Chapter Text
It wasn't a particular moment. No swelling music in a chick flick moment. No declaration of love to win some award for beautiful poetry. The shift simply happened when Metatron stole Castiel's grace.
It took three weeks for him to find the Winchesters again, and when he showed up at the bunker, Dean shoved Sam out of the way to be the first to crush Castiel in an embrace. He even kissed his cheek in unadulterated relief that the angel - well, not anymore - was still alive.
Nobody asked questions when Castiel began creeping down the hall at night to crawl into bed with Dean. He never asked permission. Dean never denied it. It was just the simplest solution to the most violent nightmares. And when Dean kept a hand on his back, or his chest, just to make sure he stayed through the night, well, neither of them needed to talk about it. They'd already been through three or four lifetimes of impossible, miserable, life and death things. Really, what both of them needed was the ability to lie close, to touch, and yes, eventually, to kiss and make love without the pressure to verbalize the truth behind it all.
Sometimes Sam accidentally walked into a room and caught them in a silent embrace or a peck over coffee. He never said anything. He knew it was a long time coming. And anyway, the younger Winchester was still rather sick from the trials. Everything he witnessed with Crowley left him quieter than before.
Even as a human man, Castiel remained on guard and on the defensive wherever they went. More than a few nights passed without him sleeping at all. Instead, he sat up while the Winchesters slept and wandered the bunker, checking and rechecking every devil's trap, angel warding sigil, and door lock in the place. He went through those phases frequently as if he expected some kind of attack, yet everything seemed relatively quiet. Within a month, even Sam started feeling like himself again.
Dean cornered the former angel in the library late one night. "Hey, why are you still up? Everything's secure."
"I'm just checking," Castiel replied without looking him in the eye.
"Okay..." Skeptical, he glanced at the front door lock and back at his new human. "But you know you're lying to me. So let's just cut the crap before we get into reruns."
Blue eyes went blank. "I don't understand that reference."
Dean sighed heavily. "Cas, just tell me what's really going on."
He shifted nervously from one foot to the other and pulled out chairs for both of them. It didn't bode well that he thought Dean should sit for the conversation but he complied if only to get Castiel to talk. The sleepless nights were becoming entirely too frequent for a human's health, even for the most unhealthy human like Dean.
"The angels are still out there," he said as if it was news.
"I know," Dean said.
"They have all of their powers, Dean, except flying. You saw the wings ... the wings burn that night." Castiel recoiled as if the words punched him in the gut. The memories haunted him, Dean knew, but he never spoke about it since then. "I'm hunted. Now that I'm human - no powers whatsoever - it makes me vulnerable. They blame me for what happened. Maybe rightly so. I did--"
"--You did everything you could to fix it," interrupted Dean.
"That's not how they see it. They're forming factions and most of those factions want me dead. It's the first order of business, really. Me living here with you puts your life at risk - you and Sam - and I'm struggling to ... to stay."
The pit of Dean's stomach dropped to the floor, though he stiffened and folded his arms over his chest in an effort to hide the very physical reaction. "I've had enough of you disappearing without any explanation. We talked about this. Whenever you disappear, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. If you flutter your ass out of here again, whether with wings or on foot, those dicks are gonna know about me anyway because I will find you."
"I knew you would say that," Castiel mumbled more to himself. "I can't stay here. They'll see me in town and follow me back here. This place must remain protected. It contains knowledge bigger than you or me. We're just leaving a breadcrumb trail for the angel factions to follow."
That news didn't sit well in Dean's stomach either, mainly because he knew Castiel was right. He nodded soberly.
"I have to go, Dean. I have to hide." To soften the blow, Castiel leaned forward in his chair and pried Dean's hands away from his chest. He sandwiched them between his and studied every cut and callous in silence. Finally, he spoke again, softer and raw in intimacy. "I would have killed myself more than once if it wasn't for you. You saved me. I just wanted you to know that."
"Don't do that. Save the Hallmark card." An abrupt jerk of his hands ripped away from Castiel's grasp.
"Dean--"
"--We leave together or we stay and fight. Your choice." Dean pursed his lips and arched his brow, as completely serious as he'd ever been about anything else.
"I can't do that to you."
"Oh but you can take off and disappear? I don't think so, Cas. That's not how we do things in this family. We're gonna talk it over with Sammy in the morning and figure out what we're gonna do. Now come to bed. We need our four hours."
Sam, of course, hated the idea of Castiel striking off on his own as much as Dean did. Even though no one verbally acknowledged the deeper relationship developing between the former angel and the hunter, they all knew both sides would descend into downward spirals without each other. They sat at the table in the main hall over Dean's eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast, debating the pros and cons of staying vs leaving. Eventually, they all reached an agreement of going into hiding until they could figure out how to send thousands or even millions of angels back to Heaven. At the very least, they had to get the angels off Castiel's ass.
The Winchesters had been in hiding before when the Leviathans were going on crime sprees in copycat meat suits. They knew how to do it. The problem was hiding from a zillion pissed off earthbound angels presented a much larger challenge.
"They'll be looking for the three of us together," theorized Sam, "so maybe we should keep separate living spaces. If I lived in a city, for example, they'd probably see me and think you're there too, but really, you're living somewhere in the sticks with Cas. I mean... you know... since you two are..."
"Yeah, yeah," Dean cut him off.
Sam's mouth twisted as if he wanted to laugh but choked it down. "We should be within driving distance of each other," he went on, "and we're gonna need new identities. Not ones we've used before."
"We can't even live in a place where we've lived before," added Dean. "How am I gonna explain living with him?" He hooked a thumb at Castiel sitting next to him.
"The truth," said Castiel, his first contribution to the plans.
"What?" Bewilderment tilted Dean's face slightly.
His dark blue eyes darted between Dean and Sam as he made his point. "The angels won't expect me to be in an amorous bond. Even in Heaven, I sort of..." He searched for the right words to describe what they thought of him. "I have a reputation for, as you put it, having a stick up my ass. Trust me when I say they won't be looking for attached men." Looking shyly at Dean, he stammered the rest. "We should be married. Or at least acquire false documents to make people believe we're married."
Dumbfounded wouldn't even begin to touch the streak of shock painted across Dean's face as he stared, utterly speechless, at that man beside him. He didn't even marry Lisa. Hunters don't keep spouses! Panic rose from his gut and he bolted from the table, fist to mouth, and turned his back on them.
"Dean, I'm not suggesting--"
"--You're suggesting we live openly even if the documents are forged. Rainbow flag, card carrying members of the other half." He exhaled sharply. "Just gimme a minute to get my head around--"
"--It's not a big deal, Dean." Sam's voice took on that irritating politically correct bullshit tone. "Half the planet's in same-sex marriages. Being married at all is probably the most normal thing you've ever done. And anyway, he's not saying get married for real. Faking out the angels is gonna save his life. Don't you think you ought to get over your messed up idea of what hunters should be to do that?"
"I get it, okay?" A fist formed and Dean wanted to punch something but that didn't help anything either. He really wanted to punch himself for acting like a douche. Again, he exhaled sharply.
Facing the table, Dean found Castiel staring at his hands with that painful innocence of a child doing wrong. Seeing emotions in his face still struck Dean as weird but he knew what the former angel felt so clearly like reading the words in his features. He thought he'd done wrong. He thought he made Dean angry.
"Cas, it's not you--" He stopped short, eyes sliding to Sam and back again. "I didn't mean you make me uncomfortable. You know how I fe--" Shit, he tangled up in his own words. "You gotta understand I tried this before with Lisa and it blew up in my face. She and Ben almost got killed. I swore I'd never make anyone else I care about that vulnerable again, so you asking me to take this out in daylight with a white picket fence is freaking me out a little bit, okay?"
Castiel stood and approached Dean, though he couldn't discern whether he looked angry or upset. "I'm not Lisa. Up until a few months ago, I had the ability to smite anything that came across my path. I've fought and led troops in wars stretching back further in time than you can comprehend. And I've rebelled, I've been cast out, my grace stolen, I'm hunted with a price on my head again, and everything I do is for you, Dean. As far as hunters go, I think I have significantly more experience than either of you give me credit for." He paused, piercing through Dean with his intense stare. "Don't create a false sense of weakness around me to make yourself feel better. Last night, you said we do this together. So, as you humans say - if you love me, you shouldn't be afraid to commit to me, even if it is forged commitment."
The fucking messed up part of it all was Dean didn't find the idea of that kind of commitment to Castiel unbearable, but he feared the culpability of domestic life. He resigned himself to being a killer, not a family man. But somewhere in his gut, he knew Castiel stood the best chance of anyone at surviving marriage to a hunter. Fuck. The word marriage fit in his vocabulary about as well as the Greek alphabet.
Turmoil strangled Dean until he bolted from the room without responding to Castiel's argument. He exploded out of the bunker into the bright Kansas sunlight, breathing clean air as if he'd been suffocated. He didn't know if he could do it. If he attempted that life again, that addicting taste of normalcy, even if it was just designed to keep Castiel alive in their self-designed Angel Protection Program, he might get used to it. He might like it. Then what? Would they get fake divorced if Castiel got his grace back from Metatron? Or would he have to watch someone else he cared about die because of his hunter life?
Fuck.
In the end, Dean agreed to the plan. He decided somewhere in the middle of the night as he yanked blankets back from the blue eyed octopus next to him that refusing to go through with it definitely ensured a bloody end. If he went through with it, at least they stood a shot.
The next morning, Dean shuffled aimlessly around the bunker clutching a coffee mug that he barely touched. Sam teased him about looking like a real groom headed for the ball and chain, to which Dean seriously considered punching him. It was going to be a fake marriage, not a real one, yet Dean's stomach twitched and jumped all day as if it was real. Maybe it was, a little bit. He and Castiel certainly behaved like people in love, but never in the open, and that made him nervous.
Damn it. Dean drove himself nuts thinking in circles, yet Castiel sank into an undefinable quiet serenity. So certain, it seemed. So clear on his new life path. That baffled Dean to no end.
"Okay, so I called Charlie," announced Sam, joining the silent fake-engaged couple in the kitchen. "She's the best hacker we know. She's working on new identities and all the stuff we need to, you know, join the normal human race. She thinks she can get us some funds for getting started too."
"None of the aliases we normally use," Dean added.
"Nope. I did some digging and it looks like people..." The younger brother hesitated. "You know, people like you two - they're hyphenating their last names."
"I don't have a last name," Castiel pointed out rather calmly.
"You will. And we're limited to states where same-sex marriage is legal, which, luckily, are mostly states we never frequent. Mostly up in New England. I looked around and I think our best bet for laying low is the Portland, Maine, area. Decent sized city but mostly rural."
Equal calmness from Sam responded to him, which meant his hesitation acted out of fear toward Dean. Well, they were both entirely too calm about this marriage business and Dean considered going into Witness Protection just to hide from it himself. His brain circled around again - nope, it wasn't Castiel that freaked him out. It was the eventual loss of normalcy that had him unglued. And if he didn't quit thinking in fucking circles, he intended on driving his own skull through a brick wall.
"Is this really the best way to hide Cas?" he asked for the third time.
Patiently, Castiel nodded in his direction. "This is the last thing the factions of angels will expect me to do. They're used to your movements. Sam's right. It will take them time to catch up to us in Maine under these circumstances."
Dean sighed - more like took a cleansing breath - and nodded, again, for the third time.
It took a week for the hunter to ease himself into the idea of fake marriage to a man. He forced him to confront the panic, bordering on phobia, and slowly understood some buried part of himself that wanted the family life and viewed the fake marriage as authentic. Dean taught himself not to act on emotion all the way back in his childhood, so when a little feeling escaped the cage, like for Castiel, his entire body fought and wrestled the damn thing to the ground. Sure, it wasn't healthy, but what was healthy about him? This time, though, that escapee emotion got away. He couldn't catch it. He couldn't wrestle it. So he surrendered.
Charlie and her flaming red hair appeared at the bunker eight days after Sam commissioned her services. They gathered in the main hall and she dropped a shoebox in the center of their powwow.
"Meet your new selves, boys," she said, pulling out driver's licenses, birth certificates, immunization records, and a substantial wad of cash. "Sam, your name's gonna be Paul Soule now. Newlyweds, you're Michael Soule--" She pointed at Dean. "--and Nicholas King--" She pointed at Castiel. "Together, you're Soule-King."
"Hold on. You're calling me Michael? Are you trying to be ironic?"
Charlie's olive green eyes went blank as her brain tried to piece it together. Then she blinked and gasped in horror. "Oh, crap! I forgot you were Michael's big lightsaber! I had to go through census records from the nineteenth century to find IDs that fit your trio here. It'd take time to change it..."
"No, it's fine." The longer they delayed, the more likely the angels would find them before they even disappeared. Dean studied his new Maine state driver's license.
"Okay, so..." Charlie and Sam exchanged knowing looks of apprehension as she handed Dean a large page. "This is your marriage certificate. You were married December 31, 2012, in Old Orchard Beach, just a couple of days after it became legal. I didn't do it on the actual day it became legal to avoid curious people looking through newspapers. Besides," she shrugged and formed a crooked smile, "New Years Eve is romantic."
Dean felt dizzy. Castiel, on the other hand, visibly suppressed a smile into some sort of forced serenity. It made him happy, Dean guessed through his spinning brain, and he really didn't want to disrupt that suppressed happiness with a frightened reaction.
"Oh! I forgot!" shrieked Charlie as she hopped to her bag on the table behind her. "You can't be fake-married without fake-rings. I banged them up a little so they look used. Here."
A boxed tossed at Dean and another box tossed at Castiel, who immediately put his on without hesitation. The silver band sported a few scratches but fit well on the ring finger of his left hand. Dean really didn't want them staring at him, so he slammed the ring on his finger and then slammed both of his hands in his back pockets.
Luckily, Charlie didn't dwell on the moment. Her hands clapped together and she outstretched her arms like a priest. "Go forth and multiply, my children. Don't forget to change your cells. Call me when you get to your new digs up there with the lobsters and lumberjacks." She opened her arms again. "Bring it in, boys. Gimme a broment."
The tree of them piled around Charlie, the little sister they never knew they needed, and their enormous statures nearly swallowed her whole. She kissed all of them goodbye with a special reminder to Castiel not to forget how dreamy he is, which he didn't understand at first, but pink tinged his cheeks when it did register. And as she hugged Dean again, she whispered in his ear that she lived openly with her girlfriends and it was okay, that he should relax and enjoy it. He nodded, thankful that she kept her advice in private tones.
A day later, the three of them packed their things - just enough to look like any other hunt - and headed east. The wedding ring distracted Dean as his hand balanced on the steering wheel, but he practiced being accustomed to it.
They stored the Impala in Pennsylvania and split up, using some of the cash to buy used cars. Castiel insisted the angels would look for Dean's preferred old muscle cars, so he found himself begrudgingly paying for a used black Volkswagen Jetta. Sam bought himself the kind of shapeless eco-friendly car that he always did if he got left alone too long. At least the good news was their new identities checked out enough to get each of them car notes. Jobs. Dean knew they'd need jobs as soon as they got to Maine.
All right, so maybe the Jetta didn't feel so bad, he admitted to himself on the third day of driving cross-country. He glanced in the rear view mirror for Sam's dark blue eco-shit. It all seemed to go well. Maybe he could relax a little and, as Charlie put it, enjoy his life in their self-designed Angel Protection Program.
"You want a house or an apartment, Cas?" he asked, glancing at his passenger.
Castiel's face shot up from his book, bewildered. "Nobody has ever asked me that before. What do you want?"
"I'm cool with anything," he replied with a shrug. "Hell, I lived in my car more often than anything else. A roof over my head and a bed without visible stains is a castle to me. So whatever makes you happy is fine."
"Perhaps it's time you think about what makes you happy too, Dean." Those studious blue eyes observed his profile intently. He didn't need to look. He felt it. "I think I would like to have a garden if you truly want to know what I think. Flower patches. Vegetable patches. The growing season is much shorter that far north but--"
"--But we can make it work," the hunter, nodding. "If you want a garden, then you want a house."
There was that serene, self-assured, smile again. "A house, then."
Holy shit. Dean Winchester was married.