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They stop in Salina on their way home from Eureka Springs. It’s still too far from the bunker to bother picking up groceries. Ice cream would be a lost cause by the time they got it into a freezer, but for the sheer sake of variety some of the big box stores in Salina offers both novelty and a conveniently timed pit stop in the seven hour drive home. The traumatic loss of and subsequent regaining of his memories over the last couple of days has left Dean feeling a little too shaky to drive straight through.
Not to mention he really needs to get a new phone. It sucks to keep borrowing Sam’s just to check in with Cas, who insisted on regular updates once Dean had finally told him what had happened. Just in case he suffered a relapse, or any other side effects of being both cursed and cured by witchcraft in the span of twenty-four hours. If he can’t be home already, replacing his phone feels like a good start. He hopes has hasn’t lost all the pictures on his crushed phone, the ones he hasn’t had a chance to back up on his laptop back at the bunker. He should really do that more often, he thinks. Losing his memories has given him an entirely new perspective on things like that.
Hell, the first thing he wants to do when he gets home is to just look at everything. The walls, the books, his weapons-- the light sticks. Touch it all, make sure it’s all still real. Re-absorb the evidence of his own existence. He already sent a text to Mary asking if she’d mind returning his journal. After nearly losing everything, he just wants to hold it in his hands. It’s the most tangible proof he has that he’s real, that his life is accounted for. He knows it’s waiting for him, to page through and recount the proof of his otherwise nearly invisible imprint on the planet.
But Sam spots a sign for a Japanese hibachi restaurant, and hey, that’s the kinda place normal people go to celebrate stuff, right? He talks Dean into stopping with the promise of an onion volcano, so Dean rolls his eyes and teases Sam about catching shrimp tossed by the chef into his big mouth until he comes just shy of preemptively ruining the entire experience for the both of them. Dean knows where the line is, and he congratulates himself on toeing it to perfection.
They fill up on steak and shrimp (yes, even the ones hurled at their heads by the chef), and maybe have a bit too much sake, but everything is good again. Sam had been right. It is a life-affirming meal.
Sam refuses to let Dean behind the wheel until he’s sure Dean can operate a motor vehicle safely. His standards had become a lot stricter in recent days, but Dean tries not to let it get to him. Sam’s probably right again. They leave Baby by the restaurant and wander across the parking lot to Target. They need supplies of the non-perishable sort, and it’s about their last chance to shop in a real store before they hit Lebanon. Win/win, Dean figures.
They make their way through the dollar section, Dean teasing Sam with an assortment of pink fluffy heart things just days before Valentine’s day.
“Still better than the time you tried to give me a human heart,” Sam says when Dean waves a pen topped with a sparkly pink heart in his face before dropping it back into the bin.
“So you’ll be my Valentine?” Dean teases, tossing a couple boxes of conversation heart candies into the cart.
“You shoulda tried that line on Larry,” Sam snaps back, pushing the cart off into the store.
Dean stands there for a second and then shrugs. “Larry probably would’ve appreciated the sentiment, at least.”
“Larry’s a robot, Dean.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have feelings.”
Sam wanders into the men’s clothing department and studies the assortment of socks for sale. After a few minutes, he tosses a ten pack of white athletic socks into the cart and rolls it away. Dean had stopped, looking at the array of novelty socks and boxers, many of them with Valentine’s Day themed designs. Hearts, cupids… love stuff. Without thinking he picks up a pair of boxers covered with conversation heart candies. He doesn’t even like the damned things, but for some reason he’d already chucked a couple boxes of them in cart, and now he was gonna fucking wear them? Right up against his junk?
What the hell? Did Rowena miss something critical when she fixed my head?
Dean looks down at the words written on each of the hearts. BE MINE. SWEET HEART. ONLY YOU. HOT STUFF. I LUV HUGS.
Yeah, those candies might taste like sugar-flavored chalk, but damn, it’s not like he was gonna put them back. Right now more than ever he could really use a hug. Sam teased him for it in Heaven once, but it wasn’t a lie that he wuvs hugs. He shakes off the weird feeling of deja vu-- probably a side effect of having all his memories crammed back into his head at once-- and stomps off to stop Sam from buying any douchey ipod accessories for Baby.
An hour or so later, Dean jogs across the parking lot, his new phone in hand, to bring Baby around to the front of the store while Sam pays for all the rest of their new stuff. He’d been inordinately relieved with the guy who set up his new phone had been able to recover all the data-- photos, contacts-- from his dead phone and transfer it all to his new one. He calls Cas the second he’s outside to tell him he’s been reconnected to the grid. Cas sounds relieved, and doubly relieved when Dean tells him they’re only about an hour and a half from home.
He’s positively itching to get there now. Just seeing Baby gleaming under the sodium lights gives him a flippy feeling in his stomach. Dean gasps and Cas asks him what’s wrong, and maybe for the first time in his life, Dean means it when he replies, “Absolutely nothing.” He recognizes her. Because of course he would.
And screw Rowena for calling her stupid. He could forgive her for a lot, but that was crossing a line.
He grins to himself the rest of the way home, knowing the rest of his little family is waiting for him there. Mary. Cas. Castiel. He can remember them now, and he never wants to forget again.
He pulls into the garage just after nine. It had been a really long couple of days, and it’s so good to be home.
Mary and Cas meet them in the garage. Dean walks straight up to his mom and hugs her tight. Not only had he forgotten her, he’d also forgotten how lucky he is to have her back now after almost a lifetime without her. He’d almost lost her twice over.
She lets him go after a moment, patting his cheek. “It’s good to have you home, Dean.”
“Thanks, mom.” He smiles at her, and then sees Cas looming over her shoulder. She steps aside and Dean pulls a surprised Cas into a clenching hug.
It reminds Dean a little of their first hug after Mary had come back, only flipped around. Cas had thought he was dead, and he’d been shocked beyond belief to find Dean alive. Dean had been a little overwhelmed by Cas’s enthusiasm at the time, but now he understands it completely. He’d caught Cas off guard. Cas hadn’t expected to be practically tackled to the floor.
“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, slowly wrapping his arms around Dean.
“Hey, Cas. Fuck, it’s a relief to see you, buddy.”
He barely whispers the words into Cas’s ear and feels Cas’s arms tighten around him. Cas sighs, and Dean feels the tension wash out of his shoulders. It’s… nice, Dean thinks. He was right, a hug is exactly what he’d needed.
Sam pops Baby’s trunk and the groan of her hinges reminds Dean that he and Cas have probably been hugging longer than propriety dictates. He clears his throat and lets his hand brush down Cas’s sleeve before stepping back.
“Wanna grab a couple bags? We got some of that tea you like.”
Cas smiles and nods, and follows Dean to the trunk. Sam had divided all the shopping bags into three tidy piles, separated by their respective duffel bags. Dean stuff, Sam stuff, and kitchen stuff. Mary dives right in, grabbing up most of the bags in the kitchen pile. Cas collects the rest and then offers to carry something else with his free hand. Dean passes him a bag with a couple new flannels and a pair of jeans and they all make their way inside to get everything put away where it belongs.
“Just drop it on the bed,” Dean says when Cas follows him to his room.
The bed’s already half covered with Dean’s duffel and several other shopping bags, so Cas walks around the other side and sets it down. “I’ll take the rest to the kitchen.”
Dean nods, glancing up from where he’s dumped out his duffel full of dirty laundry, some of it extra dirty from spending the night passed out in the woods. He makes a face at the state of his green jacket and dumps it in the laundry basket. Hell, he can’t believe he actually wore the filthy thing within ten feet of any sort of food.
Cas watches all of this with interest, still hesitant to just walk out of the room like Dean expected he would. Cas isn’t normally one for dilly-dallying, and it catches Dean’s attention.
“I’m relieved to see you as well, Dean,” Cas finally says when Dean looks back at him.
Dean itches to take the three steps between him and Cas and just start hugging him again, but he thinks that would probably be weird. Instead he finds himself standing there with one outstretched hand. He looks down at his own hand as if it had somehow betrayed him. He has no idea what he’d been planning to do with it, so he clenches his fist and lets it drop to his side.
“What is it you’ve told me before?” Cas asks, letting a smile spread across his face before pinching his brows together in mock seriousness. “Don’t ever do that again.”
Dean can’t help it, and he knows it’s morbid as fuck, but he laughs. “Trust me, I’ll try my damndest not to.”
He remembers looking into the mirror as his last memory of Cas slipped out of his head like a wisp of smoke, remembers trying to hold on to it while everything else drifted away. He shudders, and then feels Cas’s arms around him again, warm and solid and pulling him back from that horrifying memory.
“You seemed like you needed this,” Cas says when Dean doesn’t respond right away.
Dean forces himself to breathe normally; he’d forgotten to breathe reliving his worst nightmare. He hugs Cas back and nods against his shoulder.
“Sorry. I guess it’s gonna take a while to get over that.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that.” Cas squeezes him tighter and whispers. “I won’t let you forget again.”
Propriety be damned, Dean lets Cas hold him together for a few minutes until he can reassemble himself, ground himself in the present. He leans back and sees the mix of fear and relief and something he can’t quite put his finger on in Cas’s eyes, and tries to lighten the mood.
“Did I tell you about the bunny?”
“Bunny? What bunny?”
Dean looks down and sees the grocery bags sitting by the door and smiles up at Cas. “Go put those in the kitchen and get us a coupla beers, and I’ll tell you about it.”
Cas comes back and hands Dean a beer a few minutes later. Dean had finished sorting his laundry and moved on to ripping the tags off his new shirts. Cas looks over the blue plaid shirt Dean’s inspecting for weird stickers or plastic things that would melt into the flannel in the dryer, and then tentatively reaches out a hand to touch the soft material.
“That’s a nice shirt,” he says, and Dean looks up at him with a grin and offers it to Cas.
“You want it?”
“I have a shirt,” Cas replies.
Dean rolls his eyes and pushes the shirt into Cas’s hand. “Variety is the spice of life. Just take it. It’ll look better on you anyway. The blue brings out your eyes…”
Dammit he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He’d been thinking too hard about all the embarrassing shit that fell out of his mouth when he hadn’t remembered what a social filter was. He’d told Rowena she had plenty of snuff, for fuck’s sake. He’d called her hair bouncy. After that, commenting on Cas’s eyes seems pretty damn tame, especially considering the surprised pleasure his words bring to those sad blue eyes. He locks down his social filter before he can say anything about sparkling or twinkling or… or worse. But Cas is smiling, and that’s always a good thing in Dean’s book.
“Thank you, Dean.”
“You’re welcome,” he replies gruffly despite the smile he can feel tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Are you going to tell me about the bunny now?” Cas asks, draping his new shirt over his arm and taking a sip of his beer.
Dean glances over at the bags of stuff he still has to sort through and waves a hand at the far side of the bed. “Sit down, this is probably gonna take a while.”
Cas gets himself situated on the bed, leaning back against the headboard with one foot still firmly planted on the floor and his new shirt draped across his lap, while Dean tells the story of how he woke up in the woods with a fluffy friend. It leads into a slightly muddled tale of the rest of the weird shit that happened on their last hunt, ending with his epic ride on Larry the bull.
“It sounds like I missed out on an exciting week,” Cas says eventually, when Dean’s down to unpacking the last bag.
It’s nothing but Valentine’s candy and the ridiculous boxers he still can’t fully believe he actually bought for himself. The bed’s otherwise clear, finally, so he sits down beside Cas and pulls the bag up into his lap. He rummages around for something to snack on and comes up with one of the tiny boxes of paste-flavored conversation hearts. He tosses it to Cas.
“What’s this?” He turns the box over and squints down at the big heart-shaped label that says Sweethearts and then looks up at Dean for an explanation.
That’s when Dean realizes he doesn’t really have one. “I don’t know. It’s almost Valentine’s day. I think there’s a law you gotta buy a box of those once a year.”
Cas doesn’t look satisfied by that explanation, but he sets his beer down on the nightstand and opens the box to investigate. He picks out a candy and holds it up for inspection.
“Yes,” he reads out, and then looks to Dean again for an explanation. “Yes what?”
Dean can feel his face heating up. Why had he done this again? Some sort of self-flagellation? Shit, he’d been through enough personal torture this week already. Cas gives up on waiting for an answer and puts the candy in his mouth and chews it up with a look of intense concentration, like he’s trying to rearrange all the molecules into the correct configuration to analyze the flavor.
“These don’t taste very good, Dean,” he says, picking another heart out of the box and reading out the message printed on it. “Love me.”
Dean gulps down the immediate impulse to blurt out I already do, and watches Cas pop the candy in his mouth. He stares dumbstruck as Cas makes a face but shakes another tiny heart out into his hand.
“Angel,” Cas reads, and then turns to Dean with a raised eyebrow. “I assume this one won’t taste any better than the other two.
And Dean’s newly reestablished filter cracks under the strain of holding back. “I bet it does.”
Cas’s other eyebrow shoots up level with the first one, and he stares at Dean. Dean just reaches over and plucks the box from Cas’s hands. He digs through the bag for something better.
“Here. Chocolate. You’ll probably like these. They don’t taste like chalk.”
They’re still wrapped in pink foil and covered with hearts, but hey, they were half price. He shakes a few candies out of the bag and hands them to Cas, and absently unwraps a piece of chocolate for himself while watching Cas’s careful fingers tease the foil off one of the chocolates, smoothing the wrinkles from it as he goes. Dean chews up the chocolate, letting the gooey caramel center squish across his tongue, but Cas sits frozen just staring at the wrapper in his hand with his candy half-raised toward his mouth.
“Do all Valentine’s Day candies convey romantic sentiments?”
“Wha’s that?” Dean asks, leaning over to see what Cas is looking at. The inside of the foil wrapper is printed with a message.
“You’re cute,” Dean reads out, and then grins. “Hey, Cas! Your candy’s hitting on you.”
“You’re the one who read it out,” Cas replies, squinting at Dean. He raises his unwrapped chocolate to his mouth, but stops to point out the crumpled wrapper in Dean’s hand. “What does yours say?”
Dean looks at it and debates whether or not to just wad it up and pretend it doesn’t say anything, but he sighs and flattens it out enough to see the words inside. It’s just a silly game. It doesn’t mean anything. He can play along.
“You melt me.”
Cas puzzles at that for a second, and then nods in understanding. “Because it’s chocolate, and chocolate melts at body temperature. That is amusing.”
Dean tries not to choke at Cas’s interpretation of the sentiment, but goes ahead and starts unwrapping another one. Cas crams the whole chocolate in his mouth and bites down with a pleased hum. “You were right. That’s far more pleasing than the chalk candy.”
“Yeah, we’ll use the other ones to draw summoning sigils or something.” He dumps out the rest of the chocolates on the bed between them and drops the bag to the floor. He’s found something Cas likes to eat; hell yeah they’re gonna eat ‘em all.
“Hug me,” Cas says when he’s unwrapped his next candy.
“Huh,” Dean replies, holding up his wrapper for Cas to see. “Same here. Hug me.”
“Do you think it’s a command?”
Dean shrugs. “Dunno. Might be bad luck not to.”
Cas leans across the small pile of chocolates and wraps an arm around Dean’s shoulders. They lean awkwardly into each other for a few moments, and then break apart to tear into more of the candies.
“Sweet on you,” Dean says, and Cas replies, “You make me happy.”
Dean can’t help it. It’s probably just the sugar rush. He can blame it on a caramel overdose. Plus chocolate’s supposed to trick your brain into feeling pleasure or something, right? He grins and replies, “Aw, Cas, you make me happy too.”
“You didn’t read that in a wrapper, Dean,” Cas admonishes.
Dean shakes his head, looking Cas in the eye. “Don’t need a candy wrapper to tell me that.”
Cas turns as pink as the scraps of foil littering the space between them, but he’s smiling even broader now. Dean knows better than to try and pass it off as a sugar rush this time. They both reach for another candy without looking away from one another, rushing to be the first to get theirs unwrapped and read out their next confessions, because they’re both on the same page now.
“Be mine,” Cas reads out triumphantly, handing the wrapper to Dean.
“I’ve been yours since you collected me from the pit, Cas. Didn’t you call dibs or some shit?”
“I didn’t call dibs on your soul, Dean,” Cas replies, slightly scandalized and slightly overwhelmed at Dean’s confession. “I battled through countless ranks of the damned to reach you first. I didn’t need to call dibs.”
Dean grins. “So you won me fair and square. Impressive.”
Cas rolls his eyes and pops the chocolate into his mouth, pointing at Dean’s still wrapped piece.
“Fine,” Dean says, rolling his eyes and unwrapping the candy.
His heart heaves a mighty thud and then sets to racing when he reads the message printed inside. It’s just two words. He should be able to say them. Cas gets that this isn’t really a game anymore. At least, Dean hopes Cas gets it.
“Love you.”
It comes out a little hoarser than he’d intended, and he’s not entirely sure Cas answers at first because he’s too busy wondering if it’s possible to stare a hole through a piece of pink foil. He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, clears his throat, and then slowly raises his eyes to Cas’s face. Cas looks stunned, like he’s not sure he heard correctly, or if he’s not sure that Dean would ever have said those words if it weren’t part of some silly game. But he looks so damn hopeful that they’re true. So Dean repeats them.
“Love you, Cas. I really do.”
And that’s it, Dean thinks. Cas knows all his secrets now. Every last one. If anything ever happens to him again, he’d never truly be gone. Cas has the complete backup version. He’d thought it should terrify him, to lay himself bare like this, but Dean finds it strangely soothing, to be emptied out of all his long-buried feelings.
Cas just nods for a few seconds. “I love you too, Dean.”
“Does one of these say kiss me?” Dean asks, scooping up the rest of the chocolates.
Cas takes them from his hands and tosses them to the floor. “I don’t need candy to give me commands.”
So Dean leans in and kisses him anyway.
The next morning Cas wears his new shirt to breakfast. Dean beams when Mary tells him it suits him, that it brings out his eyes. Cas smiles over at Dean, and Dean grins back, wrapping an arm around Cas’s waist. He doesn’t need a candy wrapper to tell him to. Then again, he also knows Cas stole his goofy heart-covered boxers, and somewhere over Cas’s hip where Dean’s hand is resting, his fingers press all the most important words into Cas’s skin, angel, all mine, true love, forever.
There’s no way either of them will forget again.