Coming Back Around

by liptonrm

Chapter 4

It surprised Dean how many things he’d forgotten, how many things he’d even had the time to notice.

They were little things--like how Cas was a morning person, up with the sun and more energy than Dean had seen this side of 20. How he used so much cream in his coffee it was hardly beigey-tan but he never added sugar. How he left socks, just socks, laying all over the place, on the floor, on the table, strewn in the bathroom, and a couple memorable times in the freezer. How he drove like he wasn’t paying attention, one lazy hand on the wheel. How he smiled with his eyes and laughed with his whole body. How good it felt to feel him standing right next to his shoulder, warm and solid.

How guilty Dean felt, still, because Cas was human, whole and incomplete. how Dean had dragged him down into the blood and the dirt. How he hadn’t been able to save Cas from the consequences of his own choices.

Cas was one more person that Dean had never been able to save.

The good times, the bad, the mundane and the ridiculous. Dean hadn’t known how much he missed all of it. How much he’d missed Cas.

He hadn’t realized how lonely he’d been until he wasn’t anymore.

“Sounds like things are good,” Sammy said, tinny and distant on the phone.

Dean glanced over at Cas, sitting lotus-style on the cot, eyes closed, headphones on, face limned warm and yellow by the lamp.

“Yeah, I guess they are.”

They didn’t hurry to kiss again, didn’t hurry to do anything. Dean had wrapped his solitude around himself for so long he’d almost forgotten what it meant to not be alone. It was enough to lean into Cas’s solid warmth, to bump shoulders in the kitchen, to let hands linger on shoulders and backs, to feel a heartbeat counterpoint to his as they sat close, side by side, no space between them.

There were mornings when Dean was up first, when he hadn’t really slept. He would sit out on the step and watch the stars dim, the sky go from black to purple to blue, see the horizon glow pink and gold as the sun rose. When the door would creak behind him and Dean would look up to see Cas there, hair still pressed flat on one side and pillow marks on his cheeks. He would sit down next to Dean and pass him a steaming mug of coffee, the heat always a shock.

They would sit there, quiet, and watch the day begin.

Notes:

This is the only end I think I'll ever have for this fic. My plan for this story was to take a Dean who was rudderless and purposeless, a Dean whose world had changed and who wasn't sure how to change with it, and to take him from there to a place where he could find some version of a happy ending.

But no matter how hard I bang my head against the keyboard, I can't find the bridge from the Dean here to the one I see in the final scene that already exists in my mind, a Dean who is happy and who is willing to believe that the people he cares about will always care about him, no matter what. The story from here to there is either too big or too small for me to write. I just can't drag it out of my mind or channel it through my fingers. It exists somewhere, I'm sure, just not right here.

Here's the thing about the kind of depression I've tried to depict here, nothing is big enough to fill it, no other person, or place, or belief, or love, can come from outside and make you whole again. But it can be healed over. It takes time and trust and relearning your own worth over and over again. Its a daily struggle, until suddenly you look at yourself and realize that you do love yourself and that you are worth the trouble, that you're happy.

it's not easy and it's not perfect, the hole never really goes away, but things do get better. That's what I wanted to depict with this story. And that's what I'm not going to be able to do. Just know that at some point Dean wakes up and he's warm. The sun is shining through the window and he can hear Cas moving around somewhere outside of the room. This is a Dean who smiles, who gets out of bed, who drinks coffee and leans against Cas on the couch. A Dean who gets up eventually and grabs his toolbox and finally, finally finishes fixing the furnace while Cas hands him parts while telling him about a story he'd just read online.

In another world they were happy. Because that's what they deserve to be.