Work Text:
Jack was halfway through his fourth masterpiece when Cas shuffled into the kitchen, half awake after a short nap on the couch.
Dean smiled at him from their spot on the floor. “If you wanted, you could go on to bed.”
Cas slowly sat down beside them and leaned back against the cabinets. He studied the painting taped to the floor. “Is this a pumpkin patch or a more experimental subject?”
Dean plopped Jack onto Cas’s lap. Jack gave a funny little snort and dripped a blob of drool onto Cas’s sweater. Dean was 99% certain there was an incisor vying to make an appearance soon. The drool situation was becoming severe.
“Oh, thank you,” Cas said to Jack anyway, managing to sound like he meant it.
Dean turned his head to view the painting from a different angle. “I think he’s really captured something autumnal in this abstraction.”
“Hmm.” Cas bounced Jack, who made one of his patented Lecherous Old Man Giggle noises. “How did he manage to combine the red and yellow together into so many shades of orange?”
“Well, we started with orange, yellow, white, and black.” Dean smoothed down a wayward curl behind Cas’s ear. “I don’t know what happened to the red paint.”
“It might be in the toy box,” Cas said.
They’d found the old trunk in the basement in August, hauled it out into daylight, scoured it with dish soap and hot water, and once it was dry filled it with teethers, binkies and board books, a rattle shaped like an owl, miniscule socks, craft supplies, and a squishy anthropomorphic candy corn. Tummy time, of late, had been transformed by the suggestion Dean had read about on a mommy-blog he otherwise loved to hate. Finger paint squeezed onto white paper put into a ziploc bag taped to the floor became a canvas for Jack to smear his artistic ambitions onto, in between learning to hold up his own head and participating in conversations with a series of babbles, squeaks, Ah-ah-ah’s, and, once, a fart so loud he started crying.
The baby cuddled against Cas’s chest. Cas rubbed his back and started humming a slow, silly, rumbling version of The Addams Family. Too in love to hum along too, Dean threaded his arm behind Cas and rested his hand on Cas’s waist. Jack patted at Dean’s knee softly, as if to complete the circuit.