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“Cas, what’s your star sign?” Jack asks.
Dean glances up from the case notes on his laptop. Cas is folding laundry across the bunker table. He seemed to enjoy the task since becoming human, but he always brought the clean load through to the library to fold while helping Jack with his schoolwork, or to the kitchen to ask Dean about his day. The dryer room was tucked away in some distant corner of the bunker - fritzing electrics had rendered it pitch black and the door had a tendency to jam shut on you, and Cas didn’t seem able to stay inside it for long. Dean thinks if he thinks to deeply about why, he’ll cry.
Cas is gazing softly at Jack. “I was created before the stars.” he responds patiently.
Jack furrows his brow, stares hard at the floor as he thinks. “Oh, of course! I forgot …maybe…when you first came to earth?”
Cas chuckles. “Well, the concept of dates hadn’t really been created yet.”
“You really remember that far back, man?” Dean cuts in, “I mean, I get that you guys are old but surely even you don’t got the headspace for all that.”
Cas’ hands are busy on the shirt in front of him and he squints a little to focus on smoothing out a crease. “The angels hardly came to earth, before you and Sam. I remember each time quite vividly, but especially the first. God – Chuck – had us…stirring the primordial soup, as you might say.”
“Bout the only good food you ever made, huh,” Dean quips.
Jack stops their banter before it can begin. “Cas” he stresses, “Your star sign.”
“Perhaps we could use the day I took on this vessel,” Cas says thoughtfully. Though its not as if I took Jimmy’s personality…or the day I lost the last of my grace maybe.”
“Look, why don’t you just pick one. Go for the one with the best little picture thing,” Dean laughs. A text from Sam suddenly buzzes his phone - he and Eileen are working a routine ghoul case fifty miles west that Dean has been helping research - so he’s only half listening to Jack’s reply.
“No, Dean.” The kid’s expression is withering. “I need his sun sign. Your sun sign is supposed to represent how other people see you, I read it on astrology dot com. OH,” He shuffles excitedly in his seat, “WE could choose Castiel’s sign, since we know him best! Like a kind of game!” He doesn’t wait for either of them to agree, starts typing something into his laptop and soon gets lost in the reading.
A minute or so passes. Sam's text - got the ghl. heading to eileens place for tonight - has relinquished Dean from further research, and eventually he gets up and stands by Cas to help him fold the laundry, despite his soft protests that he’s got it covered, Dean, please don’t trouble yourself. Working together like this, they’re close enough that their shoulders brush; the backs of their hands touch twice whilst reaching for the same piece of clothing and even if Dean feels his cheeks warm, neither of them steps away. After another minute Jack speaks up again. The quiet, but not the intimacy, is dispelled as they’re reminded that he’s sat there.
“I think Cas is a Cancer,” he announces, beaming, “They’re.. sensitive, loyal, good parents. And if you have a summer birthday, we can go to the beach!”
Cas smiles back at him. His eyes sing unconditional love. Carefully, he sets down the half-folded shirt in his hands and crosses over to Jack; places a quick kiss into his hair, and firms his hands onto his son’s shoulders, leaning to read the screen over his head.
“Predestined for a family life,” Cas quotes, cheeks tinting pink. “Well, I like the sound of that.”
Dean circles round the table to join them behind the laptop screen. He’s desperate to crack wise and dispel some of the sincerity in the air. Cas and Jack are just so good at talking to eachother, mirror images of open earnest love in any setting, and Dean has been trying, he really has - since purgatory and since they cracked the empty wide open – to be more comfortable saying what he wants to say. Even just now. How many times has he said the words before? You’re family, Cas. Cas is family. Yet somehow hearing Cas talk about family life whilst wearing one of Dean’s old flannels and folding laundry, the absurd domesticity of the scene, drags heavily on Dean’s chest, and it’s not a bad feeling; it’s good. Its relief, the kind of biological relief one feels when breaking the surface of a pool to breathe after swimming all the way to the bottom, and Dean is just afraid that if he doesn’t change the tone, he’ll choke out something sappy and unintelligible, make things weird with Jack in the room.
Leaning in beside Jack to scan the words on the screen – god, Dean doesn’t want to admit he needs glasses now he’s 40 – he skims through the listed traits and yeah, honestly, its Cas down to a T.
“Good find, kid” he slaps Jack’s shoulder, “Hey, and they even mention your dad’s whole “weirdo” thing too, heh.” Dean points to the line in question. Cas gives him the look of a long suffering 1950s sitcom wife, and Dean has just enough time to start feeling smug when Jack scrolls up and he notices for the first time what was typed into the search bar: ‘aquarius cancer compatibility’.
Hell, if the domesticity, the intimacy, weren’t heavy enough on him before, this should’ve felt like his ribs caving in. But some switch in Dean’s head just clicks instead. He stares down at Jack’s screen and thinks: this is my kid. Cas and mine’s. Our child who we coparent. Oh my god I’m a parent. With Cas. Why the hell am I even ignoring it anymore?
Cas must’ve been right that night in the armoury. To be able to say it out loud, completely open and unashamed, to save the man he loved in the process (because that’s what its all been for, right? To save Dean Winchester.) That had been enough to make him truly happy, letting himself admit it. He’s been relaxed around Dean since he returned. Their first night back in the bunker he’d taken him aside; said "I understand the effect my…declaration may have had on you Dean. Please don’t feel any pressure to answer right now. Or ever, if you don’t wish to.” he’d finished easily. As I said, my happiness come from simple acknowledgement – I don’t need more than that.” It had actually thrown Dean – about to grab Cas round the shoulders and say you KNOW you can have me, dumbass – off his stride, seeing how not-nervous Cas was whilst his own stomach was in knots. He’d been practising that one line in his head for weeks.
And then Cas had walked away. And Dean had lost his nerve. Until now.
He steadies his breath, tells himself that they really are safe enough for him to finally be; that there’s nothing to break them apart anymore.
When he turns his head, Cas is already staring at him.
Dean is thinking about the job offer at a garage out in Wyoming that’s currently sat on his desk, and the homey two bedroom places he’s been saving from realtor websites. There’s one in particular he keeps in an open tab: a faded olive-green place with a sprawling garden on the edge of town advertised as ‘ideal for families’. In his weaker moments he gets caught up imagining himself and Jack arriving back home in the Prius – it’s much more economic, Dean, besides, I already promised Claire she could have your car – after fishing at the lake, to see Cas contentedly weeding his sunflowers, an over-indulged tabby winding round his ankles. In Dean’s imagination the view, the little house, were reminiscent of the one that Cas had lovingly prepared for Jack. He knew it would ache to walk past the kitchen table and be reminded of how he’d wrapped his own heart in a curtain sash and burnt it on a pyre, but he would bear that if it meant living somewhere Cas would feel at home.
Dean reaches across Jack’s head to rest a hand on Cas’ shoulder, and then, tentatively, on his waist, a lingering question, unasked. Cas is a little shy somehow, or hesitant, worried how far he’s allowed to go. Dean answers silently, sliding his hand down to Cas’ and picking it up, placing it firmly on his own right shoulder, palm splayed. You always had me, it says. He leans forward to press their noses together, briefly, a promise that says they’ll talk later, when their son's in bed and they’re alone.
“Hey kid,” Dean addresses Jack, who's deliberately oblivious to the little scene behind him, “Why’d you even need Cas’ mumbo jumbo sign crap anyway? Some kind of heavenly spell you’re working on?” Sure, Jack had released his god power out to the universe, but the kid still had his Nephilim grace.
“Oh no, I just needed it for this quiz on Buzzfeed dot com: What Riverdale girlboss are you based on your zodiac sign.” He looks up and smiles sweetly.
“Cas got Betty.”