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Sam hears the whirr of the machine from the kitchen and smells the scent of coffee long before he hears Cas shuffle up the stairs into the library.
“It’s late, Sam,” Cas says, but still places the cup down in front of the hunter, who looks up from the file he’s been poring over with a smile. “Are you going to be well-rested enough for the hunt tomorrow?”
“The coffee’s not gonna make me go to bed any earlier, you know.”
“I do,” Cas replies, pulling out the chair and sitting across from him. There’s a lightness to Cas since he’s been back that Sam hasn’t seen in the angel in a long time; maybe it’s just a projection of the way the whole bunker feels lighter now that Cas is back. Things feel right, like they’re the way it’s supposed to be, or as close as he dares to hope, for the first time in ages. There’s a part of Sam’s mind that’s screaming at him that this is a warning sign, that things can’t be going this well and they’re all going to fall apart and he can only feel this way because he’s still in denial about his mom but—he takes a sip of the coffee. It’s not bad.
“How are you feeling?” Sam asks, laying a ribbon in the middle of the book he has open and closing it, inviting conversation the best way he knows how.
“I feel good,” Cas says, and he sounds good. Maybe it’s just because he’d spoken to Cas so little before what happened in North Cove, maybe it’s because they’d both spent the last year so strung out, maybe it’s just the fact of the death—but talking like this again, late at night in the library, it feels like another piece falls back into place. “As good as someone who’s back from the dead can feel, probably.” Sam smiles at that.
“I know the feeling.” Cas smiles back.
“Sam, I wanted to thank you.” Sam straightens up in his chair to look at him, surprised that the conversation has turned towards him in any form. “Jack—he was supposed to be my responsibility. And I failed -”
“- Cas, no -” Sam tries to interrupt him, but Cas holds up his hand and he stops.
“- I failed. But meeting him,” Cas continues, looking right at Sam and looking strangely emotive. “I knew right away that he had been taken care of when I wasn’t there. And I thank you for taking care of him. He’s told me how much you’ve done for him.”
Sam worries with the handle of the mug for a second, looking past Castiel and at shelves on the other side of the room. He hasn’t given Cas the full details of everything that’s happened while he was dead, doesn’t know exactly what Jack has told the angel; he suspects that Jack has left out some conversations. Personally, he thinks Cas probably should know about how slowly Dean’s come around on Jack and how scared Jack was (is? ) of being a danger because of it—but he’s going to let Jack tell Cas that. It’s not his place, especially not without asking Jack first. (In an ideal world, Dean would apologize and tell Cas himself.)
“I prepared a lot for his birth,” Cas says, casually moving past (or oblivious to) the pause in conversation, once again drawing Sam’s wandering mind back to the library. He’s already opening up a book on revenants to where Sam left a bookmark, falling back into their researching routine so easily that for half a second, Sam can almost forget that Cas has been dead and gone for a month.
“I saw some of the books in the house when we went back to burn your body,” Sam says. I didn’t know what to do with them, he thinks, but doesn’t say out loud. I didn’t know what to do with them, or the diapers, or the nursery wall you two painted in a rental house we burned your body outside of.
“They talked a lot about milestones,” Cas continues, and Sam just nods and listens, letting Cas get whatever’s on his chest out before he adds anything else. “Laughing, rolling over, sitting up. First words. They’re all supposed to happen within certain timeframes, and I was dead, and I came back to... Jack is…” Cas tilts his head upwards, and folds his hands over the book, like he’s looking to the ceiling for answers he couldn’t find on paper. “He’s perfect, he is, but there’s a part of me that feels like I’ve missed so much.”
“You know, he skipped most of that with us too,” Sam says, trying not to brush off Cas’s feelings while being honest about what the boy he found in that nursery looked like. “Jack, he just… skipped all of that. He chose to. Kelly told him it would be safer if he wasn’t a baby.”
“I know that, which just makes it foolish.”
“No, that’s - Cas, no, it’s not foolish,” Sam says. “When we first caught up with him, in the Sheriff’s office in North Cove, you wanna know what he said to me in that holding cell?”
Cas doesn’t reply verbally, but his eyebrows furrow in a question, and Sam continues. “He said he needed to find his father, because he knew his father would protect him. And I, you know, worried for a second, but—he chose you as his father.”
Cas doesn’t say anything, but his eyes widen, and his shoulders relax a bit. “There’s gonna be other milestones. It might not be the ones in the books,” Sam says. “But that’s never how stuff goes with us. And you’ll be here for them now, and that’s the important part.”
“Thank you,” Cas says after a moment. Sam doesn’t say anything, just raises his eyebrows and nods in a way that he knows Cas will understand as of course. They don’t need words to fill up the next few minutes, just the rustling of pages and the gentle clink of Sam lifting up and putting down the ceramic mug on the table. I missed this quiet, Sam realizes, so different from the silence of absence.
“Sam, for the record… I think you’ve been just as much of a father to him his first month as anyone could hope to be,” Cas says, and it’s Sam’s turn to look up in surprise. Sure he’s watched out for Jack, seen his younger self in the nephilim’s fears and wanted to protect him in a way that he’s never quite felt before but— father is a heavy, heavy word. Maybe heavier for Sam than for others, but still not one he would have imagined anyone using to describe what he’s done for Jack. There’s a difference between buying a book on parenting gifted children at the bookstore and lying about being a father to the cashier and actually being called one.
“It’s what anyone would have done,” Sam says with a sheepish half-shrug and nervous half-smile. He picks the mug back up and hastily takes another sip so he has something to focus on other than that word.
“No. It’s not, Sam,” Cas says, and stands up. “To trust the child of the devil is no small thing. And you, more than any other person, had every reason not to trust him.” He doesn’t elaborate on that, and they both know that he doesn’t really need to, with the echoes of Lucifer’s return still so fresh—and here in the library, so close. The angel starts towards the hallway, but pauses next to Sam, hesitantly rests a hand on the hunter’s shoulder. It’s so warm through the fabric of his shirt that for a brief moment, Sam is so focused on that reminder of Cas being alive again that the gesture itself takes a second to catch up to him.
“Thank you for believing in Jack,” Cas says, and pulls his hand away, as though he got halfway through the gesture. “And for believing in me. Goodnight, Sam.”
“Night, Cas,” Sam says. He only looks in the direction of the footsteps once they’re far enough away that he’s sure Cas won’t be looking back at him. He’s left in the library with cooling coffee, his books, and a lot to think about—far too much to think about the night before a hunt. He reaches up to where Cas’s hand rested on his shoulder and brushes his fingers against the fabric to see if it’s still warm, then opens a new book.