Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cas trips and falls every now and again.  Dean thinks it’s because he’s too busy looking elsewhere when he ought to be watching where his feet are headed.  

Cas trips over piles of car parts in the junkyard and over Dean’s boots left out on the library floor.  He trips over the third step on the staircase, every single time.   He wakes Dean up by falling out of bed in the middle of the night, and he makes unholy noises when he trips in the shower every morning. He falls off the ladder while painting the trim.  He falls from the roof when he’s out there nailing shingles after a hailstorm, and in doing so sprains his wrist and ruins another pair of jeans.

Cas goes around with jeans with rips in the knees, and half-healed scabs from the process of creating them.  Every pair of his jeans has holes in them, though Cas doesn’t seem to mind particularly; he’ll wear each pair until they’re faded and falling apart and covered in motor oil and grass stains and thin tears from getting caught on nails, and if Dean tries to throw those jeans away before Cas thinks their number is up, then Cas will just fish them out of the trash when Dean’s not paying attention.  Cas doesn’t let things go easily.  

Cas never lets him throw anything out. He rescues things out of the trashcan when Dean’s not looking, liberating a worn-out sock missing its mate or a boot whose sole is falling off.  Cas rescues Dean’s old shirts, the ones that look like they’ve been put through a meat grinder, all ripped and shredded and bloodstained.  Dean tries to throw away a faded blue flannel shirt he’s had for years, but Cas won’t let him.

"I can fix it," he objects when Dean complains.  He reaches out and pats Dean’s hand, and the gesture takes Dean so much by surprise that all he can do is watch as Cas gently pries the shirt out of Dean’s fingers.  "You shouldn’t throw this out, Dean.  It might be useful.”

“You," Dean grumbles, "are a hoarder."  He’s seen Cas’s corner of the garage.  It’s rapidly overtaking the part that supposedly belongs to Dean, and Cas has filled it with the internal components of seven different ham radios, and his collection of small bits of wire and his larger collection of scrap metal, and lined it with a row of empty coffee cans.

“We live in a junkyard,” Cas says, sounding honestly confused.

“Yeah, okay.”

The blue flannel shirt reappears at dinner one night, and then again the next morning at breakfast.  Cas is wearing it despite the shredded left sleeve and the bloodstains on the collar just under his ear.

That’s my shirt, Dean thinks stupidly.  He sleeps in my shirt, and he’s never even kissed me.   He can smell himself and Cas too, blended together in the worn-thin fabric, when Cas comes over and leans in close to his side.  

He looks at Cas’s arms, with the torn sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and sees the dark brown stain of his own blood over the left breast pocket, right over Cas’s heart.  Dean thinks about putting his arms around him and feeling Cas’s warmth bleeding through the fabric of Dean’s own shirt.  He wants to know what the beat of Cas’s heart might feel like under that wrinkled, faded blue flannel.  

“You’re a mess,” he informs Cas.  It’s true, this morning in particular but also in general.  Cas never looks like he takes care of himself. And Cas doesn’t look like anybody else takes care of him, either. Dean finds himself wishing sometimes that Cas would make more of an effort. Just to look like he belonged with somebody, and that he wasn't just fending for himself. He wishes sometimes that Cas would treat his stuff with something more than this casual disregard.  

Cas just shrugs at his words, and doesn't do anything to ease Dean's concern.  Dean’s doing laundry when he realizes that Cas doesn't have any pairs of undamaged jeans left.  

He takes a pair of Cas’s ruined jeans to his room for inspection. Cas opens his door cautiously, and Dean shoves the jeans at Cas's chest.

Cas turns them inside out and studies them. The knees are blown out, like usual, and the belt loops have broken from holding up the heavy tool belt Cas wears sometimes when he's working in the garage. 

“What happened to all your clothes?” Dean demands.  "Everything you own is ruined."

"No, not ruined," Cas protests. He sounds puzzled. "I like these. These are fine."

"Cas,' Dean says, "just look at the knees."

Cas does. He sticks his finger through the holes and frowns, mystified. "They're more comfortable this way," he says, like Dean ought to know that by now, like it's some essential truth of the human condition that Cas has discovered.

"You don't have anything decent to wear," Dean snaps.

Cas is shaking his head. "It doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does," Dean tells him.  "Why don't we get you some new clothes?” 

“I have clothes," Cas answers. "I don’t need anything else, Dean.”

“Don’t you ever want nicer things?” Dean asks him in despair, but Cas just glances at him, uncertain.  

Dean gives Cas a pair of his own jeans to wear, but Cas puts them on the next day and immediately falls off the porch.  

“Cas,” Dean says, crouching over him on the porch steps. “Those jeans were brand fucking new.  How the hell did you manage to fall off the porch?”

Cas looks at the bloody tear in his jeans with all scientific interest and no actual concern.  He pokes a finger in the tear and carefully pries the denim away from the wound.  “A board stuck up,” he replies.  

Dean thinks he knows pretty well what Cas isn’t actually saying. “You weren’t paying attention, you mean,” Dean translates.  “Thought you fixed that board, anyway.”

Cas runs his finger underneath the frayed denim sticking to his other knee.  “Different board,” Cas explains, and they both sigh.  The house has a natural inclination towards falling apart, no matter how much work Dean puts into trying to keep it together.  

"Stay put," Dean tells him, and goes inside the house for the first aid kit.  When he returns, Cas is still sitting on the porch steps, still poking at his bloody knees and saying, "Ouch. Ouch," like it's a new, surprising sensation every time.

Dean sits back down next to him and hands Cas a antiseptic wipe, and watches as Cas wipes away the worst of the blood.  Dean offers him a bandaid, but Cas refuses.  

He stares at Cas's knee for a while without really knowing why. It ought to be so easy for him to reach out and place his hand on Cas's knee. It ought to be so easy for Dean to brush his fingers around the ragged edges of Cas's jeans and down to the skin underneath.  

Dean puts his hand out, and touches Cas's knee. Cas says, "Ouch," but doesn't move away.

Dean very carefully traces the fraying threads of the denim. Cas sits still and lets him do it.  His knees are bony.  Dean sort of wants to see if he's ticklish at all, but he doesn't quite dare.

He picks up a tube of Neosporin and applies it to the broken skin.  When he's finished, he pulls his hand away.  Then he puts it back, on Cas's thigh, and leaves it there.

Cas looks down at the hand on his leg.  "Thanks," he says.  

"Hey," Dean says, "no problem, buddy."

"I'm sorry."

Dean thinks about running his hand up and down Cas's leg.  He thinks about patting Cas's thigh a little.  He doesn't, though.  "For what?" he asks.  Sometimes, out of the blue, Cas will look at him with something deep and grieving behind his eyes, and just say, I'm sorry, Dean, and Dean never really knows why.

"Ruining your pants."

"It's okay.  I've got more."

He feels Cas exhale.  Cas stands up and wipes the blood off his hands, using the seat of those ruined jeans.  He hears the fall of Cas’s boots on the boards as he walks across the porch and then disappears into the kitchen.  And Dean’s alone.

Dean spends a lot of time on the porch.  He takes his guitar out there sometimes in the evenings.  Cas joins him occasionally, though not often. Sometimes when he's on the porch, Dean can hear Cas in the kitchen, listening to a baseball game over the radio.  Dean imagines, sometimes, that one of these days the door will open and Cas will come out and sit on the porch swing next to him, maybe hand Dean a beer and pop off the cap of his own, and they'll sit together, quiet and friendly.  

He tries to make it happen for a while.  He sees Cas standing at the kitchen window, watching a cardinal perched on the railing.  He goes out and buys a bird feeder and hangs it on the porch, but Cas only ever looks out at it from inside the kitchen, sitting at the table, and after a while Dean sort of gives up.

He keeps working on the porch anyway.  He nails down the boards with edges that curl up, and paints the railing with the leftover white gloss they used on the crown molding.  He finds a battered round table in one of the outbuildings and drags it out to the porch.  He tries to convince Cas to eat outside with him and fails.

Once in a while, he spends an evening on the porch talking to Sam over the phone.  The best thing about those evenings with Sam is that Sam, whatever he might actually think about the situation, never tells Dean to give up.

Sometimes Dean wonders why Cas is still here.  Sometimes he thinks that Cas is discovering that there's nothing for him down here on earth, after all.  Sometimes he thinks that Cas might've been happier if he'd gone with the angels.  And he wonders, sometimes, if he hadn't been wrong after all in asking Cas to stay.  

It's the porch that breaks their holding pattern, in the end.  Dean's been working on something.  He's not even sure why.  It's just a board he found in the garage, a nice piece of cedar, and after he spends a few hours sanding it, he pulls out one of his knives and carves letters into the wood.

The letters are slightly uneven and blocky.  Nothing fancy.  But when he's done with the piece, he stains the cedar and hangs it up over the kitchen door, where it announces WINCHESTER HOME.

He finds Cas in the garage, engaged in some mysterious business with his radios.  "Come on," he says.  "Want you to see something."

But Cas barely glances at him.  "What is it, Dean?" he asks absently.  "Can it wait?"

It's not even anger that takes hold of Dean.  It's a disappointment that cuts him down to his bones, and utter exhaustion.  

"Once," he says to Cas.  "Just once, I wish you'd do something with me."

Cas jerks his head up.  He looks startled.  "Dean?"

"You never want to do anything with me," Dean says slowly.  "And if you don't want to do anything with me, why'd you even stay?"  

He turns to leave.  

"Where are you going?" Cas asks as Dean brushes past him. He doesn't reply.

Dean doesn't go far.  He only gets as far as the bottom porch step. He sits down.  He makes a fist and punches a hole in the wood.

His fist comes away bloodied.  He pulls it out of the porch step and studies it.  He's got a deep scrape all along his knuckles, and there's a large sliver of wood wedged inside his palm.  Dean thinks he probably ought to go inside and pull out the first aid kit.  But he doesn't really feel like moving.   He just sits there instead, by himself.

Only he isn’t by himself.  He looks up, and Cas is there, standing over him and shading him from the sun.  

"You're hurt," Cas says.  

Dean doesn't answer.  He puts his head in his good hand and puts his elbows on his knees.  He hears Cas's boots moving across the porch, and the door opening and shutting.

But the door opens again, and Dean feels Cas settling down on the porch step by his side.  Cas gently takes Dean's hand.

Cas wipes away the blood. "I like the sign," he says quietly.  "It looks nice, Dean.  You did a good job."

Dean doesn't really look at him.  He keeps his eyes on Cas's hands instead.  "Oh yeah?" he asks, weary.  "I'm glad you like it."

He watches Cas's hands dig through the first aid kit, finally pulling out a needle.  His fingers shake very slightly as he moves the needle under Dean’s skin.

Dean feels a tug under the flesh of his palm, and Cas pulls the needle out and holds it up under Dean's eyes for inspection.  There's a sliver of wood balanced on the tip.  "Got it," Cas says.  He sounds surprised.

"You’re good at taking care of me," Deans says tiredly.  He doesn’t really think so.   Not really.  Cas has yet to demonstrate any current strong desire to want to take care of Dean.  But he says it anyway.  Cas has done his best to take care of him, in the past.  Cas had given everything he'd had in the name of taking care of Dean.  Just because Cas doesn't really take care of him now doesn't mean that he never will again.  Dean's holding out hope that maybe one day, Cas will be able to take care of him again, in a different kind of way.  Something real.

Something like a smile tugs at the corner of Cas’s mouth.  “You think so?” he asks, kind of sheepishly.

“Yeah, you bet.  Where’d you learn to take care of me so good?”

"You," Cas says.  "You're good at taking care of people.  You take care of me."

"Yeah," Dean grunts.  "As much as you’ll let me."  He doesn’t mean to sound bitter, but he does.

But Cas acknowledges him with a nod, and then shoots him one of those angled glances.  “You’re sad,” he observes slowly.  He looks worried about it, too, which feels important somehow.

“Today, I am sad,” Dean says.  “Not always.”  He thinks that it’s important to let Cas know that distinction.  

"Why?" Cas asks.

“You don’t need me,” Dean says.  

“I would be very lonely without you."

Dean snorts.  “Thats not the same thing,” he says, but Cas pins him down with a stare.  

“Isn’t it?”

They sit like that for a while, shoulder to shoulder. They’ve been doing a lot of this lately. Sitting and not talking. 

“The house needs painting,” Cas observes, and he’s right: they never did get around to fixing up the outside of the house, so it’s all peeling paint on the first floor and weathered boards on the second.  For all that the house is looking better than it was, it’s still not back to the way it had once looked.  Not by a long shot.

“We should do that soon,” Cas adds thoughtfully, and Dean blinks, because this is Cas, assigning them a project for the first time, instead of Dean.  

“Yeah?” says Dean.  “What color?”

Cas squints.  “Gray?" he offers.  

"Okay, then," Dean says.  "Gray. Do you mean it?  Are you really going to do that with me?"

He feels Cas place a hesitant hand on his shoulder.  Dean reaches up and covers Cas's fingers with his own.  "Yeah," Cas says.  "I mean it.  Is that okay?"

Dean says hoarsely, "Cas, that's all I've wanted."  Cas's hand lingers there on his shoulder, and Dean leans into the touch self-consciously.

"Dean?"

"What?"

“Are you happy?” Cas asks, and Dean takes a moment to consider

“Sometimes,” he says slowly, and then, “Yeah.  I'm happy.  I’m thinking it’s got something to do with being with you.”

He looks at Cas, sitting beside him; Cas, with his hand on Dean's shoulder. Cas, trying to make things better.  So this is what it feels like to have Cas on his side.  To be supported by Cas, almost in his arms.  It’s full of blessed relief.

“Why’d you stay?” Dean asks him, finally. It's an important question, and Cas takes a long time answering.  

“To be with you,” he says eventually.  “For as long as I could.  Why did you stay?” he asks in return, and Dean knows he means here, at the house.  Bobby’s old place.  Their home now.  "You could have gone anywhere.  You could have gone with Sam."

Dean chokes out a laugh.  “I wanted to take care of you.  But here you are, doing that for me instead.”

He feels Cas’s hand drop away from his shoulder, and then Cas's fingers are stealing his own, pulling Dean's hand into his lap.  Cas says, “It’s a good thing, taking care of each other. Will you always?”

Dean feels his breath leave his body.  He can’t speak for a moment. “Always,” he tells Cas.  “Yeah, Cas, always.  I’ll always take care of you.”

“We could take care of each other,” Cas offers.  

“That’s a good idea, buddy,” he says.  “Sounds simple.” And it does sound simple, even though Dean knows perfectly well that it never is, but there’s Cas, smiling a little and looking like maybe he wouldn’t mind so terribly if Dean were to lean over and kiss his cheek, and it does sound so simple, it really does.  

Cas sighs and shuffles closer, until their knees are pressed against each other.  He leans his head on Dean’s shoulder, the soft scruff of his beard scraping against Dean's cheek, and this time it’s Dean’s heart that trips and falls.