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“Well,” Charlie says, doubtfully, “at least he’s a very cute frog.”
Cas grumbles at her, the two little sacs sitting under his chin puffing delicately.
“Hey, man,” Dean says, sharply. “Don’t be rude. She’s here to help.”
The little speckled brown frog shuffles around in the terrarium and blinks blue eyes at him, very slowly. Dean has no idea if his eyes are getting dry, if it’s something like happy cats showing affection, or if that’s just the froggy equivalent of a squint, but either way, Cas has his attention fixed on Dean, now, not on Charlie anymore.
How Cas’s gaze manages to be just as intense when he’s a frog small enough to cuddle on Dean’s palm, Dean doesn’t know. Must be the blue.
Charlie blinks at him, too. “Hey! You can understand him?”
“Nah. I mean, not really,” Dean says, lightly pressing a fingertip against the glass of the enclosure. “But grumpy angel saying ‘look, stupid human, bodies don’t matter, don’t you know I’m really the size of the Chrysler building?’ sounds the same no matter how you say it?”
He grins at Cas to show he’s joking. Sort of. (Not really.)
Cas sticks out the tip of his—bright pink—tongue, then turns his little brown butt pointedly towards them and starts using his webbed hands to start digging in the mulch at the bottom of the open-top terrarium. The stripe going from his nose to his tailbone wobbles back and forth with the force of his digging.
“Uh huh. Yeah, same to you, too, buddy,” Dean snorts.
Apparently Cas is a sulky little shit even when he’s an eeny weeny frog.
Not that Dean can exactly blame him. Yeah, this whole deal is funny in one way. And yeah, the little glass aquarium thing with the greenery and mud and the artificial pond in the corner made out of part of a submerged ceramic dish is both hilarious and looks pretty comfortable, as far as frog things go, right?
But yeah, they’re leaving the lid off. Dean is pretty sure any attempt to actually keep Cas inside it, a-la glass top, is going to lead to a very pissed-off angel once Cas is back to being a baby in a trench coat, and not a slimy amphibian.
(He got really upset and launched himself directly at Dean’s face when Dean called him ‘slimy,’ too.)
“I don’t get it,” Charlie says, watching Cas get his slippery—slippery, not slimy—skin all covered with mud in a pattern that looks like camouflage for the smaller speckled dark patches covering his brown skin, like a leopard’s spots. “Why exactly are angels vulnerable to witches? Seems like they’d be immune.”
“I dunno,” Dean admits, and turns towards the frog. “Do you know, Cas?”
Cas, very slowly, blinks those big blue eyes from where he’s currently mashed his whole side up against the inside of the aquarium, half-buried now in the mud with his legs on that side squished against the glass. It doesn’t look all that comfortable, but Dean’s borders of knowing what to do about frogs involve things like knowing that certain species of toads in the Midwest secrete a powerful hallucinogen that sometimes makes people think they’re in the middle of a spirit quest. And when he was a kid, if he spent time by a creek, sometimes he’d catch a few hoppers or tadpoles in peanut butter jars, and bring them back to whatever motel they were staying at, because they made Sam laugh.
Dean hasn’t thought of that in a long time. He never felt all that guilty about it before—they always let them go eventually, but at the time, he was a stupid kid: he’s got no idea what happened to any of the little jumpy buggers eventually.
He and Cas stare at each other. Eventually, Cas croaks, two little white balloons puffing out in a loud pale flash to either side of his face, and this time, he sounds annoyed.
“Right. Right, yes or no questions only,” Dean agrees, with a sigh. Then he frowns. “Hey, what are we going to feed you?”
Cas balloons out at him again. This time, the noise he makes is louder than Dean would have thought was possible for something so small, and definitely translates to “Look, you stupid human, didn’t you just say yes or no questions only?”
“It was a rhetorical question, dude,” Dean says with a snort.
“Oh, geez,” Charlie asks, crouching by the terrarium. She doesn’t tap, and Cas studies her with eyes that are no less blue, just a lot more… well, round, and buggy, now. “Is it rhetorical? Hey, are you hungry, Cas? Uh…” she looks at Dean, looking a little panicked. “I mean, you can go dig him up some earthworms? Frogs eat earthworms, right? Or, uh, crickets? Where can we get crickets?”
“The Internet, probably. You’d know better than I would.” Dean pauses. “Wait, why would I know how to dig up earthworms?”
“I don’t know, why do you know how to do a lot of things you know how to do?”
Touché. “Well, I’ve never had to dig up earth—”
Cas groans, loud and long, as raspy as his regular voice and twice as loud.
Wow.
They both turn to look at him. He has his front legs folded all the way underneath him now, his chin jammed against the glass, and small amphibian or not, he doesn’t look pleased, the pale air sacs still deflating as he lets out the rest of the sound.
“Oh,” Dean realizes, chuckling. “You don’t eat, huh. Still?”
Cas croaks again—twice, because the way their life goes, Cas been saying ‘no’ a lot more than he’s been saying ‘yes,’ so no is one croak, yes is two.
“Well, okay, then,” Charlie says, and bends over to look Cas in the eye again. “You hang in there, okay? You frog it up, and I’m gonna go work my thing. Me and the dark web have got you. We’ll get you back to being biped and with prehensile thumbs in no time, now that you fixed my carpal tunnel.” She wiggles all ten fingers back at him, then grins at the softer, high-pitched peeping noise he makes at her, pressing one fingertip in farewell to where Cas’s nose is squished against the corner.
“I’ll keep ‘im company,” Dean offers. Not that Cas needs his company—he was always flitting off on his own even before he lost his wings—but Dean figures that being really squishable and also small enough to step on will keep Cas around. At least for a little while. “That okay with you, buddy?”
Cas doesn’t give Dean the sweet, high chirping noise he gave Charlie, ‘cause he’s still a jerk. He eventually booms out two deep croaks, though Dean thinks they still sound sort of pissy. But Dean takes that as agreement and scoops up the little glass box carefully. “My room?” he says.
Two ribbits.
Dean doesn’t have a coffee table or anything like that, so there isn’t much place to put Cas other than one of his nightstands. Dean shuffles stuff out of the way—a handful of silver bullets, a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep—and puts him down. After a second, he turns off the lamp on that side, too: it’s old stuff, and it still works surprisingly well, but won’t that make it too hot in the aquarium? It plunges his room in a soft twilight half-light from his other lamp.
Cas looks up at him with those big, peaceful blue eyes and lets out a soft peep. Like a baby chick.
“Heh,” Dean says. “No problem, buddy. Look, you… shouldn’t have,” he continues, clearing his throat. “You shouldn’t’ve gotten in the way of that spell like that. Should’ve let me take it. I woulda been fine.” Okay, there might have been earthworms or crickets in his future, because he’s not an angel and he does have to eat, but Dean’s made marshmallow fluff mac and cheese. How bad could they be, right?
Cas just stares at him. But he does wiggle himself out of his corner and hop a few steps over, then climbs onto one of the little wet sticks that Dean got out of the creek and leaned up against the side. He moves one leg at a time while he’s climbing, rather than in little hops—the front ones look almost too small to support his weight, other than the long fingers, but his hind ones look like, well… like Cas’s. Thick and heavy, arched underneath him when he stretches out on the log like that, one limb at a time, wiggling himself down.
Okay, Dean’s already uncomfortable with how often he’s perved on his angelic best friend when he was wearing a human vessel, he’s just… yeah, not going there.
“You comfortable in there, though?” Dean says.
Cas says yes, and Dean relaxes.
Sure, Cas’s human bedroom is pretty bare—and as far as Dean knows, he still doesn’t sleep—but when he was in the pet store, Dean might’ve gone a little crazy with the ceramic water dish and a basking rock and all kinds of vegetation on top of the mud that they hastily dug up from the creek nearby—Cas launched himself right into the water and swam around when they got there after their frantic drive, so they figured it was safe and good for frogs.
Well, they figured it was safe after Dean had a minor panic attack about him drowning, or being washed away by the water, or eaten by an alligator or something. (Sam took the moment to inform Dean that there aren’t any alligators in Indiana and that Cas was much more likely to be eaten by a longnose gar. Thanks, Sammy. Super helpful.)
Look, that Leviathan shit that Cas went through a few years ago was… memorable. And it wasn’t like if he ended up washed up onshore miles away, that someone would take a look at a little pebble of a brown frog and think, “Oh, yeah, I should take him home and dress him up in a blue cardigan and fake like we’re married, yeah, that’s a good idea!”
Their lives are truly, truly fucking bizarre.
But, well, Cas is safe right now. And he’s not in the pot that they put him in in the beginning, which, to Dean’s opinion, kind of looked like the worst kind of jail cell. Or an oubliette, maybe. He kept hopping out of it—once successfully managing to land right on Dean’s shoulder, which, okay, that was sort of cool; the time he landed wrong and ended up having to scrabble himself up the corner of the countertop, though? Scared the fuck out of Dean.
“You know. You’re kinda cute like this,” Dean says, grinning and pressing a hand to the glass. “I mean, sure, you haven’t got any mojo—wait, do you?”
Cas doesn’t ribbit at him—or croak, or whatever—but it’s not like the frog is giving him any more expression than Cas does a lot of the time. He just stares.
So Dean’s not at all prepared for Cas bunching his little legs underneath him, and then launching himself up and up and up, higher than Dean’s ever seen him go, right out of the top of the aquarium. Dean reels back mostly out of surprise, but Cas isn’t trying to attack his face this time—he sails right past Dean, his legs still outstretched in a little brown-spotted line, and Dean’s reflexes are not good enough to grab him out of the air.
Even though he does try.
Holy fuck he got some serious altitude, he—
Cas plops onto the mattress with a bounce into Dean’s comforter, and lies there in a muddy little squished flop of frog, a little too flat for Dean’s comfort.
“Hey! Hey, hey,” Dean rushes over, alarmed, and then kneels down beside him. Is he supposed to pick him up? Is he supposed to—but what if it’s like a neck injury, maybe he isn’t supposed to move him, fuck—
Cas stirs.
“What the fuck are you doing, man?!” Dean asks, his voice a little too high.
Cas can’t turn over his shoulder to look at him—Dean’s not sure he has a shoulder—so Dean’s not sure if Cas is ignoring him. Anyway, he gathers his legs underneath him, so he seems to be alright? And he starts hopping his way towards the head of Dean’s bed, towards…
Towards the laptop?
“Oh,” Dean says, breathing out a long sigh of relief. He does seem like he’s okay. He’s moving all four of his limbs, anyway, and those small hops don’t look… pained? But would Dean even know what a pained hop looks like? “Dude, you should have just asked.”
Cas doesn’t bother to answer that bit of stupidity. Instead, he climbs himself onto Dean’s pillow and stays there. And, when Dean doesn’t move, the blue-eyed brown frog reaches over and impatiently puts one muddy foot on the edge of Dean’s closed laptop.
Dean almost laughs. He doesn’t know if it’s relief or hysterics. Yeah, if there was ever any doubt, that’s definitely Cas in there. “You wanna watch a movie, huh?”
One ribbit.
“TV show?”
Two ribbits.
“Orange is the New Black?”
Two ribbits, one of them louder.
“Well, okay, but you gotta wash your feet first,” Dean announces. “You’re getting mud all over my bed and it ain’t like you can do laundry.”
Which is how Dean wakes up sometime later that evening—with the laptop open and plugged in on his thighs, and Cas, well, after they washed him off, Cas decided somehow that he got the best view of the screen sitting right in the middle of Dean’s chest, right on top of the t-shirt. Dean dozed off somewhere around episode three or four—look, it’s been a long few days—and he almost panics when he jerks awake, because what if he rolled over and squished the little guy?
But Dean’s still, somehow, on his back. Thank God. And he can still feel that small weight right on his breastbone. If Cas turned around, he’d have the worst view of Dean’s double chin, but considering that his neck doesn’t turn like that, Dean’s been looking right at the little stripey slope of his back for most of the episodes.
Dean peers down to check on him. Wait, how long is he supposed to stay out of water? He seemed like he was drying out on their drive to the creek, that’s why he launched himself into the stream so fast when they got there. But he’s pretty sure Cas would have moved or jumped onto Dean’s face to wake him up or something if he needed something…
Cas blinks those big blue eyes at him. At some point, he must’ve turned around. So he’s just been sitting there, froggily watching Dean sleep from his chest like the creeper he is. Netflix, behind him, is asking if they’re still watching.
Oh, maybe he couldn’t make the mousepad work to click ‘next?’ Yeah, that’s probably it—poor guy. Maybe they can teach him some keypad shortcuts or something? Can he reach keys to press them all together, or is he just going to end up keysmashing the whole thing with his whole body? Sounds like the kind of thing Charlie and Sam would have a field day figuring out…
“Hey, buddy,” Dean says hoarsely.
He wonders if Cas can feel the vibration of his voice from where he’s sitting. He wonders if it feels good to him.
Cas blinks at him and ribbits softly, and all of a sudden Dean’s wide awake.
Something’s different. Something’s really different.
Cas isn’t mottled brown with little darker patches and lighter stripes down his back and along his sides anymore. He’s not… brown at all anymore.
He’s a brilliant, fluorescent, day-glo yellow.
He’s a color that Dean’s never seen on a frog. Hell, he’s a color that Dean’s never seen in nature before. And when those little air sacs to either side of his face puffed up?
They’re blue. Bright blue. Blue like his eyes.
Dean puts a hand over him to hold him close, sits up as fast as he safely can without throwing out his back, and yells for Charlie.
*_*_*_*
“Oh,” Charlie says thoughtfully. She turns her laptop around and there, on the screen, in all that froggy glory, is, well, Cas.
Except it’s not Cas.
“So I guess according to the Interwebs, he’s an Indian bullfrog.” Charlie reaches out a tentative hand, and Cas-the-frog doesn’t try to hop away; Dean watches with a weird, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach as she pats a finger carefully down his back. Cas lets out a little murmurous nose, half a grumble, half a purr. “Well, you’re a very pretty frog, but I guess you were a pretty dreamy guy. I like the color, dude. Really rockin’ the Walkin’ on Sunshine vibe.”
Cas chirps at her, the high, soft sound that Dean’s coming to think as “Thank you.”
Dean has his mouth open to ask if Cas is sick, but then he glances at the screen again. It… does look really similar. He can’t be sick if that’s the normal color of a frog in the wild, right?
Charlie laughs. “You’re welcome,” she says. “But, uh, I guess we need to find you a date? Or something? That how this is working, right? I mean, yeah, this is probably more effective communication than the yes-no system. Don’t know how you did it, but good on you!” she tells Cas.
Cas blinks at her and doesn’t answer. Not even to say ‘thank you.’
“Charlie, what are you going on about?” Dean demands.
“I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she says, and holds out her hand, flat on the tabletop. After a slightly suspicious moment, Cas climbs onto it, one foot at a time, and huddles in the middle of her palm, pulling his legs in tight like he’s getting ready for takeoff. But Charlie’s careful enough lifting him up that Dean doesn’t feel the need to reach out and steady Cas. “Indian bullfrogs aren’t this color most of the year—they’re brown with little stripes and spots, like he was yesterday. They only get this color in mating season.”
Cas hops right off her hand and plops back onto the wood. Then, for good measure, jumps a few more little bobs away until he’s squatting sulkily in the middle of the table.
He doesn’t say “No,” though. Actually, Dean can’t even see the little blue air sacs when he’s not yelling at them. Huh.
“I don’t think Cas likes that,” he observes with a snort.
“He might not like it, but the Internet doesn’t lie,” Charlie says, turning the screen around again and pointing at a picture that could be Cas’s identical froggy twin. (Though, in Dean’s opinion, Cas’s yellow is just a little brighter and more fluorescent. And his eyes are definitely nicer, that rich royal blue that Dean’s so used to seeing on Cas’s face rather than the brown in the pictures.)
Dean’s pretty sure everyone recognizes the noise Cas makes as a snort.
“Yeah, you’re right, buddy, the internet does lie plenty,” Dean agrees. He’s weirdly proud of Cas for recognizing it. The guy’s come far since the whole… pizza man and babysitter business. “But, um, Charlie’s right about this, probably. ‘Bout you being, uh, y’know. Come-an’-get-‘em colors.”
Cas tucks both sets of his legs underneath his body and hunkers down like an angry yellow pebble with blue eyes.
“Don’t be embarrassed!” Charlie says soothingly. She hovers out a hand to touch him again, but then seems to think better of it and scoops up some water instead, bringing it over to sprinkle it on top of him. (It doesn’t seem to make his glare any less… well, okay, it’s more cute than it is scary, but Dean’s pretty sure that Cas is meaning to burn a hole through her with it.) “I mean, you didn’t change colors intentionally, I guess? I thought you did. But that makes it really obvious, right?”
“What do you mean? What’s obvious?”
Charlie ignores Dean and sprinkles Cas with some more water. “Look, it’s not fault you’re probably caught up in a fairy tale curse,” she soothes. “Those things are pretty bullshit. Actually, the frog one’s worse than most. But at least it’s an easy fix, sort of.”
The tension in Cas’s body relaxes—just a little bit. His body peps upwards again rather than squashing itself down on the table. And…
Jesus fucking Christ. He can do the little squinty thing where he tips his head, even as a frog.
Well, for once it’s not Dean making him make that face, and since he’s just as lost, he says, “Wait, what do fairy tales have to do with Cas looking like one of those Japanese school kids in a Ghibli movie?”
(Dean fucking loves those movies, okay? And Charlie won’t judge him. Actually, he’s got to show them to Cas, come to think.)
Charlie pauses for long enough to look at Cas again. “Huh, you’re right,” she muses, then shakes her head. “Me and Sam were talking about it last night? He’s almost done clearing out the coven’s cabin and they had a whole collection of folklore books. Like, fairy tales and stuff.”
Dean doesn’t like where this is going. He doesn’t like it at all. “Okay…?” he says warily.
“So there’s a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that has a frog in it. I mean, it was a Disney movie too, but… yeah, everyone’s a frog in that, so it doesn’t count,” Charlie starts, then shakes her head. “Anyway, it’s got a prince who gets enchanted into the shape of a frog, right?”
Dean wants to stop her right there, but Cas still looks puzzled. Charlie directs her next comment to Cas. “He, uh, he meets a princess, and rescues a golden ball from a pond for her in exchange for… personal favors from her. Okay, that sounds bad!” she hurries on, as Dean’s eyebrow rises. “Eating from her plate, getting fed by her hand, that kind of thing.” She clears her throat. “Anyway. Different, uh, different version of the story end different ways. Either she kisses him, or he gets to sleep on her pillow beside her, and poof, instant prince! And they lived happily ever after in heteronormative ideals, the end.” She looks back and forth between them, her expression painfully eager, but Dean has no idea what the fuck she’s looking so excited about. “So, you know, not that hard? Maybe?” She shrugs just a little too carelessly. “Probably doesn’t even have to be a girl. I mean, are you even a male frog? Guess you must be, ‘cause you’ve got the mating color,” Charlie finishes, nearly without taking a breath.
Cas blinks again and doesn’t answer. Dean’s not sure if that silence is because he’s stunned by what she’s saying, or a “don’t ask stupid questions.”
Dean really, really doesn’t want to tell Charlie that Cas kind of already spent at least a few hours in Dean’s bed, on Dean’s chest, and in fact he was sitting right there when he turned into a lemon, so that didn’t work. And Cas took a piece of Cheeto from Dean’s hand while they were watching Netflix. (He spat it back out after trying to chew on it. Turns out he hasn’t got teeth.) So not that either.
And if the whole ‘sharing a pillow’ business isn’t literal and it’s supposed to be some kind of weird metaphor for sex, holy fuck those fairy tale dudes were kinky, because… uh, no.
“So you’re saying someone’s got to… to…” Dean starts, and he can’t finish.
“Kiss him? Well, yeah, probably!” Charlie looks back and forth between them, and throws up her hands. “C’mon, guys, what else is the fact that all of a sudden he’s in very obvious mating colors supposed to mean?” she demands. “Sam and I were kind of already talking about this possibility—”
Oh, they were, were they? Sam’s gonna regret leaving the door to his room unlocked, yup.
“—but now Cas is yellow.”
Cas seems to be of the same opinion as Dean, though, because he shuffles one big step back from them and and ribbits so loudly that both Dean and Charlie wince. Dean pushes back onto the back legs of his chair. Damn, Cas can get some volume, and especially when he’s not inside his little glass aquarium. (He doesn’t ribbit again, so that’s a very definite fuck no.)
“What else is in that story?” Dean demands.
“I mean, in the earliest version, the princess throws the frog against the wall in disgust when he says that she has to kiss him, and that’s what breaks the spell. But, uh, I’m not sure what anyone’s supposed to learn from that, considering he marries her after,” Charlie offers sheepishly, and Dean nearly tips his chair the rest of the way over.
“Holy shit. No. No one is kissing or launching the frog,” Dean announces. No one’s kissing Cas to, to break a curse or whatever. It doesn’t work like that. Nothing works like that. Right? ‘Cause in those stories, it’s, like, true fucking love’s kiss (though what that has to do with throwing someone against a wall… yeah, it’s all bullshit, yup).
Cas ribbits twice. So there.
“You said it, buddy. And you know what? I need a drink,” Dean announces, and shoves to his feet. “Hey, Cas, you wanna try some?”
(It’s probably a bad idea, but Cas seems to enjoy sitting in a saucer filled with beer, his tongue poking into it every so often. Dean’s learned that frogs can absorb things through their skin.)
They don’t talk about what Charlie said. At all.
*_*_*_*
A day turns into a week. Sam comes back, but he leaves again, ‘cause someone’s gotta keep the hunter fires burning. But he stops at every folk and myth library he can find along the way.
Charlie stays.
It’s not… terrible, though. Dean takes one hunt away from the bunker, just a little salt-n-burn in the nearby county. Charlie takes care of Cas while Dean’s gone, and Dean thinks his color is just a little more dull than it was when he gets back, but Dean rubbing him down with a wet thumb seems to get him shiny and happy yellow again, like a wet raincoat. And he croaks just as happily when it’s evening, and hops right onto the laptop on the bed, thumping his big hind foot on it when Dean doesn’t get onto the bed himself fast enough.
(“He didn’t wanna watch movies with me,” Charlie complains. “Even when I told him he could sit on my boobs!” Dean hasn’t laughed so hard in weeks.)
Day nine is the first time Cas doesn’t respond to a direct question, though. And not in a… “I’m ignoring you because you are being stupid and your question doesn’t deserve an answer,” way. He just stares at Dean when Dean asks him a direct question, and it’s not a complicated question, either: Dean asked him if he wanted to watch Scooby Doo or Looney Toons, one ribbit or two, and doesn’t get an answer at all. Cas just stares at him like his little froggy processor crashed or something.
But Dean doesn’t think too much of it. He puts on Looney Toons, and after a long moment, Cas shuffles forward and settles on Dean’s stomach, rocking back and forth to get into the soft crease of Dean’s belly and tucking his legs underneath him to watch his favorite cartoons. He even tries a ‘meep meep’ sound. (It doesn’t work, but hey, A for effort.)
Day ten is the first time Cas startles when Charlie reaches for him to take him out of his little glass aquarium so he can join them at the table for breakfast, jumping back into a corner and scrabbling his feet, throwing up mud everywhere until Charlie pulls her hand back out, surprised.
By day fourteen, it’s pretty fucking obvious what’s going on.
Cas squats in the middle of the Vault’s main table next to his saucer, looking miserable and tired—even for froggy-him. There’s no getting around the fact he isn’t as slippery and healthy-looking as he used to be, and the shine and the brilliant color of his skin isn’t nearly what it was when he first turned bright yellow. Dean thinks he looks more like those pictures that Charlie showed him in the beginning, without Cas’s little extra… angel razzle dazzle to him, or whatever.
‘Cause Cas is becoming more and more a frog. Not just frog-shaped, but… yeah.
He’ll still answer questions most of the time, but sometimes the answers take longer than they probably should, even to simple questions. He’ll flick his tongue sharply towards shadows of motion and then shuffle backwards and duck his head like he’s a little embarrassed he did that.
He hasn’t flinched back from Dean’s hands—yet—but he sometimes needs a moment before Charlie can pick him up, and Sam hasn’t been able to carry him at all in days. There are definitely no more trips to the farmers market for him. (Shut up, Dean only did that once, and it was just ‘cause he thought maybe Cas might want to pick out something colorful, a little pumpkin or something, to add to his aquarium. He did, too.)
The times when he doesn’t answer at all are the times that scare Dean.
“Cas,” Dean says helplessly. He lowers his chin down on his arm, resting on the table, to look Cas in the eye. “Look. It’s… yeah.”
Cas puffs out his blue air sacs, but the noise that comes out of him isn’t even a ribbit. It’s sort of a little wheeze of sound, them deflating slowly, sadly, like the air going out of a balloon trapped up in a tree.
Dean can’t always understand what his little noises mean, but he’s pretty sure that that needs no translation.
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “It’s bullshit. This is all bullshit.” He sighs and scrubs his free hand through his hair. “I mean, I know Sammy and Charlie are trying—Sam’s gonna have to come up for air soon, he’s been in the library so long his hair is gonna get tangled in the bookshelves—but… I, um.”
Dean’s not sure they can wait. He’s not sure how long they have.
Cas sighs again. But then he hops forward, two controlled little tucks of his powerful hind legs, and settles next to Dean’s arm. He can’t really tilt from side to side, but he can push up with two of the legs on one side until he’s leaning on Dean’s bare forearm, cool and slippery and so, so soft. So squishy.
Dean smiles, even though he can feel it pulling at the corners of his mouth and his eyes in a way that’s not exactly happy, and dips his finger into Cas’s saucer to wet it before starting to stroke his back, long pets from his nose, to between his eyes, all the way down to his butt. (Cas doesn’t like being petted in the other direction.)
Cas rumbles softly, and half-closes his eyes.
“Look, I’m not gonna, um, throw you against a wall. No one’s gonna do that. Ever,” Dean informs him. “That’s just… you and me, we’ve done some pretty asshole things to each other, and I’m not gonna add to my karmic load or whatever.”
Cas gives him a look and zaps out his tongue. Well, one advantage of him being in this form: he can’t give Dean any lectures about how that’s not what karma actually means.
“But, um. I could try. The other thing.” The words come out in a rush. “Maybe… maybe Charlie was right. The whole… uh, you looking for a mate to break the curse business? There’s gotta be a reason you’re yellow, right? That wouldn’t just happen.”
Cas gives him a long blink, and is so silent that Dean wonders if he’s trying especially hard to just teleport the fuck out of there. Frog with wings, wouldn’t that be something?
Dean lifts his head from his arm—slowly, so he doesn’t knock Cas away with the motion; he’s so little that they’ve all had to learn to be careful about how they move, though at least he’s brightly-colored enough that he sure as hell doesn’t blend with anything—and swallows. His free hand rises to scratch at the back of his own neck, and it’s only a second later that Dean realizes it was the hand he was petting Cas with, the tip of one finger still cool.
“Look,” he says. “All the stories, they say it’s gotta be… I dunno, true love’s kiss, or something? And… I don’t know anything about that. Any of that. True love or whatever. I sure as fuck don’t know anything about happily ever after.”
Cas lets out a soft peep. When Dean looks back at him, Cas bumps him with his whole body.
Dean manages a smile. Even at not quite six inches wide, Cas is super bossy. “But, um, y’know. You’re… family. I can’t… can’t let you fade away, buddy, I can’t, you gotta let me help. You gotta let me at least try.”
And maybe what Dean feels for Cas, even if he’s never said it—even if Cas never knows, even if he never feels it—that’ll be enough. It can be. It has to be. Doesn’t it?
After a long, terrible moment, Cas lets out a small, low rumble of a sound, a single rough burst of it.
No.
Dean’s whole stomach twists into something horrible and knotted, and he wants to be mad, he does, he wants to pick up and walk away, he wants a glass of whiskey so big that Cas would have to swim in it, he wants—
But then after too long, a second little ribbit follows. Softer. Cas’s blue eyes blink at him to match the little puff of his blue air sacs.
Yes.
“’Kay then,” Dean says, and his voice is… hoarse. Why the fuck does he sound like that? Because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, that’s why.
Dean’s kissed a lot of girls. He’s sure as hell never kissed a frog. And he’s sure as all fuck never kissed Cas, frog or not, and it shouldn’t feel like a big deal—because, again, with the whole frog business; they’ve done a lot of really fucking weird things while cursed, and some even weirder things to get out of curses, and there’s a reason Dean just really, really hates witches.
But he puts both his hands down on the table, palms and pinkies gathered together, and Cas crawls up on them, one careful, slightly sticky little yellow foot at a time. Carrying him like this feels secure. It feels good and familiar, now, after the first few weeks, Cas’s whole body filling his cupped palms, his skin slippery and delicate, so soft. When Dean raises him slowly towards Dean’s head level and props his elbows on the table, it feels like a big deal.
Cas lets out a tiny ribbit. It’s so quiet that it barely flashes his little blue circles. But with him cupped in Dean’s hands, Dean feels the motion of it traveling throughout his whole small body.
Dean thinks it might be his imagination that Cas is saying “Go on, now.”
Dean has about two seconds to think about the fact that this position could end up being a really bad idea, because if it works, he’s going to have nearly six feet of angel being supported on his cupped hands and elbows and he’ll probably end up breaking his wrists. But if he tries to change anything right now, he’s going to fucking lose his nerve and go running screaming into the night until someone comes after him.
So Dean keeps his eyes open, and brings the frog his best friend is wearing towards his face.
But then he’s kissing it. Him. It’s… weird. Cas is smooth and a little slippery, and he’s so small that even with that little brush Dean’s lips touch gently along his whole front.
Then it’s over, and Dean pulls him away from his face, and waits.
And…
Nothing happens.
Absolutely fucking nothing.
The frog cupped in Dean’s hands, for once, doesn’t blink. Cas just stares at him.
The little paired sacs under his chin puff, just enough to flash vivid blue, but all he ends up letting out is a tiny wheeze of a sound rather than his big, noisy, deep croak.
Great, Dean’s shocked him speechless. Awesome.
“Well,” Dean mutters, and looks away. “So much for that. Uh, maybe it’s gotta… I dunno. Do we gotta find a girl to kiss you? Or maybe another frog? Yeah, that might—”
This time, Cas’s noise is definitely a protest, and loud.
“It’s not that bad,” Dean tries to say, except it is that bad, it’s all that bad, what the fuck was Dean thinking, he—
He stalls right in the middle of whatever bullshit he was about to try to peddle as Sam comes galumphing through the doorway with his hair sticking up all on one side, like he remembered to comb one half and not the other, and no fewer than five books in his arms.
“God, this library is amazing, did you know—” Sam begins, gleefully, putting down the books with enough of a thump that Cas’s saucer rattles. Then he trails off. “Uh… Dean, what are you…?”
Dean has no fucking idea what Sam is seeing.
Actually, no, that’s not true, he’s got a pretty good idea what Sam is seeing: Dean sitting at the Vault’s main table, elbows propped onto it, Cas-the-frog cupped gently in both hands and still held up to his face.
“I, uh, I dunno, I guess I…” Dean mumbles. “Nothing. Just, y’know. We were just talking.” He almost drops the little froggy angel in his hands, but in the end he lowers him carefully back to the table, next to his little saucer.
Cas refuses to hop off his fingers, and clings on. Dean doesn’t know whether that noise he makes is a ribbit or a protest or an insistence of “We are going to talk about this,” but since they’re not going to talk about this, like, ever, that’s that.
“Oh… can he talk, now?” Sam asks, curiously.
“No.” Dean’s pretty sure his tone of voice isn’t inviting any more questions about the matter. He glares at the frog trying to wrap legs around Dean’s pointer finger, and waggles it. “Hey. Off. You’re dripping on my hands, man. And you’re gonna dry out if you don’t get back into your water, you’re not a toad.”
Cas can’t narrow his eyes, but he lets out a loud belch of annoyed croak before he hops back onto the table with a soft plop and and frog-marches—heh—awkwardly into his wet saucer. He scrabbles around in it for a little bit, flinging water everywhere with his back feet. Dean scowls at him.
“Sorry,” Sam says apologetically. “Didn’t mean to, uh… interrupt?”
Dean has no fucking idea what his brother is talking about, and there’s a strangely careful way to the tilt of Sam’s head that means that he doesn’t want to know. “You didn’t,” Dean says hurriedly. “You didn’t, ain’t nothin’ to… uh, anyway. What is it?”
Sam looks between them again, back and forth like he’s expecting one of them to say something. But Cas is a frog, and Dean’s Dean, so.
But then, he breaks out into a hopeful grin. “I think I found a way to break the curse!” he announces.
Yeah, already tried that, doesn’t work, Dean wants to say. He doesn’t, though. “Charlie already told us about the whole… kissing and slumber party business,” he says flatly. “That’s old news, Sammy.”
Sam frowns at him. “What? Oh.” He shakes his head. “I mean, sure, you could try that if you want, but that’s probably just allegory. And besides, the witch coven we broke up was of Chinese cultural origin, not Germanic.”
“What does that mean?” Dean demands.
Cas is suspiciously silent, flattened at the bottom of his half-empty saucer with his air sacs pulled in so tightly that there’s barely a hint of blue on either side of his cheeks.
Sam smiles broadly. “So get this…”
*_*_*_*
Dean honestly stops listening after “symbolism of yin” and “association with the moon, especially the full moon” and “actually, they’re seen as quite lucky, Dean.”
Dean doesn’t see it happen. He’s not sure anyone does. Even with an industrial-sized pot of coffee with them, he, Sam, and Charlie all kind of nod off in little spurts of momentum. And in one moment, Cas is a little yellow frog sitting on a dish, bathed in the light of the full moon and letting out little contented grunts (apparently the wind and stuff on his skin feels good) and the next, he’s… not.
He’s also naked. He’s a mile of gleaming pale skin in the moonlight, the only dark patches on him the hair on his head, the elegant box of Enochian on his ribs, and the dark fluff of hair at his—
Okay.
“Jiminy Cricket!” Charlie squeaks, covering her eyes and sounding suddenly wide awake.
Sam, because he’s Sam, immediately throws Dean’s dead guy robe over Cas. He apparently just had it handy and on him. Just in case. Be prepared, and all that shit.
Cas squints up at them as Charlie peeks warily out from behind her fingers. He doesn’t ribbit—Dean has to admit, that would probably have been as disturbing as funny—but he does have to clear his throat a few times, and pat around his neck with both hands like he’s looking for little air sacs that aren’t there.
God, it is good to see him again—to see his face.
(Dean doesn’t think about how much he’s gonna miss having a pair of tiny eyes peeking at him contentedly from somewhere around his belly as they watch YouTube videos of The Daily Show.)
“Thank you,” Cas finally says, looking around at them. His voice is even rougher than Dean’s used to hearing it, rusty and too heavy for the cool, light night air. Or maybe Dean’s just not used to hearing it anymore. It’s been weeks, after all, even with Cas right there.
Those quiet, sad blue eyes come to rest on Dean. But it’s just for a second before Cas turns to Charlie, and holds up his hands.
“Look,” he says, and touches his middle fingers to the tips of his thumbs. “Prehensile fingers!”
Charlie cracks up. After a second, so does Sam.
Dean’s not sure what’s funny at all.
*_*_*_*
Dean spends the next five hours asleep, and most of the next day cleaning. Charlie kisses him on one cheek—okay—then slaps him gently on the other cheek—okay—and says “Cheer up!” before she announces, “See you on the flip side, bitches!”
Dean doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and he just waves as her Gremlin tools away.
(Actually, it’s nearly the same color as Cas was as a frog, too.)
There’s a lot to clean, isn’t there? There’s all these tiny wet spots that two weeks of life with a frog made all over the place, some of them drying to white patches or water stains. There’s a whole aquarium to empty of mud and gunk and maybe even a couple of isopods, the vegetation wrapped up and put separately so it can be taken outside and thrown into the woods.
Dean doesn’t want to think about how he felt, the brief flash of panic, when he woke up and the bedside lamp was on on that side.
But of course, Cas wasn’t in there. No one was. No one is.
Dean scrubs harder.
And that’s how Cas finds him. Actually, mostly it’s because Cas walks in and immediately picks up a dishtowel, positioning himself to Dean’s right and poised to help. He even dressed the part, in jeans and short sleeves like he thinks they’re going hiking rather than rearranging dishes.
How the hell is Dean supposed to refuse an offer like that without looking like a total jackass?
He doesn’t, he can’t, but that doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it.
They’re working silently together for a full fifteen, twenty minutes before Cas even so much says a word. And when he does, it’s to say “Thank you. For, ah. For taking such good care of me when I was… vulnerable.”
“Yeah,” Dean grunts, and goes back to aggressively washing the mud out of the aquarium. No need for it anymore, right? It’s not like Cas is going to be hanging out in it on Dean’s bedside table while Dean’s asleep anymore. It was empty when Dean woke up, and that’s it. “No problem.”
Besides, Cas was still sort of angelic, even then. He didn’t eat, and as far as Dean can tell he didn’t pee or poop either (which is good, because Dean did not sign up with the universe to clean frog poop). They never had to test any of this out, thank God, but even as squishy as Cas looked, it’s possible that he could have just smited them out of existence if they’d accidentally stepped on him.
Now that Dean thinks about it, he’s got no idea why Cas put up with getting stuck in an aquarium in Dean’s room every night, and carried around in a saucer or in a breast pocket for a lot of the rest of the day.
But at least they’re not going to address the elephant in the room. It wasn’t a big deal, though. Dean watches the run of muddy water down the drain, taking the base of Cas’s temporary home with it. Not a big deal at all, so they don’t have to talk about it—
“You… kissed me,” Cas says.
Nope. Nope, Cas is going to jump on that elephant and ride it around, apparently.
“I mean… sort of. Not really. It wasn’t…” Dean answers uncomfortably. That’s his hill and he’s gonna die on it. “Anyway. You’d’ve done just the same.”
“Yes. I would have,” Cas answers, and there’s a softness to it that starts something warm and sweet and uncomfortably squirmy just behind Dean’s bellybutton. Cas takes a step forward, and he’d be in Dean’s personal space if Dean actually turned to look at him, but Dean’s just not gonna. He keeps washing, each of the rocks he picked out personally for Cas to have a nice spot to sit on outside the water, smooth so nothing could catch on his soft skin; the deep ceramic dish that made his little pond, and Dean used to laugh to find Cas floating and kicking around in it in the mornings, making little splish-splashes. “In fact, I would like to return the favor.”
Dean snorts and shakes his head. Everything’s clean, now, and wet, and Dean’s plaid is damp at the elbows where he got splashed. Dean spent so much time over the past few weeks with clean hands for Cas to sit on that the skin has gone cracked and white. “It didn’t work anyway.”
“That is hardly the point,” Cas says.
It wasn’t, Cas is right, but the fact that Dean did it at all is also… well, Dean doesn’t know what the fuck it is. “Well, I really am not planning to be turned into an Indian bullfrog or a frog princess or whatever anytime soon, so maybe we just save that for a rainy day, huh?” he snaps, and twists away, thoroughly uncomfortable now. “You can find some other way to break the next curse that fucks me over.”
Dean hates witches. He fucking hates them.
He doesn’t want to think about the fact that that’s probably the only kiss he’ll ever give Cas, and Cas didn’t even kiss back. Maybe he couldn’t, and maybe it would have been sort of gross if he had, but he also didn’t.
“Not… that,” Cas says, after a brief pause. “I mean… of course I would help you if you fell under the spell of a curse, but that’s not what I was referring to.”
“Yeah, okay, what, then?” Dean chances a look upwards and sidewards. Just a sharp glance, so Cas knows he’s being annoying and doesn’t think Dean’s avoiding his gaze. (Even though he really is.)
Then Cas is tilting over towards him, one hand rising to Dean’s cheek.
Dean’s frozen at the gentleness of the touch, the way Cas’s calluses skirt around the edge of his jawline in a delicious little rasp. Cas’s thumb catches at the corner of his lips and the roughness of it makes Dean quiver as Cas keeps going, moving it in a gentle stroke, stroke, stroke.
“Your lips are so soft,” Cas says in a voice that sounds like wonder. And then he’s leaning in, he’s close, he’s close, his eyes are open and watching and he’s got beautiful, thick, short eyelashes. How did Dean not notice them before?
Hell, he’s not sure he notices them now. All Dean can think is that Cas doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, because Dean’s lips aren’t soft, Cas’s are, where they’re pressed against his.
It lasts a moment. It lasts a lifetime. It’s so fucking chaste that it tingles all the way down to Dean’s toes, because he doesn’t know how something so innocent brushed against the soft bits at the inside of his lips in a way that sent his stomach to clenching.
Then Cas is pulling back with a soft sigh, warm, sweet breath on Dean’s lips. He studies them, rather than Dean’s eyes. Dean wonders what color they are. He wonders what color his face is.
“What?” Dean croaks. Because… what just happened? What the fuck happened here?
“Don’t you know, Dean?” Cas says, and his eyebrows are tilted together again. The expression on his face is softer than Dean expected, though. Happier.
“Obviously not,” Dean answers. “Uh, what’m I supposed to know?”
“Dean,” Cas sighs, like Dean’s really, really dumb. “You made me a comfortable home—one just for me, one that you kept by your bedside. You allowed me to relax on your chest, in your bed, and take in your warmth. You tried to find things that I enjoyed, that I could eat, even though I didn’t and don’t need to eat.”
As he’s listing, Dean can feel his cheeks getting redder and redder. When Cas lists them out like that, it all sounds a little fucking incriminating.
“What’s all that got to do with anything?” he mutters. There’s a tiny bit of mud left in the corner there that the sponge missed. He starts the water again and pokes at it with a finger.
And Dean wants to claim he’d have done it for anyone, and maybe he would’ve, but he didn’t do it for anyone. He did it for Cas.
But the look that Cas turns upon the side of Dean’s face is so impossibly fucking fond that Dean actually shuts his stupid trap.
“It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a human being. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to you. I enjoyed it all very much, Dean. How was I not supposed to show mating colors for you, after all that?” Cas says softly. Deeply. Deeply enough that the words rattle softly around the kitchen, or maybe that’s just inside Dean’s head.
Mating colors? For him? Wait.
“Wh-what?” Dean stammers, and puts the aquarium back down into the sink with a thunk before he drops it. “But the… Charlie thought…”
But then Dean trails off, because Charlie was very obviously wrong. Sam found the spell in a book that had to be said under a full moon—even memorized the Chinese to say it in the original language, and since Cas didn’t come out with buggy eyes or no human voice or a craving for earthworms, Dean’s pretty sure his nerdy little brother successfully out-nerded a curse.
“I’ve loved you for years, and I know you weren’t aware. I wouldn’t have wanted you to be.” Cas sighs softly, and the shaky hint of loneliness in it widens Dean’s eyes. “But then… you were taking such good care of me right from the beginning. And I was only a frog, after all, and they’re so much more obvious about these things than humans.” He shakes his head, and there’s a small, achy smile on it now. “But now you know. So… thank you, Dean. For… for the kiss,” he says softly. And he’s backing away, now, one little step at a time. “I will treasure them. Both of them.”
Both of them. Right. Yeah.
“Wait,” Dean croaks, just as Cas is about to hit the door, and probably flap away, never to be seen again, just ‘cause Dean didn’t know how to say the right thing to keep him here. He’s never known what to say to make Cas stay. That was part of the reason that maybe having him by his bedside, Cas sitting on his belly as they Netflixed together, was so easy. So good.
Well, Dean still doesn’t know. He’s got no fucking idea what to do here. Because Cas just told him that Dean took good care of him—that Cas loves him, that he wanted to kiss him, that he wanted to show fucking mating colors for him, and…
And not even Dean’s enough of an idiot to let that all go slipping through his fingers again just because he can’t find the right words.
“Didn’t work,” Dean blurts.
Cas’s eyebrows bunch inwards. “What?” he says. “What didn’t?”
“The kiss. It didn’t… work,” Dean repeats. His hand clenches on the edge of the kitchen sink. He can’t look up—he can’t turn around to look at Cas, because if he does, Dean thinks he might burst into a fireball or turn into a black hole, or… or something. Something else catastrophic. “It, uh… it wasn’t… enough.” He licks his lips and out of the corners of his eyes, watches Cas’s eyebrows relax downwards, and then rise upwards, like little balloons. Dean clears his throat. “So I think you might, uh… might have to do it again.”
“Oh,” Cas says. Then, shockingly fake-casual, “Alright, then. If you insist.”
Dean snorts, and feels the tension running out of his back like water out of the drain. “You know, maybe I prefer you as a frog. You were cute and small, and a lot less mouthy,” he complains.
But Cas is drifting back towards him in careful, slow steps, and his hand, when it comes to rest, is on Dean’s hip. It’s shockingly intimate. It’s warm, and solid, and big.
Dean wants to lean into it. He wants it to slide around his back and move up his spine and rest on the back of his neck. He wants.
And maybe, just maybe, he can… he can have. A bit. Just a little something. For himself.
For them.
“Really?” Cas says, and the tone of his voice is low and rough and happy and so knowing that Dean shivers, and watches the hairs prickle on his bare forearms. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
And maybe Cas takes pity on him, because the next kiss has lips, and tongue, and Dean can’t fuck up talking when he’s turning them around with their mouths still joined and pushing Cas back against the counter, because those little pecks? That wasn’t kissing. That was hunt and peck, mouth edition.
Dean’s gonna show him kissing.
Other things, too.
And, as it turns out, watching Netflix with Cas draped on top of him is much nicer when he’s not a frog.
~fin~
