Archive of Our Own ^beta

The word slips out because he’s half asleep and they’re halfheartedly arguing over the last dregs of coffee in the pot.

“Y’ain’t gettin’ any of my coffee. Make your own, honeybun,” Dean mutters into his mug, hand clamped around the plastic handle of the carafe that he holds above his head.

“I would if you let go of the—” Cas pauses and makes a sound like he burned himself. Plausible; the machine is still on warm and Cas isn’t particularly known for his coordination before there are two cups of coffee circulating through his veins. But he’s also pressed up against Dean’s side, hands scrabbling at the arm holding the pot just out of reach, which means the machine is all the way on the other side of the kitchen.

Dean still blearily cracks an eye open to check though, just in case.

He finds Cas staring at him, eyes wide and bright and surprisingly awake considering their current squabbling over the life-giving coffee pot. Past squabbling now, because Cas is silent and still and has his head tilted in that usual I-don’t-understand-your-references kind of way, looking at him with—what is that, bafflement? Concern? Fear?

“What?” Dean grunts with all the gruff intimidation he can muster with one eye still glued shut with sleep sand.

Cas’s arms drop and Dean takes the opportunity to top off his cup.

And then he promptly misses the mug and pours hot coffee all over his hand when Cas asks, in a voice like a man who’s discovered a new breed of skittish animal, “Did you just call me a ‘honeybun?’”

Uh. Roll back the footage and double-check—yeah, he did.

“Shit!” Dean shouts very elegantly and succinctly, because the liquid splashing over his skin isn’t quite hot enough to burn but it’s hot enough to pretend. He drops the fancy stainless steel mug and lets it clatter on the floor and makes a show of turning on the tap to run over the juncture of his (not) burned thumb and palm.

When he finally turns to assess the damage, there’s coffee all over the floor, puddling in the uneven dips of the hardwood and splashed across Cas’s bare feet, soaking into the dragging hems of his pajama pants.

“It wasn’t that hot,” Cas mutters, scooping up the empty pot from where Dean abandoned it on the counter. “And I’m not cleaning that up.”

“Whoops,” Dean laughs as the pot blocks the stream of water still flowing over his hand, “overreacted there.”

“Mm,” comes the hum of agreement. “That you did.”

They’ve been living in this little blue farmhouse for three months now, ever since the skies finally turned from grey snow to wet spring rain in mid-March, which of course made renovations an absolute nightmare. But Dean had insisted that they move right there and then, said that the bunker was getting overrun with hunters and that he needed some goddamn vitamin D if he was going to live a decent life past his early forties because his bum knee was finally protesting the hunts.

In response, Cas had dutifully packed his few belongings and, when he piled his singular duffle and cardboard box onto the mess of Dean’s shit in the back of the Impala, he had even seemed somewhat relieved to be free of the place at last.

Dean couldn’t blame him. The bunker had been their home for so long, but it held in those walls and wardings the reminder of everything that had happened there: the fights and the injuries and the rituals and the sacrifices. And the deaths, all those souls still haunting Sam and Dean’s dreams through the nights, even though the only things that actually set off the EMF reader were some of the cursed objects locked up in the storeroom. For Cas, it had been the place of his last words, that final—

Nope. Not going there right now.

Plus Jack was gone more often than not, off doing God stuff in all the dimensions, and the kid could teleport or fly or whatever—there was no need to stay in one place for his sake.

And besides, the new generation can make better use of the resources more than the old man Winchesters, as Claire so bluntly put it when she showed up bleeding after a ghoul hunt in Mankato. Sam advises them now; he answers calls and sometimes comes over from Topeka to make sure nothing’s burning down or set loose in the halls, like the hunter equivalent of Yoda or somethin’.

In March, they all moved out and new hunters moved in. Sam and Eileen went to Topeka where they live now in a nice 1950s cottage in a nice neighborhood in a nice school district, just in case that becomes necessary someday.

And Dean and Cas and Miracle came here, the quaint farmhouse sat on five-ish acres a half hour drive from Manhattan, Kansas, and here they are now. Cas tends his garden and gets bronze and strong under the sun and Dean fixes up hunters’ cars as they pass through and they trade off turns with the coffee pot and bicker over whether or not they should turn the attic into a studio or storage. Dean puts a nice soft dog bed in every room, even though Miracle much prefers to free roam outside now that the weather has warmed, and Cas asks Miracle to keep the squirrels away from his vegetable gardens.

This is where Cas thumps grumpily across the hardwood with bare feet despite always complaining that it’s cold. This is where they sit across from each other at the little kitchen table and talk about Cas’s upcoming tomato and zucchini harvests. This is where Cas has begun to amass a strange collection of souvenir mugs from the hunters that roll through for car tune-ups.

This is where Dean peeks in through Cas’s door at night when he can’t sleep or gets jolted awake by a leftover nightmare, just to make sure he’s still there. This is where they binge watch gritty HBO shows and resolutely do not talk about that night. This is where Dean tries very hard to live a life that isn’t composed of zig-zagging across state lines and bleeding from the scarred expanses of soft flesh that cover his body.

This quiet blue farmhouse unseats all of Dean’s trepidations. The swing Cas insisted on for the porch lets him sit peacefully. The creak of the bathroom door reminds him that this is a home, if he’ll let it be one. The clatter of the living room window shutters whenever the wind ghosts across them just right tells him that it’s okay to want this.

Six months after Cas came back, Dean wipes up the puddle of spilled coffee in their kitchen and listens to the drip-gurgle-drip of the little coffeemaker that could while very pointedly not looking as Cas sheds his coffee-sodden pajama pants in the middle of the kitchen, muttering something about angelic grace being useful in times like these.

Honeybun, the self-deprecating part of Dean’s brain squeals in laughter as he wrings the cloth out over the sink. Where the hell did that come from? He’s never called anyone that in his life. It’s pretty funny, that part of his brain supplies. Like, not really ha-ha-funny but oh-my-god-funny, the kind of funny that keeps you up at night.

“Christ,” Dean mutters under his breath, because he’s definitely never recovering from this. He really needs another cup of coffee. Or a drink, but he quit alcohol somewhere between Cas getting back and the farmhouse, and their house is dry as a bone save for that bottle of shitty white wine that Cas has left sitting in the fridge for a month.

Cas brings the entire pot upstairs with him when it’s done brewing though, so Dean is shit outta luck.

The only logical recourse is to double down.

“Hey handsome, was thinking I’d roast a chicken for dinner,” he tries that afternoon, ignoring the way Cas’s shoulders twitch over his newest gardening magazine. “So roast or mashed potatoes?”

“Dean,” Cas begins, turning in his chair to look at Dean. “Did you—”

Mm, nope, Dean is not ready for this. So he opens his mouth and solves his own dinner dilemma: “I can roast ‘em in the pan with the chicken. One less pot to clean.” The words rush out as he turns on the sink and scrubs at the Yukon golds, letting the rush of water fill the space where Cas’s half-finished question hangs. “Unless you’ve got your heart set on mashed?” He directs this question to Cas, still sat frozen in his chair with that puzzled-worried-afraid expression on his face.

“Roasted is fine,” Cas replies slowly, enunciating every consonant a little heavier than usual.

“Cool,” Dean says, though his face is feeling decidedly not-cool under Cas’s heavy gaze. “Grab me some rosemary and thyme?”

The chair squeaks against the floor as Cas pushes back from the table. He grabs his herb shears from the bucket of tools on the counter and disappears out the back door to his carefully potted herbs, and only then does Dean finally let out the breath he’s been holding since the breathy “ha” loosed itself across his tongue.

So Dean is pretty sure he’s maybe-probably-certainly in love with Cas. Sue him.

But like, damn, it’s been six months and Cas said absolutely goddamn nothing about the confession when he showed up on New Year’s Eve unconscious and mojo-less and covered in goop, sprawled in Jack’s arms in the bunker like some fucked up father-son reverse pieta. And Dean kindly did not punch Cas in the jaw for making the deal, and he very generously let Cas recover on his memory foam for the month, and he very, very graciously did not bring the whole deathbed love-confession thing up even once Cas was up and at ‘em at long last.

Mostly because Dean thought that if it still mattered—if Cas still felt the same—then he would say something.

But he didn’t. So Dean didn’t, even though it gnawed at him every night, and he couldn’t place the reason why.

Wasn’t until he was unlocking the door to their new (old) farmhouse on a drizzly grey day in March and letting Cas pick the room with the west-facing windows and thinking that they should probably get a move on if they want to make it to the hardware store before it closes that the realization dawned on Dean that oh, he’s in love. Not just “loves,” that slick, vague active verb, though he loves him too, but “in love,” capital-L Love, that sickening butterflies-in-stomach, booming-bass, heart-wrenching, world-ending feeling that makes Dean go absolutely moony-eyed when Cas rushes excited and pink-cheeked into the kitchen with the first handful of precious cherry tomatoes of the season cradled between his palms.

“Try one,” Cas offers the small pile of orange-red fruit to Dean from over the counter. “They’re sweet even though I planted them a little late.”

Dean holds his palm out. Cas gingerly places the fruit there and watches expectantly as Dean pops it in his mouth and chews. Juice, sweet-sour-fresh, bursts between his teeth. The tomato is still warm from the June sun, or from Cas’s hands. It tastes like a riot of summer sunlight.

“Whoa, good job, good-lookin’,” Dean tells him through the mouthful. It’s mostly garbled, but something in Cas’s face shifts anyway, just a little extra crease forming between his brows. All Dean can do is steal another tomato and pop it into his mouth before he turns back to the cutting board. “Still waiting on those herbs though.”

There’s an extra beat where Cas hesitates, jaw tightening like he has something to say but can’t find the right human words, but then he plops the last five tomatoes on the counter and disappears out the back door again.

Later they gnaw fragrant herby chicken from the bone and Dean slips a couple less seasoned scraps into Miracle’s waiting mouth. Cas mashes his roast potatoes with a fork on the plate. After Cas washes the dishes they watch some riotously funny, irreverent show about a dysfunctional family of televangelists until some youngblood hunter shows up on their doorstep bleeding profusely out of a gash in their side, which is when their peaceful night in goes completely sideways.

At two past midnight, Jayce-who-knows-Krissy moans on the plastic-coated emergency mattress, barely conscious but stable enough to see morning.

“Rinse off and get some sleep, buttercup,” Dean whispers as he pushes Cas toward the stairs, Miracle hot on their heels. “I’ll keep an eye on ‘em.”

“Alright,” Cas acquiesces without a fight, though they both wince when he hits the creaky step halfway up.

Dean stands at the kitchen sink scrubbing Jayce’s blood from under his fingernails when he realizes what he said not five minutes ago, and that Cas had looked at him a little extra long before he turned to disappear up the dark stairs. And yeah, despite the momentary embarrassment of saying the pet names, Dean is kind of having fun.

Anyway, Cas hasn’t been outright protesting. Were he to though? Too fucking bad. If Cas got to dump his feelings on Dean and then traumatized him by fucking dying for him, then Dean gets to call him stupid names for the rest of their lives. Makes perfect sense to him. A man in no-longer-requited love should be allowed these teeny, teasing displays of sincere affection. It’s definitely preferable to martyring yourself at the end of the world, since there’s no more end of the world waiting (he hopes and prays to Jack). And it’s not like calling Cas a couple of pet names truly hurts anyone; it’s about the equivalent of calling him “huggy-bear” or “son of a bitch” or “Cas”—just with a couple of extra, barely perceptible feelings.

So Dean says, “G’night, dollface, don’t wake me up ‘till at least noon unless someone’s dying,” as he passes Cas on the stairs in the morning when they trade places playing nurse to Jayce. If Cas whips around to look at him because of it, that’s none of Dean’s goddamn business because the sweet siren song of his bed is less than ten steps away.

They say it takes three weeks to make a habit. This one takes less than three days to make itself at home in Dean’s brain.

He calls Cas “stud” to thank him for bringing the right wrench. Then he says, “Slow your roll there, hot stuff,” when Cas shovels burning hot lasagna into his mouth and chokes. He asks, “Sleep well, dreamboat?” one morning when Cas rolls into the kitchen with half his hair sticking up and pillow lines creased deep on his face. “Puddin’” earns him a baffled look, but maybe that’s because he said it while they were eating blackberry pie. He even manages to whisper, “Go to bed, dove,” into Cas’s ear after he falls asleep on the couch one night, which is a little silly when Dean thinks back to it, but he only said it because Cas had looked like a nesting bird with the blankets and pillows tucked around him like that. Makes total sense.

Okay, maybe “sweet cheeks” is pushing it, but in Dean’s defense Cas does have a very nice set of cheeks. No, no, up top, like on his face. Cas’s got cheekbones that have rounded out a little over the years, not as high and round as Dean’s but they sit nice and even with the sharp curve of his jaw. Dean likes the way they go bronze under the warm summer sun when Cas forgets his hat in the kitchen midday.

Unfortunately, one of those cheeks is bleeding from an unfortunate run-in with a new brand of razor. Dean came running when he heard the yelp because, well, what else was he gonna do?

“I’m fine, Dean,” Cas mutters darkly as he holds the wad of toilet paper up to his right cheek. He looks at the five-blade razor, sitting across the sink drain where he dropped it, like it killed his father or drank the last cup of coffee or something. “This damn thing just refuses to comply.”

“Lemme see,” Dean demands, holding Cas’s chin and shoulder. His hands are a little extra insistent when Cas sullenly tries to wrench out of his grasp though, gripping fast and tight to the half-shaved face.

“I was Heaven’s most skilled swordsman,” Cas hisses at the sink, “I could be bested by none but an archangel in a sword fight. I know my way around tools of war much more dangerous than some off-brand razor.”

The yellow light of the vanity light glints teasingly off blades one through four of the blasted thing and Dean swears that Cas would rain lightning down on the razor if he still had any grace left in him. But he doesn’t, and he’s being inordinately stubborn about the cut on his face so Dean has no choice.

Really. Not a single other choice.

“C’mon, sweet cheeks, show me the damage,” Dean coaxes, a little extra gruff as he jerks Cas’s glowering chin toward him.

It has the intended effect because immediately Cas’s hand drops, mouth falling half-open in surprise. The toilet paper sticks to the bleeding wound until Dean peels it back. It’s not that bad, just a little nick an inch from his lip. Even if it leaves a scar, Cas can let his stubble grow a little and no one will be able to tell.

“Eh, you’ll live,” Dean tells him. “Just a flesh wound.”

From here, Dean can indulge in all of the fine details of Cas’s face, like the left eyebrow that grows a little wilder than the right one. The ever-present tired furrows under his eyes still sit deep and dark when the light flows over them, but they’re softer now, feathery lines extending off them from years of emoting in ways an angel was never meant for. These wrinkles, much like the fuller cheeks and the flecks of grey feathering at Cas’s temples, make Dean want to chew on a handful of rusty screws. Like, in the best possible, most euphoric way.

Dean pats Cas on the cheek once, twice, all gentle-like, then returns the toilet paper to the barely-bleeding cut. “We’ll get the brand name ones next time, save your pretty face from further injury.”

Then he turns and walks out of the bathroom. He stretches out on the couch with some mass market pulpy western novel he picked up at the thrift store. And he does not panic because he might be really, truly fucked if just calling Cas by some saccharine terms of endearment makes his heart tap dance something wild in his chest.

As in all things, Dean gets ballsy when he thinks he’s getting away with it.

Cas must get used to the nicknames because he reacts less and less when Dean throws them out. So Dean keeps on keepin’ on, using dorky-sounding, saccharine words to replace the usual rat-a-tat beat of “Cas” that dots his speech.

Cas rolls his eyes at “sugar bean,” which, fair; it was early and Dean was trying to make a joke when he scraped the bottom of the coffee tin, but neither of them were caffeinated enough to make it work. “Chickadee” makes Cas look up from where they’re sewing up some poor bastard who had a run-in with a werewolf and swing his head around at the trees and the roof of the house, and when Dean asks him what the hell he’s doing, Cas just says, “There are no chickadees here, Dean,” and the kid they’re patching up throws up on the nice cushions that Dean bought for the porch swing.

“Cupcake” he says with a wink that sends Cas’s eyebrows shooting to his forehead, but that might also be because when Dean rolled out from under some hunter’s car, he was bleeding from the forehead from dropping the wrench on his head. “Good night, gorgeous” results in a strange huff of laughter from around Cas’s toothbrush, eyes determinedly not meeting Dean’s in the mirror of their shared bathroom where Dean is definitely, definitely not surreptitiously eyeing Cas’s farmer tan and pale, bare chest. “Hottie” makes him sound like a swooning teenybopper so that gets nixed after one use, an offhand “ducky” gets absolutely no reaction (though Sam splutters through a mouthful of beer over Facetime and Dean immediately hangs up), and “angel”—well that one just makes Cas look a little sad.

Dean loses track after a while. And why wouldn’t he? He says whatever the hell comes to mind when he looks at Cas since this is the only thing he gets now, because Dean has not brought up The Deal and Cas has not brought up The Goodbye and that means that they’re both completely past those catastrophic events. Right? Right.

Which is why no one can blame him when he forgets that this way of addressing Cas, like the house, is a new status quo. You do anything for six weeks straight and it’ll make a home in your body, natural as breathing.

August hits and summer is truly, undeniably still raging. Dean and Cas meet Sam and Eileen at the Topeka farmer’s market one weekend. Very unsurprisingly Dean ends up laden down with bags of random produce, Eileen having pronounced him the bag bitch for the day, so it is with canvas and hemp bags digging into his shoulders and the crook of his arm that he spies a stand stacked high with peaches, nectarines, and plums.

While Dean is hefting stone fruit in his hands, Cas wanders over with a basket of ripe strawberries as fragrant as candy and shocking crimson.

“Dean, you have to try these,” he insists, breathless with delight.

There’s a strawberry seed between his front teeth. Cas must have done a little enthusiastic snacking right there at the stall where he bought them, Dean imagines, and yes, he feels miffed to have missed it. Instead he hands the bag of peaches to the stall attendant for weighing, and while they do some quick math behind the counter he plucks a strawberry from the basket and chomps right down.

“Holy shit,” he mumbles. The fruit gives easily between his teeth, dripping sweet juice between his incisors. This is the best strawberry he’s ever eaten. Also, it might be the first strawberry he’s eaten in years, unless you count those little packets of diner jam. Either way, it’s awesome.

Cas beams at the expression on his face and Dean smiles back.

The woman manning the calculator and money box says, “Sir, your total comes to eighteen dollars,” and Dean remembers the peaches.

“Hold on, sweetheart,” Dean replies, hands going to his pockets. He has cash tucked in his wallet, but between the bags hanging from his arms, the surprisingly tight pockets of these jeans (why, why, why did he choose these?), and the half-eaten strawberry pinched between his fingers, reaching the billfold across his body causes a lot of fumbling.

“I’ve got it,” Cas tells him, and in a blink he’s holding a rumpled twenty out to the woman. “Keep the change.”

“Appreciate it!” she chirps. Then she holds the bag of peaches out to Cas instead of Dean.

“Thanks, you’re a peach,” Dean grins as Cas takes the bag. But Cas must not hear it, or it doesn’t register, because his fingers don’t quiver when they wrap around the plastic.

“He’s a what?” Sam’s voice booms from behind them.

His little brother has the absolute worst goddamn timing, Dean decides when he feels his face heat up. He whirls around anyway, meeting Sam’s amused expression with what he hopes is cool nonchalance.

“I’m making peach pie,” Dean answers. “And I think I got sunburnt.”

“Cool,” Sam replies, and from the amusement dancing in his eyes and the grin fighting to stay hidden at the twitchy corner of his mouth, he is absolutely not buying it. “I bet Cas will love that.”

“You’re damn right he will,” Dean shoots back, glaring.

Cas tilts his head at both of them in that puzzled way, clearly wondering what strange communication the brothers are doing with their faces. He must decide to ignore it, because he comments to Sam, “Dean bought a lot of peaches,” as he pulls one of the canvas totes slung on Dean’s shoulders open to deposit the fruit.

Dean’s arm jerks under the extra weight. It’s not a big deal.

“Right, so Eileen and I are going to head home,” Sam tells them, jerking his thumb at where Eileen is idly thumbing at some potted herbs a few stalls over. “Hand me our stuff.” In one swift motion Sam pulls all the bags from Dean’s right arm, leaving him profoundly unbalanced. “We’ll see you in a couple days?”

“Oh yes, the barbeque.” Dean doesn’t need to look to know that Cas’s face has lit up at the reminder. But he turns his head to see the expression anyway. “Yes, we’re looking forward to it.”

“Seeya, Sammy.” Dean waves his free hand to bid his brother farewell.

Sam opts for hugs instead, which is unusual at first; he squeezes an arm loosely over Cas’s shoulders and then leans into wrap his arm around Dean’s neck, smirking like he’s got Dean’s number.

So Dean hisses, “Not a fucking word,” into his little brother’s ear.

“Tried ‘pookie’ yet?” Sam whispers back. And then he slips out of Dean’s reach with that smug shit-eating grin stretching across his face. “Use some aloe vera for the burn,” he suggests in a normal volume. “Heard it’ll help with the chafing.”

“Bitch,” Dean snipes.

Sam just laughs and throws a “Bye, jerk!” over his shoulder, tossing his hair like he’s in a goddamn shampoo commercial.

And Cas states, like he’s commenting on the weather, “Sunburns are not caused by friction.” Then he leans in to peer more closely at Dean’s face, assesses the skin on his cheeks. His damp strawberry breath ghosts over Dean’s ear in a way that definitely does not send a shiver down his spine. “But you do look somewhat red.”

Dean takes a deep breath. “Then let’s go pick up some aloe, babe.”

He feels ever so sun-drunk and floaty while they make their way back to the car.

They get the aloe vera gel, a big tube of it because Cas keeps forgetting his hat and the sun beats down harder and brighter as the summer rolls by, and more sunblock because now that Cas is human, he has to worry about things like melanomas. They also drop by the big budget supermarket to stock up on junk food and meat, because while Dean is thoroughly enjoying the delicious fruits (okay, mostly vegetables) of Cas’s labor, a man cannot survive on rabbit food alone.

With Sam whispering “pookie, pookie, pookie” looping in his hear, Dean trawls up and down the snack aisle looking for those cement-like fudge brownies with the rainbow sprinkles. He’s a man on a mission, eyes sharp with the single-minded focus of a predator looking for very specific prey. He sent Cas to the other end of the aisle to search, because he’s not leaving here without his damn brownie bricks.

He still hears it loud and clear when Cas says, “Oh.”

When Dean turns his head Cas holds out a box of brand name prepackaged honeybuns, the nostalgic kind with the little cartoon girl in the corner and ugly font proclaiming that this is a “BIG BOX” even though Dean is pretty sure they’re getting smaller year by year.

Dean grunts because these are not the pastries he’s looking for and starts to turn back around. “You want ‘em, put ‘em in the cart.” But Cas doesn’t move to put box back on the shelf or chuck it into the cart, doesn’t even tilt his head like he needs time to consider every single ingredient on the back, so Dean pauses mid-swivel.

Cas just stands there shock still, stares down at the box, eyes calculating and—worryingly confused? He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at Dean, just keeps his eyes fixed on the big ugly brown font on the box, reading the name over and over again.

“What does it all mean?” Cas mutters.

Huh. Dean makes his way down the aisle until he’s mere inches from his frozen friend. “Hello?” he prompts, waving a hand under Cas’s nose. “You with me? Earth to Cas.”

Those bright blue eyes snap up to stare straight at him. And oops, Dean definitely stopped a little too close when he approached. “You called me ‘Cas,’” Cas croaks, lips turning downward and oh, his brow dips and a crease forms between his eyebrows too. He’s upset. Why is he upset?

Dean shuffles back a little. “Uh, yeah, that’s your name?”

Cas glowers at him, practically white-knuckled with how hard he’s squeezing the flimsy box. The edges of it buckle in his grip, plastic crinkling audible through the cardboard.

“You okay?” Dean tries again. “Y’know Cas, if you mangle that box any more, we’re going to have to buy it—”

He doesn’t expect the snarl that drips from Cas’s scowling mouth. “I am never going to understand you, you infuriating man.”

Dean has no idea what’s going on. “What the hell, Cas?” He fires the question off and it sounds angrier than he means it to, but once the words are in the air he can’t take them back to round them at the edges.

“I’ll be by the car,” is the only answer he gets before Cas stomps past him, all but slamming the now-misshapen box of pastries into their cart before he rounds out of the snack aisle.

Dean watches him go, mouth agape. A woman inches past him with her cart, looking apologetic as she does, so Dean picks his jaw up from the floor and very calmly puts the Honeybuns back on the shelf and finds his overprocessed brownies where he and Cas would have met in the middle. Then he stocks up on microwave popcorn and those awful organic cassava chips Cas likes, grabs a couple packs of nicer steaks, and checks out while making pleasant small talk with the cashier.

True to his word, Cas is leaning against the passenger door of the Impala when Dean exits into the parking lot, just a tiny figure at the far end where Dean parked it. When he gets closer Dean can tell that Cas’s arms are crossed and that one of his feet is tapping at the ground, and when his facial features come into view, Dean sees the clench of that jaw and the furrow of that brow, his expression a guerilla thunderstorm unapologetically darkening the clear skies.

It's been a good day between the farmer’s market and seeing Sam and Eileen, and now Cas has decided to rain all over the parade. Dean says as much as he pops the trunk and unloads the bags, asks, “What’s gotten your goddamn panties in a twist?”

“Don’t start,” Cas snaps, sharp and jagged. He very pointedly does not once look at Dean while he climbs into the passenger seat.

Fine. Dean doesn’t.

He wheels the shopping cart to the corral like an upstanding citizen, only slams the door shut a little harder than usual, and drives the entire hour back to their little blue farmhouse in complete silence. They unload the groceries without looking at each other and Cas disappears into his garden without a word, hatless and sunblock-less.

So here we are, Dean standing over the sink with the bag of peaches.

The fruit is warm in his palms from the heat of the summer sun seeping through the windows of the Impala, safely tucked into the footwell of the backseat with the rest of their farmers market haul. He turns the faucet on and cold water rushes over the fruit, beading on the fuzzy skins like the peaches are resisting their bath. So he scrubs them over with his hands, careful not to press bruises into the delicate fruits as he washes each one and stacks them in the waiting colander. And then he husks the corn and scrubs the dirt from the baby beets and hulls the peas and gives Cas’s strawberries a nice rinse while he’s at it.

By the time he finishes, his hands are numb from the cold and there is a giant pile of produce on the counter next to him. All things that Cas isn’t growing in his garden, either because he forgot or there wasn’t space. Dean had listened to him at the market harping on about the wonderful properties of okra, vowing to certainly plant a patch next year instead of his overabundant rows of zucchini.

Every inch of Dean wants to just chuck the vegetables in the fridge and be done with today.

Except it’s barely two in the afternoon and his stomach finally reminds him that they skipped lunch.

“Damn it,” Dean breathes, scrubbing a hand through his hair. Irritation and anxiety simmer in his chest, the kind of low dark dismay that he thought he’d mostly bid goodbye to when Cas returned to Earth. A year ago he would have disappeared into his room with a bottle of cheap whiskey and blasted Black Sabbath until he fell asleep, and woken up with a hangover that outweighed his annoyance.

But he vowed when Cas came back that he would handle things differently, that he would try to confront instead of deny, that he would nut up and be a better friend (and maybe, maybe, if Cas still felt that way towards him, something more, some foolish part of him whispered in the dead of night, when Dean would stay up thinking about these things).

So Dean makes two sandwiches with the overpriced pain de mie that Cas insisted on buying from the bakery stand because he’s not (that much of) an asshole. Bread, a smear of the good mayo, the nice ham from the deli, Swiss cheese, greens and shaved fennel from a leftover salad. He grabs the two biggest peaches and rubs them dry, then stacks the sandwiches on a plate and cradles the peaches in the crook of his arm before he makes his way out the back door, squinting in the bright afternoon sun.

Christ, it’s hot. Dean twists his head around the garden. He spots Cas hiding behind some overgrown (flourishing, thank you very much) bean poles, a hatless riot of dark hair barely visible above the tops of the plants.

He weaves his way between the neat aisles of vegetables, each and every one of them abundant with green leaves and stems. The sunflowers are looking worse for the wear, their heads drooping under the darkening seeds. The tomato plants are starting to bend under the weight of their fruit too, and the goddamn zucchini are definitely out of control.

It’s a beautiful, productive, well-kept garden on a big parcel of land outside a quaint home with big windows. Cas should be out-of-this-world pleased with himself; he should be happy, Dean thinks. But no, instead he’s moping, butt planted on the wooden edge of the raised garden bed with Miracle lying between his legs, stroking his hands over and over through the long fur on the dog’s back, mumbling to himself.

“—opaque motivations. Do you understand the reasoning, Miracle? You know, your canine language has incredible grammatical complexity but even then, I used to revel in its clarity of meaning when—well, when I could still understand it.”

Never mind, the guy’s talking to the dog. Dean inches closer.

“Each year I spend on this planet I feel more attuned to this humor and yet I’m still missing the punchline here,” Cas sighs as he scratches behind Miracle’s ears, back muscles shifting under the thin blue t-shirt that looks oh so lovely on him. “We could help each other out. I could sneak you extra chicken when Dean’s not looking and you could tell me what he—”

Dean’s toe catches on one of the lavender pots and the scraping sound makes both Miracle and Cas’s heads swivel around.

“Uh,” Dean says. Cas stares. Miracle leaps up and rushes his legs because he smells ham and Dean tries very hard not to trip over the excited dog as he keeps making his way forward. “Down, boy, no. This is human lunch, c’mon!”

“Hello, Dean,” Cas mumbles, hands dropping between his legs. A normal person would avert their eyes here; Cas just stares straight on at him, gaze brighter than the fucking summer sun.

“Thought you might be hungry since we missed lunch.” Dean nudges Miracle out of the way and plops down next to Cas, where there’s just enough shade behind the wall of winding bean plants curling up their poles to make sitting in the heat more comfortable. He pulls one of the peaches from the crook of his elbow and buffs it on his shirt before offering it to Cas.

Cas takes it with a nod. “Thanks.”

No smile though, Dean notes as he balances the plate on his knees. Miracle sniffs at the other peach when he sets it on the ledge and well, he’s been a good boy keeping a mopey Cas company so Dean rewards him by throwing a sliver of ham across the yard.

And then he picks up his sandwich, turns his head toward Cas, and holds the plate out. Cas plucks it from his fingers, gaze dropping to his lap when he turns back.

Dean is pretty sure of two things. One, that Cas needs to wear his hat and-slash-or the sunblock, because the bridge of his nose is looking a little too red for comfort. Two, if he doesn’t say anything then they’re going right back to their old routine of scooting around each other and finally going back to business as usual once the conflict simmers down, and then things are fine until the whole cycle inevitably repeats again, and Dean absolutely cannot have that.

So he says, “Talk to me, Cas,” and watches Cas hides the flinch by biting into his sandwich. And he waits, watches the achingly slow chew of Cas’s jaw while he holds his own sandwich limply in one hand.

Miracle pops back up between them. Dean chucks more ham beyond the tomato plants and watches Miracle scramble around the planters.

“Ham isn’t good for dogs.”

Dean looks at him, really glares into Cas’s eyes with the most what-the-fuck expression he can arrange his face into on short notice. “Okay, well you giving me the silent treatment for no reason ain’t good for me.”

“Your constant stream of jokes isn’t good for me,” is the clipped response.

This is all so friggin' baffling. “What the hell does that mean? I haven’t been telling you jokes.”

The look Cas gives him could freeze Mt. Vesuvius. Too bad he wasn’t pissed at Dean when Pompeii went down. “You,” Cas grits out, “have made me the butt of your jokes for six weeks and it is very hard to enjoy your special brand of humor because I don’t know what the punchline is.”

Six weeks? Dean blinks.

Cas turns away and tears into his sandwich with a particular savagery that makes Dean think he might have been raised in a barn. Or maybe he’s just really, really pissed at Dean for—for—

“Dude, are you mad because I called you a couple nicknames?” he asks, and oops, that’s either exactly right or exactly wrong because Cas’s jaw works harder at the mouthful of bread and meat between his teeth.

“It wasn’t a couple, Dean,” Cas shoots back bitter and sharp after he swallows. He doesn’t look at Dean. “Eighteen different ones.”

Miracle gleefully turns right around when Dean throws more ham.

“Cas is a nickname,” Dean counters, fingers squeezing around his increasingly thin sandwich.

“But it’s a nickname that makes sense for us!” Cas roars back. And when he looks at Dean again, his eyes flash with a challenge—just try me, Dean, the sheen of those baby blues threatens.

Dean takes a deep breath. He counts to four on the inhale, lets it out one-two-three-four-five-six, stands and lobs the entire sandwich as far as he can across their yard when Miracle’s golden head peeks back around.

“Sorry you don’t like the nicknames,” Dean tries, calm as he can when he sits back down.

“That’s the problem,” Cas grumbles around another resentful mouthful.

“What is?”

“I enjoyed them,” says Cas in a voice like the crunch of broken glass. He puts the sandwich back down on the plate and puts the entire thing on the dirt of the garden bed behind them. “I really—they pleased me greatly.”

Dean doesn’t understand. “Then what’s with the fuckin’ attitude?”

Cas rests his elbows on his knees, heavy on the worn denim stretched over his thighs, and presses his face into his upturned hands.

Dean waits. He also turns around and snatches the rest of Cas’s sandwich, because his became the sacrificial lamb of the day. It’s a damn good sandwich. The bread is soft and pillowy, a little nutty, and the fennel isn’t too overbearing with the salty-sweet ham. Miracle ought to know just how good he has it.

When Cas finally lifts his head, he stares across the garden to where the eggplants have finally started turning a deep purple.

“What about me reminds you of nutritionally void prepackaged junk food cakes?” he asks, voice quiet and dry.

Dean blinks. “What the hell are you talking ‘bout?”

“The Honeybuns,” Cas replies, dropping his face in his hands again. “Tell me I share with them a shade of beige, or that they betrayed your trust on multiple occasions, or that you like to watch inaccurate cowboy movies with them.”

What? Cas must be high, Dean decides, or delirious from the sun. “You feeling okay, man?” He lifts a hand and presses the back of it against Cas’s neck, feels how the overgrown hair there curls sweat-damp against the collar of his t-shirt.

Cas jerks away from his touch. “Dean.”

“Uh,” he shakes his head and pulls his hand back. No fever. “Like, the Honeybuns from the store?”

Cas nods, still hunched over, jaw tight with frustration.

“You don’t really remind me of ‘em,” Dean answers, which is true. “Yeah, I guess you’ve got a pretty good tan goin’ on, but what’s with the rest of that?”

A beat, and Cas heaves a sigh like Dean is absolutely not getting what he’s throwing down, which is also true. Lotta truths coming out of the woodwork today, Dean supposes; someone should throw a parade. Dean and Cas tell the truth! Bring out the marching band! But then Cas is talking again so he shoves the thought aside.

“You called me ‘honeybun’ in the kitchen in June.” Another true statement.

“Yeah.”

“In the store today,” Cas begins, and he finally lifts his head and squints at Dean again, “I saw the box and realized that I hadn’t known what a honeybun was until that point. I had assumed, of course, that it was a pastry of some sort, but seeing that package illuminated the truth of the matter: you’ve been teasing me the entire time.”

“I haven’t been teasing you,” Dean says, and as lame as it sounds, it’s true. Or, well— “No more than usual.” Sure, he pokes fun at Cas as often as the sun goes ‘round, probably more, but the stupid pet names weren’t a part of that; they were for Dean—lovesick, dumbass Dean.

The corners of Cas’s mouth twitch. “It was so stupid of me. The snacks and I have nothing in common and it reminded me that you haven’t been calling me these nicknames because you think of me like that. You humans pick up these terms from boxes and television and eavesdropped conversations in diners, and then you repeat them in daily conversation without much thought. I’ve seen you call women ‘sweetheart’ and ‘darling’ and I’m fairly certain you were not trying to convey romantic affection to them.”

“Cas,” Dean begins, but Cas just goes on and he can’t get a word in edgewise.

“Yet I liked when you called me silly things like ‘sugar bean’ and ‘doll face’ because it felt good, Dean, and I could pretend for a moment that we had something here, in this house and life we share. Then you called me ‘Cas’ again in the supermarket like before and that gossamer fantasy dissolved in front of me. I had promised not to want like this when I came back, to never chase after what I can’t have, but humanity has made me emotional and selfish and prone to delusion.”

Despite all of Dean’s compartmentalizing, that night comes rushing back. The one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have, Cas had said, and then he dropped the bomb and pushed Dean aside and got swallowed right up before Dean could make heads or tails of it all.

“Cas,” The name leaks from his lips like air from a deflated balloon. He clears his throat and tries again. “Cas.”

“I know I’m being foolish and selfish,” Cas tells him, earnest and apologetic. “I’m sorry, Dean, for purposely misinterpreting what you—”

Dean finally cuts him off because clearly the conversation has swung a left from plain truths to one of their Very Classic Misunderstandings. Sure, half (more than half, probably) of this is definitely his fault, but hey, what are second chances for if not to course-correct before things veer off into chaos? He asks, “Castiel. Cas. Buddy. Dude, babe, darling, honey bunches of oats, sweetheart, love of my life, are you fucking kidding me, you stupid-ass angel?”

Cas frowns and furrows his brow at Dean, pure reflex to the snide appellation. “That’s not very nice,” he chides.

Dean just looks at him and waits.

And then Cas says, with eyes the size of saucers, “Wait, what.”

So Dean puts a hand on Cas’s shoulder, leans in a little, and stares him right in the eye. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to go. You and me are gonna eat these very expensive farmer’s market peaches. Then we are going to go inside and put some aloe on you because you’re definitely sunburnt, and maybe me because I’m fucking roasting out here.”

Ostensibly to ruin the plan, Cas opens his mouth.

Dean shushes him with a shake of his head and a wag of his finger. “Shut up. Now, once we are sufficiently aloe-ed up, we are gonna sit at the table and I’m gonna tell you that I’m in love with you and you’re gonna tell me if you still love me, and then we can figure out what to do from there. Capisce?”

Cas capisces and closes his mouth.

They eat the sun-warm peaches bent forward at the waist so when juice dribbles down their chins, it doesn’t fall on their jeans. Dean ignores the little pleased sound that Cas makes after the first bite and slurps at his peach a little extra obnoxiously because it’s his land, he can do what he wants, thank you very much. Cas holds his hand out for Dean’s peach pit and tucks it into his pocket wordlessly, and Dean feels sure he’s going to be finding that rattling around in the dryer next week.

When they make their way back to the house, they find Miracle curled up in the shadiest patch of porch, belly full and satisfied as he takes one of his many afternoon naps. He yawns and flaps his tail a little when they pass, but doesn’t follow them inside.

The aloe vera sits on the kitchen counter with the sunblock. Cas hisses a little when Dean smears the stuff over the bright red bridge of his nose and forehead, and Dean’s got some sunburn on the back of his neck that the cold gel feels amazing on. Or maybe it’s Cas’s hands on his neck, rubbing against the sensitive skin there. Put a pin in that; they can revisit it later.

And then comes the Talk.

“So,” Dean begins, drumming his fingers on the table, the sharp corner of it separating them. He swallows once, twice; his mouth feels dry from the heat and the peach barely quenched his thirst.

Funny how out there, all of their shit laid bare in the sun, it had been so easy to quote his future self with intent of setting things right. But the plain, unadorned “I love you” and “I’m in love with you” catch in his throat, thick and gooey and never meant to see the light of day.

Cas, for all he complained about how humanity makes him emotional, apparently holds no such reservations. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Okay, two can play at that game. “Why didn’t you?”

Again Cas shoots him the kind of long-suffering look that Dean has seen a thousand times. “Because I’d already said my piece.”

“You didn’t think it was worth revisiting?”

“No, Dean,” Cas frowns—no, aches with the memory. “I thought, all this time, that you would never reciprocate. I wanted it to fade into the background as just another bad memory, just one more painful goodbye to be forgotten.”

The heat of rage bubbles up in Dean’s throat at that, the galling assumption that he would ever forget. But he doesn’t shout, he doesn’t push anything over, he doesn’t slam his fists on the table. He curls his fingers inward and lets his nails bite into his palm. “I have not,” he begins, and makes sure he’s got Cas’s full attention for this, “forgotten a single fuckin’ farewell of yours.”

Cas averts his eyes, the coward; he has the nerve to look ashamed. Dean reaches forward and grabs his chin, the scratch of stubble rough under the pads of his fingers, jerks that face back so Cas has to look at him, to see clearly for the first time what Dean lays out in front of them.

“All of them, Cas. Every time I thought it’d be the last time I saw you? Lives right up here, bright as day,” he insists, tapping at his temple with his free hand. “From that fight we had in the Beautiful Room, then your suicide mission against Raphael, all the way to—to you getting stabbed by April, and at the lake house where Jack was born, and then again when you left us after Rowena died and I was so goddamn pissed at you. God, Cas, I remember wrapping you up in old curtains and burning you on the pyre with Kelly and putting your ashes in that field with the blackberry vine and I remember praying to you in Purgatory before the rift closed because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t forgive you.”

Cas doesn’t say anything. He gazes at Dean with those shining eyes, bright and electric and magnetic, just like they were that night when Castiel walked into that barn, that night Castiel beat him half to death in the alley, that moment that Dean found him in Purgatory by the lake.

“So how the hell could I ever forget your big, blow-out goodbye?” Dean demands, because he can’t make the logic work in his brain, because in retrospect this entire thing has been so effing transparent that he’s shocked Sam didn’t kick him in the nuts even once between 2015 and 2020.

“You knew then,” Cas murmurs, and the movement of his jaw between Dean’s fingers stutters up and down. “You know and have known since then.”

“No, because then you came back,” Dean supplies, and there’s a hand at his elbow, gripping around the joint with calloused fingers.

“I came back but nothing had changed.”

So this is where they diverge. Dean feels like he’s discovered the goddamn origin of being or something. He can’t help the way his fingers squeeze Cas’s jaw. “Everything changed, Cas. You came back human and mostly unconscious and covered in goo—”

A hand lands on his mouth and they’re there, sitting at the table with their hands on each other’s faces, leaned in with a scant foot between them, eleven and a half inches of distance that makes Dean suck in a breath. They’ve been closer, stared more intently into each other’s eyes because it was the fuckin' end of the world or something, but this brand new awareness sparks a new heat in Dean’s stomach.

“And I still loved you,” Cas tells him, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Dean tracks the way his dry lips part and yeah, yeah, it should have been the most obvious thing, but Cas hadn’t changed a bit in the way he looked at Dean, and all the actual differences, like the ease with which he startled and the flush of red that would hit his cheeks, had been easily swept away with Cas’s new humanity. “And I still do.”

Dean is very well aware now, in that twenty-twenty thing of beautiful and regrettable clarity called hindsight, that nothing had changed and that Cas had still loved him. But hey, no matter how many times someone stops the apocalypse and saves the world, an emotionally stunted asshole is entitled to be an emotionally stunted asshole.

So Dean breathes from behind Cas’s fingers, “Fair ‘nough, but I still wish you had told me again when you got back, because I’m pretty damn dumb, if you hadn’t noticed.”

And Cas laughs, throws his head back enough that Dean’s fingers slip, and those fingers curve from his mouth to his cheek and behind his ear, down the slope of his neck where they rubbed aloe vera gel not fifteen minutes ago. “If I had known that repeating myself was all it would take, then I would have said it the moment I regained consciousness in your room.”

Perhaps this should be more of a surprise, but they’ve danced around the sun so many times with their Big Misunderstandings that the entire thing feels rather silly to Dean. Between four or five apocalypses, what’s a slip like this?

“Just a couple of dumbasses then,” he says instead of all that, because it’s far simpler.

Cas’s eyes gleam. “Should I be using ‘dumbass’ as a term of endearment for you?”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Dean retorts, and somehow they’ve gotten so goddamn close that even the light huffs of air that escape Cas’s nose in a chuckle tickle across his upper lip.

“Alright,” Cas acquiesces, hand tugging Dean in another scant inch. “What would you like me to call you?”

What the hell, Dean’s last brain cell supplies, because Cas’s face shines with summer sunshine and clean green aloe and his chin jumps and twitches as Dean worries his thumb across the dip at the tip there, and Dean tugs and Cas comes forward with the pull of his hand.

Dry and salty-sweet, a bloom of the summer. Cas’s upper lip smells of peaches and saliva. Dean is absolutely going to ruin the moment, but the joke is worth all that and more.

“You can call me Meat Man,” Dean murmurs against Cas’s mouth.

“No,” Cas growls back, the hand looped around Dean’s neck squeezing there tight while Cas pulls away, like he’s afraid that Dean will up and disappear from his hands if he doesn’t hold on.

“C’mon, pookie,” Dean cajoles; he puts his best sly grin on, looking at Cas through his eyelashes, as is customary when flirting. “You know you want to say it.”

As with all things, he gets carried away when he thinks he’s getting away with it.

“Dean,” Cas whispers instead, “my love.”

Turns out, being on the receiving end of an affectionate pet name is, well, pretty damn embarrassing if the flush that rises to Dean’s cheeks is evidence. “My love” ain’t even that stupid compared to some of the shit that’s come out of Dean’s mouth in the last six weeks; hell, it could classified more as fact than a term of endearment with the way Cas looks at him (has looked at him, and wow, Dean is a certified, grade-A dumbass for thinking even once that Cas changed his mind).

To hide the fluster because no fair, Cas has had weeks to get used to these stupid nicknames and this is Dean’s first turn ‘round the block, Dean inches forward to kiss that smiling mouth again, savoring the tremble of Cas’s jaw under his fingertips. He doesn’t even have to lead, just lets Cas move their lips together and curl his fingers into the scruff of hair at the bottom of Dean’s head, but he does let out a little moan when the hot damp tip of Cas’s tongue darts out to flick ever so lightly against his bottom lip.

Seems like they have a lot of lost time to make up for.

“Alright, loverboy,” he murmurs when Cas licks placidly into his mouth, the hand at the back of his neck squeezing warm and tight in all the right ways. “Slow your roll.”

Cas pulls back, surprise dancing in those baby blues. “Sorry, was that—”

“No, it’s great,” Dean reassures him, sliding his hand down over Cas’s chest to press firmly over his sternum, feeling the rapid pitter-patter of that very excited human heart drum under his fingers. “Two things, though, before this gets any hotter or heavier.”

“Anything.”

“One, just in case you missed it the first time, I’m in love with you,” Dean declares, grinning at the spark of joy that leaps through Cas’s eyes at that. “Really. You’re it for me, Cas.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Dean,” Cas murmurs, one of those sun-bronzed hands slipping over Dean’s wrist to lay over where Dean’s palm is spread over his chest. “What’s number two?”

“If I catch you gardening without your fuckin’ hat on again, sunshine, this fine ass is off limits for twenty-four hours.”

“But—” Cas starts to protest. To make his point, Dean untangles their hands and presses his fingers against the sunburn blooming across Cas’s cheek and gives Cas a look when the pressure results in a wince.

“No buts.”

Cas catches Dean’s hand and presses it to his mouth, soft and plush against each of Dean’s fingertips. “Alright, my love. Deal.”

And that’s that. A man could get used to this, living in this cozy blue farmhouse with his best friend (now with an asterisk) and a flourishing garden and a spoiled dog, Dean thinks as he tucks an arm around Cas’s waist and pulls him close.

He also has the passing thought that he could probably get away with calling Cas “homeskillet” if he convinces Cas it means he’s hot.

Maybe next time.