Hello my friends! Sorry I didn't get this chapter in for a while. I was juggling a test and writing my other fanfic (which you should read if you haven't yet!). Anyway, it's here now so enjoy! Oh, and I don't own Supernatural.

Cas sat in the "shotgun," which was a term that didn't really make sense to him, and looked back at the cage where his new hamster was sleeping.

"It seems so at peace."

"Yep…" Dean said absent mindedly. He was realizing that Castiel might not really be able to take care of the hamster all the time, seeing as he would be up in Heaven with his little angel buddies doing who knows what. Did that mean that he would have to take care of it? He probably should have thought about this more.

"Can I… hold him?" asked Castiel hopefully, but tentatively.

"Hell no. Not in my baby—" Dean began to answer, but was cut off when he looked over and saw Castiel's searching, wishful blue eyes staring back, "I mean…Yeah, sure. Go ahead." Damn this nerdy little angel. Why did he have such a hold on Dean?

Castiel's face broke into a giant smile, in angel standards, at least. He twisted around and grabbed the little rodent's cage. Putting it on his lap, he opened the top and reached his hand in. He pulled out the little squirming animal and cradled it in his hands. He wore a sweet smile as he held the hamster up to his face.

Dean looked at him and thought how weird it was that something like an angel, who smites human beings so quickly and without thought, could be so gentle and caring to a simple creature like a hamster.

"Look, Dean! Its whiskers are brushing my cheeks!"

It was unbelievable how childish this man could be. Dean tried to look at it like he found it annoying, but it was so goddamn cute.

For the rest of the car ride Castiel held the hamster and pointed out all the things about it that were "delightful" or "endearing." Dean just nodded, smiled, and wondered to himself if this nerdy little angel could get anymore adorable.

Dean walked into the skeevy hotel room, "Sammy?" he called.

"Dude, what the hell? Where have you guys been?" Sam hollered back from the bathroom.

"Dean and I went and purchased a hamster!" Castiel practically yelled, clearly excited.

Sam walked into the room, but stopped when he saw what Castiel was holding. "You went and purchased a…What?"

"A hamster, Sam! Look!"

Sam didn't think he had ever seen Cas look so animated about anything. "Oh…Right. Yeah, of course. What….What's its name?" he asked, trying to sound like he supported this strange occurrence, or even understood it.

Castiel looked at Dean, then at the hamster, then back to Dean. "We need a name, Dean!"

"How 'bout…Pudding!" Dean concluded. That had come to be what he said when he didn't have any other good ideas. He thought it fit well this time.

"Pudding…As in the gelatinous desert?" Cas inquired, with a tilt of his head.

Dean nodded, and Castiel thought about it for a couple seconds. Finally, he nodded as well and a smile broke out on his face. He held the cage up to eye level and looked at the small, furry creature inside. "You are now Pudding, little one!"

By the time it was evening, Dean and Sam were sitting on the bed cleaning their machetes and were very surprised to find that Castiel was still with them, playing with his new pet.

"How long do you think it'll be 'til he goes back upstairs?" wondered Sam aloud.

"I don't know. I'm surprised he stayed this long."

Castiel had never had a pet before and he was very enlivened by the curious little creature. He knew that he should get back to Heaven, that he had work to do, but he just wanted to stay with it a little longer. Not only did he love being with it, the hamster was an excuse to stay with Dean.

"Dean…I should go," Cas said reluctantly.

"Oh, yeah. Sure. I'll take care of the ham—I mean, I'll take care of Pudding for you."

"Thank you, Dean," he replied. And with the sound of wings and trenchcoats flapping, he was gone. It felt a little lonelier in the room all of a sudden.

Dean was entranced. He had been staring at this hamster for more than an hour and he couldn't seem to break away. It had such a strange, hypnotic hold on him. I should not have bought it that stupid wheel, he thought. "Hamsters need regular exercise" they had said.Did they take into account the fact that it would change his whole goddamn outlook on relationships?

I guess blaming that all on the hamster and the store clerk wasn't really fair. Maybe it was in him all along. In fact, that was probably the case. But Dean liked the idea of blaming it on other people more.

This hamster and it's frickin wheel. Castiel and his frickin questions. "Why is Pudding always running on his wheel, Dean? Doesn't he know he isn't going anywhere?"

Dean didn't know what to tell Cas at the time, so he decided to watch the hamster to see if he could figure it out. The more he watched the hamster, the more time he had to think. And the more time he had to think, the more he actually did think. If anyone knew the bad things that thinking did to a person, it was Dean Winchester. He carried on, though. He wanted to be able to answer Castiel's question.

At first he was thinking about why the hamster ran on the wheel, sure, but being a pretty egotistical bastard, his thoughts soon reverted back to himself. It had gone from "Why would the hamster keep running on his wheel if he knew that it just went around in circles?" to "Why do I keep pretending I don't feel anything for Cas when I know we're just going through fake motions and we could be so much more?"

And yes, Dean knew that was a pretty big leap to make in such a short time. But it really wasn't a short time at all, was it? It was a painfully long time in which Dean was all alone with his thoughts, all alone to ponder what he was doing with his life and why he was doing it. As mentioned before, he had been staring at the hamster, pondering, for over an hour. Pondering will be the death of me, he thought to himself bitterly.

But still, Dean couldn't get the idea that Castiel was more than a friend out of his head. I mean, Dean did have those moments where he thought…No. Those moments were pushed far to the back of his head. Far to the place where he put thoughts that were too bad or embarrassing to even think about. Or as he liked to call it, Dean's Corner.

Looking back at that stupid hamster running on its wheel, though, was dragging unwanted things out of Dean's Corner. Things he didn't want to think about. Things that he rarely let escape. This particular "thing" had been escaping far too much recently for Dean's taste. Up until now he had been able to shove them back into the Corner. Nobody puts Castiel in a corner, a little voice in his head joked sadistically.

He knew he couldn't stop it from coming out, he was going to think about it sooner or later. He might as well get it off his chest now, before Sam came back from the diner (hopefully with pie) or Cas came back from where ever it is he went.

"Am I in love with an angel?" he whispered, finally relenting and letting his mind speak out loud what it had been suppressing all this time.

Dean was so absorbed in thinking about the hamster, his own feelings, and most of all, Castiel, that he didn't even notice when the angel himself appeared just behind him.

"Hello, Dean. How is Pudding?" asked a very serious voice.

Hearing Castiel say Pudding in such a stoic way was so comical that it almost made Dean laugh. But then he realized what he had been thinking about previously, very previously, and he stopped himself. Angels did have that whole mind-reading thing. What if Cas could sense what he had started feeling, or rather, discovered he had been feeling? Wait a second…

"Cas, how long have you been there?" Dean demanded, more than a little worried.

"Approximately seventy eight seconds," he answered flatly.

Seventy eight seconds? Seventy eight seconds? Had he heard what Dean had said? Did Dean want him to hear what he had said? God dammit, Dean hated when his mind let him thinking. He shouldn't have let Sam leave him alone.

Cas could see Dean's mind going at one thousand miles a second, and decided to put him out of his misery, "If you are asking whether I heard you or not," he paused, Dean holding his breath, not quite sure what for, "The answer is yes."