Chapter Text
The third and final game of the day is Steelers versus the Colts, eight-thirty eastern time. Indianapolis is down by seven points when the second quarter ends and Ellen says, “One of you go get me another beer, the dog’s on my feet.”
“Not me,” Bobby mumbles, hat tipped low over his eyes. “I finally got this damn thing to recline all the way.”
“Ditto,” Jody says, holding her own beer balanced on her stomach. “Time to get new chairs, Ellen.”
Ellen points at them with her empty can. “Excuse me, are you insulting my Lay-Z-Boys? Because there’s plenty of room on the floor for ingrates.”
“They’re pieces of crap and you know it—”
Dean’s bottle of water has gone tepid, anyway, so he sighs loudly from his place on the couch. “I guess I could get up, stretch my legs. Anybody else?”
“You might want to check with hubby on that one,” Jody says, smirking behind her Pabst.
“What?” Dean looks down at the crown of Castiel’s head, which along with one of Ellen’s throw pillows has migrated to about mid-chest on him. “Cas?”
“He’s out, honey,” Ellen says. “He’s been out.”
“First quarter. Clunk, ” adds Bobby, who snored his way through the entire Cowboys game earlier in the afternoon.
Dean hasn’t actually heard a peep out of Cas since the pies were declared cool enough to eat, which in this house meant cool enough to provoke a small melee in the kitchen. He cranes his head forward to check, and sure enough, Castiel has his eyes closed and his face turned into the couch back. Dean can feel the slow, measured rhythm of his breathing through the pillow, the heat of his body through denim and cotton, and there’s no reaction when Dean runs a hand up his arm.
“Maybe you two should head back to Bobby’s for the night,” Ellen says. “After you grab me another beer.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Dean says, biting his lip against what he knows would be a godawfully dopey smile. He drops his chin on Castiel’s shoulder to ask, “Hey, Cas. Wanna head out?”
Still no reaction, so he follows it up with a tap to the nose. Castiel immediately wrinkles it, and Dean laughs and wraps both arms around him, squeezing tight.
“Cas—”
“No,” Castiel grumbles.
“No?”
“No,” Castiel confirms, and burrows deeper into Dean’s hold.
“You like football that much?” Dean asks him, and that finally brings him around enough to stop and turn his head. He blinks hazily at Dean, forehead creasing.
“... no?” he says.
“Is this the same guy who was talking my ear off about tax reform over the cranberry sauce?” Ellen wants to know. “You sound like a cranky toddler. Go home!”
She’s just ribbing him, the same as she would Dean or Sam, but Castiel stiffens immediately. “I’m awake,” he says, eyes flicking around the room. “Apologies.”
He starts to sit up, but Dean holds on and puts his lips to his ear. “Hey, it’s cool,” he says. “If you’re that tired, do you want to leave?”
He isn’t going to pretend he doesn’t know the answer has been “yes, please, immediately” for most of the day, but Castiel is a stubborn bastard. “I’m fine,” he says, jaw set, wooden in the cradle of Dean’s body.
Under the blast of a holiday toy commercial, Dean says softly, “It’s been a long day. You’re sure?”
Castiel is quiet for a moment, hands coming to rest on top of Dean’s where they splay across his chest. “I don’t want to be any trouble,” he says, just as softly.
Right. “Yeah, I think Cas and I are going to knock off,” Dean says, looking over to Ellen. “If you can muddle on without us.”
Ellen snorts and waves her empty beer. “How will we ever survive?”
“Take the dog home, too,” Bobby says. “Rumsfeld! Wake up, boy.”
It takes nearly as long to coax Castiel off the couch as it does the old hound dog, but eventually Dean has a leash in one hand and the other at the small of his husband’s back, pushing him towards the door. He’s trying to get his feet in his boots without letting go of either, so he misses Ellen coming up beside them until she’s saying, “It was great to finally meet you, kiddo,” and pulling Castiel into a tight hug.
Castiel’s eyes immediately go wide, and he stares over her shoulder at Dean in a mute plea for something— help, or interference. Dean just smiles at him; it might not have been the smoothest set of introductions from Castiel’s perspective, but Dean is pretty satisfied with the results.
“Don’t be strangers, you two!” Jody says from her chair. Castiel hesitantly brings his arms up to return the hug, and Ellen gives him a few hard thumps on the back.
“Hey, it’s just as easy to drive from Queens to Boston as Boston to Queens,” Dean says to Jody. “You don’t be strangers, it can’t be me buying all the gas.”
“Especially in that piece of shit Chevy,” Jody agrees, and Dean and Bobby both turn narrow eyes on her. “What? I call 'em like I see 'em.”
“Oh! Leftovers,” Ellen says, and releases Castiel just as suddenly as she’d grabbed him. Castiel stands frozen where she leaves him, looking completely bewildered by the whole experience. It only adds to Dean’s private conviction that Castiel hasn’t encountered that much physical affection in his life, and the equally private decision to provide as much as Cas will let him to make up for it.
“We’ve got plenty of stuffing and gravy, still, and the jello salad,” Ellen says, disappearing into the kitchen. “Oh, and the extra pie. Don’t need that around here.”
“I don’t know, El, Jo seemed a little attached to that pie,” Bobby drawls.
“My daughter is in college and still disappeared after dinner to go catch monsters on her game thing,” she replies tartly. “She gets no say if she can’t spend two minutes talking to family.”
“Speaking of,” Jody says, dragging herself out of the recliner. She gets to her feet and crosses the room to the stairway. “Girls! Dean and Castiel are leaving, are you going to say goodbye?”
Somewhere upstairs, a door opens and music pours out: the bad, moody kind Dean remembers very clearly from his own days in a Baba O’Riley-style teenage wasteland. “What?” Jo yells.
“Dean and Cas are leaving! Come on!”
Castiel gets a few more collateral hugs as Dean gets swarmed, first by Jo and then Annie. Jo does object to the removal of the pecan pie, so it’s just pumpkin, apple, and two slices of Ellen’s jealously-guarded French Silk that make it into the tote on Dean’s arm, along with the other leftovers. By the time Ellen’s finished loading them up, his shoulder is about to fall off and Rumsfeld’s gone back to sleep on the foyer floor. It takes ten more minutes and a turkey wing before the dog, Dean, and Castiel are finally out the door and into the frigid night, shuffling carefully down the steep steps to the private alley behind the Roadhouse.
Castiel doesn’t speak until they’ve emerged onto the damp street and turn north, and when he does it’s low and hesitant. “That was...”
“It was great,” Dean says, and has to laugh a little at the suspicious look Castiel turns on him. “Cas, c’mon. You think they’d just go along with whoever I brought home and be fine with it?”
“Yes,” Castiel says. “That is exactly what I think.”
Dean laughs in earnest this time, and pulls Castiel’s scarf out of the man’s coat pocket to drape it around his neck. Cas forgets stuff like that, and the chilly wind is making Dean’s cheeks sting. “Well, I can tell you from painful past experience that that’s a tough crowd to please. You did good, Cas.”
He bumps Castiel’s shoulder with his as he says it, and Castiel leans into it, into him. It just makes sense to slide an arm around him at that point, although with Rumsfeld pressing into his legs and half the turkey day table on his other arm, it makes walking tricky. Dean still pulls him in close, and Castiel sighs deeply.
The streets in this part of Queens are narrow, lined with big trees and little houses. There’s no parking for miles, so they’ll walk the half-hour it takes to get from the Roadhouse to Bobby’s place. Ellen and Bobby prop up opposite ends of Murray Hill, fighting the gentrification creeping up from the south by keeping 5¢ wings on the menu at the bar and letting the junkyard’s landscaping get gnarlier every year, respectively. Jody’s in a neighborhood closer to Little Neck— Annie’s still in school and the public district there is better.
“Do you really think it went well?” Castiel says wistfully as they wait for a light, the cross street bursting with the striped awnings of old Italian bistros and new, garishly neon Korean script.
Dean thinks he might need to take a more analytical track with this, given Castiel’s marked preference for cerebral over social interactions. “Okay, first of all— Ellen hugs? Hard to come by unless you’ve broken a bone recently. Two: Jo’s a pretty suspicious character, too, and she, uh. Used to have a big crush on me. She’s hated pretty much everyone I’ve ever brought home, Lisa included. But you got a hug. Three: Bobby’s definitely going to make you do his taxes, thanks to that dinner speech.”
Castiel groans and Dean has to lean over and kiss the side of his head, because that part was kind of terrible. “You let me babble.”
“I let you lead us in a very informative discussion about commercial tax law, which will have direct benefits for the two small business owners who were at the table,” Dean corrects him, and Castiel makes another sound of profound suffering.
There’s a brief break from walking while Rumsfeld strays into the grassy strip between the street and sidewalk and Dean has the occasion to ask, “What the hell have you been eating , dog?” as he does the necessaries. They make the rest of the walk home in tired but companionable silence, and the sleeting rain is kind enough to wait until they turn onto Bobby’s street.
“I’m going to dry Rum off down here,” Dean says once he pulls up the garage door, icy trickles sliding down the back of his neck and making him shudder. “You want to watch anything? Doesn’t have to be the game.”
“I’m tired,” Castiel mumbles, drifting towards the door to the house while trying to unbutton the trench with clumsy fingers. He never got his gloves out. “I think I’d rather sleep.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Okay. See you upstairs.”
Rumsfeld gets fed and watered, and Dean checks the rest of the house, locks the door to the garage and cranks up the thermostat a few degrees before heading upstairs. When he gets to the end of the hall, the bathroom light is on and the sink is wet. Castiel’s toothbrush is out on the counter, their toothpaste laid next to it, mangled like always.
“How friggin’ hard is it to just roll from the end?” Dean mutters, grabbing his own toothbrush. “C’mon, sweetheart, work with me here.”
Bobby’s put the two of them up in Dean’s old room, the one he shared with Sam until they hit those really rocky years and the kid moved into the basement. No word to Bobby or Dean about it, just, one day sleeping down there with the spiders, and somehow even angrier after Dean hauled all those old rugs and leftover paint down so it wasn’t so goddamn grim. Dean’s still not used to seeing a full queen-sized bed in here, when there’s still tape from his posters and scratches from Sam’s desk on the otherwise bare walls. He leans in the doorway, brushing his teeth, and Castiel, down to socks and boxers on the bed, looks up from frowning intently at the floor.
“Do you think we offended Ellen, leaving so early?” he asks.
Dean groans and goes to spit.
“Dean?” Castiel calls after him, sounding worried.
“Jus’ a seh!” Dean calls back, and mutters, “Oh mah Gah.”
When he comes back to the room, pulling the door closed behind him, Castiel is still sitting ramrod-straight on the edge of the bed, anxiety in every line of his body. “Dean—”
“Cas,” Dean says, maybe a little less than patiently. He peels out of his shirt and sweater and drapes them over the chair in the corner, next to the rickety dresser. “I’m serious. It’ll probably take another visit or two before you really click, but as far as first meet-ups go? Honestly? This was everything I could have hoped for.”
“Do you mean that?” Castiel asks guardedly. “Because I—”
“Yes,” Dean says, starting on the buttons of his jeans. “Really. They loved you. They think you’re great.” He dumps them on the chair, too, then hits the lights. He kneels on the mattress and crawls towards Castiel with a ridiculous amount of protest from the creaking springs. “Why aren’t you under the covers? It’s freezing.”
“I’m aware. I was waiting for you,” Castiel grumbles, and Dean throws an arm around his waist and drags him up the bed until he can maneuver them both under the worn-soft sheets and old comforter. Cas goes willingly, wiggling close until they’re facing each other with Dean’s head on his arm, the other arm curled around Dean’s shoulders. His fingers brush idly through Dean’s hair.
“You are the cutest fucking thing,” Dean tells him. He has his face buried shamelessly in Castiel’s neck, soaking in his warmth, the way he doesn’t mind Dean’s cold hands splayed over his skin. “And you worry too much. Cas, Jesus. Even if they hated you— which they don’t— it’d be fine.”
“I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t,” Castiel demurs, but at least he says it lightly.
“It would. We’d make it work.” Dean smiles in the dark. “I love you. You’re stuck with me.”
“I see.” A thumb rubs gently behind his ear, and Castiel’s heel presses into the back of his knee. When he speaks, it’s breathed against Dean’s forehead. “How fortunate I love you too.”
Hearing it is still a quiet, blooming thrill, and Dean has to tilt his head up and kiss him at least once for that. Twice for coming down to New York with Dean, even though he was so nervous. Three times for the tax talk, which Dean thinks might put the junkyard in the black for the first time in a decade.
“I liked them too,” Castiel confesses, barely above a whisper. “I really did.”
“Knew you would,” Dean whispers back. “Now you just gotta meet Sam.”
“Dean," Castiel says plaintively, and Dean muffles his laughter in his bare shoulder.