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"Hey, welcome back," Dean whispered.
Since Cas had fallen asleep -- it seemed -- with his ear pressed to Dean's chest, he had no difficulty hearing him.
Cas shifted in the v of Dean's legs just enough to be able to look at him. "We're on a hayride," he said, not asking a question as much as stating a fact that seemed as surreal now as it had twenty minutes ago.
"We are." Dean smiled with his eyes. "You conked out like you'd been drugged, man."
They were pressed into flatbed wagon atop a scattering of loose, sweetly musty-scented hay and amongst a scrum of children eating caramel apples and adults talking rowdy. The wagon rumbled over a series of tree roots as the path the horses took came out of a copse of trees and into another part of the farm; partial moonlight illuminated a long field of tall, spindly skeletons.
Cas blinked. As the wagon banked to follow the edge of the field, a wind gust made the corn stalks chitter in strange ripples.
Dean tightened his arms around him. "Still cold?"
"I guess," Cas mumbled, shivering as much from the warmth of Dean's body as from the spookiness of the corn. He yawned, and frowned.
Dean chuffed a small laugh. "The ride ought to be over in thirty minutes, and then you can crash at the motel good and proper."
"I thought." Cas realized he didn't know where his thoughts were in fact going. "We don't have to talk to the second witness again?"
"Nah," Dean said, dropping his volume again, eyes intent on Cas. "Sam called. He's doing okay, getting back up to full strength. Said he and Jody are gonna hit her up at the hospital before visiting hours are over."
"Ah. Good." Cas gave into a second yawn. "I don't understand why I'm so tired."
"Cost of being human, I think," Dean said. In his face was something like sympathy, something like regret.
Cas was grateful for the former and wished he could erase the latter. He wasn't ashamed to be human, despite all he missed about being angelic. He'd survived the fall, and being with Dean and Sam gave his new life an intention, a direction. He struggled to sit up and shake off the cobwebs in his mind.
Dean didn't let him go far, arms still encircling him. The wagon bumped and rattled over the muddy farmland, and the children whooped and giggled. Cas watched Dean watching them, Dean's eyes gentle and a smile just barely hidden on his mouth.
I love you, Cas thought with wonder, the words in his head like an explosion of crows lifting into flight.
When he came back to himself, Dean was watching him intently. Cas could not for the life of him guess at what Dean was thinking.
Dean looked away to clear his throat. His cheeks were a little pink.
Cas's mind flitted away from that. He took a second to purposefully take in their surroundings again.
Hmm. Still mostly corn stalks.
The entire concept of paying someone to drive them around and through a field of harvested corn was so spectacularly foreign to Cas that they may as well have been drinking enough alcoholic slushies to stun a musk ox or flinging large pumpkins into a pond via cannon or medieval trebuchet -- two other activities that were available to be enjoyed for a price at this bustling Hartford cider mill and farmstand. They'd come to interview an employee of the market, and she'd talked to them while selling fresh edible donuts, coated in sparkling sugar, and bumpy, warty gourds that apparently nothing and no-one ate and which were only grown as decorative seasonal items. Cas sometimes resented that being very long lived had not given him a single advantage when it came to deciphering the cultural mores of the upper midwest.
After the interview, wherein the employee revealed nothing useful about the night of the purported zombie attack, Dean had taken one glance at a sign about $2 hayrides. In that instant, Cas witnessed him light up like a jack o'lantern with eyes blazing.
He'd looked heartbreakingly young.
Cas would have followed him anywhere, and was. At least the cornfield wouldn't open up into a direct portal to hell or a headquarters for the living dead...he hoped.
An incline in the path back towards the farmstand had everyone oohing and ahhing, jostling into and off of each other, as the horses went faster, almost at a gallop. An apple core went whizzing over Cas's head and into the dark. Dean was grinning. A kid next to them was holding out her small hand to bestow upon him what was, as far as Cas could tell, a fake orange and yellow pointed tooth. When Dean had accepted her gift, she directed her benevolence at Cas and placed another tooth in his hand, before stumbling back into her older brother's lap.
Cas squinted at the object now in his palm. The tooth was slightly sticky, probably because a toddler had been holding it for who knew how long.
"Candy corn," Dean explained. "You eat them."
"Do you?" Cas asked faintly.
Laughing without being loud about it, Dean shook his head -- Cas had said something funny. Cas popped the tooth (kernel?) in his mouth and chewed. The waxy candy tasted like honey, sort of, a brief burst of sugar before it was swallowed and gone. He remained skeptical.
Dean had one arm around Cas's waist and one hand on his knee, fully bracketing Cas in. A piece of straw was trying to poke itself through Cas's jeans to scratch him by the ankle. A woman at his feet was picking corn silks out of a baby's curls. The baby was wailing like a banshee. On the opposite edge of the wagon, two kids were having a slap fight while another kid refereed. Dean put his chin over Cas's shoulder and flexed his hand on Cas's knee.
Cas had never wanted to stay anywhere ever as badly as he wanted to stay in this moment.
The bedsheet ghosts and straw-headed pumpkin people that were staked to the entrance of the hayride road could be seen in the distance. The passengers would have to awkwardly roll off of the wagon in a few minutes; Cas would have to leave the shelter of Dean's arms and clamber back into the working world on shaky legs. He breathed against a heaviness in his shoulders, his stomach. Possible zombies to investigate, et cetera.
The horses whinnied to a halt.
Dean and Cas put their feet back in the yard. The real world, Cas thought.
At the motel, Cas cleaned up for bed in the tiny bathroom while Dean talked to Sam on the phone. The easiest way for Cas to tell the case wasn't anything special was Dean not raring to go back out into the crisp October night. The victim had some interesting things to say but also a head injury, and Sam was staying to help Jody keep the conversation coherent, if that was something that could be achieved under the circumstance.
Cas shuffled into the room in his borrowed sweatpants and hoodie. Dean hung up and joined him on the couch by the window.
"No other attacks reported so far," Dean said.
"Seems promising." Cas bit back a smile at the sight of Dean's hot dog pajamas.
"Yeah." Dean scooted closer. "Hey."
Cas waited, head cocked, trying not to focus on all the places where Dean and he were touching.
"Never got to go on one as a kid, so, uh. Thanks for coming on the hayride with me," Dean said.
"You're welcome, Dean," Cas said, leaning towards him without really meaning to.
"Yeah?" Dean said, which didn't seem to be in response to anything, but then he was kissing Cas soft as a breath, and his hands were pulling Cas closer, and Cas was kissing him back, finally; and it didn't matter, Cas thought, what the question was, or even if there had been one, because this -- Dean's mouth warmer than candlelight, Dean making a noise like he'd been starving and was grateful to be fed and Cas desperate to hear him make that sound again -- this had been the answer all along.