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Dean was not snooping.
He just happened to be walking past Cas’s room. And the door just happened to be cracked open a little. And it just so happened that Castiel wasn’t around. Dean assumed he was feeding the local feral cats, having caught him with a bowl of milk outside the Bunker not even two days prior.
So really, when Dean peeked in and saw the trench coat hanging there, all neat and reverent like it was some kind of relic on a hook. well. That wasn’t snooping. That was curiosity.
Cas had worn that damn thing since day one. Through heaven, hell, purgatory, and probably a few laundromats along the way, which is why he knew that this opportunity was far and few between, what was the harm anyway? He had practically owned the thing for a couple of months while Cas was off playing house as Emmanuel.
Cas had looked strange in his cookie-cutter, apple-pie life clothing, never looked fully dressed without it, which always made him wonder…
“What’s the deal with this thing?” Dean muttered, stepping inside.
He glanced around, as if someone might pop out and scold him for committing a crime against angelic fashion. Then he reached up and took it off the hook.
It was heavier than he remembered and smelled faintly like…something warm. Not Walmart detergent, nor cologne. Just Cas. Which didn’t help Dean’s already loosely termed curiosity.
“Alright, trenchy,” he said to the coat, “what’s your big secret?”
He shrugged it on.
And instantly understood why curiosity killed cats.
It fit. Not perfectly, not tailored, but well enough that it was a little freaky. And it felt good. Comfortable. Dramatic. Dangerous. Dean caught sight of himself in the mirror over Cas’s dresser and raised an eyebrow.
“Damn,” he murmured. “No wonder he struts around like he owns the place.”
And then, because he was a dumb ass, he tried the full Cas impression. Gravel voice and all.
“Hello,” he growled, lowering his voice and glaring at the mirror “I’m Castiel, Angel of the Lord.”
The laugh that burst out of him was loud and stupid and echoed through the bunker.
That was the exact moment Castiel walked in.
Dean froze, mouth agape, somewhere between a yelp and a frown, still staring at himself in the mirror like a deer in a proverbial trench-coated headlight.
Behind him, the door clicked shut with a soft finality.
“…Dean?” Cas’s voice was lower than usual, edged with confusion and something else. Something sharp and breathless.
Dean turned around slowly, praying to a God who absolutely did not listen to him anymore.
“Hey, Cas,” he said, trying for nonchalant. “I, uh…was just lookin' for you.”
The silence between them stretched, heavy and electric. Cas wasn’t speaking. Dean wasn’t either. His pulse pounded in his ears.
The coat suddenly felt hot, like it was conducting heat straight from his skin. Cas took a step forward, slow and deliberate, eyes dragging over Dean’s chest, shoulders, down to his hands still clutching the lapels. Dean couldn’t move. Didn’t want to. The tension crackled like static.
“You…” Cas croaked breathlessly. “You look very good in that… Dean.”
Dean sucked in a startled breath, the words hitting him low in the gut. He didn’t laugh it off. Didn’t look away. He just stared.
He licked his lips. “Yeah?”
Cas nodded once, barely. “Yes.”
Another step. They were closer now. Close enough for Dean to see the rise and fall of Cas’s chest, the flicker of something dark in his impossibly bright eyes. They pulled Dean in subconsciously, until he could feel the radiating warmth of Cas’s skin against what little of his own was exposed in the trench coat.
Neither of them spoke. The air buzzed. Dean’s hand tightened on the lapel.
Then, voice hoarse, he muttered, “Yeah, well... fun’s over, trenchie goes back on the hook, let’s all pretend this didn’t—”
“Don’t,” Cas interrupted, quietly but firmly.
Dean’s breath hitched. His mouth snapped shut.
They stared.
Another inch. Cas’s hand lifted—hesitant—like he might do something reckless, might touch Dean in the ways he is impossibly starved for. Dean can feel his heart in his ears, his eyes flash to the bedroom door, then Cas’s lips, gearing up for the moment his body decides whether it wants to give in or flee. The space between them was growing smaller, and Dean knew he was going to make a deliciously bad decision.
And then...
“DEAN?”
Dean scrambled back like he’d been caught with his pants down. Sam’s voice echoed through the bunker like divine intervention. Bad timing and holy hell, this was a disaster.
“Crap,” Dean muttered, he tore the coat off in a mad panic, nearly tripping over himself. “Jeez Cas, don’t loose this again will ya! Didn’t take care of it for nothin!” Deans yelling nonsense and both he and Cas know it. He’s not even looking at Cas, babbling directly at the door over his too close shoulder.
Shoving the coat into Cas’s stunned hands, he beelines it straight for the bedroom door and doesn’t risk looking back as he feels his face heat to an embarrassingly lethal level.
“Later,” he tossed over his shoulder, just before Sam’s footsteps rounded the corner.
Cas was left standing alone, coat in his arms, staring at the door like it had just personally stripped him of his angelic grace.
Dean didn’t talk about it.
Not to Cas, not to Sam, not even to himself. Which was really saying something, because usually when he avoided stuff, he at least had the decency to lie to himself about why he was avoiding it.
But this?
This was a level of denial that deserved its own zip code.
He was fine. Everything was fine. So what if he couldn’t look Cas in the eye without remembering the way his voice dropped when he said Dean looked good in the coat? Or the way they’d stood there, breathing each other’s air like something was about to happen? Or the fact that Dean had kind of wanted something to happen?
Nope. Not thinking about it.
So, naturally, he avoided Cas like the plague.
He took longer showers. Slept in late. Hung out in the garage. Roped Sam into meaningless grocery trips, which resulted in him eating a Vegan taco because god forbid they eat something with saturated fats. One time, he fake-snored through an entire afternoon just to avoid passing him in the hallway.
Cas, on the other hand, was spiraling in his own special brand of emotional apocalypse.
He’d folded the coat three times, unfolded it twice, tried to wear it once and then immediately took it off again because it smelled like Dean now and that made his thoughts deeply impure.
Dean in the coat had done something to him. Shifted something. Like someone had flipped a switch inside his chest and now he couldn’t turn it back off. Not that it had been off before, but now it was loud. Dean had always been loud to Cas. Now he was unbearable.
Dean had practically fled, he saw the look in Dean's eyes moments before their lips met, soft and unsure of whether he wanted to kiss him or run. Cas folded the trench coat again slowly, as if it would help the trembling in his hands and the ache in his chest Dean had left in his wake. His thoughts fought against the unbearable hope that maybe Dean had wanted him too.
Did I misread it? His brow knit together, tense at the thought. With that, Cas spent the next three days avoiding Dean, believing his inexplicability to make tense and awkward situations all the more worse to be particularly detrimental to this one.
They passed each other in the hallway on Day 3.
Dean nodded stiffly. “Hey.”
Cas responded with a formal, “Hello, Dean,” like they hadn’t nearly collided in a cosmic explosion of sexual tension just seventy-two hours prior.
Sam, of course, noticed immediately.
“You two good?” he asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously as Dean downed his third beer at breakfast.
“Peachy,” Dean replied, with all the warmth of a dead car battery.
Cas looked at the ceiling. “I am also… peachy.”
Sam blinked. “Okay.” He directed a strained smile at Cas and gave a questioning side eye to Dean, who promptly ignored it by taking a larger than necessary swig of beer.
They continued whatever they each constituted as ‘breakfast’ in silence
Dean sat with the TV on low, contemplating the seriously stupid decision he was about to make. He was starting to think that maybe Sam’s divine intervention had really been a divine cockblock.
He shouldn’t walk down to Cas’s room right now, they were doing the safe thing, the mature, repress-until-it-kills-you thing, ‘The Winchester Special.’
And yet here he was, sitting with his favourite old western practically on mute as he debates dredging up shit that would eventually go away if he and Cas shoved hard enough.
With a long, drawn out sigh, Dean trudges down the long hallway, reaching Cas’s plain, unobserving door. Not that it was a bad door, it was structurally sound and probably built better than half the new homes today, and he was definitely stalling.
Fist raised, hesitating like he always did when it came to feelings. He wasn’t here to talk about the damn coat. Or the kiss that almost happened. Or the way Cas’s voice had wrecked his brain with stupid words.
He was here because… he needed a flashlight.
Yeah. That worked.
He knocked.
Cas opened almost instantly. Dean wondered if he’d been standing on the other side waiting for his knock, being a celestial being and all it wouldn’t really surprise him.
Dean shoved his hands in his pockets. “Hey. Uh... just wondering if you’ve seen the backup flashlight. The one with the red lens. Think I left it in here.”
Cas blinked. “You haven’t used that flashlight in three years.”
Dean coughed. “Yeah, well. I was feeling nostalgic.”
They stared at each other.
Cas opened the door wider, stepping aside and giving Dean the go ahead to enter.
Dean stepped inside.
The room was neat, quiet. Familiar.
And there it was, hanging on the hook by the closet: the trench coat. Still. Untouched. Like a relic.
Dean’s eyes locked on it. His stomach turned.
“You haven’t worn it,” he said before he could stop himself.
Cas followed his gaze. “No.”
Dean shifted. “I didn’t mean to make it weird. I just.. it was a dumb idea. You haven’t touched it since I—” He swallowed.
Cas turned to look at him, brows drawn.
“What?”
Dean huffed a humourless laugh. “I mean, you’ve worn that thing every day since 2009. Then I put it on for two seconds and you retire it like a bad memory.”
“You didn’t ruin it, if that’s what you’re implying,” Cas said, voice quiet. “You made it harder to wear.”
Dean looked up, confused.
Cas took a slow step toward him. “Because now, when I see it, I see you. I feel you. And I don’t know how to put it back on without remembering that moment.”
Dean froze. The words hit somewhere deep in his chest.
“And we haven’t talked about it,” Cas continued. “You’ve been avoiding me. I’ve been… giving you space. But neither of us is fine.”
Dean rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. You’re right.”
The words came out gruff, almost painful. But honest.
He met Cas’s eyes. “You looked at me like you wanted something. And I think I wanted it, too. I just didn’t know what the hell to do about it.”
“Then,” Cas turned and faced Dean, his eyes boring into Dean's own, making him squirm under the sheer intensity “...Do something about it now.”
Those words skipped his chest completely, making a swift decent towards his groin.
He stepped forward.
Closer.
The coat hung there, innocently. Like it wasn’t now the center of the most ridiculous sexual awakening of Dean Winchester’s life, if he ignored the moment with Rhonda Hurley. Dean gave a shaky laugh, murmuring. “You haven’t even heard the part where I freaked out thinking I broke your damn coat.”
“Dean.” Cas admonished him, voice low and gravely, his warm breath against Dean's lips. Dean surged forward, hands fisting in Cas’s shirt, slamming their mouths together like he was trying to finish what they’d started three days ago and maybe make up for years of not doing it.
It wasn’t soft.
It wasn’t careful.
Cas let out a startled noise, half growl, half gasp, and responded immediately, fingers digging into Dean’s waist, dragging him in like the solution to all their years of tension would be solved by brute-force kissing.
Their teeth knocked. Breath hitched. Dean groaned low in his throat as Cas shoved him back against the door, lips sliding hot and open, tongue slipping in like he meant it. And if that didn’t cause something warm and wicked to curl low in his gut, when he grabbed a handful of Cas’s hair and tugged and Cas bit his lip in retaliation, he was utterly on fire.
Dean gasped “Shit-” and Cas kissed the sound right off his mouth.
It was chaos. Perfect, glorious, desperate chaos.
Cas kissed like he was starved. Like he’d been thinking about it every damn day and had finally decided to devour Dean whole. And Dean let him. Pulled him closer. Let his hips grind forward, unthinking and too far gone.
“Cas I-,” Dean breathed, Cas didn’t let him finish. Just kissed him again, moving further along his jaw, towards the hollow of his throat, where he began to suck… hard.
Dean groaned, voice hoarse as he tried to regain some control “Okay. All right. You made your point, Cas. You got moves. Congrats. Gold star for the celestial make-out technique.”
Cas didn't look at him, just moved so he was directly next to Dean's ear,
“Dean, I have laid witness to thousands of different beings, across a millennium of different worlds, but the way your soul calls to me, burns against me right at this very moment is incomparable.”
Dean pulls in a deep breath and closes his eyes at Cas’s gravely tone, “Shit, Cas— yea— that’s…” too much and too intense but Dean would be lying to himself if that didn’t set every nerve ending in his soul alight.
Sam had just finished pouring himself a cup of coffee when the creak of the hallway floorboards made him glance up from his laptop.
He expected, from the initial flash of a tan trench coat, to hear Cas grumbling out a good morning.
What he got instead was Dean—barefoot, sleep-rumpled, and wearing nothing but Cas’s trench coat.
Tied shut.
Poorly.
Like “this barely counts as coverage and if he sneezes we’re all in trouble” poorly.
Sam blinked.
Dean shuffled into the kitchen with a grunt, didn’t even register Sam’s wide-eyed stare, and went straight for the coffee pot. His hair was sticking up on one side, there were faint bruises on his neck, and the belt of the coat was clinging on for dear life.
He poured a mug. Took a sip. Squinted at Sam.
“…What?”
Sam slowly set his cup down. “Seriously?”
Dean looked down at himself, blinked like he’d just remembered what he was wearing, or wasn’t wearing, then made a face like he’d been personally betrayed by the thing.
“Oh. Uh...”
He cleared his throat. Straightened the coat like it made a damn difference.
Then he pointed his mug at Sam. “Not a word. Not. A. Word.”
Sam opened his mouth.
Dean cut him off. “Nope.”
“I wasn’t gonna say any—”
Dean raised his voice. “I said nope!”
He turned on his heel, muttering under his breath, and shuffled back down the hallway. A second later, a muffled voice floated from Cas’s room:
“…Did you really go out there like that?”
Dean’s grumbling answer: “I forgot, okay? I was sleep-drunk and caffeine-deprived. My whole ass almost made a guest appearance in the kitchen.”
Sam took a sip of his coffee and sighed.
“I hate this house.”