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Castiel comes home on a Sunday.
His grace is cupped in the pool of his palm, spilling cool blue through the cracks between his fingers. There is blood at his throat. He is standing where the end of a street curves into a cul de sac, looking up at a pale yellow house.
There is birdsong above him. His coat is streaked with black goo.
Something is beginning.
*
Castiel stoops to kneel in the flower bed. The knees of his suit get damp, but he finds doesn’t mind. He is alive, and the wet earth is doing what wet earth shall do.
He tips the contents of his palm down into the ground, and a line of sunflowers begins to grow.
*
The front door is unlocked. Castiel is—afraid to knock suddenly, afraid to shatter the soft murmuring peace of this bit of sun-stained street.
Everything about this place is warm, soft. The porch swing moving gently in the breeze, and the welcome mat on the stoop.
The man whose presence he can feel inside, glowing, as it has always done, like the sun.
Castiel opens the door.
The hallway is light and wide, lined with rich wooden flooring and blue walls. There’s a coatrack behind the door: Castiel recognizes Dean’s jacket, and a pink raincoat that must be Jack’s, and their shoes lined up neatly below it. There’s a staircase leading off to the right, what looks like a living room to the left—but none of that is what Castiel is here for. Not yet.
He can hear a murmur coming from straight ahead.
Castiel’s heart beats in his chest, and beats, and beats.
He walks down the hallway.
They don’t see him at first, but Castiel sees them. Castiel sees them and he wants to weep.
The air smells like bread, and the kitchen is golden with the light of the rising spring sun, and Jack is sitting on a tall stool at the island concentrating on a book spread open in front of him, his brow furrowed and his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. And Jack is—oh, he’s so small, he’s smaller than Castiel has ever seen him, with a body that actually reflects his age. He’s a baby. He’s Castiel’s baby.
Dean is leaning over him. He has an arm curled around Jack’s tiny shoulders with all of the protectiveness in the world even though there’s no threat to be seen in this cozy home, watching Jack sound out the words on the pages before him with deep, gentle eyes. He’s wearing a robe, belted around a waist that looks thinner than when last Castiel saw him, and there are shadows beneath those eyes, and his hair is graying at the temples, and he’s lovelier than anything Castiel will ever see. Lovelier than the sunrise.
Castiel knows that when he steps forward out of the shadows of the hallway, they will see him. And he should be nervous, maybe—he doesn’t know how much time has passed between his love confession in the bunker and here, now, himself graceless, and Jack a child, and Dean with his hair gone long enough to brush the back of his neck—but he simply isn’t.
He loves these two people more than he ever knew it was possible to love, in all his millennia of existence. There is no space in his brimming heart for anything but joy.
Castiel moves into the light, and Jack lifts his head.
He watches the smile break across Jack’s face, and a moment after, the tears. Jack squirms off of his stool. Jack sobs Castiel’s name, his voice so small, a lisp to the word where his front teeth are missing, and launches himself across the room into Castiel’s arms.
“Jack,” Cas breathes. He has fallen to his knees. Jack’s head fits perfectly beneath Castiel’s chin, his little warm body settled against Castiel’s chest. Castiel kisses his forehead. Smooths his soft blond hair back. Kisses it again. “I missed you, Jack. I missed you, my baby boy.”
Jack isn’t saying anything. Castiel can feel his grip on the back of his coat, Castiel can feel his tears soaking through his shirt. Castiel missed him so much that even though he has him back now, it almost hurts to breathe.
Castiel looks up.
Seeing Dean nearly pushes a sob out of Castiel’s throat. He looks almost small, wavering there on the other side of the room. His knuckles have gone white where he holds himself up on the island. His face is stricken. He looks—he looks lost.
“Dean,” Castiel says, his voice rough from disuse, from emotion. He holds out the arm that isn’t clutching Jack to him. Palm open, fingers spread. “It’s me.”
Dean’s eyes are so wide. Anything could tumble into them.
Castiel wants to clutch Dean to his chest, too.
Castiel loves him.
And Dean can’t seem to speak. He shakes his head once, slightly, his eyes going wet. He takes a stumbling step towards both of them.
Jack draws back before Castiel can say anything else, reaching up to cup Castiel’s cheeks in two pudgy hands.
His hair is messy, and his eyes are bright and blue. There are freckles on the apples of his rosy cheeks. He looks healthy, and happy. He looks like he has been loved well.
“I knew you would come back,” he says. “I told Momma you would.”
Castiel cups the back of his head, smiling despite himself. “Momma?”
Jack points behind him.
And still, Dean looks as if he is seeing a ghost.
“Oh,” Castiel says softly. He stands, shifting Jack to his waist as he does so, and he watches Dean’s forlorn eyes track him helplessly. Castiel loves him. Castiel wants to cup him in his hands, more precious than the grace he ripped out to get back to him. “Oh, Dean.”
Dean’s throat moves when he swallows. Quick and harsh. His lips are parted, but no sound comes out.
“Should I do the tests?” Castiel asks him gently. He would, though now that he thinks about it, Dean has never asked him to before. Never, not any time that Castiel has come back to life. He has always just seemed to know. To have faith. “I will, I don’t mind.”
Dean hesitates. He is older than the last time Castiel saw him, but something about him looks like a little boy in this moment. Lost. Alone.
Castiel thinks of him standing outside a burning building with a baby in his arms. With no one to care for him.
Has nobody cared for him while Castiel was gone?
“Momma, it’s really him,” says Jack. He’s still clinging to Castiel like a little monkey, with his knees curling up and pressed into Castiel’s soft human side. “It is, I can tell.”
Dean’s whole countenance changes when he looks at Jack. His face softens, and the abandoned curl of his shoulders straightens out.
“I believe you, sweetheart,” he whispers.
Oh—his voice. It’s rusty and thin and barely more than a rasp, like he very rarely speaks. Castiel thinks of his silence. Castiel thinks of what Dean told him long ago—that he didn’t talk for a year after Mary died.
He takes a step closer.
Dean always falls into his arms when one or the other of them escapes death, and Castiel has come to anticipate those moments of affection. Those moments where Dean lets himself take what he needs, where he trusts himself to Castiel for even just a blink of time, and lets Castiel hold him up. His head in the crook of Castiel’s shoulder, his chest against Castiel’s chest. The entire warm form of him entwined with Castiel’s own.
But Dean isn’t falling into him now. Dean isn’t letting himself have even this.
“Are you—are you—“ Dean gestures to the blood at Castiel’s throat, to the remaining tendrils of the Empty still gripping at the hem of his clothes. Dean’s hand is shaking.
Castiel wants to press Dean between himself and the wall and keep him there, safe and held.
“I’m ok,” he says. And he is. He is. He’s home, and his baby is in his arms, and Dean is alive and in front him, and in the front yard, his grace is making flowers grow. “I’m—human.”
Dean blinks. The soft stutter of his eyelashes. The desperate tilt to his mouth as he gathers his resolve around him.
He lifts his hands. He signs, Then you have to eat. And he turns toward the stove.
*
Castiel knows that Dean loves him.
He has known since the last time Dean prayed to him in Purgatory, his words saying one thing and his soul saying I love you, come back, I’m so sorry, I love you, I love you.
Castiel couldn’t let him say it aloud, of course. And he certainly couldn’t reciprocate.
Not until the end.
*
Dean makes him scrambled eggs, and bacon, and cuts him two thick slices of fresh bread that he spreads with golden butter from a little dish on the counter. He makes the same for Jack, albeit a smaller portion; and then he sits on the other side of the island and watches them eat, his two hands tangling with each other restlessly.
Jack babbles happily to the two of them as he eats his breakfast, little socked feet swinging high above the floor. Castiel appreciates it—both because it is a delight and a balm to hear his son’s voice after so much thick dark silence, but also because the weight of Dean’s unspeaking gaze is almost too much for him to bear.
Castiel is worried about him. Castiel thought that he would be ok. That he would be sad, of course, but he’d be able to live out the rest of his long life content and comforted by the knowledge that Castiel loved him.
He has not felt stupid very often in his ancient lifetime. He feels stupid now.
Dean has clearly not been ok.
There is a lull in Jack’s cheerful monologue, so Castiel speaks up hesitantly.
“How long was I gone?”
Jack looks to Dean. Castiel follows suit.
Dean is staring down at his own hands. His thin fingers. His bitten nails. The scars on his knuckles, woven thick like cloth.
“Two—” says Dean in his tattered whisper. He stops. Swallows again. Lifts his hands and signs, two years, three months, twelve days.
Castiel’s eyes sink closed.
He left them alone. He left them alone for so long.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
“Cas,” Dean rasps.
Castiel hasn’t heard Dean say his name in two years, three months, and twelve days. It hits Castiel’s chest now with a soft thud, sinks in like a stone.
Dean is finally looking at him again. His cheeks are too hollow and the shape of his eyes is too sad and Castiel wants to come around to Dean’s side of the island and pull him into his arms.
You’re back now, Dean signs. Castiel imagines Dean being so quiet for so long that he had to learn how, imagines Dean practicing the shapes of words and letters with his strong, nimble hands. That’s all that matters.
*
After, Dean swings Jack up onto his hip to go dress him in his clothes for the day, but he turns to Castiel first.
He’s closer than he has been all morning. Castiel can nearly feel him, the warmth of him; Castiel can see the freckles on the bridge of his nose.
Still, there is something holding him back.
“Go take a shower,” he says, in his softly cracking voice. “I’ll leave a change of clothes on the bathroom counter.”
Castiel is eager to wash away the blood and the sweat and the goo. He imagines it’s upsetting for Dean and Jack, as well, to see him this way. He thinks about Jack’s body, with its eyes burned out. He thinks about hundreds of Dean’s, scattered bloody and broken at Castiel’s feet.
Yes. He wants to wash this death off of himself.
But he—but it is difficult. To let Dean and Jack out of his sight.
Dean must notice his hesitation. He looks, for a moment, like he’s going to cry.
He puts Jack down. Signs something quickly to him that Castiel doesn’t catch, but that breaks Jack’s face out into a bright, wide smile.
“We’re gonna wait in the bathroom with you!” Jack says, taking Castiel’s hand and marching him down the hallway and toward a flight of stairs. Castiel glances over his shoulder, reflexive: Dean is following them closely. “While you shower! And I’m gonna tell you all about my book!”
Castiel manages to meet Dean’s eyes. Manages to get the gaze to hold.
Thank you, Castiel thinks, and hopes his face says the same.
Dean gives him a small smile.
They stop by Dean’s room quickly enough for Dean to dig a pair of baggy sweatpants and an old t-shirt out of the back of his dresser, but not long enough for Castiel to take the look around that he really wants to. He gets an impression of tidy surfaces, of pictures on the walls and a bedside table overflowing with books—and then Dean is ushering them out.
Castiel doesn’t protest. If privacy is what Dean wants, then Castiel will give it to him.
Castiel will give him anything.
The bathroom next. It’s as cozy as the rest of the house is, the walls blue, the towels fluffy and clean, a little plastic bucket of bath toys that must be Jack’s sitting on the floor.
This house is cared for. Loved. Castiel could not imagine a better place for Jack to grow up.
Castiel watches Dean lean into the shower and turn on the water, adjusting the temperature, making sure the curtain isn’t letting anything out. Castiel watches Dean immediately fall back into that role of caring for him, too.
And Castiel loves him.
Dean turns away as Castiel undresses, looking down at his socks. The tips of his ears are pink, and the crests of his cheeks. Castiel wants to put his mouth on him.
Castiel’s own skin is hot. His human skin, now unregulated by his grace.
Castiel gets into the shower.
The water feels lovely, shunting gore and grime away from him and down the drain. He listens to Jack tell him all about his book, which Castiel cannot make head nor tails of, and he washes himself with the soap Dean keeps in the shower. It’s strawberry scented, the bottle pretty. And this bathroom is right off of Dean’s bedroom, so it must be where Dean washes—this must be what Dean smells like.
Castiel smells like him, now. Castiel is going to get out of the shower and dry himself with Dean’s towels, dress himself with Dean’s clothes. Castiel is in Dean’s home. Castiel is home.
He squeezes his eyes shut. He lets the hot water wash away his tears.
*
The day passes with a gentleness that Castiel has rarely felt in his long, long life.
He helps Jack pick out what he wants to wear—striped leggings and a shirt with a dinosaur on it, and headband with bobbles that Castiel is told sagely is meant to look like a bee—while Dean gets dressed in his own room. He sits on the couch with Jack in his lap and helps him through another chapter of his book. He listens to the sounds of Dean baking bread in the kitchen, the comforting rattle of mixing bowls and pots and pans, and indulges himself in as many glances as he thinks he can get away with. He calls Sam, who starts crying immediately, and then changes to video call so he can talk to Eileen, who makes fun of Sam even though her own eyes are wet. He eats soup for lunch. He drinks tea out of a big, heavy, handmaid mug. He is alive, and he is home.
They go outside. Castiel sits on the porch swing with his tea, rocking slowly, the breeze against his face and the sun against his shoulders. He watches Jack and Dean, playing together in the yard: they’re running in circles, and every time Jack ‘catches’ Dean Dean falls to the ground, letting Jack pounce on his chest and tickle his stomach and laugh at the top of his lungs. Dean is smiling, truly smiling, for the first time since before Castiel died.
Dean is grass-stained and winded by the time they’re done. He is flat on his back, looking up at the sky. Jack is tucked like a little bird into his side.
Castiel stands, and makes his way down the front steps.
Dean doesn’t look at Cas until he’s sitting on the grass, too, his legs crossed and his tea held warm against his chest.
When he does, he blinks slowly. His eyelids are thin and shiny, purple with exhaustion, and the lines at the edges of them are deep. His mouth is an aching shape.
“Cas,” he says. Quiet, quiet. “How did you… how did you know where we were?”
Dean’s shoulder is just an inch from Castiel’s knee, but the distance might as well be miles. Castiel looks at the pulse racing in Dean’s throat. Castiel looks at the hand he has spread over Jack’s back, protective and steady.
“Time passes strangely in the Empty,” Castiel says slowly. “What felt like a day to me must have been a year to you. I knew very quickly what I must do: I had to pull my grace out if I wanted to come back to you, so I could be human, and my deal could be broken. And I did want that. More than anything, Dean.” He stops. Dean isn’t looking at him any longer—Dean’s eyes are squeezed shut as if it hurts to have them open. Castiel feels his voice waver as he begins again. “I did not spend a second there without that thought in my mind. I wanted to go home. I would have done anything to get home. And when the Empty ejected me, home was where I arrived.”
They are quiet for a long time, as the sounds of this idyllic suburban street surround them. Birdsong, the breeze in the trees. Somewhere, far away, the roar of an interstate leading to the rest of the world.
He thinks that Jack might be asleep, his ear nestled over Dean’s heartbeat. He would think Dean sleeping, too, if not for the tremor that has taken up residence from his shoulders to his palms, if not for the little hitch of his breath.
If Dean was asleep, Castiel would lift him in his arms. He would hold Dean and Jack both close to his chest, he would take all of their weight onto himself, and he would carry them inside.
“You can’t leave again.” Dean’s voice slides in rough beneath the quiet. He’s breathing too fast. “Cas—you can’t. No matter what. We. We couldn’t take it, man.”
“I’m not leaving,” Cas says, startling himself with his conviction. His hands are squeezed tight around the mug, tight enough that he would have cracked it by now if still an angel. “Never again, Dean. I will never leave you again.”
He won’t. And he’ll say it a thousand times if he has to.
*
Dean carries Jack to bed for the rest of his nap, and he is gone for ten minutes, fifteen, thirty—and then Castiel is following him.
He doesn’t have to look very far.
Dean looks so small on his bed, curled over himself with his spine facing out and his head tucked down and his arms holding his middle tight, tight. And his shoulders shaking. Shaking with tears that Castiel can hear from the doorway.
“Dean,” Castiel murmurs. He sees Dean flinch. He crosses to Dean’s side of the bed, and god, he can taste his heart at the back of his throat, and the moment he lets himself touch Dean’s shoulder Dean sits up and launches himself into Castiel’s arms.
Castiel catches him. Of course he does.
“It’s ok,” Castiel says. He doesn’t know why he’s saying it. It’s one of those human ways of providing comfort that never made sense to him until he met Dean—until he met the most loving man who has ever lived. “It’s ok, Dean. I’m here.”
Dean’s face is in Castiel’s neck. Dean’s hands are at his waist. Dean is absolutely silent when he cries, like he doesn’t want to bother anyone with his grief.
He makes Castiel’s heart ache.
“You can cry,” Castiel whispers. He feels Dean burrow further into his neck, feels the damp heat of his tears. “I know. I know.”
He rocks the two of them gently. Standing with his thighs pressed to the mattress and Dean kneeling up to reach them puts Castiel much taller than Dean than he usually is, so he bends himself down around Dean like the bows of a tree, like a roof, like a shield. He wishes that he could wrap Dean in his wings. That he could cover him with downy feathers, warm and thick, and let him rest.
“I,” says Dean, and then stops. He’s holding Castiel so tightly, his fingers wound up in the fabric of his too-small, borrowed t-shirt. Castiel can barely hear him. He turns his face into the softness of Dean’s hair, and he breathes. “Cas, I love you too. I love you. I love you. I—“
Castiel guides Dean’s face out of hiding with a hand on his cheek, and Dean’s skin is warm and tear-damp, and Dean’s mouth is trembling. And Castiel kisses him.
It’s slow, and wanting. Touching to know that they are alive.
Dean melts against him, his breath shuddering out in a sigh.
“I love you,” Castiel murmurs. Dean’s eyes flutter closed, and some day—some day he will want Dean to look at him while he says it. He will want Dean to see the truth of it shining in his face, and be able to carry that next to his heart. For now, he simply runs his fingertip lightly along the lacy line of his eyelashes.
“I meant everything I said, Dean.”
Dean swallows.
“Cas,” Dean breathes. There is a mark on his lower lip where he’s bitten it raw, worried it between his teeth too often. Castiel kisses him again, light and caressing, and draw back to watch pink spread like dusk across Dean’s face. “You—you promise you’ll stay?”
Cas takes a breath to speak, but suddenly Dean’s eyes are open, wide and wet, and he’s tripping over himself to speak.
“Because Cas, I—I meant what I said earlier, too. We couldn’t take it if you were gone again. We—I couldn’t. I didn’t. I've barely been able to talk to anybody out loud but Jack in two years, did you know that? Two goddamn years. I just—just—my words wouldn’t come consistently for anybody but him, and I think it was ‘cuz he’s got so much of you in him that sometimes, lookin’ at him, I didn’t feel the loss of you quite so bad. I'd just wake up some days and couldn't talk to anybody but my baby, couldn't even make a sound. And I—and Cas, I. I don’t even think I’d be alive if I didn’t have him to take care of. I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be. I don’t wanna have to live again without you, Cas, I don’t want to—“
His voice breaks off with a little click, like the capacity of language has just run out. He just stares at Castiel. Stares at him with anguish that Castiel knows it will take a long time to soothe.
“I promise,” Castiel says, low and firm. He wipes at the wetness beneath Dean’s eyes. “Dean, I promise. Not Heaven or Hell or the Empty or the end of the world could take me from you again.”
Dean is gripping the front of Castiel’s t-shirt now right at the collar. Clinging. He says, small, no sound to his voice and only air, “Ok.”
Castiel looks at him. At his tight shoulders, at the divot between his eyebrows, at the downturn at the corners of his mouth.
“Lay down,” Castiel tells him gently.
Dean does.
His willingness, his eagerness to please, makes something in Castiel’s heart clench. Dean is tired and careworn, softened and frayed around the edges like paper folded too many times. There is nothing left in him that wants to push back, that wants to fight.
He crawls to the middle of the bed and then he blinks up at Castiel. He is still holding on to Castiel’s shirt.
Castiel slips in next to him, running his and up Dean’s arm and over his shoulders and around to cup the nape of his neck, and Dean deflates with a stuttering sigh. Castiel touches the warm soft skin there—just one of a thousand secret precious places on Dean’s body that he’s dreamt about. He will kiss Dean there one day. He will kiss Dean everywhere, if Dean lets him.
“You’ve done such a good job,” Castiel says, “taking care of Jack while I was gone.”
Dean shakes his head. His hair rasps against the pillow case. “Don’t,” he croaks, his hand flat against Castiel’s heart.
Castiel curls his free hand around Dean’s wrist, thumb pressed to the pulse there. “Why not?” he asks.
Dean blinks. Blinks again. He’s staring at the place where their hands touch. “He’s our kid,” he says. There is grit in his words, silt on a sandbed. “And I love him. ‘Course I took care of him.”
Dean isn’t looking at him, but Castiel watches his face anyway. The way his jaw is still tense, and his eyelids flutter like they want to close.
He echoes his thought from earlier. “And who took care of you?”
That makes Dean look up.
He looks—startled. Like he doesn’t know why Castiel would say that. “I was fine,” he whispers.
“Dean,” Castiel says. He keeps his words low. Their child is sleeping down the hall, and Dean’s eyes are wide enough that Castiel thinks one loud noise would make him jump. “My love.”
The pet name makes a small sound slip from Dean’s throat. He is twisting the fabric of Castiel’s collar between his fingers, an unconscious movement.
“I don’t,” he says, and breathes, and breathes, and Castiel slides his hand up and enfolds Dean’s completely to still the nervous movement. “I don’t—Cas—“
“Let me,” Castiel says. That heat is back behind his eyes, the tears from this morning threatening to fall again. He thought he might never get to see Dean again. He thought he might never get to tell him that he is so, so loved. “It’s my turn to take care of you, Dean. You’ve done so much, and it’s time to rest.”
Dean’s eyes are wet, too. Dean tucks himself forward into Castiel’s chest, both arms slipping around Castiel’s waist and squeezing tight.
“I just missed you,” Dean gasps quietly. “I missed you so bad.”
Castiel wishes that Dean could have been the one to experience these two years like the blink of an eye, the one who only had to bear a fraction of the pain. But he wasn’t.
So Castiel is going to hold him. Castiel is going to kiss him, going to love him.
Castiel will not leave him again.
*
Dean falls asleep like that.
His breathing has evened out, and now he’s snuffling softly into the skin of Castiel’s throat. He is rosy and warm in Castiel’s arms. Safe and small and restful.
The house is still around Castiel. This house, sunny and lived-in, happiness in every corner even though Dean has been so sad.
There are birds signing beyond the bedroom window. The day is waning into late afternoon.
In the front yard, a row of sunflowers grows.