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“Dean.”
Cas approaches him a few days into being human and a few days after coming back from the empty. He’s sporting what Dean thinks is his casual indoor wear, which for Cas is still jeans and his white cotton undershirt. Dean, however, has been human for almost forty years and is wearing his hot dog pajama pants, a t-shirt, and his dead guy robe.
Dean looks up from his book and into the door frame of his room. “What’s up, Cas?”
“How do you shave?”
The question seems to come from left field, but now that Dean considered it, he supposes Cas has never had to shave. Sure, he was human some odd years back, but even then he just never cut it. Now though Dean could see the beginning of something darker than a five o’clock shadow. He wants to laugh a little, but the way Cas is shifting his weight from foot to foot stops him. He’s not beyond a wisecrack though.
“Not digging the whole,” Dean gestured to his own jaw, “ Castaway vibe?”
Cas scowls, he was starting to express his emotions more vividly as a human, “that is not an apt comparison and you know it.”
Dean laughed, they watched the movie last night at his own behest, but he spent most of it watching Cas’ reactions. Now he waited and watched for Cas to finish his request. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous, but he often seemed that way, even before he fell. It’s just that now it was harder for him to conceal it. Dean thinks that Cas had a certain way of only showing what he needed to as an angel, but as a man his heart was clearly on his sleeve.
“I do not know how, I have not needed to know how. I wasn’t sure who else to ask.”
“Well you’ve come to the right guy,” Dean exclaimed, clapping his hands once and then standing. He walked past Cas and into the hall, gesturing for him to follow into the bunker’s main bathroom.
“You know,” Dean continued as he walked, “I had to teach Sam how to shave too. He came to me one day, face all scratched up from trying to do it himself. Should’ve seen Dad’s face, whew -” he chuckled to himself quietly.
Cas trailed behind him. As they entered the bunker’s rather spacious bathing room Dean gestured for Cas to sit on the closed toilet lid so he could have a better angle. Dean reached above the sink into a cabinet to retrieve his shaving kit.
“We’ll have to buy you one of your own, but for now I’ll just show you how to use mine. Is that cool?”
Cas nodded, “of course, Dean.” He paused, and then, “thank you.”
Dean shook his head, “What? No, man, no thanks are needed.”
“But they are - I should be able to do this, and I can’t. I don’t even know where to begin.”
Setting aside his razor for a moment he leveled a look at the man next to him, once an almighty angel and now sitting on the seat of a toilet.
“No, stop . It’s okay, I don’t mind teaching you.”
Cas averted his gaze to the floor, “you don’t know what it’s like.”
Dean paused. “You’re right, I don’t. But I do know that I’m glad you’re here, and that I’m glad you’re safe. And I do know that you’re just as important with,” he waved his hand in Cas’ general direction, “or without all that angel mojo.”
“I appreciate that, Dean.”
A moment.
Dean brought his empty hand to rub the back of his neck.
“Alright, so - let me do this side and I’ll help you on the other.”
Then Dean’s hand was on Cas’ chin, moving it toward his face and to the light so he could see better. When Dean’s hand stilled a moment too long without doing anything, Dean coughed and then lowered his hand entirely. Cas’ eyes seemed impossibly bluer than they did when he was an angel. The bathroom lighting was dim, but his eyes were always bright. Sure, Dean had noticed he had some pretty nice eyes, but nothing compares to them now. Wide and always taking in new information, always unable to hide what he’s thinking. Dean understands now what people mean when they say eyes are the windows to the soul, as cliche as it sounds.
Dean brought out a can of shaving cream and deposited some into his palm. He hovered a brief second before Cas’ jaw, and though as if steeling himself for something, began rubbing the cream into circles. Cas leaned his head upward, not unlike a moth to light, thought Dean, into his touch.
“You don’t need a lot of this stuff,” Dean began. “Just enough to not cut yourself.”
Cas nodded.
Dean took the razor, still resting on the towel where he left it, and slid it down the edge of Cas’ jaw.
“You’ll want to go in the same direction it grows,” he said tilting Cas’ chin. “Otherwise it won’t be a clean shave. It also sucks like a bitch to do, so” and he laughed.
_
It went like this for another few minutes. The gentle press of Dean’s thumb on Cas’ chin, the drag of a razor against skin. Slowly Cas’ face started to show beneath the beard.
Dean rinsed the razor in the sink, and then stepped away to admire his handiwork.
“Lookin’ good Cas, it’s your turn.” Then he handed the razor to Cas.
Dean moved to the side a little to give Cas room to stand in front of the mirror. He watched as Cas repeated Dean’s movements with the cream and the razor, and Dean could not help but notice how human he looked. He had seen Cas in a myriad of ways, dead, all-powerful, tired, exasperated, leviathan, Lucifer, but he looked the most handsome now. Standing in front of a dinghy mirror shaving his beard, he looked the most beautiful.
“Dean?”
He hummed in answer.
“You’re staring.”
A flush rose up Dean’s neck, “sorry. It’s just weird - watching an angel shave in my bathroom.”
Cas began on the other side of his face, slower than Dean, but all the same. He didn’t hesitate to answer Dean’s words, “I’m not an angel.”
Normally Dean would have scolded him, but he was right, Cas wasn’t an angel anymore. Instead Dean found himself still staring at Cas’ profile, admiring his jaw and the way his hands aren’t as steady as they were when he was inhuman.
“But you were ,” Dean says instead.
Cas’ eyes don’t move from his own reflection, “a poor excuse for one.”
“Cas, c’mon, ma-” Dean begins a rebuttal, but is stopped when Cas pulls the razor away with a hiss.
Just below his ear a small cut has begun to bloom. Cas’ face is grim, not with pain, but with frustration. He feared he would never adjust to life as a human.
Dean must see the way his thoughts are running, because soon he is reaching over him for a tissue. Tearing it slightly and then pressing it to the wound.
“It happens, Cas,” he consoled and then gestured to his own jaw. “Before you rebuilt me, I had a scar just below the side of my jaw. Dad wasn’t much of a teacher, so I had to figure it out on my own.” The statement contains their own sorrow in their implied raising, but Dean says it with a smile as though he is recalling an old joke.
Cas finally turns to make eye contact and raises his now empty hand to grab Dean’s. He turns the palm upward and traces a line across the heel of his palm. “You also had one here,” he moves his tracing to Dean’s figurative life line, “and here,” and then once more to the tip of his index finger “and here.” Dean shivers at how featherlight the touch is.
He’s then struck with a realization, one that Cas may not have even realized himself.
No, he wasn’t an angel, but he knew where Dean’s scars were, he had rebuilt him from atoms and Hell’s ash, and he was simultaneously the kindest and strongest person Dean had ever known.
And Dean was in love with him.
Desperately and foolheartedly, Dean was in love with him. The color of his eyes, the way his hair was never tidy, his unkempt tie, his mannerism and the way he drank his coffee. He wasn’t an angel, but he was angelic.
Dean still has his thumb pressed to the side of Cas’ jaw, holding the tissue to his cut. With a surge of boldness though, he raises the rest of his palm to his jawline. Cas leans his head into it, but doesn’t let go of Dean’s other hand, still tracing circles into the center of his palm.
There’s a moment, and then Dean has leaned forward, breathed Cas in until his lips were on his. He tastes like mouthwash and honey. It’s softer than Dean had imagined, and he had imagined many nights. It was slow and soft and tender and he drank it in. Relished in the way Cas abandoned his hand to tighten into the front of his shirt, in the soft sound Cas made as he pulled away, leaving one last brush on the corner of his mouth.
Cas’ face was still half shaven. His face was flushed and his lips mottled with red.
Dean leaned in one more time and pressed his lips against Cas’, it was chaste, but it promised something more if they let themselves.
Dean picked up the abandoned razor, “let me help.”