This is a post-season 15 story - and I'm only on season 14, but I know what's coming up and I don't think it's ever too early to start on fix-it fics. So, there may be errors - things that I don't know about yet, in which case please forgive me and try to enjoy to story as it is! I just had a few thoughts about flowers and then they became an interaction between Dean and Cas and then this story had to happen. It was going to be quite short and get to the point quite quickly, but then I was enjoying rambling, so I'm just letting it ramble on, as you do. I've got three complete chapters so far and will post them over the weekend and then as and when others are written. I hope you like it!

Chapter 1

Cas was back.

He was back. Really back. In the flesh. Not a dream or a nightmare or a vision of something Dean longed for but couldn't have, but the real, flesh-and-blood, solid, trenchcoated Cas - accept no substitutes, money-back guaranteed, one hundred percent ex-Angel-of-the-Lord, Castiel.

And Dean knew that to be true, because Jack said so.

So Dean should've been okay. He should have been happy and - after the long, dark days of deep, dragging, scouring pain when Cas was gone - he should have been fixed.

And he was okay in many ways - grateful, relieved and so on. But there was a big part of him that just couldn't trust any more. Too many times over the years he'd thought his angel was back - Cas was safe, he was whole, he was with Dean, where he should be. But now - it was like a part of Dean was broken - broken into little pieces, and he didn't have the remotest clue how to fit them together and make himself whole again. He just didn't - couldn't - trust that Cas was back to stay.

So Cas was back.

And Dean was still broken.

But Cas was broken too.

Jack wouldn't, or couldn't say exactly how he'd carried out his rescue mission. But the upshot was that Cas's grace hadn't come back with him. He was, in effect, the human version - powerless, wingless, subject to all the ailments and ageing of your average forty-something male.

He'd been human before, though, and managed okay. So it wasn't just that. Dean didn't know what it was, but Cas was definitely broken.

He rarely spoke. He rarely came out of his room. And when he did come out, he looked at Dean with wide, blue, haunted eyes and such an expression of doubt and confusion that Dean just didn't know what to say to him.

Did Cas even believe he was home? Did he believe that Dean was real?

Sam had tried speaking to him, one time Cas had ventured out of his room and sat down at the kitchen table and picked at a plate of toast that Dean had pushed toward him. But the ex-angel had looked at Sam with that empty, lost expression and had begun trembling, his hands twitching, his mouth opening and closing like he couldn't find the words, or maybe he did have words ready to spill out, but he didn't want to speak them.

And then he was gone, out of the kitchen, down the hallway, his door shutting softly but firmly behind him, leaving only silence and emptiness - and Dean standing there outside, helpless and just as lost as Cas.

Dean couldn't help Cas and he couldn't help himself, so he had fallen back on what he knew. He'd gone hunting.

There was a case that sounded like a poltergeist, and it should have been straightforward enough - the kind of thing Dean had been handling since his teens. But even in the midst of flickering lights and flying furniture, his mind wouldn't stay where it needed to be, the poltergeist had gotten more than a bit riled - and Dean had woken up in the back seat of the Impala with a lump on one side of his head and bruises everywhere else left by the hard edges of a staircase.

So hunting was out for now, even though he'd told Sam his distraction was just a one-off and he was fine, really.

"You're not fine, Dean." Sam had paused his relentless tap-tap-tapping at his laptop to prune up his mouth and give his brother the full-on bitch-face - he'd run out of puppy-dog eyes a while ago. "I think what you need is a change of scene. Get your head together."

"What?"

"You and Cas. It's not doing either of you any good, hanging around here, hiding from each other in your rooms."

"I'm not-"

"Yes, you are, Dean." Sam cleared his throat, which always meant something awkward was coming. "Look, I found a place that you could go, for a bit. If you want."

"What kind of place? Oh, no - let me guess. Somewhere quiet, with nice, soft walls, yeah?"

"No! No, Dean, I would never-" Sam broke off and sighed. "It's a house, not far from here. It's still owned by the Men of Letters, or in their name anyway. You could go there for a bit, fix it up." He shrugged. "I don't know. It was just an idea."

A house? Dean rotated his beer bottle in place, leaving a smear of moisture on the smooth wooden surface. A house that, potentially, belonged to them, as Legacies. He'd never owned a house. He'd never owned anything much, apart from Baby.

Sam tapped a few keys on his laptop. "I, uh… I went and had a look one day. Took some photos. So…" He spun the laptop toward Dean and got up, his lanky frame looming over the table for a moment before he flapped a hand at the laptop. "Have a look, if you want. I'm going for a run."

He left and Dean was alone.

A house?

Dean pulled the laptop toward him and flicked through the photos Sam had taken. Yup, it was a house alright - a weatherbeaten old clapboard place, two storeys - no, three. There were dormer windows in the roof.

A scrappy wilderness surrounded it and a few trees. There weren't any other houses in the shots Sam had taken.

Maybe… no. No. What did Dean want with a house? His problems were here. Running away never helped anyone. He closed the laptop, roughly, in a way that would have Sammy bitching at him forever if he knew.

Dean didn't need a house. He needed to get his act together so he could get out hunting again. And as for Cas. Well, Dean didn't know what he needed. Leaving him alone hadn't helped so far.

Anyway, the bathroom wanted cleaning and no one else was going to do it. Dean forgot about the house and went to find some cleaning supplies.

But he didn't forget. Especially when Sam sent the photos to his laptop and they popped up in his inbox and Dean couldn't just leave them without having another look. And somehow Sam had got some really clear shots and zoomed in on them so that Dean could see the roof was basically sound, apart from a couple of tiles here and there. There were a few bits of clapboard that'd need replacing, and all of it would need repainting. And then there were some internal shots, including one of a big, old kitchen with the cast iron range cooker still in place.

He didn't need a house, though.

Except, when he was driving to the store to pick up supplies, it occurred to him the place would probably need rewiring completely.

And when he was giving Baby a thorough cleaning and waxing, he wondered whether the floors were good enough wood to sand down and stain, or whether they'd need covering with carpet or laminate.

And then, when his hands were deep in a burger-mix - mince and finely-chopped onion squishing through his fingers - he thought about that range cooker and wondered if it heated water for the whole house and would the system still work or had the pipes and tank rusted away.

So one day he left the bunker (without telling Sam because he didn't want any told-you-so smugness from his brother) and he drove his Baby to the place Sam had marked on an old-fashioned, honest-to-God paper map instead of some glitchy online crap that'd probably send him driving through a river or over someone's backyard fence.

The area was mostly farmland, with a couple of clusters of dwellings here and there. The map led him along a hellishly rutted driveway (Dean winced over and over on Baby's behalf) and after a mile or so the driveway came out of its borders of head-height thorn bushes and there in front of him was the property in question, on a shallow dome of land, flanked by a forest of conifers a way off to one side and curving around the back, and on the other side by a field full of little twisted trees. Maybe they were fruit trees, which would make that an orchard.. Dean didn't know and wasn't that interested, unless there were any creepy-ass scarecrows or ancient Gods lurking in there, in which case he'd get interested to the tune of torching the whole shebang, fruit or no fruit.

But no, he wouldn't need to, because Sammy would've thought of that already and reduced any sacred trees to cinders all by himself.

Dean pulled Baby up in front of the lop-sided verandah.

He got out and just stood there in front of the old house, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, fingers twisting restlessly amongst the mess of lint, spare cartridges, items that could potentially be used as lockpicks and a couple of bits of candy, mostly covered in the aforementioned lint.

Dean's nose twitched with the scent of late summer - dry grass, hot earth and pollen. He pulled a hand out of his pocket to scratch, but one of the candy wrappers stuck to his fingers and came along for the ride. Dean eased the crinkly plastic away from the sticky mess, regarded the pink blob for a moment, picked away a couple of bits of the lint and then popped it in his mouth to get a burst of slightly fluffy, chemical-tasting, strawberry sweetness.

He looked at the house and chewed. Then slowly, he made his way around the dilapidated building, getting a good look at the weatherworn clapboard, the rotting window frames, the boards on the raised porch that looked like they'd collapse and let you fall through to the crawl space beneath, where there were probably snakes and maybe rats and other creeping things (but hopefully not kids who lived down there in the dirt).

He walked nearly all the way around and discovered that the little bunched-up, tangled trees were an orchard - or would be if someone cut them back or whatever you were supposed to do to apple trees. Dean reached between the branches and plucked out a round, red-green fruit. He spat out the remains of his candy, inspected the apple for suspicious holes and then took a bite.

The flesh was sweet and juicy and slightly pink. And there weren't many apples, but maybe if someone who knew what they were doing looked after the trees - maybe there'd be more next year?

Next year… Another year and another and another, which Dean had never really let himself think about before, because you didn't if you were a hunter. You didn't take those years, or even the next few months, or even the next few weeks for granted. But seasons and apples came every year, rolling around and around into the future, and in the most secret part of Dean's mind a faint, wavering flame sparked to life, like the tiniest of birthday candles - maybe, just maybe there would be years for him.

But for now, he turned his attention back to the house and carefully climbed the creaking steps to the wrap-around verandah. The steps held and, though some of the boards between them and the front door definitely looked rotted through, there were enough that were sound. Dean pulled the house keys from his jeans pocket, unlocked the door and went in.

And ten minutes later he was out again - decision made. The place was a mess, but it would be his mess to fix. The walls were peeling, the floors scuffed, the wiring lethal, the plumbing outdated to the point of serious lead-poisoning. The kitchen range was rusty, the windows swollen and warped in their frames, and birds had gotten into the bedrooms and left shit everywhere.

But Dean's mind swept all that away and just saw what he could do with the place. He could change it from a crappy old ruin to a place where you could live - he could make it a home. His hands itched and twitched for the work and his mind craved the satisfaction that would come from fixing and mending and making new, Instead of the fighting and bleeding and killing he'd done all his life.

He locked the door and followed the pattern of safe boards over the verandah and down the steps and back to his Baby, waiting for him patiently on the churned-up, weed-infested driveway. Then his eye was drawn once more to the orchard. HIding in the trees were a couple or maybe a few boxy, lop-sided shapes, choked all around with weeds, looking like tiny versions of the old house, or maybe - and Dean hoped not - weirdly geometric termite mounds.

He pushed his way through the tall, tangled grasses, swore at the reaching arms of briars that caught on his jeans and ducked beneath the low branches of an apple tree.

They were beehives. Very old, falling to bits and not a bee in sight, but they were definitely beehives. Dean reached out slowly and let his fingertips ghost up a rough, sloping edge and down the other side of one of the little pitched roofs.

And then he was on his knees, his forehead resting against the warm, splintery wood. And his breath was coming in painful, choking sobs and his fists were grasping desperately at bunches of the tough, thigh-high grass.

He cried like a little kid, letting it all come pouring out - all of the pain and confusion and tamped-down despair and agony and black, bleak horror of the past few months. Tears and snot ran down his face. His throat ached and his head pounded and he sobbed and moaned and wanted. He wanted what he couldn't have, because Dean could never have the things he truly wanted - wanted with soul-deep longing. Because although Cas was back from the Empty, he'd come back broken. He wasn't the angel who had told Dean he loved him.

Now, Cas hid from him.

Now, Cas didn't want Dean, or he didn't want to be back, or he didn't even believe he was back. Or whatever. Dean just didn't know. He didn't know anything anymore and because he was totally alone in this abandoned, unloved place, he could admit to his despair, just this once, and let it take him over, just this once.

But, after a long, long, heartaching while, Dean became aware of a pain in his forehead where the old, splintery wood was digging into his skin. And he realised he was watching a trail of ants, marching across the dirt in between the clumps of rough grass, creating a highway that led beneath the beehive. And then he noticed the stinging heat on the back of his neck and decided he'd probably got sunburnt.

He wiped his face on the sleeves of his jacket, which he shouldn't have needed on such a fine day - except he always seemed to be cold at the moment. Then he stood up, stiffly, his head swimming, the pounding of his headache slowly receding like a tide going out.

The sun had sunk low and the shadows of the apple trees stretched away from him over the rumpled, weedy ground. Dean took a long, slow breath of the warm, evening-scented air and let it out as gradually as he could, feeling every so often the uneven tremor of his lungs, that hadn't quite recovered from all the hitching and sobbing and gasping he'd done.

He turned away from the orchard and looked up at the old house again - and something firmed-up inside him. His jaw tensed and he gave the house a sharp, decisive nod.

He'd fix it. He'd fix it up real good and he'd make it his own.

And, he decided, while he was at it, he'd fix other things too, whether they wanted or expected or were ready to be fixed or not.

Ooh, a lovely house for them to live in together and be all happy and cosy! Well, maybe not for a while...