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It’s late June, and even at nine in the morning the air has turned sticky-hot, hovering somewhere in the upper eighties. Days like these are good for driving, for rolling all the windows down and turning the music up. It’s Physical Graffiti in the tape deck today. Dean’s got one arm lain along the window line, drumming his fingers along to Down by the Seaside, stuttering over the rhythm as he flicks his eyes over to his passenger.
Cas is shotgun, hands folded in his lap like Sunday school. He’s in hand-me-downs: a faded AC/DC t-shirt of Dean’s, bunching a little tight at the shoulders, and a pair of Sam’s jeans rolled up four times at the ankles. They’d set him up with Dean’s backup boots, identical to his regulars (you never want to own just one pair of shoes — you can’t know when they’ll get their toes incinerated in holy fire or soles disintegrated by ectoplasm). They have the same shoe size, but otherwise, nothing fits quite right.
His — Jimmy’s — regular getup was pretty destroyed by the Empty, and he’s rotated through borrowed t-shirts and sweatpants for the weeks following. Dean spent several late nights running through the old tricks, from lemon juice to baking soda to peroxide, but nothing was de-gooing those clothes. When Cas was graced up, he was capable of advanced dry-cleaning with a snap of his fingers; that’s probably lower on the list of things he misses from his time before the Empty.
Cas told him to throw the old clothes away. Dean has them folded in the back of his closet.
Cas’s got his head propped up on one hand as he gazes out at the passing scenery. Before Dean had rolled the windows down, he had himself leaned up like Sammy did when he was thirteen: full forehead-against-the-window nobody-gets-me angst.
Down by the Seaside drifts into Ten Years Gone, and Dean fiddles the volume dial down about half, clearing his throat.
“So,” he says. “Thrifting, huh?”
Part of the road south out of Lebanon cuts through pastureland. On their right, a handful of cows are bundled sleepily along the fenceline. Cas watches them, not even turning his head to acknowledge Dean. “Yes,” is all he says.
Dean tries to keep his tone neutral. “I mean yeah, sure. Don’t get me wrong, not a problem you want your own duds. Opposite of a problem. I want my shirts back, you know, before you stretch them out too bad.”
“Yeah.” Cas is fully turning in his seat to watch the cows disappear behind them.
Dean surges on. “But thrift shopping, specifically. Any particular reason?”
Sam’s jeans have a small hole above the left knee from being dragged over the stone floor of a crypt. Cas starts tugging at one of the loose threads there. “Well. It’s environmentally conscious.”
It’s a near-exact quotation of what Sam had said over dinner last night, when Cas had first brought up his big ‘everything I own should be secondhand’ idea.
It had been a good night up until then. Dean had made breakfast-for-dinner: cinnamon pancakes with fancy maple syrup, the kind that comes in glass bottles, real from-the-tree shit. Cas had not only finished his plate but asked for seconds, and after nearly a month of his picking and poking at meals, Dean was ready to call this night a rousing success — until Cas started on about the secondhand shopping.
Sam was immediately supportive, gassing up Cas’s ‘environmental consciousness’. As though that’s Cas’s motivation — like Cas hasn’t been making himself as small and resource-light as possible, trying to convince Sam and Dean they live alone and never got him back at all. This guy isn’t aiming for a smaller ecological footprint, he’s looking to straight up disappear.
Sam made the point, after Cas slunk away to his room to finish his plate alone, that this was the first time that Cas had actually, explicitly asked for something since before the Empty, and it wasn’t Dean’s place to decide whether or not it was ‘good enough for him’. Dean was also informed that he was being a massive dick and asked what was so wrong with thrift shopping in the first place.
Dean got them both beers from the fridge and told him to drop it, and they had shared silent, sullen bottles at the kitchen table until Sam excused himself to bed.
This morning, Dean woke Cas up at eight AM and bundled him into Baby to start the hour and ten-minute drive to the nearest real suburb. If Cas is demanding secondhand clothes, Dean’s at least going to put him in the path of clothes that may have, at one point, been worth more than five bucks.
Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “So,” he says again, pushing on through it. “What’re you into?”
Cas does turn to look at him now, squinting a little and cocking his head. He looks more like himself when he’s acting as though Dean’s grown another head.
Some sort of feeling bubbles up in Dean, and he tamps it down, rolling his eyes. “I mean, what do you like? What’s your scene, clothes-wise? If we’re getting you kitted out, it’d be good to know what you even want.”
“I don’t have shirts, trousers, or underwear of my own. To return yours I’ll have to find replacements.”
“Great, fantastic. But do you have any clue what you want these, uh, shirts, trousers, and underwear to look like? Or feel like, or whatever?”
The hole in the jeans has widened just a little under Cas’s plucking fingers. “I am open to most things.”
“Okay, I don’t believe you, but sure,” says Dean. Cas is one of the pickiest, most finicky bastards Dean’s ever met. Dean made pizza (with homemade crust and everything) for dinner a few nights ago, and Cas had insisted on peeling off every ingredient to inspect and eat separately, refusing to even eat the mushrooms at all. “What don’t you like, then?”
Cas pauses in his tugging of the thread. “I don’t like tags on the back of my neck,” he says, finally.
There are forty-seven minutes left until they hit the outer suburbs of Salina. “Alright, that’s a start,” says Dean. “I’ve got, uh, we’ve got some sewing stuff back home, I think we have a seam-ripper. If we get anything too tag-happy I can take those off for you.”
Dean knows what it feels like to have Cas’s eyes on him — the sort of prickling heat of it. He’s also not trying to hide it at all; in his peripheral vision, Dean can see that Cas has fully turned his head to stare him down. “Would you?”
A low hum of anger has been thrumming like a bassline through Dean’s blood since Cas has been back. Maybe that’s not fair — that particular melody has followed him his whole life. But Cas’s self-imposed martyrdom, the way he locks himself in his room all day, the way even promises to introduce him to Auntie Anne’s soft pretzels couldn’t convince him to let Dean take him to the mall and spend any amount of money on him — it hasn’t helped.
Sam says Cas just needs some time, that’s all. Guy got back from being dead (again) less than four weeks ago, and he had to become human (again) to do it, and the life he’s coming back to is different than the life he left. Sam would also say that cursing Cas out for being ‘too sad’ would qualify as a dick move.
Cas is surprised that Dean would take fifteen seconds out of his day to cut a tag out of the back of a shirt for him.
“Would you?” Cas asks him.
“Yeah, man, I would,” he responds.
Cas is still staring at him, and Dean finds his eyes involuntarily flicking to meet his. They are a soft and offensive blue in the midmorning sun. Dean looks back at the road.
“Thank you, Dean.”
Dean turns up the music.
—
The shop itself is slotted into a sort of shopping pavilion in a suburb outside Salina. There’s a teriyaki place to its left and a mom-and-pop’s dry cleaner to the right, all catacorner to a liquor store. The building itself is a nondescript grey-brown rectangle, recognizable only by the large red plastic letters labeling it VALUE PLAZA and the tag sale calendar plastered in the front window.
Cas is in front, loitering just outside the doors with his hands in his pockets as he carefully considers the calendar.
When Dean was younger he spent a lot of time with calendars like that, the ones that detail what color tags are at a discounted price on what day. Not all stores advertise them, some only announce tag sales over the intercom. Dean would have to either kick around the better half of an afternoon waiting for the announcement or go play up some Oliver Twist routine to a checkout lady so that she would maybe skip asking questions about why an unaccompanied eleven-year-old needed to know about the sales on Men’s Jeans and jump straight to telling him if it was red or green half off today.
Three or four times a year John — Dad — would thunder back into the motel room from some hunt, take a look at Sam and his too-short pants (or his too-short sleeves, or John’s own shredded-by-a-poltergeist flannel) and let Dean know he had to go shopping. Once Sam hit twelve he insisted on coming along, trailing after Dean and offering his endless (uniformly negative) opinions on every single under-three-dollar garment Dean tossed into the cart. Dean liked the trips better than, even if he had to explain and explain that they could only get clothes with the tags in the colors on sale.
But he doesn’t have to care about the tags anymore, nor does Sam. Cas will never have to.
He claps a hand on Cas’s shoulder — “Come on, bud!” — and steers him through the sliding entrance doors.
The interior is a musty pale yellow from the fluorescents, with chessboard linoleum floors and a gridded ceiling. The majority of the sales floor is occupied by long racks of clothing, giving way to the assorted Home Goods on the left and Shoes and Accessories to the rear. It’s 10 AM on a Tuesday, but there are still a few other folks milling around. Other than the bored cashier up front and her tattooed coworker re-racking Children’s Pajamas, there’s a toddler and his exhausted mother in Women’s Outerwear, an elderly couple in Shoes, and a teenage girl in cookie monster pajama pants loitering around the underwear.
Cas comes to an arbitrary stop, blocking the door, and Dean herds him over to the stack of shopping baskets to their right. He nabs one and is handing it to Cas when he has a realization.
“Oh shit, man, what size do you wear? Do you know?”
Cas looks from the stack to Dean to the basket before gently accepting it, hand closing on the handle as far away from Dean’s as it possibly could while still holding the same object. “I’m not sure,” he responds. “I’m sorry, it didn’t occur to me to measure.”
“No, right, I didn’t think of it either.” Dean continues holding the basket like a dumbass for a second, then jerks his hand away. “Well. We can, uh, guesstimate. If we split up, I’ll grab you a couple a’sizes of pants and you can try them on. I think for, uh, shirts —” Dean gestures to the appropriate racks — “you’re probably a large.”
Cas is still standing there. “Thank you, Dean,” he says.
Cas is a weird little guy, yeah, but he’s not a truly small one. He used to be kind of — Dean’s never figured out how to describe it. Twiggy, maybe, and ethereal. Like a stiff breeze might catch under the tails of his trench coat and carry him off back to heaven. Of course, at that point, he summoned gales and thunder just for the razzle-dazzle, and any flying he did was intentional.
Things are different now.
The point is he’s beefed up since then. Still, with his basket, standing frozen at the entrance of a secondhand shop as though at the edge of a cliff, he seems… small.
Dean fights back the frankly ridiculous urge to wish Cas good luck. “T-shirts are that way,” he says instead, gesturing again in their direction. Cas nods, holding the basket directly in front of his torso like a sort of shield, and Dean takes off towards Men’s Trousers.
—
Cas has no opinions, and his vessel dressed like a certified public accountant. Dean figures he could have changed his clothes at any time, though, so maybe he was into that kind of look. JC Penny. Banana Republic. Middle-aged suburbanite with a respectable career and a rescue basset hound.
Dean dutifully picks up three sizes of khakis before heading down the denim aisle.
He holds up a pair of plain, dark-wash, straight-leg jeans. He’s looking for as standard as he can find, but also thick enough to stand up to average hunting wear and tear. Four pairs of identical jeans are added to the clothing slung over his arm, then three more, because Cas should have more than one pair of jeans. Sam fully tore open the ass on a pair once, in the middle of a cemetery on a hunt, and since then he’s kept a spare pair rolled into the bottom of his laptop bag. He doesn’t know Dean knows it’s there, and that’s somehow even funnier than the ass ripping.
Dean spares a glance to Men’s Shirts, just to check in.
Cas is making his way down the t-shirt rack impressively slowly, thumbing through each garment one by one. He checks the armpits, interior of the collar, and side seams on each one as carefully as the one before. The basket’s only got one thing in it so far — something plain grey cotton. At the rate he’s going, he’ll reach the end of short-sleeve knits sometime in the next six hours.
He’ll meet him in the middle, Dean decides, maneuvering to Men’s Button-Downs.
The rack is laid out in vague color order — white at one end, spilling into the Roy G. Biv and muddling into greys and blacks. Some are standard cotton or poplin, some brightly patterned, some plain, and there’s one that’s this kind of entrancingly hideous bright orange with a gold chain motif printed all over.
Shirts are harder than pants. They’re closer to the face, right, they’ve usually got a little more personality going on, or something like that. There’s certain stuff that will look more or less right on one person than another — Sam’s got some ugly-ass t-shirts that Dean would rather burn than wear, for instance, but on Sam, they just look like ‘Sam’.
Sam’s clothes look like Sam, Dean’s clothes look like Dean. What looks like Cas?
Dean watches Cas move glacially through knitwear. His hair is tufted up on one side from when he leaned up against the Impala's window earlier, and he’s squinting down at the rack like it’s personally offended him (or like he needs glasses). Looking at him now, Dean’s not sure if ‘respectable businessperson’ is the best way to describe him. It’s not enough, at least. Cas is something else.
Some people, in some circumstances, could describe Cas as beautiful. Dean tries the word out in his mind, where no one can hear it or comment on it. He thinks it is, objectively, true, which makes it easier to hold in his head.
He’s got an architectural sort of face, a triangular nose and pointed cheekbones over soft cheeks, and those hangdog blue eyes that get more disappointed every time you meet them. Sure — Castiel, angel of the lord, is beautiful. Dean can think that in the way that he thinks Dark Side of the Moon is beautiful, or the Grand Canyon, or a dandelion soldiering through a crack in the asphalt along the interstate. He’s pretty sure he could say it out loud, he thinks, if he needed to — if Cas ever needed to hear it out loud. If he ever asked.
But Cas won’t ask about something like that, so Dean will never get to tell him.
None of this has anything to do with what kind of shirts Dean can buy him.
Dean grabs a plain white cotton button-down without really looking at it, tossing it over his arm and deciding to go grab some socks, instead, and let Cas figure out his own shirt situation (even if it takes the rest of the day).
Before he can fully leave Men’s Shirts, however, he’s waylaid. It’s a pattern recognition thing; someone racked a sweater in with the button-downs, a color in the swarm of blacks.
The muddy sort of blue of the sleeve sticks out, and that’s the only reason he notices it. He pulls it out for a closer look, and it’s surprisingly soft to the touch. Maybe it’s cashmere or some sort of Egyptian something — maybe that’s difficult to clean? He’ll have to look it up. The blue is a sort of pigmented grey rain color, stormy and tranquil at once, gentle and — blue. The sweater is blue, it’s a blue sweater.
Dean pulls the emergency stop on that train of thought by yanking the hanger a little violently and throwing it over his arm.
—
Thirty minutes, two six-packs of socks, three four-packs of boxers, and one ribbed white undershirt richer, Dean rolls his way back to Cas.
Cas has worked his way down the t-shirt line and folded himself into the yellows of Men’s Sweatshirts. He’s left his basket on the floor a few paces away from him and Dean stoops to empty his haul into it before checking in.
He’s standing oddly still, the way you stand when a bee lands on your arm and you’re trying not to give it a reason to sting you. He’s hovering over a mustard yellow pullover sweatshirt, gripping the right sleeve with his left hand, gazing down at the shirt back.
In a time that is not now, Dean would walk up to him, maybe throw an arm over his shoulder or jostle him at the crook of his elbow, tell him to get a damn move on. But he doesn't.
Maybe it’s all in Dean’s head, but Cas has seemed less solid since he got back. He doesn’t think it’s the grace thing, he’s been low-powered and even full human before, but there’s something so on-the-edge about him, like any big moves might break him in half. Dean knows Cas well enough not to call him ‘breakable’ to his face, but he just doesn’t want to man-handle him the way he used to. Well, he wants to, but he won’t. So he doesn’t.
Dean just sort of shuffles up to him, instead. Tries to make his footsteps extra loud so he doesn’t surprise him.
It’s a commemorative sweatshirt from Salina High Central’s 2017 production of Oklahoma. Under the cheerful looping title, there’s another cowboy-adjacent font proclaiming ‘Cast and Crew’, with two columns of names squished beneath it in something a little more legible. Cas is rubbing a thumb over the puffy raised print of the letters.
“Uh, acquaintance of yours?” Dean breaks the silence.
Cas’s eyes dart quickly to Dean before returning to the shirt. “Oh, no. I was just thinking.”
He seems content to leave the thought there, but Dean nudges him a little, physically and verbally. “About..?”
“Oh. I was, uh, wondering whose shirt this was. Before it was donated, I mean. It was most likely someone whose name is on this list.” His hand loosens on the sleeve, letting the sweatshirt fall more in line with the others in its row. “I like the idea of the clothing here having some history, that the humans who wore this before — that some part of their story is threaded into these objects.”
Along with their dead skin flakes, cat’s hair, and deodorant stains, Dean thinks but keeps to himself. “Yeah, lotta history. Everything in here could be haunted,” he says instead. It’s not much of a joke.
Cas does not smile, still looking down at the back of that shirt. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was just thinking — thinking of that, and… wondering.” His eyes tighten. “I think he might have enjoyed theater, had he had the chance to go to school. He was very outgoing. In an environment like this, where a group focuses on the same project, I think he would have gotten along well with his peers. I’m thinking — I’m wondering if he would have enjoyed it.”
Three or four nights a week Dean will watch Sam or Cas sleep.
He’s spent hours, at this point, memorizing the way Sam’s chest rises and falls. He grips his blankets tight under his chin, and his hair does this sort of fan thing over the pillow that makes him look like an endangered tropical bird. He snores sometimes, too, which is hilarious and loosens the background tightness in Dean’s chest.
When he catches Cas sleeping, it’s in a little ball, curled into the top left corner of his bed. He’s always completely still, betrayed as alive by breathing alone, and he’s never snored.
Maybe half the time, Dean arrives at Cas’s door to find light still spilling out from under it and the faint grumbling murmur of his voice beyond. Most of the time it sounds like a spoken sort of diary — a low, mumbled monologue of his day, what Dean made for dinner, a description of a bird that he saw that afternoon. But sometimes his voice will become quieter still, and Dean, piece of shit that he is, will press his ear up against the crack of the door.
“It’s okay if you want to come home, Jack,” Cas will say, or something like it. “No one would be upset. No one’s angry with you. We all miss you, and you’ve taken on so much. It’s okay if it’s too much. It’s okay to come home.”
Jack is a hands-off God. As far as Dean knows, he’s never responded to prayer.
Cas is blinking, and Dean notices with considerable alarm that his eyes are glittering slightly in the buzzing fluorescent light.
He just stands there. He should do something — Cas believes that Dean is the sort of person who would do something: say something comforting, somehow eddy the grief rolling off Cas into something else. Put a hand on his shoulder, tell him it’s alright, tell him Jack’s happy, something. But Dean isn’t the guy Cas thinks he is. All he can imagine is shaking Cas by the shoulders and begging him to never cry again, make him promise that Dean will never have to see it again, because Dean is selfish.
He just fucking stands there.
Cas’s broad shoulders tense and untense under the thin stretch of Dean’s old t-shirt. In a moment, Cas turns to him. His face is soft, and the terrible glittering in his eyes has faded. “Do I try things on now, Dean?”
—
The changing area is tucked behind the shoes. There aren’t quite dressing rooms, instead, there are six little stalls hidden behind curtains, large enough for one and a half people to scrunch in. One stall is already in use by the mother and her toddler.
Dean deposits the armful of fabric on Cas, spins him around, and pushes him into an open stall on the opposite end from the mother. “Go ham.”
Each stall has a harsh overhead light installed in the ceiling, leaving Cas standing in a puddle of his own shadow. The light and the shadow carves across his face, across his vessel — his body. He is half in the dark, alone.
He pulls the curtain tight behind him, and Dean watches the shuffling feet behind the curtain as Cas crouches to carefully unlace and toe out of his borrowed boots, stepping out in socked feet. There’s a hole in the sock over Cas’s left little toe.
Left alone with the toe and his own thoughts, Dean remembers that Cas loves him.
Dean hasn’t been thinking about it. In the in-between, after Cas was taken and before they stole him back, he thought about it constantly. It was all he was able to do: turn the words over and over in his mind until they were smooth as river stones, until he knew for certain they couldn’t mean anything else. Cas was in love with him, unbrotherly love, and there was absolutely nothing Dean could do about it but sit there and think.
But now Cas is back, and Dean doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Dean can worry about other things — Cas needs to sleep, bathe, and eat. He needs to learn to appreciate memory foam and good water pressure. Dean needs to learn what kind of food Cas likes (pancakes, burgers, root beer), and what he doesn’t (sour candy, very hot peppers, hoppy IPAs).
Dean wants Cas to eat well, and to always ask for seconds. He doesn’t want Cas to ever be hungry or cold or have a crick in his back. He wants him to own nice things, and take holiday photos, and learn what movies he thinks are funniest and which he finds to be overrated. More than anything, he never wants him to be alone again: Dean wants to be there, for all of it. He wants to be there for every goddamn second.
Cas loves him. Dean doesn’t know how long he’s been watching his socked feet pad around behind the curtain.
Cas pulls back the curtain of his stall. He’s wearing Dean’s clothes — the clothes Dean picked. The white button-down, one of the dark jeans, and that sweater pulled over the top. Other than the sock feet, Cas looks like an adjunct English Lit professor.
When Dean doesn’t immediately respond, Cas does a little spin. The jeans fit ridiculously well, and Dean realizes in a far-off sort of way that Cas’s ass had always been hidden by the trench coat before.
“These are the best fitting of the jeans,” says Cas, helpfully. “And the sweater you picked.”
“Yeah,” says Dean.
“I like it,” Cas continues. He’s fiddling with the cuff, scrunching it up to his elbows. “It’s very soft.”
“It looks good, man.”
Cas is smiling — that tiny, curved line of his smile, and it very nearly meets his eyes.
Cas loves him.
Dean takes a deep breath. “You all set?”
Cas has divided the garments into two neat piles, his accepted pile significantly smaller than the rejects. He pulls the accepted over his arm, the way Dean was carrying the clothing earlier. The corners of his mouth are still tugged gently upwards, and on anyone else, it wouldn’t count as a smile — but for Cas, he’s practically beaming. “Yeah, I’m ready,” he says, looking up at Dean.
Cas loves him.
“Right,” says Dean.
—
The woman at checkout doesn’t comment on Cas wearing the clothes up to the register. She’s seen worse, and just has Cas lean across the counter so she can scan various tags sticking off of him. Dean pays on card, and Cas clutches his brown paper bag of clothing to his chest as they exit.
He continues cradling it as Dean loads them both into the Impala and gets her revved up. Dean sneaks a corner-of-the-eye glance or two at Cas as they pull out of the pavilion lot, at his seasonally inappropriate blue sweater and crumpled bag.
It’s not good enough for him, but it’s — it’s a start, and Dean’s got him for the rest of it. Now he’s got his own underwear, socks without holes in them, jeans he doesn’t have to roll up four times at the ankle. When they get home, Dean’s going to have him change back into borrowed clothes so that he can wash every single piece of fabric they just bought four times over through the laundry machine.
He can’t give Cas what he deserves, but he can give him stuff.
At the next glance, Cas catches his eye. Before he’s entirely aware of what he’s doing, Dean has crossed over three lanes to pull onto the side of the road.
The smile has dropped from Cas’s face, his eyebrows now pulling together, his hooded eyes more disappointed than ever. The late morning sun hits them at such an angle that they almost seem to glow, to emit a low, lake blue light. The sweater was a good choice — it matches almost exactly.
Running off some deranged autopilot, Dean is reaching across the gap between them to cup Cas’s cheek in his left hand. His skin is very warm and slightly dry, soft and scratchy with stubble. Unbidden, Dean’s thumb slides slowly over the little peak of Cas’s cheekbone.
Cas is frozen, his mouth slightly open, his glowing eyes wide. To be fair, they are both frozen, besides Dean’s thumb. To the passing cars they must look idiotic: two adult men sitting stock still in the front seat of their car, the driver holding one arm straight out to assault his passenger’s face. Dean almost wants to put the hazards on.
“Uh,” says Dean.
Cas moves — his right hand flying up to meet Dean’s, holding it in place against his face. He closes his mouth and then opens it again.
“You like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” blurts Dean. “Or, you did.”
Cas closes his mouth.
“Sam — uh, Sam mentioned it. When you were human, you liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Just jelly, not jam. For the texture.” Cas’s short bottom lashes send shadows onto the tip of Dean’s thumb as he sweeps it up just below his eye. “When you were human the first time, I mean.”
“Yeah,” says Cas, eyes wide as dinner plates, voice several octaves lower than usual.
“Do you want — tonight?” Not a sentence. “I mean — I was thinking, maybe I could make PB&J tonight. Seeing as it’s your favorite and we’re figuring out your taste. There’s a — some people grill ‘em. They say that you can never go back once you’ve tried them that way.”
The corners of Cas’s mouth are tugging up again, and there are crinkles gathering at the corner of his eyes. No glittering now. “I would like that very much, Dean. Thank you,” he says.
The cornered, frightened animal side of Dean wants Cas to reel back and punch him in the face. Another side wants Cas to pull him into the backseat and stick his tongue down his throat. He wants Cas to throw him up against a wall and just follow his instincts.
The biggest side wants to make him sandwiches. He wants to be able to talk to his best friend again, without the awkward silences, without loss and grief and confession weighing down every word like concrete shoes. He wants to see him smile like this every day for the rest of his fucking life.
Dean has been holding his face for too long. He drops his hand, moving it to the volume knob, but is stopped by a hand on his arm.
“Dean,” says Cas, beautiful. “Thank you.”
His gaze is soft, and while he’s not fully smiling anymore, it’s not a frown, at least. He loves him. Cas loves him. And Dean —
Dean turns up the music.