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The third night, he caught him doing it again. Slipping away after he thought Dean was asleep in the cot they’d dragged in for him, sneaking out of the cabin. He had followed every night, just to see where Cas was going. It was the other Dean’s cabin, every time.
This time, he confronted him, jogged after him and stopped him with a harsh smack, palm to sternum. Cas didn’t seem that surprised to see him, smiled with one side of his mouth, amused but smart enough not to telegraph it too plainly.
“Just tell me, honestly. Is he fucking you?” Dean growled, low and serious. Cas rolled his eyes.
“No,” he said with a flat look. He lingered, like he knew Dean wasn’t done with him yet. This Cas was patient, Dean had noticed.
“You fuck him?” Dean asked after a moment.
“I have, but no, that’s not really – “ Dean cut him off, more frustrated and tense and confused than before they’d started talking, because if not that, then why else would Cas be in the guy’s cabin every night?
“Then what?” Dean hissed. “What do you do?”
Cas paused, looked up at Dean – into Dean – his expression unbearably kind.
“I hold him, Dean,” he murmured. Dean froze. Cas must have worried that Dean hadn’t heard him, because he repeated it, clearer, “I just hold him.” He considered a moment, after he spoke, then amended, “You. I just…I just hold you,” he explained, giving Dean a sad, knowing smile, more a momentary pursing of lips, before patting Dean’s hand where it still rested over his chest. His big warm palm felt like heaven against the cold skin on the back of Dean’s hand. “I gotta go,” he whispered, stalking off silently in the direction of older Dean’s cabin, leaving Dean in the middle of the path, still as a statue.
+++
And Dean can’t stop thinking about it, because Dean hasn’t been held by anyone at all since he was four years old.
So, he thinks about it – can’t help but picture it – every time he sees this twisted older version of himself, every time he locks eyes with this hollowed out version of Castiel. He finds himself fixating on Cas’s arms, his hands, the broad expanse of his chest, the slight curve of his collarbone. In the car, on the way to that stupid fucking suicide mission, Dean sits next to Cas and feels the warmth radiating off of him, wants to know what it would be like to lean into his side, drop his head on Cas’s shoulder, feel his stubbly cheek against his own forehead.
Even when he’s back, even when the nightmare is over, even when real Cas rescues him from Zachariah. He can’t stop thinking about it.
He claps a hand on Cas’s shoulder, and he’s warm, even warmer than his mortal echo was. His bicep is firm under Dean’s fingertips, and the look on this Cas’s face, it’s softer, more open, than Dean ever remembers it being. Has he always looked at him, into him, like this? How did he not notice it until now?
Of course, shit hits the fan, over and over and over, and he still finds himself thinking about it.
When he’s on Bobby’s couch, or the backseat of the Impala, or shivering on a never-ending parade of motel mattresses, he imagines the steady heat of another body behind his back. Tells himself that it wouldn’t necessarily have to be Castiel. Can’t manage to picture anyone else. Doesn’t exactly bother to try.
Sam is gone, and the apocalypse averted, and Dean keeps his promise.
And he thought being with Lisa would quiet that part of his mind. Sleeping in bed with another person for the first time in years, it should be enough. Some nights he even holds her, wraps her in his arms, feels her spine against the midline of his torso, the back of her neck flush with his sternum, her hair soft on his lips, feels her warming up against him. It isn’t what he wants.
Dean himself runs cold, especially since he got back from Hell. He swears by layers – multiple shirts, at least one jacket, even in the summer. He sleeps in thermal shirts, when he can get away with it. While he’s with Lisa, he tries to sleep in just boxers again, like he used to, but he always wakes up shivering.
Of course, shit hits the fan, over and over and over and over, and he still finds himself thinking about it.
He thinks about it when ‘Emmanuel’ turns those big blue eyes on him, wearing that soft navy sweater, introduces him to Daphne – his wife. Wonders if she gets to feel him pressed against her at night.
He thinks about it in Purgatory. First while he’s all alone, prayers on his trembling lips in the dark. Then, when he’s with Benny, when Benny asks these little half questions about Cas, trying to be polite while he susses out exactly how close his relationship with the angel is. And Dean doesn’t know how to explain that he’s closer to Cas than anyone else in the universe, barring his brother, who doesn’t count. He’s closer to Cas than anyone he’s ever met, and they’re still not as close as he wishes they were. Then, on the long walk to the rift, he thinks about it so much that he’s certain that Cas must feel it, must smell it on him when their shoulders brush, must hear it underneath Dean’s words, the bone deep want of it.
He thinks about it when Cas is back again, when Cas drifts and lingers and wallows, when he sits limp in a motel bed across from Dean, before Dean understands that Cas is giving up.
He thinks about it after April kills him, after Ezekiel brings him back to life, thinks about it while his hands roam over his neck, his cheeks, his arms, his chest, checking to make sure he’s really back, really breathing. Breathing. Something Cas isn’t normally supposed to do, something he has to do, now. And he can’t help but imagine what that would add to the experience, what it would be like to hear Castiel’s slow steady breaths in his ear as Dean drifted off to sleep, secure in his arms. The tandem rhythm of their chests, rising and falling, the blurry percussive metronome of Cas’s heartbeat against Dean’s shoulder blade.
He thinks about it once Ezekiel makes him send Castiel away, when his own bed feels even emptier than usual, somehow. When Cas calls him on a case, and Dean pieces together that the guy’s been sleeping in the gas station stock room, nothing but a sleeping bag between him and the concrete floor. Dean gets him a motel room for the night, lays five feet away, listening to Cas snore softly in a double bed of his own. He doesn’t even try to sleep. When Dean gets back to the bunker, he sleeps on the concrete floor in his room for a few days. He’s not really sure why he does it. Maybe as penance. Maybe just to feel closer to him, even from several states away.
He thinks about it so much, for so long, that it starts to fade into the background, seeps into the rest of his loneliness, dissolves in it like sugar in hot water. It’s no longer a discrete thought, able to be evaluated separately from his other aches and pains. He thinks this means he’s stopped thinking about it. He hasn’t.
It takes Castiel dying again for this particular curiosity to rise back up to the surface, individual and gleaming with the sickly sheen of grief. Cas is dead on the ground, splayed out, limp as a child’s doll. And he’s cold. And the first thing that Dean’s idiot brain presents him with, upon the very next firing of his stunted synapses, is the need to warm him up. Cas is always so warm. If Dean can just get his temperature back up, then maybe he’ll open his eyes, blue and awake and alive. That’s the thought that cuts his knees out from under him, drops him down beside Castiel’s corpse, Dean’s own skin cold from the bite of the night air, the wind whipping off the frigid surface of the lake. He wonders which of them is colder now, if Cas is warmer than Dean, even in death. And when they burn his body, Dean watches in asymmetrical horror, one eye squinting through the smoke. Some desolate part of him wants to crawl onto the pyre, wrap Cas’s arms around him, let the flames warm him instead of the angel himself.
After Cas returns, he thinks about it again, as an isolated desire. There are more important things, than what Dean wants. He’s learned this lesson dozens of times over the years, and he’s ready to internalize it at last. It doesn’t matter what Dean wants, not while lives are at stake, not while there’s Asmodeus, or Jack, or Michael, or Billie, or Chuck with which to contend.
Shit hits the fan, over and over and over and over and over and over, and he still finds himself thinking about it.
Until Cas dies again.
“Dies.”
Like that even begins to cover it. Castiel doesn’t die when the Empty takes him. He’s subsumed, swallowed, neutralized, swept into an endless and inaccessible abyss. Even when they defeat Chuck, it feels like the bastard must be out there somewhere still tugging on Dean’s strings, because everything is put to rights, all across the universe. Hell, maybe even across all of the universes – Dean doesn’t know. Everything is back to how it should be, everyone alive again, all the fucking people, all the fucking birds, even. Everyone except Cas.
Sam reconnects with all their old friends, and Dean stays in the bunker.
Sam starts consulting on cases, and Dean stays in the bunker.
Sam goes out on hunts again, mostly with Eileen, and Dean stays in the bunker.
Dean expected nightmares about Cas.
There’s no reprise of Cas’s departure, of the oozing blackness glomming onto him and gulping him down. There isn’t even a highlight reel of his other deaths, of the nightmares that visited him in years past – his bloated body limping into the reservoir, his hand slipping out of Dean’s on the cusp of freedom, his lifeless corpse crumpled in the dirt.
No, Dean dreams of the other Cas, the Cas that Dean was foolish enough to think was extricable from the Cas he knew. That the Cas living out his days beside Dean at Camp Chitaqua was corrupted in some way that his own angel hadn’t been, broken in a way that Dean could simply avoid. But it wasn’t Croatoan that led that Castiel to his demise – it was Dean. He told him, ‘never change’, and Castiel had lobbed that same secretly amused half smile at him in the present that his counterpart had given in the future, and Dean hadn’t bothered to notice. Castiel hadn’t needed to change at all, to destroy himself for Dean. He’d been doing that all along, it seemed, and Dean had just been too oblivious to catch him in time.
Night after night, Dean dreams of that other Cas, his moonlit eyes sharpening to fine points, needles held over a flame until the tip turns blue-white from the heat, pressing into Dean until they scrape against bone. The weight of his palm on Dean’s hand, gentle and enormous, a fulcrum that transformed Dean into a lever, turning his world upside down forever. Or perhaps, turning Dean himself upside down, doomed to walk through an unchanged world carrying enlightenment that he’s not equipped to use. More than anything, he dreams of the words – ‘I just hold you’ – uttered like they weren’t themselves a revolution, the toppling of a kingdom in Dean’s chest, his heart sliced apart and stitched back together in the same breath.
He dreams it, and he calls it a nightmare, and it isn’t one. Dean doesn’t know the difference anymore. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there never was. Maybe any dream can be a nightmare, if it hurts bad enough.
Once, early on, he and Sam discussed looking for a way to get him out. To get him back. They found out pretty quickly that the amount of information to be had about the Empty is negligible, and the amount of information about communicating with it is nonexistent. Sam has hope, that something will turn up, that they’ll find some big break, somewhere down the line. Dean gives his most convincing smile, says maybe.
+++
When Cas comes back for the last time, there’s no fanfare to mark his arrival. The lightbulbs don’t burst. They don’t even flicker. There’s no mucky portal to spit him back out. There’s no one waiting for him, when he reappears in the bowels of the bunker, standing in the same spot that he was over a year prior – 591 days, specifically. The amount of time that he’s been gone means nothing. It is a human thing, to measure time this way. Castiel is an angel. The Empty is primordial. Jack is all.
There was no grand negotiation for his release. Jack did not barter with the entity, did not even speak to it. He didn’t need to enter it, physically or otherwise, to pluck Castiel from its depths. He merely waited until it was asleep once more, and deftly brought him out, along with countless other angels and a few choice demons he’d need to help with his restructuring of the afterlife. All of these, he returned to the appropriate realms. All but Castiel.
Sometime just after three in the morning, Castiel reappears, and he stands in the dark of the disused room for seven minutes and twenty two seconds before he understands that this is the dark of Earth, not the dark of the Empty. It smells like dust and concrete and lightly rusted pipes. The Empty smells like nothing. There is a faint light, under the closed door. There is no light in the Empty.
Castiel emerges from the room into the hall of the bunker, and he knows it is nighttime in Kansas, because he is an angel, and this information makes itself available to him on an atomic level. He’s getting used to perceiving again, having spent so long in stasis.
If Sam and Dean still live in the bunker, then they will probably be in their respective rooms, considering the time of night. They will probably be asleep. He walks silently past Sam’s door, hears him breathing, his heart beating, using his extended sensory array. He hears another person’s heart beating just out of step, right beside Sam’s. It takes him a little while to identify them, by the sound of it alone. When he does, he smiles. Eileen.
Castiel moves down the corridor, stopping in front of Dean’s room.
He hears Dean breathing. His heart, beating fast. A nightmare, perhaps. He hears another kind of breathing, another kind of life, and recognizes it as the circulatory rhythm of a dog.
Castiel doesn’t really intend to enter the room, but he feels compelled to do so. There’s a tug, metaphysical and unashamed, on his grace, and he follows it willingly, into the darkness of Dean’s room. The dog does not notice his entrance, and neither does his master.
Sitting on the edge of Dean’s bed, he looks down at him in the dark, the light from the hallway, where he’s left the door cracked, spilling across his features. He’s as beautiful as Castiel remembered him, made all the more beautiful because he is here, alive, eyes ticking back and forth under his eyelids. He reaches out, just to touch him, the impulse so strong that he doesn’t even consider not indulging it, when Dean startles awake.
+++
“Cas?” Dean rasps, his throat uncooperative to the sudden demands of wakefulness. Dean has hallucinated a lot over the years, much of it being Castiel, but he has been spared that particular facet of grief this time around. He’s not sure he could survive it.
“Dean,” Cas responds, voice as rumbling and shredded as ever, perhaps even more than usual. He hasn’t spoken since the day the Empty took him.
“Cas,” Dean sits up, reaches out blindly beside him until he flicks the bedside lamp on. He needs better light to see Cas, but he can’t bear to look away, even for a second.
“Dean,” Cas says again, but the intonation is different. Less matter of fact. Dean is used to Castiel saying his name to mean any number of things, from ‘hello’, to ‘I’m sorry’, from ‘please’, to ‘wait’. He’s not sure what Cas means with it just now, but it’s something fond. Something aching and soft and apologetic and relieved.
“You’re – it’s really – you’re really – ?” Dean gasps out the beginnings of questions, inhales too hard in between them to finish any of them. Chokes on a sob, reaches out to touch, to reassure himself that Cas is real, stops short. Perhaps afraid that he’ll find nothing but air where Cas should be.
“It’s me,” he murmurs, letting his hand close the remaining distance between himself and Dean, as he’d wanted to before the man awoke. His palm comes down softly on Dean’s shoulder, where he marked him when they first met, where he touched him last. “I’m real.”
“But I can’t – how can I – what if – ?” Dean seems reassured somewhat by the physical contact, but his doubts – well-founded, Castiel must somberly agree – won’t loosen their grip on him yet. His eyes are so wide, Castiel can see white all the way around his irises.
“I’m not sure how I can prove it to you, but I understand the desire for proof,” Cas offers haltingly. Dean seems distracted, all of a sudden, and roots through his bedside table until he finds a small pocket knife. He flicks it open and unceremoniously swipes the blade in a long firm stroke across his left palm, gritting his teeth against the pain.
He looks up at Castiel, still sitting on his bed (though now wearing an expression of horror at what he’s just witnessed), and Dean lets out a strangled laugh, then bursts into tears.
“Oh thank fuck,” Dean babbles wetly, closing the knife as an afterthought and dropping it on the top of his nightstand. “Thank fuck, it’s you, I’m not nuts, fuck fuck fuck.”
Castiel, distraught and confused, reaches his other hand out to touch the wound on Dean’s palm, healing it with a thought. It shimmers white-blue with grace, then disappears, like it was never there, and Dean only cries harder. He clasps Cas’s shoulders in his hands and drags him down onto the bed in an awkward laying position, half-crushing Dean. Cas allows himself to be moved.
“I’m…glad that helped you understand,” Cas offers after Dean’s weeping has abated, winding down to a few errant sniffles. He laughs, when Castiel says this, and Cas isn’t sure why, but it sounds genuinely joyful, so he smiles, settles down a bit more naturally next to Dean. He lays his head on a pillow, so that their faces are close.
“I can’t believe you’re back,” Dean sighs, sounding impossibly young, more hopeful than Cas has ever heard him.
“As unlikely as it must seem, it is true,” Cas agrees, and Dean laughs again, and Cas smiles again. Until Dean shivers, just a minute twinge, from his shoulders to his ankles, that makes his teeth clench in momentary discomfort. “You’re cold,” Cas observes, and to Dean’s ears it's almost disapproving.
“Yeah,” Dean replies, a little defensive, “I’m always cold, Cas.” And it’s back, full force, every molecule in his body, all straining towards Cas, all begging for the same thing.
Cas looks at Dean – into Dean. Searching through him until he finds what he’s looking for. And then he smiles, just a little, with one side of his mouth. He’s amused, by Dean, by what he wants, by what he’s too shy to ask for, but he knows Dean well enough not to openly dangle his amusement in front of the man.
“If you’d like,” Castiel murmurs, plush and patient, “I could hold you.”
“Yeah?” Dean breathes, so quiet that no one but an angel would ever hear it.
“Yes.” Cas nods, already shifting to arc his body towards Dean, laying on his side, his spine a convex crescent, making room in front of his chest.
Dean props himself up on his side, scoots back until his shoulders are flush with Castiel’s collarbone, his spine aligned along Cas’s sternum, his navel, symmetrical across their middles. When he stills against Castiel, he brings a solid, heavy arm around him, tucked beneath Dean’s, to press his palm flat against Dean’s chest, a welcome point of heat over his heart. He rests his own arm over top of Castiel’s, lets his hand clasp gingerly around his wrist. Dean falls back asleep, Castiel’s unnecessary heartbeats keeping time against his back, his unnecessary breaths rippling sweetly in his ear.
+++
In the morning, Dean wakes up in someone’s arms for the very first time in his adult life.
He’s only human, so he has a moment of complete disorientation when he feels a presence behind him, feels himself tucked against another body. But just a moment. A flicker of eyelashes, a quarter of a heartbeat, nothing more.
And then, he laughs, because for the first time in he can’t remember how many years, he wakes up almost uncomfortably warm, sweat slicking the joins of his thighs, the creases of his elbows. The back of his shirt is stuck to him, clinging to his deltoids.
“Cas?” He whispers, not disbelieving, not doubting, but anxious.
There’s an anxiety inside of Dean that he’s known longer than he’s known his brother, a constant companion that has saved his life more times than he can count. This anxiety taught him how to shoplift without getting caught, how to care for a toddler in a motel room that’s far from baby-proofed. This anxiety showed him how to tell the difference between the many phases of John Winchester’s drunkenness, how to know whether a stranger is actually kind or playing nice. It’s the anxiety that carries him through his hunts, that has him urging Sam to text him when he makes it to his destination. And the anxiety wants Dean to make sure, extra sure, just one last time, that this isn’t a trick, or a fabrication, or a hallucination. So he gives it what it wants, because he owes it that much. That much, and so much more.
“Dean,” Castiel answers, voice as dark and lovely as ever. He pauses, and when Dean doesn’t speak, he continues, hesitant. Perhaps Castiel is anxious as well. “Last night…when I came into your room, when you…” Cas seems so afraid, to say something wrong, to ask something wrong. Dean twists in his arms, so their faces are mere inches apart. He needs to see him. It seems to soothe them both, and he feels Cas relax, his arms around him slackening, more the suggestion of pressure than the fact of it. “What were you dreaming about?” He asks at last, and Dean can’t help the smile that tugs at his mouth when he hears it. An old question, uttered anew, not rigid and prodding like it was all those years ago. It’s tender and green, the way he says it now, sprouting up, peeking out of the soil, brave for no other reason than that it’s all there is, the only thing left to be.
“You, Cas,” Dean replies, simple and true. He nuzzles closer, trying to explain with his body what he can’t inflect with his voice. That dreaming of Castiel means something, means something warm between two bodies. Cas seems to understand this, brings a hand up to cradle the back of Dean’s head, long fingers not pressing, just holding, taking the weight. “I always dream about you, now.”
“I’m sorry,” Cas says, closes his eyes, and Dean misses the blue of them immediately, the cloudless sky of them.
“Why?” He asks, but he knows all the things that Cas could mean. He just wants to know which one it is, which hurt Cas ranks highest, which he’s most eager to atone for.
“With everything that’s happened. Everything that I’ve done. I don’t suppose they’re pleasant dreams.” Cas still has his eyes closed, not clenched shut tight like Dean would do, if roles were reversed. Not braced against tears. Just closed, lidded lightly, hidden.
“They weren’t exactly bad dreams,” Dean hedges, and is rewarded for his cryptic response with the careful revelation of Castiel’s eyes, open and curious. He wonders how they can look so different, how Jimmy Novak can have the same physical eyes and not light them up the same way, not imbue them with the same depth. This body wasn’t always Castiel’s, but he’s made it his own in every way imaginable. “And I guess, they weren’t exactly about you.”
“Were they about me, or not?” Cas asks, and he almost sounds jealous, and Dean cracks a flirty smile about it before he remembers that they’re talking about the constant march of grief that’s been running him into the ground for over a year. The smile fades, but doesn’t disappear altogether, just desaturates, drifting back towards center.
“You remember, when Zach sent me to that future, where Croatoan wiped everybody out?”
“Yes.” Cas cocks his head a few degrees to the side in confusion, and Dean can practically hear him thinking ‘how is that not a nightmare?’ but he doesn’t wait for him to ask.
“Right, well. While I was there. I met this other you. And he, um. I dunno. He just got me thinking. About you and me. And once you were gone, there was nothing to distract me from it all anymore, I guess.”
“I’m…not sure that I understand.” Cas stares at him, doesn’t need to blink, and Dean stares back, because he’s missed the feeling so much. Missed feeling like Cas had him under a microscope, or like he had him laid out on an operating table, sorting through Dean’s mangled insides with careful reverent fingers.
“I thought he…I thought the me, in the future, was using that Cas, or, or hurting him. Taking advantage of him or something. But I had it all wrong. I confronted him about it – the other you. And he said that he was just…just taking care of the other me. Just, you know. Going to see him at night to…to hold him.” The words don’t want to come out of him, even after all of these years. He’s always had a problem, saying things out loud, ever since he was very small. He feels very small, now.
“And you dreamed about…” Cas still sounds too confused for Dean’s liking, so he intervenes, in a bit of a huff.
“About him saying it, telling me that. I dream about it every night.” Dean watches Cas absorb this, slow motion, brows raising, mouth parting in surprise. He decides to double down, while he still has the nerve worked up. “And I’ve never stopped thinking about it. All these years, I never stopped. I looked at you, and I – I tried to see the overlap, you know? How you could ever want – “ Dean cuts himself off, swallows the rest of the thought, a thought worn thin by time, a threadbare handkerchief, worried smooth between thumb and forefinger in a gentleman’s pocket. Cas doesn’t need Dean to finish his sentence, though, because he knows all the things that Dean could mean. He must be kinder than Dean, because he doesn’t even ask him to finish it anyway, to see which hurt Dean ranks highest.
“Did you want – when you were thinking about it, did you want that? This?” He gestures with a dip of his chin to the way their bodies are lined up, the coil of their arms, the tangle of their legs. “Or did you only want to understand how I might? Were you merely curious, looking for…connective tissue, between myself and this other version of me?” Castiel looks calm, but Dean knows better, knows to look for the slight pinch around his eyes, the tense set of his upper lip.
“I wanted this. At first I…I guess I just pretended not to understand. I thought that would make it easier, not to have it.”
“It doesn’t make it easier,” Castiel sighs, almost commiseratory. It’s so utterly Cas of him, something in Dean just gives way to it, and he tucks his face into Cas’s chest, breathes him in. He wants to bask in him, sunbathe in his radiance.
“It’s better, having it,” Dean clarifies, voice muffled where his mouth is pressed into Castiel’s shirt. Cas curves around him, one hand still resting on the back of Dean’s head, the other skating down his ribcage, sliding up under his sleepshirt to stroke his side, his shoulder blade, the divot of his spine. He presses his lips against the crown of Dean’s head, not so much a kiss as a meditation.
“It is better,” Cas exhales warm into Dean’s hair, sending a pleasant wave of tingles across his scalp, “Having it. Having you,” He clarifies, careful. Like he’s afraid Dean hasn’t realized the innate intimacy of this act, and the spell could break at any moment.
“Last time you brought it up, you didn’t seem so sure of that.” Dean tries for teasing, but it comes out raw, because it still hurts. Maybe hurts more, for all the time that’s passed.
Time is not a healer, not really, though it can be. A fresh wound is clean, at least. Has the potential to close, scab over. Broken bones can be set right. Deep cuts can be stitched so that they won’t even scar. But a wound ignored and left to fester, or poked and fussed and irritated by constant attention, it only gets worse with time. Infected, inflamed, tender. At best, a hideous scar and a painful memory. At worst, lethal.
“I had to believe…” Castiel pauses. Not breathing. He doesn’t have to do that, and Dean’s so comforted by that fact, so dreadfully glad that Cas doesn’t have to breathe anymore, if he doesn’t want to. He pulls back from Cas’s chest to look up at him, and his eyes aren’t wet with tears, his expression is as good as blank. Dean can see the worried bunching between his brows, just the suggestion of pain, barely a whisper of a crease there. “I had to believe it, in that moment. To save your life.”
And as much time as Dean has had to think about it, he’s never seen it that way. Never for a moment had he considered that Cas wasn’t shooting from the hip, firing off a magic bullet that he could have launched at any old time, but just waited to use until it would benefit them in some way. That Cas wouldn’t have been happy saying those things, settling for saying those things, when it wasn’t life or death. When it wasn’t Dean’s life or death.
“You…” Dean can’t breathe, which is unfortunate, because he does need to breathe. Cas stares at him, into him, and he doesn’t even need to ask what he was about to ask, doesn’t need clarification about what it all meant, if it was true, how much of it, how true. It’s all right there, in the way he looks at him when he can’t get past the obstacle of his own tongue, his own windpipe, his own brain.
“I know what I said.” He smiles, just a little, just half of his mouth, ticking up, like he might not even know he’s doing it, or how to keep from doing it. It’s Dean’s favorite one of Cas’s expressions. “And this is better,” he reaffirms, scrunching his fingers where they’re planted on Dean’s head, just enough to scratch pleasantly along his hair follicles, reminding him how they’re connected.
They lay like that for a while, just enjoying each other’s presence, the way they fit together, the simple nameless thing they’ve created. There’s no rush, to say ‘I love you’, to hash out the years of unspoken feelings. They just let themselves spend the morning in bed, having the thing they’ve both wanted for almost as long as they’ve known one another.
Eventually, of course, they get up, and Dean finds it hilarious that Sam and Eileen are already gone by that point, off to do something important. They’ll have to wait until they get back, to share the cosmically big news. When Dean asks how Cas got out, he thinks on it, and decides it had to have been Jack, because he can feel the other angels who’ve been released tittering about it on angel radio. It brings a smile to Castiel’s face, because he hasn’t heard the peaceful communication of angels in the ether for a very long time.
Dean’s sipping coffee when he finally works up the courage to ask.
“So, what’s next? You gonna go see if Jack needs a spare set of hands up there?”
“Pardon?” Cas asks from across the kitchen. He’s been snooping in the fridge for a few minutes, even though he doesn’t need to eat. He’s always been nosy, and it’s nice to see that the Empty hasn’t changed that about him.
“You know. I’m asking what you’re going to do next, now that you’re out.”
Cas looks at him, into him. Crosses the room in a few industrious strides, and sits opposite Dean at the table. He puts his hands on the tabletop, palms down, and scoots them forward until they’re bracketing Dean’s own hands, where they rest on either side of his coffee mug. He keeps staring, and Dean, helpless, stares back.
“This,” Castiel insists, in a tone that brooks no argument. “I’m going to do this.”
“Yeah?” Dean grins, tries to stifle it. Fails.
“Yes.” Cas nods, curling one hand around one of Dean’s. His warm palm is like heaven, against the cold skin on the back of Dean’s hand.