Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dean’s first day after fishing Cas out of the Empty passes by in a blur, a sort of head-rush disorientation that reminds him of being two days deep into a stakeout. It’s something that he’s got a feel for, after over a decade of checking in and out of various afterlives and alternate timelines like they’re fleabag motels: a sensation that’s less out-of-body than of being in a body that doesn’t remember how to slot itself back in to the world around it yet. 

By this point, (16 years since Stanford, Christ. He never saw that coming), he has the settling back in down to a well-worn groove: a hot meal, a phone call to anyone who can confirm that yes, Dean, this is Earth Prime , and a hot shower, in whatever order he can line those up. Getting off with someone is a nice touch but optional, depending on who’s around, and a long nap is usually too much to hope for, given how often he’s been resurrected just in time to deal with ninety-nine more problems than he left the world with.

This morning’s version of the drill had been: breakfast with Cas at a dusty roadside diner which had confidently declared itself to be The Home of The Waffle Stack , a call to Sam back in Kansas to confirm that all three of them were still alive and on the intended plane of reality, despite the odds, and a pair of truck stop showers, Cas awkwardly clutching the second toiletry bag that Dean had shoved at him, the one that he’d been keeping on hand in his duffle for months now. The showers hadn’t been hot, not all the way through, not really, but they’d both managed to get the worst of the Shadow’s weird clingy black sludge out of their hair, which put them in good condition for sorting out the rest of the day.

Then Dean had pulled an ancient road atlas out of Baby’s glove compartment and traced a route with his fingers, counting off the inches under his breath spanning the thin-Veiled strip of nowhere where they’d been spit out and an edge where the map turned blue.

“Hey, it looks like four hours to the beach. You wanna go?”

The bravado had been forced, feigned nonchalance, like so many of the things that he’s asked Cas about over the years. He’d spent months on end chasing every lead he could find on the Empty, avoiding the bunker even when his routes took him through the heart of the country, and sleeping in the car when he was too far off the grid to do anything else, or when the thought of pulling Charlie’s card out of his wallet at the motel desk was one more remembered loss than he could grapple with, and every time, he’d drifted off thinking, toes in the sand, once this is all over. I’m taking him on vacation. He didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do now if Cas cited urgent heaven business and shot him down about it here at a truck stop in Millbrook, Alabama.

But Cas had just squinted and taken the question in stride, like usual, and Dean had counted that as enough to go by, like usual. They had a good thing going like that.

That’s brought them here, to the Gulf Coast at night, sea breeze rolling in through Baby’s open windows as they lie tangled up in the back seat.

They hadn’t talked much on the way down, only the basic rundown of the last nine months: Chuck’s forced retirement, Jack’s ascension, Cas’ flickering grace, and the uncertain state of a cosmology in which Death and the nothingness after Death had leapt for each other’s throats like drunks in a bar fight. They hadn’t talked about the confession, not the big stuff, not yet, but Dean had let Cas pick the music on the drive south once the recap of the essential facts had tapered off, and if submitting to the first three hours of Castiel’s Top 53 Lana del Rey Traxx did not clearly convey “I love you too”, then, well. They’d take that one day at a time.

They’d hit the coast in the early afternoon, taking their time finding a spot far enough off the main drag that it had gone quiet this late into vacation season, with just a snowbird couple and a few day-trekkers visible on the dunes. Things got easier after that, Dean’s floundering uncertainty as to what people were actually supposed to do at the beach balanced by Cas’ natural ability to meet any situation halfway, like wherever he was standing was right where he was supposed to be. Dean guessed that it made sense, for the one thing that God had never been able to control, that there were no wrong answers for Cas. Whether he was being thrown out of a bordello for offering impromptu therapy, playing a year-long game of hide and seek in Purgatory in a martyr’s gambit, or struggling valiantly to navigate a Hot Topic in preparation for a teenage girl’s birthday party, there was a certain throughline of Cas-ness that never wavered, and when Cas responds to the beach by launching into an esoteric anecdote about almost stepping on a fish 400 million years ago, Dean thinks, yeah, that tracks , followed shortly by oh, God. He’s really back.

He lets that realization settle in around him as they take their time tracing the shoreline, boots ditched in the car as promised, work jeans and dress pants both cuffed so that they can walk through the surf. He hadn’t realized, from books and movies, how fishy it was going to smell out here, brine and seaweed and just straight-up fish making the sea air land several clicks to the left of whatever it is that they put in Ocean Breeze fabric softener. But it’s real, and it’s not bad, not really, just kind of sharp, and the breeze feels nice while Cas uses his whole astral-vision thing to tell him about all the seashells, about the old couple reading paperbacks on their fold-up chairs, about the dolphins in the water.

Dean realizes that Cas is being sweet by talking about everything and nothing, that he’s giving him space, not pushing. Cas isn’t going to bring it up, isn’t going to ask why did you save me if you don’t want me?, even though Dean remembers him crying in the dungeon, remembers the one thing I want - it’s something I know I can’t have. And maybe that’s what makes it easy, once the sun’s gone down and the other beachgoers have trailed home, to kiss him slow and gentle, and to ask him to come back to the car with first night back on earth, hmm? You got any plans?

Cas gets it, this time.

They stay pretty quiet during sex, no grand declarations, just the sound of the waves breaking in the distance between is this okay? and that’s - that’s nice, like that . Dean knows that it’s been a few years for him, suspects that it’s been a few more than that for Cas, and he’d worried at first that he’d freeze up, or that he wouldn’t be able to measure up to the most loving human being that I will ever know , to whatever ideal Cas had built up in his head about some working class guy from Kansas, prophesied archangelic vessel or not. But the nerves had fallen away once he got Cas laid out under the moonlight, because Cas had just been watching him with that same steady unwavering acceptance that had carried them both this far for this long, that just being , and it had quieted the restless performance anxiety that Dean’s carried as a default for so long. It’s just Cas. We’re just gonna figure out how to make each other feel good. It’s okay.

Half an hour later, he’s coming down, his head languidly resting on Cas’ chest where his fading angelic grace seems to have left a heartbeat on as an auxiliary function, a sort of just in case for a day when it finally flares and sputters out like a candle. It’s the hum of a backup generator. Dean thinks that he’s never going to be able to sleep without it again. 

They’re a mess, after, but the night breeze is keeping them on just the right side of too sweaty to cuddle, although Dean is pretty sure that two dozen demons couldn’t drag him away right now, much less the weather.

He’s letting Cas have aux privileges again - for that matter, they have an auxiliary adapter now - which Dean figures has to count for at least as much as a marriage proposal. He’s letting shotgun choose the music, for God’s sake. Cas has put on some quirky radio show, something by a couple of college kids, maybe, soft acoustic covers of classics mixed in with reverb-heavy beats (are kids these days manufacturing static on purpose? Pre-ripped jeans for music?). Dean thinks that he should hate it, ought to hate it, but Cas is working his hands over the knots in Dean’s back with the same unwavering attention that he spends on everything else, and Dean’s boneless, all mussed and post-coital, and whatever Cas wants to play is fine, actually.

And it isn’t bad , not really. Simulated or not, the low fidelity effect makes everything feel pleasantly far away, muted like the moonlight reflecting off the water. And the covers of old standbys are sweet, uncomplicated in their nostalgia. Dean hasn’t thought of it in years, but he finds himself wondering what it would have been like if his dad had never rolled up to Sonny’s in ‘95, if Dean had had the luxury of losing his virginity after the school dance at sixteen instead of in a truck stop bathroom six months later. He thinks it might have felt a lot like this.

He thinks about the shower he’d grabbed after he got off the phone with Sam earlier, about how comfortable he’d been, even getting undressed in a truck stop in the middle of Alabama, gearing up to hit the road with a man who he’d known had wanted him, who he’d wanted. He thinks he must be in love with Cas, to have felt anything but terrified about it. 

That seems worth saying.

“...Cas?”

Cas makes an appropriately interested noise but doesn’t stop petting him, just gives Dean time to gather his thoughts. Dean realizes that he doesn’t quite know where he’s going with this, that he’s never been the best at bridging the gap between feeling something and talking about it. He also realizes that he doesn’t really know where he’s going in general, that he’s fallen asleep over and over for the past nine months thinking toes in the sand, once this is all over, that he’s planned exactly this far and no further. 

The rest had been a dream that he hasn’t allowed himself to live in yet. He has bits and pieces in his head - a fishing pier, a kitchen to slow dance in, more car sex for sure. A pawn shop ring, because his mom’s isn’t gonna fit Cas, no matter how much they resize it, but he wants to give Cas something to let him know he’s got a soft place to land if he Falls again, that he’s safe now, that he’s wanted. But it all has the fuzziness of dream logic, and he doesn’t feel right asking Cas to commit to a guy who's got nothing going on. He steels himself, tilts his face up to meet Cas’ eyes.

“I gotta tell you, man - aside from getting us a hotel for tonight, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Cas is good with him. Patient. “Hardly anyone ever does, I think. What do you want to do?”

“I want to ask you to come home with me, but - I don’t know where home’s at for me, any more. Not that I ever…” He takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. It’s been thirty-nine years since the house burned down. He’s so tired. “I’ve barely been back to the bunker, since the last time you were there.”

Cas pulls him in closer like Dean’s the one who needs it, like he was the one who’d been dead for almost a year. Dean feels like he should argue with that, but it feels good, so he puts his arms around Cas so that he can lean in closer, turns his face back into Cas’ chest. Listens to his backup heartbeat.

“You don’t have to know everything to ask me. Just ask me for what you want right now.”

“Stay? I’m just… Going to drive around for a while, try to figure it out. Come with me.”

“Yes.”

He still doesn’t know where he’s going. He turns it over in his head and is surprised by how absent hunting is from his thoughts about directions that he might want to choose. He thinks of how his dad never got to retire, kept chasing something he never found. He thinks about how his mom never wanted this for him, and he thinks again about being young, of how it might have gone if he hadn’t bailed out of Sonny’s in the middle of the school year.

He thinks about everything since. He thinks about everyone he lost on the road - Bobby, Ash, Ellen, Jo. He thinks of Charlie and how he misses her so bad it hurts every time he buys groceries. He thinks about how Sam’s revamping the bunker with Eileen, how he wants to make it safe meeting ground for supernatural creatures who want to get on the straight and narrow and for hunters who want to get out of active duty. He’s so damn proud of that kid. He thinks about Benny, and he thinks about Garth and Bess and the kids.

He thinks about another angel taking him apart slow in the back seat, all those years ago - how he’d known it was a one-night thing, any port in the storm, and how much he’d needed it anyway, after Hell, needed to touch and be touched without hurting or being hurt.

Anna had slipped through his fingers so fast it still feels like a daydream, the war pulling them back to their corners and their loyalties before they’d had a chance to put down roots in each other. He’s not a big words guy, but he’s gotta try to do better with Cas.

The lore says that a curse can be broken in living water, that standing in a river or an ocean lets you walk out clean. Dean’s never tried it, always aiming to burn the rabbit’s foot or to smash the mirror at the source, swift and direct compared to corralling everyone into Baby and trying to track down the closest muddy midwestern stream just to take a shot at an untested duct tape fix. But laid out like this, listening to the waves roll in, he thinks that he gets it. The ocean's bigger than him, primal, older than his problems, older than anything his dad tried to tell him about who he was allowed to be. He's just fought his way through an eldritch hell dimension, and he's just had gay sex in the Impala, and Cas is playing his weird indie girl mix, and it's all okay. Maybe it's okay to say the thing, too.

“...hey, Cas, man? I love you too.”