Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cas has something on his mind. Dean can tell, because Cas has been spending all his time either alone in the garage working on one of his mysterious, secret-from-Dean projects, or fixing things around the house.

Every time Dean goes looking for him, Cas is doggedly trying to fix things, not stopping for sleep or for dinner or for beers with Dean on the front porch.  The clock, the sink, the door Dean put his fist through last week during an tempestuous late evening argument where he had shouted and Cas had glared at the floor with a stony face.  

Cas can’t do much about the door.  It’s busted all the way through. Cas seems to have decided that the only thing to do is to take the door off its hinges and leave it leaning against the wall beside his room, where the doorknob catches on the pocket of Dean’s jacket every time he walks down the hall to the bathroom, causing him to swear loudly about fallen angels with passive-aggressive tendencies.  

Cas fixes the shifty board on the back porch steps and the broken window in the second-story bathroom.  He touches up the demon-proofing around the house, hanging extra horseshoes and adding more salt to the lines around the windows.  He gets his hands bloody carving Enochian sigils over every door.  

None of the inscriptions are the same.  Dean’s bedroom door has an extra line of lettering over it that doesn’t appear over any other door in the house.  

"I bet it’s to keep me from busting up another door," Dean snipes to Sam, who wisely doesn’t answer the phone with So how are you and Cas doing these days?  

"Why’d you break the door?" Sam asks, cautious.  

Dean closes his eyes.  "I said it," he says.  "I said it.  He didn’t listen."  

That’s all he has to say.  He doesn’t have to explain a thing about it to Sam. Sam had been there, at the trials.  Sam knows what Dean must’ve said.  Sam knows.

"Send me a picture and I’ll see if I can translate it," Sam offers instead.  "I could use a sigil like that in our kitchen.  Amelia goes through a place setting a week."

Whatever it is that Cas is worked up about, it keeps Cas up at all hours of the night.  He takes apart their clock in the kitchen while Dean is sleeping.  Dean wakes up the next morning and finds pieces of wiring and screws and mechanical parts strewn all over the kitchen table and Cas nowhere in sight.  The parts are still there the next day, and the day after that.

Cas is still working on it three nights later.  Dean watches him from the library.  It doesn’t take him long to understand why the clock has been giving Cas so much trouble.  Cas can’t hold the screw in place.  He can’t hold the screwdriver steady.  He can’t fuse the wires or pick up the smallest parts.  Dean leaves him fumbling for a grip on a wire cutter and goes to bed.

The next morning, Dean heads to the kitchen and encounters Cas in the library, precariously balanced on a ladder, painting the crown molding.  He has flecks of paint in his beard and on his jeans, and dark circles under his eyes.  The laces of his boots aredangling dangerously, catching on the rungs on the ladder.  

Dean stops under the ladder and reties Cas’s shoelaces wordlessly.  Cas will let him do this for him, as long as Dean doesn’t ask for permission beforehand or say anything about it later.

“What are you doing, man?” he asks Cas, who looks down at him expressionlessly from his perch on the ladder.

“I’m painting,” Cas says calmly.  "What does it look like, Dean?”

“Yeah, you’re a regular handyman,” Dean agrees.  “What’s with all the Tool Time lately?”

Cas rubs his cheek with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of white in his beard.  "These are things that need doing," he says slowly. “This is important, Dean."

"You’re okay, though," Dean says.  It’s a question, really.  "You don’t need me to help?"

Cas studies him.  "No," he says eventually.  "I’m fine here."

"You’re avoiding me," Dean states, just for the record.

Cas gives him a flat look.  "I’m right here."

Dean waits him out. Sure, he could corner Cas, maybe force him to talk.  Butsometimes trying to understand anything Cas says is like trying to make sense of a phonebook written in Linear A: the words might be there, but the meaning is impossible to decipher.  Whatever decoder ring ought to have come along with Cas has been lost to the annals of time, and Dean doesn’t always understand what Cas is trying to say, or even if Cas is trying to say anything at all.  

Maybe nothing’s wrong.  Maybe Cas just has energy to spare.  At any rate, the house is looking better.  Cleaner.  More kept up.  Dean can’t exactly complain about that.  But in the meantime, Cas is looking haggard and drawn in the mornings.  He’s not sleeping.  And when it comes down to it, Dean would rather see Cas looking better kept up, instead of the house.

And sometimes the direct approach doesn’t work.  Sometimes he has to come at Cas sideways to knock anything out of him.

Dean corners him under the sink that night.  He stands there for a moment, enjoying the view.  A former angel of the lord, now wrestling with the hellish forces of interior plumbing, wielding a wrench and a screwdriver, beard dripping from getting a blast of water to the face after accidentally breaking the water line.  Will wonders never cease.  

He rubs a hand over his face. "Go to bed, Cas," he says wearily.

Cas slides out from under the sink just long enough to grab the wrench and shoot Dean a hostile glance.

"If you’re not going to help," he says dangerously, “then just go."

Dean sighs, and Cas looks at him suspiciously.  Waiting for him to leave.  Dean drops down on his knees and joins Cas under the sink.  

Cas tenses up beside him, but doesn’t move away.  It’s sort of nice, for a while, just lying there in the darkness of the cabinet with his shoulder brushing up against Cas’s, feeling the warmth of him all along his side.  

They don’t say anything.  They just lie there and breathe, staring up at the dismantled drain pipe in silence together.  

Dean sighs again.  “Cas, this isn’t working.”

Cas stiffens up immediately.  “I said I was fine,” he mutters.  "And I am."

“Wasn’t talking about that,” Dean says.  Cas’s fingers drum on the edge of the cabinet beside him.  Dean wants to reach out and cover his hand, get him to stop maybe, or maybe just to feel the warmth of Cas’s fingers under his own.  He doesn’t.  “I mean the drain’s not working because the garbage disposal’s busted.”

“I know that,” Cas mutters.  He reaches up with his wrench to reattach a section of pipe.  His hands are shaking.

"You’ve got to get some sleep," Dean tells him.  

Cas works the pipe back together.  He’s not looking at Dean.  "I don’t want to."

Dean studies him carefully.  "Okay," he says.  "Okay."  He pushes his hands against the back of the cabinet, preparing to slide back out.  He nudges Cas’s booted foot with his own.  "I’ll make us some coffee, then." 

Cas’s hands stop moving.  "You don’t have to do that."

Dean shakes his head, rueful.  "Yeah, well.  I want to."  He stands up, holds a hand out to Cas.  "Come on."

He can’t get Cas to bed, but after the table’s been cleared of the clock parts and the coffee’s poured, Cas doesn’t retreat back under the sink.  He sits at the table with Dean and stares up the ceiling, and starts talking nonsense.

Cas gets maudlin when he’s drinking, which is fortunately rare, and he gets belligerent when he’s dead-dog tired, but when he’s halfway to sleep and fighting it for all he’s worth, draining the last dregs of coffee like it’s a mission from god, that’s when Cas gets philosophical.  Dean remembers all the nights they’ve spent on mattresses, side-by-side in the library, of almost sleeping, of waking up to one of Cas’s strange, quiet remarks echoing across the room.

Dean sort of feels obligated to listen to Cas ramble, since Cas doesn’t volunteer much on any other given day.  Cas confesses things to him at night, like that he’d stolen Dean’s Kansas cassette and hidden it away because he was sick of listening to “Dust in the Wind" on repeat in the Impala, or that after a while, he’d forgotten how it felt to wield a sword.  

Sometimes he says things like I still don’t understand the attraction of chocolate chips in waffles and sometimes he says other things, things like I wish it hadn’t happened this way.  

Dean never knows what Cas is going to say next, but he knows it’s important to pay attention, even if he’d rather be sleeping.  He might miss hearing Cas say something important, something he’ll never say again.  

Like tonight.  Later tonight, he’ll fall on his knees beside his bed and thank any god that might be listening, for letting him hear Cas talking tonight.

"This is the best part," Cas says, out of the blue.    

Dean waits, but he doesn’t continue.  "The best part of what?" he asks, and Cas looks at him with sudden intensity, hair falling in his eyes.  

"The best part of falling," he says.  "It’s being with you."

There’ s a choked feeling somewhere in his throat.  He knows what he wants.  He’s known for a while.  What he wants to hear is Cas’s voice, that same dark deep rumble, saying, Goodnight, Dean, as he climbs in bed next to him.  He wants to hear what it would sound like if Cas ever said I love you.  This might be the closest he’ll ever come to hearing something like that.

"What’s the worst part, then?" he asks, fighting that choked feeling for all he’s worth.  

"Dreaming," Cas answers thoughtfully.  He smoothes the tablecloth idly, fingers tracing over the pattern of roses stitched into the fabric.

"So what do you dream about?”  He doesn’t know if Cas will answer the question.  But he can guess.  Cas, after all, has several millenia of bad experiences to dream about.  Hell, purgatory.  Here.

Cas stops sipping his coffee long to enough say slowly, “I don’t know.  I’ve only ever had the one.”

"What was it?” Dean asks.

“It was nice,” Cas says.  “There was water, and a dock, and you.”

All at once that choked feeling threatens to overwhelm him.  He laughs around it, feels a small piece of his heart tear off inside.  "Dude, that was my dream," he says. “Not yours.”

"I know," Cas says.  "I was in it.  And you are in mine."  

What he says next is almost too soft for Dean to hear.  He confesses the words to his coffee cup.  It’s decaf.  But Cas doesn’t know that.  "I meant it, you know.  I am happy, here with you.  I don’t think I should be allowed to be so happy.  To be here with you."

So this is what keeps Cas up at night, then.  Cas thinks maybe he shouldn’t have gotten a happily-ever-after after all.  So Cas considers his humanity an unearned reward, rather than a punishment, something he thinks he doesn’t deserve.  Dean gets it.  He does.  Cas thinks he deserves nightmares.

They don’t say anything for a while.  Dean thinks about the busted door, wonders if he should carve those sigils somewhere in their kitchen, too.  Something’s going to shatter tonight.  

He doesn’t know what it’s going to be.  He doesn’t know what Cas is trying to say.

But the moment is over before it’s begun.  When he looks across the kitchen table, it’s to find that Cas has finally fallen asleep.  

"I love you," Dean tells him.  This is what he says to Cas whenever Cas can’t hear him, when he’s passed out on the couch after drinking whisky until dawn or asleep in a motel bed next to Dean’s.  It’s the only time Cas will ever listen.

This is it, he knows.  This is it, he’d said to Sam, in those terrifying moments at the end of the trials, with Cas closing the gates of heaven and Dean hanging on to him like he was the most important thing in the world.  This is it, he’d said to Sam then.  I don’t care if he never loves me back.  This is it.  I’m not leaving him.

Love you, Dean whispers to Cas, but only when he’s asleep.  He tried to say it to Cas, once. Love you, he’d said, but Cas shook his head over and over, covering his ears, saying, No, no, no, saying You can’t.  You shouldn’t.  Just don’t.

And now there’s a hole in the door, a testament to Dean’s frustration, furious because Cas isn’t ready to hear those words and he’s ready to say them, because every night he prays Love you, love you, love you to the fallen angel asleep in the room down the hall.

Well, maybe Cas will take that I love you now.

He shakes Cas’s shoulder, gets him standing up, then stumbling towards his room, past that broken door still leaning in the hall and into his bed.  

Before he turns and leaves, he smoothes back the hair on Cas’s face.  Cas closes his eyes.  "You could say it again," he murmurs.  "What you said before. I don’t mind."

"Goodnight," Dean says to him, a near-whisper.  "I love you," he says, and leaves a kiss on Cas’s forehead to ease the blow.