Cas has shy wings. He’ll fold them up tight next to him or duck them under his arms when he thinks someone is coming too close. He’ll hide them away when they meet anyone new.
But, when Dean has a terrible night and he’s sitting on the floor, Cas sits next to him and slowly, slowly lets them unfurl, just ghosting around Dean’s frame like an umbrella. It’s so close and Dean can’t help himself. He raises a shaky finger and brushes one of the feathers with it. Involuntarily, Cas’s wing flutters back with a whoosh and Dean thinks he’s hurt him. When he looks at Cas’s face, he has his eyes closed and he’s biting his lip.
Dean opens his mouth to apologize, but when he does, he realizes that Cas’s wing is still slowly coming closer. Closer. Dean watches, mesmerized, as the tip of the wing dips and brushes, feather soft along his arm, Cas’s hands in fists as he breathes out.
Dean touches his hand in reassurance watching it unfurl. The muscles in the sides of Cas’s eyes relax and finally, he lets them blink open.
They’re close, foreheads touching, holding hands. Dean holds perfectly still when he feels the wing tentatively wrap around his arm, slowly tightening. It’s intimate and he can see Cas’s lips twitch with tiny shudders Dean doesn’t fully comprehend, and he knows. Knows Cas has never done this.
So, they stare, the feathers fusing to Dean’s skin, their breaths heating up the tent that’s created under the giant blanket of wings, one over their head now as the space between them gets smaller and smaller. And Cas’s fingers tremble with every miniscule twitch Dean makes, even as the hunter tries to stay achingly still.
Cas’s breaths are fast, his hair wild, eyes bright even under their shadow of black.
Dean’s out of breath, too, simply from watching him come undone.
Then, leaning forward as slowly as he can manage, Dean kisses him chastely, noting the way that Cas’s lips are soft too, in a different way, the movement of their mouths together small, but desperate, as wings tighten around them with a growl.
Dean doesn’t know when it happens, but suddenly, he’s holding Cas, his head against Dean’s chest, eyes closed. He looks exhausted and small.
Lightly, Dean kisses the top of his head, tasting a little fluff of hair between his teeth.
“Thank-you” he whispers, and he feels the flutter of wings against his skin.
This is the fluff I need so desperately right now, and also pleases my Wing Kink.
Dean hadn’t realized his voice could actually hit that pitch since puberty. He held the bag of art supplies in his hands, white-knuckling the thin plastic handles.
Sam, at least, looked as dumbfounded as Dean felt. He’d paused with a cabbage halfway out of the bag. Cas regarded them both curiously, steadily removing dry grocery items from their respective bags.
“Our room,” Cas said again, more slowly this time. He glanced from Dean to Sam, a frown creasing his brow. “Or… should I keep them in my old room and use it as a studio?”
“’Our’… ‘old’,“ Dean said. He looked to Sam for help. Sam’s gaze darted from Dean to Cas and back again. His jaw worked.
“Ah… congratulations?” Sam said uncertainly. Cas frowned at him.
“What is it?” Cas asked. He held onto the box of cereal he’d been unpacking. “What did I do?”
“Nothing,” Dean said immediately, because that was his kneejerk response to that tone in Cas’s voice. He winced. “Just… when you say shit like that, it has… you know.” He cleared his throat. “Connotations.”
And if those connotations made Dean’s heart speed up a little and his palms sweat, well. That was Dean’s problem.
He knew he was in well over his head. It had started off innocently enough; after all, what’s a little bed-sharing between friends when the nightmares are bad? A little fully-clothed cuddling, a sleepy Cas… Dean had been living his dream and kept his hands and his thoughts to himself, though some mornings he’d had to vacate the bed rather quickly lest Cas realize how much Dean enjoyed their little arrangement.
Dean’s feelings were entirely Dean’s problem. Cas was newly human and fragile and had night terrors to rival the ones Dean had after he got back from Hell. Dean wasn’t about to begrudge the guy anything that helped ease the nightmares, and if that ‘anything’ happened to be sleeping next to Dean at night, so much the better.
But it was platonic. Just… with cuddling.
But then Cas had to go and say our room in that voice of his, throwing the phrase out there like it was totally natural, and of course Sam would totally misread what was going on because fuck Dean Winchester’s life.
“Connotations,” Cas repeated, deadpan.
“If two people are sharing a room, it usually means they’re together,” Sam piped up helpfully. Cas stared at him. “Romantically.”
“And we’re not,” Dean interjected quickly, looking at Sam and hoping the younger Winchester would use some friggen’ sense and shut up before Cas realized that Dean saw him in a not-at-all-platonic light.
Dean didn’t know how Sam knew, but he knew Sam knew. Had known for a while that Sam knew, though they had never spoken about it.
Dean was so busy glaring Sam into submission that he completely missed the stunned look that crossed Castiel’s face.
“Oh,” Cas said, looking down at the cereal box now crumpled in his hands. He turned away and put the box down on the counter, where it promptly fell over as he busied himself instead with the other bags of groceries. Dean’s brow furrowed in concern.
“Cas?” he asked.
“I… excuse me,” Cas said, his head bowed just enough to hide his expression as he abandoned the bags of granola and flour in favor of the kitchen door. Dean exchanged flabbergasted, worried looks with Sam and took off after Cas.
“Cas?” he called, hurrying to catch up. He grabbed Cas’s shoulder, stopping him short, and pulled gently. Cas turned slowly back, his eyes on the floor. “What was that?”
“I…” Cas shook his head and then lifted his gaze to meet Dean’s. “What are we, Dean?”
Dean pulled his hand back as if Cas’s flesh burned. He backed up half a step, suddenly too aware that he was well in Cas’s personal space.
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
“Friends. We’re friends, Cas,” Dean said, his mouth suddenly dry.
Did Cas know that Dean wanted more than friendship with him? Was he disgusted?
Cas closed his eyes tightly and nodded his head once.
“Friends. Of course,” he said woodenly. He gestured vaguely behind himself, the movements of his hand was quick and sharp. “I’ll just… I can move my things back to my old-” He stopped himself. “My room.”
Dean’s heart dropped.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, voice low with sudden panic. He’d been waking up with Cas in his arms for weeks now and he’d gotten used to the illusion of intimacy, the daydream made real. He didn’t want to lose that.
It was completely selfish of him, he knew that, but he couldn’t lose this now that he’d tasted it. He’d done his best to keep his feelings to himself, hadn’t he? He wouldn’t let his unrequited feelings be Cas’s problem, not ever, would never look or touch or kiss.
But if he lost Cas, if Cas left.
Cas was shaking his head.
“I should.” He looked at Dean, eyes wide and pleading. “Dean, I have to. I can’t- I misunderstood, I’m sorry.”
All warmth left Dean in a rush. He felt as if he’d been turned to stone, his feet heavy and arms weighed down.
“Okay,” Dean said. His voice cracked but he was beyond caring about that. He nodded and looked down. “Okay. If you gotta, I mean… okay.”
It wasn’t Cas’s fault Dean could feel his heart breaking. Dean knew it was his own fault. He’d just wanted it so badly he’d ignored how much it would end up hurting.
“Okay,” he said again, like repeating the word would make it true. Cas grabbed his wrist.
“Dean, if I’ve made you uncomfortable-” Cas swallowed compulsively. “You should have told me. I would have stopped.”
“Made me uncomfortable?” Dean asked, looking at him incredulously. Cas nodded, looking as though he were bracing himself for a blow.
“I assumed things, which I know now were… wrong.” Cas lifted his chin, jaw set firm. “I never intended my feelings to become your problem and you’re not obligated to… indulge me.”
Dean’s brain short circuited. His synapses busted a fuse. He stared dumbly at Cas, his thoughts chasing themselves in circles as the words refused to make sense.
“Your feelings?” he echoed, thunderstruck. Cas’s expression shuttered and he let go of Dean’s wrist, only for Dean to grab his and pull him back.
“You assumed things?” Dean asked, heart beating so frantically he could feel it in his ears. “What did you assume?”
Cas looked at him, wary and a little pained, a little uncertain. Dean brought his other hand up to cup Cas’s cheek, watching the former angel’s eyes widen.
“What did you assume, Cas?” Dean asked again. Cas breathed.
“That you and I…” he said. His voice trailed off uncertainly. His eyes flicked down to Dean’s mouth and Cas licked his lips unconsciously, nervous.
“That we?” Dean echoed, letting his gaze linger on Cas’s mouth. Letting Cas catch him looking, watching the understanding slowly dawn on his face.
“That we’re together,” Cas said. Dean felt the words settle in his chest, lighting him up from the inside out.
“Do you want that?” Dean asked, breathless and already knowing the answer.
“Do you?” Cas asked, stunned. Dean laughed, the joy in him bubbling up and spilling over as he finally, finally leaned in to kiss Cas.
Cas getting a job in college as a pizza delivery boy, just to pay the bills.
Dean, his asshole college roommate, ordering pizza whenever he knows Cas is working. He likes making Cas drive across town to his own dorm room, finds it hilarious. And he likes making the strangest requests, when he orders.
“Sing a song when I open the door.”
“Balance the pizza on your head.”
“Kneel when you give me the pizza, and call me Your Majesty.”
Cas goes along with it, because - well, he finds it funny in a way, even if he would never show it. It’s something that isn’t monotonous, at least, something different. Something weird. And Dean is kind of good-looking… and he seems less and less like a douche, the more Cas gets to know him.
In fact, he’s kind of… kind of the reason Cas doesn’t sleep at night, for the butterflies in his stomach. Kind of the only person Cas can think about.
Cas rearranges the pepperoni on Dean’s pizza one night, so that it’s in the shape of a heart. When he delivers it, he’s so busy blushing and throwing the pizza at Dean that he completely forgets to fulfill Dean’s typically stupid request at the door, and just runs.
The next night, though, when Dean’s request comes in, Cas doesn’t forget it. He thinks about it the whole ride across town, and when Dean opens the door - looking unusually shy and flustered and hopeful - he smiles.
“I don’t have time,” Dean says dismissively, when Cas tries to recommend him new books, new movies, new things to share. “Not right now. I gotta work on the car.”
And then it’s, “I gotta make dinner.”
And then it’s, “We kinda have a ghost hunt on, Cas, if you didn’t notice.”
Eventually, Cas just comes and sits beside Dean when he’s soothing the Impala’s latest aching joint; he opens his book, and starts to read aloud. Dean, stuck under Baby with nowhere to go and an exhaust pipe to fix, complains at first - and then listens.
And Cas keeps following him around, reading. To the kitchen, to the car on a trip (”I don’t get travel sick, Dean, it’s fine”) - anywhere Dean goes, Cas will follow after with his voice shaping words and drawing stories in the air.
One afternoon, Cas is sitting on his own bed, quietly - and Dean comes looking for him. “Gotta fix the car,” he says. “You wanna come or what?”
Cas wants to. They move through books fast, the days soundtracked by the soft rustle of pages turning. By the tilt and camber of Cas’ voice. By the quiet noises of surprise and happiness and horror that Dean makes as the tales unravel.
“Don’t stop,” Dean says one night, when he’s about to go to bed. “Just finish the chapter.” And Cas sits at the end of Dean’s bed, and reads.
The next night, he does the same.
At some point, he stops going back to his own room. He sleeps in Dean’s bed. They don’t talk about it - not until one day when they wake up, and both pretend very thoroughly not to have woken up, and carefully move with sleepy gestures, very very sleepy gestures, into each other’s space. Hand a little closer to chest. Hips turned towards hips. Forehead almost - almost - pressed to forehead. Sneaking glances under half-closed lids, measuring distances, until they catch each other looking and open their eyes all the way.
Quick tell me all the dorky things Cas does that Dean begrudgingly finds adorable.
Never matches his socks.
Always makes hot chocolate with two packets of mix instead of one and gets cocoa powder all over the counters.
Stops to feed the pigeons in literally. Every. Single. Parking lot.
Falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open. He hogs Dean’s favorite spot and his favorite throw pillow.
Has metaphysical debates with him in the middle of the night, even though Dean has literally no idea what he’s saying. He hums and nods in all the right places until Cas’s low, rough voice lulls him back to sleep again.
Rolls his eyes when Dean makes a pun.
Crunches corn chips as loudly as possible whenever he eats them. Even if they’re in the god damn library, Cas.
Randomly wanders outside just to hang out in the woods. He doesn’t really know what Cas does out there, but whenever he finds him - after yelling himself hoarse and worried to the point of a minor heart attack - Cas has got this content little smile on his face that almost makes the search worth it. Almost.
Dean wakes to the feeling of a warm body in his arms.
He blinks his eyes slowly. In front of him, he sees a head of dark, messy hair.
Oh. He’s had this dream before.
Dean closes his eyes again and wraps his arms tighter around Cas. He shifts closer and blindly presses his mouth to the back of Cas’s head.
“Mornin’, Cas,” Dean says, voice hoarse from sleep. Cas is stirring, Dean can feel it. He waits expectantly, wondering if his subconscious had decided to bless him with sleepily affectionate Cas or perhaps something a little… hotter.
Cas tensing up in his hold though… that was new.
“Dean?”
That wasn’t Cas’s voice.
Dean blinks again and lifts his head to find Sam staring at him in wide-eyed shock. Sam is standing in the kitchenette of the extended stay motel room, a bowl of oatmeal forgotten in his hands.
For a moment, nothing makes sense. Then, abruptly, it does.
The endless string of ‘no vacancy’ signs until they’d finally found a single room open. Finding out that room only had two queen beds. Drawing lots to see who was sharing their bunk.
Being too aware of Cas’s even breathing next to him to fall asleep. Blowing years of carefully concealed longing and buried feelings because Dean Winchester can’t fucking tell the difference between dreams and reality when he’s half-asleep.
Fuck.
“Dean?” And that is Cas, awake and twisting in Dean’s arms.
Dean looks back at Cas, feeling a bit like he’s staring down an oncoming train. There’s no way to play this off, no way to claim he’d been dreaming of… of Lisa or Cassie or someone, and he’s still holding Cas, shit-
Cas’s hand comes up and Dean flinches, almost expecting to get punched, but the hand that cups his cheek is gentle. Dean opens his eyes again just in time to see Cas close the last of the distance between them and lay a gentle kiss on the corner of Dean’s mouth.
OMG what if season 13 starts with a really nice fluffy dean and cas scene? like there’ll be bickering and laughing and touching and smiling and fond looks, and it’ll be the softest scene and dean will be making the gooiest expression imaginable. and then it’ll be violently ripped away as we’re brought back to the present, showing dean, alone, having had dreamt up/hallucinated the whole thing, or worse, simply reliving an old memory
(plot twist dean realises fairly early on that it’s a djinn situation but can’t face waking up. hangs around and takes advantage of really having cas for once, says to him all the things he never could say to ‘real’ cas, lets himself be soft and cuddly and have everything he couldn’t have in real life for so many reasons, from ‘in this life you can’t afford to be weak/to love things/to not be EXTRA MANLY’ to ‘cas will never love me back’)
(more important plot twist: it’s REALLY CAS in there somehow he managed to cling to reality enough that he can get through where it’s thinnest like in dreams and djinn visions. he gives dean everything he knows dean would never have let him give when awake. he hears dean whispering to him at night when he thinks cas is asleep about how he knows it isn’t real but screw it, he’s going to keep it for as long as he can. but then sam finds dean and manages to wake him up..)
I was trying to enjoy my Friday night damnit!
apparently this made MULTIPLE PEOPLE sad being the meaning of my “…” was unclear.
OBVIOUSLY what it meant was
dean feels himself waking up. he realises what it means. he goes NOOOO CAS I DON’T WANT TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE YOU ARE NOT. he clings. cas drops the pretence and confesses he is real, he knows, tells dean to find a way to get him back to reality. Dean goes “…..!!!!! EVEN MORE NO NOT LETTING YOU GO”
Dean’s being dragged away. We have a call-back to the Purgatory parting shot where dean’s trying to cling to cas and cas’ hand either slips through his or cas decides to stay. But this time Cas’ other hand comes forward and they both cling to each other….
… and it works! CAS IS MAGICALLY DRAGGED BACK INTO REALITY don’t ask how that works and there is sam standing beside Dean when he wakes up, looking pissed, which quickly turns into OMG A CAS APPEARED and cas looks at dean for a moment and dean looks at cas and Sam is talking at a hundred miles a minute and hugging dean and hugging cas and cas is looking at dean KNOWING dean is going to push him away now and deny everything that happened in there and he will be okay with just being dean’s friend again, he can do that, right?
and cas starts to lower his eyes to hide the sadness and turn away, and dean grabs his shoulder, a fistful of trenchcoat all bunching up as he drags cas back
“It’s just,” says Dean, “I kinda - you made me think like you’d say yes, man. I really thought -”
“You misunderstand me,” Cas says. “Or perhaps I should have answered more completely. I… am falling in love with you, currently. But I am not yet finished.”
“Finished?” It’s put an end to the look of hurt in Dean’s eyes, at least. Now he just looks confused.
“Well,” says Cas. “In love is something that sounds final. An end point, a… goal. But I am not at the end point yet. I can’t be, because every day I fall for you… more.” He clears his throat. “I notice something new about you, or you say something you’ve never said before, or you say something you have said before. The things that make me love you deeper are very diverse in nature.”
Dean, by this point, looks struck dumb. Cas continues, to fill the space.
“So I’m not all the way in love, not yet. I don’t know if I ever will be. But I am falling in love with you, Dean. All the time.”
Dean likes it. Cas can tell by the way he smiles down at his hands, as though at a joke, like he can’t believe it.
“Ask me,” Dean says. Cas doesn’t waste time pretending not to understand.
2k of 12.19 coda. spoilers, obviously. sam just wants to help his brother. (ao3)
Sam sees the tape sitting in the ash tray of Cas’ truck. He’d recognize his brother’s handwriting anywhere. That’s one of Dean’s tapes.
He picks it up and reads the label before making a noise, “Huh. I wonder how this got here.”
Dean looks over at Sam for a second before his face settles into a glare and he snaps back to the road, “We got bigger things to think about right now, Sam.”
Sam’s eyebrows jump a little, “Dean, you’re going 90 in a school zone.”
“Yeah and you should mind your damn business and start thinking about what we’re gonna do when we find Cas and Kelly,” Dean growls in return, his shoulders hunching up defensively.
Ketch knew a lot of Dean’s background from Mick’s files and his one stint of work, therefore he expected finding some lewd magazines and extra barrels in his room. Hell, he would’ve been confused if he didn’t find anything. What he didn’t expect were the photographs.
There were old, some of what looked like family members most likely. A few had Sam and others had a scruffy old man in a hat. There was even one of Mary taken way before Dean got the hardened look of a soldier that Ketch has grown accustomed to fighting against.
What he didn’t expect was the small leather box with even more pictures, only this time all of one person. The angel.
There were maybe dozens of them taken over what seemed like a few years at least. All looked taken in haste while others had Castiel looking at the camera, not understanding what was happening most likely. There were some of the two of them, though not many and it didn’t look like they knew they were being taken either. Some had handwriting on them, too, which caught Ketch even more off guard.
“Post-Apocalypse - He stayed”
“We’re alive”
“Before I die, Cas…” There was smudged handwriting following those words, like the picture had been picked up and put down so much that the ink bled off.
The list went on, and with the later years that Ketch could tell by how Dean aged the words appeared more and more, each one getting blurred as well towards the end, like there were words Dean had rewritten countless times but could never say.
“Mr. Ketch,” a crony came into Dean’s room. “We believe we have learned a sufficient amount regarding the Winchesters’ attachments.”
“Yes,” Ketch replied, still sifting through the pictures and piecing the puzzle together. “We have learned something remarkable indeed.”
you know how Dean was lecturing Cass on how to pick waitresses in the preview clip? imagine if Cass used that info to pick a male waiter and Dean getting jealous.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” Dean gasps. He pulls Castiel’s jacket off with both hands and doesn’t even bother shutting the door behind him. No point anyway. He bites down on Castiel’s lip without being cute about it.
“Dean,” Castiel hisses, helpless. His hands hover uselessly out to the sides as Dean pushes him deeper into his bedroom.
“‘I love you?’” Dean accuses, squeezing Castiel’s hips with those rough beautiful hands so hard that it would probably bruise anyone else. “Just like that, in front of everyone,” he says. He shoves Castiel down, hard.
Castiel bounces a little on the bed, right against Dean’s chest, quickly descending down on his. He looks like he was the one that got hit by a truck, eyes wide open in the oncoming headlights. “Dean.”
“Don’t,” Dean growls, ripping Castiel’s shirt open. Buttons scatter to the floor. His skin is pale, smooth, unblemished beneath the cotton. Soft and pliant where his nails dig into it. “You couldn’t even look me in the eye, you coward.”
Castiel can’t deny it or defend himself.
“Your last words,” Dean adds, dangerously close to a sob. “Were going to be…”
He pulls back from Castiel’s face and pants into his mouth. His nose brushes against Castiel’s in a kiss of its own. His lashes are wet.
“I love you,” he whispers.
Castiel reaches up and wraps his arms around Dean’s neck, drawing him into a hug. He knows, intuitively, that Dean isn’t repeating his own words from before. He’s just stating a fact.
And quite a personal one, from the way his lip quivers. The kind of fact that’s unwavering, heartfelt and secret but truer all the same as the seconds tick by, which makes it that much harder to confess to somebody else.
All the breath in Castiel’s body leaves him at once, painfully. Dean doesn’t give him the chance to say anything else before he surges forward again and kisses him, wet lashes cool against his skin. He’s gentler with it than before. His hands, still tacky with dried blood, come up to loosen Castiel’s tie. It slithers limply in his grip, cool and silky, and Castiel gasps when the fabric slides across his nipple. Dean bunches it in his grip against his knitted-back-together side.
“The… door,” Castiel sighs.
Dean turns his head and kisses his cheek. His ear. The bolt of his jaw. Dragging his warm, slack mouth along the rough skin of his neck. “Doesn’t matter,” he tells him.
That’s his serious voice.
Castiel swallows hard. Dean licks a long line up the column of his throat.
“Just be with me,” Dean pleads. His hands go to Castiel’s belt. “God, I really thought I was going to lose you,” he laughs, a little hoarse.
“I really thought I was going to die,” Castiel confesses, just on the right side of hysterical. He lifts his hips up just enough that Dean can pull his pants down over the swell of his ass. Castiel hesitantly reaches up and runs one hand through Dean’s hair.
He walks his fingers down until he’s cradling Dean’s face. Their eyes catch, and hold.
Without another word, Castiel starts divesting Dean of his clothing. They kiss and they kiss and they kiss until their faces rub raw with stubble burn and their lips are red and wet.
The door stays ajar, and the sounds of their hushed and anguished moans echo like old ghosts through the halls.
