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Sam certainly can’t move out — not that the bunker’s safe, exactly, but it’s safer than anywhere else — but he has to get space from Dean every so often. Dean hates it, obviously, but Sam chafes, and Dean knows it.
So, Sam runs every day. His relationship with running is complicated. He used to run in college because it seemed like the thing to do, and with the way their dad raised them it’s not like Sam wasn’t in shape. And Jess liked it, liked when he’d come back in his tank top, said it was hot when he’d pull the hem up to wipe sweat off his face. Christ. He thinks about that, sometimes, that there was a time someone could say they thought he was beautiful and he didn’t shudder at the— the violation of it.
He decides to stay aboveground when he’s done tiring himself out, pops back into the bunker for a glass of water, embarrassed about being grateful that he didn’t run into Dean while he was down there. They don’t have a garden — Cas keeps talking about it, but Sam’s not sure when it’ll happen — but the land above the bunker is one long stretch of tall grass, easy to get lost in, familiar enough to a midwestern boy like him.
Sam sits down in the grass, looks up at the sky. After the lush coastal beauty of California, dark forests in Pennsylvania, the mammoth architecture of the Grand Canyon, he’s grateful for the vast openness of Kansas. Just land under a curved sky and Sam, watching the pink sunset around him.
He drops to lie flat on his back, still overheated enough to be comfortable in his T-shirt and sweatpants. Once his sweat starts to dry he’ll probably get too cold to stay outside, but he tries not to think about the ending of a thing before it happens.
He hears the crunching grass before he sees Castiel. “Hello, Sam.”
“Cas.” Sam pushes himself back up to sitting, legs stretched out in front of him. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” Cas drops down into a squat next to him, holds a blade of grass between his fingers. Sam watches him rub his fingertips together gently, sending the florets flying. “You know I love your brother very much, but sometimes he can get to be… a little much.”
“Yeah,” Sam chuckles, “you can say that again.”
“I mean, going to Walmart isn’t usually a life-threatening endeavor. I’m sure it’s been historically more dangerous for us than for most people, but he doesn’t need to send me grocery shopping with witch-killing bullets.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, because he knows it. But, still. “He— he just worries.”
“I know. I know that.” Cas eyes Sam in that strange, inhuman way he has, like he knows everything about the human body but not what one might do with it. And then — as if he’s tired, which he probably is, come to think of it, human and permanently this time around — he flops back, looking up at the darkening sky.
Sam can’t help the laugh that pours out of him. The first time him and Cas met, Cas had called him the boy with the demon blood, and it had shaken him to his core. All through those long decades in Hell, all through Lucifer in his head, Sam remembered that, that one of God’s first creations had known his blood before all else. Now Cas is human, sprawled out his back, looking up at the stars like a kid on vacation.
“What are you thinking about?” Cas asks, closing his eyes, head tilted up like some portrait of a beatification.
Sam shakes his head, not out of any negation, but just— just because he doesn’t know what to do with himself or with Cas. They’ve both outlived themselves. “The first time we met, I guess,” Sam says, because he tries not to lie about stuff like that anymore.
And Cas — Cas who forgets to say thank you to the cashier, Cas who thinks twenty dollars is a reasonable tip for a cup of coffee, Cas who can never tell if something is a flirtation or not — Cas replies, prescient, pointed, “I called you the boy with the demon blood, didn’t I.”
Sam inhales sharply. “Yeah. Yeah.” Him and Cas — they haven’t talked about it, exactly, but Sam knows Cas doesn’t think of him that way anymore. Can’t, not after what they’ve been through together, what they’ve done.
And yet. Thinking about those brief years, the demon blood in him, the way it pulled him under, and after Hell, all the times he couldn’t trust his senses — he still quietly, privately, thinks of himself as a freak some days.
“I never apologized for that,” Castiel says. And he opens his eyes to look Sam right in the face. And he says, “I’m sorry, Sam.”
Sam blinks back unexpected tears. He didn’t think he’d want that, not after all these years. “Thanks, Cas,” he says hoarsely. “Thank you.”
Cas holds his hand out and Sam takes it, grateful for him as much as for the smell of grass in his nose, clean air in his lungs.
“Can I tell you something?” Cas asks eventually, once the stars come out to grace the sky. Sam thought he’d be cold by now, but either Cas’s warmth or the lingering burn in his muscles has kept him going.
“Yeah, ‘course.” Sam’s still holding Cas’s hand in his.
Cas sighs, his breath translucent in the night air. “I didn’t appreciate the stars when I knew them,” he murmurs. “I could have named every single one above us. Could’ve told you who made them, and why. Some of the stars were— it’s hard to explain. Not friends, not the way you and I are friends, but.” Sam watches him twist his mouth, frustratedly. “I knew them. More than knew them. Biblically, maybe. But I know that’s a euphemism for sex now.”
Sam waits, but Cas seems to be finished. Weird place to stop talking, but he’s a weird guy.
Sam rests his elbows on his thighs, holds Cas’s hand in both of his like a heating pad for his sore knuckles. “We could study them,” he offers. “I know it’s not the same, but you could learn them again.”
Cas nods. Seriously, more seriously than amateur astronomy probably warrants, he says, “I think I’d like that very much, Sam.”
“Cool.” Sam lets go of Cas’s hand to lean back, hands flat on the earth. “You see those ones that make a shape like a pan? One, two, three, and then the five other ones—”
“That looks nothing like a pan,” Cas says grumpily, and then adds, almost begrudgingly, “but yes, I see what you mean.”
Sam laughs quietly. “Yeah— yeah, I know, sometimes constellations can, can feel pretty arbitrary. Still. That’s, uh, that’s a popular one, almost everybody knows it. That’s the— the Big Dipper.”
“The Big Dipper,” Castiel says. “I’ve heard of this one before. Seen it, of course.”
“Of course,” Sam repeats, indulgently. “You want some more advanced stars, huh?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.” Cas is breathing steadily, slowly enough that Sam’s soothed by it, Cas’s voice keeping him grounded in their nowhere land under a nowhere sky.
Sam says, “You see that one all the way over there, almost at the horizon? The little cluster of stars in a little group?”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe, all right, I— I’ll take it. If we’re looking at the same thing — here, look where I’m pointing, dude — yeah, if— if we’re looking at, at the same thing, that’s Taurus. You a Taurus, Cas?”
“I… don’t know. Are you?”
Sam has to think about it. He hasn’t really brushed up on his Western astrological calendar — the horoscope stuff is so widespread these days that the power’s diluted, nowhere near the strength of the Chinese zodiac or other forms of divination. Still, it should be somewhere in the back of his brain. The other tough part is remembering when his birthday is.
Cas evidently gives up on Sam answering, turning back to look up at the sky. He says, “You become a Taurus based on your date of birth, correct? I believe I’m familiar with the astrological calendar.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, because he can’t really backtrack from how absolutely ridiculous it was to ask an angel of the Lord when the hell his birthday is. “Never mind, Cas, it was a stupid—”
“I think I’m an Aries,” Castiel says suddenly. Sam shuts the hell up, because what the fuck? “Aries is the first sign of the astrological calendar, and I was born anew in the spring. I think I’d like to be an Aries.”
“Okay, sure.” And then he remembers: he was born on May 2nd. “Hey. As it turns out, I am a Taurus.”
Cas rolls his head towards Sam with a bright grin on his face, grass all in his hair, dirt all over his neck. “Neighboring signs,” he says, patting Sam on the knee. “I think that makes us good friends.”
“Yeah, Cas,” Sam says, feeling, for once, real and in the world and — impossibly — safe. “I think so, too.”