dean sneaking in through your window because he cant sleep!
tw. fluff. slight angst. slight sub dean? teasing.
the tap against your bedroom was so gentle you convinced yourself you’d imagined it.
but then it came again- a soft tap tap tap, more insistent this time like whatever is waiting on the other end is getting impatient.
groggily you peeled yourself from the cozy duvet, rubbing your eyes as you crossed the room to the windows ledge. pulling back the curtain you nearly jump-
“you’ve gotta be kidding me…”
dean winchester grins up at you from outside- all pearly and proud with a pile of stones in his hand. he waves smugly as you unlatch the window, pushing it open enough to feel the cold breeze.
“dean,” you whisper trying and failing not to smile. ..”what are you doing outside my window?”
“i..” he rubbed the back of his neck. “didn’t wanna wake your dad up..”
“you woke me.”
“yeah.. sorry bout’ that.” he huffed leaning back on his heels.
despite it being nearly midnight and the weight of getting into trouble hanging heavy on your shoulders- you laugh curling your finger at dean to climb up.
a few grunts and “fuck..” under deans breathe is all you hear before his boot curls over the window, then his hands as he pulls himself over before landing on your floor with a soft thump. his dirty boots leave a print on your carpet making you scowl.
his brown hair was a mess like he’d been running frustrated hands through it for hours, wearing an old led zeppelin shirt and gray sweatpants instead of his usual jeans. you shut the window behind him.
“you know you could text..” you murmur.
dean pats his pockets. “i lost my burner phone- sorry.”
with your arms crossed you watch as dean walks around the room- fingers trailing on the desk before reaching for the picture of you and sam sitting in the back of the impala. he laughs under his breathe before placing it back down gently.
something wasn’t right, noticing his tense shoulders and how nervous he seemed to be. the complete opposite of the annoyingly cocky dean you know.
“i came to ask you something.” he says suddenly turning back to you. you shift on your feet hoping dean cant sense how fast your heart is racing.
“okay..”
his embarrassed smile made your chest ache- something you’d never seen before. “i was wondering if i could y’know.. sleep in here, with you. i sleep better when theres somebody there-“
you didn’t answer immediately, a little shocked and flushed at what he just asked.. how it would work. the dark circles under his eyes are what finally convince you.
“sure, d.” you mumble.
relief washed across his face so quickly it nearly broke you. your heartbeat finally slowed as his shoulders relaxed.
“i don’t wanna make you uncomfortable.”
“you wont.. just take your boots off. i dont want dirt in my bed.” you teased while dean chuckled, kicking off the boots and leaving them at the window.
silence filled the room after- you could tell dean was nervous about sleeping with you even though he seemed to brag about having a lot of experience.
you grabbed his hand gently, calloused skin pressing against your soft as you climbed into bed- dragging dean along with you.
he hesitated looking between you and the cot before crawling in next to you gently- like even the mattress will push him away with rejection. for a man who usually carried himself with so much confidence, he somehow looked uncertain about where to put his arms.
you reached out first slipping an arm around his waist. he seemed to tense up- like a beaten dog feeling soft pets for the first time, then almost instinctively melted into you.
he buried his face carefully against your shoulder like every muscle in his body had finally been given permission to let go.
“you okay?” you whispered.
a tiny nod- before his arms wrapped carefully around your torso, thumb brushing against your flushed skin.
his breathing slowly began to even out.
“you know..” you murmured into his hair “next time you don’t have to climb through the window.”
his sleepy voice came muffled against your shoulder.
“…yeah?”
“you can knock.”
he hugged you just a little tighter. “…can i come back?”
you brushed your fingers through his messy hair, the scent of his shampoo mixing with your pillow.
“you never have to ask, d.”
dean didn’t answer- his breathing slow and steady, the tension finally gone from his body. within minutes the hunter who looked like he’d been up for days was fast asleep, held close in your arms where you know he’ll finally be safe.
๋࣭⭑atlas : dean's really bad at showing you his affection. you show him you love him with dozens of photos of things that represent the two of you. you think dean hates it, dean loves it so much he doesn't know how to explain it
๋࣭⭑binary stars : dean x reader (gn)
๋࣭⭑classification : fluffy hurt/comfort
๋࣭⭑stellar density : 2.0k
๋࣭⭑omens : reader's kinda whimsical, reader is shorter than dean, a bit of miscommunication, dean cries, soft soft ending :]
๋࣭⭑message in a bottle : requested !! i do shit like this with my best friend irl all the time !!! loved loved loved this idea so much <3 honestly, writing this made me think a lot of @violained and their odd!reader series so PLEASE go check that one out !!! also im so sorry if this is bad, i felt yucky today thank you mystery illness </3
๋࣭⭑ taglist ༊彡 masterlist
Dean wakes to the buzz of his phone on the motel nightstand, cold metal vibrating against equally cold wood. Scrubbing a rough hand over his eyes does nothing to clear the sleep from them, and clearing hi throat doesn’t help his voice wake up either. He pushes himself up on one elbow, hearing the old mattress and bed frame creak as one under his shifting weight. The headboard thuds against the wall, rattling a picture of a boat in its frame, the blue water a harsh contrast to the pale beige walls stand with something like years of cigarette smoke.
His thumb pries the cover to his phone open, moving clumsy along the keypad until he finally opens your message. The image fills in one line at a time, revealing a photo of coffee cups from down the street next to two muffins pressed together. The chocolate one is bigger and fluffier, while the other one is shorter and rounder.
Look, it’s us :)
is your accompanying message.
It takes all of Dean’s strength not to smile bright at your text and reply to it with something sappy and sweet. He knows he could, knows you’d love it, knows he probably should; but the idea of letting himself show it scares him half to death. When you grow up being told the hand that feeds is feeding you poison, you learn not to trust the hand when it feeds you love. All he can do is hope you’ll wait the years it will take him to unlearn everything bad he’s been taught about love. Instead, he turns his phone back over and sets it back on the table. He’ll tell you he loves you when you come back to the room; because he’ll know it’s you, but also because saying it in person is more meaningful than saying it over text.
Dean must fall back asleep, because when he next opens his eyes, his arm is numb from hanging off the bed, and you’re seated beside him, legs crossed, nibbling on a muffin.
“Hi,” you chirp happily, brushing crumbs from your lip. “I was gonna wake you up soon, so your coffee didn’t get cold.”
He hums a low sound back, fumbling to press a soft kiss to your knuckles. You laugh as he chapped lips tickle your skin.
“Did you see my message?” you ask.
Dean blinks, nodding. “Yeah.”
“What’d you think?”
“’S cute, sweetheart.”
He can see your expression dip and immediately regrets it. Just as quickly as your grin crumbles, it replaces itself when you smile again and point in the general direction of his muffin.
“Eat it so it’s not lonely.”
Dean smiles softly at you; of course you’d worry about the muffins getting lonely.
“Alright,” he mumbles around a yawn, taking a bite.
“Is it good?”
Dean nods, swallowing. “Mhm.”
“Is it really, or are you just saying that?”
Dean grumbles an indignant complaint, pressing a messy kiss to your forehead that you try to duck away from to avoid getting muffin crumbs in your hair.
“It’s good! Promise,” Dean says, gesturing.
“Did you see my other picture?”
Dean frowns, staring at you, the corners of his mouth tipped down in that precious way that would make you cave if you weren’t on a mission to learn something important right now.
“What other picture?”
“The one I sent you last night. From the gift shop.”
His frown deepens as he scrolls through your texts to each other. He goes past the messages from yesterday, then back through every single one, hoping something will jump out at him. He finds the picture right where you said it would be, nestled between a text about dinner and another one about when you were coming back to the motel. There’s a photo of two rocks sat together on the windowsill, lacey white curtains tinted cream with age framing them like curtains of seafoam. The tall black one is heavyset in the top half and thinner in the second half, and the shorter rock matches the colour of your eyes almost too perfectly for Dean to believe it’s true. But the picture is right there in front of him, with an ever-present message accompanying it;
Us !!
Ice-cold guilt floods him when he realizes he saw that message and never said anything about it. Usually, he sends back anything as simple as a thumbs-up, or just a ‘yeah’, or even just mentions it to you in person when you come back from wherever you were. But not this time. This time, he saw the picture and fully intended to mention it, but the moment you were back it slipped his mind. Not because he forgets easily, or because the picture was nothing memorable to him. But because to him, it was so much more than just a picture of two rocks on a windowsill.
To Dean, it was a declaration that even in the smallest, most unsuspecting places, you will find your way back to him. And you will find him in every lifetime, in every variant of your love that exists in the world, and you will show him each time you find it. All those versions of the two of you existing at once, and he gets to love you in each and every one of them; and he loves you strongly enough that you find them in the world and send him those pictures. To Dean, it’s the most important thing in his life, because it means you love him as much as he loves you. To Dean, it’s terrifying to know that he loves you like that, because in his life, love gets rewarded with tragedy.
“Sweetheart, I-.”
Your face crumples, shoulders folding inward like you can put a shield up between them and pretend nothing is wrong.
“Dean, if you want me to stop sending them, just say that.”
“It’s not-.”
“You don’t have to play along with it,” you say, rambling now, your voice breathless and airy with poorly concealed disappointment. “You can just say it’s stupid and I’ll stop. You can just say you don’t want to be with someone who sends childish stuff like that. You can tell me it’s immature, I just need you to say it to my face.”
“I-.”
You take a sharp breath in, letting it out slow and wavy like the tides to the ocean. “Just don’t keep me around because it’s convenient, okay? Don’t…don’t make yourself deal with things you don’t want to deal with.”
Dean’s about to explain himself, but he’s stopped by Sam coming into the motel room, hair drenched by the rain and carrying a stack of books under his jacket. He shakes his head, looking something like an oversized dog when the water falls out of his hair, toeing off his boots and handing you the books with the kind of grim look that says you’re in for a rough one.
“What’s up, Sam?” you say, clearing your throat.
“For once, I have no idea. I got us some stuff that might help but…” He trails off, gesturing uselessly around the room once he’s freed his arms from the jacket. “It could be nothing. Or it could be something we haven’t heard of yet. Whatever it is, we gotta figure it out now.”
That week is the longest week of Dean’s life. Half because the monster you’ve been tailing is scary good at adapting its patterns to conceal its identity. It’s been almost impossible to track it, and the only reason you got to it in the end was because you helped Sam go through traffic camera footage and found a shape in one frame that wasn’t meant to be there. It was caught between two fenceposts with barbed wire strung between them, knotted together in the middle like the posts were holding hands. That right there was the other half of why the week felt so long; normally, you’d see those posts and send Dean a picture with a caption for him. The only picture you sent him this week was a page from a lore book with information you thought he could use working his part of the case.
He doesn’t get a chance to mention it for another week after that, because all that time is spent with Sam uncomfortably close, and a conversation this important doesn’t need prying ears, whether they mean to listen or not. He waits for the perfect time, which happens to be in the Impala while Sam’s back at the motel waiting on you and Dean to bring back dinner, and Dean’s waiting in the car with you for the food to be ready. He’s expecting to start the conversation with something meaningful and important about how he values all the pictures you send to him and how he remembers every single one with shocking clarity.
“I’m scared,” is what he says instead, surprising both you and him.
“You’re- Why?”
Dean’s beet red by now, embarrassed to have the conversation but embarrassed to spill this most precious part of him, the part that he keeps locked tightly away in case anyone dares to question it.
“Dean is this about the pictures?” you press, gentle as ever.
“Yeah.”
You stutter a laugh into the palm of your hand. “What’s so scary about the pictures?”
“It’s not the pictures, sweetheart. The pictures are great, I promise.”
You narrow your eyes, staring at him through your lashes. “Then what is it?”
He takes a deep inhale. “I’m scared that…” A deep exhales, followed by another inhale. “I’m scared of how much I love you.”
He rushes the last part of the sentence so much you barely even catch what he’s trying to say. But you’ve spent years getting close to Dean, you know how to interpret every mumbled word of his uttered into your skin. And this whispered sentence makes your heart drop to your feet and cry tears of something bittersweet.
“Dean, baby…” you murmur, holding one of his hands in yours.
Dean braces himself for rejection, for what inevitably happens when he opens up to anyone that matters to him. It happened to him with his dad, with Sam, with Cassie all those years ago. And now it’s about to happen again.
Except you don’t insult him or throw him out of the car like he’s nothing more than an empty plastic bag. You take his hand in yours and you stretch out his fingers, and you press them to your lips, kissing the callouses that live on their pads.
“Why didn’t you just say that?” you whisper against his skin.
And Dean, darling emotional Dean, feels his cheeks dampen under tears he didn’t know were falling.
“’Cause that made it real. ‘N ‘cause I don’t want ‘em to take you away.”
“From you?” you murmur.
Dean nods, wiping at his cheeks.
“They can’t take me away from you.”
“You don’t know that.”
You smile, pressing a soft kiss to his temple. “Yes, I do. D’you know how?”
Dean shakes his head, sniffling.
Another kiss to his temple, and you continue.
“’Cause I see us together all the time. We’re always gonna be together somehow, even if it’s just in stupid little pictures. They can take my body if they want, but they can’t take away what we have.”
Dean’s head falls to the crook of your neck, and you tuck it there, hand cradling his head, murmuring reassurances into his sandy hair that pokes your cheek. You rock him slowly back and forth, one hand playing with his hair and the other one rubbing circles over the cotton of his dark t-shirt. You sit there until Dean has to go in to get the food, and when you’ve brought it all back to the motel and are settling in for the night, you hold Dean against your chest the exact same way as he sleeps.
When Dean wakes up the next morning with sand in his eyes and a headache from crying, he turns on his phone to ask where you are. And the first thing he sees is a picture of two bunnies sitting side by side near the parking lot, a huge dandelion stem sat between them. And a caption, with your signature
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