Work Text:
The laundry room smells like the same discount detergent that you can find in any drugstore in America, the kind they’ve been using for decades, and that alone is enough to calm Sam down a little. That had always been his chore, laundry. Dean had taken care of pretty much everything else, growing up, but Sam had dragged their stuff to the nearest laundromat, quarters clinking in his pockets, and watched the clothes tumble, usually working on some homework.
He still feels a little like he does after running a marathon—stretched out, a little bit loopy—but it’s a bit better now. Reading the Enochian, hearing it spoken, that hasn’t helped much, but at least with Donatello back online, it’s over for now.
“How did you convince him?”
Cas stares at the shirt held up in front of him. Sam watches, amused, as he folds it into fourths from collar to hem and then folds the entire long piece in half. While Cas puzzles over the next one, Sam quietly takes his shirt and refolds it.
“Punched him, actually,” Sam says, a little sheepish.
He’s always hated how naturally violence comes to him. Tried all his life to hunch in himself, seem less threatening. To fight the instinct.
“I told him I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and he caved.”
Sam doesn’t believe for one second that his brother is actually convinced, but he doesn't need conviction. All he needs is the knowledge that Dean won’t sneak off in the middle of the night with the box.
“That’s something,” Cas says after a moment.
He gives up on the henley he’s trying to fold and throws it over to Sam. Then, he shuffles off to measure out the detergent into the next load. Sam resists the urge to follow him and make sure that he’s doing it right.
Can’t be worse than the werewolf guts that are stinking up the current load, anyway.
“I still can’t believe he didn’t tell me.”
Cas keeps his back to Sam as he pours the detergent into the lid. He holds the cup up to eye level to make sure that he’s reached the correct line and then dumps it in the washer.
Sam doesn’t want to intrude. But this dance that they’ve been doing—well. It’s kind of pointless, if you ask him. Sam knows better than anybody else that you should take hold of love with both hands when you get it.
He’s watched his brother stand dead-eyed in front of a pyre, watched Cas’s normally composed face crumple at the news of a box. But he’s also watched them when they think the other can’t see them, and he’s not stupid.
How does he approach this with Castiel? With someone that’s been alive nearly as long as the Earth?
“When he told me, after I confronted him,” Sam says slowly, “he said that he hadn’t told me because he didn’t think I’d be able to let him go. He thought I’d talk him out of it.”
Which was true. Least of all because Sam knows perfectly well the fate his brother had chosen for himself, even if Dean doesn’t seem to realize the gravity of his choice.
“He was right,” Cas says.
“Yeah, but if he really decided that was what he wanted? I don’t think I’d be able to stop him.”
He thinks about his own decision, what feels like several lifetimes ago. Not too far off the mark, really, considering what he’s been through between then and now, even excluding Hell. He thinks, back then, that there had been a part of him that thought he would be able to take anything Lucifer dished out.
He’d been wrong.
He wonders if Dean thinks the same thing. If he thinks someone like Alastair could even hold a candle to a pissed-off archangel. That’s not fair, a part of him says, but Sam thinks it anyway. There’s something so cosmic about Lucifer, about Michael, no matter what dimension they’re from, that a demon just can’t match.
“But you, Cas—”
Sam considers his next words carefully.
“I think he was afraid that you’d give him a reason to stay.”
He finishes folding the last shirt and hefts the laundry basket on to his hip.
“Give me a call when the next load’s done.”
He leaves Cas staring at the rattling washer, lost in thought.
Cas sorts socks until he can’t justify holding off on the conversation any longer. As a pretense, he gathers up Dean’s socks in his arms—it’s easy to tell which are his, he’s far more particular about thickness and matching than Sam is—and marches off toward his room.
Dean answers his knock with a grunt that tells Cas that he’s still stewing in his thoughts of the box. Cas sets the socks down on his dresser.
The look on Dean’s face tells Cas that he doesn’t think this is an appropriate time to be worried about something like socks, but Cas just steps back from the dresser, eyes trained on Dean. He’s sitting against his headboard, headphones on.
“You’re telling Sam the truth. You’re going to stay.”
He doesn’t phrase them like questions. Couldn’t stand it if it turned out that the answers were no.
“Yeah,” Dean says, peeling the headphones off. “I am.”
Cas sits down on the end of the bed, half turned away. “You could have built that box a little bigger. I’ve effectively immortal, you know.”
Dean raises an eyebrow, a little bit of humor in his eyes. “Oh yeah? You want to put up with this for eternity?”
Cas shrugs. “I can think of worse things.”
It wouldn’t be a bad life. Technically, it wouldn’t count as happiness, either. So it probably would be an eternity.
“I pulled you out of Hell,” Cas says after a moment. “I won’t stand idly by as you cast yourself back in.”
At that, Dean snorts. “Not what you told me back then.”
No, Cas supposes, it wasn’t. “I was very different, then.”
He thinks about the other Castiel, the one from the other world, broken from one too many reboots. He’s glad this was his fate instead, as terrible as it looks sometimes.
“You’re joking about squeezing in that thing with me, right?”
“I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth, Dean Winchester. Or the depths of the sea, as the case may be.”
Dean swallows. Cas knows it’s a lot to process, so he stays quiet as Dean thinks it over.
“I don’t understand why.”
Cas smiles, then, but it’s a tired smile. “I think you do.”
Dean nods. “You’re right. I do. But I don’t understand how someone could be so stupid.”
“I learned from the best.”
He picks up the laundry basket as he stands to go. Cas can feel Dean’s eyes on his back the entire way out the door.