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Warm, full laughter is scattered through the tiny space afforded as dining room, where the five of them are squashed around a table for four, elbows knocking against neighbours, dishes clattering on the too-small surface. The bungalow is too small for anything bigger than a small party for the group of them, but cluttered and cramped as it is, it feels like home.
There is Sam, tired, with bags under his eyes from night-school, his button-up rolled up past his elbows; Jess with her hair scraped back in a messy bun and dangly clay earrings that one of her seventh-graders made her as a thank you present before school broke up; Mary with a mouthful of pumpkin pie that she relishes in churning around her mouth and then opening up to show people. And there is Cas.
Across the table, Cas lifts his head, catches Dean’s eye. The smile he gives Dean is only small, a barely noticeable tilt at the corner of his mouth that anyone else might not notice if they weren’t fine-tuned to him—but by this point, Dean knows better than any other expression how Cas looks when he’s trying to look like he doesn’t want to kiss Dean stupid.
Dean never learned that subtlety. He grins wide and is delighted when Cas rolls his eyes and looks away to keep from laughing.
“—it just doesn’t make any sense!” Sam says, raising his voice over the squawk of Jess’ choking laughter.
“And I started getting worried!” Jess manages, wiping her eyes. “I was thinking, for sure he’s gonna call me when he finds it, and then days go by and days go by and—nothing. So I’m thinking, oh, shoot. He’s actually mad about it. That’s why I haven’t—”
“That’s what tipped me over the edge,” Sam says. “A mask on my bed. I can handle a lot of things, but—”
“So I eventually called and I got a hold of Mary—who is, by the way, not supposed to be using the phone—”
“I’m way old enough!” Mary protests, scrubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand.
Jess’ eyebrows lift. “Um, excuse me, if I don’t get to use a telephone until I’m in my twenties, you sure as daylight don’t get to use it when you are eight years old.”
Mar scowls and spears at what’s left of her dessert with her fork. “I’m nearly nine.”
“Oh! She’s nearly nine, everyone. She is nearly nine.”
“Sorry—can you pass the wine?” Sam tries to interrupt discreetly, stretching a hand around the back of the chairs.
Ever the gentleman, Cas takes the wine glasses instead, and with shaky focus, pours wine for Jess, for Sam, for himself. Dean tries not to look at the bottle, and he drains his glass of water. Before dinner, Cas had asked Dean if he wanted to make some kind of punch for him and Mary, and out of sheer laziness, Dean had said no. He regrets that now.
“So what’d Mary say?” Dean asks.
“Well, after I give what-for since she’s using the telephone, I say, like—” Jess drops her voice low, re-enacting into the curve of her hand where the mouth-piece should be: “Is your daddy okay? I haven’t heard anything about the mask I left on his—and she’s just—” Jess’ dramatic performance breaks up again as she starts laughing.
“What mask?” Mary recites, and Jess just loses it.
Sam leans across the table conspiratorially towards Dean and Cas. “I still have no idea what this mask looks like.”
“It was super scary!” Jess exclaims, on the tail-end of a snort. “I spent a whole ten bucks on it and I just—I don’t know what happened! It can’t have just disappeared.”
Mary wiggles her fingers over the table. “Maybe our house is haunted.”
“Haunted by the ghost of the world’s ugliest mask,” Dean says.
Jess sighs, wiping tears from under her spectacles. “It was gonna be so funny and I just—ugh. We’ll never know, I guess.”
The dishes are stacked in a tottering pile alongside the sink; butter congeals in the lowest corner of a baking tray left haphazardly askew on the kitchen counter; empty beer bottles clutter along the windowsill, and the record-player on the shelf is humming the last of the static. They chase their dessert around the edges of their plates as Christmas day winds down into sleepy submission.
Most years, they go out to Sam and Jess for the holidays. Celebrating in Dean’s house is infrequent and odd when it happens—the five of them squashed with no room to breathe, and Mary forced to sleep between Sam and Jess even at her age just because there’s nowhere else she can fit.
It’s no show-room, that’s for sure. There are stains of mildew on the roughly whitewashed ceiling, and damp blooms along the windowsill. The curtains are mismatched, one window in gingham, another in grey pinstripes; their cast-iron radiator regularly sputters and gurgles, but doesn’t make much impact in terms of actually heating the place up. Luckily it never gets too cold out here, but even so, some mornings Dean wears a hat and scarf to eat breakfast. Some mornings he and Cas huddle around the toaster like bums round a barrel. This place is cheap, small, poorly-furnished, a little ugly, in want of interior redecorating, prone to leaks and creaks—but it’s theirs.
On two veteran disability pensions and minimum wage salaries, it’s not bad. Cas wouldn’t want any bigger for the way it’d make his chest cramp up with panic, and everyone knows Dean’s a sucker for a fixer-upper.
The war is fifteen years behind them and it almost feels like it. Dean has now been a civilian longer than a soldier, and when he thinks back on combat, things are indistinct with distance—what was the name of the Battalion S-2? Was it with Dog or Fox Company that they went into Grandcamp? That soldier, brown hair, heavy set brow, a thick accent, what was his name?
Cas has adjusted to a life of halves, blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, his hand propped in Dean’s armpit to steady him on one leg, and Dean has been wearing his aluminium prosthetic now so long that the ache he feels is one of discomfort, of leather biting into scar tissue, rather than an ache of loss. Most nights they sleep seven hours.
“So there was this time in France,” Dean starts slowly, and everyone turns to look at him. “We were hanging around and this buddy of mine just would not stop complaining about the water in his canteen. It was real hot that day, but we were waiting on someone to come resupply us, so he was just complaining—it ain’t cold anymore, it tastes of metal, there’s dirt in it—on and on.”
All eyes are on him. Dean knows he doesn’t talk too much about Europe. He gets this thing in this chest, this squeezing behind his ribs, and sometimes Cas can touch him and ease it away, and sometimes Cas can’t. Sometimes it takes him down with it. Even now. Dean breathes deep and keeps going.
“So we’re bored of hearing him whinge and we decide to, uh… lend him a drink outta one of our canteens. Only it’s not water in there,” Dean says delicately, and he watches Cas’ eyebrows rake up high, and Jess bursts out with an ugly cackle.
“Oh my God,” Sam says.
Mary looks between her parents. “I don’t get it.”
“We’re stationed there a while so, you know, we wait ‘til the need’s getting pretty urgent,” Dean says, carefully talking around the topic while Mary frowns on the far side of the table. “I think it was actually Benny, in the end, who—uh, did the deed. Filled the canteen right up. And then someone came and gave us the order to move out.”
Dean looks right at Cas, and he watches his face shift with realisation.
“On the way to Saint Lo,” Cas says slowly, and Dean can hear the cogs turning inside his head—although in fairness to him, it’s not like Dean dicking around with one-platoon narrows it down any. “It was—what was it? Martinville. No. La Madeleine?”
“I’m not sure. But Normandy, definitely,” Dean says. “Anyway, Cas comes round and he’s in something of a storm that day, snaps us all into move, move, move—and we just… forget. We stow the canteen and we get going.”
Cas squints. “So I’m to blame for this?”
Dean’s grin stretches wider. “You bet.”
Cas shakes his head, but the corner of his mouth is lifting up into a smile.
“Couple hours later, we’re settling down into our next position and we’re all wiped. And our platoon commander, especially, is bone-tired and sweating and—he’s swearing ‘cause he’s all out of water.”
“Oh, no.”
“What?” Mary asks. “Mom, what’s—”
“An officer?” Cas says incredulously.
“You’ve not heard this story?” Dean asks. “Holy—yeah, an officer. And Benny’s the generous type, and he’s forgotten all about it, so—here you go, sir—and—” He breaks off into laughter and can’t finish, and Jess is near enough in fits. Sam’s head in his head his hands, groaning, elbows propped on the table, while Mary shakes his elbow to try make him tell her why it’s so funny.
Cas says, “Which officer?”
Dean realises too late he shouldn’t have told this story.
He hesitates, reaches for the water jug to buy some time. “Uh,” he says. “Lieutenant Wallace.”
Something shutters behind Cas’ eyes.
He says, “He never told me that story.”
“I mean, he was real good about it,” Dean says. “We were sure he was gonna bust us but he just made a big joke out of it, like retching and praying to God and being real melodramatic. He made it funnier than it was.”
“What did he say?” Cas asks. His face is flat and hard to read. His voice, too.
Dean shifts in his seat. “Saying he’d see us in court… like, asking who told us his personal preferences, things like that. Just goofing off. I don’t really remember. Sorry.”
Cas nods, like an affirmation—yep, sounds about right. That’s Inias for you. His eyes are lost for a while, on the wallpaper just behind Dean’s shoulder. Unmoving.
“Could you pass me the pie, please, Dean?” Jess asks, tentatively breaking the silence. She goes into theatrics, rubbing her hands together in exaggerated glee. “I wanna get another slice of that sweet apple-y goodness.”
Cas gets to it first. He misses the edge of the dish initially, his fingers clumsy and grasping, before he can find it. In the process, the sleeve of his sweater slides up, and Dean sees the exact moment Jess registers the long, knotted pink scar at the underside of Cas’ wrist, disappearing vertically into his sleeve.
Jess’ eyes flick up to Dean, and Dean pretends not to see her. He didn’t tell them when it happened and he doesn’t see much point telling them about it now, three years after the fact, especially not at Christmas. He doesn’t want to get into it.
“To tell the truth, if anyone deserved it, Inias did,” Cas says out of nowhere. “He got into a lot of trouble when we were young. He got me into a lot of trouble, too.”
His voice is soft and slow, piecing together what he wants to say before he says it. He doesn’t look at anyone.
“He once hot-glued a teacher’s chair. I think he once hot-glued my chair.” Cas shakes his head, looks down at his hands where they are tangled in his lap. Dean wants to reach for him, but he’s too far, wedged in beside Sam. “He did get banned from the school art room, though.”
“That’s tough,” Jess says, impressed. “Art teachers let you get away with anything. I should know.”
Cas tips his head over. “They did give him a lot of extra chances,” he admits. “But they couldn’t let him keep doing it forever. And I remember once in basic training—he went out one night and he employed a—ah, disreputable woman,” Cas goes on, with a meaningful look designed to go over Mary’s head. “She was about fifty years older than he was, and not the most attractive woman he could have chosen. Inias paid her all his wages to come back to barracks the next day and ask for him in person—and he gave her our drill sergeant’s name.”
Jess cackles again. “And of course, your drill sergeant was the humorous type.”
“Absolutely not.”
Sam grins.
Then Mary pipes up, “Who’s Inias?”
Silence falls over the table like heavy snowfall knocked from an awning. The only sound is the scrape of Mary’s fork over her plate and the static humming from the record-player. When Sam shifts awkwardly in his seat, the creak of the rickety wood seems to echo.
“A close friend,” Cas says, at last. “From when I was young.”
Mary glances over at Jess. “Have I met him before?”
Jess, in her defence, tries to stop her: “Honey, leave—”
“No,” Cas says. His voice is steady and even. “He passed away.”
Mary’s mouth opens and shuts uselessly, like a goldfish. “Oh. Sorry.”
Cas sits perfectly still, every muscle reined in tight. A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It’s okay.” He clears his throat. “It was a long time ago.”
The silence stretches again between them until it’s taut enough to snap. Dean tries and fails to catch Cas’ eye.
Cas stands, so abruptly that the whole table clatter. “I should get another bottle out,” he says, and leaves.
There is still a half bottle of red wine sitting in the middle of the table.
Sam looks across the table at Dean, grimacing apologetically. Dean shakes his head. From the kitchen, there is only the sound of running water. No movement. Dean excuses himself.
He levers himself carefully up onto his feet, settling his weight on his prosthetic so that he doesn’t slip. He ignores the dull ache of the leather squeezing his thigh where it is laced uncomfortably tight, and he sets off slowly for the kitchen.
Inside, Cas is drying his hands.
For a moment, Dean pauses in the doorway, one hand still on the frame. From here, no-one would know Cas was any different. Just a regular joe with an arrowhead nose, the coarse, dark scruff of beard growth, and big, careful hands. Handsome, a little serious. Dean comes up behind him.
“On your four o’clock,” he says, and Cas lifts his head accordingly, looks back over his shoulder—and as he turns his head, the illusion is lost. The worst of the scarring is mottled and uneven like hot paint, and more pink than the rest of his skin. His left ear is sort of a hole; his left eye drags a little at the corner. His hair is patchy and thin on that side, non-existent at the burn site, and the scar continues down into his shirt collar, spiderwebs faintly over the bridge of his nose. But then he looks at Dean, and that look is exactly the same: the stern, flat line of his mouth, and the way that it softens at the edges when he sees Dean.
Cas lowers his head. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
Dean steps in close beside him. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
Cas is so full of shit. He has that deep furrow in his brow, that tightness in his jaw, and the movement of his hands is brisk bordering on frantic. No-one needs to dry their hands that vigorously. Dean’s kind of worried for the dishcloth.
“Hey. Come here.”
“Dean, I said I’m fine,” Cas snaps, but he lets himself be turned around—dishcloth still in hand—to look Dean in the face. “What?”
Dean reaches out and lightly smooths out the crease in Cas’ brow with his thumb. His hand comes down, then, grazes over Cas’ jaw, tries to make him release the tension there. He knows that Cas can’t feel anything too well on that side, but it works. Cas slumps at the shoulders, and he can’t hold Dean’s eyes anymore. He looks at the ground, and Dean’s hand falls away.
“I thought I was ready to tell those stories,” Cas mutters, knotting the dishcloth around trembling fingers. “Christ. It’s been years, I should be able to—”
“According to what bullshit rulebook?” Dean interrupts. “You don’t have to ever be ready.”
Hell. Joe Harvelle got shot through the hip and thigh retreating from Gut Hasenfeld. His blood spurted hotly over Dean’s hands as they flinched under the smoke and shells, and when the dust finally cleared it was only to stare the barrel of a gun. Dean remembers being able to stand, although shaking, in agony, his knee half buckling under his weight. He remembers that Joe couldn’t. He remembers the crack of Joe’s head snapping back, the blunt noise the back of his skull made against the concrete, when the Krauts decided Joe as a prisoner wasn’t worth the effort it’d take to carry him.
Dean has never told anyone that story, or about the raw, animal grief that seized inside him in the weeks that followed whenever he had room to be anything other than terrified. But Joe wasn’t his best friend. He didn’t grow up in Joe’s pockets. He never looked at Joe as his real family when his own flesh and blood turned him out.
Dean thinks Cas is within his right not to talk about Inias.
Cas doesn’t answer. His eyes move somewhere past Dean, in the direction of the pantry, but somehow Dean doesn’t think he’s thinking about what to make for breakfast.
Dean steps in closer, his prosthetic foot scraping dully over the kitchen tiles. “You with me?”
Cas blinks. Once, twice. His eyes are red at the corners. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“One to ten?” Dean asks.
With a shaky breath, Cas pinches the bridge of his nose. “Five.”
Dean can work with five. He just never wants to find Cas back at a ten without any warning. He doesn’t think he can fish Cas out of another darkly-stained bathtub. He leans forwards to plant a kiss right between Cas’ eyebrows. “Love you,” he says.
“Yeah.” Cas rakes a hand backwards through his hair, and one hand fumbles for the counter at his side.
When he lifts his head, his hair stands up at ridiculous, tufty angles, and it emphasises where the beginnings of grey is blooming at his temples, and Dean can’t help but smile.
Cas squints at him. “What are you looking at?” he grouches, and Dean can feel his own grin spreading wider.
“Some asshole,” Dean says, and Cas tells him to fuck off, but his voice is soft. When Dean reaches out to fuck up Cas’ hair some more, Cas leans out of reach—with a hand on Dean’s hip, to be sure that Dean doesn’t overbalance—and then nods his head in the direction of the dining room.
Dean points, first, to the wine sitting out by the bread bin, and Cas passes it over. Bottle in hand, Dean leads the way back in. His prosthetic is rubbing, in the way of a new shoe that doesn’t quite fit, even though he’s been wearing it for years now. It feels like the strap cinched around his thigh might be slipping, but he can’t be bothered to fix it.
“—and Susan wanted to play softball with the boys,” Mary is in the middle of saying, “only they wouldn’t let her ‘cause of how she’s a girl and she thought it was real unfair and so did I and we told our teacher but Mrs. Schnetzer said that’s just how it is and she wasn’t even listening to us, she was reading something at the same time, just like she tells us not to when someone is talking to us, she says you’re supposed to give ‘em your five thousand percent concentration—”
Jess lays her hand on Mary’s. “Breathe, honey.”
Mary takes a big, theatrical gasp. “She was giving us only five percent, or two percent.”
“So what did you and Susan do?” Cas asks, sliding carefully back into his seat, as Dean sets the wine down.
“Well,” Mary says, and she lays both palms flat on the top of the table, solemn as anything, “I didn’t get to do anything because Mrs. Schnetzer stopped us but she was too slow to stop Susan entirely so Susan had scissors and she cut off all her hair. Except for a part by her ear, here, where she didn’t reach. Her mom had to shave it off when she got sent home or else she would’ve looked dumb.”
“And of course, you weren’t really going to cut your hair off, right?” Sam asks, his voice somewhere between exasperation and hope.
“Uhhh,” says Mary. “No?”
Dean winks at her and she beams. Encouraging rebellion and trouble in Mary is just about his favourite perk of being the Favourite Uncle. So far he’s taught her how to spit from her teeth, how to slingshot a tin can from twenty feet, how to knock a boy out cold if he tries to put his hands on her.
Mary wears two short braids to her shoulders and a blue cotton dress that she has managed to get splatters of cranberry sauce all over. She is wickedly smart, outgoing in a way that makes Sam and Jess dread her teenage years, and when she fixes her wide green eyes on Dean, he feels a little like he’s being interrogated. He can see a lot of Moore in her attitude, a lot of Winchester in her looks. She meets Dean’s eyes and her grin is mischievous.
There is only one slice of pie left, which Dean gladly helps himself to, even if it’s his own making. Cas leans over with a fork, steals a chunk of buttery crust, and Dean lets him. Sam stretches, scrubbing a hand backwards through his overgrown hair, and he drains his glass. Mary starts to read jokes from a book she received a few hours ago; Cas contributes with his own until Dean throws a balled-up napkin at him.
The room is lit by one flickering bulb overhead and a wobbly second-hand lamp from which crinkly aluminium tinsel is festooned in loops of gold and silver; Christmas lights in garish colours flash and dim where they are draped over furniture and clumsily sellotaped to the wallpaper. Between the fading bulbs and the decorative slow twinkle, reflected back and back in the sheen of baubles and wine glasses as though in so many tiny mirrors, the room is aglow.
Jess, who has been apologising all evening for how little help she’s been, now spots her opportunity and starts tidying up dishes. Her wineglass is reduced to a dark puddle in the bottom of the neck, so Dean reaches out to refill it. He gives a little more to Cas, to Sam—pretends to tip some into Mary’s open, laughing mouth—and then he pauses, bottle still uncorked.
Dean’s fingers fidget.
One glass is fine. One glass won’t hurt anyone.
Cas says, “Dean?”
Without even looking at him, Dean can hear the knot in Cas’ brow, the way his mouth will pull into worry. Christ, Dean doesn’t want to make this a thing, not in front of his fucking brother.
Dean is still holding the bottle. He sets it down on the table beside him, but his hand stays wrapped around the base. His thumb traces a distracted pattern over the label.
He could say that his leg hurts. It’s not a lie, technically—it always kind of hurts, even if it’s not too bad right now. But he could play it up and no-one would say anything and he could get away with it and Cas would give him that goddamn look, the one that looks an awful lot like he’s breaking Cas’ fucking heart, and hey, if the damage is done after one tiny glass, he might as well have two or—
Dean holds the bottle out for Cas to take.
There is a tremor through his wrist.
Wordlessly, Cas takes it. He sets it down on his far side, and as the conversation swells and bubbles again into laughter around a story Sam is telling, Cas catches Dean’s eye. He doesn’t say anything, just hold Dean’s gaze, and it’s so far the opposite of the look Dean fears that he knows he did the right thing. Embarrassed heat grips his throat.
He drops his eyes, refills his glass of water, and turns back to Sam’s story.
It’s a good one—about some of the recurring characters Sam keeps bumping into on his way to night school, each one more colourful and bizarre than the last—and somewhere in the middle of it, they move into the living room, where there is more space, although not by much.
The living room is mostly filled by a long flat couch that folds out into the spare bed, and the one armchair that Dean is able to easily haul himself out of. Candles drip dyed wax into old dishes resigned to their fate. There isn’t room in their tiny bungalow for a Christmas tree, but Cas has a potted plant that he’s hung some ugly ceramic baubles from. It looks stupid, and Dean’s told Cas as much like ten thousand times, but Cas is nothing if not stubborn, and so the Christmas fern remains. A heap of discarded, crumpled wrapping papers is half-hidden under the couch, and the hardwood floor is scuffed, a little warped, in the house’s age. Over one cabinet, there is mounted a slightly uneven shelf, polished to shine but not quite straight, where Dean has been getting into woodworking. He’s not all that good at it but it feels good to make something out of nothing.
Dean resets the record-player.
It starts with piano chords, slow and plaintive. It builds. Cas’ hand skims over Dean’s hip as he passes him, his fingers lifting goosebumps on the back of Dean’s neck, and Dean straightens up to the introduction of easy percussion that makes Jess sway in her seat, a string section that swells as Cas turns back to him. Dean is caught, hopelessly, on shoulders and waist and the feather of Cas’ hair that sticks up belligerently at the back in spite of his best efforts.
They did gifts some hours ago, all the early day excitement dispersed but lingering like smoke in the air. Around the edges of the room are small stacks of presents organised by recipient, some useful, some frivolous, some hand-made with new value assigned to them beyond anything they could originally have thought. When Dean builds Cas a new wood planter from his own two hands, it’s simple and straight-forward and not, technically speaking, difficult, but it makes Cas crumple inwards a little with that hard set to his mouth which seems pissed off to all hell but which Dean now recognises as an effort not to get soppy. By this point, their garden is flourishing, vegetables and flowers alike, but Cas crumples all the same. Without fail. It’s important to him.
Now, as the music lifts to tangle with fizzy lemon-yellow lights overhead, Cas stoops to move gifts out from underfoot, Dean gratefully sinks into his armchair to take the weight off his prosthetic.
At the side of Dean’s seat, Sam lets out an extended groan, stretching again, and he rubs his belly until his sweater rucks up like an old man. “That dinner was nuts,” he says. “I don’t know how you do it. I honestly don’t.”
Dean pulls a face. “Just a God-given gift, I guess.”
“I swear. Can I bring you with us to Jess’ mom’s house next year? I love Lucille, but…” Sam glances back over his shoulder, and then his voice drops low and furtive. “The woman boiled the turkey last year. In just—plain water. Nothing else in there. And nothing else gets added to the turkey at any point in the recipe.”
Dean recoils. “You’re fucking with me.”
“Language, man,” Sam hisses, glancing back over his shoulder to check that Jess is none the wiser. “And—no, I am not… fudging you. Last time, I tried to sneak some salt onto my plate.” His voice drops low, furtive, and an edge of desperation comes into it. “She noticed. She actually started to cry, Dean. Said I was disrespecting her in her own house, I just—”
“Christ. That’s gotta be illegal.”
Sam shakes his head. “Are you sure you can’t come?” he asks.
Dean pulls an apologetic face. “No can do. We’re in Bedford next year.”
“Oh. Eleanor, right? Does she, uh…” Sam trails off, but his eyes flick meaningfully to Cas’ back, where he is arranging electrical wires so Dean doesn’t trip over them later.
“No, she doesn’t know,” Dean says. He shrugs. “But Cas said last time that I’m a war buddy, mentioned that I served with him, and that got me off the hook. She knows I knew Inias, and I guess that’s enough for her. Plus Cas said he can’t travel cross-country alone, so. By this point, I think she expects me.”
“It’s not gonna be a problem?”
“Nah. I’ll just make up some shit about my girl out West or something, if she does start sniffing round. And we’ll be careful.”
“Okay,” Sam says, and his face does that complicated thing Dean hates—puppy eyes and creased-up brow and his mouth tugging at the corners—like he’s rifling through how to feel about this and he’s coming up with pity. “I just—I wish you didn’t have to do that.”
“Really? Me, I love it. Nothing brings me joy like—”
“Alright, alright. Point made. Sorry.”
Dean falls quiet. He shouldn’t be needling Sam like this. He knows how lucky he is, pulling the one in a million scratch-card of his family not tossing him out or locking him up or worse. But in his own house, he can pretend that this is what normal looks like, Sam’s weighted support only highlights all the ways they’re different. “It’s fine.”
“It is fine,” Sam agrees, almost too emphatically, and Dean rolls his eyes. He doesn’t want another pep talk, and so instead he sets about taking off his leg.
For a few hours now, he hasn’t been able to get totally comfortable—or even as close to comfortable as he ever gets wearing the stupid prosthetic. All night, the pressure on his thigh has built and built to the point that he can feel his pulse against the leather strap, and whenever he moves there is a sting of chafing where something has slipped.
He hikes up the end of his pants, past where his knee should be, and further, until he can get at the strap of his prosthetic. He wiggles his fingers underneath the laces to loosen them far enough to shimmy the whole thing off.
It’s the lazy way out but he can’t be bothered to fiddle with it, and right now he doesn’t care how much it’ll piss him off tomorrow morning to find it like that.
The relief of pulling free of the socket is instant and overwhelming, second only to jerking off. Dean tips his head back with a sigh and lets the prosthetic fall heavily to the floor. However, when his fingers skim over his thigh, he finds sores where the skin has rubbed raw, and he swears under his breath. He won’t be able to wear the prosthetic for a couple of days. Well done, Dean. A moment’s laziness and you’re fucked for the week. Way to go.
“Everything okay?” Sam asks.
Dean waves Sam away with a dismissive hand. “Yeah, fine.”
“You sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”
“I’m sure.”
“Do you need Cas? Because I can—”
“Sam, don’t make me throw my leg at you.”
At that, Sam’s mouth shuts with an audible click. He holds up both hands in surrender, ducks his head in a weird little half-bow, and then mimes zipping his lips shut. Dean knows he means well, but Sam is the most aggressively over-attentive nurse in the northern hemisphere. Jess had to keep intervening when Dean first got back from hospital after the war, just because Sam was trying to be helpful to the point of belligerence. Dean feels like a dick for saying it, but Christ, sometimes you just need people to quit asking if you’re okay.
Thankfully, Sam gets the message. He claps a hand to Dean’s shoulder in solidarity, and then moves into the middle of the room with a big loud voice to ask which party game they’re going to play first.
They play Twenty Questions—badly—and charades—worse, with a world of disconnect between the celebrities and characters Mary knows versus the ones that Dean has heard of, and with Cas’ totally unhelpful suggestions eternally veering between the realm of possibility and just being a dick on purpose.
Sam and Dean play Jess and Cas, while Mary takes the role of moderator a little too seriously, banging a wooden spoon like a gavel, and keeping track of every time Cas cheats—or at least every time he forgets the silence rule and tries to give Jess clues based on ridiculous noises that always sound exactly like a lawnmower regardless of whatever the hell he’s actually trying to impersonate. Cas gets himself disqualified by round three, and Dean laughs himself stupid.
They bring out leftovers, cold cuts and tough crusty bread with jelly thick enough to slice, and Jess remembers at last the wallet of Mary’s school photographs she’s supposed to be distributing among family. She digs under couch cushions and beneath dishes before she finds, until at last she comes up victorious.
The picture in question isn’t a good one. In it, Mary is smiling sweetly and her hair is curled—and one eye is swollen shut, red and puffy, her eyebrow inflating like a hot air balloon above it.
“Jesus,” Dean says—jerks sideways to avoid getting smacked by Jess—and then, “What happened here?”
“Wasp,” Mary says, matter-of-fact.
Dean stares, mouth open. “How big was the wasp?”
“Hang on, Mary, hold up,” Jess says, raising her hand as if calling for quiet in her classroom. “Let’s get the whole story here, shall we? How many wasps were there, and where were they peacefully living before—”
“They weren’t peaceful!” Mary argues, bristling. “They were chasing Wilma and their nest was just sitting there right on the edge of where we do hopscotch and no-one was doing nothing about it, so I grabbed it—”
“Oh,” Cas says. “I see.”
“—to pass it over the fence, only I guess when I picked it up they must have all got real mad and—”
“Now it all makes sense,” Dean says. “Although you should tell it like you got in a fight.” He does a dramatic gasp, and swings his head around to look at her again, like he’s seeing the picture for the first time. “Wait, you took out how many high-schoolers? Ten?”
Mary catches on, her face lighting up. “Fifty-seven,” she crows. “All at once!”
Cas joins in, solemn: “I heard they were all on the wrestling team.”
“I heard one of ‘em was part tiger.”
“I heard that they took one look and ran away weeping.”
“Nah, I heard they were cops. The whole squad trying to take her down.”
Mary grins as wide as her face. “I was too quick. I beat ‘em all up and then I—I ran. Far away and they couldn’t catch me.”
Jess’ hand smooths through Mary’s hair, and she smiles down at her as Mary tilts her head right back into it. “Alright, easy, Sugar Ray.”
“I still think she looks a lot like Dean,” Sam says.
Dean’s head whips up. “The hell you trying to say?”
Sam’s eyes roll. “Obviously, not the part that’s been stung, idiot.” He turns to speak to Mary. “He was blonde when he was little, too. Eyes too big for his face and everything—you look a lot like him in that picture.”
“Mary, do you think that’s a compliment or an insult?” Dean asks her.
She puts a finger to her chin and hums loudly as if considering.
“Cute, though!” Sam backtracks, while Jess laughs and tells him he’s in for it now.
Dean’s smile widens into something smug and satisfied—a look that he has been reliably told by Cas, on numerous occasions, is totally insufferable. “Can I get that in writing?”
Without so much as looking up, Sam flips Dean off behind Mary’s head, and Dean’s mouth drops open.
“Sam,” Dean says, low and scandalised. “In front of your own daughter? For shame—”
“Fudge off.”
Jess smacks him in the side with a magazine. In the ensuing squabble—Jess telling Mary to hold Sam still so she can scrub his mouth out with soap, Sam trying hopelessly to defend himself—Cas gets carefully to his feet. Without a word, he vanishes into the hallway.
Dean cranes his head to look after him, but the sound of moving furniture and heavy boxes reassures him as to what Cas is doing—and sure enough, he returns a second later with a battered cardboard box, KANSAS scrawled on the side in thick black ink.
When Dean and Cas moved out West, they only took what they could fit in two suitcases; when Sam and Jess sold the old house, they had to shift a whole lot more. There are old boxes piled in the pantry, stuffed with ornaments, clothes, bric-a-brac that no-one is sure what to do with—and photographs. Grandparents and great-grandparents, Winchesters all the way back; kids in starched linens and women in high collars, whose names nobody knows anymore. Somewhere in the mix are the photographs of Dean and Sam from their old mountings in the hallway where they learned to tie their laces.
“There must be an old photograph of Dean in here somewhere,” Cas says as he carries it over.
“Couch—”
Cas adjusts his course at Dean’s direction, navigating around the arm of the couch, and he sets the box down in the middle of the floor. Sam scoots across on his knees and starts flipping through with practiced expertise, knowing the contents of the box better than Cas does, and while Sam searches for an appropriate example of Dean’s childhood resemblance to Mary, other images float to the surface, and Cas and Jess get distracted.
“Oh my God, I love this one,” Jess says, cooing as she retrieves a grainy sepia photograph in which Dean beams at the camera, missing most of his front teeth. She turns it around to face them and pouts. “You could drive a freight train through that gap.”
“Hey, I was a baseball hero for all of two weeks, I’ll have you know.”
“And the laughing stock of the school for two years,” Sam chimes in.
“Ha-ha.”
Cas says, “Why don’t you do your hair like this for me anymore?”
Dean looks over to find Cas, with an arch smile, holding up a photo from Dean’s sophomore year at high school. In it, he has bad acne, a broken nose held in place by a splint, and a middle parting that flicks up at the sides like two door handles.
“Alright, smartass,” Dean says, lunging for the photograph from his chair while Cas rocks back out of reach, smirk widening. “Give it.”
“I’m putting this in my wallet,” Cas says.
“Like hell you are.”
Cas makes a show of tucking the photograph into the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m keeping this safe.”
At last, Sam holds a photograph up high above his head, gleeful and triumphant, and then shows it off: Dean, maybe a couple years younger than Mary is now. The resemblance is undeniable, from the same big eyes to the same splodge of freckles over the bridge of the nose.
“Huh.” Dean nudges Mary with his foot, his toes poking into her ribcage until she wiggles and squirms. “Good looking out, kid.”
Cas is looking at Mary, his face soft and still. He doesn’t say anything. He lowers his eyes.
They have uncovered gold dust here, and there is so much more still to be mined—all Sam’s terrible haircuts, the phase of flounced musketeer shirts, the stiff prom pictures with Sam’s wobbly writing on the back penning a love note that makes Jess shriek with delight and Sam flush red to the tips of the ears. Then Jess slows.
She picks one up, says nothing, but holds it out carefully for Cas to take.
“That better not be another high school one,” Dean complains. “Look, all my buddies did the same thing. It was a whole—thing. Cas.”
Cas doesn’t answer. His face softens, gazing down at the photograph in a way that makes Dean more nervous than ever.
“Cas?”
At last, Cas heaves himself up onto his feet, and he comes slowly to sit on the arm of Dean’s chair. The photograph he holds out is instantly familiar—Dean in service dress, clean-shaven, more freckled than fair, a smudge of camouflage-cream under one ear, the tail-end of a thick, angry head-wound peeking out from under the peak of a garrison cap pulled too low.
“Brunssum,” Cas says, his voice reverent. His fingertip grazes over the lopsided peak of Dean’s cap, over the shrapnel wound Dean had tried and failed to hide, and Dean is looking at Cas and not at the photo.
Cas’ lips part, and there is something quiet and aching in his face, and Dean knows that he is remembering. He says, “Yeah.”
Cas looks at him. He’s not smiling, but in his eyes there’s this warmth and tenderness that could leave a guy breathless. Dean remembers sometimes it used to scare him, being loved that fiercely. Even when Cas couldn’t say it. Even at the ends of the Earth.
“I wish I had a photo like that of you,” Dean says.
Cas rolls his eyes. “You mean when I still had my face.”
“Hey, I’ll still objectify the shit outta you.”
Cas huffs a laugh, low in his throat, and he turns his head to offer Dean the healthy side of his face, stubble and wrinkles and all. He says, “Here. Get your fill.”
“Nah,” Dean says. “That ain’t gonna do it.” He curls his hand under Cas’ chin, tilts his face back to face him head on, and leans in as though to kiss him—close enough that he can hear the satisfying moment when Cas’ breath hitches in his chest. He watches Cas’ eyes drop to his mouth, but he still doesn’t move in any closer. He just looks at him.
Dean remembers a time when Cas challenged him on it—accusing him of settling for second-best, saying if they didn’t have the war between them, Dean would have married some beautiful girl and got her pregnant five times over. Dean remembers the words like he can still taste them in his mouth: Shut up. I will not imagine my life without you.
Cas is not quite breathing steady.
Uneven hairline, cobweb-muscled jaw, piebald skin. Narrow wrists and long, gentle fingers. Blue eyes. A mouth Dean could drown in.
Dean’s fingers sweep to cup Cas’ jaw, and Cas’ expression gentles. The curve of his lower lip is the softest thing Dean’s seen.
“Alright, Winchester,” Cas manages, at last, and he scowls, but his cheek tilts further into Dean’s touch. “Dial it back. You won me already. I’m here.”
Dean laughs.
From the other side of the room comes an ear-splitting whistle that makes Dean wince. “Heads-up, lovebirds.”
Dean’s face flushes hot and he lets go of Cas. “What?” he grouches.
Sam grins. “We’ve heard this record three hundred times now,” he says. “You’ve gotta have something else.”
Jess sits up straight. “Ooh, you got Perry Como?”
Dean scoffs. “The hell do I look like?” He points Sam in the direction of the case where records are haphazardly stacked.
The photographs are temporarily forgotten while they flip through. Most of the records are old, some of them broken in their sleeves from the move, since Dean could never be bothered to clear through them. At last, Sam is satisfied—“Aha! And to think I always believed you had no taste.”—with an old Ricky Nelson record, and he resets the needle on the record-player. The warm brass melody that comes crackling out is like something reaching out from the past.
Jess starts to sing along, loud and off-key and brimful of enthusiasm, while Sam makes a scene of wincing and covering his ears; Mary laughs and laughs, and Jess just gets louder, and when Mary is hopping up and down to fight Sam free of his own imprisonment, Cas grabs her from behind.
Mary squeals, and then Cas is spinning her, holding both her hands and twirling fast. He side-steps with her, movements ungainly and exaggerated. Cas’ long fingers shift to steer Mary round and round on the floorboards as he rocks from side to side, a low rumble in his throat where he hums along to the record-player but doesn’t know the words. He lets her teach him a couple new steps, twisting and swinging and kicking. To say that he’s terrible would be a serious understatement.
“Nice moves,” Dean calls out, around a grin.
Cas doesn’t falter, but he does step on Mary’s toes. “Thank you.”
She tries to spin him in turn and he bumps the side table, the corner of the couch, and steps on her foot again, but she just laughs the whole way through it, and Cas is unembarrassed by it.
Dean can feel that he’s smiling like an idiot, but it’s hard to care when he can see Cas’ mouth tilt up at the corners and the crinkling of his eyes. It makes something curl warm and fizzy in Dean’s throat to see Cas not worried, not ashamed, not feeling like he’s less, somehow, for the shit he’s been put through.
“You were better off when you didn’t dance,” Dean heckles.
Cas twirls Mary out, and as her back is turned, he swivels to face Dean and mouths a clear, enunciated FUCK YOU.
Dean bursts out with a laugh. “Later.”
Cas’ eyes narrow.
Jess hauls Sam up onto his feet and sways with him, smile wide and beatific. There is a moment where Sam’s hand skims down over Jess’ hip and, just for a second, cradles her belly, and Dean wonders if there’s something his brother hasn’t told him. Then Cas grabs Mary by the waist and pretends he’s going to try dip her, and she screams, while Sam and Jess cheer and do exactly nothing to rescue her.
Pain throbs, incomprehensibly, where Dean’s left ankle should be, and Cas loses the beat of the music every now and then when he can’t hear the song right, but there is the giddy, unrestrained warmth of Cas’ smile without fear in any line of his face, and there’s that squeezing in the pit of Dean’s chest but it’s good.
The skyline fades through a cold peach twilight into inky darkness until the coloured lights seem to glow brighter than ever, and Sam gets a little tipsy, and Mary sags towards sleep where she stands, stubborn as ever, refusing Jess’ little gentle suggestions that it might be time for bed. The red wine is emptied, and another one opened, and Dean drinks fruit juice and he doesn’t think about how it might feel to be loose with liquor, confident and assured and unafraid of anything.
***
It is getting late when the party starts winding down. Jess and Sam are having an argument about nothing in the kitchen, and Mary is asleep on the couch, a hat made of tinsel drooping over her eyes, while Cas is fastidiously trying to finish a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box is of several horses galloping through a valley, but so far, on the floor, it’s just a wobbly rectangle frame filled with some hooves at the edges. Mary lost interest about forty minutes ago; Cas, being Cas, is sat on the floor and stubbornly still working on it.
For a while, Dean just watches him. Cas’ brow creasing with concentration, the way he tilts the puzzle pieces back and forth, rubbing each one between finger and thumb to make sure he understands the shape of the edges before he tries to fit it anywhere. He has a small section of one white horse almost completed in his lap, and nowhere to stick it.
“How you doing over there?” Dean calls.
“Fine,” Cas says distractedly, not looking up.
“You know that puzzle’s for kids, right?”
Cas ignores him, and Dean decides that’s as good a real as any to carry on being a jackass.
“I’ll give you ten dollars if you admit you’re stuck.”
Cas picks up a piece that only shows a strip of grass from the bottom of the picture. He tries to align it to several other identical-looking pieces, and then tosses it back in the pile with an irritated huff. He isn’t even enjoying himself—it’s ridiculous.
Dean says, “Cas.”
“When Sam and Jess said they were bringing a child,” Cas says, “I didn’t imagine you would be the problem.”
“Oh, he’s a comedian.” Dean grins, wide and sunny and totally unbearable. “Also, a liar. I’m always the problem.”
When Cas rolls his eyes, it’s a full-body motion, his head swinging over. “Nothing if not consistent.”
“Please. You love it.”
Cas shakes his head in exasperation but, most importantly, he doesn’t disagree. He tips his head over, considering his selection of jigsaw pieces. His hair is getting a little too long, curling at the nape of his neck and falling into his eyes when he doesn’t grease it. His sweater is navy, a little threadbare at the elbows, but still soft. When he frowns at the jigsaw, the line of his jaw and the focus in his eyes is an echo of an officer, all strategist, and yet, sitting cross-legged in his socks, he also looks impossibly small.
Out of nowhere, Dean says, “I meant it, by the way, that I want a picture of you.”
Cas doesn’t look over. “There’s bound to be one somewhere from before the war—or basic training, if you want me in uniform.”
“Either. Both. And you now, too.” Dean swallows. “It was something I thought about a lot when I was—” The words wobble and give out. Damn it. He wets his lips, tries again. “In Germany.”
Cas knows what that means. He lifts his head.
There are some things that, even fifteen years later, Dean has never really talked about. Stalag-6G is one of them.
It takes him a long time to even start. His voice gets stuck somewhere behind his teeth and he can feel sweat prickle at the nape of his neck, nausea blooming in his gut on instinct. “When I got sick,” he says, faltering, unsteady, “I got real delirious. Everything got fuzzy.”
Even now, it’s all snippets and shards. The stench of piss and vomit and rot. The cold bite of a pistol at the back of his head. A barking, scraping voice that still makes him cringe in its echoes at the back of his skull. A hard pallet in a concrete room where he sweat through his clothes and waited to die.
Dean swallows. “I kept forgetting things. And then one day when I couldn’t remember what you looked like. I mean, obviously, I still knew, like—dark hair, blue eyes, big frown—”
At that last part, Cas’ eyebrows crease up. He frowns.
“—but I couldn’t picture it,” Dean finishes. “I couldn’t see you. And that scared the hell outta me.” His throat is tight. It’s like glass in the back of his mouth, thick and sharp and heavy. “I never could figure out what was worse to me—dying and never getting to see you again, or me getting out and not remembering you.”
Cas is real quiet, and Dean can feel his eyes on him.
“So, yeah. Photo of my sweetheart would’ve helped.” Dean clears his throat. He tries a dismissive shrug, and he backpedals on the topic. “Also, it would’ve been something to jerk to, so.”
Without speaking, Cas gets up. His knees pop as he stands, and he is unsteady for a moment, battling vertigo. Then he reaches Dean, leaning against the armchair, and his fingers thread through Dean’s. His cheek tilts against the top of Dean’s head, and his thumb traces a pattern of slow, steadying comfort across Dean’s knuckles.
Dean can hear Cas’ breath in his throat, the way he pauses to weigh his words before he speaks. Then, at last: “Wherever you are, whenever I’m not with you,” Cas says, his voice soft as prayer, “I will always, unfailingly, help you masturbate.”
Dean manages to laugh. Hell, Cas surprises it out of him.
It’s dumb and ridiculous and flippant, and it cuts right through the anxiety fluttering in Dean’s throat. There is real reassurance beneath the surface, an unspoken promise—Dean’s been with Cas long enough to recognise that—but handed to Dean in disguise, in a form he can digest it. Dean has given Cas enough escape-routes when he needed them to spot an out when he sees one.
Dean doesn’t trust himself to say what he means right now, and he knows that nowadays Cas can’t always read it in his face, but he says it like this: his fingers tighten fractionally around Cas’. He presses his face into Cas’ side, into the warmth of his sweater and his body, underneath. Cas kisses the top of Dean’s head, just once, quick, but he pushes his nose into Dean’s hair, and he lingers there until Dean is the one to pull away.
***
“Dean.”
There is a gentle hand on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean jolts. “Yeah, I’m listening,” he mumbles, blinking, bleary, to see Cas leaning over him.
Cas’ mouth pulls into a half-smile. “No, you aren’t.” He smooths his palm over Dean’s knee. “Come on. Everyone else is gone. Let’s go to bed.”
Dean makes a sleepy noise of complaint, but he guesses he can see some logic in that.
“You checked everything?” Dean asks.
“It’s okay. Sam did the perimeter with me. Everything’s secure.”
When Cas reaches out for where Dean’s prosthetic lies in a heap on the floor, Dean stops him with a hand to his arm. “Leave it,” he says, rubbing a tired hand over his face. “Hurts.”
Thankfully, Cas doesn’t push any further. The first couple times that Dean tried to explain the hot, sharp pain, like a knife scraping against bone, where his shin should be, he ended up just getting angry. Of course I fucking know it’s not there anymore, I was there when they cut the fucking thing off. I don’t know how else to tell you it hurts.
Instead, Cas just pushes a hand carefully back through Dean’s hair, and the gentle prickling over his scalp doesn’t cancel out the weird, awful telescoping going on where his leg should be, but it does feel nice, and that’s fine.
“Where’s your crutch?”
Fuck. Dean knuckles at his eyes. “I dunno. Sorry.”
“Come on.”
Cas steps lightly on Dean’s foot to keep it from slipping on the hardwood floor, and he wraps his fingers around Dean’s forearms to pull him carefully upright. Dean sways and leans heavily into Cas’ chest while he adjusts his balance. Cas’ hands, huge and warm and gentle, come to steady him, one spanning the small of his back, another solid between his shoulder-blades. Dean is caged between his arms and knows Cas won’t let him fall.
Dean buries his nose in Cas’ neck, beneath his deaf ear, and breathes him in. His hands clench and unclench on the front of Cas’ shirt, and he prepares himself for the ungainly crossing to the bed. Then—
“Shit,” Cas says.
Dean lifts his head.
“I forgot to unfold the bed.” Cas huffs a soft noise in his throat which is almost a laugh. “I’m sorry. One second. Shit.”
“Language, Captain.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Dean tucks his grin into Cas’ throat.
Cas directs him to the back of the armchair, where he can support his own weight unaided, while Cas fumbles with the fold-out bed. The springs are old, rusted, and let out a deafening screech as the bed is lowered to the ground. Dean winces; Cas doesn’t much notice. There is an old greying bedsheet balled up behind the couch that Cas pulls out to flap over the bed, and then he reaches for Dean.
“I got it,” Dean says.
Cas hesitates, but his hand retreats. He lets Dean shuffle inelegantly around the edge of the room, and doesn’t get involved even when Dean’s leg is trembling beneath his weight and his face is burning hot with the effort. He waits out Dean’s stubbornness, and steps out of the way to allow Dean room to flop heavily down into bed. The springs scream again, and there is a faint crunching sound that Dean hopes is the sound of something easy to repair.
He rolls onto his back and flashes Cas two thumbs-up. “Told you,” he grunts. “I got it.”
“As ever,” Cas comments drily, “you make it look effortless.”
“Eat me.”
Cas shuts the living door to close them off from the bedroom where Sam, Jess, and Mary staying. Dean sits up, peels off his clothes.
As he pulls free of his undershirt, the cold touch of metal chills his chest, lifting goosebumps as a small metal crucifix coming to rest in the dip of his collarbone. When Cas removes his own shirt, there is the matching lump of scar tissue just slightly off-centre to his clavicle where his own had to be cut away. Bronze, it turned out, has a real low melting point.
Dean’s eyes, however, are drawn instead to the arrow of Cas’ sturdy hips, his thick waist and chest. The solid curve of his thighs under his slacks.
Cas interrupts, “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” Dean says innocently.
“Like your niece isn’t fifteen feet away in our bed. Behave.”
Dean splutters, indignant. “To be accused of—in my own home—I would never—”
Cas’ eyebrows arch.
“Okay, fine.” Dean throws a hand over his eyes as though to preserve Cas’ modesty, although he peeks through his fingers—because, hey, he’s only human.
Once undressed, Cas has these ugly tartan button-up pyjamas that look like he wrestled them off someone in an old folks’ home, which Dean makes fun of on the regular, but the truth is that in them Cas looks so soft and warm and homely that it makes Dean’s chest hurt. Dean tugs playfully at the leg of Cas’ pyjamas pants, and then shimmies across the bed to leave room for Cas, one arm slung out across the mattress so that Cas knows where he fits into this equation.
Cas climbs into bed, but before he can get under the covers, Dean stops him with a hand braced against his chest. “Sodium amytal?”
“Yes.” Cas doesn’t meet his eyes.
“When?”
“Earlier. Can I get in bed, please?”
Dean narrows his eyes at him. “When earlier?”
Cas huffs this bitchy little sigh, like Dean is the one being terrible in this equation. “I didn’t have them,” he says, levelling Dean with a flat look. “Happy?”
“No. Go take them.”
“They’ll give me a headache.”
“Cry me a river.”
“You’re such—”
“Pain in your ass, I know. Go eat your goofballs.”
Cas drags himself up, muttering under his breath all the way. Dean can’t hear all of it, but he definitely hears, something-something as if I’m so fucking useless—and Dean decides to turn a deaf ear to that one. Cas calls from a kitchen a moment later, “Do you need to see me take them, doctor? Or check under my tongue for a razor blade?”
“Hey, I’ll check under your tongue if you want me to.”
Cas comes back in with a glass of water, his face scrunched up like he’s trying his hardest to pretend that Dean’s not funny. Dean props his chin on his hand to give Cas his broadest, brightest grin, one part annoying to three parts adorable, and absolutely relishes in the tiny smile that Cas has to fight back.
“Shut up,” Cas says, and he drains the glass in three long gulps, while Dean eyes up the long line of his throat. He sets the glass aside, retrieves something from the side-table in a surreptitious movement that Dean thinks he wasn’t meant to see, and then he clambers in under the covers.
There is a beat in which Cas studies Dean’s face, and Dean is about to ask what’s wrong when Cas finally speaks. “I have something for you,” he says, a little stiffly. “Happy birthday.”
He hands over a photograph.
Dean turns it over in his hands, still frowning at Cas in confusion, and then he looks down. The picture is old, faded, blurry around the edges. In it, Cas wears a crisply-ironed button-up and pale slacks hiked up high enough that there is a glimpse of dark socks at the ankle. He looks about nineteen, slim and serious, eyes narrowed in the sun, while a grinning blonde that can only be Inias slings an around his neck. Dean guesses it was taken before they signed up to the army, the two of them barely out of high school. Cas is not quite handsome yet, here—an odd blend of scruffy and prim; a little gangly, like a puppy still growing into big paws.
“This was one of my more casual looks,” Cas deadpans.
“I can tell. You think your pants are high enough there, pal?”
“Almost.” Cas kneels on the edge of the bed. “I’m not sure where the rest of my mother’s old pictures are. I’ll find a better one. Or I’ll get a camera.”
Dean swallows. “Thanks. This—” He doesn’t know how to say how much it means. The thought of having something he can take with him, something he can have faith in, that he’s never gonna forget who to come home to—it’s too big for his mouth and he can’t even find the words to start. He tucks his chin into his chest and stares down at the photograph. He says again, uselessly, “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
Dean clears his throat. He sucks in a breath through his teeth, and bolsters himself enough to take refuge in a dumb joke. “Good to see as well you been working on your winning smile for a couple decades.” He turns the photograph back to Cas, hides behind it, the paper pressed to his nose. “Say, you think you can get this guy a message for me? See if he wants to go out sometime?”
Cas makes a disparaging noise in his throat. “You wouldn’t want to go out with him,” he says. “He makes Lieutenant Novak look relaxed.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dean flips the picture around again, grimacing like he’s considering it. “I figure High School Handlebars would have a shot.”
“Well, obviously,” Cas says, and he lets Dean take hold of his wrist and tug him down onto the mattress with another hideous groan of springs. “One look at that nose splint would’ve had him weak at the knees.”
“On his knees, more like.”
“Mm.” There is a smile in Cas’ voice, his eyes warm and crinkling at the corners. “He could use the handlebars for support. Or leverage.”
Dean’s hands are still curled around his wrist. Underneath his fingertips is the thin ridge of that terrible scar; underneath is the steady kick of Cas’ heart.
Dean pulls Cas in until the paper of the photograph creases a little between them, and their noses bump. Cas plucks the picture from Dean’s fingers and drops it to the floor somewhere behind him, to be stepped on or otherwise re-discovered in the morning. He clicks the lamp off, dropping them into near-darkness. They’ve left the Christmas lights on. Maybe it’s a fire hazard, but truth be told, Dean’s reached a weird kind of ease. Let a string of coloured lights do its worst—if Europe can’t kill him, nothing can.
When Cas rolls back into Dean, they are flush from hips to chest, and Cas leans in. He takes Dean’s face in two hands and captures Dean’s lips, and Dean can feel the shape of his smile there.
One hand finds the front of Cas’ pyjama shirt, curls into the cloth. Cas kisses him again, kisses him harder. His fingers sweep into Dean’s hair—and then tighten into fists, pulling upwards and—
“Hey!”
“Please,” Cas says. “Just for a moment—just let me see what it would—”
“No way. No way! Get off. Hey—quit it. I swear to—”
Their teeth collide. Their noses squish. Cas huffs a laugh in the back of his throat, but relents, and his mouth turns slow, lingering. His hand runs down from Dean’s jaw to trail a caress of fingertips down his throat, the smooth glide hiccupped by the bump of his fingers over the crucifix’s chain, and then his hand curls into a loose fist against Dean’s chest. There, over Dean’s heart, where Cas can surely hear the aching drum of it against his ribs. He kisses him.
His mouth is gentle and sweet, the warmth of wine still lingering on his tongue when he presses closer, lets his lips part, and Dean breathes him helplessly in. His hand finds Cas’ waist, palms the small of his back to pull him closer. Their kisses are unhurried, no urgency here, and when they pull back from each other, foreheads knocking, they hold each other still.
Dean’s eyes are closed; he is breathing steady. The blanket weighs a warm comfort over his waist and hips, and he is boxed in by Cas’ body, with nowhere else he’d rather be. He lets Cas’ fingers thread, ever slower now, through his hair. He lets Cas hold his hand, to brush his lips against Dean’s fingers, his fingertips, every callous and scar.
“Marry me,” Cas says.
Eyes still closed, Dean says, “Sure.”
Cas’ mouth is gentle on Dean’s knuckles. It’s not the hundredth time they’ve had this conversation, but it’s up there.
They both know there’s nothing they can do about it, but sometimes it’s nice to pretend. They talk about it, too—Sam’s gonna be best man, obviously. Nah, gold’s tacky. I swear to God, it’s so ugly. Of course we’re gonna do it in a church—to the point where Dean can close his eyes and see the whole thing. Sometimes, in the dream, he has both legs. Sometimes they’re both in uniform. Sometimes Cas is reading his vows to an empty room where no sunlight spills through black-glass windows.
Then Cas’ mouth is on Dean’s forehead, and against Dean’s skin, he says, “I mean it.”
Dean opens his eyes.
The gentle glow of the Christmas lights washes over them, a dim kaleidoscope ebbing and unfolding over their skin. The slope of Cas’ nose is picked out in green; red light washes over his temple and forehead; yellow cascades over the feathery disarray of his hair. In the low light, Cas’ eyes are the dark blue of a vein.
Cas’ thumb smooths over Dean’s forehead, tracing the bumpy line of his shrapnel scar. Then over the apple of Dean’s cheek, the line of his jaw. His voice a low rasp in his throat, barely audible, he says, “Dean.”
Dean swallows. “Yeah.”
There is nothing else to say. This is it—they want to be together. To be a husband; to have a husband.
Dean wraps an arm around Cas’ shoulders and pulls him in tight against him until his nose is tucked under Dean’s jaw and his breath tickles over Dean’s throat, and there is no space left between them.
Dean presses his face into the top of Cas’ hair, where it is softest and flyaway and smells a little like pomade, a little like sweat, and he thinks, as he so rarely does these days, of Novak—the separate entity that he always was. That he had to be, for Dean and Cas both to keep from losing their minds. There are some days Dean still seems Novak in him, even fifteen years on. When Cas pulls away, or closes himself off, or turns on Dean with that low, even fury in his voice like he could order the world to burn itself down and expect to see it unquestioningly done. When Cas chokes on I’m sorry and decides that fuck you is less trouble. When Cas gets convinced of his own worthlessness and he tries to make Dean see it. When he is scared near to tears and the only way out is a fist straight through. When he’s at a ten.
And then, here he is sleeping, and he’s all Cas. Castiel. A sarcastic asshole with a bad temper and gentle hands and a small smile to light up a whole room. Exhausted and brittle and gorgeous, god complex in one hand and hopelessness in the other. Hard to love and worth the effort.
As Cas slowly, haltingly, relaxes into sleep, Dean is left there awake, his brain spinning in endless circles within his skull. Cas’ head droops against Dean’s shoulder, his open mouth warm and a little wet against Dean’s bare skin, but all Dean can think of is how bad he wants Cas to be his. Definably, undeniably, selfishly his. He wants Cas to know it, to never again entertain the flicker of a doubt that he isn’t what Dean wants.
Dean eases carefully away from Cas, even as Cas mumbles a half-conscious complaint. He gets out of bed.
The air is cold now, the radiators turned down low for the night, and goosebumps prickle out over Dean’s skin.
On the other side of the living room, cramped in against the wall so close to the back door that it can be a pain to squeeze around, is a heavy cabinet of dark wood that Sam brought over from their old house.
Dean slowly and painfully struggles over towards it, through a series of unsteady, ungainly manoeuvres around the edges of the room and around furniture that he can lean on. Then, with a hand braced on the wall, Dean lowers himself to an ungainly heap on the floor, leg sprawled out before him. It takes him a few minutes of furtive fumbling with doors and drawers before he is even certain of where he’s looking, but then at last he finds it.
The jewellery box is a gorgeous old heirloom, solid oak with a polished mother-of-pearl inlay, passed down to Dean’s mom by her own parents before they passed. It’ll probably go to Mary when she’s old enough. His dad guarded it jealously when he was still in the picture. Dean used to hear him, some nights, talking to it. He doesn’t totally know what’s inside but he has some ideas. Trepidation weighs on Dean’s chest like a brick, and he takes a deep breath as he takes it down off the shelf.
He pries open the lid with effort, the hinge rusted after all this time, and inside, there are layers and layers of faded mementoes in unfolding shelves and drawers. At the top, there are three old photographs—one in white wedding lace; one in a paint-spattered cotton dress; one with Dean on her shoulders, dimple-kneed, legs swinging. Dean’s gut twists, his throat thickening. In another section, there is a twist of pale, dry hair secured with a ribbon that Dean avoids looking at. He lifts the next shelf, and there it is, resting on a faded crimson cushion.
When he picks up the wedding ring, it feels tiny and delicate in his fingers. Way too small for Cas to actually wear—Dean tries it, just to gauge, and he can get it only to the first knuckle before it gets stuck. With its raised diamond, it’s visibly feminine in design, so much so that Cas wouldn’t be able to have it out in public even if it could fit. No easier way to flag yourself as queer than wearing a woman’s ring, unless maybe Cas develops a thing for dresses.
Dean turns it over between his fingers, feeling the tiny scuffs on the gold, the way that it is worn smooth on the inside. The diamond is cut into a square, but the edges are rounded, smooth, almost soft. It catches the glow of the Christmas lights and sparkles. Dean’s throat closes off, and the backs of his eyes sting. He wipes the back of his hand under his nose, and he breathes.
With a hand braced against the cabinet, he twists to look back at the fold-out bed, where Cas is still sprawled. His jaw pillowed against his forearm, his mouth slack, his face clear and untroubled. He snores a little, his chest rising and falling like it’s the easiest thing in the world to keep breathing, even and slow.
Dean smiles, small and secret. He pulls open the bottom drawer of the box and finds a tangle of old necklaces. He picks through, his fingers feeling huge and clumsy, until he finds a single chain which isn’t too irrevocably knotted up with the others. When he pulls it loose, there is an ugly pendant of orange glass hanging from the end, but that’s easily removed.
The chain itself is slim, too silver, in ugly contrast with the gold, but Dean doesn’t care all that much. It’s the symbol more than anything else that matters to him. He threads the ring through and looks at it for a long moment, swinging like a pendulum from his hand.
This has been a long time coming.
It’s a long way back to bed—Christ, Dean wishes he remembered where he put his crutch—through hauling himself up and carefully moving around the wall to the point where he can lower himself onto the couch.
Ever a light sleeper, Cas jerks, a groggy noise pulling from his mouth, and tension snaps into his shoulders, his head half-lifting from the mattress. Ready to move.
“Easy,” Dean whispers. “You’re okay, Cas. Just me.”
Cas mutters something to himself, inaudible and incoherent, but he relaxes into the lumpy mattress.
Dean pulls himself in, close to Cas, and decides not to disturb him trying to get this around his neck. He reaches instead for Cas’ hand.
Cas’ fingers are warm and solid, the palms smooth but for the diagonal callous where the trigger-guard of his rifle used to rest. His knuckles are peppered with small scars.
Holding his breath as though that might have some impact on whether Cas wakes up, Dean loops the chain twice around Cas’ fingers, leaves the ring to fall gently into Cas’ open palm. It’s delicate and dwarfed by Cas’ hand, but it looks good there. It looks right.
Cas stirs again, just a little. He pulls his hand closer to his chest, and he mumbles something indistinct—and then: “Dean.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, near voiceless, and he sweeps careful fingers through Cas’ hair. “Right here, sweetheart. Go to sleep. I’m right here.”
Dean shifts in closer to him, gathers him up in his arms, and even asleep, Cas instinctively leans into it, tucks his face into Dean’s throat with a low sigh. Together, their breath grows slow. They rest.
***