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“Good morning, darling.”
Dean coughs around his coffee.
“Are you alright?” Cas asks.
“Am I—?” Dean sputters. “ Yes . You called me darling.”
Cas’s brow furrows, and Dean tries not to focus solely on the perfect wrinkles of his forehead. “Why not? You’re dear to me, and I love you. I was under the impression that darling encapsulated that.”
Dean’s face feels like he’s on fire. “Well, yeah , I guess. But, like… guys don’t really call each other that.”
“Guys call each other that all the time,” Cas says, rolling his eyes. “ You just aren’t used to it.”
“Okay, fine, how about this: other people don’t really call me that.” Dean looks down at himself. He’s softened, a little, in retirement, but he’s still the same guy he always was—brutal, rough-edged, too broad and too clumsy to hold anything right. Surely Cas can see that, no matter how in love he is. “I don’t exactly fit the bill.”
“What does that mean?”
“Darling is…” Dean is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation. He should’ve just shut up and let Cas be nice to him; whenever he argues like this, it always blows up in his face. “I don’t know, it’s for thin British girls and like, Victorian babies. Not for someone like me.”
Cas is staring at him so hard Dean’s pretty sure he’s attempting to break into Dean’s brain, despite their rule about no mind-reading outside of the bedroom. Dean stares back in semi-fear.
“Listen, man, it’s not—”
Cas cuts him off by lifting him up to his feet and pulling him close. He wraps his arms around Dean, tight enough to be comforting but not scary, and says, “You think darling is for gentle or fragile things. Small things.”
Dean nods. All of his words have left him.
“You’re small to me, Dean.” Cas is speaking quietly, but his words are no less impactful for it. His arms are strong, unmoving; Dean’s pretty sure he could go deadweight, and Cas would hold him up, keep him steady and kiss along the column of his throat. “You’re delicate. You’re tender. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Dean whispers. His heart is fluttering like a little bird.
“Do you feel small now? Fragile?”
Dean swallows. Some distant part of him wants to lie, but nothing rises to the surface but the truth. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Cas smiles softly, and noses in to kiss Dean. It’s one of those kisses that’s mostly breathing together, shuddering and sighing in the tiny space between their mouths.
“You’re wrapped in my wings.” The way Cas says it. Like it’s a confession, a precious secret. “Your soul is so small, Dean, and my wings always want to hold it close to me. To the very core of my grace.”
Dean looks at him. The way he and Cas love each other is mostly incomprehensible, a scale that’s bigger than can be explained or quantified—he knows that. But still, Cas says things like that, and Dean feels the stunning improbability of their love like a second heartbeat. A human and angel. A blip in spacetime and an ancient being, holding each other close in a fixer-upper kitchen in the house they share.
“I love you,” Dean tells him. What else is there to say? What else could even matter?
“I love you too.” Cas’s smile kicks up into something brighter, more sunshine than starlight. “Darling.”
Dean laughs breathlessly. Cas pulls him in for another kiss, and Dean lets Cas move him. He gives in to it all, just a little, lets himself feel like something to be careful with. And it’s easy, basking in the morning light and the glow of Cas’s love, to believe that he is.