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After almost forty hours at the hospital, Jess is finally out of surgery, and Sam has gone to see his baby boy in the NICU only to return with a stunned, dazed expression on his face and a picture of a tiny, wrinkled little guy that Dean is going to spoil the everloving shit out of. When the doctors stop being worried and tense about Jess, and it looks like everything is going to be okay, Sam finally falls asleep in a chair beside her bed.
After all of that, Dean realizes that he’s jittery, wired from too much coffee, he hasn’t called in to work, and he’s been up for more than two days and so he might need some sleep.
His boss is understanding -- family emergencies are something that every one of the guys has been through at one time or another. Dean promises to return in another two days, and then he’s free to go home and crash. Before he leaves, he bribes a nurse to take care of Sam, and then Dean gets in the Impala and drives home.
Lailah’s car seat is parked in the front hallway, and Dean belatedly remembers offering Cas a place to stay, as his house was sort of mildly destroyed.The past two days are mostly a blur, but he remembers something about the door to Castiel’s house being off the hinges, cracks running through the ceiling, a few windows shattered.
“Cas?” He calls out, keeping his voice low because he doesn’t want to wake up a sleeping baby. “You here, man?”
The apartment seems to be empty, but just to be sure, Dean checks his spare room.
Sure enough, Cas is curled up on his side on the small, wickedly uncomfortable futon, dressed in an ill-fitting pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweater. Lailah is sleeping in her crib, the only piece of furniture in the room that doesn’t belong to Dean. It’s shoved far into the corner, but the crib is still almost too large to fit in the room, there’s no space around it to walk, and it’s preventing the futon from folding down properly. There’s no way Cas carried the damn thing, not while also carrying the baby, which begs the question of how the hell Castiel managed to get it into Dean’s apartment at all.
Dean stares at them for a moment.
Apparently, Castiel snores.
Sighing, Dean closes the door quietly.
His own bedroom is across the hall. Dean kicks off his shoes, shoves a pile of laundry off of his bed, and flops face-first onto the soft pile of blankets and pillows. His entire body hurts, he feels like he hasn’t slept in a year, but at the same time he’s so wired he’s shaking, fingers trembling a little bit if he tries to hold still.
Dean closes his eyes and, listening to the sound of Castiel snoring softly, falls asleep.
-
The futon breaks the next day.
Dean wakes up to the sound of screeching metal-on-metal, then a loud crash and the sudden, angry wail of Lailah being unceremoniously woken.
He’s out of bed and in the spare room before he’s even properly awake, and it’s a good thing that Cas knows all of his secrets, or Dean would be self-conscious about the fact that he just burst into the dude’s temporary bedroom brandishing a sawed-off shotgun and a long silver knife, ready to battle the forces of evil.
Instead of evil, he finds Castiel looking stunned, sitting in the middle of the broken futon, the metal frame twisted out of shape.
“What the fuck?” Dean asks,
Castiel blinks up at him, looking perplexed. “That hurt,” he says, sounding betrayed.
Dean offers him a hand up, then rolls his eyes and returns the weapons to his bedroom while Cas picks up Lailah.
She doesn’t cry for long, since she was more startled than anything else, so eventually Dean ends up holding on to her, jiggling her around and making silly faces while Cas attempts to repair the futon.
“Give it up, man, it’s a wreck,” Dean says. “I think it was here when I moved in. Don’t worry, we’ll go out and buy a new one.”
“I can fix it,” Castiel insists stubbornly.
“I really don’t think God himself could fix that thing.” Dean says. “Just-- come on, Cas. Don’t worry about it.”
It’s hard, looking at Castiel. Dean doesn’t know what to think of the man, doesn’t know how to parse the information he has. He doesn’t want to ask about Jess, doesn’t want to ask why Cas is on the run from demons, why they’d come after his kid, why Castiel had ---
He doesn’t want to ask what happened to the demons between when Castiel came home and when Dean and Sam arrived.
Instead, Dean looks at Lailah. It’s easy to trust her, she’s little and innocent and sweet, and she cuddles closer to him, her little hand clutching at his skin, pulling him closer as if she knows just how safe she’ll always be with him. Dean cups his hand over the back of her neck to hold her close, bouncing on the balls of his feet a bit. She’s just starting to drift off again, not asleep but sleepy, and Dean loves holding her when she’s like this, loves the weight of her in his arms.
Castiel is looking at them, a fond, soft expression on his face, and Dean struggles not to blush.
“Look,” he says, and he’s trying not to be a jerk, because he knows he owes Castiel -- for saving Jess, if not anything else. “Just -- go sleep in my room, okay? I’ll take care of Lailah for a few hours, we can figure out what to do with the futon when you wake up.”
Castiel looks almost pathetically grateful, so Dean doesn’t even regret the offer. “Go,” he says, nodding in the direction of his room. “Just don’t touch the guns, okay?”
And fuck, guns, there are weapons all over his apartment. He hadn’t even thought of that when he invited Castiel to stay there, but now that he thinks about it, this is the least safe place in the world for a child.
--
The next few weeks go by -- strangely.
Sam helps Dean haul the broken futon to the dump. While they’re cleaning out the spare room, he also hauls out a whole lot of junk, and then Lailah’s crib and the small dresser and up being the only pieces of furniture left.
Jess donates some of the more stereotypically girly gifts they’d been given to Lailah, and Castiel makes several trips back to his house to move what seems like the entire contents of Lailah’s nursery into Dean’s spare room.
And that’s not weird, actually, that seems pretty normal, but Castiel is still sleeping in Dean’s bed and even Dean knows that’s a little weird. That’s downright odd, and he really should insist that Castiel buy himself a little twin bed for the spare room, or that he repair his house so he can move back into it, but.
Well.
The thing is, Dean likes living with someone else.
He likes coming home and finding that Castiel cooked supper - or picked up a pizza, or even is just sitting in front of the television watching old cartoons. He likes not being alone in the empty apartment, likes having someone to talk about his day with.
He loves having Lailah there, every day, every night, the sweetest little girl, she’s such an angel.
He loves it, living with Castiel, having someone around him all the time.
Maybe he hadn’t even realized it before, but Dean knows now that he was lonely all this time. Before, he would go and visit Sam and Jess and try to stave off all of the-- negative things, all the bad stuff he’d feel and try to get away from. And having Castiel with him, having Lailah in the next room, means that Dean is never alone. He can wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare (seeing yellow eyes on Dad’s face, god, the way he’d smiled and talked and laughed, blood on the floor, bleeding out everywhere, and--) and Lailah will open her eyes, so sweet, so loving, and pat Dean’s face with her soft, chubby hands. It’s okay, then, when Dean can’t sleep and he goes to the living room and Castiel is there, worn-out and exhausted, watching re-runs of Mythbusters and drinking herbal tea.
They both have stupid, messed up sleeping schedules and jobs that don’t require regular hours. Dean buys groceries and Castiel cooks surprisingly well, and Dean takes out the trash without needing to be told and Castiel picks up and puts everything in its proper place, and after a meal they put Lailah down for a nap and do the dishes together, standing side-by-side.
Cas will sleep while Dean’s at work, and by the time Dean gets back, Cas is up and making food in the kitchen, wearing sweatpants and a button-up shirt and tie, and Dean flops on his bed after they eat and goes to sleep, not really caring whether or not his pillow smells like Castiel’s shampoo.
Except that’s not true, not really, Dean knows how fucked up he is and he knows that this is wrong. Not the whole being-into-Cas thing, that’s fine if unexpected. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to pretend, that he apparently wants this -- this normal, boring family life -- so badly that he’s willing feign ignorance. Dean knows that if he brings it up, if he asks, if he says anything at all, Cas will pack up his things and move out. Dean knows that he asks Cas to stay, then Cas will buy a bed and move into Lailah’s room, and stop sleeping in Dean’s bed.
But Dean wants to pretend, so he closes his eyes and pretends that Cas is there, with him, that the warmth left over from Castiel’s body is meant for him, that Castiel is coming back to bed and he’ll sleep beside Dean and keep him warm and save him from himself.
Fuck.
Dean is so, so screwed.
--
Jess is in the hospital for a week, during which Dean buys a lot of coffee for Sam, brings Jess lots of stupid girly pink teddy bears and a new bouquet of flowers every day, and tries to have his nephew named something cool. Sam and Jess appreciate the coffee, flowers, and stupid gift-shop teddy bears, but for some reason are determined to name the youngest winchester something boring. The only name they have picked out that isn’t lame is ‘Dean Junior’, and that’s only not lame because it’s Dean Junior.
Dean doesn’t want to be weirdly flattered and emotional about the fact that his brother might name his kid Dean, but at the same time, Dean is awesome and he doesn’t want the poor little guy to grow up with a giant oversized girl for a father and the name Dean Winchester to live up to. That seems like a lot of pressure, so instead Dean tries to suggest something cool, like Ozzy.
In between visiting the hospital, going to work, and being at home cuddling Lailah or pretending not to watch Castiel out of the corner of his eye -- Dean doesn’t have time for anything else.
--
After Johnny comes home, Dean starts scheduling his visits ahead of time.
He has to, because otherwise he’ll show up and Sam will be at the door, red-eyed and scowling, and Jess will look like death and be on the verge of tears because she had just fallen asleep, and now everyone’s awake and Johnny is crying and Sam will look like a kicked puppy. So instead, he texts Sam and Jess ahead of time to let them know he’s stopping by, and then he arrives on time and lets himself in and walks very quietly, straight to Johnny’s room.
The little guy is conked out, exhausted as always, and Dean scoops him up and holds him against his shoulder, because he can, and because Johnny tends to sleep a little longer, a little deeper, when he’s being held.
Jess is asleep, Sam is moving with slow, zombie-like deliberation in the kitchen, and Dean ignores both of them to make his way to the couch and put on ESPN. After a few minutes of clinking and dull thudding noises that means Sam’s walked into the counter again, his baby brother comes shuffling out of the kitchen, droopy-eyed. “Hey,” Sam mumbles, looking exhausted and blinking at Dean. “The -- oh. Okay. You. Gonna be here for a while?”
“Go take a nap, Sammy,” Dean says gently.
“Okay,” Sam agrees, showing how desperately in need of sleep he is when he doesn’t even tell Dean not to call him that.
--
Life goes on.
Dean oscillates between being deeply suspicious of Castiel -- his motivations, his history. They know practically nothing about him, and whenever Dean gets up the nerve to ask, Castiel ends up answering his questions with a wounded, heartbroken look on his face.
“I wish I was with them, I hate -- not being there. Not being able to protect them,” Castiel says when Dean asks about his family. “They need me, and I know that Lailah needs me as well, I know that my family thinks it is more important that I be here for her, that I keep her safe, but I still wish every day that I could be there with them.”
“They fight demons.” Castiel says, when Dean asks why they needs his protection.
“Lailah doesn’t have a mother,” Castiel tells him. “She has-- me. Only me.”
“My father is gone. I haven’t seen him in years. My brothers think he is dead.”
On the other end of the scale, however, is Dean being wildly and uncontrollably in awe of the man. No, not awe, but some sort of --- fuzzy, warm, disgustingly happy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Cas is just so freaking hopeless, he’s adorable, he’s like a bunny or some sort of wobbly-legged baby deer out in the forest.
Dean finds out that Castiel has never had ice cream, and that he thinks Bugs Bunny is absolutely hilarious, and that he doesn’t like coffee but he loves drinking stupidly fancy, pretentious-sounding herbal teas. Castiel can read and translate Latin as easily as he does French or Japanese, he’s the official American Sign Language translator for the local police force, he has an irrational hatred for gummy bears, but for some reason thinks Jell-O is the height of gourmet cuisine.
He’s hilarious and fascinating and he has all these facets to his personality, even the parts of his personality that don’t directly involve Lailah, and Dean is sort of fiercely in love with the guy.
It’s stupid and irrational and it comes on sort of suddenly. Or it sneaks up on him, one minute Dean’s watching Castiel to see if the other man is maybe spending a little too much time with Jess, maybe getting a little too close. And he’s a little jealous, sure, a little protective because Sam’s his little brother and Jess is Sam’s wife, so even though Dean knows that Jess would never ever cheat on Sam, he still wants to make sure Castiel isn’t getting ideas. So he’s watching, just to see if he needs to step in and talk to Cas, because he’s allowed to be protective of Jess too and Dean doesn’t want her in an awkward spot.
So one minute he’s watching him to make sure that Cas isn’t getting too close to Jess.
And then he’s watching him because Cas has the bluest eyes he’s ever seen, and a habit of licking his lips before he speaks, and his hair is rumpled and messy and he always has the most ridiculous bedhead. One moment Dean thinks, that guy is so weird, and then he’s got the image of Cas’ smile burned onto the inside of his eyelids, the way his forehead creases when Dean uses a slang term he doesn’t understand, the way he always looks so delightfully exasperated at Dean’s crass language and crude humour.
Their relationship, as it is, is deeply fucked up.
Dean comes home and pretends that they are his family, and Lailah and Castiel are so weird and reclusive there’s a good possibility they don’t even know how messed up Dean is, that he wants that. He still can’t bring himself to regret it, though, when Castiel starts filling the tiny second bedroom with lailah’s toys and furniture, decorating it with Lailah’s belongings.
Dean even helps him paint it pink.
And if sometimes, Dean watches Castiel with a bit too much affection in his eyes, or if Castiel doesn’t wake up when Dean stumbles in late from work and shoves his shoulder before climbing into bed next to him, or if they wake up to Lailah’s cries and have to spend a minute trying to untangle themselves from where they’ve wound their arms around each other during the night...
Well.
There’s no one there to say anything.