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Cas comes back just over a year and a half after Chuck is dethroned, and Jack restores the Earth back to ‘normal’, or maybe creating a new normal is the better way to understand it. Not that Dean does, but he listens when Jack decides to pop into the fixer upper Dean buys and moves into, the weight of history in the bunker proving too much.
Sam, who to his credit does spend the first few weeks of Dean’s homeownership in one of the spare rooms helping to make the place liveable. Monsters are essentially a non-issue now, but they still spent time painting salt into the window and door sills, hiding hex bags in the holes in the walls that they patch up, bury iron into the four foundational corners of the house, and apply sigils under the fresh coats of paint. Dean loves him for it, hates how his younger brother looks at him with a quiet pity, knowing why Dean bought a house with three rooms. Knows for who Dean is saving a room for. When Jack visits, which is not often but does happen, he will stay in the third room, which Dean thought that Cas would appreciate. That a space that is saved for him is also being used by his son. Even though the thought killed him. Jack will follow Dean around, carrying things and listening while Dean explains what he is doing, will help when he is asked. Their relationship is tentative, both not wanting to upset the other. At the end of the day Dean will feed Jack, who eats despite not needing to. Jack tells Dean about what he is doing with the restructuring of the cosmos, trying to fix things so they don’t need a story to follow anymore.
Eileen was brought back when Jack righted things. She does not so much care for house renovations but will stop by and bring groceries, take Miracle out for a walk. Dean loves Eileen, loves how she takes his side in pranks wars against Sam. But seeing the two of them together, easy and in love, punches the air out of him sometimes. Eventually, Sam goes back to the bunker, and hunts sometimes with Eileen, who flits around at her leisure. Dean is alone.
In the months before Cas comes back, Dean throws himself into repairs, just as a way to distract himself. Walks the dog, mows his lawn, drinks a beer on the porch where Kansas summer nights surround him.
Cas comes back, aptly, on a Thursday. Dean is halfway through cooking himself dinner, with Miracle a welcome nuisance, when he hears a knock on the door.
He opens the door to a man, naked except for the layers of tar on him, blue eyes shining through the muck. Dean doesn’t even have time to hope, before the man opens his mouth.
“Hello Dean.” Says a familiar voice pitched down and gravel filled. A voice attached to a man who promptly faints into a pile on his welcome mat.
Jack is summoned, Sam is called in from the bunker two hours away. In the meantime, Dean washes Cas of the tar, mentally adding fixing whatever awful damage this is doing to his pipes to his repair list.
He cleans Cas up methodically, rinsing the goop from his hair, his body, making sure nothing is left to mar him. When the other man is cleaned and Dean’s bathroom is absolutely ruined, he dresses Cas, the loosest sweatpants Dean owns and a hoodie that Sam left swallowing the other man whole. Dean tests him, silver, holy water, anything else he can think of, but the other man sleeps on, apparently actually who he seems to be.
Jack confirms when he arrives that it is in fact, Cas, and Dean’s knees almost give way under him. When Sam arrives he helps Dean move Cas into that extra room, and lays him down. They three keep him under a constant vigil, he sleeps for a week. There are moments of consciousness, where he explains what he remembers, but mostly he rests.
Cas comes back, not by any of their own doings but through cosmic irony. His grace being depleted and making him weak on Earth made it so the Empty did not have a proper claim on him. Because Cas was not able to sleep properly, neither so was the Empty. And being so that it was an entity with that as its sole desire, even with its hatred of Cas, rips out the tattered remains of his grace and spits him out. That is at least what Dean understands from what Sam and Jack are trying to explain to him. Dean does not so much care why Cas is back, only that he is.
The irony continues in that while he may not have been able to rest properly in the Empty he can’t seem to stop sleeping here. Jack says it is because his body is adjusting to being a human, to the new constraints of his form, that he is not supposed to be this small. Dean swallows hard against the memory of when he was first human, in the bunker so hopeful only to be kicked out by him.
The three of them take turns by his side. Jack reads to him, tells Cas things about his restructuring, things that he’s told Dean before but now he has Cas to understand, though Cas is mostly asleep while being told these things. Sam catches Cas up, tells him the news, the weather, what Jody and Donna and the girls are up to. One day Eileen comes and sits with him, just holds his hand and sits. Dean, well, Dean mostly looks at him. Waits for this to get taken from him. Even when it is not his turn to stand watch he lurks in the door frame until he is sent away.
As the days pass Cas begins to spend more and more time conscious, responding to conversations, eating, and then usually promptly throwing up. But it is clear he is settling more into himself. Jack is the first to have to go, his God-responsibilities calling him upward. Sam leaves a few days after that, clapping a hand to Dean’s shoulder and giving him a knowing glance on his way out.
And then there is just Dean, and Cas. And Cas in the room that Dean had been saving for him, not thinking that it would ever be filled.
Dean is definitely annoying Cas a little, he is checking on him too often, flitting nervously in the door, repeatedly bringing him things he doesn’t ask for.
As Cas’s strength returns, Dean shows him around the house. Cas particularly likes the land attached to the house, spends his days sitting on the porch with Miracle, damn traitor, at his feet.
Cas keeps odd hours, still adjusting to being a human for real this time, for needing to sleep, and eat, and shower. Dean has gone out and purchased the other man clothes of his own, but Cas still favors that first outfit Dean had put him in. Hoodie sagging to expose his whole neck, his collarbones. Sweatpants loose on Dean are tight to parts of Cas that Dean has to actively avoid staring at. Dean wants, he wants so bad, and now he knows Cas wants too. But he doesn’t know how to broach the subject, where to go now. Where does the after take them?
It all comes to a head one night. Dean is in his room, more laying with his eyes closed than actually sleeping, when he hears Cas get up and move to the kitchen. The clock on his nightstand shows the time as being midnight, Cas must not be able to sleep either.
This is not an unusual occurrence, but this time, Miracle decides he wants to follow Cas, and jumps down from the bed. Traitor. Dean thinks but gets up to follow him anyways after a few more moments of twitchy restlessness.
In the kitchen Cas is most of the way done with making himself tea. He had decided that he did not like how bitter coffee was, and Dean had gone to the store to buy a collection of teas for him to try. Tonight was a peppermint night.
“Hello Dean.” Cas smiles, sitting at the table. He stirs honey into his tea, spoon clinking against a ceramic cup with a cartoon werewolf on it. Dean had bought it at a thrift store when he was looking for furniture, thinking of Garth.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Cas hums into his tea, taking a long sip.”Hmm, sleep is not the issue, more that I seem unable to do it on a schedule.”
‘Well, you went from being one of the God squad to,” Dean can’t make himself say dead, still disbelieving to have his angel back, even if he is human now, “to well, gone.” He swallows. “To human, anyone would struggle.”
At this Cas just looks at him, assessing. Cas does that a lot these days, not that he ever didn’t. Now though, it seems like he is trying to answer a question just by squinting at him. Sometimes Dean wants to ask him what he is thinking about, but he has a pretty good idea what that is, and how he doesn’t know what he’d say either. Allows the inquisitive looking to continue.
“This time maybe I’ll actually get to decorate my room.” Cas is joking here, making light of the last time he was human. Hell, they’re not even in the bunker anymore but still Dean grits his teeth, heart twisting against his ribcage at the memory, how he’d had plans then that got shattered by Gadreel.
“Y’know-” He leaned hard on the hand that had been skimming the wood of the counter, hoping the added weight would hide its trembling. “I had this crazy thought when you were human, well, the first time”
He doesn’t know what is inspiring him to say this. Maybe it’s because Cas is back, maybe it’s because he’s back and sitting with him in the kitchen, empty goo gone and wearing a pair of his sweatpants and Sam's left behind comically large sweatshirt. Maybe it’s because the top of his hair is dry but the sides are still wet and curling against his ear because no one ever showed him how to use a blowdryer right so he just points it at his face until he gets too hot.
Maybe it’s because he got so used to filling the negative space with old half dissolved dreams filtered between apocalypses and mutual betrayals. Maybe it’s because even standing here saying all this Dean still can’t look right at him for fear that this is all a dream, focusing instead on the loose threads on the sleeves of Cas’s borrowed hoodie, the light he’d been meaning to replace for days a dim halo behind the former angel’s head. Maybe he is just so fucking tired of waiting.
“You were gonna stay, and I was gonna ask you to stay with me. I’d dragged a nightstand from the room across the hall, grabbed another lamp. You were supposed to leave your books in a pile and get mad that you had to sleep and couldn’t finish them that night. You were supposed to leave your clothes everywhere and I was going to bitch at you” Dean pauses here, clenches his jaw, works up the courage to look the other man in the eye, “You were gonna stay, you were gonna hog the bed, and probably snore right in my ear, you weren’t going to shave often enough and I was going to finally get to keep you.” He wished he hadn’t looked Cas in the eye, he wished he never had to stop looking at Cas.
“Dean,” Cas practically chokes out, recognition dawning on his face of what Dean is admitting to here. They hadn’t talked about it yet, Cas’s confession on Death’s (heh) door, and here Dean is blasting into one of his own. “Dean, you have to know. You have to know you already had me then.” Dean had not known, he hadn’t even known for sure that angels, even half fallen ones, could even actually feel that way until Cas was halfway swallowed up by tar. Until he was left with a bloodied handprint on his shoulder and concrete steadily freezing his ass.
Dean is still leaning against the counter, hands gripping the butcher block. Cas is beginning to rise, chair squeaking against the floor in a way that reminds Dean he needed to replace the rubber on the bottom.
“I didn’t know Cas. I didn’t think that angels could feel that way. I figured I was projecting what I wanted to have happen onto you, and because I was your only shitty example of a human being you were just copying what I was doing, that you had no idea what you were copying meant” Cas is approaching him now, taking tentative steps between Dean’s sentences. “But then there you were, human and reachable, and I knew at least then you could feel that way because of April, and I knew it was something you were capable of wanting. And I wanted you to want me like that, like how I wanted you.” Dean finishes and Cas is in front of him, his hand reaching between where his own are resting on the counter, effectively caging him there.
For a moment they don’t speak, Cas staring at Dean, standing too close like they used to, studying him. Dean knows Cas does not have his grace anymore, that it got ripped out of him.
But he swears his eyes are glowing in the moonlit kitchen, that he can smell the faint cling of ozone, that it’s latent static electricity raising the hair on his arms not just the proximity.
“Cas, buddy, this is the part where you say something.” Dean gulps out.
“Dean Winchester” Cas starts, voice like tires over well loved backroads, “In many ways I fell the instant I laid a hand on you in hell. Carried your flayed and broken body back to the surface, soul screaming out because you did not believe yourself worthy of being saved. I have watched the genesis of solar systems your species has not and will not ever even see, gazed upon the first fish to haul itself onto the land, lended a hand in the raising of mountains from said sea and their erosion back into sand” Cas is close enough that Dean can smell the tea he was drinking on his breath, “I spent eons as a fractal wavelength, what was true for me once became true for me always, endlessly spiraling away and towards myself. I cannot pinpoint the exact moment I became yours and yours alone because the instant it became true it became true from the moment of my own celestial creation and tumbled through my own timeline backwards and forwards, becoming as quintessential to my being as my own grace once was. Angels are built to love God, for worship, but at some point I was rewired. Despite the best interventions of the holy host, and became built to love you.”
Dean’s brain short circuits at this and he lets out what is supposed to be a breath but is more of a whine, not that he would ever admit it.
“Jesus Cas, buy a guy dinner first.”
“We buy everything with a hacked credit card Dean, the gesture seems insincere.”
“Touche.” Dean licks his lips, looks up from where he was watching Cas’s lips move while he spoke and does what he does best, acts. He maneuvers one of his hands from where it was holding his weight and grabs the sagging collar of Cas’s hoodie, hauling him forward.
And finally.
Finally.
Finally almost fifteen years of wanting and not having and negative space are gone and there is only him, and his mouth on Cas’s chapped lips. No one ever told him what chapstick is.
If Dean thought that Cas would be timid this thought is blown out of the water immediately. The second the former angel gets his bearings on what is going on he surges into Dean, one hand fisting into his shirt and the other snaking around to pull Dean in closer by the nape of his neck. His hands are warm from where they’d been holding the hot mug, and Dean can feel the heat searing through the cotton, where the other man's thumb is just ghosting the close crop of his hairline.
The kisses start out timid enough, if you can call being shoved into a countertop timid. But they speak of a longing fulfilled more than a frenzied desire. There is not a battle for dominance but a push and pull, almost tidal, both content to explore and taste and feel the other one. What works, what doesn’t, what makes them stop and gasp and get back to it. Cas tastes like midnight breath and peppermint tea, Dean can smell his own shampoo and bodywash clinging to him, he thinks that he needs to introduce Cas to lotion and smiles into the onslaught, content that he will be able to.
That maybe here after the many ends of the world this time he’ll get to have this, and that it will be good. That it won’t be perfect because they piss each other off, and they argue, and Cas is going to insist on a garden and bees and Dean is definitely going to get stung by them, he is going to eventually make the stray he has been feeding come inside and Dean is going to need allergy pills, and Cas is going to get mad at Dean for instinctually flirting with the waitress even though their legs are tangled up under the table so tight neither one can tell which leg belongs to who anymore.
At some point, content with what he had learned about Dean’s mouth, Cas had moved to placing kisses against the side of his lips, his nose, his eyes, peppering a line down to the bolt of his jaw, down to his neck. Cas spends time pressing open and closed mouth ministrations right on Dean’s pulse point, licking and lightly biting as he goes. Dean, with his head tilted back against the cabinets, moves one of his hands from where they were exploring the hot skin underneath the hoodie to thread into Cas’s now almost dry hair, sighing.
Eventually the onslaught slows, and stops. And then they are two tired men, in a poorly lit kitchen, holding onto one another. After a few minutes of this Dean maneuvers their bodies so that they are facing each other once again. Eye to eye, lips kiss swollen and wet, Dean runs his thumb along Cas’s cheekbone, reverent.
“C’mon let's go to bed.” Dean says into the silence, Cas only hums in response. They pick their way towards the back of the house, agreement unspoken with Cas following Dean into his room, neither breaking contact the whole way. They get into bed together, knock knees and figure out how to take up this shared space.
Eventually they settle with Cas partially laying on Dean’s chest, Dean’s arms wrapped around Cas. Their legs are tangled and Miracle is hogging the bottom of the mattress like a furry footwarmer. Dean is certain he is going to die of heat stroke at some point during the night but he decides he has never been happier.
When he is reasonably sure that Cas is asleep, he presses a kiss into the crown of his head. “I love you too, don’t you ever go dying on me again.”
“Go to sleep Dean.” Cas, who was not asleep it seems, mumbles out, his arms pulling Dean closer.
Dean sighs, and sleeps, and Cas does snore directly into his ear, and hogs the blankets.