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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened, because for Dean, it seems as if it’s always been happening. Suddenly, all at once, he realizes he has always been in love with Castiel. Son of a bitch.
He has a coffee stain on his bathrobe and his hair is a mess and he missed a spot shaving on his chin and he’s humming into his coffee mug as he reads the morning paper. He’s a mess, in every sense of the word. He has bad breath in the morning and even now his ties are always slightly crooked. He always leaves his dirty coffee mug on the counter instead of placing it in the sink like Dean has asked him to. He uses all the hot water and he leaves discarded articles of clothing all over the bunker. And he makes weird noises when he sleeps, not that Dean has, on more than one occasion recently, stood in the threshold of his bedroom watching him or anything. That would just be creepy.
He has this weird little habit of picking all the toppings off his pizza and eating them only after he’s finished the rest of it. Seriously, who does that? He’s a better shot than Dean and it drives him crazy because just a few short years ago he didn’t even know how to use a gun properly. He insists on buying these fruity smelling candles and lighting them all over the bunker. Dean’s room smells like lemon meringue pie, and okay he really loves the way it smells but that’s totally not the point. What sort of man lights scented candles in another man’s room without permission first? And he always leaves the cap off the toothpaste in the morning. It’s really starting to become a problem.
His favorite TV show is The Golden Girls, and he hums along to the theme song every time he watches. He laughs so loud that Dean can hear him clear across the other side of the bunker. He is so fucking weird. But he also watches things like Cosmos, and smiles reverently at the television. He sighs and says, “I know that place,” and he chuckles to himself when they talk of the possibility of life on other planets.
Dean asked him one night if it was true, if there were other places out there like Earth, and Cas just smiled, knowingly, and started rattling off some complicated equation. After that, Dean sort of zoned out staring at his lips and if he ever did give an answer, Dean certainly didn’t hear it. Because the equation was so boring of course, not because he was thinking of kissing his lips. No. It was not that. It was the math which Dean totally hates and he does not think about kissing Cas all the time. That would be even creepier than watching him sleep at night, which he also does not do.
There’s definitely something wrong with him. He chews on pen caps and he’s always tapping his foot rhythmically as he reads. And he’s always reading something, even if Metatron did sort of spoil most of the novels in existence for him. He said it doesn’t matter, a story without context isn’t much of a story at all, and even if he does know the ending, the journey getting there is still just as meaningful. Sometimes he reads aloud to Dean when he finds particularly profound passages in all his favorite books. Dean likes it when he reads him Vonnegut, even if he does know half his books by heart at this point himself. The journey Cas’ voice takes him on makes those words somehow even more meaningful.
Cas is a horrible cook, particularly when it comes to eggs. They’re always overcooked and he never seasons them correctly. Always too much or too little. The dude is a genius when it comes to astrophysics and quantum mechanics, but he does not know how to use a salt shaker. And half the time he burns the bacon, and he never remembers to brew more coffee when he drinks the last cup.
Dean doesn’t know what’s happening to him, because he finds suddenly that he doesn’t even care anymore. The quirks, the strange little habits, the smells, the messes. Everything this fallen angel, this man, is and has become, has become a part of him as well. And okay, so he hasn’t exactly told him yet, hasn’t worked up the nerve to say the words, hasn’t dared try to kiss him. He’s working on it. He almost has, a half dozen times at night, when he was totally not watching him sleep because that would just be weird. But as their bare feet brush against one another beneath the kitchen table, their eyes meeting over their mugs, he thinks maybe today. Maybe today will be the day he finally tells him.