Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cas has taken a liking to the radio, a device that heretofore he hasn’t seemed to find much use for.  Dean’s never caught him listening to music voluntarily before.  Dean thinks he’s probably never once listened to the cassettes Dean’s loaned him.  He’s tried to tempt and ply Cas with all sorts of music, but it never seems to take.  Cas doesn’t get enthusiastic over music.  As a rule, he doesn’t really get enthusiastic over anything, which doesn’t seem right to Dean.  He could hear Sam roll his eyes over the phone at him, when Dean had told him that.  But he still doesn’t think it’s right.

He’s seen what Cas looks like when he’s excited over something.  He looks almost manic.  Wide eyes, wild hands.  He gets that way over the occasional burger and cartoons.  Dean hasn’t seen him get excited over much ever since he fell.  So he worries.  He can’t help it.

Cas just shows a mild pleasure over some things, and more often he displays cranky displeasure or long-suffering patience.  A calm, laser-focused intent, when he’s concentrating.  And sometimes, though Dean hates those times, he just looks lost, bewildered, and as though he’s too tired to do anything about it.  Like he’s too exhausted and overwhelmed to try to puzzle things through, or to take some action to make things better.  

Cas still doesn’t listen to music, but he has developed an interest in radios.  He flips through stations so fast Dean doesn’t know how he can begin to process anything audible coming through the busted speakers of the battery-powered wireless radio he’d found in a corner of the garage.  He flips with lightning speed through Christian talk shows and classic rock stations.  He scans through traffic reports and advertisements and live concerts.  He likes to linger in the space between stations.  He’ll sit there for hours, listening to something that’s half-NPR and half-r&b.  

He’s certain he’s caught Cas just listening to static alone in his room in the middle of the night and refusing to sleep.  He can always tell when Cas hasn’t been sleeping. He falls asleep at the kitchen table with his mouth open and his cereal going soggy in his bowl, and he falls asleep on the porch or while working under a car.  Sometimes the water in the shower goes on for strange amounts of time, until Dean’s forced to pound on the bathroom door to make sure Cas hasn’t drowned himself by accident by falling asleep in the shower.

He hears Cas moving around at night.  He can hear Cas walk to the kitchen and turn on the radio, and sometimes that’s where he finds Cas the next morning, asleep in a chair.

Today he listens to Cas’s radio programming in their motel room as they get ready.  Dean starts up the motel room’s one-cup coffee pot.   Cas drinks coffee leaning against the counter in the motel kitchenette and listens to the radio.  This morning he’s got it stationed on a heady combination of vintage jazz and Car Talk.  Dean takes a shower to Tom and Ray’s discussion of carburetors overlaid with a piano solo by Jelly Roll Morton and gets dressed to a jingle for dishsoap played over “The Boy in the Boat.”  

Dean buttons up his shirt on his way to the kitchennette, and he buttons up Cas’s once he’s there.  He takes the coffee out of Cas’s hand and turns him around by his elbow and does up the rows of buttons, from his collar all the way down.  He notices that Cas has taken to wearing the sleeves of his blue flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows, the cuffs of his thermal undershirt hanging over his wrists.  Dean thinks, more buttons.He unrolls Cas’s sleeves and buttons the cuffs up for him, too.  He thinks he’ll have to remember to make sure that Cas’s shirts wind up in his closet with the cuffs pre-buttoned.  There’s only so much handling of his person Cas will allow.

He straightens Cas’s collar, just because he can and not because it needs it.  He tugs on Cas’s shirt once more and lets him go.  But Cas leans in, bumping him slightly with his shoulder. Dean thinks about that as he lets his fingers linger a moment longer on Cas’s shirt.  

“Hey,” he says.  

"Hey."

“What’s with the radio?” he asks.

"Carburetors, Dean," Cas says, like that’s an explanation.

"Oh, right.  Carburetors."

They stop for breakfast at a diner.  They hold hands every morning now, across the table from each other when they’re at home, or across a corner booth table when they’re on the road, even on the days when Cas might not really need Dean’s hands rubbing circles over his aching fingers.  

Dean’s so used to reaching out to take one of Cas’s hands that he doesn’t really know what to do when Cas reaches out first. Hey, he thinks, like he does sometimes.  Maybe this can work.  He might have to reach out for the rest of his life just to get a grip on Cas, but maybe sometimes Cas will reach out first.  Maybe Dean’s not in this thing alone.  Maybe they’re in this together.  He’ll take it.

Sometimes it’s a challenge to say anything to Cas.  Occasionally it’s a challenge to understand anything Cas says back, but it’s funny how well Cas knows him, even though they haven’t done much talking lately.  

Instead of talking, Cas hands him things.  Cas hands him wheat pennies he finds in parking lots and post-it notes written over with Enochian symbols and grocery lists, so it’s nothing out of the ordinary when Cas leans across the diner’s vinyl countertop that morning and slips something in his hand.  

At first Dean assumes it’s going to be another of Cas’s rocks, maybe, one of those flat, mica-flecked skipping stones he finds by the river, or another one of those peppermints Cas always keeps in his pockets and passes over to Dean after meals, even though Dean never does eat them.  He hates peppermints, but Cas hasn’t figured that out yet.  Mostly because Dean keeps accepting them from him anyway, even though he winds up with a secret stash of sticky peppermints covered in pocket lint in the drawer of his nightstand.  

Dean hasn’t quite figured out what these small offerings mean - assuming, of course, that Cas even intends for them to have meaning.  They’re not really gifts.  More like tokens.  Just things Cas seems to find interesting, and presumably wants Dean to find interesting, too.

“Happy birthday,” Cas says, just as though Dean’s birthday hadn’t come and gone weeks ago with the usual amount of fanfare.  Which is to say, exactly none, aside from a phone call from Sam.  For the first time Dean finds himself looking down at his palm to see what Cas has given him.  A note, tucked into a small package, carefully wrapped in plain white tissue paper and tied together with a string. This isn’t like anything else Cas has ever handed him before.

“Cas, my birthday was over a month ago,” he says.  “You couldn’t have given me something then?”

“You would have been expecting that,”  Cas answers. “This is a surprise.”  

He’s never really thought of Cas’s small offerings as gifts.  But maybe that’s what this is supposed to be.  Apparently Cas can’t just give him a birthday present at the usual time like a normal person.

“So what is it?” he asks, glancing back up at Cas.  

“It’s my understanding that you’re supposed to open it in order to find out,” Cas says gravely, and, well, okay then.  It’s impossible to get anything out of him when he’s in his more mysterious moods.

“Cas,” Dean says, because he’s suddenly unsure of what he really wants to say.  He turns the package around in his hands, and he thinks about the fact that this might be the very first time Cas has ever bought anyone a present.  And it’s for him.  But he slides his fingers under the corners of the tissue paper, pulling the folded edges apart to reveal a small box, with lettering that only says MARTIN.

“For your guitar,” Cas explains.  “So you can play it again.”

“Cas,” he says again.  Guitar strings, for the guitar tucked away in a corner of his closet, broken strings hanging from the tuning pegs, and finds himself blinking, though he’s not sure why.  He’s not sure how Cas had even known about that old guitar.  “You been snooping?”

Cas just smiles and lets his eyes slide away.  Nothing’s secret, nothing’s sacred when you share a kitchen and only a thin wall between bedrooms and the world’s smallest bathroom, but all the same it’s not a usual thing for Cas to step foot in Dean’s room.

“Not snooping,” Cas says with dignity. “Investigating.  And your door was open.  Are you surprised?”

“Yeah, I am,” Dean says to him.  He’s sort of touched.  Cas went out, thinking of Dean, and looking for something to give him.  It shows a sort of initiative that’s been lacking in Cas lately.  “You look like the cat that got the cream.”

“I prefer to drink coffee black,” Cas answers, cryptic.

“Thanks,” he says, and he ought to tuck the package in the pocket of his jacket and move on, but he can’t seem to put his gift out of sight.  So he leaves the package by his plate, on the table where he can see it.  “You’re not going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, are you?” he asks.  

“Angels,” Cas says, “do not sing.”  He picks studiously at his fingernails, absorbed in a sudden scientific concern over his hangnails.  

“Hmm,” Dean says.  He’s not at all sure this isn’t one of Cas’s esoteric jokes.  Cas’s humor is unpredictably devastating that way.  

He doesn’t exactly forget about the note, but he doesn’t open it right away, either, and he’s half-conscious of the weight of it in his jacket pocket on the drive that they spend, at Cas’s instance, listening to three hours of Johnny Cash, with a faint buzz of Sunday morning sermon underneath.  

“Country music, Cas? Really?” he groans, but it’s teasing and from the look Cas shoots him, he knows it.

“It’s very earnest,” he says, and swats Dean’s hand away when he goes to change the radio.

He doesn’t look at the note until he’s alone that night in his room.  It’s just a note, just a Happy birthday, Dean, written in Cas’s near-incomprehensible handwriting, but what makes him sit there, on the edge of his bed for a long while after, is how Cas has signed it.  

There it is, in writing no less, that Cas loves him, too.

When he finally moves, it’s only to blot his face with his sleeve and place the note very carefully in his nightstand drawer next to the peppermints.

South Dakota isn’t sure if it wants to start thinking about spring or not.  It still frosts every night, but the ice starts melting away.  Dean still has to go around the house turning off and on electric space heaters in every room, but sometimes they can sit on the porch swing in the evenings and not come back in with bits of ice stuck in their eyelashes.  The Nova likes the change, Cas tells him, and Dean doesn’t mention that his car has stopped stalling only because Dean’s fixed the alternator after the Nova sat on blocks in the garage for the month of February.  

Cas calls him outside one morning, and he goes out by the garage.  Cas is crouching next to a nest of baby garter snakes, crawling out from under the blocks under a pile of junkers.

“I’ll get the machete,” Dean says, but Cas won’t let him.  Harmless, he says.  We shouldn’t hurt them.

He strings the guitar - he hasn’t forgotten how, exactly, but tuning it is a different matter, and when he realizes that Cas flees whenever he takes the guitar out into the kitchen or library to adjust the tone, he keeps to his room.

Dean doesn’t practice when Cas is home. He waits until he hears the sound of the front door slamming, hears the Nova’s engine rumble to life and the crunch of her tires on the gravel driveway, and then, only when he knows for sure Cas is long gone on some lengthy errand, does he pull out that guitar and starts to mess around. 

His fingers have lost the right kind of callouses for playing music, though they’re calloused in other ways: callouses on the palm from shooting guns and wielding hammers, callouses on on the soft part of the finger from shoveling open graves.  His fingers get tangled in the strings.  He plays “Stairway to Heaven,” “Ramblin’ On,” “Rock of Ages;” he picks up Travis picking and plays “Dust in the Wind.”  Cas doesn’t pay attention, even when Dean spends an entire afternoon on “Dust in the Wind” loudly in his room while Cas is home.  Cas shuts the door to his room and turns the radio up.

He almost finds himself annoyed by Cas’s lack of curiosity.  Cas doesn’t pay him any attention at all, until one night when Dean plays “Stairway to Heaven,” quietly in his room well after midnight.

He can’t fall asleep.  Neither can Cas, it seems; Dean can hear his radio buzzing with static. He hears the squeak of the mattress in the room next door as Cas shifts his weight, and then goes quiet, and he doesn’t want to play in front of Cas exactly, not yet, but this he doesn’t mind, this quiet hour, knowing Cas can hear him but isn’t able to see him.

Halfway through the song, he hears the radio shut off.

Cas doesn’t say anything about it the next morning, but Dean plays again when he hears the mattress squeak again the next night night.  

He hasn’t really sang to any of those songs up until now, hasn’t trusted his voice because he can’t remember how he had sounded when he sang before - he hasn’t sung in years, probably; he can’t be sure.  Well, lip-syncing doesn’t count.  But it’s all right this time too; he sings quietly, barely above a whisper, and though Cas isn’t in the room, he feels like he’s singing to him anyway.

The busted door has remained in the hallway.  Cas doesn’t do anything with it, and neither does Dean.  Cas has filled his empty door frame with a door from one of the upstairs rooms, and starts leaving it open at night.  Dean can’t say when that started, because he doesn’t know himself; all he knows is that Cas had kept his door locked up tight, the lock clicking every night when he disappeared into his room, and now the door is cracked.  This Dean notices on his way to the kitchen on his nightly prowl as he checks the locks on the doors and looks at the salt lines.  

He thinks about it.  He thinks about it some more as he takes down one of their chipped glasses and pours himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink.  He thinks about it as he walks back by that ever-so-slightly cracked door, feeling an unaccountable urge to push it all the way open as he walks back to his room and make sure Cas is okay, and it’s on the forefront of his mind when he leaves his door cracked too.

He finds Cas in the kitchen the one morning, looking grim.  He’s got Dean’s screwdriver wedged into the radio and parts scattered all over the table.

"What’s up?" Dean asks him.

"I dropped it," Cas says, and if Dean had wanted to see him worked up about something, he hadn’t really wanted it to be this.  "Then it just stopped working." 

"Did you change the batteries?" Dean asks, and Cas just looks at him.  "You can borrow my Walkman," he offers, but Cas shakes his head.  He’s got that lost, bewildered look on his face again.  Too tired to find a way to fix things.

The house is oddly quiet the next few days.  No radio.  No guitar.  Just him and Cas, moving quietly through the house.  Cas’s door stays cracked open.  Dean’s door stays cracked too, and he finds he can’t sleep, either, not with the sounds of the house settling he hears through the open door, or the sounds of Cas’s restless movements.

Then one night he hears Cas get out of bed, hears the mattress creak.  He hears the unmistakable thud of boots on the floor, and he finds himself getting up too.  

Cas is already gone by the time Dean’s got his own boots on and in the kitchen, but when he opens the door he knows exactly where Cas has gone.  He heads towards the light in the garage.

Cas is sitting in the Nova, parked outside the building.  Apparently the alternator is still working, because Cas has gotten the Nova started.  Dean opens the passenger door and slides in beside him. 

"Hey," he says. 

"Hey," Cas answers, not really looking at him.  He’s staring out the windshield.  He’s tuned the radio to static.  The cracked leather seats of the Nova are ice-cold.  Dean leans over and turns on the heat.

Cas notices.  ”Are you cold?” he asks.  He twists around and reaches into the back of the Nova, rummaging around under the seats, and comes back up with a folded coat.

Dean can’t help but laugh.  So this is where Cas has been keeping the trenchcoat.  Cas unfolds the coat and sort of drapes it over Dean’s shoulders. 

It’s not really warm, but it makes Dean feel good.  It’s not morning, not even close, daylight is hours away, but he reaches over and takes Cas’s hand anyway.  The static of the radio buzzes in his ears.

"What are we doing?" he asks.

"Listening," Cas says.  

"To the radio?" 

Cas doesn’t say anything for a while.  ”No,” Cas finally replies.  

Dean holds his hand a little harder.  He’s been wondering about this for a while now.  ”Are you listening for angels? Can you hear them?”

Cas gives him a sideways glance.  ”Sometimes,” he says slowly, “I hear something that sounds like them.  Like they used to.  But they’re gone, Dean.  You know that.”

"Yeah, I know," Dean says.  "It’s funny, though.  After my mom died, I kept waking up thinking I heard her singing in the kitchen.  But it never was her."

Cas digests this for a while.  ”Oh.  I didn’t know that,” he says.  After a moment, he adds, thoughtful, “I miss your music.”

Dean’s throat gets kind of achy.  ”Oh yeah?”

"Yeah.  You should play more.  You sound good."

"I will, then.  I thought you didn’t like music."

"Well," Cas admits, "I don’t.  But I like yours.”  He carefully pries his hand out of Dean’s and reaches for the dashboard.  He plays with the radio tuner for a moment.  Finally he settles on a station, a clear channel playing an ad.

Cas reaches for Dean’s hand and settles in close by his shoulder.  Dean leans back against him.  ”What are we listening to?” Dean asks.

"Baseball," Cas tells him.  "There’s a game on.  Rockies vs. Orioles."

"Didn’t know you were a fan."

"Yeah.  I like the Red Sox."

"You would," he snorts.  

Cas looks away.  "I love you."

"I know," Dean says.  "I read your note."

"I forgot your birthday," Cas admits.

"Know that, too."

"I’m bad at this."

"No, Cas-"  he sighs, can’t help but tighten his grip on Cas’s hand.  No letting go now.  "You’re-This is perfect."