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Dean never ran out of gas. He never ran out of gas. He’d criss-crossed the country like a spider building a web and never once, not even once, had he ever run out of gas before.
He could feel Cas watching him from the passenger seat, the sunset blushing red with embarrassment over the wide, open fields around them. There were no buildings in sight, no people; not even a large and conveniently-placed full can of gasoline by the side of the road. Ten minutes ago, Dean had been smiling out at the spread of space around them, the peace of the road resting like a softness over the corners of his soul. And Cas had been talking quietly about something scientific and strange, and his voice had been so gentle, so familiar, and it hadn’t mattered at all that Dean had barely understood a word.
And Dean had been thinking of nothing, only aware of his hands on the wheel, and the sun in his eyes, and Cas sitting next to him with his hands moving like a sculptor’s and his voice falling in time with the beat, the beat, the beat of the thrum of the road.
And then with a cough, and a shudder, and a misfire – the Impala’s engine had sighed to a gentle stop. Dean had guided them to the side of the road as best he could with the momentum they had left, and put on the handbrake.
“Uh. Well then,” Dean said now, frowning down at his hands. Cas shifted slightly next to him, and Dean thought he could see the warmth of a repressed smile out of the corner of his eye; the knot in his chest loosened a little. “It seems we’re fresh outta gas, Cas.”
There was a beat of silence before Dean looked over to Cas with one eyebrow raised, waiting for his verdict. They’d have to call Sam, Dean thought. He could come and get them. Cas seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because he was opening the glove box and pulling out Dean’s cell.
“Sorry,” Dean said awkwardly, as Cas handed it to him without meeting his eyes, looking out over the wide golden fields. “I should’ve checked before we left, I should’ve… not much point saying it now, though, is there?”
He dialled the number. The atmosphere in the car was rigid, tense – or maybe that was just Dean. He hated being so goddamn stupid. Everything had been going so perfectly. He’d wanted that drive to last forever, he’d wanted the road to keep unwinding and unwinding, growing new bends and lengths just for him. Whenever he thought of this day, now, he’d always think of this, a great big black oily smudge over the memory he’d wanted to keep.
Cas, next to him, didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He was still watching the swaying of the wheat outside the window. In Dean’s ear, the buzz of the cell was a familiar hum, quiet as a cricket in the grass. When he picked up, Sam’s voice rustled over the bad line like tissue paper.
“Dean?”
“Heya, Sammy, how’s it going?”
“What did you do,” Sam asked flatly, a wisp of exasperation curling out into the car like smoke. Cas caught it and smiled, turning his face to Dean, who rolled his eyes.
“Who said I did anything?” he said defensively, and then sighed when Cas raised his eyebrows. “Okay, okay. I might have… run out of gas.”
“What?! You’ve never done that in your whole –”
“Yeah, yeah. You can tear me a new one later, OK, Dad? Thing is, we’re in the middle of nowhere, fifty miles to the next gas station either way. So…?”
Sam agreed to come and get them, of course. Dean’s eyes were on Cas’ hands as he spelled out the directions, watching them fold and refold, trying to find a way to rest together, never quite settling. When Sam rang off, the hush of static in his ear was a surprise, pulling him out of a reverie.
“He’ll be here as soon as he can,” Dean said, answering Cas’ questioning glance. “We’ve just gotta wait it out.”
Cas nodded. There was a hush in the car, a restitching of the quiet blanket of calm that had enveloped them on their journey to this point; Dean’s hands rested pointlessly on the bottom of the steering wheel, his eyes on the road ahead, motionless.
Clunk. Cas opened his car door with the familiar metallic exhale, leaving it open as he walked away. He headed onto the grassy verge, where he shuffled a few steps left and forwards before folding his body down, and seating himself neatly, knees crossed and back straight as a ruler. The lightest of winds blew into the car, carrying the scent of crop and soil and sun.
For a moment, Dean could only watch. The threefold vista was framed by the open door; Cas at the front, the golden fields before him, and beyond that the red and orange splendour of the sky. Dean almost wanted to grab his cell and snap a photo – but that was dumb, and ridiculous, and…
He picked up his cell phone and took the photo, anyway. Dumb and ridiculous, sure, but he wanted to remember this. He wanted to be able to look at it again and again. He changed the framing to landscape. He’d be able to pull this up in three months’ time when the winter was making everything heavy and achey and brittle, and it’d be like being here again, with the sun on his face and Cas sitting there in front of him with syrupy gold lines of light and shadow running down his shoulders, over his hair, his cheeks –
Dean dropped his cell when he realised that Cas had twisted around to look at him, his eyes soft and deep, a small shadowed smile on his lips.
“It’s nice out here,” he called, not mentioning Dean’s impromptu press photo moment. “There’s a breeze.”
Dean swallowed, reaching for his cell again before clunking his own way out of the car. Maybe Sam would need to call him, he thought. Maybe he could take some more photos, he thought, more quietly. Maybe Cas would look out over the fields and not even notice if Dean took a few snaps of the way the aureate light haloed his hair and softened the lines of his chin, his cheeks…
“S’cold,” Dean grunted as he sat down. It wasn’t, and Cas didn’t respond beyond a small smile, as though understanding why he’d said it.
They watched the sun go down in a hush that was complete, speaking only in half-glances and shifting bodies, legs crossed, legs brought up to the chest, legs stretched out in front of them with the feet in the middle almost touching, shoulders almost brushing, breathing almost synchronised.
Above them, the sky deepened with the silence. The sun kissed the horizon goodbye and departed, leaving threads of gold in her wake. The night was revealed in a soundless rush; the stars squinted open shyly, twinkling away the blur of sleep.
Dean watched them, his cell gripped tight in his left hand. He must have taken fifty photos, and Cas hadn’t even blinked. He’d only sat and watched the wheat, the sky, the going down of the sun; and when he’d turned his eyes on Dean, they’d been liquid and deep and bright. Dean looked up at the stars, and all he could see was that look, that look, that look, that look Cas had given him when he’d turned his head and smiled, not at the camera, at Dean. How could he be so beautiful that it made Dean’s heart feel as though it were creasing inside him? How could he make Dean feel things that he’d thought himself incapable of feeling, how could he pour himself so easily into the cracks, the rifts that fell soul-deep and beyond?
Dean swallowed. There were so many stars out here, with no other lights to hide them away. Of course, there were always that many stars, but in the noise, the rush, they usually got hidden away. They needed the quiet to shine out true.
How long had they been up there? How long had they been watching Earth?
“Cas,” Dean whispered. He didn’t take his eyes off the skies, even when he felt rather than saw Cas turn to look at him. “When were you born?”
Cas exhaled a laugh.
“I wasn’t,” he said. “You know that.”
“Well, yeah.” Dean said. “But when were you, you know…” he waved his hand up at the heavens above. “Made?”
Cas considered this, his eyes turning upwards as Dean’s moved to watch his face, two ears of wheat bending together in the breeze of the conversation.
“I do not know,” he answered, finally. “I do not remember. Before time, I think.”
Dean nodded, his lips pinched. Before time. He’d taken fifty-seven pictures of a being that had been born before time began, today.
“The first memory I have is somewhere,” Cas paused, closing his eyes for a moment as though consulting some inner compass, before pointing a hand high. “Somewhere there. Far out, in what you would call the Kuiper Belt.”
“I’ve never called anything the Kuiper Belt in my life,” Dean said, with a grin.
Cas threw him a quick, sharp-eyed smile. They sat in silence for a few moments, lost in thought.
“Actually, I… I returned to that same place many times,” Cas said. “When I had wings.”
He tilted his head down, sucking in one of his cheeks and biting it, a gesture Dean didn’t recognise.
“Oh, yeah?” he said softly. Cas didn’t talk about the Fall often.
“It was my favourite place,” Cas said. “Especially… especially after I met you.” He cleared his throat. “After I returned from the descent into Hell.”
Dean nodded, his eyes watching Cas’ face. It was lit up now in silver-blue, cool and quiet as the surface of a clear-water lake.
“I used to rest near Pluto,” Cas said, when Dean left the silence open, waiting for more. “I always went there, when I had a spare moment, or when – when I needed to think. I don’t know what it was that drew me back there…” he trailed off, the rest of the sentence lost to inner thought. Dean wanted to be able to close his eyes and listen hard enough to hear what was going on in Cas’ head, the things he only told himself, that he kept locked up.
“There was something about it,” he said eventually, his voice a little hoarse. “Something about Pluto. The way that it’s so far – so far away. It’s up there now,” he waved a hand to the sky. “Somewhere up there, far away from anything and everything. It’s alone, and it can see the lights – the sun, shining… burning itself up and holding everything together. And around it, the planets, moving so fast and so close, together. And all Pluto can do is – is watch. And I always felt as though – as though it wanted to be… closer.” Cas swallowed, shifting his arms, shaking his head. “It’s only a lump of rock.”
“No,” Dean said. “No. I get it.” On impulse, he reached out and pressed a hand to Cas’ shoulder.
Cas smiled at him, looking him right in the eyes, half happy and half sad. It almost broke Dean’s heart to see him that way.
“It’s nice to have friends that aren’t planets,” Cas said, trying to lighten their mood. Dean laughed.
“I’ll bet,” he said, releasing Cas’ shoulder, turning back to the sky.
“Although, I have to say, I do have a lot in common with Pluto.”
“What?” Dean grinned. Cas shrugged, his eyes sparkling.
“Well, Pluto used to be a planet, didn’t it?” he said, just a little too lightly, the effect ringing hollow. “And then that was taken away.”
Dean’s forehead creased. He sat in silence for a few moments, watching Cas watching him try to figure out what to say.
“I thought I heard that Pluto was a planet again,” he said eventually, frowning. “Or a dwarf planet, or something like that.”
“No one’s quite sure what it is, anymore, are they,” Cas said flatly. Dean swallowed.
“It’s Pluto,” he said. “It’ll always be Pluto.”
Cas didn’t reply, but he did give Dean an oblique smile and a nudge of the shoulder so tiny that it might have been accidental. They sat in silence for a long while, Dean tapping his fingers against the dry grassy ground, trying to figure out if he could have said something better.
“I wish I did have a birthday,” said Cas, eventually.
Dean turned to look at him, surprised. Cas shrugged, and smiled the comment away. Dean opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again, and then bit his lip, and then turned back to watch the sky. He took in a breath, and then let it out slowly, and took another.
“You know,” he said, his throat a little tight. He’d never shared this with anyone, before, it’d always been… just something he’d thought to himself, usually when he was driving or falling asleep. “Sometimes, I… I think maybe we all have a lot of birthdays.” Cas was watching him; Dean resisted the urge to look back, allowing Cas the space to read his expressions without being observed in return.
“Because, you know, in our lives,” he began to explain, knowing that he was going to do this badly, “in our lives, we’re a lot of different people. I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago, you know? Or even seven years ago, or three. And sometimes I figure, well, maybe there was a day, like – like an actual day when I stopped being one and started being the other. And those days are like birthdays. So, so maybe… you could have one like that.”
He could almost hear Cas thinking, the quiet around them warm and comforting. Eventually, Dean turned to look at Cas, and saw that his eyes were shiny.
“Cas…” he said, reaching out a hand before he could stop himself and taking Cas’ fingers into his own. Cas swallowed, keeping his eyes fixed on the heavens above him so that the tears in his eyes wouldn’t fall. They sat like that for a long time, Cas’ hand wrapped by Dean’s like a treasure in a box. Dean rubbed his thumb along the length of Cas’ index finger, his heart stuttering at the sensation of warm skin. His stomach was filled with butterflies, wings fluttering madly.
“Sorry,” Cas said, and Dean said nothing, but shook his head once, dismissing the apology.
“I love talking about things like this,” Cas said, when the wetness in his eyes had melted. “I always did.”
Dean smiled, wondering whether Cas wanted him to let go of his hand. He wasn’t pulling away, so… he could hold on, right?
“Me too,” he said. “I – I love it, too.”
Cas turned to look at him, then, and Dean’s breath was stolen in a rush. How could there still be stars in the sky, when all of them were in Cas’ eyes? He gripped Cas’ hand a little tighter, and felt an answering squeeze.
“Cas…” he said, not knowing what he wanted to say. He hadn’t noticed how close they’d been sitting – well, he had, of course he had, but the possibilities that the closeness allowed had only just become clear to him. “Cas, I…”
They were so close, so close, so close…
“I want to kiss you,” Cas said, suddenly, the words tumbling out as the first gush of water through the smallest crack in a mighty dam, and a wave of heat rushed over Dean’s body, his mouth dropping open. “Please... may I kiss you?”
Dean’s hands were trembling.
“Y-yes,” he whispered, not trusting his voice to be steady if he tried to speak louder. Dean reached up his free hand as Cas moved into his space slowly, slowly, his eyes staying open as Dean wound his fingers into the lapel of his coat. They came together with breaths caught, tilting their heads a little more, a little more, coming a little closer, a little closer…
The first press of Cas’ lips to Dean’s was a white-out. It was an explosion of every emotion, a tremor in every nerve within him, a triumph and a terror and a pure, vast happiness too great and unexpected to understand. He gasped, as though trying to draw Cas in nearer with the force of his breath alone; Cas’ hand tightened around his, the other coming up to slide into Dean’s hair, holding him steady as they kissed again, deeper. Dean was trembling as though this were his first kiss, heart juddering, a single tear falling down his cheek at the sensation of being held, of being kissed, of being kissed by Cas…
They pulled apart, sighing into each other’s mouths, breathing each other’s breath. Dean looked up into Cas’ eyes, too stunned and starstruck to be ashamed of the tears in his eyes.
“Dean,” Cas whispered. “I think today is my birthday.”
Dean smiled shakily, squeezing Cas’ fingers in his own.
“You think so?” he said, almost laughing; how could he hold a happiness so huge inside his body?
“It must be,” Cas said. The hand in Dean’s hair moved, his thumb rubbing against Dean’s temple. He looked amazed, ecstatic, peaceful, beautiful. “It must be my birthday. I just became someone new.”