15.9 In the Yard
"I have done it again," Cas said, walking up behind Dean, who had his head beneath the hood of that Corvair he'd found.
"Dude, it's a coffee pot. Not nuclear physics."
"Indeed. Nuclear physics I understand."
Dean huffed a laugh, and when he finally turned around, Cas was a lot closer than he'd realized. Apparently becoming human had not endowed the former angel with a new understanding of personal space. In fact, Dean was beginning to think that the sneaky little shit was doing it on purpose, but he was a bit reluctant to go there. Dean's lack of comfort where matters of the heart were concerned and the fact that he'd actually kissed said fallen angel – kissed him and meant it – had become the elephant in the room, so Dean tried to spend most of his time outside. Elephants tended to fit better out there.
Cas wasn't really taking the hint, though. Dean shouldn't have been surprised. And, besides the fact that the coffee pot bested him nearly every morning, Dean thought Cas was really doing pretty well, all things considered. He was a little quieter than Dean remembered, but he wasn't ripping his hair out as he ran screaming through the yard or anything. Dean considered this a win.
Dean licked his suddenly dry lips and tried to ignore how Cas' eyes followed the motion.
"Come on," he said, clearing his throat and working his way around Cas, trying not to touch him. "I'll show you one more time."
.
Dean came in for dinner and found Balthazar alone in the kitchen, glaring at a glass of whiskey.
"I do wish you hillbillies would buy something a little more palatable than this rotgut with which you insist upon filling your cupboards. I'd kill for a good martini."
"Hey, when you get a job, you can buy whatever kind of booze you like."
Balthazar turned his glare on Dean, which was still a little rewarding, even after all these weeks, then tossed the liquor back anyway.
"You, Dean Winchester, are an ass."
Dean shrugged. "I've been called worse."
Balthazar smirked. "I'm sure."
Dean poured himself a shot and sat down across from Balthazar. "But, just out of curiosity, what'd I do this time?"
"Nothing."
"You're going to have to be a bit more specific."
"Castiel, you halfwit."
Dean stared.
"He knows what you did. Why you did it. How you did it."
Dean looked away, focusing on his drink and hating the heat rising in his cheeks. "What's your point?"
An extremely pained expression contorted Balthazar's smug face. "You know, I always had a rather low opinion of you, Dean. You genuinely amaze me with your perpetual lack of emotional awareness." Balthazar took another sip of his drink, clunking the glass down on the table for emphasis. "He's in love with you."
"Don't be ridiculous," Dean replied, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest.
"Everything he's done over the past three years – it's been for you. He pulled you out of Hell. He rebelled against Heaven. He died, and then he fell fighting a war so you wouldn't have to. You cannot be so blind that—"
"The fuck do you want me to do about it?" Dean fairly shouted, his insides twisting.
"Anything!" Balthazar shouted back. "Man up and talk to him. Make his sacrifices mean something."
.
Castiel often went into the yard to watch the sun rise, and it literally took Dean all night to work up the courage to follow him the morning after his argument with Balthazar. He found him on the easternmost edge of the yard, perched atop a mountain of crushed cars.
"The hell'd you get up there?" Dean called, trying – and probably failing – for nonchalance.
Castiel glanced down, a rare half-smile tugging at his lips. "I climbed the windows like a ladder."
Dean shrugged and set out to join Castiel. When he reached the top, however, he got a chunk of glass stuck in his palm for his efforts. Castiel reached down and helped pull him up on the hood of the topmost car, surprisingly strong, then scooted over so Dean could sit beside him.
"You're bleeding."
Castiel grabbed his hand before Dean even got a good look at the wound, and Dean tried without much success to focus on the pain, rather than the way Castiel's fingers felt on his skin. They were warm and gentle as they deftly removed the glass from his palm, and in a brief moment of insanity, he wondered what those fingers would feel like everywhere else.
Dean hissed through his teeth at the sting, then laughed nervously. "That's what I get for climbing around a junk yard like a twelve-year-old."
"You should be more careful," Cas concurred.
Dean didn't point out that Cas did the same thing every day.
Cas rested Dean's hand carefully on his thigh, which Dean was stridently not thinking about, then ripped off the hem of his hand-me-down tee-shirt. With great care, Cas wrapped the strip of fabric snugly around Dean's palm.
"I do not believe you will require stitches for such a minor wound, but it would be prudent to thoroughly cleanse it when you return to the house."
Dean nodded and reluctantly removed his hand from Castiel's grasp. Cas drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his shins, his gaze focused on the rapidly lightening horizon. Dean couldn't take his eyes off the other man's profile, his features sharp and touched with gold from the few rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon. His eyes were bright and clear, and Dean suddenly found it difficult to breathe around the spike of panic he felt, because Cas was beautiful. Not in a cheap, Hollywood sort of way, but in a Sam-would-pay-to-see-it-in-a-museum sort of way.
And it wasn't even particularly his vessel, Dean thought, so much as the way that – even as a human – there was all this power and grace and good bundled up tightly in one lithe form. Sure, his grace was gone, but Cas wasn't damaged, not like Dean thought he'd be. There were some things that threw him up (like the coffee pot), but it seemed that Castiel had pretty much taken the whole being human thing in stride. Dean thought that was beautiful, too, because every time life threw him a curveball, he usually ended up on his ass, fighting to get back up. Cas landed on both feet, which was just extraordinary.
Dean actually thought lots of things were extraordinary about Cas, and realized, just as the sun crested the horizon, that he could spend quite a lot of time learning each and every one of them.
"Cas—" Dean said, the word choked and hoarse and totally involuntary, but Cas just held a finger to his lips, never taking his eyes off the sunrise.
"It is a new day, Dean," he said a few moments later. "Another chance to right the wrongs of the past. To say and do the things today where we fell short yesterday."
Dean swallowed. "How can you be so optimistic?"
Because Dean didn't usually get the chance to make up for his mistakes. His mistakes usually ended in blood and tears and funerals.
Cas shrugged, an elegant rise and fall of his shoulders. "I am alive. It is more than I could have hoped for just a few weeks ago." He looked at Dean. "When I was… with Raphael, my only prayer was that I'd get a chance to make amends."
"For what?" Dean said incredulously.
"For failing you," Castiel said bluntly.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"I was so wrapped up in my own affairs, that I forgot the most important lesson you ever taught me."
"Yeah? Which one was that?"
"Family first. Without our loved ones, what are we?"
There was that goddamned word again.
"You were fighting a war, Cas," Dean argued, "so I wouldn't have to."
"You are correct. But what good would winning have done if I'd lost you in the end?"
"Hey, I'm still kicking."
"Yes," Cas said solemnly, "but your own guilt and self-loathing are far more perilous adversaries than any monster you may face. I fear one day they will consume you, and for my neglect, I am truly sorry."
Dean was officially uncomfortable now because this heart-to-heart shit was just too much. He and Cas – there wasn't usually a whole lot of talking between them. Epic staring contests, sure, but not so much with the sharing.
Dean laughed, partly to relieve his own anxiety, partly at the irony of the situation. Cas scowled, but Dean waved him off.
"I just think it's funny that I came out here to say pretty much the exact same thing." Cas cocked his head and waited for Dean to continue. "I'm a selfish bastard, and I should have been there for you. Maybe if I had, this wouldn't have happened."
Cas' eyes grew sad then, like Dean had gone and proven his point for him. Then he twisted around and gingerly laid a hand on Dean's shoulder, unwittingly fitting it over the scar he'd left when he'd dragged Dean out of hell. Or maybe he did it on purpose.
"You saved my life, Dean. I know what you did to do it, and I know what it cost you to make the admission."
"That's not the point—"
"I forgive you."
Then Cas kissed him, softly, like he thought Dean might throw himself off the mountain of cars to get away. It was a simple brushing of lips, nothing erotic, but it was honest and so damn full, Dean didn't think he could move if he had a gun to his head. There was just too much – too much sensation, too much blood racing through his body, too much air in his lungs, too much heart. Cas pulled away, disappointment faintly crinkling his brow, but Dean pulled him back by the nape of his neck and kissed him properly, chasing down that small bit of peace he'd felt touching Cas.
Cas obliged with a happy sigh, and Dean thought maybe he could get used to this.
They separated, needing air, but Dean pressed their foreheads together, not really wanting Cas to be much farther away than he already was. Because Need and Love were pretty much the same things for Dean, and he realized he was just going to have to be okay with that.
"Cas, I—"
"Shh," Cas said, pressing his finger to Dean's lips. "I know. You don't have to say it."
