[ao3]
Dean is doing something weird.
Sam is supposed to be watching a movie, but the armchair he’s sitting in faces the couch, which means he can see Dean and Cas out of his periphery and the movie isn’t interesting enough to keep his attention from wandering over to where Dean has his hand in the air, moving his fingers in a steady pattern like he’s stroking someone’s hair.
“What are you doing?” Sam asks.
Dean moves his hand to his lips, one finger telling Sam to sh. In a whisper, he says, “Only way to put him to sleep.”
Sam blinks down to where Cas is tucked against Dean’s chest, arms crossed and face smashed under Dean’s arm, asleep.
Dean goes back to moving his hand through the air.
They expected, when Cas came back from the Empty, that he would be human or at least something close to human. Instead, Jack restored his grace completely, wings included. As Sam watches his brother, he wonders if Dean can see or feel the wings, if he can actually sift his fingers through the feathers to put Cas to sleep, or if, more likely, Dean has finally lost it.
Dean is more relaxed than Sam has seen him in years, with his feet kicked up on the coffee table and his back slouched against the corner of the couch, one arm on the armrest and the other around Cas save for the hand floating through the air. He makes a scratching motion with his fingertips, and Cas fusses and shifts against him, pushing his face into Dean’s shirt until he’s settled.
“Sammy,” Dean whispers. “Stop looking at me like that.”
Sam turns his attention back to the movie.
At some point maybe Dean will tell Sam about his relationship with Cas, but Sam has been watching the two of them skate around each other for years and years and he’s learned patience.
He’s also learning to stay out of the way and try to mind his own business.
For the first two days Cas was back, Sam barely saw him and Dean at all, and when they did pass him in the hall or run into him in the kitchen, they both looked miserable and sad.
Then, Cas left for four days.
Then, Dean left for five days.
They came back together and disappeared into Dean’s room and Sam didn’t see them for 24 hours.
When they finally emerged, Sam found them sitting in the kitchen with Jack, eating breakfast. Sam took the empty seat next to Jack and drank his coffee and listened to their inane conversation—something about life on other planets and whether Jack had the power to travel through space-time to find out if aliens exist—and Dean asked something and gestured with both hands and then dropped one hand to Cas’ knee and kept it there, rubbing it absentmindedly as he listened to Jack’s answer. Cas made eye contact with Sam for a second and then turned his attention quickly to Jack.
They went on a couple of easy hunts, and Sam roomed with Jack with no questions asked. Debriefing was held in Dean and Cas’ room at the end of each day, the two of them sitting together on the unmade bed, wearing pajamas, existing comfortably in each other’s personal space while they all four discussed whatever case they were working on. Once, Sam looked over his shoulder as he was leaving their room, and he saw Dean getting up from the bed, saw him untangle his legs and lean over and press a kiss to the bolt of Cas’ jaw before heading toward the bathroom.
For a week, Dean and Cas went back to the way they were before. They didn’t touch as much, or disappear together as much, or even really smile at each other. Sam thought maybe this would be the right time to talk to Dean about Cas, that maybe whatever fight they were having would soften the blow of sharing feelings with Sam.
But then Sam nodded off while reading in the library one night, and as he sleepily stumbled his way down the hall to his room, he saw Dean a few feet away, standing with one hand propped against the wall by Cas’ face, like a teenager about to kiss his girlfriend at her locker.
Cas was backed up against the wall, in a much more relaxed posture than Sam had ever seen him take, and he was looking at Dean and smiling. They were whispering, and laughing, and then Dean was pressing a hand to Cas’ hip and angling his face to kiss him, and Cas put his own hands up on Dean’s hips and kissed back.
Soon after that, Cas and Jack went on a case together for a few days, and Sam overheard his brother talking on the phone incessantly—while he was cooking, or working on the car, or brushing his fucking teeth.
“Yeah,” Dean would say all goofy toward the end of each call. “Yeah, you do? Sure. Yeah, I love you, too. Miss you.”
Cas and Jack got back two days ago, and now Sam is sitting in the Dean cave with Dean and Cas, biting his tongue about Cas’ wings, desperately curious to know if it is actually possible to touch them but unsure if he really wants to hear what his brother might describe.
When the movie ends, Dean sighs and shifts on the couch, jostling Cas and saying, “Hey, sleepyhead, wake up.”
Cas stirs, clearly angry, and pushes a hand into Dean’s thigh to sit up. “Why would you do that while we’re watching a movie? I wanted to see it.”
“Can’t you just download it to your brain? Sue me for wanting to get some cuddles,” Dean says gruffly.
Sam huffs a laugh, and Dean glares at him.
“Goodnight, Sammy,” Dean says, and then he’s hauling Cas off the couch and dragging him by the hand down the hall.
Sam stays in the Dean cave for another few minutes, scrolling through his phone and sending a couple of texts to Eileen, then he makes his way through the dimly lit bunker and stops in the kitchen for a glass of water.
Dean is at the counter, his back to Sam, and one arm wrapped low around Cas’ waist from behind. Lips pressed to Cas’ shoulder, then his neck, and mumbling to him, “C’mon, Cas, you can’t be mad at me. I’ll ask permission next time.”
“You’ll have to make it up to me,” Cas says with a teasing tone, his sarcasm more sure than it used to be.
Sam sneaks out, not wanting to hear whatever comes next.
The next morning, though, Sam passes by Dean’s room and sees such an impossible picture that his fight-or-flight instincts kick in and he’s drawing his pistol from his waistband.
“Sammy, little privacy, please?” Dean asks casually.
Sam gulps and relaxes his hold on the grip. His eyes roam over the miles of black feathers until they reach the bed, where Cas is curled up and asleep, naked except for a pile of clipped feathers in his lap. Dean is next to him, wearing only boxers, with a bucket of dirt under one arm. He scoops the dirt and presses it between the feathers, and it’s then that Sam realizes the feathers aren’t black but an iridescent rainbow reflected in different light. They fill every corner of the room, their shape undefinable as wings in the cramped space.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Sam asks.
Dean glares at him and then returns to the feathers, roughly scraping his hands between a couple of them. “Preening.”
Sam decides, in this moment, that he’s had enough. “Dean, I think you and Cas should have your own place.”
Dean moves a tuft of feathers out of the way so he can make eye contact with Sam. “What? Why?”
“Um.” Sam keeps looking around at all the feathers. “Because I live here, and you guys are weird.” Unable to stop himself, he adds, “How am I seeing this anyway? Is this what you always see?”
“Hmm? The wings? No, dude,” Dean says like Sam is an idiot. “He keeps them in a different dimension.”
“But when you were…petting them last—”
“I just know where they are,” Dean interrupts.
“OK but how?”
Dean shrugs. “Because it’s Cas.”
“Well, can I touch one?”
Cas wakes up suddenly and both he and Dean shout, “No!”
Sam sighs and puts his hands on his hips.
“Your skin will burn and slough off your hand within seconds,” Cas explains.
Sam knows he shouldn’t ask, that he already knows the answer, and yet he hears himself saying, “But Dean can touch them?”
“Of course,” Cas answers. “I’ve held his soul in the palm of my hand. He’s seen my true form. Our existences in this universe are inextricably bound together until we die, and probably after we die, too.”
“Oh Cas, I love it when you talk dirty,” Dean teases.
Sam glares at both of them.
Dean puts out a placating hand. “Alright, fine. We’ll get our own place.”
And that’s the only time they ever talk about Dean and Cas’ relationship.
…Until, years and years later, when Dean and Sam are both going gray, there’s a lull in the conversation as they sit in rocking chairs out on the back porch of Dean and Cas’ house, and Dean fills the silence with,
“Do you think it’s weird that me and Cas are together?”
Sam frowns. “You’re asking me this 15 years into your relationship?”
“You know that son of a bitch got dragged to the Empty because he told me he loved me? That was the deal he made, that the Empty would take him when he was happy or something, and the thing that made him happy was telling me that he fucking loved me.” Dean scoffs and shakes his head, reluctant smile on his face. “He’s so stupid.”
Sam takes a second to process the information, then he says, “You guys never, uh, did—shared feelings or hooked up or anything before…that?”
“No.” Dean sighs. “I thought it would be too weird. Are you sure it’s not weird?”
Cas comes outside then, also old and gray because Dean insisted that they age together, and puts his hands on Dean’s shoulders from behind and kisses the top of his hair. “You coming to bed soon?”
Dean tilts his head back and squeezes one of Cas’ hands. “Few more minutes, sweetheart.”
“OK. There’s decaf coffee in the pot if you want some.” Cas leans down again and kisses Dean’s forehead, then he straightens and looks at Sam. “Goodnight, Sam.”
“Night, Cas.”
After Cas has gone, Sam says, “No, I don’t think it’s weird at all.”
