"Cas…could you change back for me?" Dean asked, "Back to before you got old, I mean."
Dean lay in a comfortable bed. He was tired. So tired. Eighty years was far too long for anyone to be alive, as far as he was concerned. Dean missed his brother, and his mother and father. He missed walking without an effort, and being able to pin Castiel to a mattress and have his way with him. Dean was tired, and if not for that selfsame angel that sat beside him now, he would have most likely gone senile years ago. It was almost time, and Dean was more than ready.
"I have been old for as long as we've known each other," Cas asserted with a half smile and a furrowed brow.
"Yeah, but this," Dean indicated the angel's silver hair, and the deep etched wrinkles that lined his face, "This is just another set of clothes for you. It's not real."
"I wanted us to appear as equals," Castiel murmured, voice a whiskey rumble, the same as ever.
"And I'm damned grateful," Dean said, "But I'd like to see you as you were."
Cas nodded, and then it was as if Dean were flipping backwards through a photo album. He saw Castiel aged as if he were sixty, his back straight and strong even as his joints had begun to creak and ache, then shrink back to forty eight, the dark brown that Dean remembered so well threading back into his grey hair. The wrinkles retreated from his skin like water flowing uphill, remaining only as a whisper of crow's feet around his eyes as his skin lost its papery delicacy and grew warm and firm again. The man that sat on Dean's bed now would not be mistaken for a day over thirty five, unless you looked into his unfathomable blue eyes and saw the creature within that was ancient of days.
"Cas," Dean's breath was coming shallower, his voice weaker, but his aged face still cracked a wicked grin, "You always were one sexy son of a bitch."
He reached a hand to Castiel's face, fighting through the tremor in his bones. Cas guided him, leaning into Dean's touch, pressing his lips into Dean's palm. Dean let gravity pull him down, fingers tracing the edge of Castiel's jaw before resting on the curve of his neck, thumb ghosting across the hollow of his throat.
"My angel," Dean breathed, as his hand fell back to his chest.
"My righteous man." Castiel ran his soothing fingers, slim and strong as he remembered them, along Dean's brow, and Dean felt himself begin to drift.
"So…I'll see you in a few?" Dean asked him, his angel's face already growing hazy in his vision.
"Yes Dean, you will," Cas promised. Dean smiled, and relief flooded through his veins as he closed his eyes for the last time.