The kitchen was a disaster.
It wasn't a paper towel commercial kind of disaster, either. This was a dough stuck to the ceiling, black smoke coming from the over, singed eyebrow kind of disaster. In the middle of the carnage sat a frustrated Sam Winchester and a burnt-smelling Castiel, cookbook open between them.
"I told you already, Cas. We can't just dump all of the ingredients in at once. It's like a chemistry experiment." Sam ran a hand over his face, adding a new layer of flour and failed cooking to his skin. Cooking a meal was not a new concept to Sam, but baking a pie with help from Cas was definitely out of his league.
Cas looked at him blankly, still holding a wet cloth to where his eyebrows used to be. It had been his turn to remove their attempt at food creation from the oven when it had caught fire. There was still fire extinguisher foam stuck in Sam's hair.
"Sam, I think it would be wise if we took a break from this. We should clean up the kitchen before Dean returns home, as he will be displeased to see it in this state."
Shit. Dean would be pissed if he came home to Sam and Cas and a blown-up kitchen. When Cas was right, he was right.
Sam looked around him at the chaos that was his kitchen and sighed. The whole reason him and Cas were in here, trying to create something that could be considered food, was because of Dean.
Since Sam and Dean had settled into the bunker, the kitchen was Dean's domain. Sure, Sam was allowed in to make food a handful of times, but Dean needed order in his culinary sanctuary. He needed knives always put back in the knife holder, and an oven that didn't have five layers of something caked to the inside. Nine times out of ten, Sam was shooed from the kitchen if he even thought about cooking.
But Dean had been off lately. His corny one-liners were laced with cynicism. He drank more but went after chicks in bars less. He wouldn't even watch the game with Sam on Sundays anymore, choosing to sit in his room instead.
Sam was pretty sure Dean's distance was caused by his recent demonic activities. They had patched up the hole in the wall as soon as Dean was cured, but he still avoided that hallway like the plague. So Sam was trying to show Dean that he still cared about him, that there wasn't any bad blood between them.
Heh. Bad blood.
Sam laughed at his own joke as he stood in the middle of his self-created war zone. He opened his mouth to let Cas in on his joke, but shut it immediately as he realized that the graceless angel probably wouldn't find it that funny anyway. So he settled on giving Cas a defeated look, disheartenment filling his eyes as he sobered up with thoughts of his most recent failure.
"You're right. Let's just throw out this mess and forget about it. Dean will be home soon."
Sam looked around, trying to find a good place to start cleaning. There wasn't one. Suddenly his view of the kitchen was blocked by Castiel, staring at him with those big eyes and standing way too close.
"Dean will appreciate the effort. Perhaps we can buy a pie for him, or a magazine that he likes."
Cas' heart was in the right place, but a convenience store pie just wasn't the same. Plus, porn magazines were only given on special occasions, and it sure as Hell wasn't Dean's birthday. Sam couldn't help but smile at his angel friend, even if his personal space was being invaded.
"Seriously, Cas, it's cool. If we clean the kitchen really well, that will be enough of a gift for Dean. I just wish you had your angel juice to help us."
Cas nodded thoughtfully at Sam's words, and seemed to consider them reasonable.
"I too wish that my grace was restored. Although we would not be in this mess, for I could have simply created a pie. The oven was much more difficult to use than I anticipated."
As Cas droned on about the complexity of large appliances, Sam idly picked up things that looked salvageable. He had just wanted to express his feelings to Dean through food, and it had turned into a nightmare. If the oven was beyond repair, the only feeling Dean would be expressing would be anger, and Sam regret. Sam wished he wasn't such a fuckup as he tried to pull a spatula from a giant wad of dough, wincing as the dough stuck fast and stretched like chewed gum. They hadn't even used a spatula.
Sam heard Cas mumbling to himself as he dug through one of the cupboards. He emerged with an aerosol can in his hand, his triumphant eyebrowless face beaming at Sam.
"I have found the required chemicals for cleaning the oven. I will offer to clean it, as I would like to learn more about its interior."
No fucking way. Oven cleaner was pretty nasty on its own, but in the hands of Cas? Dean would throw Sam out for good if he let Cas "learn more" about the inner workings of their oven. So he made a mad dash through the wreckage, grabbing up the aerosol from Cas and placing himself protectively between the angel and the oven. Cas looked at him in confusion, trying to figure out why Sam was in such a panic.
"Whoa, hey, Cas, don't worry about it buddy. I mean, cleaning the oven isn't really a big deal. I think, I think Dean wants a new one anyway. So, yeah. Hey, you know what? There's a spatula stuck in some dough over there, and it's just, it's Dean's favourite spatula and I thought maybe you could…"
Sam hoped his fast talking would work on Cas, visions of Dean coming home to a crater in the ground where the bunker once stood at the forefront of his mind. Hope fluttered in his heart as Cas' eyes lit up, turning to inspect the spatula situation.
"Sam, I will not let you down. If that is Dean's favourite spatula, I will surely free it from its doughy prison."
Sam let out a laugh as the angel turned away, half at the fact that Cas had said "doughy prison", and half at the bullet he had just dodged.
Now that Cas was preoccupied - Sam, this is proving to be a much more difficult task than I previously thought - Sam could focus on actually cleaning the oven. It had stopped smoking (for the most part), so Sam could get his head inside without choking. He was now 98% sure that after all the grime had been scraped off, the oven would work just as fine as it usually did. Dean would never know this had happened.
And after they were done cleaning, which might be never, Sam would take Cas' advice and buy a pie. Not a pre-frozen slab of chemicals, which Dean usually ate, but something warm and from a pastry shop and probably really expensive. It wouldn't be made from his heart, but it would be made from someone else's, and Sam figured that was close enough.
Sam realized that Cas wouldn't be able to keep today's adventure to himself, nor could he hide the fact that his eyebrows were burnt off. As soon as Dean got home, he would know. Sam scrubbed a little harder at the oven, imagining the sound of Dean's footsteps in the hall behind him. He hoped with all his might that Dean loved him enough to not ask questions. Because no amount of oven cleaner could scrub away the white-hot embarrassment pooling in Sam's heart.