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They’ve hit over a thousand miles together this week alone, shoved between the steel confines of the Impala. Not their longest trip together, not by a long shot, Sam sitting shotgun and staring out the window with a map in his lap, Cas sprawled across his section of the backseat, his head against the space where the window and the frame have pulled way from each other just enough to push his hair back into his neck. Dean can watch them both from the corner of his eye, see the way Sam’s hands spread out against the pages of the map in sleep, how Cas shifts every handful of minutes or so, as if he’s still not used to the finality of his skin.
It’s been the three of them for a couple of months now. Years, really, but months since Cas gasped out the last bit of grace and collapsed on them. He’d been out of it for days. Long enough for them to hook him up to a bag of saline and seriously contemplate a trip to the local hospital. He’d woken up on the fourth day and hasn’t cut his hair since, taking up a corner of the bunker that seemed to be waiting for him. After the showdown with Metatron and the angels’ decision to take their feathery asses back home, they’d all needed time to recover, but it was a surprise when Dean woke up one morning to find a backpack at the front door and Castiel writing a note to stick on the fridge. They’d stared at each other across the kitchen until Cas had put his pen down. “Thank you,” he’d said, voice solemn and a bit sad. “You have always been more than generous, but I don’t think it’s fair to impose any—.“
Dean hadn’t let him finish, had pushed past him to grind beans and dump them into the coffee maker, leaving him to stare at the faded blue robe stretched across Dean’s back. Grabbing eggs and the last of the sausage links, Dean turned on the stove and plunked a frying pan on top of it. Finally, he’d looked over his shoulder and asked “One or two?” indicating the eggs with his head. They’d stared at each other again, the fidgeting of Cas’s fingers not escaping Dean’s notice, before Cas had said “Two.”
They hadn’t talked about it. Not once in the days after, not even when Sam noted their increasingly intense staring contests across the library. It had reached a head one afternoon when researching a case a few hours north. “Ok,” Sam said, knees cracking as he pushed himself out of his chair. “I don’t know what happened, but you two need to figure your thing out. The staring was one thing, but I don’t even know what this is anymore. Use your words.”
Breaking from looking at each other, they’d watched Sam leave until they were staring at an empty doorway. Cas broke first, “I didn’t want to leave.”
Dean’s head snapped around to face him, “Then why were you going to?”
“I didn’t want to impose-“ he started, before being interrupted like he’d been in the kitchen.
“Bullshit,” Dean snapped, “Do you not like it here? With us?”
Cas knew he meant “with me” because Dean doesn’t think of himself without Sam and as close as he and Sam are, Cas knew that the younger Winchester brother would have let him leave. Not with any malice, just letting Castiel have the space to make his own decisions. But Dean asks too much, pushes into the cracks of Castiel, filling spaces created when the world began, rooting him to this place, to these men whose idea of family means constant sacrifice of self, a destructive love that has led them both to hell and also saved the world. So, no, Dean wouldn’t let him leave and if there’s any truth to be spoken it’s that Castiel had dithered over his letter, hoping someone would catch him and tell him to stay. And Dean had.
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” he said honestly. “I just don’t want to be an obligation.”
The silence after was bigger than the room, echoing back to the first time he angels had breached the doors of Hell with only a slight idea of the true nature of the Righteous Man. Dean’s voice was a little broken when he said, “Cas,” striding across the room to pull the former angel into his arms. Arms like bands around his ribs, Cas breathed into the bend of Dean’s neck, tightly gripping the back of Dean’s flannel. They stood there too long for it to be casual, their breathing jagged. Cas pulled back, ignoring the wetness on both their faces. “Dean,” he said, “Can I stay?”
“Christ,” Dean said, choking on a laugh. “Yes, stay. Please stay.”
When Sam returned they were on opposite sides of the couch, feet tangled between them, flipping through newspapers. He rolled his eyes and sat back down in front of his computer.
Since then it’d been like this, the three of them and the Impala, following cases as they popped up. With the doors to Heaven and Hell back in place, they were back to the monster of the week cases, White ladies and ghouls and the like. They rarely made it out of the Midwest corridor or their corner of the south, leaving the selkies and jersey devils to the hunters in the northwest and northeast, respectively. Sam has made a project of the bunker, delving into the depths of the storage rooms and filing cabinets each time they’re home, stretching the stays longer and longer. Dean helps, but mostly he drags Cas into the garage to tinker with the vehicles there until they find a stash of gadgets in what was likely a lab. Dean all but steps on Sam to get at them, while maintaining a façade of indifference. From then on that’s the first place Sam and Cas check when he needs to be called to meals. More often than not he’s completely dismantled something, the pieces laid out in a grid pattern that only he can decipher. He drags in a cracked chalkboard from one of the other rooms and covers it with chicken scratch—small parts of equations or simplified renderings of the innards of machines—muttering at it for hours before erasing the whole thing and starting over. Chalk covers the sleeves of his shirts more often than blood and monster innards and even when they’re on a hunt he’s scribbling notes on every napkin he handles with dying pens or scraps of golf pencils.
The night Cas finds him elbow deep into a laser of some sort and drags him back upstairs is the first night they spend together. Stripped to the waist, they keep to their own sides of the bed until Dean wakes up to sunlight on his face. He’s greeted by the curve of Cas’s back, lithe and solid, close enough to touch. Most of the blankets seem to have been gathered in the hollow of Cas’s body, carelessly tangled in his legs. One arm is shoved under the pillow, the other one wrapped in the mass of blankets. Eyes not quite yet open, Dean watches as his torso expands on each breath, listens to the soft sounds as he exhales. His toes stretch out towards the exposed calf jutting out from the blanket nest, curl back in. He stares at his traitorous foot, at the not-quite-an-inch between them, noting how pale he looks next to the skin covered in crinkled hair on Cas’s calf. He must have made a noise because Cas moves, stretching out from his center, slowly unraveling until his calf is pressed against Dean’s foot. Smiling he rolls over, keeping the contact between their legs, his toes now pressing against Dean’s calf. Cheeks flushed with sleep (and probably the heat stuffed into the blankets Dean now misses) he makes a small noise as he yawns and then says, “Good morning, Dean.”
Eyes caught on collar bones dimpled with pools of light, Dean swallows and says “Heya, Cas.”
As easy as if he does it every day, Cas slides his hand over to cup Dean’s jaw, his thumb rubbing over the morning stubble. There’s nothing sexual in the gesture, it asks for nothing, and it’s so simple and fucking perfect it cracks Dean’s chest open a little. His mouth opens on a quiet sob and he slams his eyes shut when Cas presses his thumb into the line of his jaw. It’s all he can do to keep his shit together as Cas slides his hand back to curl his fingers around his nape. Tilting into the curve of his palm, Dean opens his eyes to see Cas watching him, eyes soft. He reaches out to rest the tip of his fingers on Cas’s hip, boldly gripping it with his whole hand when Cas’s eyes flutter shut.
This is what they’ve been tiptoeing around for years. Before there was the apocalypse and divided loyalties between them, now there are years of camaraderie and fighting and arguing over dishes and four inches of gray cotton sheet. They’ve been so dumb. Fighting this, fighting each other and trying to fight the world and the angels and whatever son of a bitch wanted to gank them that week. Fucking stupid. Well, not the fighting monsters part, but the part where they avoided mornings bathed in sunlight and being able to reach out and touch. He’s too old for this shit now, too tired to pretend this isn’t exactly what he’s wanted and never thought he could have—never thought he deserved. He doesn’t deserve it, but as he rests his forehead against Cas’s, as he draws the other man closer to him so that their chests barely touch, he thinks he’s going to do whatever he can to keep it.
Which is why he shoves the box of cassette tapes at Cas, shaking them to get his attention. He takes it and Dean turns back to the road, listening as he flips through the tapes, each one clacking against the last. He knows Cas will pick one of the three he usually does, all of which are fine, if Dean’s being honest, though he doesn’t love them as much as Cas does. Most of the labels are faded to the point of no recognition, but Dean knows them almost better by their imperfections than he did when the labels were pristine. He takes the offered tape and shoves it in without looking, surprised when the first chords of “Black Dog” spill out of the speakers. Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror and Cas just smiles at him before settling back against the corner of his seat.
It’s not as easy as this moment in the car or that first one in bed. They argue, and viciously, and can’t always put all the pieces back together. They’re both of them bruised and broken in ways that rub against the other. At his core Dean won’t ever believe that Cas will stay (that Sam will either) no matter how many times Cas says he will or dives between Dean and danger. And Cas won’t stop shoving himself between Dean and bullets or knife blades, no matter how many times he ends up in a hospital, doesn’t understand that it drives Dean crazy when he disappears for a few days into town or just on the other end of the bunker. He’s still not used to the human confines of time, how days are important and he just can’t do that. He doesn’t understand the need for touch the way Dean needs it, likes it well enough, but forgets that it’s grounding until he hasn’t reached out to touch Dean for a week and finds that the man in question is elbow deep in bread to keep himself touching where it’s not welcome. They fight about that as the bread rises and as Dean teaches him to form the rolls. They fight while they bake and cool, pausing only for dinner and then they fight again as they strip off their clothes for bed. Their backs are to each other when their voices die down and Dean says one last time, “I don’t want you to do this for me.”
Cas is tired as he says, again, “I do all of this for you.”
“But,” he says when Dean groans, “It’s for me too.”
He rolls over to curl around Dean, drawing him back into his chest. His voice is soft as he says, “I waited lifetimes for you. To sit in the car and laugh with you, to argue and hate you a little sometimes. We’re told love is messy and human, that’s it’s base and not for us. But it is everything. You are everything.”
Dean doesn’t say anything. He just presses his lips to the inside of Cas’s wrist and let’s sleep take him. Cas is right.
This is everything.