Chapter Text
Clouds roll in heavy-bellied and dark across the fields to the right, blocking out the sky.
“Go on,” Dean mutters. He herds the chickens back into their coop gently, wind whipping up beneath his jacket and chilling his skin as he counts the little feathery bodies before him one more time. “That’s it, inside.”
The last one shambles her way over the threshold, utterly unhurried despite the thunder that roars in the distance. It’s Blanch, who has always been prone to escaping her coop and making Dean chase her around the backyard like a fucking asshole; he eyeballs her as she settles in next to Sophia and Dorothy and Rose.
“Stay put, ladies,” Dean tells them. There’s a crack of lighting at the corner of his eye, and it lights the land up around him eerily pale, from the farmlands rolling in the distance to the trees knitted tight and close at the other half of his property. He shuts the coop door. Latches it tight.
Laundry comes next. It’s dancing wildly on the line, and Dean marvels at the fact that it’s hanging on at all—he yanks it all down into his arms and doesn’t bother with a basket, resigned to the fact that, with the amount of detritus this incoming storm is whipping into the air, he’s gotta rewash it all anyway.
He can see rainfall in the distance, lit up by the silvered early-evening sun. It moves toward him and his little house fast. One unyielding wall.
Dean shoulders the back door open and stumbles inside to safety.
This ain’t the first temperamental Kansas storm he’s had to weather but it’s the first since he moved out here, and Dean finds that his heart pounds rapid beneath his jaw as he watches it descend upon his land from the mud room. He watches as the plants in the beds he built a few months ago, hastily wrapped in burlap when he sensed a storm coming, bow in the wind; he watches the ramshackle barn a handful of yards from the house somehow continue to stubbornly withstand the gale, and hopes it keeps Baby clean and dry inside.
There’s nothing else he can do. Dean turns away.
The dirty clothes go in the washer. His boots go in the shallow plastic tray by the door. His jacket—thick, sturdy canvas, bought second hand at the Goodwill in town and rarely taken off—gets hooked upon the coat rack, and Dean shivers in its absence even though it’s summer. The storm puts a pall in the air.
The walk upstairs to his bedroom is silent but for the sound of his heartbeat. But for the thunder swiftly moving in.
Dean changes into sweatpants and a t-shirt and the Dead Guy Robe that he took from the bunker when he moved away, only a little guilty at the early hour. It’s not like he can get anything else done outside, he thinks—and anything inside that needs doing can be accomplished while he’s comfy.
He sits on the edge of the bed to pull a new pair of socks on, these ones dry and warm and clean. The mattress springs wail. The stillness of his house is a blanket.
Something moves in the shadow of the open closet door, and Dean leaps to his feet with his heart in his mouth.
Four slender paws and the flick of a long thin tail.
“Jesus Christ,” Dean grits out, hand over his chest as he falls back heavily to sit on the bed again. His knees feel a little shaky after that, like they don’t quite want to hold him up, and he feels his face darkening with embarrassment even though there’s no one here to witness him making an ass of himself. “Stupid goddamn cat.”
Said cat wends her way across the hardwood and then to Dean’s ankles, where she curls up proprietarily between them. She’s purring; Dean can feel the vibrations against his skin.
“Asshole,” he mutters, but he bends at the waist to stroke a fingertip down the slope of her forehead anyway. She blinks her only eye half-open to glare at him in a standoffish manner. She tilts her little gray head into his palm.
Dean and Pebble have what can be best described as a toxic relationship. He found her starving in his driveway last winter and took her in; she rewards him by only usually shitting where she’s supposed to. He takes Zyrtec every day so she can have a roof over her head and cohabitate with him; she kills the mice that get into the pantry and leaves their decapitated bodies on his pillow and still makes him sneeze a little. It’s not mutually beneficial. If she ever got out, Dean would fucking cry.
Sam laughs at him for how attached he is to her, and Dean can’t even blame him.
He sighs. Works at his aching knee with his palm, kneading out the way that the weather tightens the joint.
Lets her sleep.
*
Darkness falls over the valley like a switch being flicked the moment the storm really gets going.
Dean moves slowly through the house, turning on lamps as he goes. He likes the quiet kind of golden light that spills onto the walls as he does it; maybe it’s ‘cuz he’s lived underground for the last few years, but he always feels better in the half-light lamps provide. Like he can sink backwards, and the shadows will take him.
He hesitates when he gets to the kitchen. Wavers there at the threshold.
Something about this room in silence gets up beneath his skin. Makes him ache in a way that a few soft lights and scratching his cat between the ears can’t combat, sort of hollow, sort of—well. Lonely. Ain’t no secret that Dean’s lonely.
But he feels it more in his kitchen, the epicenter of this house, the heart chamber. Nobody sitting at the table to talk about their day while Dean cooks, and no hands reaching in to steal a bite of whatever he’s making, and nobody to share coffee with in the morning, pressed up against the counter as the sun rises beyond the open window.
There’s a layer of armor Dean must don to enter this room. He ain’t ready yet.
Dean doubles back around to the living room where his record player sits, a side table all to its own. He flicks through the frayed spines of record sleeves almost on autopilot, most gone papery-soft with age, stopping when he hits the one he’s looking for.
Billie Holiday, self-titled album. It’s really not his style, and he’d rather die than let Sammy catch him listening to it—but Sammy isn’t here, and anyway, it… it makes him think of Cas.
Cas. He’d bought this record at the thrift store in Lebanon once, on one of those rare days when they didn’t have anything evil breathing down their necks and Cas hadn’t fucked off to Heaven or wherever it was he was always running to. Dean had let him play it in the Deancave that evening; had watched him as casually as he could while Cas swayed slightly in what Dean had come to think of as Cas’s armchair, a cup of tea in his hands, his eyes closed as the tender music washed over them.
Somehow it had ended up packed away in Dean’s things when he moved out here. He never offered to give it back.
And Cas obviously hasn’t asked.
He takes a shaky sort of breath into the gentle static that comes before the needle drops. A moment more of quiet, and then the low, melancholy piano notes of “Yesterdays” starts, drifting like a sigh from the hallway to the rest of the small house.
The music is just loud enough to muffle the weighted thud of Dean’s heart, rattling around in all that empty space behind his breastbone—but not loud enough that he can’t hear the storm anymore. Thunder shakes the baseboards, sending trembling vibrations up through the soles of Dean’s feet and on up into his blood, his bones. It’s perfectly dark beyond the window above the kitchen sink, though it’s only seven in the evening. The wind smears the night like watercolors.
He could be the only one left, he thinks. The only one left in this state. On this planet.
It’s a thought he has more often than he should. That maybe they didn’t really defeat Chuck. That maybe this is all some hallucination he’s been having for the last year, and that they never really got Cas back from the Empty, and that Chuck really did make everyone who has ever been disappear—Sam and Jack, too—and that Dean’s life still isn’t his own. That he’s still just some puppet on a string, the hand of God tripping him along for his own amusement, dancing him for eternity or until he gets bored. Whichever comes first.
Dean knows it’s not true. He does. He knows. He knows that Jack is God now, as hands-off as they come; he knows that Sammy and Eileen are ok because he video called with them just this morning, happy in their life back at the bunker running the hunting network with skill that rivals Bobby; he knows that Cas is ok, because… because Sammy would’ve told him if he wasn’t.
Because Dean would know if he wasn’t. Somehow, Dean would know.
He came into the kitchen to make himself dinner—he hasn’t eaten yet today, too nervous, too unsettled—but Dean finds himself headed for the cabinet where he keeps the good stuff instead.
Dean made himself cut out beer a year ago now, half on Sam’s gentle but firm insistence and half because Dean well knows what can happen to a lonely guy with nothin’ but booze on his hands. What has almost happened to Dean himself a couple times. He keeps the hard liquor in a cabinet with a lock on it, one extra step of difficulty he has to go through before he decides to get it out, a little more time to decide to leave it—and usually that works.
Tonight, though. There’s something too empty about him tonight. There is something a little too sharp and a little too aching getting caught in his throat each time he breathes.
Dean grabs a bottle of Jack, only about a quarter of it gone. Doesn’t bother with locking the cabinet behind him. Settles right here on the kitchen floor with his back to the wall, a clear view of the storm outside.
The last time he drank—really drank, hard enough that a lot of his memories of that time are just gone—were those weeks after the Empty took Cas. When it all seemed so hopeless. When it felt like he was dead for good this time, and all of it, the entire damn reason he was gone in the first place, was Dean’s fault.
He’s never felt anything like that. That desperate clawing hollowness, that loss that bowled him over, loss that scraped everything living out of him and left him nothing but a shell. Cas loved Dean, and because of that he would never again feel the sun on his face, never get to hug his son once more, never get to laugh with Sam. Cas loved Dean, and because of that, he was dead.
The whiskey burns a little going down. Warms Dean up from the inside out.
They did get Cas back. It was Jack’s first and last act as God: saving his father as Cas had saved all of them so many times.
Dean had been drunk when Jack pulled Cas out of the Empty, strands of some black substance gripping Cas’s coattails like tar. He’d used that as an excuse not to look him in the eye. If Cas couldn’t see his face, then Cas couldn’t know of the guilt that was eating Dean alive. Then Cas couldn’t know that the thing that got him killed was all Dean had ever wanted.
There must be something wrong with Dean that out of all this world has to offer, he’s only ever wanted love.
A week passed, and Dean had still somehow managed to avoid Cas. Two weeks, three. A month later, and Cas was gone.
They have never talked about—about what Cas said. They don’t have to. If Cas meant it romantically he would’ve shown Dean somehow, touched him maybe, maybe—maybe kissed him. He would have sought Dean out after he got back, at least.
And anyway, there’s no way in hell he still means it. Not after a year. Not after that love doomed him.
Lightning flashes through Dean’s little kitchen, turning the dim golden light of it stark and harsh. The record has run itself off. Nothing but a thin unspooling of static in its wake.
Dean closes his eyes. Feels the cool heavy weight of the bottle in his hand, lightening with each drink he takes.
This want inside of him isn’t easy to regulate. Just when he thinks he has it caged away that cage shatters again, filling him up with longing so heavy he can taste it bitter on the back of his tongue.
Dean moved out two weeks after Cas did. Found this little place a couple hours from Lebanon, buried in the country, in between fallow fields and a woodline that looms shelter over him. A lake out behind the barn. Acres of empty land.
He could call him. He’s thought about it every day since Cas was saved—every day a hundred times. It isn’t that they fought, or even reached a mutual decision to no longer be in each other’s lives; it isn’t that any words were exchanged between them at all. Simply that they keep going where the other can’t follow.
Simply that Dean isn’t sure Cas would want him to follow at all.
He doesn’t mean to, but the thunder is getting louder, but his alcohol tolerance has lowered over the past year and half the bottle is gone now, but he feels like a paper doll, brittle and folded and discarded for a greater plaything—he doesn’t mean to, but Dean prays.
Cas, he thinks. He’s not sure he can get beyond that. The word sits precious and unspoken on his tongue. Cas. I’m sorry. I miss you. Come home.
*
It is morning, and the sun tips over the land like water tipped from someone’s palm.
Dean kneels in the dirt. It’s cold and wet through his jeans, rainwater and mud soaking through to the skin; it’s caked on the soft insides of his wrists, stuck like mortar beneath his fingernails.
Gently, he unwinds burlap and twine from around his tomato plants.
The fabric is soaked from the storm, heavy in his hands, but the plants beneath appear unscathed. The earthy scent of them fills his nostrils as he breathes deep, winding the twine back up into the ball he’s already got started, saved to be used again.
His head pounds. His back hurts. He’d fallen asleep there in the kitchen last night, bent in half with his head against the cabinet and the bottle empty at his side, and now he feels like shit on the bottom of somebody’s shoe. He poured everything else from that cabinet down the drain as soon as he could stand. His hands still shake a little, and his mouth tastes rancid even though he’s brushed his teeth twice already. He couldn’t swallow food right now if somebody paid him.
But his plants are ok. But the barn didn’t blow down. But the chickens are loose and safe wandering the yard, and Pebble is asleep on his pillow inside.
But the sun is shining.
“Hello, Dean.”
Dean only jumps a little. He cranes his neck where he kneels, one hand coming up to shade his eyes against the sun.
Jack stands behind him, and the sun makes itself his halo. He smiles at Dean, that same kind, crooked smile that he’s always had. He pushes his flop of bangs off of his forehead.
“Jack,” Dean says, with a smile of his own to offer Jack’s way despite everything. He struggles to stand, bad leg aching fierce, and lets himself take the hand Jack offers as he levers himself up from the ground. Jack is strong though he is slender; he bears Dean’s weight easily, the warmth of his skin a shock against Dean’s after kneeling on the cold slick earth. “Hey, bud, how are you? Everything ok?”
“Everything’s ok, Dean, yes,” says Jack pleasantly, and then he pulls Dean into a hug.
This isn’t really new—Jack pops down to visit Dean at least once a month, and every time he’s eager for affection—but it still cracks something in Dean’s chest a little wider when it happens. Jack fits easily within the circle of Dean’s arms. He presses his cheek to Dean’s shoulder, and he smells the same familiar way he and his father have always smelled: like ozone and sunshine and pavement wet with rain.
“Cool,” Dean says. His head is throbbing, headache exacerbated by his swift rise to standing, and he pulls away before Jack can tell. Before Jack can heal him. Dean doesn’t think he could take that, not today. “Wanna help feed the chickens?”
Jack’s eyes light up, not a celestial and otherworldly blue but with joy—human joy, plain and simple. “Oh,” he says, “yes, I would like that very much.”
Dean grins. Slips an arm around Jack’s shoulders and leads him toward the coop.
*
Dean makes pancakes for Jack later, after they’re done and after he’s forced Jack to wash his hands off in the kitchen sink. Jack may be god, but his hands still collect that weird dusty residue of chicken feed the way any human’s would. Jack may be god, but Dean’s still got rules.
He lets Jack smother his pancakes in syrup when they’re done cooking, more than even Dean likes. He’s still a kid, and he sure as hell doesn’t get any extra sugar when he pops over to visit Sam and Eileen. Dean’s the fun dad. Sue him.
Jack tucks in, letting out a happy little noise in the back of his throat at the first taste. Dean settles in the chair across from him, and just watches: morning light spills in through the kitchen window and seeks Jack out as if it wants to belong to him, highlighting the soft fall of his hair, his blunt cheekbones, the tawny fleece of his eyelashes. Dean’s not sure if it’s a god thing or just a Jack thing that the sunlight seems to love him so—it’s almost always been this way, except for a few very specific periods of Jack’s life that Dean doesn’t like to think about.
“How’s business in Heaven?” Dean asks. He’s sipping his third coffee of the day, hoping maybe this one will abolish the heaviness that wants to weigh down his eyelids, his limbs. “Still sorting everything out?”
“We’re almost done,” Jack says. He eats as voraciously as Sammy did when he was little, and the sight brings Dean a satisfied kind of peace. It’s nice to know that he can still take care of someone he loves. “It took a while to lower the barriers of each individual Heaven, and to turn it into a place that was truly one of eternal rest and joy—but Dad helped me a lot, which made it easier. He knows more about humans than I.”
Dean’s heart has kicked into overdrive. He tries to keep himself outwardly still.
“Cas—your dad helped you?”
Jack looks up at him, blue eyes wide and guileless for a moment before they widen even further with realization. “Oh,” he says. He frowns, clearly unhappy with himself, and lays his fork down slowly. “Oh, Dean, I’m sorry. Sam told me not to mention Dad to you and I forgot.”
Dean scoffs loudly, shrugging with a dismissiveness he doesn’t feel. It’s not Jack’s fault he’s fucked. “Sam’s a worrier,” he says gruffly. He can feel his cheeks burning. “He don’t know what he’s talking about. You can talk to me about whatever, kid, it’s ok.”
Sometimes when Dean says shit like that—simple shit, basic shit that any decent dad should say to their kid—Jack looks at him with this face like Dean’s the god between the two of them. It breaks Dean’s heart. That Jack should have had to go so long without the bare modicum of affection from Dean, even if Dean was hurting deeply for most of their time together. Jack’s just a kid. He’s just a kid.
“Well he, um.” Jack swipes his finger through the syrup on the edge of his plate and licks it off, and Dean gives him a look, and he doesn’t do it again. “A few weeks after I pulled him from the Empty he joined me in Heaven. It seemed very important to him that Heaven is the way it always should have been. I was glad to have him at my side; being god is rewarding, but I am inexperienced, and Dad is good at making me feel better.”
It takes Dean a second to get the words out. “I’m glad he was with you,” he says, and means it.
Jack smiles, though there’s still something hesitant playing around the corners of his mouth. “I think,” Jack says. He chews his lip. “I think that he misses you.”
Dean says, quietly, a little stunned though he shouldn’t be, “Jack.”
“I don’t know what happened between you,” Jack says quickly, “but it makes me sad that you two are… are estranged. You finally have peace, and there is nothing keeping you apart except yourselves. I want you to be happy. I want it very much. And I think your happiness is with each other.”
Dean doesn’t know what to say. Dean doesn’t—Dean doesn’t think he can say anything.
Jack seems to know. He reaches across the table and he covers Dean’s rough hand with his softer one, thin fingers fitted in between the jagged hills and valleys of Dean’s scarred knuckles; he picks up his fork again.
“Think on it, please,” he says quietly. “For me.”
Dean swallows. His chest aches. He nods.
*
Dean walks Jack to the door because for some reason he always does, some distant habit ingrained in him as a child growing up in the midwest. You walk your loved ones to the door as they go to leave you, and you watch them disappear over the horizon. Even if they’re god.
“Thanks for stopping by, kid,” Dean says. He looks at Pebble, lax and purring in Jack’s arms, rather than at the kid himself; you walk your loved ones to the door, but sometimes you can’t look them in the eye as they depart. “I, uh. Miss ya when you’re gone.”
Jack lets Pebble down gently and then he steps into Dean’s body, arms going ‘round Dean’s shoulders tightly.
“I miss you too,” Jack says in a small voice, and for a moment he’s nothing but a child—Dean’s child, short enough for Dean to rest his chin on the top of Jack’s head and young enough that the fierce need to protect him lights Dean’s soul up hot.
“Hey listen, Jack,” Dean says quietly. His hand finds the back of Jack’s head, and he cups it with a tenderness he didn’t know he possessed. “You come see me whenever you want. Hell, you can stay. And I know for a fact Sammy’ll tell you the same thing, and your dad will too. No matter what’s going on. No matter that you’re god now.”
Jack is gripping the back of Dean’s shirt in fistfuls. He just breathes there for a minute. In and out against Dean’s chest.
“Ok,” he says finally, still small enough that Dean has to close his eyes.
“Ok,” Dean repeats. Gives Jack an extra squeeze and then steps back, hands falling to rest on Jack’s shoulders.
Jack is looking up at him, eyes a little red, mouth just to the edge of tremulous. Jack is looking up at him like a pilgrim kneeling on the Holy Stairs, and Dean thinks, breaking him would be the easiest thing in the world, and Dean thinks, I would break anyone who tried.
Dean reels him back in to kiss the top of his head, and Jack is smiling now when he pulls away.
You walk your loved ones to the door as they go to leave you, and you watch them walk down your front yard path, and you blink, and they are gone.
*
It’s a thirty minute drive from Dean’s patch of farmland to the nearest town, and half of that is unpaved gravel roads.
Baby can take it—she’s been put through worse in the years she’s been around, totaled once and nicked and dinged countless other times, bled all over, driven into walls and into woods and into marshlands that got mud stuck in places nothing should be able to reach—but she’s aging as rapidly as her owner is, and Dean is finally coming ‘round to the idea that he should probably just get a truck.
He’s not abandoning her. He never would—never could. She was home for most of Dean’s life. But it’s a goddamn bitch to haul lumber with her.
Luckily today he’s hauling nothing but groceries.
The town is mostly empty at this time on a Saturday afternoon, most people inside with their families or playing in backyards. It’s easy to find a free parking place on Main Street, right in front of the grocery store.
“Hey, Dean,” says Alanna as he walks up to the counter later on. The grocery store is a small one, and all the kids who work here know Dean by name. Every one of them is under twenty years old, and seem deeply invested in Dean’s life story. They like to say he’s ‘mysterious.’ He’d be lying if he said he never indulged that thought. “You hold up ok during that storm last night?”
Dean thinks of sitting on his kitchen floor drinking for the first time in six months, scared like a little kid that he wouldn’t have done enough to keep his home safe. He nods Alanna’s way. “I held up ok. You all?”
Alanna laughs at him, tucking their long black hair behind their ears. It’s straight as a poker, and dark as their eyes. “We don’t all live in the middle of nowhere, old man. It’s safe down here in the city.”
Dean lets himself be gently mocked. It’s kinda funny, the way these kids get a kick outta ragging on him. It reminds him of Claire.
“I don’t live in the middle of nowhere,” he grumps.
“When’s the last time you saw another living soul ‘cept one of us?” Alanna asks as they scan Dean’s flour.
“Saw my son just this morning,” Dean says without thinking.
Immediately he regrets it. Alanna looks up at him like he’s just handed them the keys to a brand new car, so eager that they bag Dean’s butter on up without scanning it. Dean fishes it out of the bag and sets it back on the end of the conveyor belt.
“Son?” Alanna asks. “You have a kid?”
Dean shifts a little, letting his eyes drift down to his hands. He’s holding his wallet too tightly. His knuckles are pale.
He is suddenly glad of the quiet, recalcitrant reputation he’s developed for himself in this town. At least nobody will expect much explanation from him.
“Yeah—um, yeah,” he says, tripping over his words. “Jack. He’s—I mean, he’s not biologically mine, but. He’s my son anyway.”
Alanna isn’t even pretending to do their job. They lean forward against the counter in their excitement.
“Jack,” they repeat. “So is Jack’s mom your wife? Girlfriend? Ex?”
Dean huffs a laugh at the thought of that before he can stop himself. “God no,” he says, shaking his head. “No, Kelly and I were never together. Jack’s dad is the one who—um, he and I… we’re…”
And the words get caught in his throat. Just get stuck there, lodged sideways and jagged and unread.
Dean doesn’t want to be here anymore.
But Alanna is now watching him with something like wonder on their face, something close to joy, no malice behind it and no longer even playfully mocking. They ask, much too nonchalantly for the answer not to mean the world to them, “So you’re queer?”
Dean’s whole body goes hot, and then shiveringly cold. He can taste his heart on the back of his tongue. It tastes like a bruise.
He watches his hands again. Watches how they tense.
“Yeah,” Dean murmurs.
He has never said it aloud before. He has never even confirmed it aloud. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t known.
Dean expects Alanna to make a big deal of it—to hoot and holler and come around the counter and slap him on the back, maybe, or to call up their friends and tell them that Dean Winchester, that old grumpy guy from out of town, is as queer as a three dollar bill—but they don’t. They are quiet. “Dude,” they say, and Dean can’t see them because he can’t make himself look up, but he can hear the smile in their voice. “Cool.”
He laughs again. It’s a little wet this time. Neither of them mention it.
*
He doesn’t see the truck in his driveway until he’s almost upon it.
“What the fuck,” Dean mutters to himself. It’s parked poorly, crookedly, taking up too much of the gravel plot Dean has designated for parking space when a storm isn’t about to roll through. He fits Baby up along beside it, glancing in the driver’s side window to see that it has no occupant.
Dean ducks into the glovebox and grabs his pistol before he kills Baby’s engine, bending his head so it looks like he’s rooting around for something innocuous. Something that’s not a fully-loaded firearm.
He hasn’t had to fire a gun in a year, but that don’t mean he’s not prepared.
Dean flips off the safety. He eases out of the car, keeping the gun hidden down low close to his stomach, and then he takes a deep breath and rounds the back of the Impala to face the porch.
Cas stands on Dean’s front steps.
He raises an eyebrow when he sees Dean’s gun, but otherwise makes no move to shield himself. He lifts his eyes to meet Dean’s.
Jesus. Jesus, that face.
Cas looks. Cas looks fucking good.
He’s wearing clothes Dean’s never seen him in before—jeans and a blue sweatshirt that hugs his arms and his chest and his shoulders and makes Dean’s mouth go dry, that brings out the blue of his eyes until they’re bright enough that Dean can see their color ten feet away—and his hair is a bit longer than Dean’s ever seen it, soft and tufted around his ears, graying at the temples. There is stubble crowded around the strong curve of his jaw, and even that is graying too.
He is looking at Dean, his hands open and relaxed at his sides. He is breathing. He is standing on Dean’s porch, and he is breathing.
That shivery feeling Dean felt at the grocery store is back now, skating along the length of Dean’s limbs. He feels weightless, outside of his own body almost, as he takes three stumbling steps toward Cas.
Dean lowers his gun. Thumbs at the safety. Lets it get tucked back into his waistband, nestled in the small of his back the way Pebble likes to sleep curled up there.
It is colder and heavier than she will ever be.
Cas begins to move. He descends the steps that separate Dean’s front porch from the ground and comes to stand just two feet away from Dean, close enough that Dean would need only lift his hand to touch him. To feel the warmth of him. Cas tilts his head.
“You’re too thin,” Cas says.
Dean says, his voice a husk, “Cas.”
Cas waits for him to say something else, and the way he looks at Dean as closely as he’s always done is a punch right to the center of Dean’s sternum. He can’t drag in enough air to speak.
“You prayed to me,” Cas says, blunt, like a knife-twist right beneath tender flesh layers. His voice is like the rock Dean tills from the earth, ragged and sturdy. “You said you miss me.”
Dean can only nod. No use pretending. He doesn’t want to pretend.
Cas is—Cas has always had this way about him, this economy of movement that Dean marvels at and envies in equal measure. He does not gesture unnecessarily. He does not speak unnecessarily, either.
Cas doesn’t smile now, but something at the corners of his eyes deepen. Sometimes his earnestness makes him too bright to look at.
“I miss you too, Dean,” he says. There is tenseness between his brows, a line of a frown. “I want to—I want to be your friend again. I find it stupid—“ and here his voice wavers, and Dean’s eyes sting, “I find it so stupid that there’s all this distance between us. I heard your prayer, and I know we want the same thing, so I’ve come here to talk some sense into you.”
“Cas,” says Dean again, low and helpless. “I don’t—I don’t—”
Dean feels stripped raw.
“I want exactly what you’re willing to give me, Dean,” Cas murmurs. God, did he always look so sad? He’s storm-eyed, not with anger but with a depth of feeling that calls Dean closer. “Nothing more and nothing less than exactly what makes you comfortable. Your friendship is too precious to me to risk losing it.”
Dean doesn’t know what to do. Dean wants to say stay with me, stay with me and never leave. Dean wants to apologize. Dean wants to set his mouth at the hollow of Cas’s throat as gently as he’s ever done anything, feel the beat of Cas’s heart beneath his lips. Dean is so lonely, and he’s missed him so much.
“Come inside, Cas,” Dean says to him instead. There are barely six inches between their feet, resting on the hard-packed Kansas dirt. “Come on in.”