Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dean is twenty-four. To the day. Maybe to the minute; he doesn’t know what time he was born. A girl had asked him once, a one night stand who was into astrology, but Dean had had no idea and nobody to ask.

Twenty-four on the twenty-fourth. Your champagne birthday, Dean had once heard it called. This one is more like his Miller High Life birthday; champagne ain’t exactly in the budget.

He finishes the can and, like a cat, he reaches out a hand, palm flat, and shoves it off the slightly sticky bar. It joins a field of others on the barroom floor, tossed there by other patrons throughout the evening. Every once in a while, the bartender uses a barber’s broom to sweep the cans into a pile.

Dean heaves himself up off the bar stool and walks over to the payphone on the side of the bar. It is as grimy as the rest of the bar, and he hesitates before he picks up the handset. But he can’t use his cell phone; the number will show up on the caller ID.

He lets the phone ring four times, then hangs up. If Sam was gonna answer, he would’ve answered. And if Dean had really intended to talk to him, he could have just walked over to Sam’s apartment, less than a mile away.

Dean had already driven past the apartment three times earlier that evening, thinking about parking the car and walking up to the door, never quite working up the courage. If Sam had seen the Impala, he would’ve recognized it; Dean was half-surprised his brother hadn’t looked out the window of the three-story building and come rushing down the stairs to shout at him to get out of his sight.

Then again, that would have required Sam talking to Dean, acknowledging his brother’s continued existence, something Sam apparently no longer wanted to do. The last time they had spoken was on Sam’s birthday, last May. Everything had been going fine until Dean suggested that maybe Sam could come back on the road for the summer. He had told Sam that he was hunting on his own as often as he was traveling with their father; a fact that he himself hated but that he thought might be a draw to his brother.

Instead, Sam had suggested that this might be a good opportunity for Dean to start thinking about something other than hunting, to get out from under Dad’s thumb. Dean had had a few choice words about what he thought of that idea, and what he thought of Sam suggesting it, and Sam had delivered even more choice words back. And then Dean had hung up, and there had been no more words since.

The bar Dean’s in now doesn’t seem like the sort of place Sam would go these days, so he figures he’s safe from running into his brother despite the proximity to his apartment. There are plenty of college students here, though, drawn in by the Friday night special (two buck drafts and dollar cans). At twenty-four, Dean’s older than most of them, but not yet old enough to fit in with the older dudes who are clearly just here to try and hook up with college girls, either.

He leans against the wall by the payphone and looks around the room. Most people are wrapped up in their own conversations and don’t pay him any mind, but as he scans the bar there’s one person who meets his gaze.

It’s one of the older guys, businessman type, not even trying to fit in with the jeans and t-shirted college students in his suit and trench coat. But he’s also not in the group of middle-aged men ogling a group of much younger girls doing tequila shots at the far side of the bar, so points for that. Though judging by the way he’s still staring at Dean, maybe it’s just that the girls aren’t his type.

Dean turns back to the payphone. He puts in two more quarters, dials Sam’s number again, lets it ring three times, and hangs up. He turns back to the bar. The guy is still looking at him. Dean’s pretty sure he knows what the guy wants, but he sidles over anyway, plunks himself down on the empty bar stool next to him, and glares.

“Something I can help you with, buddy?” The expression the guy’s face makes in response to Dean’s words is… too familiar, almost fond. It makes Dean angry; he’s met plenty of guys over the years who have looked at Dean like they know him, when they don’t know the first thing about him.

He sizes the guy up. Even under the suit, which Dean’s limited knowledge of any clothing that isn’t direct from Goodwill can still tell him is cheap and doesn’t fit quite right, Dean can see that the guy is built. He looks like he’s shorter than Dean, but he’s definitely got bulk on him — not heavy but dense, muscular.

But Dean still thinks he could take him in a fight. He’s taken bigger fish than some guy who’s probably one of those businessmen with no hobbies but hitting the gym and reading the Wall Street Journal and cheating on their depressed wives.

The guy still hasn’t answered Dean’s question. Dean doesn’t really care. “Whatever,” he says, punctuated by an eyeroll. He turns to the bar and holds up one finger, then thinks fuck it and holds up a second. The bartender reaches into a plastic barrel filled with ice and cans of cheap beer, pulls out a PBR and a Bud Light at random, and sets them down on the counter. Dean hands over two bucks, plus another for a tip, and the bartender walks away to serve more tequila to the giggling group on the other side of the bar.

Dean cracks one of the beers and drains it, dropping the can on the floor before he chances another look at the guy sitting next to him. The guy isn’t looking at him anymore, but quietly nursing his own beer with one elbow propped on the bar. Despite looking out of place with the rest of the bar patrons, the guy seems comfortable, and somehow that annoys Dean, too.

Maybe he’s just on edge, but that doesn’t stop him from turning his body toward the guy and squaring his shoulders, glare back on his face once more. “I asked you a question,” he says, and yeah, maybe he’s angling for a fight, but hey — it’s his birthday; he’s gotta do something to celebrate.

“My apologies,” the man replies. His tone is dripping with sarcasm, but there’s also something indulgent in it, and Dean can’t understand why. Maybe he has misjudged the guy — maybe he is just a businessman out for a drink after a long week at work, forced into humoring a twenty-four year old brat who has decided to make it his mission to piss someone off.

“Forget it, man,” Dean mutters. He picks up his second beer can and turns away again, moving to get off the bar stool and find somewhere else to sit. When he feels a hand on his shoulder, he has to quash both his fight and his flight reflexes before he looks back.

“Are you okay?” This time it’s Dean’s turn not to answer. The guy doesn’t look fond anymore; he looks worried, but that’s just as bad. Dean doesn’t need some stranger worrying about him. He doesn’t need anyone worried about him.

Dean decides he’s had enough of this song and dance. “Look,” he tells the guy, “I don’t know what you want, but you can leave me out of it. I’m not interested.” This time he does push himself off the bar stool, but instead of relocating to the other side of the room, he leaves the bar entirely.

In the cool evening air, Dean looks around. He’d left the Impala back parked at the dingy motel where he has rented a room, but he’s not quite ready to call it a night. He opens his remaining beer and looks down the street to see if there’s another bar nearby that might be worth checking out, but before he can make a decision he hears the door to the bar he has just left open behind him. And he knows, he just knows, that it isn’t some other random patron headed home.

“What the hell is this, huh?” Dean asks, “Something about ‘not interested’ you’re not getting?”

And then the guy says his name.

“Dean,” the man begins, and Dean gets it.

“Oh, lemme guess, my dad tell you to check up on me?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer, just begins to walk, knowing the guy will follow. He’s a hunter, obviously. Explains the build, and the suit that is only meant to pass muster at a brief glance, like the fake police badge or FBI creds he probably carries. Dean should’ve clocked him from the start.

And for some reason John had thought that Dean needed checking up on. That he couldn’t be trusted to go it alone, nevermind the fact that he had finished the hunt his dad had sent him on two whole days ago and had yet to receive any new case coordinates from John.

To Dean’s surprise, he hears a laugh behind him. He stops, and now he does turn to face the guy again.

“No,” the man says. “I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been told I’m bad at following orders, but even if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t follow your father’s.”

“Oh yeah? Then how do you know my name?” Dean demands.

“You left your wallet on the bar,” the man replies, holding it up. It’s definitely Dean’s: worn black leather, secondhand from his dad, containing a meager number of bills and at least three fake IDs tucked behind a real one— well, real first name, although it gives his surname as Campbell, just in case.

“Oh,” Dean says, wondering for the second time that night if he has misjudged this guy’s intentions. Maybe he’s just a normal businessman trying to do a good deed for the day and return a lost wallet, despite the wallet’s owner being an absolute weird freak toward him. “Thanks.”

The man offers the wallet out to him, almost gently, like he’s proffering a bit of food to a scared, stray dog, and Dean steps forward to take it. “It’s your birthday,” the guy says, and before Dean can ask, he explains, “I saw it on your ID. On one of them, anyway.” Dean nods. “Happy birthday,” the man says. “I should’ve bought you a beer.” He nods at the can still in Dean’s hand.

“‘S okay,” Dean says. The guy makes him feel off-kilter. He’s no longer angry about it, but he doesn’t exactly like it either. For a split second, Dean considers telling him he can buy him a beer at the next bar they pass, but he’s not sure if the man will take it as an invitation Dean doesn’t intend, or if there had been any seriousness about the man’s comment to begin with (although Dean gets the sense there had been).

Instead, Dean stuffs the wallet back in his jeans pocket, finishes the beer in his hand and tosses the empty into a nearby trash can, and says, “Well, see ya.”

“Dean,” the man says as Dean steps out into the street, and even though he knows that the guy knows his name, and how he came to find it out, the urgency in his voice startles Dean, makes him turn back once more. And as he turns, he sees the lights.

A drunk driver, it turns out, careening down the road. Dean’s had a few himself, has been drinking for most of the day, in fact, so his reaction time is just a little bit too slow. By the time he realizes that the car has blown through the red light at the end of the block, it’s too late. He stares, the proverbial deer in the literal headlights. Just before the car smashes into him he feels the sudden pressure of what feels like fingers on his forehead and he hears something that sounds like the wind.

And then everything goes dark.

Chapter Text

They land in a heap on the floor of the bunker. It’s far from graceful, but they’re safe.

And also, Cas immediately realizes, he has made a huge mistake.

Dean is on his feet in seconds, pulling a gun from the waistband of his jeans and pointing it at Cas, who is still on the floor.

“What the hell are you?” he demands angrily, cocking the pistol.

Cas gets to his feet, and Dean tracks him with the gun. Cas ignores him, trying to think. He knows he should have let it happen, shouldn’t have interfered. If he’d left Dean there, he wouldn’t even have had to erase his memory of their meeting. Dean surely wouldn’t have remembered him anyway all those years later if Cas hadn’t intervened — he hadn’t even told Dean his name, and Dean probably hadn’t gotten a good look at him between the dimly lit bar and the dark night.

Well, he’s sure going to fucking remember you now, a voice that sounds suspiciously like the man in question says in Cas’s mind.

Being hit by the car wouldn’t have killed Dean. The past is the past; and Dean obviously hadn’t been killed by a drunk driver in the year 2003. Maybe a broken leg, maybe a concussion, nothing Dean had never experienced before or since. Dean had never told him about being hit by a car on his twenty-fourth birthday, but compared to some of the other things that Dean had been through — most of them, in fact — it would barely rank on a scale of unpleasant memories.

And yet, Cas hadn’t been able to stop himself. When he saw the car coming at Dean — a Dean still years younger and more vulnerable than any version of Dean that Castiel had ever known — he hadn’t even thought twice before reaching out and transporting them both to the first place that had come to mind: his own home, in his own time.

“Hey, HEY.” Dean snaps his fingers with the hand that’s not holding the gun. “What. The hell. Are you?” he repeats.

“Dean,” Cas begins.

“How do you know my name?” Dean says, loudly. “And don’t give me some bull about my wallet. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just shoot you right now you son of a bitch.”

And because Castiel thinks it might be the best way to take some of the wind out of Dean’s sails, he simply says, “Go ahead.”

The bullet hits him square in the chest. Dean stares at him in shock as Castiel plucks the piece of metal from where it has nestled in the fabric of his clothing and drops it to the floor. Luckily, the tie it ruins is not his favorite. Unluckily, if Dean’s raised voice hadn’t been enough to draw attention, the sound of the gunshot certainly is. Cas hears footsteps thundering down the hallway toward them. It might be slightly easier if the person approaching is Sam and so, of course, it’s Dean.

When he first appears in the doorway, the expression on Dean’s face is one of worry, but it quickly shifts into confusion as his eyes dart between Cas and the younger version of himself.

Meanwhile, Castiel has thankfully had the presence of mind to take advantage of the younger Dean’s surprise and distraction. He plucks the gun out of Dean’s hand before he can shoot his older self. He unloads the bullets onto the floor and kicks them so that they go skittering under the bar cart on the side of the room.

What he doesn’t count on is Dean — the younger Dean — barrelling across the room and launching himself at his older self, producing an instantly-recognizable knife from one pocket or another. Cas should have known that taking away a single weapon wouldn’t be enough to disarm Dean Winchester.

But while the younger Dean may have more speed and probably better knees, his elder counterpart has the advantage in every other way. It only takes a moment before both Deans are on the ground, and the older one has an arm across his younger self’s windpipe, knees deftly pinning his hands to his sides.

“Easy,” he says, “Take it easy, alright?”

“What the hell are you?” the younger Dean asks. “Are you some kind of shapeshifter? And you—” he says, craning his head to look at Cas, as much as he can with Dean holding him in place, “What did you do to me? Are you—”

“One question at a time,” Dean cuts in. “And I get to go first.” Now it’s his turn to look up at Cas. “What the hell did you do, Cas?”

“Dean—” Cas begins. He’s still holding the other Dean’s empty gun, and he drops it on the table before he steps forward toward them. “You were— or, well, he— I had to—”

Before he can explain, there’s a new set of footsteps, coming from the direction of the kitchen.

“Oh my god,” Cas hears Sam say from behind him.

“Sam?” the younger Dean says. “What the—”

“Can it, kid,” Dean says. “Sam, watch him for a sec. Cas and I have to talk.”

Cas glances back in time to see Sam give him a sympathetic look as Dean stands up and lets the younger Dean scramble to his feet as well.

Dean shoves a finger into his own, younger face. “You try anything, and Sam will drop you as fast as I did,” he says. “If not faster. You know he can.” Then, to Castiel, he says, “C’mon.” And before Cas can respond, Dean stalks out of the room.

He only goes as far as the hallway, where Cas finds him leaning against the wall face first, his forehead against the concrete. Cas can tell by his shaking shoulders that his breathing is rapid and uneven, so he puts a hand on the small of Dean’s back and presses the heel of his palm slowly up Dean’s spine, over one bump of vertebrae at a time. By the time he reaches Dean’s neck, Dean’s breathing has evened out a little bit, and Dean rolls his face so that it’s his cheek pressed to the wall and he can look at Cas.

“What the hell did you do, Cas?” he asks. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Cas says. He chances a hand on the side of Dean’s face, and Dean leans into it, closing his eyes as the last vestiges of adrenaline drain away. “I suppose I was thinking about our conversation the other night. You were saying that you wished I could go back and check on you when you were younger.”

“Man,” Dean says. He squeezes his eyes even more tightly closed and passes a hand over them. “Pretty sure I also said I wished you could go back and teach me that sucking dick can be fun when you’re not doing it for quick cash. Maybe don’t take me so seriously.” He gives a watery laugh, but there’s still a note of real fear in his voice that sends a pain through Cas’s chest.

“Dean,” Cas tells him. “Once I have a chance to recharge, I’ll bring him— you— him, back to his own time. Everything will be okay.”

“Why’d you even bring him here in the first place?” Dean asks, sounding more curious than angry now. When Cas explains about the drunk driver, Dean asks, “What if I was supposed to get hit by that car? What if everything’s gonna be screwed up now?”

“It could have killed you, Dean, I couldn’t just leave you,” Castiel argues. “And everything still seems the same.”

“I obviously didn’t die, or I wouldn’t be here,” Dean says. He grabs at the lapels of Cas’s coat with both hands and pulls him in closer, like he’s afraid Castiel will suddenly disappear on him. There is precedent, Cas thinks. “And, hell, it could just be taking a minute for the butterfly’s wings to flap hard enough to cause the hurricane.”

“Dean,” Cas says. He puts his hands over Dean’s and squeezes them gently. “I will bring him back. And I will make sure everything is okay. I swear.” He lifts one of Dean’s hands to his mouth and kisses the knuckles. Dean nods and then pulls Cas’s hand to his own lips to echo the motion.

When Dean speaks again, there’s a bit more bravado in his voice. “Alright, well, you probably need a few hours to juice back up, so what do we do with the kid in the meantime? How old is he, anyway, like seventeen?”

“He’s twenty-four,” Castiel says. “It was your twenty-fourth birthday.” He hears Sam come up behind him and clear his throat to interrupt their conversation.

“Hey, guys?” Sam says. “Does someone wanna fill me in here?”

Dean looks at his brother over Cas’s shoulder and says, “Right here? You see, Sammy, me and the angel here are—”

“I’m serious, Dean,” Sam says, sounding exasperated. “Does someone wanna fill me in on why there’s a babyface version of you that’s hissier than a feral kitten in the other room?”

“Cas’s circus, Cas’s monkeys,” Dean says. “He can tell you what’s goin’ on. I’ll go talk to the kid.” Before Cas can remind him that the younger version of Dean is twenty-four, not a child, Dean has gone back down the hall, leaving Castiel and Sam alone. Cas gives Sam a brief rundown of how they ended up in the current state of events.

When Castiel has finished the story, Sam sighs and says, “Guess I can’t blame you. I saw Dean get hit by a car once— your brother’s fault, long story— but I didn’t exactly handle it well either.” Then he glances down the hall and says, “We should probably get back in there before they try to murder each other.”

In the main room of the bunker, the two Deans have not yet resorted to violence, but it does look like it could erupt at any moment. The younger Dean seems like he’s gunning for a fight, and his older counterpart doesn’t seem like he intends to give it to him, which in turn makes the younger one even madder.

“So Sammy says you’re telling the truth, that you’re me,” the younger Dean says. Castiel is heartened that he seems to believe that Sam, at least, is who he says he is; that’s a step in the right direction. He figures that any version of Dean would know any version of his brother anywhere. “But how do I know you’re not some creature pretendin’ to be me to get to him?”

“Guess you don’t,” Dean says cheerfully, which only seems to make his younger version angrier.

“Dean,” Sam says warningly.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Look, you can do any test you want to prove it’s me. Not that you even know how to test for half the things I could be, yet, but go ahead with what you can. Or hey, we can spill some secrets, see if our memories match up. How ‘bout it? I’ll share with the class about Rhonda Hurley, and you can tell all about the time we went to that party in the woods with Bri—”

“Okay,” the younger Dean interrupts. Castiel notices that the two iterations of Dean will barely look at each other, although the younger one can hardly take his eyes off of Sam, and keeps sneaking curious glances at Cas. “Okay. Let’s say I believe you. You still haven’t explained what he is,” he says, pointing at Castiel. “Or how he brought me here.”

“My name is Cast— Cas,” Cas tells him. “I’m—” he looks at Dean — his Dean — for help, not sure what he should say.

“He’s a friend,” Dean says. “With some powers. Long story. But long story short, he’s gonna take you back. And we’re all gonna forget any of this ever happened. You, literally.”

“Great, can’t wait,” the younger version says. “Let’s go.”

“We can’t,” Cas says. “Not yet. Time travel is difficult. It—” he pauses to choose his words carefully. “It takes a lot of energy. I need to rest before I can do it again.”

“Right,” young Dean says. “So what do we do ‘til then? Play bridge? Read the classifieds? What do you old folks do?”

Sam shakes his head and laughs a little. “Man,” he says to Dean, “I thought you were annoying that time you got turned back into a teenager. I forgot you got even worse in your twenties.”

“Hey, I’m a delight,” Dean replies indignantly, but he laughs with Sam. Then he tells his younger self, “Another long story, but we live here.”

“We live here?” young Dean echoes. His older counterpart gives him a look, as if expecting a snarky response, but Cas knows better. He remembers when the Winchesters first moved into the Men of Letters bunker, how quickly Dean made it his home. “We,” young Dean says again, then, to confirm, “You and Sam?”

“And Cas,” Dean tells him.

“Really?” the younger Dean asks. Cas nods. “Huh.” He must be starting to get slightly more comfortable despite the oddness of the situation he’s in, Cas thinks, because the next thing he does is turn on the charm, offer Cas a big smile and say, “Didn’t you say you owed me a beer?”

“I suppose I did,” Cas says, as the older Dean looks at him with eyebrows raised. “Are you looking to collect?”

“Wouldn’t say no,” comes the response. Cas thinks they could probably all use a drink, so he goes off to find some beers in the kitchen.

Chapter Text

The bottle of beer that Cas brings back for him doesn’t do much to help him wrap his head around all this, but Dean drinks it anyway. He wants to know what this Cas guy’s deal is; he must be important, with his powers and the fact that his older self and Sam let him live with them.

But apparently he’s got all night to find out what Cas’s deal is, while the guy’s magic time traveling mojo recharges, or whatever, so that’ll come in time. In the meantime, the one thing at the forefront of Dean’s mind is Sam.

Dean wants to know everything about his brother in this future present. They’re obviously on good terms these days, if they’re living together in this… wherever it is. And Sam is obviously hunting again, he must be. How did that happen? How did they become a family again? Are they a family again? Dean and Sam might be good these days but that doesn’t mean Sam and Dad are. How did Sam end up back in the life? What happened to Stanford? And what the hell happened to his hair?

“What the hell happened to your hair?” Dean asks. Sam only laughs and runs a hand through the length of it. Dean looks to his older self for backup.

“Believe me, I’ve been askin’ for years,” the older man says. “Unfortunately, Eileen likes it, so screw my opinion, right?” He reaches for Sam’s hair as if to ruffle it, and Sam ducks away,

“Eileen?” Dean asks. Now he’s really intrigued. “Sammy, did you finally get yourself a girlfriend?” He feels a little weird calling this version of his brother Sammy, when he’s got about five inches and probably forty pounds of muscle on him, but even if Sam’s technically older right now, he’s still Dean’s little brother, always will be.

Sam rolls his eyes, more at the other Dean than at him, the same sort of indulgent humoring that Cas had shown him back in the bar. Dean had hated it from Cas, a stranger, but with Sam the prickle of annoyance is tempered with the joyful knowledge that he and Sam are rolling their eyes at each other in sync in reference to shared amusement.

He decides to slake his curiosity further, although he thinks there’ll probably be a point where they stop telling him anything for fear of screwing with the timelines, or whatever. “And what about me?” Dean asks. “I got a girl, too? Or am I still sowing my wild oats?” He winks at his older self, expecting a wink or maybe an eye roll back, but instead of sharing a glance with him, the other Dean looks at Sam again instead, and then at Cas, who does meet Dean’s gaze, but his expression is inscrutable.

“Oh, hey,” Sam says. He checks his watch. “It’s already late, and I’m getting pretty hungry. Anyone else want some dinner?” It’s an obvious subject change, and Dean wonders why.

“There’s a lasagna in the fridge,” the older Dean reports. “I put it together a while ago. Give it 45 minutes at 350.” Sam nods, and disappears from the room and down the hall, presumably toward the kitchen.

Dean pictures his older self making the lasagna earlier in the day, layering the sauce, meat, and cheese carefully in a tray, maybe one that’s not even from Goodwill. Dean doesn’t know what comes between where he is now, 24 years old and lurking outside Sam’s apartment, knowing his brother doesn’t wanna see him, and where he is in the future, making dinner for himself and his brother in a house (a house? a fortress? whatever it is) they can call their own. But considering he’d always figured he’d be worm food before thirty, he can’t exactly complain.

Sam comes back a few minutes later with more beers for all of them and the older Dean suggests they all go to the kitchen until the food is ready.

“I don’t know, Dean,” Sam says, “is that a good idea? Him seeing more of the bunker? You, uh, this you—” he gestures at Dean, “is sort of on a need-to-know basis while he’s here, isn’t he?”

Older Dean shrugs. “Does it really matter? Cas is just gonna make him forget it all anyway.”

“Hey, wait,” Dean protests. His older self had said something about Dean forgetting all this before, but Dean hadn’t really registered exactly what he meant until now. “What do you mean, forgetting? Like mind-wiping? Who says anyone’s gonna get to go messing around in my head?”

“Me,” the other Dean tells him.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see,” Dean says. He looks over at Cas. Figures their buddy who can time travel is also their buddy who can steal people’s memories. Who — or what — is this guy anyway? He’s obviously not human. “Hey, what actually is this place? Show me around.” Maybe he won’t get to keep these memories in the end, but just in case he does, he wants to know what he’s in for.

His older self looks over at Cas, who shrugs. “Go ahead,” Cas says. “It shouldn’t make a difference.”

“Alright, kid.” He gestures for Dean to stand up. We’ve got half an hour or so to kill before dinner, just enough time for the grand tour. Sam, you coming?”

“To be shown around the place I’ve lived for like ten years?” Sam asks. “Thanks, but pass.”

“To enjoy the pleasure of your brother’s company,” the older Dean replies. “Twice as much as usual, even. But suit yourself. Cas?”

Cas looks between the two of them. “Why not,” he says, and Dean watches as a grin spreads over an older version of his own face.

“Figured,” the other Dean says. “Two of me is probably a recipe for irritation to Sam. To you?” He raises an eyebrow and makes a face that Dean can’t interpret but that Cas seems to understand, although he rolls his eyes at whatever it’s supposed to mean. Before Cas can say anything, his older self continues, “Alright, let’s roll. Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle, et cetera, et cetera.”

Dean follows himself down the hallway, Cas trailing closely behind them. “So where are we?” Dean asks. “What is this place?” He doesn’t really understand the whole answer — older Dean doesn’t explain what the Men of Letters are, or how exactly he and Sam ended up living here — but he gets that they’re in Kansas, that they’re in some sort of underground bunker, and that he and Sam have lived there since 2013.

2013. It’s nearly a decade in the past for them, but ten years into Dean’s own future. Ten years, he thinks, until he’ll have a home.

The other Dean doesn’t say how long Cas has been living there, when he moved in or why, and Dean doesn’t ask. His older self shows him around the place, and it’s alright, if sorta industrial. Dean — he — Dean — has a record player in his bedroom, and a bookshelf, and a couple pictures of Mom, so that’s nice. He also has a picture of Cas wearing a cowboy hat, which is a little weird, but his older self just chuckles when he asks about it, and Cas does look pretty good in it, so maybe that’s all there is to it.

They reach the kitchen just as the lasagna is ready. Sam pulls it out of the oven and dishes it out onto plates as they sit down at the table. Only three plates, Dean notices. He comments on it, and older Dean says, “Cas doesn’t eat.”

“Like, at all? Ever?” Dean asks. He seriously needs some answers. “So, what are you, exactly?” He asks Cas. Before the man can answer, Dean studies him and tries to guess. “Werewolf?”

“No,” Cas tells him.

“What werewolf do you know that can time travel?” Dean’s elder counterpart asks with a scoff.

Okay, duh, good point, Dean thinks, feeling childish.

Cas glances at the older Dean before returning his gaze to Dean and saying, “I’m an angel.”

Dean can’t help it; he laughs out loud. “Yeah? Pull the other one,” he says.

“It’s true,” his older self says.

Dean looks at him, and he’s not cracking a smile, but this has to be a joke, right? “Nice to know I’m gonna go senile in my old age,” he says, which makes Sam laugh.

“I never realized how much Claire is like how you were when you were younger, even if she’s not half as annoying as you were,” Sam says, but before Dean can ask who Claire is, Sam adds, “It’s true, Dean. Cas really is an angel.”

That throws Dean for a loop. He could believe that he goes nuts by forty, he’s already had enough concussions and knocks in the head to make that plausible, and who knows how many more are to come in the next couple of decades. But Sam? If Sam’s saying it, it must be real.

“An angel,” Dean says slowly. “Like… wings, harp…”

“I don’t have a harp,” Cas says immediately, with the long-suffering air of someone who has made this exact distinction many times before.

“Okay,” Dean says. “No harp. Cool. What the hell. Why not?” He asks the obvious next question, how they came to know an angel and why said angel is now living with them in the bunker, but the answer he gets from his older self is a sharp shake of the head.

“Like Sam said, need to know basis,” the other Dean tells him. “Eat your lasagna.”

And because Dean can’t remember the last time he had a home cooked meal, he doesn’t need telling twice.

Chapter Text

After dinner, Dean clears away the dishes and covers the rest of the lasagna with tin foil to put it in the fridge. He offers his younger self another beer, and isn’t surprised when he accepts. Sam, however, turns him down.

“Think I’m going to call Eileen before bed. You guys need anything from me before I go?” Sam asks with a glance over at the other Dean.

“Nah,” Dean tells him. “Me and Cas got it handled. Tell Eileen I said hi. And tell her to stop cheating at Wordle. Nobody gets it in two guesses that often.”

“Sure,” Sam says, “Priorities. Cas, what time do you think you’re gonna—” he nods in the younger Dean’s direction, “in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Cas says, “as soon as I have the strength for it. Do you want me to wake you before we go?”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind,” Sam says, and Cas nods. “Okay, night, Cas. Dean… uh, Deans.”

“Night, Sam,” Dean says.

“Night, Sammy,” his younger self echoes quietly.

Dean’s not certain what to do next. He’d kind of like to get some shut-eye himself, but he’s sure as hell not going to let a younger version of himself have free reign of the bunker while he sleeps.

As though reading his mind, Cas says, “You can go to sleep, Dean. I’ll watch over him.”

The younger Dean opens his mouth, probably to protest that he doesn’t need anyone to watch over him, then shuts it again. Dean wonders if he’s thinking about Mom.

“Thanks, Cas.” Dean stands up and walks to the doorway, then turns back, looks at his younger self. He’s wearing about five layers of flannels and jackets, and even though Dean knows he used to dress like that for years, he knows it’s not a comfortable way to spend a night. “C’mon,” he says, “you can come with me for a minute, I’ll get you some pajamas.”

The younger Dean looks at him skeptically, but gets up to follow him. Dean looks past him to Cas, still sitting at the kitchen table.

“Goodnight, Dean,” Cas says.

“Night, Cas,” Dean replies. Then, “Love you.” Cas hadn’t said it, and Dean’s sure it’s because he doesn’t know if Dean wants his younger self to know. But fuck it, it’s the truth. The kid’ll figure it out eventually, anyway. If not before they send him back to his own time, then many years in the future. And Dean’s not going to hide it. Not from his own self. Not anymore.

“I love you, too,” Cas replies, and with that Dean turns away from him, taking brief note of his younger self’s wide eyes as he gestures for him to follow down the hallway and to the bedroom.

Dean digs through his drawers for some comfortable clothes for his younger self to wear, waiting for him to say something. Eventually, as Dean turns back to him with some sweatpants with a hole in the knee and a faded Judas Priest t-shirt, he finds his voice.

“Wait, so, you and Cas, you’re— are you—?” he nods meaningfully in lieu of finishing his question.

Dean shrugs, and then nods. “Looks like,” he agrees.

“Uh,” his younger self says, and Dean enjoys watching him short-circuit for a moment. Then the next words come out of his mouth. “So what, I’m, like, a homo now?”

“Hey, watch your damn mouth,” Dean says, ‘cause if there’s one person he’s not gonna take shit from it’s his own twenty-four year old self. Especially since Dean knows that he has hooked up with, at minimum, two guys by that point in his life, even if each time he’d come up with excuses in the aftermath to explain to them and to himself that it didn’t actually mean anything.

“‘Watch your damn mouth,’” his younger self mimics insolently. “What’re you, my dad?”

“Nah,” Dean says, just as coolly. “If I was Dad I’d sayin’ it with you just as loud and twice as mean. But he’s not here, and I am, so watch your mouth. And hell,” he adds, a lazy grin playing across his face. “If I am, means you are too, sunshine. Get used to it.”

“But, you— what did Dad—” his younger self seems to be trying to process too many emotions at once. It’s something Dean can relate to, but as far as he’s concerned, twenty-four-year-old Dean can have a breakdown over this on his own time.

“Hey, you know what? Listen to me,” Dean hisses. “If Dad was here, I wouldn’t give a shit what he thought. I’m done with that. But guess what, in my time? He ain’t here. Dad’s dead. Sorry to break it to ya like this, kid, but he is.”

His annoyance threatens to bubble over into anger as he continues, “But you know who isn’t dead? Cas. And I know that don’t mean much to you right now, Cas being alive. But it’s a big deal. It’s—” he breaks off, momentarily overwhelmed, and thankfully his younger self is smart enough not to try to say anything in the pause. “It’s a big fuckin’ deal,” he says.

The words come out barely more than a whisper, but they seem to hit Dean’s past self harder than anything else he has said. He looks appropriately cowed, and Dean immediately feels a little bit guilty. Yeah, he — the younger him — needs to get over himself and his hangups, but Dean knows just how long and how hard he had worked to do that, almost all of it when he was much older than twenty-four, and the kid’s got enough on his plate anyway without Dean lumping him with an identity crisis on top of it.

Plus, how is his younger self supposed to understand what it’s like to love someone like Cas, to be loved by someone like Cas? What does his younger self know about love at all?

The years blur together sometimes, but Dean is pretty sure he had already met Cassie Robinson by twenty-four, and she had been amazing, their brief relationship something that had left him awed by its possibilities, shattered when she had ended it. He had definitely met Lisa by then, although what they’d had back then wasn’t anything like love; that hadn’t come ‘til later.

But Cas… by Dean’s count, it’ll still be another six years (or forty-six, counting Hell, which Dean tries not to but can’t avoid) before this Dean even meets him, and then still more years before he realizes (or admits to himself) that the way he feels about Cas isn’t just friendly or familial. Still more years than that before he lets himself even entertain the possibility that angels could feel the way humans do, that Cas could feel the way that Dean does, about Dean.

And then when he’d finally known for sure, straight from the horse’s mouth, before Dean could even say a word in reply, it had suddenly been too late.

And then, almost a year later, it hadn’t been.

But that’s still twenty years in the future for this version of himself; how could Dean possibly expect him to understand, even if he could explain?

“Hello? Earth to, uh, me?” Young Dean’s words snap him out of his thoughts. He hadn’t even noticed that his younger self was talking.

“Yeah?” Dean asks, trying not to sound too sharp about it.

“Just… sorry,” his younger self says.

“Okay,” Dean says.

“I didn’t mean…” he stops and then starts again. “I mean, I’m cool with it. You just surprised me.” There’s another long pause, and then he says, very slowly, very deliberately, “Cas… seems… nice.”

Dean almost laughs — is this how constipated he used to act about this stuff? But he holds it in, to give the kid credit for trying.

“Is Sam cool with it?” young Dean asks, then. His tone sounds so nervous, and so hopeful, that suddenly Dean doesn’t feel like laughing.

He thinks about how Sam had reacted when they’d finally, finally found a way to yank Cas back out of the Empty — how, when Cas was standing there, still covered in bits of thick, slimy black ooze, and Dean had decided that it really wasn’t fair to make him wait any longer and that he couldn’t wait any longer either, and he’d kissed him. And how Sam had looked shocked, but how after that, as soon as Sam was finished hugging Cas in greeting, he’d hugged Dean, too, the kind of hug usually reserved for when one or both of them was dying, and then he’d pulled away and said, ‘Sorry, I’ll let you get back to what you were doing’ with a look on his face that said they were going to have a big, awkward, sappy talk about their feelings, later.

And Dean says, “Yeah, Sam’s cool with it.”

“Okay,” his younger self says. He sounds nonchalant, but Dean doesn’t miss the way his shoulders lose some of their tension.

Neither of them speaks again for a while, until finally, quietly, young Dean says as much as asks, “So, Dad’s dead.”

“Yeah,” Dean tells him. “Sorry.”

His younger self clenches his jaw and blinks his eyes a few times. “How did he—”

“Heart attack,” Dean answers. It’s not entirely a lie. He knows that by the end of tomorrow, young Dean’s memories will all be wiped clean of this little expedition to the future, so it doesn’t really matter if he knows the truth, but Dean figures he can spare him that, at least.

The other Dean’s voice is even quieter when he asks the next question. “Did he get the thing that killed Mom?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “He got it.” That’s close enough to the truth, too. Young Dean nods. Dean hands him the pajamas. “You wanna sleep?” he asks, but the other Dean shakes his head. “Alright, well, Cas’s probably in the library. Go find him, and don’t go wandering. We’ll get this shit sorted out in the morning.” The kid nods again and, surprisingly, obeys.

Chapter Text

Dean — the younger Dean — finds Cas in the library. He’s reading The Martian Chronicles, a recommendation from Dean — the older Dean — but he sets it down as soon as Dean walks in. There’s no point in pretending he’s anything but fascinated by this younger version of the man he loves, or that anything else could hold his attention tonight.

And it seems as though Dean is equally intrigued by him, and doesn't even try to hide it. Dean pulls a chair away from the table and spins it around, sits down on it backwards and props his elbows up on the back and stares.

Cas figures that Dean probably has two questions, and he’s curious which one he’s going to ask first. Which one is stranger to this version of Dean? Which one is more pressing?

“You’re really an angel?” Dean finally says, and Cas can’t decide if he’s surprised that this is the question that wins out. He supposes that, even with all the creatures and beings that Dean at twenty-four has already encountered in his life, angels are pretty far removed from the usual realm of vampires and rugarus.

“I am,” Cas confirms.

“Prove it,” Dean replies.

“I’ve already transported you twenty years into your future,” Cas says. He doesn’t try to hide the amusement in his voice, even though — or perhaps because — he knows it will annoy Dean. “What other proof could I offer, Dean?”

Dean thinks for a minute and eventually shrugs. Instead of answering, he says, “You know, when I was a kid, my mom used to say that angels were watching over me, every night before I went to sleep. But I don’t think she meant it literally.”

“Unlikely,” Cas agrees, assuming that this means that Dean has decided to take him at his word. He supposes the older Dean, his Dean, came around pretty quick as well, although Cas did first have to give him the briefest glimpse at his wings to seal the deal.

He’s glad he doesn’t have to do that now to make this Dean believe. He knows that they still work, better than they did before he went to the Empty, even, but he has no idea the state they’re in these days. He hasn’t allowed himself to evaluate them in some time, focusing more on settling into his human form on the knowledge that it’s almost certain, now that he has bid farewell to Heaven for the foreseeable future, that he will eventually have no other.

“You already knew that,” Dean says. “He probably told you all my secrets, huh? Since you and him… you and me…”

“Does it bother you?” Cas asks gently. He knows that it doesn’t, knows from enough conversations with Dean in recent months that an attraction to men (or close-enough-to-male beings, in Castiel’s case) had always been part of him, something he was aware of, even when external or internal forces tried and often succeeded in keeping him from exploring it.

But he also knows that it took a long time for Dean to get to the point of comfortableness in being open about this, and that that comfort is still mostly reserved for his nearest and dearest. Cas certainly qualifies on both counts with the Dean of the present, but to this past, younger Dean, he is mostly a stranger who had interrupted Dean’s evening in the strangest possible way.

“No,” Dean says, and he sounds like he means it. “It’s just… I’m not really a relationship kind of guy, y’know? And yeah, maybe I’m gonna go soft in my old age, if I’m actually gonna make it to my old age. But I guess I just thought maybe if I got really lucky, I’d end up with a hot chick.” He laughs, a laugh that Cas recognizes easily as more performance than truth.

“Well, I apologize for not being a ‘hot chick,’” Cas tells him. He gets up from his chair and goes over to the bar cart on the side of the room, takes two tumblers and a bottle of whiskey and brings them back over to where Dean is sitting. There, he pours them each a generous glass and passes one to Dean before he sits back down. “Had I known what the trajectory of our relationship could be, I might have given my physical appearance some more thought.”

“No, man, you look good,” Dean protests, “that’s not what I meant. I just…” He pauses and takes a gulp of the whiskey before he continues. “If I had to make a bet on where I’d be in twenty years, long-term relationship with another dude wouldn’t have been the odds-on favorite over six feet under.”

“I know,” Cas says. His heart aches for him. He wishes he could tell Dean everything, not to cause him pain but to let him know that despite all that he will go through, he will come out the other side, and remain a better man than anyone Castiel has ever known.

But the story of Dean’s life, and by extension, Castiel’s life, is too much for the one night they have to share. And even if they had the time, Cas doesn’t trust himself to tell it objectively enough for Dean to really understand.

They’re quiet for a while. Castiel refills Dean’s whiskey, and watches him as he sips his own. Dean mostly looks down at his glass, glancing up at Cas occasionally but quickly looking away.

Then Dean looks up again, and meets Cas’s eyes, and from the hard set of his jaw Cas thinks that whatever question Dean asks next will likely be a difficult one.

But Dean drinks the rest of his whiskey, sets the glass down on the table, and says, “You love me?”

It’s the easiest question in the world for Cas to answer. “Yes, I do,” he says.

He recalls the Dean of his own timeline asking the same question. Dean and Sam had rescued Castiel from the Empty, and Dean had kissed him, and then Dean had pulled back with a wide-eyed expression somewhere between awe and incredulity and asked, you love me? And, as ardently as Cas says it now to this younger Dean, Cas had said Dean, yes, I do.

Dean hadn’t said it back until some time later, and the younger Dean doesn’t say it back now, nor would Cas expect him to, but Cas thinks that saying it to Dean, any version of him, will never get old — not if they have another fifty years or more on Earth together and not in the eternity of however Jack has transformed Heaven that will come after.

The weight of this is yet another thing that Cas knows would be unfair to burden this Dean with. Even if Castiel will be removing all traces of this night from Dean’s memory, he feels that somehow, Dean will remember it subliminally. And as tempting as it is for Castiel to let a reminder of his love linger on in the depths of Dean’s subconscious, it would feel like a betrayal to Dean’s older self, who is so concerned about not doing anything that would risk what he has now. Castiel understands this, and he knows he has already tempted fate enough.

And yet, he cannot resist answering Dean’s question again. “I love you, Dean. I won’t make you uncomfortable by telling you how much, but I do. And I am grateful to have your love as well, in your future.”

“I love you,” Dean says. It’s not reciprocation, but an assessment of his older self’s feelings.

Cas nods, although he knows Dean doesn’t need confirmation; he’d heard his counterpart say it before he’d headed off to bed.

As if Cas thinking of bed causes Dean to think of it, too, he yawns. “So what’s a guy gotta do to get some shut-eye around here?” he asks.

“There are plenty of rooms,” Cas tells him. “I don’t know which beds are made up, but—”

“Don’t sweat it,” Dean says. He slumps theatrically back into the armchair he’s sitting in and hooks his ankle around the leg of another chair to pull it closer and rest his feet on it. “This’ll do.”

If it were the older Dean acting like this, Cas would have argued with him, but for this younger version, he lets it slide. He does get up and turn the light off, however, before he settles back down in his own armchair.

“Can you see in the dark?” Dean asks.

“Yes,” Cas tells him.

“Are you just going to watch me sleep all night?”

“I might read a book,” Cas says.

“I’m not going to run away or anything,” Dean says. “If you wanna, you know, go to him.”

“I’m going to stay here,” Cas tells him.

“Okay,” Dean says. “Hey, sorry for shooting you earlier.”

“That’s alright,” Cas replies. “You stabbed me the first time we met.”

“Yeah?” Dean asks. “Well, sorry about that too, I guess.” There’s a long silence, although Cas can tell that he’s still awake. Eventually Cas picks up his book again, but just as he opens it Dean speaks once more. “It wouldn’t make me uncomfortable,” he says.

“Sorry?” Cas asks. He closes the book again.

“Nevermind,” Dean says quickly. “G’night.”

“Sleep well, Dean,” Cas says. He listens to Dean’s breathing until he drifts off, then picks up his book again.

Chapter Text

A few hours later, Dean wakes up when Cas shakes him gently by the shoulder. “I think it’s time to go,” Cas says, and Dean gets up from the armchair and follows him down the hall to wake up his older self, and Sam.

“Do you want some breakfast?” Sam asks him after Dean has knocked on his bedroom door, a part of him still amazed at the fact that he and his brother grow up to live so near each other, only a few doors down the hall.

But before Dean can answer, his older counterpart comes out of his own bedroom, hair shower-damp and toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and says, “No.” He turns to Dean and says, “Believe me, you don’t. Time travel seriously backs up the pipes, better to do it on an empty stomach.”

“Gross,” Dean says.

“Mmhmm,” the older Dean agrees. Turning to Cas, he says, “You sure you’re up for it? We can kill a few hours if you need some more time to recharge.”

Now that Dean knows what’s going on between them, he’s not sure how he missed it at first. The way he — his older self — leans in toward Cas, one hand gentle on his arm. The way Cas gravitates toward him in return.

“I’m ready,” Cas says. He turns away from the older Dean and towards Dean, reaching out a hand—

“Wait.” Cas and Dean both turn back. “I’m coming too.”

“Dean,” Cas begins.

“I’m coming with, Cas,” older Dean says.

“If you come, I’ll need more time to rest again before I can take us back,” Cas argues.

“Fine, good,” older Dean replies. “I’ll use that time to make sure things haven’t changed.”

“You being there will make it more likely that things will change,” Cas says stubbornly. “We’re going to be dodging paradoxes all day, and then I’ll have to erase your—” he nods in Dean’s direction, “memories of the entire day. You don’t think that big blank space will seem suspicious?”

“Got plenty of days I don’t remember,” older Dean says. “Mia says it’s probably from PTSD or whatever—”

“What PTSD? Who’s Mia?” Dean interrupts, but his older self waves him off.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. When he continues, his voice sounds slightly strained, “Cas, I gotta make sure— I can’t risk—”

“Okay,” Cas says. “All three of us will go. Unless…?” he glances at Sam.

“I’m good,” Sam says. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

Cas nods. “In that case.” This time he reaches out both hands, one toward each of them. Dean feels the angel’s fingertips press against his forehead and he squeezes his eyes shut.

When Dean opens his eyes again, he’s standing next to the Impala in the motel parking lot. His older self immediately reaches out to brush a hand over her hood.

“Lookin’ good, Baby,” he says. “Lookin’ young.” Then he turns away from the car just in time to catch Cas as he stumbles, grabbing him by the arm and around the waist to keep him from falling to his knees on the pavement. “You’re okay,” he says, easing Cas down gently, “Alright, sweetheart, you’re okay.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Dean asks, as Cas leans woozily against the Impala.

“Hang on,” the older Dean says. “You got a room in there?” he jerks a thumb in the direction of the motel. Dean nods. “Key,” older Dean says, and Dean digs it out of his pocket and gives it to him. “You don’t move until I get back.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean answers sarcastically. His older counterpart grits his teeth at that, but he’s obviously way more focused on Cas than on the other Dean. Slinging one of Cas’s arms gently around his shoulders, Dean helps him walk across the parking lot and into the motel. Dean thinks about running, about getting in the Impala and driving off, but where would he go? It’ll only be a matter of time before Cas is back on his feet, and he doubts he’d stand a chance against an angel and his own self plus twenty years more hunting experience.

When he returns a few minutes later, his older self finally answers Dean’s question. “He’s not fully an angel anymore. Stuff like this, it takes a lot out of him.”

“Why?” Dean asks. “What happened?”

“Long story.”

“Short version, then,” Dean says.

His older self rolls his eyes, but relents. “After we got Cas back—” from where, he doesn’t elaborate— “he could’ve gone back up to Heaven. Since he chose not to, he’s no longer connected. His powers have started to fade again; he’s been away too long, or whatever. He’ll never be completely human, thank fuck for that, but he’s sort of in between— it’s complicated.”

“Oh,” Dean says. He’s trying to process why Cas, an actual angel, decided not to go home to Heaven. The implication is clear: he’d done it for Dean. Why would an angel choose Dean over Heaven? Choose him over Heaven?

Love, obviously; Cas had told him outright when they were talking in the bunker the night before.

But that’s still much too much for Dean to fathom.

“C’mon,” his older self says, breaking him out of his musings. “Cas’ll call when he’s up. Let’s find someplace crappy where they won’t notice we look exactly fuckin’ alike and get something to eat.”

Dean’s not going to argue with that. They end up back on the street where Dean and Cas had met the night before, and it turns out that one of the seedy dive bars also moonlights (daylights?) as a seedy diner. The woman behind the counter doesn’t even glance at them as she shoves a couple of menus their way and points to an empty booth (every booth is empty).

Dean orders a Denver omelet and hash browns and hopes that his older self has more cash in his wallet than he does. The waitress pours them both mugs of bitter black coffee, still hardly looking at them as she does.

“So how are you even gonna know if something’s changed?” Dean asks. “You got experience with this or something?”

His older self shrugs. “Kinda. And I dunno,” he admits, “But I’m not gonna take any chances. If I get back and find out you’ve screwed things up—”

“Hey, how would that be my fault?” Dean protests. “I didn’t ask your boyfriend to chuck me in his holy DeLorean.” And even though it’s his own mouth the word comes out of, it still catches him off guard. Dean has a boyfriend. He’s got a boyfriend, or he will, someday.

Maybe Cas isn’t even the first boyfriend he’s had. He wonders if there have been others, and how many, and if they’ve all been handsome like Cas.

Before Dean can work up the courage to ask his older self any of this, the waitress drops their food down to them and refills their sludgy coffee, and they stay quiet for a while as they eat.

Older Dean keeps checking his phone, a flat rectangle that Dean knows must be how phones look in 2022 or 2023 or whichever year exactly Cas had taken him to, but which still looks more like something out of Star Trek than it does a phone.

Cas is still sleeping off his time travel hangover, apparently, because the older Dean looks at the phone screen and then drops it back onto the table. Dean hopes that the angel is okay; he’d feel pretty shitty if he’d fucked up his future self’s good thing by being too stupid to look both ways before crossing the street.

By the time they’ve finished breakfast, Cas still hasn’t called, so Dean suggests they go back to the motel and check on him. Like the waitress at the diner, the guy at the front desk at the hotel doesn’t even look up when they walk in, and they go up to the second floor, to the room Dean had rented for three nights, two nights ago. Dean thinks that he’ll have somewhere to sleep tonight, assuming his older self and Cas have turned him loose by then, but then he’ll either have to find some suckers to hustle at pool or poker or he’ll be back sleeping in the car again.

Cas is sprawled out on Dean’s bed, eyes closed and breathing slow. Dean watches as his older self walks over to him and crouches down beside the bed to get closer to him. He strokes a hand gently over Cas’s face, brushing some of his hair away from his forehead. Cas blinks his eyes open to look at him.

“Hey buddy,” the older Dean says softly, “How’re you doin’?”

Cas props himself up on his elbows. “Somewhat better,” he says. “I think I’ll live.” He offers a small smile, and older Dean matches it.

“You better,” older Dean says. He uses the tip of one finger to trace a line along Cas’s cheek. It’s like they’ve forgotten Dean is in the room; they only have eyes for each other. Dean feels an unexpected twinge of jealousy. He suddenly pictures himself in his older self’s place; he wouldn’t just kneel down beside the bed but climb into it, crawl beneath the threadbare blankets and drape himself over Cas as well.

He allows himself a moment to imagine how warm Cas would surely be as Dean curled his body into him, how his heart would beat, strong and steady under Dean’s palm — do angels have heartbeats? He can almost feel it. Then he shakes the image and the feelings out of his head and coughs to draw the others’ attention to him.

“This is it, then?” he asks. “You gonna Memento me and scram?”

Cas shakes his head. “Not yet.” He sits up all the way and then gets out of the bed, but Dean can tell that he’s still tired.

“You want some food or anything?” Dean asks. “I know you don’t eat, but for energy or—”

“No, thank you, Dean,” Cas tells him, and when he turns that small, soft smile on him, Dean feels warm again.

“You stay here with him,” the older Dean says, and Dean’s not sure which one of them he’s addressing. “I’m going to make sure we haven’t screwed up this timeline more than it already is, and then we’re gonna make tracks.”

“Like hell,” Dean scoffs, “I’ll stay out of the way, but I’m not gonna sit in this room all day and listen to the pay-by-the-hour folks do the nasty through the walls.” He watches his older self inhale deeply through his nose and exhale through clenched teeth.

“Of course you’re gonna be stubborn,” his older self says. “Don’t forget I know you better than you do, kid. You’ve spent plenty of days sitting in plenty of motel rooms. And you haven’t usually had company as good as Cas.”

Dean opens his mouth to reply, but before he can say anything the sound of his cell phone ringing in his jacket pocket cuts through the air between them.

Chapter Text

Dean doesn’t need to see the name on the display of his younger self’s little flip phone to know who’s calling. He can see it in the way young Dean’s shoulders tense and the way his spine straightens. He can hear it in the way his voice gets that little bit deeper, in the way he tries to sound a little more jaded, a little more intimidating.

A hunter that another hunter could be proud of. The bear trap, not the rabbit used for bait.

“Yes, sir,” Dean’s younger self says, looking around and then gesturing frantically for Dean to hand him the notepad on the nightstand, the motel’s name emblazoned across the top. He scrawls down some numbers; Dean doesn’t even have to wonder what they are.

He doesn’t realize that he has clenched his hand into a fist until he feels Cas’s hand on top of his, forcing him to unfurl his fingers. His other hand finds its way to Dean’s waist and Dean leans into him until his temple rests against Cas’s forehead.

And then it almost becomes funny, listening to his younger self talk to his dead father on the phone while holding hands with his male, inhuman partner. Or it would be funny if he didn’t still acutely remember his desperation to ensure that John would never have a reason to be disappointed in him, even after all these years.

“Yes, sir,” the younger Dean says again. “I’m in… Bakersfield.” A lie, and Dean can guess why. If his timeline is correct, then it’s been a while since he’d last talked to Sam, even longer since John had, and his younger self didn’t want their father to know he was anywhere near Stanford. “Yes, sir, I will,” he finishes, and snaps the phone closed, shoving it back in the pocket of his jacket.

“That was Dad,” Dean’s younger self says, and Dean thinks no shit. “He heard about some strange deaths up in Yakima, Washington, said I should go look into it.”

“Well, you’re not going up to fucking Yakima until we’re through here,” Dean tells him. His younger self rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, I figured,” he says. “Dad said to do some research first anyway, not to just go in guns blazing.” Dean snorts at that. Not exactly advice that John had ever followed, himself. “So whaddya say? Can you at least extend my house arrest to the library? How much trouble do you think I could get in there?”

Dean has changed in a lot of ways in the last twenty or so years, but one thing that’s stayed consistent since the day he had started hunting is that he’s never been a fan of research, so he’s immediately suspicious about his younger self’s eagerness to hit the books. But he can just as easily chalk that up to a desire to follow John’s instructions or an attempt to avoid the even more boring prospect of a day spent in the motel room. And it’s true that there are probably few ways that he can further screw up his timeline from behind a stack of reference books.

They haven’t been at the library for fifteen minutes before Dean has to reassess this assumption in the worst possible way. He had planned to just dump Cas and the younger Dean at the library while taking a walk to check for anything that felt off (“How will you know if something is different?” his younger self had asked, and Dean can’t answer that, but he somehow has the feeling he’ll just know) but he decides to stick around the library for a bit first, check out the recent newspaper headlines and look at some maps of the area.

Dean doesn’t really remember this trip, and maybe that’s the after-effects of the paradox that has him and his 24-year-old self here at the same time, but then again there’s a lot from his younger years he doesn’t remember. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something rotten in the time-space continuum. But he figures there’s no harm in getting the lay of the land before he heads out.

That means he’s there to hear his younger self say an emphatic, “Shit,” and duck behind a bookshelf. It’s a practiced movement, and Dean’s first thought is that he’s avoiding a one night stand, or someone he’d pissed off at the bar the night before. Wouldn’t be the first time for either.

But then he looks toward the door, where a group has just entered, backpack straps slung over shoulders and arms wrapped around textbooks. They’re students, obviously, and one among their number is someone that Dean would recognize anywhere, any-when.

“Shit,” Dean echoes his younger self, and he joins him behind the bookshelf, hoping that Sam hasn’t already glanced in their direction.

“Son of a bitch, don’t they have libraries at school?” his younger self stage-whispers in a panic. “What’s he doing here?”

Dean can’t answer that, but he knows that if Sam sees him — either Dean, really, but especially him — his hopes of leaving 2003 with the timeline intact will shrink to nil. As far as Sam knows, Dean’s 24-year-old self isn’t supposed to be anywhere near here, and his 43-year-old self definitely isn’t.

Luckily, Dean and his younger counterpart aren’t the only ones who have quickly realized this. Before Dean can even consider his next move, Cas, who has not hidden behind the bookshelves, strides between the rows of shelves and large wooden tables to where Sam and his study group have set themselves up among stacks of books and notebooks.

Dean peers at his little brother from between the books. ‘Little’ being the operative word. Sure, this 20-year-old version of Sam is already at full, ridiculous height, but he’s gangly and still looks like a kid. It won’t be until Dean goes to hell that his brother will go full Schwarzenegger and never look back. Dean has gotten so used to that version of Sam over the last decade, but when he pictures him in his mind, he always thinks of this Sam. Or close enough anyway, since Dean didn’t see this Sam for the better part of two years.

Dean can’t hear what Cas says to Sam, but whatever it is, he doesn’t seem like he’s pulling off his ‘average library patron asking another patron a query’ act any better than he manages to pose as an FBI agent or detective. Sam shakes his head and points in the direction of the reference desk. He doesn’t turn away enough for Dean — either Dean, judging by his younger self’s lack of movement — to think it safe enough to make a run for it.

Whatever Cas is trying to sell, Sam isn’t buying, so Dean waits to see if Cas has a plan B. He says something else to Sam, and Sam says something back, and then Cas nods and moves as if to leave, and Dean realizes what plan B is right before it happens.

Cas lets his trench coat sweep out to the side as he turns away from Sam, and it slides up and over the edge of the table and knocks over Sam’s paper coffee cup. When the cup tips onto the table, the flimsy plastic lid pops off. The coffee seeps across Sam’s notebook and splashes onto his hoodie.

Cas raises his hands in apology, and Sam keeps his cool, waving him off. But despite Sam’s calm demeanor, Dean sees that Cas’s ploy has done the trick. Sam glances around to find the bathroom, then gets up and heads down the hall in the direction that the sign points. As soon as he’s out of sight, Dean makes for the door. There’s no need for him to turn back to make sure that his younger self is following; he can tell the other Dean is right on his heels.

Outside, Dean glances back to ensure that Sam won’t be able to see them even if he looks to the front of the library, and then he waits for Cas to join them. The angel isn’t far behind.

“Close call,” Dean says, as they head back down the street. “Good thinking.”

“I’ll have to apologize to Sam when we get back,” Cas says.

Dean chuckles. “I think he’ll forgive you, dude.”

“It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done to him,” Cas agrees.

“What’s that mean?” younger Dean asks.

“None of your business,” Dean tells him. His younger self sounds mostly curious, rather than like he’s about to go on the offense for his brother against Cas, but Dean can’t take any chances, especially when he’s about to leave the two of them alone together again.

“You don’t have to be such an asshole to yourself,” younger Dean tells him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean replies blithely. “You sound like my therapist.”

“You have a therapist?” his younger self says incredulously, and Dean’s just about done with this conversation.

“Okay,” he says. “Here’s the deal. Find something to do and I’ll meet you back at the motel in a couple hours.” He digs his wallet out of his jeans pocket and hands Cas a wad of cash. “Stay out of trouble, and do not let Sam see you.”

Dean’s younger self rolls his eyes. “Obviously,” he says. “Don’t you trust yourself?”

A flash of memory hits. Meeting an older version of himself, not in the past but in the future, or at least, a version of the future that could possibly have existed or could have been a nightmare vision dreamed up by an angel who wanted to force him into obedience. You don’t trust yourself? Dean had asked, and his older self had said No, absolutely not. There was a lot to hate about that version of himself, but on that, at least, they were in agreement.

“No, absolutely not,” Dean says. “But I do trust Cas, which is why I’m letting you find something to entertain yourselves rather than locking you in the motel room.”

“And you know I could just pick the lock anyway,” his younger self adds.

“And I know you could just pick the lock anyway,” Dean agrees. “So do yourself a favor and don’t make me regret this. You’re lucky, you’re not gonna get to hang out with Cas again for another few years, and the circumstances will not be great, so make the most of it.”

Hoping that he won’t, in fact, regret this, Dean leaves them.

Chapter Text

“Just you and me, sunshine,” Dean says, once his older self is out of earshot.

“Yes,” Cas agrees. He’s still watching the other Dean’s retreating back. Dean doesn’t want to risk running into Sam again, and after the incident at the library no place in the nearby vicinity seems like a safe bet of avoiding his little brother, so he suggests they go for a drive. Cas agrees.

Dean heads west, toward the foothills. On those rare occasions that he isn’t traveling anywhere in particular, when he’s still waiting for directions from his father or hasn’t found a hunt on his own yet, he always heads whichever way is nearest to the coast, as if he is forever escaping the rolling, landlocked plains of Kansas, as if he is constantly keeping Lawrence in his rearview.

As he drives, he can’t help but continue to glance over at Cas. Occasionally, when he looks over, Cas is looking back. Other times, he’s simply looking out the windshield, or the passenger’s side window. It allows Dean to observe him at every angle.

He wonders what it would be like if he just kept driving, until the lights of the city faded into the distance, replaced by trees or desert or endless sky. Cas would stop him eventually, surely, use his angelic powers to put them both back in the parking lot of the motel where the other Dean would be waiting for them. But what if he didn’t?

In the end, Dean only goes as far as a nature preserve on the outskirts, to an empty gravel parking lot that he pulls Baby into and parks facing toward the forest. He turns off the car, the comforting hum of Baby’s engine replaced by chirping birds and rustling leaves as he gets out and climbs up on to the hood of the car.

Cas has gotten out of the car as well, and Dean pats the warm, black metal to the left of him. He doesn’t look over as Cas settles in next to him, but rather focuses on the sensation of Cas’s presence beside him.

It’s not something Dean can usually count on, someone in the passenger’s seat, someone taking up space next to him on Baby’s hood. Someone sitting across from him in a diner or on the bar stool beside him. When there is someone, it’s usually Dad, and he knows that when John isn’t around it’s because he trusts Dean to handle a case on his own, to take care of business without needing to be told how to do it. And usually that makes him feel proud, but if he’s honest with himself, it makes him feel lonely, too.

He thinks about his dad, who never had anyone after his mom was killed. He thinks about a string of one-night stands, women left thinking he was just an unemployed drifter who happened to be passing through town rather than an unemployed drifter brought to town on the trail of a ghoul or werewolf. He thinks about Cas.

Dean wonders how he and Cas got together. He assumes that Cas wouldn’t tell him if he asked, so he tries to come up with an idea about how it might’ve gone down.

He can’t really think of any scenario that would put him in proximity to an angel, let alone falling in love with one — and until yesterday, he would’ve said with complete certainty that angels are one creature, at least, that definitely don’t exist — so that train of thought hits a brick wall pretty quick.

He looks over at the angel, who is looking at the field that separates the parking lot from the trees. “Nice spot,” Dean says, “peaceful.”

Cas nods. “It is,” he agrees, “I once spent some time in a place similar to this. I never asked you how you chose it, but I assume you had wanted it to be peaceful.”

Dean, obviously, has no idea what Cas is talking about, but somehow he gets the feeling that he isn’t supposed to ask. Maybe they’d gone camping in a meadow like this or something. There’s a rabbit near the edge of the field, so he points that out to Cas instead. They both watch the rabbit until it hops in among the trees and out of view.

”Hey, you wanna go for a walk or are you still too beat?” Dean asks. He’s spent plenty of time perched up on the hood of the car, mostly at night, watching as the stars are hidden and revealed by clouds passing overhead, but today there’s not much to see now that the rabbit is out of sight.

He slides off the hood of the Impala and points to a narrow dirt path that leads through the trees. Cas nods and follows him through the meadow and into the woods.

It’s rare that Dean just walks, that he’s not tracking or hunting— or that he’s not being tracked or hunted. Cas falls into step beside him. At one point, the hem of Cas’s trench coat catches on a fallen branch and he has to stop to extricate it, but for the most part the two of them continue on at a steady pace, even as the path begins to ascend in the direction of a lookout that’s signposted along the trail.

There isn’t much to see when they reach the overlook. The day is foggy and the clouds hang low over the city, turning the vista gray and hazy.

“Well, so much for that,” Dean says. ”Not exactly the Grand Canyon, view-wise.”

”No,” Cas agrees, as they begin to walk back down the trail, “although I had a hand in that one, so I may be biased.”

“I’m sure I’m used to it in the future,” Dean tells him, “but you have to admit it’s weird how casually you can say something like ‘I had a hand in making the freaking Grand Canyon.’”

“It was a small hand,” Cas replies. “The river did most of the work, I just carved out a groove to give it a place to flow.”

Dean shakes his head at that, says, “Man, you are something else.” He pauses to let Cas go ahead of him on a narrow part of the path, then catches up to him when the trail widens again. ”Guessing there aren’t many angels that go down the creating the world to shacking up with some dumbass hunter on Earth pipeline.”

“It wouldn’t be the usual career path,” Cas says, “But I was never exactly Employee of the Month material.”

Dean is full of questions that he won’t let himself ask. He knows there are stories of fallen angels in the Bible, Lucifer being the most famous. Surely Cas’s situation can’t be comparable to the devil’s? Does he regret leaving Heaven? Does he wish he could go back? Dean’s older self had told Dean that Cas chose to stay on Earth (chose to stay with Dean), but how much of that is true versus how much is just making the best of a bad situation?

Maybe if that were so, knowing that Cas is only with Dean because he doesn’t have the option of going back to Heaven would make his upcoming departure easier, would make it easier for Dean to lose the knowledge of his existence, but the thought of it makes Dean’s gut twist unhappily. He hopes it isn’t the case.

They’re back to the meadow now, and Dean leans down without thinking to pick a dandelion, blows the seeds into the air with a puff of breath. He doesn’t make a wish.

One of the dandelion seeds lands in Cas’s hair, so Dean reaches up to pick it out. He pinches it between two fingers and shows it to Cas before he releases it to the wind.

“You’re happy, though, right? We’re happy? You and me?” Dean dares to ask for reassurance, then cushions it with humor for fear of leaving himself too open to whatever Cas might say in response. “I mean, I gotta be happy, at least, being with a handsome guy like you?”

It’s easy to flirt with women. Sometimes it’s even easy to flirt with men. It’s not easy to flirt with Cas. There’s no pick-up line designed to work on your future boyfriend that you’re not actually supposed to have met yet.

“Well, sometimes you irritate me deeply,” Cas says. And Dean is about to protest that he might know next to nothing about love but he still knows that people in it still feel deeply irritated by their partners sometimes, but then he catches the amusement in Cas’s eyes.

“I’m sure you irritate me deeply sometimes, too,” Dean tells him, letting a hint of faux sulkiness slip into his voice.

“You have no idea,” Cas replies dryly. “Heaven forbid I leave a sock on the bedroom floor or a mug of tea in the library.”

Before Dean can tell him that his older self is totally justified in being annoyed about that, there’s a buzzing noise from Cas’s trench coat. Dean watches him pull his flat rectangle of a cell phone out of his pocket, watches him read the message on the screen.

“That’s Dean,” Cas says, as if it could be anybody else. He looks apologetic, or maybe Dean just wants to believe he does, when he says, “It’s time to go.” He crosses the meadow and returns to the Impala, leaving Dean no choice but to follow.

Cas walks around to the passenger side door. Dean mimics him and does the same on the driver’s side. Before he opens the car door, Cas looks at him over the top of the car.

“Yes,” Cas says, nothing but sincerity in his eyes and in his voice now. “We’re happy.”

Chapter Text

On the drive back, Dean turns up the radio.

“I like this song,” Cas tells him.

Dean visibly brightens. “Yeah?” he asks. “Me too.”

“I know,” Cas says. “It’s one of your favorites.” That’s why Cas likes it.

“Right,” Dean says. “Guess you know a lot about me.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music, hums along with the music a little, but doesn’t say anything more for the rest of the drive.

They park the Impala back at the motel and then go to meet Dean’s older self where he’d said he was, near a marshy nature preserve along the bay. Dean raises a hand to greet them when they walk up, a static wave that reminds Cas of Jack.

“Okay,” the older Dean says, “Let’s pull the plug on this before we do any more damage. Nice knowing ya, Dean.” He looks to Cas and nods. It’s a signal, but Cas isn’t quite ready.

“Dean,” Cas says instead, grabbing him by the arm, “I need to speak to you for a minute.”

Dean points a finger at his younger self. “Don’t move,” he orders. When they’re a few yards away from the younger Dean, he asks Cas in a low voice what’s going on. Cas takes a deep breath and tells Dean what he has been considering since he and the younger Dean had left the parking lot by the foothills.

“I don’t know if I should do it, Dean,” Cas says. “I don’t know if I can.”

“What?” Dean asks, looking worried. “Do you mean not enough juice? We can probably stall a little longer if you need more time to—”

“I’m strong enough,” Cas tells him. “But I’m not sure it’s right.”

Dean looks even more confused and worried at that. “What?” he asks again. “What do you mean you’re not sure it’s right? How could it not—”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that this is an entirely new timeline? That things changed the moment I traveled back, or if not then, the moment I met your younger self, or the moment I brought him back into our present?” Cas is thinking aloud, keeping his voice quiet so that the younger Dean doesn’t overhear.

“Maybe this Dean’s future actions will have no impact on your life,” he continues, “Maybe your own past is already set. Now that Chuck’s out of the picture… he could have gone back and changed things if he wanted, made sure you walked the path he wanted you to, but now? Who knows? Maybe we could leave Dean here, just as he is, remembering everything, and it wouldn’t change a thing for us. But maybe it would give him a chance to live a different life.”

“I can’t risk it,” Dean says immediately. “Cas, I can’t.” Cas reaches up a hand to touch the side of his face, and Dean mirrors the movement, his fingertips sliding down Cas’s cheek and along his neck.

“Dean–” Cas begins.

“Cas,” Dean says. He darts a glance over at his younger self and when Cas looks as well, he sees endless possibilities. This is a Dean who has never gone to Hell, and could escape that path entirely, or encounter something somehow worse. “I haven’t— look, I haven’t had a good life. I haven’t been happy for most of it, we both know that.”

“I know, Dean,” Cas tells him. “I wish things could have been different for you. But maybe this is—”

“No,” Dean says, cutting him off. “That’s the thing. I don’t wish things could be different. Yeah, my life has mostly sucked, but it started mostly sucking when I was four. Changing things at twenty-four isn’t gonna make a hell of a lot of a difference. All we’d be doing is risking screwing up what I got now. You, Sam…” He shakes his head. “All I ever wanted was to have my family all together, and maybe help a few people along the way. I’ve got that now, or at least the closest I’ve ever come to it. And yeah me and Sam might’ve ended up okay in the end regardless of what came in between, but what about you?”

“What about me?” Cas asks.

“How’m I gonna meet you if things don’t stay the same?” Dean asks in return.

“Dean—” Cas nods his head in the direction of the younger version to show which one he means, “may have seen a bit of our present, but he knows very few details. There’s nothing to indicate that he won’t make the same choices as you made the first time. Though, if I could spare you from Hell, of course I would.”

“Butterfly effect, Cas,” Dean protests. “Even if he doesn’t know everything, it could all spiral. And if not going to Hell meant that I never needed you to come down and pull me out of it…” he trails off. “It’s not fair, but—”

“But you’ve never been fair to yourself,” Cas finishes for him. He doubts that it’s what Dean had intended to say, but it’s the truth.

And it’s not that he doesn’t have the same fears as Dean. He doesn’t know how many memories had been lobotomized away from him, brainwashed out of him, by Naomi and whatever angels had come before her — how many lives, how many loves. And he knows there are a near-infinite number of circumstances in which he never meets Dean, or in which their relationship is antagonistic, or acquaintanceship at best.

He had resigned himself to losing Dean when he had made the deal with the Empty for Jack’s life, but now he doesn’t know if giving him up again, or even the risk of it, is something he could bear.

“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t like it, but—”

“Yeah, yeah, you hate when I’m right,” Dean says, nudging him with his shoulder. “Do you want to break the news or will I?”

“I’ll do it,” Cas decides. But he doesn’t move toward the younger Dean; they both just stand side by side and watch him. He must feel them staring because he looks up and meets Cas’s eyes. Cas takes a step forward.

“Wait.” Dean grabs Cas by the sleeve of his trench coat and stops him. He sighs heavily. “Maybe you are right. I mean, it’s you, Cas. Chuck couldn’t control you, and I doubt Jack could either, even if he wanted to. You found me in Hell and we found each other in purgatory, too, more than once. Remember that time Sam and me got hit by those other hunters and ended up in Heaven? You found me there, too. And the Empty? No chance that oozy bitch is getting you again, so it doesn’t even matter. That just leaves Earth, and there’s nothing here that could keep me from you. And I’m not talking about fate, ‘cause you’re the opposite of fate. It’s you. Even if everything else changes, maybe we’re gonna find each other anyway. We did this time around, right? Maybe we have to let it ride.”

“Are you sure?” Cas asks, wondering about Dean’s sudden change of heart.

“Of course I’m not sure,” Dean replies. He scrubs a hand down his face and across his mouth, gripping his jaw and creating white half moons of pressure with his fingertips. The grip of his other hand tightens on Cas’s arm. “I’m never going to be able to wrap my brain around all this time travel, possible multiverse, whatever stuff. And I always figured you guys were some kind of Trafalmadorian all-knowing types who could see the past and the future all at once.”

“Jack, possibly,” Cas says, “but angels aren’t—”

“No, I know, Cas, I know,” Dean cuts in. “I know. I don’t think that anymore. I just… I wish I knew one way or another. I want my life. But I don’t wanna doom the kid to twenty shitty years if I don’t have to.”

“I know,” Cas agrees. “But that’s—”

“Don’t say ‘that’s life,’ Cas, or I’m gonna punch you,” Dean says.

“No, you’re not,” Cas says nonchalantly. “And it is.” He doesn’t feel as blase as he sounds, but he thinks it might be easier for all three of them if at least one of them does his best to compartmentalize the possibility that this is all about to go very wrong. “But,” he says, “It’s your life. You should get to decide.”

“It’s your life, too,” Dean points out. Then, “It’s our life.”

“I trust you,” Cas tells him.

“Yeah, but do you trust him?” Dean asks, glancing over at his younger self. Cas considers this, but the answer is obvious. It’s still Dean. He nods. “Well, that makes one of us,” Dean says. He groans. “Okay, fuck. He’s the one who was just minding his own business when we came and made this mess out of it. Let him decide.”

“Are you sure?” Cas asks. He looks over at the younger Dean again.

“No,” Dean says. “Go talk to him before I change my mind.”

Chapter Text

The sun is setting, but they’re on the bay, not the ocean, so it’s setting behind them rather than across the water. And it’s not a beach they’re on, just a patch of sandy dirt that’s somewhat less damp than the marshy area that abuts the water. The air is a pungent combination of salt spray smell and the odor of the marsh.

Dean notices all this as he waits to forget all of it. He’s resigned himself to it, knows his older self isn’t going to go back to his own time until he’s had Cas yank every trace of this day back out of Dean’s head.

And that’s… that’s understandable. If he could have what that Dean has— a place to live, a good relationship with his brother, Cas— he wouldn’t want to risk it either. And he reminds himself that this isn’t just for the older Dean’s benefit, that the older Dean isn’t just some other Dean who’s also older but him, one day. And ensuring that his older self gets to be happy, gets to have a home and a family and someone to love is ensuring that he will one day have those things.

It still doesn’t feel fair.

“Dean?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. He doesn’t turn to look as Cas sidles up next to him, although he can see the angel in profile with his peripheral vision.

“How are you feeling?” Cas’s voice is so soft, so kind, that it makes Dean’s stomach hurt.

“Fine, great,” Dean tells him. “I’m peachy, Cas.” Shut up, Dean, he chides himself.

“No, you’re not,” Cas replies, his voice somehow even more gentle than before. Dean wants to die. He can’t wait twenty years for this. Even if he won’t know that he’s waiting twenty years, he can’t handle the thought of it.

“What do you want me to say, Cas?” Dean asks. “This is a goddamn bitch.”

“I know,” Cas says. Dean feels Cas’s hand land on his shoulder, heavy and grounding, and Dean lets his head tip to the side until his cheek is touching it, skin to skin. “Can we take a walk?” Dean shrugs, so Cas slides his hand from Dean’s shoulder, down his arm, to finally take his hand, and they walk along the water.

“So this is it, huh?” Dean asks. He finally looks directly at Cas, silhouetted in the dusk of twilight, the warm tones of golden hour casting their light across his edges.

“The discussion that Dean and I had back there,” Cas says, “was regarding whether it might be safe to allow you to keep your memories. There is a possibility that our presence has already triggered a change in your future, but that instead of affecting our present it could have had the effect of creating an entirely new timeline.”

“So maybe what I do from here won’t change anything for you?” Dean asks suspiciously.

“Perhaps,” Cas agrees.

“But,” Dean continues, thinking aloud. “maybe it means I don’t meet you at all. Or that me and Sam never talk again.” He leans down to pick up a rock from the sand in front of him and tries to skip it across the water, but it sinks after a single hop. He wipes his hand on his jeans.

“I think you and Sam will find your way back to each other in any timeline,” Cas says.

“And what about us?” Dean asks.

Cas sighs. “The circumstances of our meeting would be… difficult to repeat. And I can’t say I’d recommend trying.”

It’s only a day, technically — he has definitely forgotten more than a day’s worth of his life from various concussions and other head injuries, so what’s the big deal?

But it’s not the length of time; it’s the content. It’s the knowledge that he could have a life he’d never dare to imagine for himself.

He always figured his most likely fate was the same as most hunters, a matter of when, not if. Best case, they’d finally kill the thing that had taken his mom and he’d get out, maybe knock some woman up by accident along the way and try to do right by her and the kid, carve out some sort of okay life for himself that way.

But he can’t imagine anyone else looking at him the way Cas does, at least the way Cas looks at Dean’s older self. He doesn’t want to forget that look, wants to have it in his back pocket, something to keep fighting for when everything up ahead looks gray and dark, but he knows— Cas had just said it outright— that remembering makes the likelihood it will actually come around for him infinitesimally smaller.

Dean thinks about it until it makes his head hurt from the paradox of it all.

Finally, he says, “Guess we’re not supposed to see what’s in the crystal ball.”

“Probably not,” Cas agrees.

“And if I agree to this,” Dean asks, “if I let you mind-wipe me, everything’ll happen like it’s supposed to?” He means, everything will turn out okay?

“I don’t know,” Cas says, a little too honest. Dean wouldn’t have minded some reassurance. “But Dean, the things you do, the choices you make— whatever you think, now or in the future, whatever anyone might try to tell you to the contrary someday— they’re because you are a good and loving man. I know,” he continues, acknowledging Dean’s soft, disbelieving huff of a laugh at his words, “you still hardly believe me when I tell you in my present; of course you’re not ready to hear it now. But it’s the truth. And that won’t change. So I have to believe that the rest will follow, and that in your future I will have the privilege to love you again.”

Nobody had ever said anything like this to Dean before. Normally he’d try to deflect it with a joke or a sarcastic comment, but Cas’s words startle him into sincerity. “I hope so,” he whispers. He stares at Cas for a long moment, as if he could memorize him. Then he closes his eyes.

“Are you ready?” Cas asks.

“Wait,” Dean blurts out. He opens his eyes again. Cas stops, his hand outstretched toward Dean, two fingers about to press against his forehead. “Can I kiss you?” Dean asks. He gears up to make his argument— that since he’s just a younger version of Cas’s partner, the older Dean should be okay with it— but it turns out there’s no need.

“Of course,” Cas says, and he drops his raised hand to Dean’s cheek instead and leans in to let him do just that.

Dean has kissed guys before. A boy on his high school wrestling team, at a party in the woods after they’d come back from a match, the two of them tipsy and jubilant in the darkness, hidden amongst the trees from the rest of their team.

Another hunter, in a threesome with a woman who was there more for pretense, for plausible deniability, than because either of them had wanted to sleep with her more than they had wanted to sleep with each other but hadn’t been able to admit it.

A much older man outside a dive bar just after Dean had finished his first-ever solo hunt, feeling exhausted and angry and lonely and too young and too old all at the same time. He’d forgotten the guy’s name, or had never learned it — hell, it could’ve been Cas, for all he knows; Dean can’t be sure that this is the only time Cas has ever gone time-traveling into his past.

They’re running out of time together, and yet kissing Cas doesn’t feel hurried. Cas’s lips are soft, slightly chapped, and his breath is warm. His hands come up to touch Dean’s face as Dean’s hand grabs the angel’s tie to pull him closer, his other hand finding the nape of Cas’s neck. Dean marvels at the fact that, although this is his first time kissing Cas— and hopefully not his last— Cas must have shared kisses with Dean a hundred, a thousand times, and yet there’s nothing that feels rote about it, nothing perfunctory like Cas is just doing this to mollify him before he leaves.

“I love you,” Dean says desperately, not pulling away.

“Oh, Dean,” Cas says. He cups Dean’s face in his big hands and kisses him again. “Even you don’t love that easily. You don’t love me yet. But one day you will, and I look forward to that.”

“You already have it,” Dean says. “You and him.”

“And you have no idea what we’ve gone through to get it,” Cas tells him. “But I promise it’ll be worth the wait.” Dean doesn’t trust himself to speak. He looks at Cas expectantly until the angel kisses him again.

This time when Cas pulls back, he looks at Dean with a question in his eyes. Dean nods and says, “Okay, do it.” Cas raises his hand, fingers outstretched, once more, and Dean meets his gaze as the angel reaches out for him. “Bye, Cas,” he says.

“Goodbye, Dean,” Cas replies, “for now.” His fingertips touch Dean’s forehead, and the world goes dark.

Dean’s head feels fuzzy and his mouth is dry. He can’t remember how much he’d drunk the night before, can’t even remember leaving the bar. He rolls over and looks at the alarm clock on the motel nightstand, realizing with a jolt that he has slept almost the whole day. That’s one hell of a hangover, he thinks. At least he’d celebrated his birthday right, even if he has no memory of it.

He’s a little disappointed that he apparently didn’t manage to bring anyone back with him, usually birthdays are good for that, but he reasons that he could’ve and that she could’ve left before he’d woken up given that it’s— he checks the alarm clock again— jesus, almost six o’clock at night.

He needs some calories, and maybe a drink, so he drags himself out of the bed and throws on a jacket. He probably needs a shower, too, but that can wait for now.

Downstairs, the clerk is at the front desk. “Hey,” he calls, as Dean makes to leave the motel, so Dean turns back to him. “Your buddy alright? He looked pretty out of it when you brought him in earlier.”

What the hell happened last night? Dean wonders. All he says is, “Yeah, he’s, uh, he’s fine. Just needed to sleep it off.”

“There’s a hundred dollar cleaning fee for any bodily fluids other than sweat and semen,” the guy says.

“Okay, great,” Dean says, and beats it the hell out of the motel before the guy can say anything more. He has no idea what the guy was talking about, who the guy was talking about, but he’s starving and hungover and he has four missed calls from his father, so he puts it out of his mind. Some things are better left forgotten.

Chapter Text

Cas finds Dean down the block from Sam’s apartment, making sure he’s well out of sight in case Sam happens to come to the front door or look out a window or walk down the street.

“He’s back in the motel room,” Cas reports. “He won’t remember anything from the time he walked into the bar last night.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Dean mutters. He takes one last look at the building Sam lives in and turns away to look at Cas. “You ready to crank up the juice on your angelic time machine?”

“How are you feeling, Dean?” Cas asks, not answering the question.

“I can’t say I’m not nervous, man,” Dean admits. “You could poof me back home and then you go ‘poof’ too. We could get back and there’s no bunker, no Sam, maybe no Earth. I know Dean— I— agreed to forget all this, but there’s still no guarantee.”

“I know,” Cas says. “But I have faith.” His tie is more askew than usual, and Dean reaches out to adjust it.

“In what?” Dean asks. “No Chuck pulling the strings, and I don’t think this is the kind of mess Jack is willing to get involved in anymore.”

“In you, Dean,” Cas replies, an answer that Dean should have anticipated.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says. His hand is still on Cas’s tie, so it’s easy to use it to pull him into a kiss.

“You’re taller than you were back then,” Cas says. “And your technique has improved.”

“You kissed the other me?” Dean asks. He stops just short of feeling jealous of his own damn self, but he does kind of wish he had been there to see it. “So not only did you take my memories, but you’re also making me wait two decades for some prime spank-bank material? You’re a menace, Cas.”

“I apologize, Dean,” Cas says. “I didn’t realize kissing me was so important to your ‘spank bank.’” Dean doesn’t think he’s imagining the smug hint to Cas’s tone, or the way he somehow imbues that same smugness into his air quotes.

“Well, yeah,” Dean tells him. “I mean, it’s not like number one on my go-to’s; that’s definitely the time that you—“ Cas’s fingertips touch his forehead and they both disappear from Palo Alto, 2003.

+

Cas nearly collapses as soon as they’re back in the bunker. “Whoa,” Dean says, getting his hands under Cas’s armpits to ease him gently into a chair. “Easy, darlin’. You alright?”

“Just tired,” Cas says weakly. No surprise there. Dean’s not sure if Jack had something to do with it without them knowing, or if Chuck had been nerfing Cas toward the end in an effort to weaken their fight against him, but somehow, when they’d rescued him from the Empty, Cas had come back with his powers not quite fully restored, but far stronger than they’d been in recent years. But traveling a sum total of eight decades through time in less than twenty-four hours was still gonna take it out of him.

Dean pulls another chair over and sits down too, close enough that he can put a hand on Cas’s knee. “What d’ya think,” he asks, “are we still the same us?”

“I don’t feel any different,” Cas says. He looks slightly queasy, but Dean assumes that’s from the time travel itself and not from anything to do with the events or consequences of their foray into the past. “Do you?”

Dean considers it. He can’t really remember those few days; he remembers driving to Palo Alto with the intention of patching things up with Sam and then chickening out, and he remembers the hunt in Yakima, a poltergeist, but the time in between is more than a bit hazy. That’s not entirely abnormal to him, but it makes him question whether the events of the past day had actually happened to him, or if Cas is right and their timelines had diverged and created an entirely new Dean the moment Cas had spoken to him in that dive bar.

It doesn’t matter though, because his present hasn’t changed. He still has Cas. And Sam has just entered the room, his expression immediately smoothing out from worry to relief when he sees that Dean and Cas are okay.

Cas excuses himself to go lie down and rest, leaving the brothers alone in the room.

“How’d it go?” Sam asks. He grabs a bottle of whiskey off of the bar cart, pours himself and Dean a drink, and sits down in the chair that Cas has just vacated.

“Mission accomplished,” Dean says, clinking his glass against Sam’s. “No thanks to you.”

“Me?” Sam asks.

“Yeah, we nearly ran into your ass in a library,” Dean tells him. “Cas had to spill a cup of coffee on you so you wouldn’t see me and freak out.”

“Oh my god,” Sam says. “I remember that. I was studying for a psych test and some guy bumped into our table and knocked a whole latte all over my sweatshirt. Wait, that was Cas?”

Dean nods. It strikes him that if Sam— this Sam, his Sam, the Sam of his own timeline— remembers Cas spilling the coffee, then the timeline didn’t split at all. It did all happen to him. He’s silently grateful to Cas for whatever he said that convinced his younger self to trust him.

“But, wait,” Sam asks, “why were you in Palo Alto? Was it a hunt? It was 2003, right? And we… we weren’t even talking. You didn’t come to see me, so what were you doing there?”

“I did come to see you,” Dean admits. “Just didn’t have the guts to knock on the door. Wasn’t the last time, either, ‘til Dad went missing and I had to.”

“Oh,” Sam says. There’s a long silence before he speaks again, finally saying, “Well, I wish you had.” He says goodnight and gets up to leave the room, patting Dean on the shoulder as he goes.

Dean wishes he had, too.

+

Dean stays up alone, turning the events of the last day — and a day twenty years ago of which he has no memory — over and over in his mind until his head is spinning from trying to make sense of them.

Eventually he decides to stop driving himself crazy trying to follow the web of timelines and memories converging and diverging. There’s no sense in trying to make sense of things without the one person who knows the whole story.

Cas is lying on his side, facing away from the door, when Dean enters the bedroom. He sleeps a little now, more and more frequently as his rejuvenated powers begin to fade again, and Dean’s sure he’s wrecked from the time travel as well.

But he has a suspicion that Cas isn’t actually asleep now, a hypothesis that is proven correct when he sits down on the edge of the bed and Cas immediately rolls over to face him.

“Are you watching me sleep?” Cas asks.

“You’re one to talk,” Dean says. He reaches over to turn on the light and watches as Cas’s tired face is bathed in the warm glow of the bedside lamp.

“I do recommend it,” Cas says. He grasps Dean’s wrist and Dean allows himself to be guided down by the flannel of his shirt sleeve until he and Cas are laying, facing each other.

“Sam remembers you giving him a Starbucks bath,” Dean reports.

“I see,” Cas says. “I suppose I’ll have to apologize in the morning after all.” He sounds grumpy about it, which makes Dean chuckle.

“I think he’s over it,” Dean tells him. “But you know that means that the timeline didn’t split. No multiverse or whatever.”

“No,” Cas agrees.

“You don’t sound too surprised,” Dean says. Cas shrugs, his shoulders shifting against the bed. “But you were the one who suggested it to begin with.”

“I felt that both options were possible. That the Dean we met in 2003 would one day become you, and that my meeting him in that dive bar created an entirely new reality for him. Of course, it’s also possible that every single moment that took place following that meeting also created a new reality. Or that, whether you had chosen to keep your memories or not, we would somehow still end up here. Or that—”

This is getting too existential for Dean, especially after a long and stressful day, so he cups a hand to Cas’s face and presses a thumb over his lips to stop him talking. “I get it, I get it,” he says. Maybe an infinite number of universes had all narrowed down to a single moment, or maybe there had only been one path, but either way, they had found themselves here, together. That’s good enough for Dean.

He studies Cas’s face. There are bags under his eyes, crows feet framing their corners. There are lines across his forehead, and the spray of stubble that covers his jaw is flecked with gray.

Dean tries to remember how exactly Cas had looked the night that he and Bobby had summoned him in a barn. Younger, certainly. Jimmy Novak had definitely been a handful of years older than Dean when Cas had come calling, but only a handful.

He wonders how different he had looked to Cas back then, and how it compared to Cas meeting him in 2003. There were less than six years in between the two encounters, but there had also been decades. By the time Cas had met Dean in 2008, his spirit had spent more time in Hell than it had on Earth. How different might he have looked to Cas at twenty-four, without that darkness on his soul?

He almost asks, but in lieu of the question he says, “Anyway, fill me in. What’d I miss?”

“Hmm?” Cas replies. He sounds as though he might be nodding off, and Dean almost tables the conversation for the following day and lets him.

But his curiosity gets the better of him. “When I was off making sure we didn’t Back to the Future ourselves out of existence, what were you, or, uh we, getting up to? Did I annoy the shit out of you the whole time or what?”

“I may be able to restore those memories to you,” Cas says. He reaches out a hand, two fingers extended, but Dean catches it in one of his own.

“Nah,” Dean says. “Can’t miss what I can’t remember. Just gimme your POV on it.” He sits up, puts a pillow up against the headboard, and leans back against it. Cas joins him.

Dean listens as Cas runs him through the day he’d spent with Dean’s younger self. When he reaches the point where Dean re-enters the picture, by the nature preserve, as they debate whether the younger Dean should get to choose whether to keep his memories, Dean starts to tell him that he can leave it there, that Dean remembers that part, but Cas just motions for Dean to keep listening.

“I’m not a martyr,” Cas says. The memories that still occasionally haunt Dean’s dreams — Cas’s vessel being disintegrated into a burst of flesh and viscera, Cas with the point of an angel blade protruding from his chest, the look in Cas’s eyes just before they are covered by the dense blackness of the Empty — would have Dean begging to differ, but he lets Cas continue. “It’s not like I’m looking for a way to lose you when it would destroy me, Dean.”

“Yeah, likewise, buddy,” Dean says, trying to use the lightness of his words to smother the way his body immediately finds itself on the edge of panic at the thought.

“I didn’t lie to you,” Cas continues. “I told you that if our meeting changed things, if it led you down a different road, then it would be unlikely that we’d meet again. Obviously, I didn’t know if your younger self would be swayed by that, but if so then of course it would serve my own purpose.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean says, “I think you’ve earned the right to put your finger on the scale a little.”

“To be honest, I think the prospect of a better relationship with Sam may have carried more weight,” Cas says, “although I did tell him I thought you two would end up okay no matter what.” Dean nods, once more wishing that he hadn’t left Palo Alto for Yakima before knocking on Sam’s apartment door.

“And then you kissed me goodbye to seal the deal,” Dean says.

“You asked me to,” Cas replies firmly.

“That does sound like me,” Dean agrees, grinning. He nudges Cas with his shoulder. “You, uh, you could give me back my memory of that part,” he says, “Not really fair if only you get to remember our first kiss.”

“It’s not technically our first kiss,” Cas tells him.

“Okay, my ‘our first kiss’ then,” Dean says with an eye roll, “technically. Sorta.”

“Are you sure?” Cas asks. He lifts a hand, lets his fingertips hover just above Dean’s eyebrows.

“Yeah, sweetheart, lay it on me,” Dean says. He winks at Cas and then feels Cas’s fingertips brush his forehead.

And suddenly the memory is there, like he’d always had it. And it’s clear, not hazy and half-remembered like some of his other memories from that period. He wonders if Cas has juiced it up a little, because when Dean thinks about it, he feels like he’s there — Cas’s hands on his face, Dean’s on the back of Cas’s neck. Feeling too young and so fucking alone and wishing there was some way that Cas could stay, because when was the last time someone had touched him so gently? And knowing he’s got to forget all of it if he ever wants to hope to have it again, and that even that’s not a sure thing.

“I love you,” the memory of Dean says, desperately.

“Oh, Dean, even you don’t love that easily,” the memory of Cas replies.

“Jeez, warn a guy next time,” Dean says.

“Not one for the… spank bank, after all?” Cas asks, in the present.

“No, yeah, you know,” Dean says. “It’s not that.” He leans into Cas until Cas lifts an arm to encircle Dean’s shoulders, and then Dean leans even more until he can rest his head in the crook of Cas’s neck. “It’s… man, if I’d gotten to remember that, there’s no way I wouldn’t have screwed things up trying to find you sooner,” he says.

“Who knows,” Cas replies, “maybe you would have found a way.”

Maybe, Dean thinks. He’s sure he would have tried. But he doesn’t need those what ifs now. “C’mon,” he says. He turns off the light and shifts down on the bed until he’s lying flat again, scooches down farther to wrap an arm around Cas’s waist and nuzzle his face into Cas’s warm stomach.He feels one of Cas’s hands on his head, nails scratching softly through his hair, gentle, and then Cas pulls him back up to lie beside him. And Dean listens to the rhythm of Cas’s breathing, steady and present, until he drifts off.