Chapter Text
“Dean.”
“What?”
“Where are the colored lights?”
Dean looked up from where he was sitting Indian style on the floor, fingers wrapped in the lights he was trying to untangle. Cas was in a comparable state of apocalyptic tinsel, which was hanging off of even his eyelashes. It looked like solid, metallic dripping water, like Cas had just been pushed into the ocean and emerged as the Tin Man.
Dean couldn’t help but to smirk at his reflective boyfriend, but Cas was still looking down at the collection of lights and frowning.
“I could’ve sworn we got them down from the attic,” Cas said, sounding flustered. Cas was the kind of person who stressfully micromanaged his way through the winter holidays. Cas had to have everything perfect or else it wasn’t good enough. Dean would have been annoyed if it was anyone else; Cas wore it like a cute personality quirk.
“I’ll go get them,” Dean told him, gesturing for Cas to sit back down when his boyfriend nervously rose with him. “I think I can manage it, Cas. You just get that tinsel figured out.”
“Are you sure?”
Dean nodded confidently when, really, he knew he would be completely lost the second he climbed the ladder into the attic of their craftsman style home just outside of Charleston. But, for the moment, Cas looked like a huge burden had been lifted off of his shoulders and he smiled at Dean with the same wondrous light in his eyes as he did when Dean first kissed him, like he was the most amazing thing in the universe, and Dean was a sap so he didn’t care. He leaned over and kissed Cas on the top of his head before heading up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The second he hit the top of the stairs, the Led Zeppelin on the stereo changed to a Christmas CD. Dean sighed so heavily he could have blown the house down, but kept moving.
The attic was through a trapdoor on the ceiling of their back room, used for storage and Cas’s relatives they don’t like when they come to visit. Dean pulled the string and moved out of the way before he was impaled by the ladder, heaving himself up to the attic. He glanced around.
The attic basically looked like Dean’s higher brain functions—incomprehensively cluttered and filled with cobwebs. The lights were probably somewhere around the same place as higher-level mathematics and, as Dean glanced at the piles of disorganized boxes that were never opened out of laziness after the move two years ago, it became very clear that Dean was in way over his head.
But Dean had never backed down from a challenge. No matter how many mystery boxes.
He took a seat on the floor and pulled the first box to him, flipped the top flaps open, and peered into the contents.
And that’s where Cas found him thirty minutes later—wearing a feathered boa, a pair of giant sunglasses, a pair of leg warmers on his wrists, and a childhood shirt of his that reads ‘I Wuv Hugs’ as a doo rag.
“Dean,” Cas said, sounding disproving and long-suffering.
“I got distracted,” Dean felt the need to say, despite that being abundantly obvious. Cas’s lips started to twitch up into an amused smile even though he looked like he didn’t want Dean to have the satisfaction.
“You’re unbelievable,” Cas replied, but he was laughing. “How did you even find all of this?”
“In this box,” Dean said guiltily, nodding down at it. “I couldn’t resist.”
Cas sunk down next to him, so close that their knees were touching. He reached out and pulled the box next to the one of Dean’s lifelong mistakes closer to him, prying open the flaps.
He made a muffled sound, reaching in and yanking out the top item.
It was a picture frame.
“Oh my god,” Cas said. “It’s from our first Christmas together.”
“No way,” Dean replied, taking off his massive sunglasses and leaning over. Sure enough, in Cas’s hands was a picture of them, arms slung around each other’s necks, grinning widely. They had Santa hats on their heads and a glass of eggnog in their free hands. Cas’s cheeks were flushed, his hair grown too long, and Dean looked like he was a drink away from stripping on the bar to REO Speedwagon. They both had on a goofy sweater, and they both looked the same kind of crazy-happy that Dean felt every morning when he woke up next to Cas.
Dean looked at Cas, but Cas was still looking at the picture, his face softening. Dean leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Cas leaned into him, smiling down at the picture. Dean leaned forward and found the box filled with more pictures, more mementos—pictures of Sam dressed as Santa sans pants on the roof of their mom’s house in Lawrence and Jo from the Christmas she got stuck in a Fischer-Price enclosed wagon, tattered Santa hats that survived an epic fall into an icy lake, paper chains with their initials scribbled on it, a big framed picture of Dean and Cas kissing under a mistletoe . . .
“Hey, Cas,” Dean said. “I have an idea.”
And that’s how Cas and Dean ended up laying together in a blanket fort in the living room, surrounded by walls decorated in images and objects from their past, raw and nostalgic, filled with memories imprinted in love and family and everything that’s right in the world, and Dean held Cas for hours looking at them, thinking about how this Christmas was going to be just another one in the memory books, another memory on the wall, and Dean couldn’t wait until the day where today would just be another story they could look back on with a smile, because everything was perfect, and Dean would never regret a second of all the time he has and will spend with Cas.
They never did find the colored lights.