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Dean realizes he's in love with his best friend in the dairy aisle.
Seriously, Dean's standing there leaning on the cart and he looks over at Cas who's squinting at some blueberry yogurts like they're the most confusing thing he's seen all year and he's wearing the hoodie from their college days that's full of holes and has a broken zip and should probably be burned and there's definitely still a twig in his hair from the nature ramble he went on this morning with his hippie pals (and Sam) and Dean thinks about how he's a comic book illustrator but he's spent more time filling his draft book with sketches of Cas lately than anything else and he thinks about how he can't ever get mad at Cas for leaving wet footprints all over their shared bathroom even though he's nearly slipped a dozen times and he thinks about coming home and finding Cas asleep on the couch with a documentary on bees playing on the TV and how he'd touched Cas's hair just because he could and realizes that holy hell--
he's in love with his best friend.
Cas is still contemplating the yogurts, blissfully unaware of Dean's intense inner-crisis, and he's picked up some plain Greek something or other as well, and he holds them up and says, "I can't choose," and because this is obviously a Very Important Decision Dean just sighs and huffs and pretends not to care as he snatches the blueberry ones and tosses them in the cart. Plain yogurt is gross, okay, and Dean may have just realized he's hideously in love but he still has fucking standards.
(Cas, Cas is the standard.)
They move onto cheeses and Dean starts to wonder what he's actually going to do, how on earth he's going to tell Cas, the world's most unromantic 23-year-old environmental conservationist to ever exist. Honestly, Dean had to coach him through taking his high school girlfriend Meg on a date because Cas thought 'romantic' was a beekeeper suit and the honey farm after-hours--and that still hasn't really changed.
Because of course he is going to tell Cas; they've told each other everything since they were in fourth grade, and this is huge, this is freaking Dean right out, he's gotta tell his best friend. It's not in him to hide things from Cas.
Who he's in love with.
And maybe probably wants to spend the rest of his life with and adopt like a puppy or something and get a house with a yard.
Right.
The cart gets fuller and fuller and with every new item Dean loses another little scrap of confidence until he knows he just has to do it, right now, or he'll chicken out and won't do it at all.
"So I'm in love you," he blurts, and Cas stops with a frozen turkey in his hands. "I thought you should know. You don't have to... do anything. But I do. Love you, that is."
And then the frosted turkey slips out of Cas's butter fingers and lands directly on Cas's toes and he totally ruins the moment by yelping and hopping around in pain and Dean judgementally glares at Cas's shoes because he's always said those canvas things--seriously, what are they, slippers?--were fucking useless and oh look, he's right.
Butterflies in his stomach are making him jittery so he ignores Cas rubbing at his foot and wheels the cart away from the not-conversation before he has to hear a gentle let down. He stops two aisles away and picks out a frozen cheesecake and then two tubs of Ben and Jerry's because they're on promotion and also some frozen buttermilk biscuits, and he's starting to wonder if he should go back and get some flour and sugar because all of a sudden he wants to bake and bake until he eats enough brownies to make himself sick when Cas comes round the corner.
He looks relieved to see Dean which is always a better reaction than mildly pissed and angling for a punch and he comes right up into Dean's space and fixes him with that look, the one he used to get when they were kids and Dean had mixed the Play-Doh colors up or had a bad night at home, all scary and laser-focused on Dean's face, and he demands, "Did you mean it?"
Dean winces, just a bit. "Why d'you think I ran away?"
There's a clatter where the cart bumps into something but Dean doesn't notice because he's got two armfuls of Cas, Castiel, six feet of muscle and bedhead and hotness, 10/10 would bang, and oh, oh, this is what's been missing. Cas's tongue in his mouth, his hips pushing Dean back into the freezer unit and his fingers tugging at Dean's hair.
"Me too," Cas says with swollen lips against Dean's mouth and Dean makes this soft little whimper that he can't even bring himself to be embarrassed about because Cas wants him, actually wants him back, it's like all his Christmases have come at once.
Somewhere behind Cas a woman clears her throat pointedly and Dean's tempted to flip her the bird except this is their regular grocery store and they can't really afford being banned, so he detaches himself from Cas before she can ram them with her cart.
"Let's get out of here," he mutters, words pressed into the soft skin behind Cas's ear. They've only got half the groceries they need but Dean doesn't care, just drags Cas and the cart by the hand to the checkout and unloads the stuff stupidly fast and the young girl behind the register smiles and asks if he's in a hurry but Dean doesn't even hear her because Cas has hooked a finger into the waistband of his jeans and he's whispering filthy things in Dean's ear and whoever knew Cas the nature-loving hippie would have such a mouth on him.
By the time they leave Dean's feeling hot and prickly all over and then Cas stops and tugs him in at the edge of the parking lot and they're kissing again, grocery bags getting crushed between their chests, and kissing Cas is really nice, fucking awesome actually, but Dean's still got the common sense to protest about his food getting squashed because one of those bags has got a pie in it somewhere.
So he pulls back and runs a finger over the screen-printed slogan on Cas's t-shirt ('plant your seeds and save the bees!') and smiles. "Let's go home."