☁︎ Summary: You never noticed the freckles littering Dean's body, what happens when you do?
☁︎ Warnings: fluff, body worship (non-sexual), sweetness 'n tenderness, mild self deprecating Dean + silent comfort, respect of boundaries/consent - can be read as regular Dean or Deer!Dean
☁︎ Word Count: 700
☁︎ Rating: Mature/15+
☁︎ Requested by: @clemeowntine
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You and Dean have had this strange relationship for a while, closer than two friends should be but nothing definitive has been said yet.
It's hot, some cheap motel room you're in doesn't have a working air conditioner so you have to tough it out. Shorts are the only logical choice, though logic is defied when you can see that much of Dean's legs. Then, you take a closer look. Through your ogling, you notice little spots all over the back of his thighs. Little freckles splayed across his skin like stars across the sky.
He flops down onto his bed, two tired and hot to care about doing anything else, and he spots you eyeing him up and down.
"See something ya like, Sweetheart?" He asks, voice full of a slightly dimmed version of his usual cocky confidence.
"H-have you always had those?"
Your voice is so soft he doesn't think he can take it.
"Had what?"
"Those freckles, on your thighs"
"Oh, yeah, guess I have. Never really paid much attention to 'em before, got 'em everywhere"
"Everywhere?"
"Mm, chest, back, you've seen my face" He lets out half a chuckle, almost concerned by the look you're giving him, like you don't like them. Him.
Then, you get up. Just as his thoughts are spiralling into an all to familiar rabbit hole of self hatred and doubt, you approach him.
His eyes follow you but he makes no move to stop you, he doesn't turn away, nothing.
You kneel beside the bed, hand reaching out so slowly, he could stop you if he wanted, but he wouldn't dream of it.
He twitched the slightest bit when your finger tips met his skin, cold and leaving a trail of fire all at the same time.
You trace over each one, mesmerised by the constellations covering his body.
You draw over every spot on his thighs, eyes flicking up to where his t-shirt rides up, more, you think.
"May I?" You ask, fingers toying with the hem.
He nods, once, short, sharp, afraid he won't be able to make coherent sounds if he tries to speak.
You carefully, painfully slowly, lift his shirt up his back, pulling the black cotton back to reveal a sea of little tan marks littering his skin.
As you pull his shirt up over his head, your breath stutters just a little and Dean's so glad you can't see the fire dancing across his face.
You move up the bed, necks planted firmly into the mattress, bracketing his hips.
"This okay, Pretty?" You ask gently and he nods, but that's not enough "Gotta be sure baby, gotta hear you say it"
"Yes" He croaks, swallowing hard "W-whatever you wanna do, please"
You feel a twist in your chest, the poor thing's so desperate for any kind of love and contact, he's just too precious.
You return to tracing each and every freckle, over and over, mapping out his life over his back.
Then, you lean down.
Your lips ghost over one, lower down, right on the dip in his spine.
"Just say the word and I'll stop, 'kay?"
"No, please don't"
His voice cracks and you can hear the tears forming in his eyes.
You keep going, kissing each little dot you can see. The higher you go, closer to the back of his neck, the more forced his breaths come out. Like he has to work to take in air.
Finally, you press a lingering kiss just under his ear and you can feel his pulse racing under your lips. You settle then, nuzzling into the crook of his neck, arms coming to slip around his waist as you lie on him. Your weight comforts him, a steady, reassuring presence that tells him you aren't going anywhere. He slips into a deep sleep soon, feeling more comfortable and safe than he has been in years.
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You walk past Dean, noticing the soft little smile he's wearing, making you melt.
You slip your arms around his waist from behind, leaving a small peck to his cheek.
"Morning Pretty" You murmur into his ear, smiling and nudging closer before pulling back, going back to what you were doing.
It was so quick you didn't notice him freeze.
Later, he's working on Baby, leaning over the hood when you walk in.
You watch for a moment, seeing how cute he looks when he's concentrating.
When he comes up for air (a beer) a black smudge paints his face, right across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek.
"You look cute like that" You chuckle, not thinking much of your words.
That is, until you think Dean may have stopped breathing.
You rush to his side thinking something's wrong, but he seems to snap pretty much out of it, turning his attention back to the engine quickly, trying and failing to hide his adorably rosy cheeks.
"Dean?" You ask, mischief in your voice.
"Uh, y-yeah sweetheart?"
"You okay, handsome?"
He doesn't reply.
Though you can't see him too well, you know he froze up at that.
Now, you have him on his back, laying across his bed, taking every sweet and tender word you give him.
"You're so gorgeous Dean"
"My pretty baby"
"I love you. So fucking much"
"You're everything"
"My perfect, sweet, good boy"
Every word you speak is whispered against his skin, woven in between kisses, solidifying every syllable.
Animal Characters Masterlist | Main Masterlist | Ask me about Deer!Dean, Dog!Dean, Cat!Dean, Otter!Dean or anyone else!
thinking of deer dean who’s freckles are his spots… he has more all across his chest and back, some on his thighs if you’re able to get a close enough look… maybe one warm night when he’s in nothing but a pair of shorts you take your time tracing all of them, asking if he’s always had them all or if some are new.. sigh i love deer dean so much <3
deer dean my beloved…
Okay so I love this waaaayyyyy too much lol and ended up writing a bit of a drabble for it so it's added to the queue!
Pretty Little Deer will be out on the 7th of April!
But for now....think about being bored shitless in a motel room, Dean's sleeping and you connect his freckles like little constellations. He wants to be annoyed but it's just too sweet and adorable and he loves that you know them all by heart and see such beauty in him he never thought possible.
My only big thought here is just whenever Sam and Dean get in a fight, their antlers hit each other and clank around an doe!reader is scared but also trying to suppress a laugh just a lil bc this shit is fucking funny.
So sorry for the lateness of this update. Life is a fucker. I would not recommend being an adult.
Also, animals are both half human and full animal in this verse. Which ones are half human will be determined by my closet oracle. No, really. I have no real reasons for making some animals fully human other than how creepy I think wolf people eating other animal people would be. I am scum.
The afternoon for Castiel wore on slowly. He tried to go about his usual business, collecting branches to fix up his nest, eating some berries he found growing a few dozen yards away from his usual gathering grounds, but he found himself constantly loosing focus, drifting off into thoughts about wolves and defenseless, small creatures.
Truth be told, Castiel could barely even remember the last time he had seen a wolf. He had been very young then, just recently having taken his first flight. He remembered that it had been late, most of the daytime residents were bedding down for the evening.
The wolves had been a sudden and violent intrusion on the evening. Completely devoid of any humanoid features, the pack had been a snarling, howling mass of teeth and hunger, rushing down on an unfortunate elk who had strayed too far from its migrating herd. The poor animal had been done for in minutes, the vicious pack of canines lulling into hungered grumbles and snapping as they settled into their dinner.
Castiel and his siblings had watched the whole affair from the safety of their nest, high above the forest floor, scared, but free from danger. Castiel thought about the fawn. The child had no nest to hide in, and with his mother missing he was as vulnerable to predators as that lone elk had been.
Worry was starting to win over indifference and Castiel spent a good hour preening and fussing from a tall perch in his gathering grounds, unwilling to go back and check on an animal he had no real reason to worry about, yet unwilling as well to just fly home and abandon the young fawn completely.
A scream, followed by several short, yipping barks made up his mind for him. Without a thought —and with a strange, blind panic in his chest— Castiel launched himself through the trees, wings beating hard to bring himself to the fawn in time.
Bursting through the last of the tree cover into the general area in which he had left the fawn his eyes immediately sought out the boy.
There, at the far edge of the clearing. The boy sprang forward, unaware of Castiel’s presence as the fawn made an aborted attempt to get away from his attacker. An over-sized fox made its move as the fawn tried to escape, biting at the boy’s flanks. The fox obviously thought that it could risk the usually powerful kicks of a deer if the specimen was one as small as this fawn. The meal must have looked too tempting to avoid.
Furious, Castiel dropped from the sky, slamming into the fox with his full weight.
With a pained yelp the creature released the fawn, who took the opportunity to deliver one hard kick with his back legs before he scrambled to hide behind Castiel, who was picking himself menacingly up from his landing spot. The crow flared his wings, tucking the fawn safely behind them.
The fox scrambled up from where the fawn’s strike had knocked it, shaking itself off and snapping at the pair with a yip. Castiel puffed up further, taking one step towards the animal, who decided it had had enough fighting for the day and turned tail in retreat. The pair watched the fox lope off into the forest before turning to each other with relief.
“Cas..Casteel…” the fawn exhaled shakily.
“It’s Castiel,” The crow corrected automatically as he reached out, hands roaming over the fawn, checking his wounds, which were thankfully minor except for the bite on his left hind leg. It was bleeding sluggishly, several puncture marks from the fox’s teeth shining red in the light of the clearing. “Let me see that,” Castiel said awkwardly, reaching out to feel the leg the fox had been worrying at.
“Casstl...Cas,”
“What?” He replied, slightly annoyed now that he had a moment to realize what had just occurred. He had to have gone flying off to save this little creature—had barely been in time to save him. The fawn however just shook his head, ducking his chin in to look at the ground as Castiel finished checking the leg. It would be fine, just some superficial bleeding and slight bruising if they got it cleaned up soon.
Something occurred to Castiel. “What are you called, fawn?”
The fawn continued to stare up at the crow, eyes wide and trusting, only blinking when Castiel scowled and tilted his head at him expectantly.
“I’m Dean,” the boy said, shyly grabbing at his ears again as Castiel straightened back up, absently wiping his blood covered fingers on his pants. They should definitely find a stream soon and get that wound washed out. Castiel paused, movement stilling as he realized that he was considering—no, that he had decided to stay with the fawn, or at least take Dean with him.
“Well,” Cas said awkwardly. “I suppose we should find somewhere safe to sleep for the night.”
The fawn’s ears flicked up in surprise. Embarrassed, Cas started off into the forest.
When he felt a small hand slip into his he knew that Dean had followed.
Dean came and went. It was his nature. It didn’t mean that he didn’t leave behind, though.
“I’ll be back,” he’d murmured into Castiel’s neck, face bent and buried into his skin.
They lived in the woods, far from the beaten dirt road out of the forest and to the paved highway. From the paved highway out into the cities and the world. They live deep amidst the trees in a small house made of warm, flat stones with a high roof and a warm hearth and a huge cellar full of jam and root vegetables and confit.
Castiel had lived in the city, once. Only coming out once in a while with great bows and quivers full of arrows and a head full of thoughts and problems that buzzed through him like bees. With a temper like wildfire. With a sadness like a river flowing out of his soul. His head is still busy, sometimes. His temper still snaps, sometimes. His sadness still floods through him, sometimes. It all comes so much less often now, though.
He is happier here, with Dean. He is gentler, too.
He stares down the rough path that Dean wandered down months ago and wonders idly when he’ll be back. It’s spring now, early spring, and he is tired of living in their house alone.
Castiel lets the door slam behind himself and picks up the broom from the kitchen and sweeps the wooden floor of the house. It’s more a cabin than anything, really, all one large room with a bed tucked in the corner and a bathroom delicately place opposite the hearth and the kitchen. A few large, comfortable chairs in front of it, a tall bookcase full of the books Castiel couldn’t leave in the city and a few records. His bow came with him. His arrows, too. Thick blankets and heavy pillows. A well stocked toolbox. A better stocked first aid kit.
He finishes sweeping and realizes that spring is as good a time as any to beat the rug, so he rolls the thing up and heads to the clothes line with the broom.
Castiel’s a bit leaner now. Still muscular, not stripped and starving by any stretch of the imagination, but something about growing and hunting most of their food, it changed the shape in him.
He pants as he beats the thing as hard as he can, stirring soot and ash and dirt from the fibers. Leaves it to air for a while as he struts back inside. Touches the deeply carved wood of the door frame for luck.
He didn’t used to be superstitious.
Castiel was hunting, in the spring. Deer. His bowstring pulled tight. His arrow at the ready. His mind quiet, the world observed down the shaft. Sharp and tight. He’d had it pulled. He had been ready. He’d seen them, the flash of the color and shape. The antlers. Just waiting for the deer to raise its head.
He thought maybe he was a college kid, pulling some sort of weird prank at first. Had shouted at him for not wearing safety colors, demanded he pull the antlers off.
And then Dean had stopped laughing and apologizing and just ran.
There was swiftness to him. A way of his gait. A shape to his body. A panic. And it all made Castiel realize, suddenly, that Dean wasn’t pulling a prank.
Those antlers were his.
So Castiel chased him. Threw down his bow and arrows and ran as fast as he dared, as hard as he could. Tore through the woods. Knew with an unsettling certainty that this was important.
He got pretty far too until he tripped over a root and twisted his ankle.
He must have sat on the floor of the forest for a good hour before Dean approached him again, saying, “You’re not gonna shoot me, are you?”
That was nearly three years ago now. It felt like a lifetime.
Now Castiel knew. He didn’t have to believe.
There were frayed edges of the world, places where people could fall through and find the kind of raw magic that made up the universe. Torn places in the patchwork quilt of the world where people like Dean lived, people who weren’t really human at all. People who were the spirits and protectors of herds, of predators, of trees and plants. People who had such strange forests hidden inside of them.
And Dean had lived out here in the woods as the deer and the elk and the horned things since there was a forest, since there was a shape of it here in the mind, in the world.
He leaves in the winters. Comes back with the springs, with a new set of antlers and a wild look in his eye for a few weeks.
Castiel is not so presumptuous to believe that he has somehow tamed Dean. Dean still runs. Dean still migrates with the herd. Dean still freezes in the middle of talking or washing the dishes or hanging up clothes and announces that there’s someone in the woods or that a child is lost or that the birds have hatched. Sometimes Castiel will be speaking and Dean will look right through him, ageless somehow. A way of speaking without words. Dean doesn’t speak much at all really. He tells jokes and swears and laughs, but left to his own devices, he just watches. He speaks for Castiel’s benefit, not his own.
When he and Castiel first started meeting, it was less them conversing and more Castiel chattering nervously while Dean studied him, occasionally asking a question.
He’d been heartbroken to learn John Bonham had died a little over thirty years ago. Said as much.
Castiel’s still not sure what Dean sees when he looks at him.
Castiel had a fairly sizeable nest egg when he’d met Dean, and it had been another year before the feeling between them was too strong. Before Castiel found himself staring out of all of the windows and Dean found himself skirting the edges of the city. Before they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other, their eyes away from each other, their thoughts away from each other.
Castiel sold everything he owned. Bought a bicycle a few how-to books. Dean helped him clean up the house, an old shell of a thing for the first few weeks of that summer. Started a garden in the backyard, bought sturdy clothes, bought plush wool for knitting.
And Dean brought him flowers and told him strange old stories and showed him the best places to hunt and fish and held him close against his body all through the night, smelling of musk and trees and rain and earth.
Castiel is hanging the laundry on the line when he sees something amidst the trees, out of the clearing. The barest blush of color that doesn’t belong there. A new shape.
His heart leaps as Dean springs from the wood and Castiel runs to meet him.
His arms fit so securely around his neck. Dean’s hands were made to settle just over his hips. His forehead rests on Castiel’s just so, letting him look down on him fondly. Softly.
“I told you I would be back,” Dean murmurs.
“I know,” Castiel answers.
His breath tastes like winter air and bitter greens as Castiel kisses him deeply. It is like water in a drought, touching him and smelling him after this long. It places something safe and warm in his chest and soul, this inescapable sensation of being home.
Dean’s body is peppered with scars, both from sparring with males and from being shot by hunters. He doesn’t have any new marks under Castiel’s fingers though, and it leaves a great feeling of relief to have Dean come back healthy and whole.
Castiel pulls away from the kiss to look at Dean. He’s sun-bright and golden, his hair shot through blonde in places and freckles scattered all over his body. He hasn’t shaved in a while and a scruffy beard settles over his face. His new horns look to be for a stag, and they’re still coated in velvet. They’ll bleed in a few weeks and itch like the devil and stain all of their pillows and sheets but he’s here and he’s home.
Dean crooks his head forward just right and scratches Castiel’s head with his antlers. Castiel laughs, suddenly, and twists his fingers into Dean’s hand.
“We’re not going to need to widen the doors again, are we?” he asks.
Dean smiles and shakes his head.
Falling in love with Dean had been like watching flowers bloom.
He leads Dean into the house. He will sit him in the small, old bathtub and wash him, pulling away the mud and blood and ticks of the season. And then Dean will rise and he will hold Castiel all through the night.
