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Dean and Cas own a bee farm now.
Nobody knows how it exactly happened. One day they were merely a broken shell of a righteous man and a miserable excuse for an angel, then one thing led to another and they decided to just—be done with it. Call it quits.
Maybe it was the constant pressure of the world’s burden upon their shoulders. Maybe it was the perpetual longing stares that never got the chance to be translated into something else. Hell, maybe it was Sam’s endless supposedly “subtle” nudges for them to just get on with it already—whatever it was that they were supposed to get on with, anyway—but they finally made it.
Or, to be more accurate, they finally make honey now.
Well no, that’s not exactly accurate as Cas is the one who does most of the work when it comes to the actual beekeeping and harvesting and—Dean still shivers whenever he hears this—queen rearing.
(“They don’t actually initiate contact in their rear area, Dean. We simply wait for the queen to be in full maturity and then—“
“You know what, no. It’s like waiting for my own daughter to grow up, only to see her fly away and mate with a random dick with wings.”
“Now you’re just making it weird.”
“Yeah well, your face is weird.”)
Charming comebacks aside, Dean still helps around in several tasks where he can, like whenever harvesting time approaches and Dean is left with honey extracting duties.
Don’t get Dean wrong, he genuinely likes seeing the pure liquid form of honey slowly dripping into a perfectly pristine jar. He’s also very serious in getting the job done, but it can be pretty dull when you have to do it for hours on end. So if every now and then he likes to poke Cas’ elbow with one of the honey combs he’s extracting, says something stupidly lame and cheesy like, “will you be my honey, honey?” only to be on the receiving end of the former angel’s bitchface (which Dean is positively sure he had learned from one Sam If-I-Had-A-Nickel-For-Everytime-I-Make-Bitchfaces-I-Wouldn’t-Have-Had-To-Do-Credit-Card-Scams Winchester), can you really blame him?
Plus, Cas would never admit it, but Dean is smart enough to tell if the faint blush dusting his cheeks is a result from the summer heat or not.
Or like right now, with Dean cutting up a new set of wooden hive bodies because apparently people like their honey so much that they had to order more honey bees to satisfy the steadily increasing demands of their customers—hence the need for more wooden hive bodies. Cas is also outside, feeding a colony of honey bees while gently whispering praises to them for their excellent work like the little nerd that he is.
Cas always appreciates peaceful and quiet moments like this, but Dean has a tendency to be a little shit sometimes, so he decides to amp it up a bit by slowly removing his sweaty tee while wiggling his jeans-clad butt to the rhythm of an imaginary tune in his head. This is all done nowhere near the proximity of where Cas is standing, of course. Dean had to learn the hard way about what the consequences of not wearing a beekeeping suit in a beekeeping area are, and he has no plans to relearn them again, thank you very much.
Cas, on the other hand, is totally disregarding the whole suit in favor of only wearing a protecive veil, a pair of gloves, and god forbid—an oversized bee patterned sweater with “Save The Bees, The GMOs Are Killing Their Buzz” written smack dab in the middle of it. According to Cas, he doesn’t need all of the basic protective clothings to prevent him from getting stung because “I have been doing this for almost two years, Dean” and “I was a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent for the last few “years”—("Cas you really gotta stop doing the hand quote thing")—how hard could pursuing a career as a Professional Beekeeper be?”
Now, with Cas trying (and failing) to stealthily sneak glances at Dean’s rippling muscles and sun kissed skin, donned in his stupid baggy sweater and his dumb humongous veil, the former hunter is debating on whether he should call him a Professional Beekeper or a Deflated Astronaut.
Dean’s favorite part though, is when they go to the market to distribute their jars of honey every Sunday morning at the ass crack of dawn. He will never admit it to himself, let alone say it out loud, but it’s mostly because he can get a good look of how Cas interacts with people who are not—well. Him or Sam.
It’s refreshing, really.
Being able to see the way the skin around Cas’ eyes crinkle up when he quietly huffs a breath of laughter over a joke which admittedly isn’t even that funny to begin with, the way Cas’ nimble fingers arrange the jars and carefully move them from one basket to another like they’re worth so much more than just a couple of bucks, the way Cas shyly ducks his head when one of their distributors compliments on how sweet and pure his honey tastes.
The way Cas firmly grabs onto Dean’s hand to confirm that no, he did not make the honey alone and yes, he is very happy to have his boyfriend by his side and share the workload with him.
(The first time Cas said it, Dean had to drag them back home in such a rush just so he could pin Cas to their front door and kiss him stupid.)
So it isn’t exactly the kind of life Dean was expecting he would ever have in a million years. And sure, he could never have foreseen that in his late thirties he would be delivering bad puns about bees and honey to someone who wasn’t even supposed to matter to him but has slowly learned to wriggle into his life and make a permanent space there.
Someone who doesn’t even know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars.
Someone who wakes up every morning with untamable bed hair and cannot properly function without caffeine in his system beforehand.
But hey, Dean figures that his life is quite the bee’s knees.