dean look more hurt than he thinks the situation warrants. “No, no, don’t—don’t take that the wrong way. All the attention is…refreshing. Really, it is. But it takes some getting used to. And I don’t know what any of it means, because you two seem angry at each other, or something, and I’m mostly just kinda lost.” Dean sighs, scratching at the back of his ear and leveling Sam with a frustrated glare. “Jesus Christ, you’re annoying.”
He fidgets some more before shaking his head once and blurting, “We’re both in love with you, you moron.”
Sam’s jaw drops open and lands somewhere around his knees, and it takes him several tries to make any semblance of sense out of Dean’s sentence. “You’re…you’re what?” He manages, shell-shocked.
"Do I need to spell it out for you?" Dean snaps, and though his face is the picture of annoyance, his cheeks are starting to redden all over again. "I’ve wanted you since…" The sentence dies in Dean’s throat, and he juts his chin out almost defiantly, but the fear in his eyes breaks his facade in two.
He’s actually afraid, Sam thinks, amazed, and he stares at Dean for a breathless minute longer before turning to Cas. “You too?” He asks, feeling high-strung and apprehensive, like he needs to ask even though he’s fairly certain he knows the answer.
Cas smiles at him, reaching up to cup Sam’s cheek with one hand and making his heart jump at the suddenness of it. “Years, Sam. Perhaps even since the moment we met.” Sam laughs shakily at that, putting a hand over the one the angel has on his face. “No way. Back then, you thought I was an,” he struggles briefly with the the next word, assailed by flashes of jagged memory, “abomination.” Dean makes a strange noise at the back of his throat, but averts his eyes when Sam looks at him.
Cas recaptures Sam’s attention when he slips his other hand into the hair at the back of Sam’s head, gazing at him with such clear intent that it’s Sam’s turn to blush, heartbeat racing because he’s never done anything like this before and, oh yeah, he’s just been told that his brother and one of his closest friends are in love with him.
His brother—whom he was so fatalistically attracted to as a teenager that it ate away at his insides for years, who means so much to Sam that he couldn’t even begin to put it into words—and Cas, whom Sam has admired and identified with and found intimidating and impossibly endearing at the same time. And they’re telling him now that they’re both…
“May I kiss you?” Cas asks, straightforward and without an ounce of hesitation. Sam swallows a couple of times, moves his hands around uncertainly before they settle at Cas’s waist, feather-light. “Sure.”
Cas’s face lights up, and Sam has a half second to wonder at the abrupt tightness in his chest before Cas leans forward to brush his mouth against Sam’s. It’s a little strange at first, but then Cas tugs lightly at his hair and starts kissing Sam’s neck instead, his lips and his teeth traveling all the way up to the corner of Sam’s jaw, and it has Sam’s breaths already coming out slightly ragged.
Sam’s gaze finds Dean, who’s leaning against the wall and watching them, looking distinctly left out. “Dean,” Sam breathes, his eyes locking on his brother’s as Cas’s hands work their way under his shirt, fingers splaying. “C’mere.” Dean raises his eyebrows warily, climbs back onto the too-small bed with them and sort of hovers, casting his eyes about like he doesn’t know where to look. Sam drags him in with a palm cupped over his shoulder, slowly, planting a careful kiss on his lips just as Cas bites softly at Sam’s earlobe, making him gasp into Dean’s mouth. Dean’s arms wrap around Sam’s back, somehow managing not to jostle Cas, and he kisses Sam back fiercely, outdoing that first birthday kiss by a mile.
"My turn," Cas says when they break apart to breathe, his lips ghosting across Sam’s cheek before they meet Sam’s parted mouth, and Sam’s fingers trail over Cas’s chest as Dean tugs at Sam’s sweatpants, pulling them abruptly past his hips. Sam shivers when he feels Dean’s rough fingertips slipping down his stomach and grazing the waistband of his boxers, stopping there like he’s uncertain of what he’s doing. Sam gives him a hand by yanking his boxers down unevenly, his eyes closed as Cas slides his tongue into his mouth.
Dean pulls his boxers down the rest of the way with an audible intake of breath, and Sam clutches at Cas as Dean gets his hands on him, impatient and needy.
They don’t talk about it, afterward, though it weighs on each of their minds as they go about the day together. Dean is too jumpy, eyes skittering away from Sam every time they accidentally touch. Cas, on the other hand, is even more touchy-feely than he was when he and Dean were butting heads the other week, taking Sam’s hand whenever the urge strikes him and sticking to his side for hours at a time. Sam’s mostly just kind of unnerved by it all, unable to fully process what had happened that morning, and what it means for them. He’s also kind of sore and his neck displays a pattern of small hickeys, serving as constant reminders of the line they’d crossed, and pretty embarrassing ones at that.
When the three of them finish up the evening’s hunt, the sharp smells of sweat and iron hanging in the air around them, Sam brings it out into the open. “Do you guys…regret it? Any of it? Because, uh. I’d understand if you wanted to, y’know. Get on with business as usual, pretend it never happened.” He starts to bite his lip, but the nervous motion might devalue his casual tone, and anyway, he has blood crusted over his mouth.
“I don’t regret a thing,” Cas announces, giving Sam a contagious smile. Dean kicks lightly at the ground as he walks, sending a puff of dirt floating upward. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he mutters, fishing for his keys in his pockets with his brow furrowed. Sam lets the conversation drop at that, reaching for Cas’s hand and being rewarded for it when Cas beams delightedly at him. He thinks to himself that though it seems unlikely to him now, maybe they can work this out somehow, find out where this new thing between them fits into all three of their lives.
And sure enough, he feels infinitely better when he wakes up the next morning, with Dean spooned around him and Cas up and about across the hall. “Hey,” Sam says, whisper-soft as he sits up and watches Dean blink blearily awake, eyelashes as messy as his hair. The corner of Dean’s mouth quirks, and he presses the smallest of kisses to Sam’s wrist, which is the closest part of him he can reach without having to move.
"Hey."