Work Text:
Even after everything, there is grocery shopping. It’s mundane and boring and a fucking revelation after having everyone who’s near and dear to you die and come back from the dead for the so manieth time in the span of just one measly human life.
Turns out, that’s not the type of thing you grow used to.
Speaking of things Dean’s not used to- “So if a guy tells you he loves you and then immediately dies, what’s a good way to bring it up after he comes back to life?”
Sam has been pushing their cart and leaning on it like he maybe still hasn’t woken up from his three day nap after their big yay-saved-humanity-again bash, but now he suddenly whips his head up. Dean doesn’t see much it, because he’s in front of the same display of breakfast cereals that he’s been pretending to study for the past full two minutes and he refuses to look, but he catches the movement out of the corner of his eyes.
“Cas told you he loves you?”
That’s enough of an annoying surprise that it makes Dean turn, accidentally still wielding dual cereal boxes. “How do you know-” he starts, rattling his Frootloops, and then he promptly gives up, because on one-and-a-halfth thought (not second – he doesn’t need to go that far) what’s the point, anyway? Yes, he’s talking about Cas. Obviously he’s talking about Cas. Who else would he be talking about? “Yeah, okay, he did.”
A conversation about feelings! Sam looks like Christmas came early. He has his attentive listener face on, but Dean knows him. He knows what kind of darkness lurks underneath. “In what way?” Sam asks.
“With his mouth, Sammy, in words.”
“Huh,” Sam says, and that drives Dean crazy. What’s he supposed to do with a huh? He slams the Honey Nut Cheerios in his right hand into Sam’s shopping cart, which makes Sam look up after drifting off a bit. “So are you going to tell him you feel the same?”
Dean dramatically fumbles the Fruitloops in his left. He almost catches them before they go sailing to the floor, but instead he just volleyballs them into the cart, where they crash-land on top of the Cheerios. With his hands free now, he plants one in his side and one on the wire edge of the cart and frowns and pretends this was the intention from the get go. “What do you mean, feel the same? You’re making it sound like the dude’s in love with me or something.”
Sam’s eyebrows, which saw a slight unimpressed raise at the mishandling of breakfast cereal, now really go flying up. “He’s not?”
Why’s he saying that like it’s a surprise? “Why are you saying that like it’s a surprise?” Dean asks, because he’d like an answer.
Sam doesn’t even have the decency to give that answer like he needs to think about it for a second. “The way you made it sound, it seemed like a last minute confession that you now had to figure out how to deal with because we all have more minutes than we thought.”
“Cas is not a telephone,” Dean snaps, because hey. “And it wasn’t. He just told me I was a good person and that there was something he knew he couldn’t have and he cared about the world because he cared about me and that he loved me, and then he experienced true happiness from just saying it, instead of having, and that’s how he sacrificed himself to save me, and that’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.” That’s it. Normal stuff. That’s all it was, and it’s the end of it.
No need to start having one-and-a-halfth thoughts about it, because there’s nothing to be one-and-a-half thinked, except maybe that-
Dean nods slowly at Sam. “And now that I tell you about it, that does sound a little like a love confession.” He says it, and then he actually hears it, and then he realizes that it’s probably true and wants to strangle Sam for being right at the worst of moments. He has an existential crisis while staring at a dented box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Dammit. “Jesus Christ,” he hears himself say, and he starts paying attention immediately this time, because apparently his mouth knows some things his head doesn’t yet, “the dude’s in love with me.”
Oh, his head says. Holy fucking shit, his heart says. “And this surprises you?” his Sam says.
Dean grips the cart so tightly the wire bites into his palm. Everything that felt so real and grounding about grocery shopping five minutes ago feels like it has to be a joke right now, because this can’t possibly be the backdrop for something so earth-shattering. “What do I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
He goes with his gut, which is churning. “Die, maybe?” Or sink through the floor – he’s really not picky. “Would that be a way to avoid this?”
“Temporarily,” Sam says. At a frown from Dean he adds, “I mean, obviously we’d find a way to bring you back in the end. What’s the point of everything we’ve done if you just die the moment we’re finished?”
“Shit,” Dean says, because that definitely sounds right, and also because he can’t sink through the floor either, because Castiel would probably know it would be to avoid him. “Oh, fuck.” The earth feels just a little unsteady under his feet.
Sam is quiet for a bit, but then a big hand lands on Dean’s shoulder and a head that badly needs a haircut ducks into his narrow field of vision, brows furrowed. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to have a panic attack.”
Dean opens his mouth twice, but only the third attempt produces something besides a vague feeling of desperation. “I can’t just talk to him about it.”
“I mean, you can,” Sam says, exactly like someone who’s not actually in Dean’s situation would.
“I can’t,” Dean says, because he’s Dean, and he is in his situation.
Sam is apparently done being sympathetic and pulls another of his unimpressed faces. “So what are you gonna do, just never address it and pretend like it didn’t happen?”
“Maybe.” Dean considers nodding, but decides there’s no reason to invite the world to shake even more than it already has. “Might do that, yes.”
Sam drops his hand. He radiates disapproval, even while he clearly tries to sound neutral when he asks, “Why?”
“Oh, why? How about there’s no possible good way to start that conversation, that’s why.”
“Still not sure what kind of conversation you’re trying not to have with him in the first place.”
Dean sucks in a big breath of air, squares his shoulders, plants his feet. The concrete is concrete again. “Sammy, I-” He gets stuck there. He gets stuck really badly. “Guys. I sometimes, uh-”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam says, drily, but with a badly hidden undertone of fondness and pride that makes Dean fear he’ll walk into his room in the bunker sometime over the next week and all his stuff will have been replaced by identical things in colors of the rainbow. “But he doesn’t. If you can’t tell him, then show him.”
Right! Who cares about a rainbow bedspread? Dean has serious shit to worry about. “Yeah. Cool, okay. Can you-” He waves at their cart, but Sam is already nodding.
He’s grinning, too. “Go, get your angel.”
Dean resolves to freak out about that phrasing in this context and about Sam’s general unsurprised reception of all this news later. For now, he punches Sam in the shoulder. “Thanks, man,” he adds, but completely in the wrong direction, because he’s already past Sam and about to escape the cereal aisle.
The store is a blur around him. There are other people, and products, and bored teens with name tags, and maybe a crying kid or two, but it’s very easy not to give a damn when you’re running because you need to get somewhere but your brain is also screaming WHY ARE WE RUNNING at you because it’s fucking scary to think that you might get to that place you need to go.
Which is the parking lot. Where Cas is waiting, by the car like a weirdo because he didn’t feel like coming in but he wanted to stretch his legs and probably people watch, or something.
Anyway, the way to go about letting your best friend know that his sexy romantic gay angel feelings for you are reciprocated by sexy romantic human feelings on your end is obviously not to just refuse to stop walking until you pretty literally run into him and can mash your mouths together in the worst, most awkward, very best ever-ever-ever kiss you’ve ever had, like the heroine in some teeny romcom running into the arms of her high school crush as the music swells at the end of a movie that feels like it’s taken years and multiple trips to hell, but, you know.
Sometimes you’ve already done that thing, and you can’t go back now. All you can do is kiss the gay angel a little harder, and realize he’s gripping the meetcute mark on your shoulder and feel a thrill that threatens to sweep you clean off your feet.
So that’s what Dean does. Hey, gotta do something. Might as well make the best choice he’s ever made in his life.
Or at least it feels like that until he needs to breathe and their kiss breaks. Then they’re suddenly staring at each other from a distance of maybe half a dozen inches, which isn’t new, but the way they’re still accidentally kind of entangled is. Dean loosens the fist he made in Cas’s trench coat. Cas watches him, does not move away, and looks exactly as stunned as Dean not so deep down also feels.
Dean needs to say something. He frowns. He panics. “Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” Cas replies, in that rumble of his. He says it like he accepts this as a totally reasonable place for them to be in this interaction right now, but somehow also like he would love nothing more than to strip Dean naked and have his Honey Nut Cheerio way with him right there in the Costco parking lot.
Retroactively, if Dean thinks about it maybe one-and-one-fourth of a time, a lot of the things Cas has said to him over the years have sounded like that, actually.
Dean’s heart hammers against his ribcage in a way that has him a little worried he might soon need to add another little mark to the number of times I died and was revived for stupid reasons tally in his head. “Hi,” he says again, but it’s difficult, because he’s grinning like a loon now.
Cas blinks. “So I take it-”
“Yes,” Dean says, because as far as he’s concerned, Cas can take anything he wants, up to and very much including Dean’s body. “Wanting is good, saying is awesome and stuff, but I think you should do some having. I think we- We both should. Right?”
Cas looks at him like he hears the words those were supposed to be, instead of just the ones they were. “I would like that.”
“Good,” Dean says, thoroughly relieved. And then, because it just rolls of his tongue, “That’s good, because I love you too.”
Cas stiffens up. “Dean.” His voice is even more gravelly than usual. “I think we should go home now.”
Dean suppresses a shiver, uncomfortably aware that they’re still out in public. “Yes. Before the rainbow bedspread appears.”
“What?”
“It’s not important,” Dean says, which makes him wonder if anything will feel important ever again, in the face of this, right here. His hand on Cas’s shoulder like always; the shape of Cas’s lips still tingling on his own like never before.
He walks around the car with Cas and opens the passenger door for him, and then feels extremely foolish and hurries back. He sits down and turns to his right to find Cas already looking at him. He only tears his eyes away because he needs to turn the key in the ignition, and he does so while smiling stupidly.
“Let’s go,” Cas says, like he, the practically immortal heavenly being, is feeling the ticking of the clock on this random weekday after the world was saved.
Dean is not as worried. He’s been dead a bunch of times, but he’s never felt more sure about being alive.