Work Text:
“Dean?” Cas asks softly, and Dean opens his eyes to the angel bathed in the ambient glow of night and the moon through the curtains, his head resting on a pillow and his position mirroring the hunter’s own sleep-heavy limbs.
“Did I wake you?” he rasps back, trying for an apologetic smile but feeling it come out like a grimace, like he isn’t drinking in the sight before him of Cas alive and animated, piercing eyes illuminated by white light instead of shadowed by darkness.
“Yes,” Cas replies, because he has no concept of social tact.
“Oh,” Dean whispers, squeezing his eyes shut. “M’sorry. You should keep resting,” he says finally, like he’ll be able to fall asleep again after seeing what his mind conjured up while floating in oblivion. It’s painfully easier to be soft in the low light, and he hates that even as he tries to bury it.
“Can I do anything to help you sleep?” Cas presses, and the foot of space between them has never felt so close or so far. Dean licks his lips and lets his unsteady gaze flick away from moonlit irises and tries not to think of the gentle press of a mouth against his. Cas isn’t in his trenchcoat or tie. Dean doesn’t know why he fixates on that detail, but it won’t leave his mind.
“I…” he begins, because there is something that would help, but he doesn’t want to cross the invisible line between them.
Because Dean knows that his best friend is in love with him. It’s too obvious, the connection between them that doesn’t have a label but seems to be clearer than crystal. It’s late nights in motel rooms lying face to face because there’s only two beds and hands lingering on the backs of necks and shoulders in one last brush of warmth or the heavy rush of adrenaline as he looks over and nearly crashes the car because he’s busy staring at the way the afternoon sunlight hit the glowing eyes of the man in his passenger seat.
It’s hard because he knows his best friend is in love with him but he can’t imagine a worse fate to subject someone to than his own love. His love tastes like bitter wine, like salted holy water, like fanatic worship. He loves too deep for it to be anything but terrifying, that gaping chasm between his ribs where he tucks those emotions, and Cas deserves more than his darkness.
“I…” he repeats, then stops. He can’t say it out loud. He can’t admit that for the world to hear, but inside the sanctuary of his own head, he can at least try to say what he wants, even if every word is like poison between them, ruining their fragile peace, the line they dance of never putting it into words.
To Castiel the angel of me, who gripped me right and raised me from perdition, he prays with every ruined spark of his being, and he’s privy to seeing Cas’s pupils blow even wider, swallowing up the blue until his eyes are almost completely dark.
“Dean,” the angel gasps impossibly quietly, like his every exhale shapes the hunter’s name on instinct and now he can just barely verbalize it.
Please, Dean continues, squeezing his eyes shut so he won’t have to look at the expression of—of rapture, of awe, that’s spreading across Cas’s face. Can I hold you, he asks, just for tonight, just until I fall asleep, and there’s no response but then there’s a hand on his cheek that shocks him enough that his eyes fly open, and—
Castiel is smiling at him, lips parted, looking impossibly grief-stricken but also so tender, as his thumb strokes across Dean’s cheekbone. “Of course,” he whispers, his hand enveloping the side of Dean’s face with gentle warmth. “Anything.”
And doesn’t that just knock the breath right out of him, doesn’t that just make him blink furiously so tears don’t spill over his waterline.
“Okay,” he says dumbly instead of something stupid like I think you’re the first person to make me better instead of worse and that fucking scares me, and reaches out to pull the angel into his embrace. It’s not awkward, is the thing. It’s not stilted or stiff or tense. It’s just them, just breathing, just touching, like this isn’t anything that could permanently change the fabric of Dean’s entire universe.
In the end, when he wakes up to sunlight streaming through the cheap motel curtains, he and Cas are still wrapped around each other.
The angel’s head is tucked underneath his chin, Dean’s face buried in his feathery black hair and his arms wrapped around Cas’s shoulders like if he lets go they’ll disappear. Cas’s own hands are resting with splayed fingers at Dean’s hip and pressed flat against his chest like Cas was counting his heartbeats.
“Good morning,” Cas rumbles into Dean’s collarbones like a lover would. It makes both of their chests vibrate, his voice rough with sleep and gravelly like rocks on the bottom of the ocean, and Dean sucks in a breath as quietly as he can so he doesn’t say, I think I’m in love with you and have been for so long, do you think this is something we could do without crashing and burning like everything else I’ve ever tried, and he buries his face back into the soft nest of Cas’s hair in wordless want as he wishes this was something he could allow himself to have.
Those fingers at his hip tighten, the thumb brushing skin from where his shirt rode up, and Dean can taste the faintest crackle of electricity, bright and stifling, shifting across his tongue as Cas makes no move to get up or even disentangle from the embrace and Dean barely dares to keep gulping down air in tiny, bite-sized portions.
This is dangerous. It might’ve been looked over or brushed off in the middle of the night, in that safety net of smog-shrouded stars and darkness, but this is day, this is knowing and seeing and doing it anyway.
Dean should push him away. He never should’ve asked for something like this in the first place. He should sit up and loudly say that last night was a fluke and he didn’t know what came over him, like he didn’t gasp awake and immediately calm when Cas was there, warm and solid and peacefully asleep, caged in the circle of his arms.
Like he didn’t pretend, for those moon-washed heartbeats, that this could be them every night.
“Good morning, Cas,” he rasps, and he’s pretending he’s not choking on a sob.