Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s a last-ditch maneuver. The witch is surrounded, Sam untying the unsuspecting teen she’d kidnapped while Dean advances. Her eyes are wild, a thin trail of blood dripping onto the floor from the still-fresh cut in her hand. Thankfully, that cut and a few herbs in a bowl was as far as she’d gotten in her ritual. 

Dean raises his gun. “Witch-killing bullets,” he says.

The witch knows she’s going out. That must be why she does it - a desperate hope that she’ll gain some time, maybe a defender. A couple muttered words in Latin, and her eyes flash purple.

She doesn’t get to finish her spell, though. Something silver pierces through the front of her chest, and she gasps. She doesn’t flicker out, eyes flaring before dimming like an angel or a demon. The angel blade works just like any other knife. Her lips continue to move for a moment, and the witch falls on the floor, dead.

She’s young, really. Not that you can tell with witches - Rowena looks pretty young for someone on the wrong side of 300. But the iPhone in her back pocket and the gems on her fake nails, shining in the lamplight, give her away. She can’t be more than 25, and they killed her. Granted, she was about to kill a kid in some invulnerability ritual, but still. It feels a lot less like killing a monster and a lot more like killing someone who’s lost their way. 

Dean looks up from her crumpled body and sees Cas. He wipes the blood off his angel blade and returns it to wherever it goes when it isn’t in this plane of existence. 

“Thanks,” Dean says. “Looked like she was about to hit me with something nasty.”

“I think she did,” Sam says. The kid is free now, and he can’t be more than sixteen. His wrists are rubbed raw from trying to work against the ropes that bound them, and his eyes skitter across the room, occasionally catching on the witch’s dead body. “That sounded like a love spell, Dean. And she got all the way through casting it.”

“What the hell was she casting a love spell for?”

Now that Sam mentions it, though, Dean can feel it. There is something different in his brain, an urging that wasn’t there before. It doesn’t have anything to do with the witch, though. He ignores it.

“It’s a good strategy,” Cas observes. “If she had been able to turn you and Sam against each other, this fight might have gone very differently.” 

“Good thing you were here, then.” It’s the sort of thing that teeters on the edge of saying too much, letting Cas know he is appreciated without implying anything special or un-familial about that appreciation. 

“Dean, that love spell didn’t take, did it?” Sam asks. 

“If it had, shouldn’t I be crying my eyes out that she’s dead or something? Nah, I’m good.” Dean lies.

Sam shakes his head. “She was dead before it could work on her. But those spells work on the first person you see, so… that’s Cas.” 

Cas raises his eyebrows and points to his chest in an apparent “Who, me?”

“Dean, I’m gonna ask you again. Did the love spell take?”

Dean can feel the spell inside him. It wants and wants, everything he’s always felt turned up to eleven. But the want isn’t the worst part. That, he can deal with. It’s the way the spell whispers to him to ignore all of the careful suppression of his feelings he’s mastered over the years. To tell Cas that right now, standing over a corpse with his hands in the pockets of his ill-fitting trench coat, he looks both startlingly human and impossibly distant, every bit the fearsome angel Dean had first met. That he looks beautiful . 

Dean looks at the floor. 

“Yeah,” he says. He nudges the witch’s boot with his own. “So, are we gonna burn her, or what?”

The drive back to the bunker is awkward, to say the least. Dean puts a tape on and wants to let himself get lost in the music, but he can feel Sam’s eyes boring a hole in the back of his neck. Cas is doing his best not to act bothered, which means, apparently, determinedly not looking at Dean except when Dean is not looking at him. Dean can tell. Cas isn’t subtle. 

“Can you guys stop acting like I’m an exhibit at the goddamn zoo?” Dean says an hour into their drive. “I dunno how many times I have to tell you I’m fine.”

“Dude, you got hit with a love spell,” Sam says. “You’re not fine.” 

“I am too fine. Not acting weird or anything. Cas, tell him.”

Cas stares out the windshield of the Impala and says, voice carefully modulated, “Dean does not seem to display any erratic or unusual behavior.” 

“See!” Dean said to Sam. 

Two songs later, Cas still hasn’t looked anywhere that isn’t the dark road before them, so Dean says “Sorry if I made things weird asking you to back me up there.”

Cas shrugs slightly. “It’s okay,” he says. He does not look at Dean. 

“No,” Dean says, and he knows Sam is just going to use this as evidence that the love spell really got to him, but right now he doesn’t care. “If I upset you, it matters. And it looks like I did, so. Sorry.” 

“Two apologies and nothing’s even broken,” Sam says. “It’s a miracle.” 

“It’s a love spell, Sam, not a miracle,” Cas says.

“Jesus Christ,” Dean says. “Am I not allowed to be considerate of my best friend’s feelings?”

The silence in the car indicates that, at least in the past, the answer to that question had been a resounding ‘No.’ And Dean doesn’t need a love spell to feel shitty about that. It just helps. 

The first day of the love spell sucks. Big-time. Cas looks away whenever Dean comes into a room, so he spends most of the day in his bedroom, watching Netflix on his laptop. Sam searches his pockets for hex bags and when he can’t find one, calls Rowena for help. He doesn’t go far enough away, or maybe he’s just finally reached senility and put his phone on speaker mode, because Dean can hear Rowena very clearly as she refuses to help.

“This might be good for them!” Rowena says in an overly-sweet, extremely Scottish accent. “And buy yourself some noise-cancelling headphones, Samuel. I would not want to be in that bunker right now.” 

Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. 

Because really, it’s not like being under this spell is going to change anything. Dean is still going to be in love with Cas, and he still isn’t going to do anything about it for a wide variety of reasons, mostly circling around Dean’s certainty that even if Cas felt love in the same way humans did (and that was a big ‘if’), he definitely doesn’t feel that for Dean. So everything will go on like it always has, only with the addition of a spell egging Dean on to profess his feelings. 

Dean runs into Sam in the kitchen. Sam is entering, scrolling through something on his phone and not looking where he’s going, while Dean is making a hasty escape, a large pile of leftovers on his plate. 

“Hey, Sammy,” Dean says before he can chicken out. “Can you tell Cas I’m not gonna, like, try and jump his bones if I see him? I get the whole love spell thing is super weird, but. I dunno. I don’t want him to feel like things have to be different now because of it.”

Sam looks up from his phone. “Yeah, I’ll tell him,” he says. He clicks the screen off and puts the phone in his front pocket. “Is the spell weak? Because she was dying when she cast it?”

It’s not. Dean can feel it in every atom of his being, different enough from the way he’s always loved Cas that he would never confuse the two. One is his soul reaching out for Cas, craving being in the same room as him just to settle his mind, wanting to see the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. The other is intrusive, a selfish desire that takes his desire to protect Cas, to make him happy, and twists it, whispering ‘why not’ to every gesture Dean knows Cas would hate. 

“No, it’s pretty strong,” Dean says. He raises one shoulder in an approximation of a shrug.

Sam just looks at him. “Really? Because you seem normal.” 

“Would you rather I be all over Cas when he doesn’t want me to be?” This was, Dean realized, an admission that he would like to be. But hey, he was under a love spell. He could say some shit, just so long as he didn’t actually make anyone uncomfortable. 

“No.” Sam’s eyes widen. “No, no, no.” 

“See?” Dean says. “Besides, Clone Wars is getting really good.”

Sam looks him up and down like he can see his soul like Cas does, and understand him somehow. “And you’re good with that? Being under a strong love spell and watching Clone Wars by yourself?”

“I mean, I’m not a huge fan of the love spell. But yeah, it’s a pretty good show. I can see why Jack likes it.” 

Sam tilts his head back and looks at the ceiling. “Okay. Whatever.” 

As Dean retreats to his room, he thinks maybe he doesn’t have to be avoiding Cas like he is now. He doesn’t want to make him uncomfortable, but the love spell really is the perfect excuse. He’s not gonna, like, profess his undying love, both because that’s not something he thinks he will be able to make himself say without a lot of work on his part and probably some therapy, and also because Cas deserves to hear it when he knows it’s true. That it’s what Dean really believes, not an unintended consequence of a witch trying to save her own skin. But if he stands a little closer to Cas than was strictly necessary, well. Maybe that’s a nice thing he can have, if only until Sam figures out a way to break this spell.

On the second day, Dean goes to the grocery store. Cas goes with him, because there’s some plant he wants to buy that’ll attract butterflies, or something. It’s blissfully normal.

Cas doesn’t say anything on their drive into town, but he rarely does. Dean listens to his music and drums his hands on the steering wheel when one of his favorite songs comes up, and Cas sits quietly, comfortable in a way he hadn’t been two days ago. 

“So this plant you’re getting,” Dean starts.

“Milkweed,” Cas interrupts. “It’s very common.” 

“Yeah, that. You starting a garden?”

“I am providing a home for the butterflies and bees on their migration.” 

“Right.” 

“But yes, I believe it counts as a garden.” 

Dean smiles a little bit, and Cas does too, and it’s nice. Almost like it always had been, except for the spell that has wound its way through his brain and the fact that Cas knows about it.

Cas plants the milkweed above the entrance to the bunker, and Dean sits with him while he does it. He won’t let Dean help, as Cas is very protective of his brand-new butterfly rest stop, but it’s early enough in the fall that Dean can just plant himself on the grass and wait without freezing his ass off. 

It should be boring, sitting out here, but it’s not. It’s quiet. The only things moving are the orange leaves in the barely-there breeze and Cas shuffling around with a spade. Dean wasn’t made for stillness - it makes him itch, watch over his shoulder for the next monster, want to jump into the Impala and find something to hunt. And maybe it’s the spell, or maybe he’s just getting old, but today the peace of this calm outweighs that itch. 

“This must be strange for you,” Cas says. He isn’t loud by any means, but his words break the silence and Dean’s head immediately turns toward him. 

“What?”

“I said,” Cas says, patient, “that this-”

“No, no I heard you,” Dean interrupts. “And. Uh. Why?”

There are so many reasons why this would be strange for him, starting out with simply being under a love spell and ending with the object of that spell being his best friend, a literal angel. 

Cas gestures broadly at himself. “This vessel is a man. You like women.” 

Dean wrinkles his eyebrows. Sure, maybe he’s never said that he’s into men, and maybe he spent way too much effort making people think he was very straight when he was younger, but it’s been years since then.

“I like guys just fine, Cas,” he says. That might be the first time he’s said that, but it’s just not his fault Cas didn’t pick up on that sooner. Hell, Cas met Benny. What did he think was going on there?

Something strange passes across Cas’s face. It’s not judgement, or disgust, or whatever other emotions he’s seen on the faces of people who concern themselves way too much with who other people like. If Dean didn’t know better, he would say it was joy. 

But it passes, and Cas says “Oh,” and turns back to his milkweed, and Dean raises his eyebrows even though no one can see him and wonders what that was all about.

“How’d the shopping trip go?” Sam asks him later, popping his head into Dean’s room like this is in any way a normal thing for him to do or ask. 

Dean stares blankly for a moment before responding. “Fine?”

Sam nods. “Good.” 

“What’d you expect me to say, man? It was the grocery store.” 

“With Cas.” 

Dean rolls his eyes. “Dude, you can stop hovering,” he says. “I’m fine. I’m not gonna spontaneously combust before you figure out how to cure this.” He waits a second and narrows his eyes slightly. “I’m not gonna, right?”

“No, Dean, you’re safe. Or, well, physically safe anyway. If something happens with you and Cas, though-” Sam’s phone lights up in his pocket and he breaks off for a second to check his notification. 

Dean stares him directly in the eyes when Sam looks back up. “Nothing is going to happen with me and Cas, okay? Being under a love spell doesn’t make me stupid, Sam.” 

Sam opens his mouth to say something, so Dean points at the door Sam is still standing in. “Out.” When Sam doesn’t immediately leave, Dean says “I’m not idiot enough to act on love spell feelings.”

The fact that the feelings are very real and had existed for a long time before the love spell doesn’t matter. First, because there’s no way he’s telling Sam that. And second, because Cas would never believe that. Being under a coincidental love spell has to be one of the worst times to confess genuine feelings.

Sam raises his eyebrows and puts on his patented bitchface. “Remember the Grimoire? You definitely were then.”

Dean says “Out,” again, and Sam leaves, hands up in a mock surrender. 

Dean finds Cas in the library after dinner. His head is bent over some old-looking book, but he doesn’t seem to be concentrating that hard on it.

“Hey, buddy,” Dean says. “It’s, uh, it’s Tuesday, so.” Why is it so hard to just be normal? Dean blames the spell - it was one thing being secretly in love with Cas, and it was a whole different thing for Cas to know and think the feelings weren’t real. “We can put it off until after we get the whole spell thing figured out, if you want. But if you’re good with it, it’s Mandalorian night.” 

For the last several weeks, Dean and Cas had been watching the Mandalorian every Tuesday. Jack was trying to get them caught up on Star Wars - Dean had been so sure that he was in the loop on pop culture that he’d been offended when Jack first claimed to know more about Star Wars than him, but he’d found out pretty fast that Jack was right. And since then, he’d been watching the shows whenever he had the chance, determined to once again be the pop culture king. 

(Maybe he was also doing it to understand what his kid was so excited about, but he didn’t want to think of himself as old enough to be a dad just yet. Even though he was nearly 40. Sue him.)

“That wouldn’t be strange for you?” Cas asks.

“No?” Dean is confused. “Why would it be? I just don’t want it to be weird for you.”

“I would like to watch The Mandalorian with you, Dean,” Cas says. He isn’t smiling but his eyes are doing that crinkling thing - he’s clearly happy. 

Dean doesn’t get it. How is the love spell thing not weird for him? It’s only not weird for Dean because he’s been used to feeling like this. He can’t imagine how he would be feeling if the situation was reversed, but he definitely wouldn’t be as okay with this as Cas was. 

“Great,” he says. “So. Deancave?”

Cas rolls his eyes a little when Dean says that, and it’s so normal. His heart feels strangely full, and for once, he doesn’t make himself not think about it. If he wasn’t under a spell right now, he might say something. Tell Cas how much he enjoys spending time with him, or maybe just flat-out tell Cas how he feels. But he is under a spell, so he just leads Cas to the Deancave, a small smile on his lips.

It’s only been a few weeks since they got the TV in the Deancave (a word Sam still can’t hear without rolling his eyes, much to Dean’s chagrin), and Dean isn’t quite used to it. He mostly uses it when he’s watching TV by himself, at times he isn’t love-spelled and hiding in his room, or when Sam is there. When it’s just him and Cas, they usually keep to their pre-TV routine of watching movies on Dean’s shitty laptop screen, sitting just a bit too close on Dean’s bed. Today, though, they’re using the big screen. 

The Mandalorian is better on a bigger screen. Dean had thought it would be. And he is paying attention to it surprisingly well - not too distracted by the intent way Cas analyzes the screen, the slight upward curve of his lips and softening of his eyes whenever Grogu is onscreen. 

Most nights, he’d at least pretend he wasn’t looking. Tonight is not one of those nights. His eyes flicker between Cas and the TV screen, never lingering for more than a few seconds on either. 

The recliners in the Deancave have an armrest between them. This is great when Dean’s by himself and has a beer he needs a cupholder for, or when Sam’s there. This is not great when he’s watching a movie with Cas and misses like a physical ache the way their sides usually press against each other while they balance the computer on their knees. 

Maybe one aspect of this spell is that he wears his emotions more openly, or maybe Cas has just gotten better at picking up on things he’d rather not, because he turns to Dean and says, “Are you sure this is okay with you?”

Dean fidgets in his seat. “Yeah. Course it is.” 

“You keep looking at me.” It isn’t an accusation. Just an observation, one with no loaded weight behind it. And it makes Dean feel… guilty. Cornered. 

“I’m sorry.” He means it. He doesn’t want to make Cas uncomfortable, and he hates that his feelings, even if Cas thinks they’re entirely spell-induced, would do that. But Cas is captivating when he’s so engaged with the TV, and the spell is a pit in Dean’s chest that wants and wants, and he hadn’t seen the harm in just looking.

“I have no experience with love spells,” Cas says, “but I imagine it would be unpleasant being forced to want something, or someone, you normally would not. I wouldn’t be offended if you wanted to spend less time with me until Sam figures this out.” 

“Is that what you want?”

If it is, Dean will go. He’ll stay in his room the whole damn time, and when Sam gets this spell out of his head he’ll be thrilled to be Cas’s best friend and he won’t even think about asking for anything more. 

Cas pauses the episode. They’ve missed a few minutes; they’ll have to rewind it. “I simply don’t want you to be uncomfortable because of me.” 

“I’m not,” Dean says. There is something soft about his voice when he says “This is all I want.” He thinks it’s from the honesty. 

“Really?” He sounds surprised, and Dean gets why. What kind of love spell just makes someone want to hang out and watch TV with its target? 

“Yeah.” 

Sure, he’d like more. He’s known that for a long damn time. The spell in his head screams at him to tell Cas, to confess his feelings and for Cas to be his. He ignores it. Because he’d like to hold Cas’s hand, to lean against him and for neither of them to justify it with anything other than that they want to. Cas unpauses the show, and Dean thinks that as much as he’d like to kiss Cas, to do other things if Cas wanted and to wake up next to him every morning, this right now is more than enough. 

They are out of coffee on the third and final morning of the love spell. Apparently, Sam had drunk the last of it as he pulled an all-nighter deciphering some counterspell he found in one of the bunker’s innumerable storerooms. Dean finds out both of these facts when he drags himself into the kitchen the next morning, moving on autopilot over to the coffee machine before his eyes catch on what are clearly spell ingredients laid out on the island. 

“I figured it out,” Sam says, excited. “It was harder than I thought, especially since there was no hex bag to burn, but I was looking through the lore and…” He trails off as he sees that Dean, who is still mostly asleep, is not following. “Sit down,” he says.

Dean pulls one of the cold steel chairs back from the island. He really needs to get some better furniture, he thinks as he sits on it. Christ these things are uncomfortable. 

Sam talks as he works, explaining the elements of the counterspell as he mixes them in a bowl, then finger-paints them in sigils on Dean’s arms and over Dean’s heart. Dean wrinkles his nose in distaste as the mixture, which seems to be mostly herbs, thank God, gets on his pajama shirt. If there had been blood in this, it would’ve been another good shirt wasted. 

When Sam paints the last sigil, they all start to fizz, glowing slightly as they sink into Dean’s skin and vanish. 

“Did that work?” Sam asks after only a few seconds. “Is it gone?”

Dean is still too tired to think. It’s early, he hasn’t had any coffee, and he’s just had a spell performed on him. But he searches his brain, and when thinking of Cas doesn’t immediately conjure up something decidedly outside himself, he figures it’s good. 

“Yep,” he says. “Thanks.” 

“No problem.” 

“But did you really have to drink all the coffee to do it?”

Dean’s joking, and they both know it, but it’s Sam’s deadpan “Yes, I really did,” that gets them to start laughing. 

The spell is gone, but that doesn’t mean Dean’s feelings for Cas are. He’s resolved to never do anything about those, and he wasn’t lying to himself when he decided that being Cas’s best friend was enough. But that doesn’t mean he wants to face Cas right now, either. 

Cas, though technically an angel, is close enough to human that he eats and sleeps, even if he doesn’t, strictly speaking, need to. He always sleeps in later than Sam and Dean, having never developed the extremely light sleep of a hunter, so he is still asleep when Dean leaves the bunker. 

He’ll be back, eventually. But he doesn’t want to look at Cas and say that all his feelings are gone when they aren’t, or see the relief that would surely be on Cas’s face when he knew the spell was lifted. So he drives, and he buys more coffee, both the cheap stuff from the grocery store and the fancy Starbucks kind he knows Cas likes. He looks at the clear blue sky from the grocery store parking lot and thinks that if he didn’t know God wasn’t listening, this is when he’d send up a quick prayer to get through this. 

Cas’s hair is still pointing in every direction from sleep and the bags under his eyes are more noticeable than usual when Dean returns. 

“Got coffee,” Dean says, dropping the bag on the counter. 

Cas immediately begins preparing to brew a pot, but stops when he sees what’s in the bag. “Dean, the Starbucks is thirty minutes from here,” he says, putting the bag of coffee grounds with the incriminating logo in plain sight.

Dean shrugs.

“You don’t even like this blend.” 

“You do.” 

Cas’s eyebrows shoot up. Dean silently cursed himself - was he really such an asshole normally that doing any nice thing was regarded as suspicious?

“Jesus, Cas,” Dean says. “Am I not allowed to be nice to you?”

“I was under the impression Sam removed the spell,” Cas says, but he opens the coffee anyway. 

“He did.” Dean lingers in the room. He probably should’ve told Cas about it himself instead of leaving and letting Sam do it. Looking back, that might have been a shitty move on his part. 

“Then why…”

“To be nice?” To show Cas that he is appreciated, that Dean had noticed which of those prissy, expensive coffees Cas liked to drink and remembered it. “It’s just some coffee.” 

Dean isn’t under a love spell anymore, but he thinks he might say something unfortunate if he stays in the kitchen, with Cas looking at him like the coffee was some kind of revelation. He slips out, curling his hand into a fist and pressing his nails against his palm until he’s sure they’ve left marks. It’s like the spell brought things to the surface - things are harder to repress now, even after the spell’s gone. 

Dean stays away from Cas for the next few days. Whenever he sees him, something hopeful passes through Cas’s face before abruptly shuttering, and on the one time Dean had attempted to hang out with him, Cas had been downright moping. 

He asks Sam about it one afternoon. Sam searches for a case, tapping at his laptop, and Dean leans against one of the library bookshelves slightly behind him. 

“What’s up with Cas?” He wants to sound casual, and he thinks he pulls it off. “He’s been weird the last couple days.” 

“Has he?” Sam asks absently. It isn’t a true absent-ness though; this is how Sam talks when he wants Dean to work out an answer to something. 

“Yeah, since…” Dean traces Cas’s weird behavior through the last several days, and realizes it started after Dean got him that damn coffee. After the love spell was removed. 

“You might wanna talk to him about that,” Sam says without looking at Dean. 

Dean very much does not want to talk to Cas about it. What he wants is for their easy friendship to come back, because he doesn’t know what he did to fuck things up and he doesn’t know how to fix it. But Sam is right - as he often is, not that Dean will ever admit it - so Dean lightly kicks the bookshelf and steels his courage. 

Dean finds Cas outside, in his mostly-milkweed garden. It’s only been a week since he planted it, but the garden already looks like a wild thing, plants sticking every which way among grass that has already started to cover the mounts of earth at their bases. Cas sits at its center, still and quiet. There are no butterflies yet, but soon enough there will be, and Dean can imagine Cas sitting there in the grass and dirt as they fly over his shoulders. Cas in the garden is both extremely human and removed from it, more a figure in a landscape than a person. 

His back is to Dean, and he doesn’t turn around when Dean kicks a small pebble, sending it skittering along the slight hill, though it’s obvious he heard it.

“Something’s wrong,” Dean says. 

“Something’s always wrong. Is it Lucifer? Michael?”

He has a point. Since before they met Cas, things have been going wrong for Sam and Dean. Aside from this past week, there hasn’t been a time that all three of them have been alive and there hasn’t been an apocalypse on, and Dean’s pretty sure that even this brief time is just the calm before yet another storm. 

“Nah.” Dean settles down next to Cas, still a foot or two away from him. He looks across the garden and determinedly does not look at Cas. “Nothing that bad.”

Cas tilts his head to the side; Dean can see it out of the corner of his eye.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. 

“You’ve avoided me as well.” 

He isn’t wrong. 

“Why?”

“You first,” Cas says. It wasn’t the Winchesters that taught him how to avoid questions; he’d been plenty good at that when they met him. 

“You seem…” Dean can’t just say ‘different’. He searches for a word for a moment. “Upset. When you see me.”

Cas doesn’t say anything, so Dean says, “Your turn.”

“I’m not upset,” Cas says in the steady voice he uses to lie. “I needed some time, that’s all.” 

Dean doesn’t know what’s going on, but there is an idea forming in the back of his brain. “To deal with the whole love spell thing.” 

Cas nods. 

“And you only needed that time once Sam got it fixed.” 

Cas freezes, and the idea in Dean’s mind is growing, edging closer and closer to certainty. But he doesn’t know for sure, he needs to hear Cas say it. “Why?” he asks, finally turning to Cas. 

“Don’t make me say it.” 

“Say what?” It’s a challenge, and they both know it. And neither of them are the type to back down from a challenge. 

“You know what.” Cas shoots him a withering look. “This is humiliating.” 

That’s not how this was supposed to go. Cas was supposed to confirm his suspicions, tell him he was upset because Dean’s feelings were gone now and then Dean could tell him they weren’t gone and-

Well. He’s going to have to go about this another way. 

“I don’t need a spell to care about you, buddy.” 

Cas is still glaring at him, but his eyes shine brighter than normal, and shit Dean didn’t mean to make him cry , how the hell did he mess things up that badly?

“I know that, Dean.” Cas’s voice sounds far away, quiet like his words pass through a long tunnel before they reach the air. “You’re my best friend.” 

“That’s not what I meant,” Dean says, but Cas is already walking away. 

“How’d it go?” Sam asks.

Dean doesn’t stop to talk, storming through the library on his way to his room. 

“Fucking horrible,” he says. 

It’s two in the morning and Dean is waiting for his frozen fries to cook in the oven when Cas finds him. 

The oven light is the only one on. Dean hadn’t really felt like turning on the lights, since he could see well enough, so he’d navigated by phone flashlight. Cas doesn’t see him in the dark, leaving the lights off as well and walking to the fridge. The fridge glow, though, illuminates Dean, and Cas stops suddenly.

“Dean,” he says. His voice is as deep as it had been the day they met, but so much less sure of itself. 

“Cas.”

Dean doesn’t know what to say. He just wants things to be like they were before - though, if his suspicions were correct, they could be even better - and for once it isn’t even his fault they’re arguing. 

“I’m sorry for avoiding you,” Cas says. He’s strangely sad when he adds “I am grateful to be your best friend.” 

“Shit, Cas, you don’t gotta be grateful,” Dean says, walking over to where Cas still stood in front of the open fridge and closing it. Its light turns off as the door shuts. “It’s not like you’ve got any competition.” 

Cas’s nose wrinkles and his eyebrows scrunch together and it would be adorable except he’s saying “You have other friends, Dean,” like that’s something Dean doesn’t know. 

“None of them are you.”

Cas doesn’t say anything, just waits, and Dean thinks the ball is definitely in his court now. He just doesn’t know what to do with it - how to be absolutely certain that saying what he really wants to say isn’t going to fuck things up so badly he can’t fix them. 

“The love spell - you know those feelings weren’t mine, right?” 

Whatever was between them snaps, and Cas says drily “I am aware.” And then, maybe because it’s two in the morning or maybe he’s just tired of keeping secrets, Cas says “I wanted them to be.”

He’s braver than Dean, so he just waits, letting that confession linger in the air between them. 

Dean wants to reach out, but he’s spent so many years telling himself he can’t have this that he can’t move. His hands are frozen by his sides and Cas is waiting.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says, cursing himself. “The spell feelings weren’t mine, but the actual feelings are.” 

Cas doesn’t get it. His head tilts to the side slightly and his eyes narrow in confusion, and there’s nothing left but just saying it.

Because Dean is a coward, and repressed, and who knows what else, he can’t say it with his eyes open. So he doesn’t see Cas’s reaction when he says “I didn’t need a spell to be in love with you, idiot.” 

But he feels Cas’s tentative hand on his cheek, thumb swiping softly over the cheekbone, and he lets himself be drawn in. Cas kisses him softly, as though he’s still scared Dean will reject him, and somehow Dean’s hands can move again because he brings one up to the back of Cas’s neck and settles the other on his waist, holding him there.

“I never thought I could have this,” Cas says when they pull away. “Last week was like a dream come true, even though I knew it wasn’t real. And then Sam undid the spell…”

“It’s real,” Dean says, pressing soft kisses to Cas’s jaw, his cheeks, in between his words. “We are real. You can have me for as long as you want.”

He still can’t quite believe Cas really wants him - that out of anyone, Cas picked him to love. But there are still tears in Cas’s eyes, nearly spilling over, and Cas looks at him with fondness like Dean’s never seen. 

“I will always want you,” Cas says honestly.

“Always might not be a long time.” 

They’re hunters. There’s trouble around every corner, and whatever’s going on with Lucifer and Michael still looms over them. 

“I am an eternal being,” Cas says. “As is the human soul.”

Dean doesn’t have the brainpower to think about that right now. “Why don’t we take it one day at a time?”

“Of course, Dean. Whatever you want.” 

In the brief span of time as Cas leans in to kiss him again, Dean thinks that if they weren’t both so determined to put everyone else’s happiness over their own, they could’ve had this a long time ago, and they wouldn’t have needed a spell to get here. Then Cas’s lips meet his, and he doesn’t think anymore.

“Dean?” Sam says, walking into the kitchen. The clock over the oven blinks at 2:09, and the oven light seems to be on. “Get this.” 

He starts to pull out his laptop to show Dean their newest case, but stops himself as he catches sight of Dean, standing in front of the fridge, kissing Cas like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. 

“I did remove that spell, right?” 

Dean pulls back from Cas enough to growl “Get out” at Sam. 

“You did,” Cas confirms. He looks like he might’ve been crying, which contrasts with the pure joy on his face. 

Sam raises his hands in surrender and backs out of the kitchen. He isn’t even out of the room before they’re back at it, Cas leaning against the fridge and pulling Dean somehow closer. “Your food’s burning,” Sam says as he reaches the hallway. “And don’t have sex on any communal surfaces!”

Dean yells a good-natured “Fuck you” at Sam, and he laughs. Though he might be careful touching the fridge tomorrow, just to be safe.