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Dust in our eyes our own boots kicked up
Heartsick we nursed along the way we picked up
You may not see it when it's sticking to your skin
But we're better off for all that we let in
It happens one day at breakfast.
Dean makes a joke about how he’d like to retire, finally get some rest, and that it wouldn’t be so bad to have Cas along for the ride. That is-- if Sam wanted to be a loser and live with Eileen. There’s stunned silence, and Dean makes a lame excuse about needing to go change the oil on the Impala. He leaves for the garage in a hurry.
Cas follows him.
Dean is already under the hood of the car, in jeans and a worn-out Zeppelin t-shirt. Without turning around or looking up, he says, “Hey, Cas.”
“Were you serious?” Cas asks without preamble, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets.
“About saying hey to you? Absolutely.”
“Dean.” Cas walks over to the side of the car, away from the garage entrance, so that Dean can’t avoid him, “You know what I’m talking about.”
Dean shrugs lamely, “I mean, eventually Sammy’s gonna start producing horrible children with Eileen—“
“Dean, they’re not even married yet.”
“—And the bunker’s not really suitable for kids, and I don’t wanna spend the rest of my life only here, and I know Jack is itching to go places—“
“Dean, I know you want to retire, I was just asking about—“
“—But I can’t really leave you behind, unless you want to go back to heaven, which would be the worst but—“
“Dean!”
Finally he stops talking and turns his gaze to Cas, “What?”
“I don’t want to go back to heaven. I’d like to stay here with you. But I’d also like to know whether you were joking or not.”
Dean straightens up, locks eyes with Cas, pulling out his signature Dean Winchester is about to express his emotions and he’s a little uncomfortable about it smile, before saying, “I would never joke about wanting you with me.”
We've lost friends and loved ones much too young
There were so much promise and work left undone
When all that guards us is a single center line
And the brutal crossing over when it's time
There’s talk of whether or not Jack will go with them, or stay at the bunker, or something else entirely. Jack settles the debate by saying that he’s going to keep hunting the minor stuff that’s left—but that he’ll come back; of course he will.
The whole conversation leads to Sam and Eileen saying they want out, too, like Dean thought they would.
Cas watches Dean as the days pass. There’s a sort of reserved sad-happiness around Dean’s eyes now, as if everyone leaving is bittersweet.
Because of course it is.
One day Dean asks Cas how he feels about campers, and Cas says that he feels neither positively nor negatively about them, and then he comes home from the grocery store to discover that they (as in, he and Dean) are now the owners of a sixteen feet long 1986 Scamp camperin dire need of some fix-ups.
Soon enough, the others are gone, down the road, only a twenty minute drive in the Impala away. That’s when Dean sets to work. He rips out the plumping in the camper, salvaging the toilet and sink. He strips away the moldy linoleum, builds new floors out of wood, using that as an excuse to buy a jigsaw. Cas doesn’t mind. He follows Dean to the hardware store however many times Dean goes a week.
Spring fades into summer. Dean works outside in his oldest shirts, with holes and the sleeves ripped off, and Cas gets cajoled into wearing jeans, and then t-shirts, too. He learns to cook—the first thing he makes Dean is a grilled cheese sandwich. They watch westerns or nature documentaries at night. Cas reads and reads and reads. They go to dinner at Sam and Eileen’s, and Jack calls them nearly every day about something or another.
But his favorite thing to do is to watch Dean work outside. He’s content out here, a boombox playing his Zeppelin tapes, the time in the sun causing more freckles to bloom across his neck and face.
Dean looks like summer.
Ooh
(Well, I don't know where it all begins)
Ooh
(And I don't know where it all will end)
Ooh
(We're better off for all that we let in)
One day, Dean lets him in the camper—it’s the first time Cas has been in it since it arrived at the bunker. It looks completely different—warm, homey, happy, clean. The sunlight streams in the tiny windows and Cas can imagine himself in here, reading, except—
“There’s only one bed,” he notes.
Dean turns a delicate shade of pink, “Is that alright?”
Cas glances over at him, smiles softly, “Of course.”
There’s no more talk of the bed after that.
Instead, Dean questions Cas repeatedly about paint colors,what kind of mugs they should get for the little cabinets above the tiny stove, and does a terrible job of admitting that, as amazing as the Impala is, Cas’s Continental would be better for pulling it.
Cas chooses a light mossy green, tells Dean it’s his favorite color, and Dean’s face lights up a little in the middle of the hardware store, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
What Cas wants to say is, you’re my favorite color, but that’s not an option. Although if Dean was a color, he would be that green, or a deep, mustardy yellow, warm and comforting.
Dean fixes up the chipped Scamp logo across the camper, paints it the new green, and then uses it for accents inside. One day, Cas goes to the thrift store in town and buys a bunch of mugs with trees and flowers and animals on them. Dean makes fun of them, but Cas notices how he carefully sets them in the cabinets with a light in his eyes.
They plan on where to go.
One day those toughies will be withered up and bent
The father-son, the holy warriors and the President
With glory days of put up dukes for all the world to see
Beaten into submission in the name of the free
They decide on the Rockies; take a real road trip. Sam comes over to inspect the camper, worries at them, hopes they aren’t doing something unsafe. Dean just laughs, but Cas seriously informs Sam that they’ll be fine.
“Say,” Sam says to Cas in a low voice, as Dean roots through his toolbox, “Does he know?”
“Perhaps,” Cas shrugs.
“You should tell him.”
Cas sighs. “We’re happy this way,” he says, “Why would I want to mess this up?”
“You could be happier.”
Sam is right, of course. There is something missing, but it’s something Cas knows he has to wait for. He has a hope, polished and golden in his chest, that being patient will lead to what he desires, but it’s just that, a hope.
Two weeks before they’re supposed to leave, Dean comes home from the grocery store with a dog, and Cas says, “I didn’t know they sold dogs at the supermarket.”
Dean laughs, “I found him by the side of the road. He looked sad.”
It turns out that the dog isn’t microchipped, and so they decide to keep him and name him Jackie, which delights the real Jack, who promises to visit the bunker once they’re back from their trip. Cas misses him, and so it’s sort of fun to have a fluffy, breed-ambiguous dog (Dean calls him a “mutt”) named after his son.
(Jackie sleeps in Cas’s bed. Secretly, Cas refers to Jackie as his zorge —“friend” in Enochian.)
They go to the store, driving fifteen more minutes to find dog food and a leash and a collar and a bed and a—
“Dogs need a lot of stuff,” Dean grumbles as they carry everything inside the bunker, but he’s smiling. Dean’s the one who found Jackie, and also the one who feeds him bacon under the table.
They discuss whether or not Jackie will fit in the camper, and they decide he will, that it’ll be fine.
“He can sleep in our bed,” Dean says, as if it’s no big deal, and maybe he doesn’t notice the phrasing, but Cas does, and it adds to the growing hopeful feeling in his chest that gets harder and harder to brush away.
June fades into July, and the camper is almost ready. Sam gets them a new atlas and worries about their safety. They have one last dinner before they leave on Sam and Eileen’s new front porch. Cas admires the way they smile so openly when they look at each other. He sneaks a glance at Dean, who has a burger held loosely in one hand and a smile on his face as he laughs at a joke Sam’s told.
It’s all so golden, but Cas isn’t sure if it’s his .
We're in an evolution, I have heard it said
And everyone's so busy now but do we move ahead
The planets hurling and atoms splitting
And a sweater for your love you sit there knitting
The drive from Lebanon, Kansas to the Shoshone National Forest at the foothills of the Rockies in Wyoming is about twelve and a half hours. Dean insists on driving the whole way, saying they’re going to “power through.” They do stop for lunch, though, at a roadside diner. They take their food to go and then sit in the parking lot in the cab of the Continental. Dean tears off a strip of his burger and feeds it to Jackie.
Dean catches Cas staring, “What?”
“Nothing.” Cas returns his attention to his own burger.
They listen to the radio, to some of the tapes that Dean brought with him. Cas reflects on how nice it is to drive somewhere because they want to and not because they have to in order to save the world or something,
“What do you want to listen to next?” Dean asks.
“You’re letting me choose?”
Dean shrugs.
Cas picks up his trench coat, laying on the seat next to him (it felt wrong to leave it at home, at the bunker) and rifles through the pockets. There’s the mixtape Dean made him. Cas fits it into the tape deck, rewinds it and presses play. The opening notes of Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same echoes through the truck.
“You saved it,” Dean said, after the song had finished and moved onto the next one.
“Listened to it every day whenever I was away,” Cas replies. He doesn’t say anything else. There doesn’t seem to be a dire need for words now. The silence is comfortable.
Ooh
(Well, I don't know where it all begins)
Ooh
(And I don't know where it all will end)
Ooh
(We're better off for all that we let in)
Cas wakes up as the sun is setting.
He didn’t mean to fall asleep, and he yawns as he picks his head up off the window and looks out at the mountain range blooming in the distance, at the hues of the sun cresting off of the clouds. It’s as if the sky’s been done up in watercolor.
The radio is turned down low, and Cas turns his head to catch Dean looking at him, smiling.
“Should only be two or three more hours,” Dean says.
Cas nods sleepily, turning his head to watch the sunset roll by. It blooms, and then eventually fades into an inky black sky full of an impossible number of stars.
Dean turns up the radio, Cas offers to drive, Dean tells him that they’re almost there. Jackie gets up, snuggles into Cas’s lap, and Cas runs his hands through his shaggy grey-and-white fur mindlessly. They stop for gas.
The camp site is less populated than Cas expected—not that he minds. Dean parks the truck and the camper, starts hooking up the plumbing, while Cas takes Jackie for a walk around. It’s quiet out here—Cas can hear an owl.
It’s quiet at the bunker too, but that’s a different kind of quiet—a manufactured silence, designed to keep them safe. Cas likes this better. Here, it feels like the world was always meant to be without distractions.
He’s staring up at the stars, listening to the frogs, when he hears a crunch of sticks, and then Dean is standing next to him, shoulders touching, looking up, too.
“Beautiful, ain’t it?” He asks.
Cas nods once.
See those crosses on the side of the road
Tied with ribbons in the medium
They make me grateful, I can go this far
Lay me down and never wake me up again
The next morning, Cas wakes up to something warm over his feet and a weight across his chest. As it turns out, Jackie is asleep at the bottom of the bed, and, despite the fact that they fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed, Dean’s head is now tucked in the crook of Cas’s neck, his arm slung across Cas’s chest.
Cas just lays there, thinking, watching the sunlight filter through the cheap curtains, and then he feels Dean shift.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” Dean says. His voice is sleepy and loose, “Do you want me to make us some coffee?”
“Sure,” Cas replies.
But Dean doesn’t move for a little bit; he just lays there, breathing into Cas’s neck. Eventually, he scoots himself out of the bed, heads to the world’s tiniest kitchen. While he makes coffee and scrambled eggs with cheese, Cas folds the bed up so that they can use the table, and soon they’re sitting across from each other at it in their pajamas. Cas eats the eggs, even though he doesn’t have to. He’s still an angel, but barely—he slept last night.
He doesn’t think he’ll mind when his grace is all gone.
They get dressed, and Cas realizes he accidentally packed a couple of Dean’s shirts for himself that must have gotten mixed up in the laundry, but Dean doesn’t say anything, just looks at him and smiles, and then they decide what to do for the day.
Kat writes a poem and she sticks it on my truck
We don't believe in war and we don't believe in luck
The birds were calling to her, what were they saying
As the gate blew open in the tops of the trees were swaying
They go on a hike.
Forests are different when you’re not running away from something, and Cas keeps stopping, much to Dean’s exasperation, to look at things he thinks are interesting. Eventually, though, Dean starts stopping too, finding a plant or a rock he thinks Cas will want to look at.
Jackie likes the long walk, wagging his tail and hitting trees with it. They take turns holding his leash, their fingers brushing every time they switch.
They packed a lunch (Dean made sandwiches, informing Cas that the dijon mustard he took up space with in the mini fridge is totally worth it, even though it means they have less milk), and so they sit in a clearing by a stream in the forest and eat.
Cas notices that Dean is sweat-slick, the parts of his hair by his ears sticking up, and that there’s the start of a sunburn on the bridge of his nose. He watches Dean whisper something to Jackie as he pulls a bit of ham off of his sandwich and gives it to the dog. Cas can’t help but smile.
After lunch, they walk through the stream, and Cas crouches down to look at all the little creatures in it. Dean tries to use this as an opportunity to shove Cas into the water, but Cas is still enough of an angel that he’s stronger, and Dean goes tumbling. The victory is short lived, though, because then Dean splashes him, and then Jackie joins in, and soon they’re all soaking wet and breathless. They lie on the ground to dry off, watching clouds, and then Cas looks over and Dean has fallen asleep with Jackie snuggled up to him, both of their breathing steady.
I've passed the cemetery, walk my dog down there
I read the names in stone and say a silent prayer
When I get home, you're cooking supper on the stove
And the greatest gift of life is to know love
At night, they find a clearing with a picnic table near the campsite, and after dinner (Dean used the campsite grill to make burgers), they go and sit on it with their beers.
Dean toasts Cas, before leaning up to stare at the stars. He’s unusually quiet.
“Something up?” Cas asks.
“Just….” Dean sighs, “I’m content.” A pause, “Never really felt that way before.”
Cas hums in agreement, “It is nice.”
Dean sets his beer down, props his hands on his knees, his chin on his hands, stacked up, and stares off into the distance, “Are you content?”
“I would go so far as to say that I’m happy.”
“Why are you happy?” Dean turns his face to him.
There are a thousand things Cas could say. I’m happy we’re alive. I’m happy Sam and Eileen are happy, that Jack is happy. I’m happy to see you smile.
What he says instead, though, is bungled, and too forward, what he says is, “I’m happy because I’m with you.”
There’s a pause, and then Dean says thickly, “I’ve known for a long time you were it for me.”
“Oh?”
Dean laughs softly, “I dunno when it began, there’s not an exact moment I can pinpoint. But you always came back to me. And I always had to come back, too, otherwise it was like I was missing a freakin’ limb.”
“Hm.”
Dean takes a deep breath, keeps going, “And if you had said you wanted to go back to heaven…I probably woulda kept on hunting. I couldn’t do this, be content, on my own.”
“On your own?” Cas asks.
“On my own without you, I mean.” Dean falls silent, and then a few moments later, leans his head on Cas’s shoulder.
That night, they don’t bother to try and sleep on separate sides of the bed. Instead, they turn towards each other, combining warmth, and whisper about everything and nothing until their mouths eventually fall together, and the feeling in Cas’s chest no longer hurts, because now he knows it’s his to keep.
Ooh
(Well, I don't know where it all begins)
Ooh
(And I don't know where it all will end)
Ooh
(We're better off for all that we let in)