Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open?
Are you willing to do these things for a day?
Then you are ready to keep Christmas.
― Henry van Dyke
While they don't precisely live at the hospital, they're not exactly living at home for the month following the birth of the twins, either. The rule of thumb they're given is that they can usually expect a NICU stay to last until the original due date, as premature infants gain weight and the ability to maintain a body temperature, until they can drink from a bottle easily, and until brachycardia and apnea that plague preemies with their underdeveloped organs are no longer common.
Dean hates hospitals, and he'd avoid the clinical rooms with their bad memories of his assault at all costs . . . but for the twins, he deals with his issues. During his recovery, while Bobby wouldn't let him near a garage to save his life, Dean haunts the NICU until Cas eventually buys a second-hand couch for his office just to give his husband someplace to crash. When Dean is ushered out for procedures and care, he huddles in Cas's office under a hospital blanket until Cas's shift ends and they can go together to the NICU, and finally home to curl in bed and start over again at the hospital the next day.
It is a month of terrifying moments: the first alarm, when Mary is dozing on Castiel's chest and stops breathing, until the nurse pats her and teaches them to rub their tiny feet when it happens, explaining that apnea is a normal aspect of prematurity. Their little bellies turning hard and pained within hours of each other, setting Cas and Dean out for days unable to hold them while the antibiotics ran their course, having to reach through the hood over their cribs just to touch them at all and waiting to see if surgery would be required.
It is a month also measured in landmarks that others take for granted. Their first diaper changes. Their first bottles. The first time Jimmy stared in rapt unblinking fascination at his father's eyes. The first time Mary screwed up her face and wailed piteously when the nurse put her back into her incubator after the kangaroo care. The transition is gradual, more and more of their care given over to Dean and to Castiel from the NICU staff, and every menial task they're able to snatch for themselves is a step closer to home.
Their family is patient because they have to be, because the twins are shut away until they're healthy and stable enough for the world. Updates are given in texts with candid photos snapped on cell phones, and in Dean's weekly calls to Sam, a tradition finally revived and kept to religiously without court dates or tragedies demanding it. Castiel's emails to Claire are as quick as ever, for his niece's sake, but when his brothers call they have to coax information out of him about anything other than the twins.
Their lives outside of the hospital are on pause for a month. The moment a discharge date is set, though, everything seems to explode into fast forward, and for once they plan to spend a weekend at home, starting Castiel's leave from work a few days early to get everything ready. After grocery shopping enough for a month on Friday night, so they won't have to worry about it while settling the children into their new routine, Dean faceplants into bed early, grunting in acknowledgement when Cas steals his keys to grab a 'few last minute items' because he can't sleep.
Dean wakes up at two in the morning to the sound of Castiel moving their couch across the living room, and investigating the situation takes stepping over a box ripped open and left discarded in the hall. Scrubbing a hand over his hair, Dean scrutinizes the situation in bemusement, noting the potential pitfalls of ornaments and plastic bags strewn across the floor, before landing on his husband who clearly still hasn't even tried to sleep. Cas's bare feet are braced on either side of the stand to keep the base of a fake Christmas tree stable as he growls quietly with frustration, trying to shove the top two thirds in to lock in place. The entire thing wobbles dangerously until Dean steps up behind him, flattening himself to Cas's back, and steadying it with his greater height as Cas snaps it into place. "I don't want to alarm you, Cas, but it looks like Macy's Christmas Sale broke into our house while I was sleeping and vomited tinsel on all our furniture."
"That's a disgusting way to phrase this. It's festive." Cas corrects, fussily straightening what branches he can reach without pulling away from Dean's arms around him, tilting his head for a kiss on the cheek that Dean drops against the corner of his mouth, already shaking his head in amusement. Cas is acting like this is completely normal, just an earlier-than-usual morning and Dean coming up on him doing something mundane like making the first pot of coffee for them. Cas is staunchly ignoring that there's anything odd about him doing a reverse-Grinch in the dead of the night with no warning at all.
"Missing the point. Why is Christmas all over our living room, Cas?" Takeout Chinese and Die Hard. Dean has a tradition and he's comfortable in it, he folded Castiel into it last year and enjoyed it even more, head resting against Castiel's knee as they sprawled on the floor of their brand new house, foot braced against one of the boxes and Cas feeding him bites of his lo mein as he complained about Bruce Willis's acting, jealously assuming he was another of Dean's screen crushes.
"We have children now. . ." Castiel defends, and Dean rolls his eyes and laughs under his breath as he steps back from the tree, shoves ornaments and candy canes aside, and flops down on the couch with an arm braced low over his stomach against the pull of his healing incision. He's awake enough now that he wants to hear this, but not awake enough that he wants to be standing for it.
"No, really Cas? I must have forgotten that." He probably wouldn't tease Cas so much if Cas wasn't just so fun to tease. He watches, trying not to smile, as Castiel deliberately ignores him as he sets to work plugging the ends of the lights together within the tree, carefully zip-tied into place against the trunk and away from the grabbing hands of children, and then plugs the whole thing in. Soft yellow-white lights twinkle from the branches, and Castiel brightens when it works as planned. Dean has to prod him again verbally to get a response. "Mary and Jimmy are going to be too young to remember this, Cas. And we're not supposed to over-stimulate them right when they get home . . ."
"I know." Castiel admits softly, and he's framed by the branches as he looks at Dean, wide blue eyes illuminated in the glow of fairy-lights, pleading and hopeful and sheepish at once, this Alpha who people have called stiff and expressionless and robotic. "I didn't buy anything that plays noise, and we don't have to do presents or use all of the decorations. But it's their first Christmas, Dean."
How's Dean supposed to say no to that?
"Damnit." Dean mutters, and Castiel smiles in the face of his surrender. Circling the tree to join him on the couch, Cas nudges Dean until can slip in behind him on the cushions, dragging a quilt down over them both and settling with Dean's head pillowed on his arm, so they can look at the tree together. "You did the puppy eyes thing on purpose."
"Mm." Cas doesn't even deny it, the bastard, he just curls in closer to Dean, wedging a knee between Dean's legs and pulling him back into his chest, pointing out their tasks with an arm out from under the blanket. "We need to place the tree ornaments, hang the wreath on the door, decorate the mantle and hang stockings, and then decide if we're hosting guests here for the holidays and send invitations if we are. Everyone wants to meet the twins."
"Over-stimulation. . ." Cas may be the doctor of the two of them, but Dean has absorbed every word the NICU nurses have said over the past month and internalized them, instinctively protective as a parent the same way he was as a big brother raising Sammy. Two tiny, fragile infants are depending on them, and Dean has never been one to shirk responsibility to a child.
"They'll be fine, Dean. We can explain to our families. We'll bring people into the nursery one or two at a time to introduce them. . ." Cas places a kiss behind his ear, and tucks his arm under the blanket again, hand sliding up beneath Dean's t-shirt. Dean's belly is softer than he can ever remember it being, the scar from the C-Section red and angry low across it, but Castiel isn't bothered by either. Dean had their children. Cas still hasn't wrapped his mind entirely around that miracle, and this is proof of it. "If you don't want to cook, I can tr. . ." Dean snorts, interrupting the offer to try and cook before Cas can even make it, and Cas bites his earlobe gently for the implied commentary about his culinary abilities before continuing. ". . . Fine. We can do potluck."
"Like hell." Dean grumbles, and Castiel smiles into the bend of his neck, taking a heel to his shin for it when Dean notices he's cheated twice now to get his way, and that Dean just caved both to the party and cooking for it. "You damn well knew that'd make me agree. Why are you so eager to throw a party, Cas? You hatecrowds."
True. Castiel is also the runaway of the two of them, the one that turned away from his family for the better part of a decade and was deployed and away at school long before that. He chews on his answer for a long while, stroking a hand up and down Dean's skin as he considers it, quietly reveling in the way Dean melts back into him over time, relaxed and content and waiting for a response. Teasing and banter comes easily between them, between Dean's lightning-fast quips and Castiel's dry deadpan, but Cas needs a moment to frame important thoughts, still. For all they needle each other, Dean's patient with him when it matters, and Castiel loves him for it.
"You gave me family, Dean. Not just Jimmy and Mary, but you gave me Sam and Jessica and Robert, and Bobby and Ellen and Jo. You gave me back myfamily, too . . . I don't think I'd ever have fixed things with them if you hadn't dragged me back to Illinois. As a priest Christmas was about prayer. . ." And then the Christmases between, Castiel spent quietly watching Mass from his pew, unable to accept the sacrament when he felt like a murderer and a failure to his faith. He took every holiday hospital shift he could to not be at home alone, and watched the people coming through the hospital driven to extremes by their loneliness, before finishing his nights drinking alone in empty churches or his own living room.
Dean must hear something in that pause, some shift in his tone, or sense it in the emotions Castiel shoves aside. When Cas shrugs uselessly as words escape him, Dean turns to face him on the couch, curling an arm around his waist, pressing a warm palm to the base of his spine comfortingly, an anchor to a present filled with so much more hope and joy than Cas ever expected from his life. "I want to give them holidays, and holidays are about family."
The thought kept him awake when he should have been sleeping, sent him out the door impulsively, spending more money than he likely should have, just to give them a real holiday. Cas wants their children to grow up knowing they are loved by so many people, and that they're not alone. He doesn't want to cut family out again, or keep them away. He's done that before, and he's trying to be better at not shutting out the people who matter. He wants their children to grow up with Dean'sgrasp of family, not his own, to be embraced by people who love them, a family formed and held together by mutual acceptance and love and choice as much as by blood. Jimmy and Mary were born Winchesters, after all, and now Castiel is one himself. It's time they embraceDean'sideals and act on them, for them to begin building traditions around the values they want for their children.
Dean searches his face and then chortles quietly, pressing a kiss to the cleft of Cas's chin. "God you're a sap."
"So you've said." Cas agrees, but he can hear the acceptance in it, Dean's affection for Castiel's quiet sentimentality, so he presses in closer for a kiss.
Cas tastes like sugar and peppermint, like stolen candy canes and mocha coffee... like Christmas,and is kissing him softly, unhurried, reveling in the way Dean settles into him, sinking his fingers into the soft, flyaway hair he loves. They fitlike this, away from prying eyes and the press and the courtrooms and anyone who would think to judge them. The past month has been focused on their children, on being parentstogether, but they fall back into this kind of intimacy as naturally as breathing, stealing the moment before their lives change again come Monday.
"You know. . ." Dean catches Cas's lower lip in his, dragging his teeth along the tender flesh, winning a full bodied shiver from Cas before releasing him. Grinning against Cas's lips, Dean hooks a leg around both of Castiel's and presses forward. ". . . It's been forever since we reallyhad sex. Before the kids were born, even." Those words in that tone, Dean smirking as he teasingly breathes across Cas's lips, tongue lightly tracing across his lower lip, Cas can't be held responsible for the sound that pulls out of him. "How 'bout it, Cas? You willing to put off being a holiday elf a couple hours while you're already playing hooky?"
Chances are it will take a couple of months for Dean's hormones to even out after the pregnancy, for his body to go into Heats again and start demanding they try for another baby, birth control or not. But Cas can feel the damp press of fabric against him as Dean crowds in closer, feel the flood of pheromones between them telling him that Dean is wet, willing, and trying to tempt him, and when Dean rocks in to kiss him again, Castiel flips them on the couch instinctively, bracing a hand against the floor to keep them from tumbling onto the carpet as he seizes control of the kiss and pins Dean beneath him.
Dean's quiet hiss of pain alerts him to the issue in this position, and Cas recoils quickly, kneeling up between Dean's legs and removing his weight from the surgical scar. "I'm sorry. Are you alright?"
"Shit, I'msorry." Dean flops back into the throw pillow, frowning petulantly as he rubs a hand over the incision. "I was getting into that."
"I know." Castiel trails a fingertip over the obvious tent in Dean's boxers, watching as Dean's hips flex, rocking him up into the motion unconsciously as he catches his kiss-bruised lower lip between his teeth, eyes fixed on Cas above him. "I could. . ."
"If you're about to suggest anything other than actually fucking my brains out right now, I don't want to hear it." Dean's words are a growl, and he tugs Cas back down but Cas refuses to be manhandled into potentially hurting his husband. Dean hasn't been deprived of pleasure, no matter how much he's glaring. But right now he doesn't want Cas's mouth or his fingers or his tongue, and Cas has never been able to deny Dean anything he wants. Dipping in, he kisses Dean again to distract him, waiting until the tension rolls out of him to hook his elbow beneath Dean's knees, the other arm braced behind his back, and hoist him up from the couch.
He ducks his head to hide the smile at Dean's surprised yelp, carefully shuffling them past the ornaments on the floor of the living room. It's worth the effort for Dean's surprise, the way his hand knots into Cas's shirt again and his eyes fly wide. "If you tense up on me, or thrash, I am going to end up dropping you. . ."
"Put me downbefore you hurt yourself, dumbass." Cas carried Samandriel much farther distances while dehydrated, malnourished, exhausted, and in 120 degree dry heat while wearing 50 pounds of gear. He helps the nurses hoist patients into hospital beds, too, and he may have fallen out of the habit of running every morning since getting married, but he's still physically active. He can make it from their living room to the bedroom carrying his mate just fine, no matter what Dean thinks.
When he settles Dean into the pillows on their bed, he's completely unsurprised by being hauled into it with him, Dean locking an arm around his waist and establishing his own strength, and Cas smiles his amusement into the kiss he's immediately caught in when that movement takes a grunt of effort for once, Dean not quite as in shape as he was when they met.
"Shut up." Dean grumbles at the silent Alpha, winning a laugh as he eagerly strips Cas's shirt off of him.
"You tell me to shut up a lot,when I'm not saying anything at all." Castiel observes wryly, bracing palms and knees against the bed to keep his weight off of Dean.
"Just 'cause your mouth ain't moving doesn't mean I can't tell what you're thinking." Dean grumbles, but there's no real complaint in it. He waits until Cas is about to respond before flicking his thumbnail over Cas's nipple, rolling the peak of it between his fingertips, enjoying how it wins a surprised and appreciative hiss.
Dean's always liked knowing what's hiding under the shapeless scrubs and out-of-fashion suits, but now pretty much every nurse at Cas's hospital has found an excuse to seek him out in the NICU while he's snuggling their children, and knows what Dean's husband looks like shirtless. Dean's just vain and jealous-minded enough that when the weather warms up and they get the kids used to the double stroller, Dean's going to end up joining Cas as a running partner out of pride and stubbornness and lingering paranoid self-preservation, until he's completely back in shape.
Because damn Cas is hot like this, disheveled and shirtless, muscles corded to keep him over Dean, barely touching him. Curling a hand around the back of his neck, Dean pulls him down as far as Cas lets him for another kiss, made slightly awkward by Dean stripping out of his boxers without breaking the seal of their lips.
Cas has missedthis, missed Dean's urgency. The first two months of pregnancy Dean would practically tackle him into the bed just to ride his knot, wanting it almost as desperately as he does in his Heats, but since then it's been tender and careful lovemaking, curled into bed together, and then in recent months his mouth and hands only, and mindful of Dean's mood swings and nausea and headaches.
Castiel meant it when he told Dean their relationship was important enough to him that if Dean never wanted sex again he'd honor that. Cas enjoyssex, but he doesn't often need itthe way Dean does, or as much as he needs intimacy and touch and shared comfort. He'd be celibate for Dean, and wouldn't love him any less for it. Months of abstaining from knotting his mate is only catching up with him all at once now that Dean has a hand thrust down the front of his stolen jeans, palm pressing Cas's erection up towards his stomach and fingertips teasing the sensitive skin where Cas's knot will form.
The need builds quickly enough that it's dizzying, intoxicating. Warmth floods through him as Dean strains upwards to mouth down the bend of his neck, and he tilts his head to give Dean room as he teases color to the surface, a rose-petal bloom that will darken, mark him, jealously stake a claim. What Dean doesto him he can't even hope to explain.
Cas captures Dean's wayward hands, stopping their teasing explorations, and pushes himself to his knees, planted between Dean's bowed legs. Fingers curled around Dean's wrists, Cas considers his mate for a moment and then tugs him upright. "Get up. On your knees."
Cas probably shouldn't enjoy the way Dean's lips part softly in a shuddered breath at the command, the way his eyes go dark with want. Dean wets his lips again, watching Cas like he's desirableeven as he ungracefully kicks his pants off and shucks his boxers with them, knowing he'll trip over them in just a few short hours and not caring at all. He trails a hand over coarse stubble and then down the supple bend of Dean's neck, over the smooth freckled skin of broad, muscular shoulders and arms sculpted and defined by hard work, fingers tripping over the ladder of Dean's ribs, making him shiver. Even the relative softness of his stomach is both endearing, a sign of the family Dean gave him, and battle scars in a way: Dean is healthy, and the twins are coming home. They won,took a risk and beat the odds against childbirth in this day and age, and against preemies when the air itself is dangerous .
It's not being an Omega that makes Dean appealing, it's the strength and resilience in him that's beautiful, apparent in every line of him.
Cas wants to look so he does as he sits back on his heels and wraps his fingers around Dean's erection, but as beautifully as Dean responds to that, hips rocking forward to fuck into Cas's fist and a groan rumbling through his chest, it's Dean's impatient shift that gets him, how he presses his knees into the bed, spreading them farther apart unconsciously. It takes only a moment for him to remember that he wants more than this, jaw setting stubbornly and a challenge in the glint of his eyes as he arches a brow at Cas, grabbing his shoulders to steady himself as he straddles Cas's thighs. "Don't make me tackle you into the bed."
He kisses the smile off of Cas's lips, savoring that sweetness almost as much as sinking down onto Cas. This is so much more than either of them ever expected. The world led them on such a strange and terrible path, but it brought them here. Cas can't imagine life without Dean now, and Dean doesn't want to consider where he'd be without Cas. They didn't just change each other, they savedeach other.
Despite the teasing, they make love slowly, carefully, determined to take their time to make up for how long it's been, and how long it might be before they can again. In a couple of days, they're going to be full time parents. After that, they'll be juggling their jobs and the legal battles and parenting. There's no telling how often they'll get uninterrupted time to just be together like this outside of Dean's Heats, when there's no compulsion for sex, just choice and mutual desire.
Cas is always lazy after sex, and particularly now when he was already fending off sleep. Dean's more alert: he got his four hours before the rude wake up of Cas rearranging their home, and he's more settled now like this, desire chased away and pulse slowing again, full and content and anchored to Cas.
He'd never say that aloud. It's no one's business that he likes to rock back into the pan of Cas's hips, to tighten around the length inside of him to keep Cas knotted as long as he can. He likes the breathy little groans it pulls out of Cas, the press of his knot against Dean's prostate, milking come out of him even when he thinks he's spent, sparks of pleasure that curl his toes, steal his breath as Cas pulses deep into Dean. He likes how shamelessly affectionate Cas becomes when they're knotted together like this, and how easy it is to let himself enjoy it without having to push Cas away.
He's being sandpapered by well-past-five-o'clock stubble, Cas's arms twined around him, warm breath tickling behind his ear and Cas's knot slowly softening, and all he can think about is home, and family, and frikkin' Christmas now that Cas has put the idea in his head. "You ever believe in Santa?"
There's a long delay for the words to register to Cas, and then process as anything other than meaningless syllables, and after he's pieced it all together he still shrugs instead of answering. Dean has to elbow Cas to drag words out of him, hoarse and slow and sleepy.
"I wasn't introduced to the concept of Christmas and Santa Claus until after we were out of the crèche. By then it was too late to believe the fantasy. If he existed as the stories had said, he would have found the three of us there."
There's something sad and quietly lonely to that idea, the thought that Cas at six years old was confronted with this childlike belief of others his age and left to conclude that either he and his brothers were unworthy of Santa's attention, or that his existence was a social construct offered to other children as a reward they never were permitted. The knowledge that he grew up looking at Christmas and all its trappings and thinking of those first six years is depressing as hell, drags to mind that picture of solemn little Cas, Jimmy and Emmanuel surrounded by their more rambunctious brothers, herded outside for Christmas pictures with the family. Cas deserved more than that. Dean wants to say something about Cas's belief in God despite the crèche, versus the understanding that Santa was a myth, but atheist or not even he knows Cas wouldn't appreciate the comparison.
"I only really remember one Christmas where I believed. Last one I had with Mom. Half the time I don't know if I really remember it, or if I thinkI remember it and filled stuff in. Sam… I don't know if he ever believed. I think he humored me, when I tried to convince him growing up. We didn't have much…" But he begged, stole, and borrowed to get gifts to his brother for the first few years, even gave his own away sometimes. That was easier once he was in school-candy and stupid little gifts he got in the classroom ended up in Sam's hands once he got home.
"I want our kids to have that." All of it. Stupid pictures with department store Santas, stockings and presents and a tree, making a huge mess of wrapping paper with their cousins, cheesy old movies and hell even midnight Mass or whatever Cas decides on for their religious upbringing. Dean wants all of that for them, he wants to give their children the childhood they were both robbed of. Dean catches Cas's hand in his, twining their fingers together over Dean's belly, and smirks. "So I'll help you out tomorrow. Just one rule okay?"
Cas is listening, even if he's worn down his batteries entirely and he won't really be useful for conversation until tomorrow, and he nods and presses a kiss to Dean's shoulder, pulling out slowly now that he can so he can tangle himself around Dean to sleep and lay his head on Dean's chest. Dean grimaces at the wetness between his thighs (Alphas are so damned messy, but he's not going to let Cas plug him, kinky bastard), but accepts the affectionate snuggling, the way Cas has decided to use him as a pillow. Petting his hand over Cas's hair, fingernails scraping over his scalp, he lets Cas settle in before dropping his only rule for this.
"We can go as stupidly overboard as we want with the party and presents and whatever… but you're never decorating in frikkin' angels. Capisce?"
Castiel's laugh is sudden, genuine, and beautiful. He falls asleep still smiling, and when he wakes in just a few short hours to Dean demanding his help unloading the Impala of his hardware store loot of lights for the outside of the house, when he's stuck sending out invitations to Sam and Jess and Robert, to Chuck and Amelia and Claire, to Emmanuel and Daphne, to Jody and Alex, to Bobby and Charlie and Gabriel and Balthazar, it's with the understanding that the couple that defies nearly every tradition is establishing their own.
This is the future they are building for their children, and it is bright, festive, and full of love, family, and joy.
