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The night sky is a deep blue, like the ocean after a storm. Cloudless and filled with a myriad of flickering stars, it stretches above their heads to the confused line of the horizon, where sky and earth blend and blur into tiny specks of dust that shine under the moonlight. It’s beautiful, one could think. And Dean and Cas do.
They’ve been sitting on the hood of the Impala for an hour, a shared bottle of beer between them, gazing at the starlit sky without a word. Sam’s gone to the bunker to have some rest, but Dean suspects the git of playing Disappearing Samantha to let Cas and him have some alone time – but he lets it pass.
It’s nice, being there, with Cas, and nothing else to worry about than the distance between their bodies and the (too) loud beating of his heart. There’s a faraway scent of honey and sand lingering in the air; their quiet breaths and sparse sighs echo gently in the silence surrounding them.
“Hey, look,” Dean points at a bright light between what he thinks is Orion and Gemini. “Isn’t that Jupiter?”
Cas nods appreciatively. “I didn’t know you had learned the positions of the planets.”
“I don’t,” Dean chuckles. “Lucky guess.”
They’re silent for a moment, watching Jupiter glim vibrantly in the dark sky.
“I’ve seen the precise shade of your eyes there, Dean.”
Dean almost chokes on his saliva. “Wh-what?”
Cas is looking at the sky, but there’s something in the way his eyes dart to the left every now and then that makes Dean think he’s trying to remember something; perhaps about his time as an angel. But they don’t talk about that. Not since he and Sam tried to question him and Cas closed up on them, refusing to leave his room for three days.
“It happened just before Sam killed Lilith, and just after you told me in the Green Room that if there was anything worth dying for, fighting the Apocalypse was it. I needed a place to think for myself without pressure from you or anything else. But I – I couldn’t choose a place where my mind could be truly at peace, so I let myself drift off into space, and I landed on this spot. Perhaps the stars led me to your path,” he grins, bittersweet. “Or, I did, without even noticing.”
Dean is positively dumbfounded. No matter what, he can’t wrap his head around the fact that a goddamn angel went around the universe looking for the shade of his eyes. He doesn’t let himself ponder too much on why.
“After that, I found many things of this color here, on Earth,” Cas continues, still looking at the sky, as if trying to find the color among the unmoving constellations.
“I remember a tree in the Amazon rainforest, neither old nor young. Its trunk was plunged in the river and its leaves softly blown by the wind, and as I perched on a branch, one of them fell in my open palm, cracked and eaten by ants.” At this, he looks at Dean, almost sorrowful. “But its heart was so green that the leaf seemed to have a life of its own, as if it was trying to hold onto it. And there it was again.”
Dean, lips slightly parted, is hanging to every word of Cas’ story. There’s something incredibly gentle and sad in the way he says it, his voice hopeful but his eyes wary; something in the way the whispered words resonate in Dean’s head and seem like screams and shouts at something he had tried to forget was there.
“I saw it again in the ocean, as the raging sea below me capsized ships and drowned men; on the wings of a dragonfly caught in a spider web. In the morning dew on the lashes of a sleeping deer; glimmering on the barrel of a gun that had just killed a man. And all along, I imagined it was you, watching me.”
Dean breathes softly. His heart feels heavy in his ribcage, and yet he can swear it has risen to his throat. Or his mouth. For all he knows, he could be spitting it out if he tried to say something.
“The last time I saw this color…” Cas sighs, the sentence left hanging above their heads, heavy and bitter. “It was right after my fall. I had landed face down in the dirt, and when I looked up, I saw it everywhere – on every leaf of every tree, on the dirt under my fingernails, in the dim glow of the moon, in the fiery trail my brothers and sisters left as their wings-” Cas clears his throat. “I was so confused, I didn’t know if my perception of colors had been altered or if my brain was trying to find a pattern as a defense mechanism, maybe to cope with what had happened.”
He takes the beer in one hand, studying the label for a moment.
“I kept finding it everywhere, but as time went by, I realized it never was it; it was always too yellow or too blue, and either way, all of it was nothing like your eyes. It was – it was dead.”
He’s started peeling the sticker off; bits stay stuck on his fingers, some float away in the breeze and get lost in the tall grass.
Dean knows Cas won’t say anything else. He has that nasty habit of taking things too far and then stopping everything all of a sudden. Dean will never admit it, but he finds it strangely endearing.
“Hey,” he whispers, “Look at me.”
Cas has one quality, though. He’s stubborn. So he continues scraping the bottle, plucking off bits of dry glue, his shoulders slumped and his gaze wary.
“Don’t - ,” Dean sighs. “Could you, just – turn your head and fucking look at me!”
He finally does, eyes wide and searching.
“Cas,” he says quietly, keeping his gaze focused on Cas’ eyes. “I’m here, I’m real. I know you can’t fly off and find whatever shade it is in goddamn Siberia or hell knows where… But you don’t need to, okay?”
Cas still won’t say a word. At least he’s looking at Dean, and that has to be something, he thinks.
He also thinks that Cas’ eyes are the ones who deserve to be looked for across the universe.
The bottle shatters almost silently in the grass. Night butterflies and crickets fly away from the broken glass, their high pitched sizzling echoing faintly in the dimness; and, for a second, Cas looks as startled as them, looking at his own hands in confusion.
“Dean, I – “ Cas starts, his voice tired and frustrated. “I don’t deserve all of this. I don’t deserve you. I shouldn’t stay here.”
They went over this issue so many times already. Dean had tried everything: yelling, shouting at the fallen angel until his voice went hoarse and Cas’ eardrums were left ringing with desperate pleas; talking calmly in the kitchen weighing the pros and the cons (and at least Cas had to admit Sam was rather convincing), and, even if Dean will never tell anyone because he’s not even sure it even happened, falling at the foot of Cas’ bed half drunk, barely making out the shape of his sleeping friend, repeating in feverish and trembling whispers ‘I need you, Cas, fuck, I need you, I need –‘
It had sounded like a prayer. The kind you make before dying.
So, instead of this, he keeps his mouth shut and tries to find Jupiter in the sky again.
He just waits, until the beat of his heart is but a breath among theirs.
He doesn’t know how long they stay here, but he figures they’ll just have to see how long the stars shine this evening.
Soon, the sun rises on the horizon, and the sky becomes a messy palette where deep blues and pale pink mix with burnt yellow and shy grey. The stars go out one by one, as a few rays of morning light fight to break through the damp air. One of them touches a shard of broken glass from the shattered bottle, sending a spark of green glimmering brightly. And – there it is: Cas looking at it with so much faith and hope, Cas’ expression darkening, Cas looking at the ground in defeat.
And Dean knows that if he doesn’t do anything now, Cas is lost to him. So he slumps ungracefully to the ground and stands in front of Cas, hoping the idiot will look at him. Of course, he doesn’t.
Sighing heavily, he puts his index under Cas’ chin and lifts his head.
They stare at each other for a moment, and God, it’s so terribly intimate it takes all Dean’s willpower not to crack an awkward joke and walk away. He breathes softly, focusing on Cas instead.
“I’m not rich enough to pay you a trip to the Amazon and I can’t take you to goddamn Jupiter, okay?” He says slowly. “I’d have liked to, though. Y’know, if I could I’d take you around the world and show you that there’s more than,” He makes a vague gesture encompassing the bunker and the burnt grass around them, “than this. But sorry, I can’t. So you’ll have to cope with it; you’ll have to find something which keeps you alive, alright?”
Dean wishes he could say more, but words are hard and some are better left unsaid. (I need you. I need you.)
“Dean, I don’t know if I can – “
“Just, look at my eyes and tell me what you see,” he says, softly. He’s not sure it will work, and it sounds fucking stupid. But it’s worth a shot.
For a moment, Cas keeps quiet. Dean’s not even sure he’ll answer; sometimes he’d like to freeze time, so that Cas could be stuck with him for goddamn eternity, but there’s only so much one man can do.
“I see my fall,” Cas whispers.
When he says it, it’s more a breath than anything else; but then again, who could blame a man for trying to stay alive?
Dean blinks, startled. “I – “
“I haven’t finished,” says Cas, his voice louder. “I see my fall. I see my rise; and I see everything in between, my victories, my failures. I see what I fight for, and sometimes I don’t. I see my cracks and my gaps – yours.”
He exhales softly. In front of them, the sky is bright red. The stars are bleeding; and the sun is slowly murdering them. But they don’t see any of that; they’re not watching this kind of sky anymore.
“I see life and death so mixed up that nothing even matters anymore. I see bravery, self-loathing, exhaustion, and a little hope. Wars and thunderstorms; destructive love and blind faith. And, most of all, I see humanity at its rightest form.”
(“I see the universe,” he wishes to say. He doesn’t.)
Dean’s brain has gone blank. He opens his mouth, closes it, and nothing comes out of it. There’s too much to say, and words are not enough; there’s an ocean between what he means and what mere letters can say.
So when the words tumble out of his mouth, trembling and shaky, he’s not sure he’s the one who said them.
“I need you.”
“Please stay.”
They dissolve quietly in the morning breeze; and Dean and Cas are still staring at each other.
Finally, Cas lifts his eyes to the sky. “One of Jupiter’s four natural moons is called Ganymede,” he says calmly. “It’s made of silicate rock and water ice – it’s grey and uninteresting. But 200 km below its surface, there’s an ocean caught between two layers of ice, as blue as any ocean of the Earth and as salty as one can be.”
Dean turns to look at Jupiter again, but the planet is gone, swallowed by daylight.
“Ganymede,” Cas continues, “is named after a Trojan prince who was seduced by Zeus – or Jupiter, if you will. Of course, the tale differs. Some say he was abducted by Zeus to serve as a cup bearer, others claim they became lovers, but after all – who can make a constellation out of you?”
Cas is silent for a moment, watching the landscape slowly waking from a long night, the tip of the trees taking a golden color that softly flows down their leaves and branches to fall on the dirt at their feet, the starlings starting to chirp enthusiastically at each other.
“What I mean is – I can’t leave you, Dean. From the moment we met each other, I knew I would never get out of your gravity, even if it destroyed me. Even if I was reduced to stardust.”
Movement in the bush: two birds fighting for a prey, maybe. One of them flies away in a cloud of cracking leaves and cackling chirps.
“Ganymede didn’t choose to revolve around Jupiter, did it?” he adds softly, almost as an afterthought. “Perhaps that’s our difference. At least, I made my choice.”
See, the thing about words is that sometimes they don’t need to be said. So, instead of dim sentences that hold no meaning compared to stars and galaxies, Dean threads his fingers through Cas’ and keeps them there. And if Cas needs something to be said, he’ll just have to listen to the vibrations made by the blood pulsating through Dean’s veins or count the goosebumps forming on his skin – and perhaps, blooming underneath their flesh, there is a whole language shaping itself that only they can understand.
Dean leans back against the Impala, and, as Cas tightens his fingers around Dean’s, the starlings fly off the bush, as if startled by the sun warming their wings. Dust hovers in the air for a moment, and there – for a split second, sunlight strikes it, and every speck, every particle shines with a golden light. Dean can swear he sees a whole constellation right here; a small universe, right at their feet.
So maybe Dean was right, there’s more than this; but for the moment, it’s enough for them.