Written for a challenge by my beta, Miss Elucidation. Merry Christmas!
Finally, Dean spoke. "Cas, you have been sitting here for three hours. Either you invite me to the porn show in your head, or you tell me what's so interesting that you refused to help me and Sam pull my baby into the garage." The Impala, brave, beautiful soul that she was, had fought the good fight until the last drop of gas had burned from her tank, leaving Dean, Sam, and their resident angel stranded in the middle of a field, too far from civilization for any of their tastes.
Except for possibly Cas, who had been sitting on the side of the road since the car had ground to a stop, eyes trained on the apparently featureless field that stretched for miles on either side. When he'd been asked (by Sam), and then demanded (by Dean) to get off his feathery ass and stop mooning over the cow pats and help them push the car into town because it sure as fuck wasn't going to move itself, not since Cas made them pass up the last gas station because he smelled demons or whatever, Cas had simply shaken his head. When Dean had hooked his arms around Cas' shoulders and tried to haul him up, he found the angel absolutely immovable. He was a stubborn son of a bitch; Dean would give him that much.
So, Sam had pushed and Dean had steered, and then Sam had whined and Dean had pushed and Sam had steered until they made it all the way into a podunk little nothing of a town where the gas station was practically the town square and probably where all the coolest parties happened. They filled Dean's baby up as he patted her hood, apologizing under his breath and swearing the next time they needed gas, they were stopping even if Dean had to fight through the hordes of hell to get his baby her fuel.
When the brothers had returned, they had found Cas exactly where they left him; on his ass on the side of the road, staring at grass.
"There is no porn show in my head," Cas replied gravely.
"Then...what the hell are you looking at?" Dean asked, hands twitching towards the knife hidden-admittedly uncomfortably-in the waist band of his jeans.
"Grass growing," Cas said placidly.
"...You're serious." He turned to Sam. "He's serious, right?"
Sam gave a helpless kind of shrug. "Guess so." He folded himself into the backseat of the Impala, slamming the door shut and curling up. "Your turn to drive," Dean heard him say. "Haven't slept in..." Sam's voice trailed off, and Dean turned back to the motionless angel in the dirt.
"You can't see grass growing," Dean pointed out.
"I can," Cas said. He broke his tireless gaze to look up at Dean. "You can't even imagine what it looks like."
Dean shifted uncomfortably. "Nope, no I can't. Can't even imagine anything that boring, actually."
"It's not," Cas answered, breaking the look with Dean and focusing again on the grass. He sounded disappointed, and Dean wrinkled his nose, glaring at nothing in particular.
"Cas, look. I'm glad you think this stuff's neat. Appreciate the little things or whatever, that's great. But Sammy's passed out in the backseat, and frankly, he isn't the only one who needs a bed right now. I know it slips your mind sometimes, but the two of us, we gotta sleep, and I am running on nothing," Dean said, impatiently.
"When a cell splits," Cas said, unheeding of the unhappy scrape of Dean's boots against the pavement behind him, "It looks like glass shattering and growing."
"Uh, what?" Dean said.
"But it is not breaking. When most things split, the halves are lesser than the whole. When something grows, it becomes more than what it was, using only what it has been."
Oh my god, Dean thought. Someone gave him weed.
"It almost defies the laws of nature. Something coming from nothing...it is miraculous."
Maybe in brownies? Dean thought. Maybe it was that diner a few towns back. He'd thought that waitress was looking at Cas funny. Shoulda done something about that, 'cause now he had a mumbo-jumbo-spouting drugged out angel, and if Cas started seeing spiders everywhere, Dean did NOT want to be in the way when the smiting started.
"The leaves unfurl in the sunlight the way the banners of God's warriors did in the light of His presence," Cas said softly, and Dean thought maybe Cas wasn't high after all.
The hunter bent to tie his boot, which was already tied, and sat down next to Cas, thinking these jeans had already about seen the last fight they were ever gonna see anyway, since one more trip through the wash would probably shred 'em.
"He did have a presence, you know. A very long time ago," Cas said.
"You're...still looking, aren't you? Even after what Joshua said?" Dean asked, looking side long at the angel.
Cas met his gaze evenly. "I see His work in everything. There is nothing on this earth He has not created perfectly, and I am reminded of it every day."
Dean snorted. "This fucked up place? You said it yourself, Cas. There's nothing down here but pain."
"I was wrong," Cas said slowly. "There is a kind of beauty in the chaos. Everything in Heaven is perfect, sterile. The imperfections of this world…improve it. And you are the one who helped me see that."
"Me?" Dean asked, frowning incredulously. "How the hell do you figure that?"
"There was something here you wanted desperately to save. At first I thought it was only Sam-" He gestured towards the car where he was sleeping "-But there is more. You are tired, Dean, but you look at things with wonder. I wanted to see what you saw."
Dean laughed uncomfortably. "I think you're seein' a little more than what I see now, man. I don't sit and watch grass grow."
"Perhaps you should," Cas said.
"...Yeah. Maybe I should."
They did.
Epilogue
Sam woke up in the car four hours later unable to turn his head to the left and with one foot completely numb. He hobbled out of the car to find his moron brother and his moron brother's angel sitting in the dirt staring at grass, and he pitched an enormous bitch-fit, which eventually ended in Dean telling him he could just fucking walk to the nearest motel and Sam saying fine he WOULD and he was NOT going to share a room with Dean-the-chainsaw-snorer Winchester and that Dean could damn well pay for both rooms and Dean said that was fine because they shared money anyway, dumbass. They all got one room anyway, and Cas fell asleep face down on Dean's bed without taking any of his clothes off so Dean just went to sleep in one of those nasty hard chairs instead and let Sam take the first shower to say he was sorry and Sam let Dean play Back in Black for the nine hundred and fifty fifth time (without even complaining when Dean started singing along) to say he was sorry, and Cas continued to find that the most incredible things in the world he'd given up his own to fight for were the two humans in the front seats, but that when it came to heart-stopping beauty the miracle of growing grass really had nothing on Dean Winchester's eyes.