Work Text:
THEN
Dean shoves the phone back in his pocket, the grateful sound of Sam’s voice echoing in his ear—fine enough to be on the receiving end of, sure, but he can’t quite hear it without thinking about how soon it’ll probably be tainted again by the bitterness that won’t stop running like a river between them. How soon Dean has until one of them does something unforgivable, again. How soon before the other has to forgive.
He looks up and, somehow, Cas is still there standing beside him, silent as the blaring cicadas in the woods around them aren’t.
“Hey, so,” Dean says, instead of answering the unspoken question present in his tilted head. “I know you’re busy but, c’mon—Kansas City. It’s against the law to not stop in for some barbecue.”
Cas turns a little, tipping his head back, ever upward towards the night sky. “I have matters to attend to.”
It’s not a direct no; Dean’s done much more with much less. Besides—maybe he’s just projecting his own relief, but hadn’t Cas’ face been folded in a rare sort of smile when they’d first landed alone on this stretch of back road? Maybe it wasn’t a full one, but he’d been happy to see him, Dean’s nearly sure of it—and, boy, had he been happy to see Cas.
“Sure, we all do, but—I just got back from the apocalypse, man, I could stand to be around a friendly face for a minute.” Dean waits, faltering in the monolith stillness of Cas’ expression. “Never mind, it’s fine, just drop me near—”
“I suppose,” Cas says, words shifting deep and slow like stones under the earth. He is an ancient being; Dean is drawn up short. “I suppose I could spare a few hours.”
“Hell yeah,” Dean says, overtaken by the buzzy feeling of adrenaline that hasn’t really left his bloodstream for the past days—hours—who’s counting? “You won’t regret this. Now, see if you can drop us—I think it was somewhere around 31st?”
***
They slide into a booth with just enough time until closing that it’s merely inconsiderate rather than outright rude, but their tired-looking waitress still hits them with a decently curled upper lip that doesn’t twitch even in the presence of Dean’s toothiest grin.
“Hey there,” he says, shrugging on a friendly cadence; she blinks slowly, unimpressed. “Two of whatever’s on tap and the same of your sloppiest ribs.” He glances to Cas, who is barely paying the waitress any mind, and back. “Please?”
She doesn’t write it down, which is fine, seeing as they’re basically the only ones here on a Wednesday night. “Sauce?”
“You got a house special?”
“Sure do.”
“That’ll work great.” She gives him a half nod and turns on her heel back towards the kitchen, barely getting out of earshot before Cas beings to speak—which, for Cas, displays restraint of epic proportions.
“You do understand that no matter the sauce, it will—”
“Yeah, yeah, molecules, I get it,” Dean says, breaking the small paper loop around his utensils with his thumb. “But maybe you haven’t had the right combination of molecules yet, huh? Maybe there’s one out there that you’d, you know, really like.”
“That’s not…how it works,” Cas says, squinting.
“Sure it isn’t.” Dean sighs. “Ever notice that the rules around here never really stay the same for long? Shut up and eat your damn ribs.”
Cas’ eyes remain narrowed, but Dean can hardly care. There’s an excitement underneath his skin, one that’s tired and strange in its calmness. It’d been a close call, and he can still feel the weight of Zachariah’s hot, faux breath on his face before it’d been replaced with cool roadside air. His eyes are still stinging with it, both the quick transition and its accompanying relief. More than that, even just sitting in a restaurant after 72 hours of fighting for his life in some savaged wasteland, after seeing the devil wear the skin of his brother like it’d been born for him—returning to a world that makes even a lick of sense makes Dean want to kiss the tacky formica tabletop. Maybe slip it some tongue.
Hell, even the company, strange as it would have been a calendar year ago, two—strange even in the company of demons and hellhounds and witches—is a thrill. Castiel, angel of the lord, sitting ramrod straight in a flaking polyester booth on the Missouri side of a city named for the state Dean was born in. He’s not entirely sure how the saying goes, more things on heaven and earth, blah blah blah, but right now it seems more like heaven or earth, and the man sitting across from him is tipping the scales in their favor. Dean taps the table with his fingertips.
“Hey, Cas.” It’s a bit of a pointless two syllables; Cas is already looking at him dead-on—seemingly he never stopped. Which is kind of rude, considering Dean’s done the polite thing and given him the seat facing out towards the rest of the restaurant—not that there’s much currently to watch, but still. The principle. “So, I, uh—I saw a lot of fucked up shit in the future.”
Cas nods, grim. “Which is why it’s imperative we stop my brothers and sisters. They can’t be allowed to—”
“I know, I know,” Dean says, cutting him off with a swipe of his hand. He leans in a little closer over the table. “But you wanna know the weirdest goddamn thing about any of it?”
“I—imagine it was Lucifer,” Cas says, a little halting, like the mere mention of the tragedy that’s become Dean’s entire life will leave him sobbing on the floor; he rolls his eyes. Though maybe it would some other day, right now he’s got company, he’s got ribs on the way, he’s—alright. “Lucifer, in possession of Sam’s body.”
Dean makes a buzzer sound, which in turn makes Cas’ forehead wrinkle further. “No, no, I was kind of prepared for that one, actually,” he says. “No, man, it was you.”
Cas’ face smooths out, almost-amusement taking the place of confusion. “Hm.”
“What?”
“I suppose…the fact I make it to any sort of future it’s,” he pauses, tilts his head as sardonically as an angel is able, Dean guesses. At least, this particular one. “It’s a strange idea.”
Dean clears his throat. “Alright, a little grim for the barbecue place there, Cas, lighten up,” he says, despite the truth that rings in Cas’ words. “It was—you were human, for starters.”
Cas’ gaze sharpens, pins Dean to the booth. “Human?”
“Completely, man, unrecognizably,” he says, shaking his head. “Drugs, beard, girls, the works.” He pauses, unsure if he should take the conversation from objectively hilarious to sort of dark, lest he piss off their most powerful ally, but he’s too tired to resist curiosity. “Have you ever…?”
“Given my limited time on earth, most probably no.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Have you ever thought about it? Becoming human?”
Cas shakes his head. “If I were to lose my grace, it would be from a death blow from one of my siblings,” he says. “They would not allow me to remain alive in any capacity.”
“Cop out, come on. What’d you do, anyway? You know, if you were,” Dean says, trying to posit the question lightly in order to balance out the fact that he’s suddenly hungrier for its answer than he is any plate that’s gonna come out of the kitchen doors over Cas’ shoulder. “What I saw doesn’t count; it was the apocalypse, no one’s really human in that.”
Where anyone else currently standing on earth might hum in consideration, fill the air with some kind of noise to keep the flow of conversation, Castiel remains silent a beat or two too long to be comfortable until he’s found the words to speak.
“I would,” he starts, then nods, as if he’s affirming his newly thought decision to himself, as if he’s still learning the borders of the human body in his possession. “I would continue to follow you, Dean Winchester.”
Again, Dean blinks in the face of this timeless, stretching entity who has—apparently—looked into his stupid, human soul and decided to stick around. There’s a feeling under his sternum, peaking and ebbing like one of those screensaver things he’s seen on old library computers; maybe this sensation, the one like a shifting, poorly rendered geometric shape, is indeed his soul. He coughs around it.
“You wouldn’t have to,” Dean says. “Plenty of other people out there to get to know in your, ah, limited time.”
“Perhaps.” Cas is almost smiling again, so similar to his face on that old lonesome bend of road. “Not many as human as you.”
Dean raises his eyebrows but smiles all the same. “Cas, you’re one hell of a dude, but you’ve got the worst taste of anyone I’ve ever met.”
The waitress returns, unburdening herself of their plates in a haste that leaves Dean a little worried about their structural integrity. “Can I get anything else for you guys?”
“No,” Cas says, and Dean smiles to cover up the bluntness. He doesn’t even have to fake it.
“Alright then,” she says, shoving her hands deep in her apron pockets. She gives them a tired smile, one Dean knows from experience is a son of a bitch to shake the dust off and put on. “We do close up in about twenty minutes, so you’d better eat quick.”
Cas nods, grave, and Dean shoots her a salute, making her roll her eyes as she turns to leave. He resolves to be finished in fifteen.
He’s halfway through the first rib—the sauce is sweet; he’d bet any car that wasn’t his own that there’s molasses somewhere in the bottle—when he looks up to see Cas with arms still hanging at his sides. Dean sighs, leans over the table on his elbows.
“You heard the woman,” he gesticulates with his occupied hand; the rib drips red onto the table, “get to it.”
Cas picks one up, mirroring Dean, and considers it. “It always did seem like an interesting organ to choose.”
“Huh?”
“The rib, from Adam.” Cas looks at the portion of meat in his hands like it’s something more than the cheapest cut the restaurant could get away with serving smeared in a sauce that’s made by the bucket. Dean thinks he can relate a little. “An interesting choice.”
“What, would you have rather it been, like, his kidney?” Dean pauses a moment to think of other organs. “His schlong?”
“Why not a femur?” Cas says, ignoring him. “Scapula? His left side looked so defenseless, lying there in sleep.”
Again, again, socking Dean over the head with it: I am an angel, I have seen more than could ever possibly be told in words even if your shitty tape deck spewed them until the end of time, I am practically infinite, I am—sitting across from you.
“Well, sure,” he says, chewing, swallowing. Continuing the human experiment. “Maybe that’s why.”
“I don’t understand.”
Dean shakes his head. “Nothing worth having gets got without a little risk,” he says. “So maybe he was sleeping vulnerable for a little while, but who was there to take advantage of it? Besides, he wakes up and, bang, world’s first woman.” He shrugs. “Kind of worth it.”
“I,” Cas’ brows are furrowed. “I suppose.”
“Nothing like talking to you angels to make me feel like half a high school diploma’s almost too much,” Dean says, reaching for his beer. After a long pull, “dig in already, c’mon, I feel weird.” Cas very slowly does, chewing like you would if you were still half asleep. “Well? How are the molecules?”
“They’re…vibrating. At certain frequencies.”
Dean laughs, full of food and drink and night air. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
***
The Impala is right where he’d left it, shiny and unharmed. Whichever angel intern finally throws the idea of tracking his car into the ring is sure to get promoted out the wahoo, but for now, Dean relishes in his safety within its four doors.
There’s something strange about ending the night beside his car, something that has him itching to fall into the rhythm of what this almost is. Because, of course, dinner, an escort, Dean’s beginning to feel like he should have bought a corsage. Cas doesn’t exactly help, what with the staring, but on the other hand it’s—Cas. The most routine of hunts, road trips, whatever, get turned on their head when he enters the scene, sparks flying. Maybe it’s the grace, too nebulous and large to be contained in one small human body, diffusing into the air around them to make everything feel strange and new and somehow profound. Maybe it’s just the knowledge Dean’s the only man alive who’s ever seen an angel eat some Kansas City ribs.
“Hey, uh, thanks for sticking around,” he says, but the words dry up in his mouth when he swings his head back to see the empty air that now fills the vacuum the angel Castiel has left behind. Dean stares for a moment, then huffs out a laugh, tilting his head up towards the dark sky where he can only imagine the molecules of the man who’d just stood before him are now zipping around. At least, Dean figures over the unsatisfied ache in his gut, he’d gotten to hitch a ride back to Baby.
He settles into his seat with a sigh, feeling the heavy weight of everything he’d been able to put off for the last few hours start clinging to his clothes again like static electricity. He’s tired, sure, but there aren’t enough shitty motel rooms in the world to sleep off the pending apocalypse, so he turns the key and points true north again—towards Sam.
***
NOW
A third thump echoes through the kitchen wall and Dean, seated at the table, sighs. “You know,” he says to Cas, who’s squinting at the contents of their fridge. “When you pitched suburbia, I didn’t think the thing I’d miss most about the bunker was the soundproofing.”
“He’s playing that video game,” Cas says, not looking up. “The one Sam brought up a few weeks ago.”
“Okay, I don’t know much, but that?” Dean points towards the offending wall. “That’s not playing—Jack is losing that game. Or he really doesn’t know the rules.”
Cas glances over with a soft little smile that basically hogties Dean into smiling back. “Maybe so.”
Dean looks down before it can spill out of his mouth, the fact that no number of bumps on any amount of walls could ever drive him from the door of this quaint little three-bedroom; he lets the fact that the happiness he’s touched before doesn’t hold a candle to what he’s got now remain unspoken. Cas already knows.
Which is not to say everything’s all apple pie easy now; it’s been an adjustment, but Dean would be long dead if he weren’t adaptable and—it’s not bad, this thing they’re all adjusting to. It’s kind of the opposite.
Dean doesn’t have it in him to complain even a little bit, especially after making it through that uncertain place, those raw weeks between Cas’ consumption into the Empty and Jack’s sudden, solemn-eyed reappearance.
Dean had been so far gone that the sudden materialization of the strange, timeless kid in front of him had barely made him blink. “Aren’t you supposed to be, I don’t know, being God somewhere?”
“I’ve been thinking on it, and—I can get him out,” he’d said, and Dean hadn’t even needed to ask.
“You—how?”
“It’s a little complicated,” Jack said like an apology. “But I can do it, I just need you to—well, I need someone to call him.”
Dean looked at him, stuck like a jammed tape. “We can get him back?” And then, “wait, what do you mean, call him? Won’t he listen to you?”
“He would,” Jack said, all earnest eyes. “But keeping a portal open at all is going to be difficult enough. We might only have one solid shot at this—I don’t want to lose him all over again.”
“Well, I get that,” Dean said, feeling blasphemous for the laugh in his mouth. “How soon can we—?”
“Now.”
Like peeling back the thin, outermost layer of an onion, Jack made a downward motion with his hand and there it was, the swirling dark mass of it. Dean blinked, trying to tamp down on the urge to step between it and Jack and push them both back a few steps.
“So I just—” Dean glanced at Jack to see him completely absorbed in his task, eyes open but unseeing, jaw clenched. “Right. I can figure it out.” He cleared his throat, edging ever closer to the vortex that could probably eat him alive, ever closer to the angel inside that would want him moving towards anything but that. “Cas?”
There was no answer, but Dean hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “Cas,” he said again, experiencing the strangest sensation, like hearing an echo from another room. “Cas, it’s us, we’re gonna get you out—it’s Dean, man.”
The whirling black surface shifted, something like an oily bubble popping. Dean didn’t know whether or not to take that as a good sign; looking to Jack revealed nothing. He sighed.
“Yeah, it’s me. We’ve been—we’ve missed you, man.” He took a breath, remembering that last tortured time he’d looked Cas in the face. “Hey, if you’re not coming out ‘cause you’re afraid it’ll be weird, or whatever, that’s a stupid reason, alright? I’ve done a lot of thinking since you left in the middle of our fucking conversation and you know what? I think I have an answer now.”
Like a lock clicking, Dean knew. He blinked and he was reaching deep into the cold, damp prison on only some crazy instinct, made crazier by the touch of smooth, warm flesh on the other side.
He was so startled by it that it took a moment to grasp and hold on, to fold his own hand around the one beyond his sight and pull.
Inch by inch, Cas appeared, hand, wrist, and finally arm, clad in the very same trenchcoat he’d worn an age ago when their positions were reversed. Dean clasped his other hand tight around Cas’ shoulder and hauled him the rest of the way into the light.
In the black-out interim that Dean had thought—until about fifteen minutes ago—was gonna be the rest of his life, he’d gone over Cas’ face in his mind an uncountable number of times. Sure, they had some pictures of him, maybe even a lot of them, but he hadn’t wanted his memory of someone so goddamn integral as Cas to be fouled up by it being in static picture form.
Now, standing in front of the real deal, Dean knew there wasn’t a picture, painting, hell, any translucent fragment of stained glass that could capture the person before him. Dean wanted to slump into him in relief and, from the look on his face, Cas might even allow it. He settled instead on the most stitched together smile he could manage.
“Hey, Cas.”
There was something in Cas’ face that Dean had never seen in anyone else, a kind of sweet knowledge, a kind of holding that happened even without the laying on of hands. Maybe it was the kind of expression you could only form after making the switch from angel to human and back again like some flickering lightbulb; maybe it was just the natural chemical reaction of their two met gazes.
“Dean.”
“Listen, before you say anything else, I wasn’t yanking your chain back there, I’ve got an answer,” Dean said, holding onto Cas’ arm as tightly as he dared. “I know, I know everything you said back there about just saying it being enough, but I—”
“Dean,” Cas said, and Dean would've perhaps been annoyed at the interruption if he wasn’t so completely relieved to hear anything in this particular voice that he couldn’t feel his toes. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t, you think I’ve lived a life with this many problems by just doing whatever I thought would make other people happy?” He held on; he never should have let go. “You said it’s not in the having, but I want you to have it. And I—I want to have it too.” Cas’ smile was wide enough to span any sort of divide that’d ever sprung up between them; Dean didn’t have to flounder for even a second wondering if there was some fatal misinterpretation afoot. “I can’t believe you fucking died before I got to say it.”
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Cas said, and Dean laughed, a small huffing thing that felt light in his lungs. “I’ll, ah, plan it better next time.”
He smiled, hurting only in the sweetest way. “No, you won’t.”
It was difficult, at the moment, for Dean to give anything but Cas the time of day, but the corner of his eye still managed to pick up tendrils of black waving in a non-existent wind, whatever membrane that’d been pulled away to reveal them remaining so.
“Hey, kid? We got him, you can slam the thing,” Dean said, not looking away from Cas’ face, not quite trusting it to remain if he did.
And the miracle was, Cas was looking back—until he wasn’t. Dean blinked and he’d lost the grip on his sleeve, lost his hand, as the concerned tilt of his head was now pointed toward Jack, who looked at the world with blank but smiling eyes.
“Jack.” Cas’ voice was gentle, firm. Real. Dean swallowed past thick relief. “Jack, you have to close it.”
“I got you back,” Jack said, voice a little dreamy. “I did it.”
“Yes,” Cas said. He was looking at Jack with a strange intensity, one so well-worn on his expression it ceased to be odd. “Jack.”
Jack blinked. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, and Dean took an unwilling step forward at the lost little sound of his voice. “I’ve been working towards you for so long and now—I just don’t know what to do.”
Cas ducked his head a little closer, an attempt to get in Jack’s nonexistent sight line. “Let it go. You don’t have to wield this power—no one does.”
Jack tilted his head—like father like son.
“Cas is right,” Dean said, aware of how much he was intruding, a single man edging in on beings of infinite power. But—maybe that was the point. Dean Winchester, ambassador for humanity. “You’ve gotta—just being a person really ain’t that raw of a deal, kid. I mean, usually.”
Cas slanted him a glance; Dean shrugged his shoulders in a what? gesture.
“Jack,” Cas said, and Dean could see that with every utterance of his name, the kid fell more and more into himself, closer to looking at them straight. “There is so much more to being alive than you’d ever know if you don’t release yourself.”
“C’mon, kid,” Dean said. “Join the team.”
It was a whisper, the way whatever strange energy that’d been inhabiting Jack’s skin bled out from him and slinked away, but Dean saw it all the same. Without checking over his shoulder, he knew the Empty was gone, closed up for good. He knew that Jack was free of his power, of the strength and burden of it. He knew that the people standing before him were so incredibly precious.
Cas had pulled Jack close, hand cradling his head like the dear thing it was, and Dean, no longer afraid his touch might set off some celestial atom bomb, had joined the embrace. He’d hung his head, laying it down to rest on those who could hold him up and he could be trusted to hold in return.
So, yeah. Dean’s adjusted himself to worse things.
It helps, a little, that they’re all on the same playing field now, more or less. When Jack had sloughed off the weight of heavenly responsibility, he’d removed something else as well. At first, Dean’d thought it was just the relief, but within an hour it was apparent that Jack’d actually been losing years before their eyes, stopping with a screech somewhere around a healthy twelve years old.
Cas, too, had returned from the Empty changed, new. Not much of an angel anymore, perhaps something better, something at home and at peace scoping out their well-stocked kitchen cupboards.
“Eggs,” the no longer timeless being standing in front of their open fridge says. “And honey.” Cas points at him, and it takes a moment for Dean to correctly read it as an instruction and not an endearment, but with Cas it might always be a little bit of both. “Do not purchase the brand you did last time, I—”
“You like the bear, yeah, yeah, I got it,” Dean says, scribbling the items down. “Any preference for the eggs, your majesty?”
Cas glances over with a smile. “Cage-free.”
“I was gonna.” It feels like fraud, almost, how easy it is to stand in the kitchen and smile at each other, to know that there’s nothing keeping the two of them apart except a countable number of feet across a white tile floor. Dean ducks his head. “You think the kid—” He taps the side of his fist twice against the shared wall. “Hey, Jack, you want any more of those Scooby Doo fruit snacks?”
There’s a beat of quiet in which Dean strains his aging human ears only for the resounding YES that vibrates through the drywall to smack him in the face.
“They really don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Dean says, scratching onto his list. “Hey, Cas, you saved some of that ground beef like I asked you to, right? I was gonna show Claire how to grill a real burger if she makes it down this weekend, how’s it sound?”
Cas doesn’t respond; Dean looks up to see his back turned like Dean’d never spoken, oh-so-casually headed for the doorway that leads out of the kitchen and away from this particular line of questioning. Dean grins, jots it down, and then stuffs the list in his pocket to grab Cas by the waist before he can fully escape.
“Hey,” he says, face buried in the side of Cas’ neck, his attempt at halting successful. He’d known it would be.
He can feel the rumble of Cas’ voice before he hears the words. “Hello, Dean.”
“Listen,” he says, overcome by a wave of sentiment that takes control of his voice before he can stop it. “I know you’re not an angel anymore, I know you gave it all up, that whole old eternity thing, all for us, and,” Dean stops, inhales. There are things that get easier with time and there are things that Dean will be hacking against forever; it’s hard to tell what exactly this is yet. “And I love you for it.”
Dean can’t see it, but the world’s gentlest, most human smile is there in Cas’ voice. “I love you for it too.” He’s a lot better at it, but hey, he’d gotten a head start.
“Yeah.” Dean lets it lie there a moment, rests his head. “Anyway, sorry, I was just thinking about how glad I am you can’t blink out of existence anymore, I fucking caught you.”
“You did nothing of the sort, Dean Winchester,” Cas says, falsely tart. He turns, slowly, carefully, until they’re facing each other, close enough that Dean is satisfied.
“Yeah, yeah.” It’s real easy, easy as anything, to sway in, to lay one, two, three kisses on Cas’ mouth, to pull away and smile. “You wanna grab those reusable bags Sam passive aggressively got us?”
“I believe Jack is using the one with the oranges to store his rocks,” Cas says, so serious Dean wants to smile—he does. “The strawberry and melon ones, however, are fair game.”
“Strawberry and melon it is, then,” Dean says. They’re close, like Dean is learning and relearning how to get used to—he’s learning to cherish it, not as something that might be taken away any moment, but as something that simply is. He ducks his chin into Cas’ shoulder and listens to his breathing, to Jack in the next room, to the hum of their refrigerator. It’s stupid, maybe, but to Dean it feels a little like he’s listening to the future.
And—you know what? It sounds alright.