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Dean grumbled through his first six months in Paradise. Cas would have thought he had never been tortured in Hell or lost in Purgatory or pursued by Heaven or done battle with God. In form true to an odyssean hero, he went about muttering complaints to whomever might eavesdrop.
“You tear down Heaven and build up a new one, but can’t find the time to drop a house here or there for guy to move into?”
Jack didn’t answer Dean’s grumbles. So Dean went door to door instead—Mary had lumber and Bobby knew how to lay pipes. Charlie, given a night or two to study, could wire up anything. Ellen had redone the Roadhouse’s roof multiple times. Jo and Sam would lift and hammer and saw for beer, and the unspoken pleasure of a sunny day’s grueling work. Dean had picked the perfect spot, right between Sam’s and their parent’s. The sky stretched infinitely in every direction. Mountains rose up in the distance. There was room enough on the property for a house and some gardens, maybe a chicken coop or a pool or a fountain (depending on what type of retirement Dean decided on). Just a ways away, a little path led down to the lake with a dock facing east and the sunrise. After a moment or two, it didn’t matter that Ellen had never met Mary who had never met Jo who had never met Charlie. They breathed in the air—sweet, with flowers blooming in brighter colors and fuller scents than they ever had on Earth—and got to work.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just give him the house?” Jack asked his father Castiel later.
They stood a ways away from the house, watching people arrive for the housewarming party. Cars lined the driveway and the side of the road on both ways. Already people bustled around inside, and more were traipsing up the steps bearing gifts. For each guest, Dean threw open the door. He puffed his chest out like a proud beaver showing off a fresh-built dam. He welcomed them with hugs and handshakes and ushered them inside.
“Maybe,” Cas acknowledged. “But look how happy he is.”
* * *
It took Dean a long time to start decorating. Sam and Eileen’s house was perfectly curated in the way that they both were; meticulously practical, but slowly overwhelmed by the passage of a life. Over time their perfectly organized books were shuffled around to make room for baskets of children’s toys and stacks of photo albums.
Dean and Cas’s house was not like that. Dean had never lived in a place long enough to have a say in decorating it. He made do with a bed, and with painting and repainting the walls in pursuit of a different vision for each room. Dean built the kitchen table to sit at when Sam or Mary visited, and the completion of that project was enough incentive to install shelves and cabinets, put proper curtains on the windows, find matching chairs and plates and silverware, and put it all together. From there he had made burgers one day on the grill that lived on the back porch, and then mac and cheese and then meatloaf. He put up a photo, then another and another. He moved what few signs of life inhabited other rooms into this one. And now, months after Cas had started hanging around often enough that there was nowhere else in Paradise that he could appropriately call ‘home,’ the kitchen was still the coziest room in the house.
Cas sat at the table. If Dean were here, he’d be sipping at his coffee. He wasn’t as irritable before his coffee anymore, though Cas wasn’t sure why—if Paradise had pruned away his caffeine addiction or the pressures of a middle-aged body, or if he was finally waking up to a life he relished. A life where he could drink coffee at 9am one day and 5am another and Cas would always be sitting across the table from him while he did it.
Like the very thought had conjured him, the door flung open. It smacked against the wall with a satisfying whack. Dean strode through, a tension locking his jaw together like a bear trap.
“How was John?” Cas asked.
“Fine,” Dean said. The fishing gear lived in the front closet, and Dean cast it in with the care of an ungrateful teen and shut the door behind. When he needed it again, it would be as organized as he wanted it to be.
“Did you two talk?” Cas asked.
“Not really,” Dean said, thudding into his seat and cracking open a beer. It gushed, cold and frothy, and overflowed across the table and down the front of his shirt. Dean snapped a perfectly articulate curse.
“Drink with me,” Dean said, sliding a fresh beer Cas’s way as if they did this every weekend.
“Okay,” Cas said. And when Cas cracked the golden bottle open and the froth burst down his clothing, Dean smiled. Then he laughed, and all the tension went out of his body. In the corners of his eyes, wrinkles shone like the folds of a wedding dress. The beer trickled down Cas’s chest. Dean fetched a clean rag in the kitchen he had built for himself with his own two hands.
“Okay,” he offered, tossing the rag Cas’s way. The kitchen glowed in the morning-afternoon-evening sun, and Dean watched Cas dab turn the rag over in his hands. “That’s my bad.”
* * *
They had a second housewarming later, on the anniversary of the first one. It was a little unnecessary, but retired hunters seemed to need parties in death like they needed cholesterol pills in life.
The house was a little more fleshed out. There were couches in the living room, and Cas moved chairs out from the kitchen. There was scented soap in the bathroom. Every window was opened with curtains pulled back. And somewhere along the way, they had acquired a record player, and Led Zeppelin was playing throughout the first floor. The music got louder and softer in time with the crowd’s rhythm. Now and again people stood and put their bodies to work against the music. They danced to Led Zeppelin and AC/DC and Elvis and the Beatles. And before long a slow song came on. Jo reached out her hands to Dean. They began to sway. One by one the years dropped away and Dean was twenty-six again. And Jo was a pretty girl, jeans riding low on her hips and big eyes turned up to him.
“Hey,” Dean said later, when he and Cas stood on the back porch. They had sought a little respite from the crowd. “What do you think we have ahead of us?” Dean asked. The house was getting hazy in the heat, warping the music, and the sound of the crowd, into some blurred American incantation. “All this?” He put up his hands. “It’s great. Really, all of it is great. But I just gotta know.”
It was dark outside. Rain might fall tonight or tomorrow. Somewhere down a little path through the brush was a dock. In the morning, the sun would rise there over the water. When the sun rose in the morning here, it was easy. On Earth, Cas could sense every force — the gravity of the Sun and Moon, the turning of the planet. The very passage of time weighed heavy on his senses. But here in Paradise, the sun rose smooth and easy as water over a riverbed. No longer a series of literal bodies, this world was something different—something between an illusion and a deeper, truer truth than has ever been told.
“I think we’ll be happy,” Cas said. He smiled at Dean, then tilted his head and smiled about something further off than Dean or Paradise or the limits of this little universe.
“What?” Dean asked.
“On Earth right now,” Cas reported. He could feel it, the same way he could feel the Earth turn on its axis and the summer begin to peel away into autumn. It was a little lifeline of a heartbeat, strung along a clothesline up to the heavens. “Somebody is thinking about us.”
Dean snorted. He put the beer bottle to his mouth — in Paradise he still drank like he’d never tasted anything as cool. The condensation twinkled on the outside of the bottle. His Adam’s apple bobbed like driftwood caught in the waves on a beach, and Cas could not peel his eyes away.
“No clue why they’d do that,” Dean said. His voice was gruffer, less twenty-six than forty-one. Less dancing with Jo than standing with Cas.
“Because it will make you happy,” Castiel said. The fireflies were beginning to come out. They winked in the darkest spots between the trees. “They want you to be happy.”
“What are they thinking?” Dean asked.
Inside, the crowd sang along to some joyous anthem. Outside, the fireflies sparkled.
“They’re saying thank you,” Cas said.
* * *
“I love you,” Dean said one night.
“You don’t have to say it,” Castiel said.
“I want to make you happy.”
“My happiness doesn’t matter. It’s not my Paradise.”
“It’s mine, then,” Dean said. He turned over in their bed and the moonlight found them. They had hung up as many photographs and posters and art prints as they could think to hunt down. They had no rhyme or reason for their design, except for Dean’s love of music and Cas’s love of Dean. At just the right time of night, moonlight lit up the far wall and the silhouette of their bodies in bed together. “It’s my Paradise—”
“It’s everyone’s Paradise—”
“—it’s my Paradise,” Dean said. He had picked out these sheets with Cas and built the bedframe himself in this house that they shared. In the morning, he would make coffee and sit across from Cas at the kitchen table. “And I want you to be happy.”
“Will that make you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Then say it.”
Dean sat up in bed and looked down at Cas. Moonlight was his color. Wrinkles wedged themselves into the corners of his mouth, his eyes, the center of his forehead. The shape of his shoulders was different. And how he held himself. Somehow in all the time that had passed between them, time had passed for the angel as well. Time would keep passing, maybe, depending on what they wanted and what the future held. Soft time, maybe. Time full of coffee and tea and lunches and parties. Catching up and sitting on the porch and going for a walk. Everything they did not know how to do.
Unless, thought Dean. If enough time passed, on and on and on, some kind of end might come to pull Castiel away. Then Dean would get to go find that dark thing—the Empty—and seize it with both hands. And in this possibility, at least, nothing between them would ever change.
“I love you, too,” Dean promised.
Cas smiled at that.