Chapter Text
"I love you."
Dean blinks, opens his mouth, blinks again, and closes it. The air caught in his throat feels a million years old. Cas is looking right at him, standing in his sweat pants that tug too low on his hips, that spill over his feet and under his heels. Wearing one of Dean's old t-shirts, worn thin and frayed at the edges.
Dean feels like the floor has just been swept from under his feet, and he looks at Cas just to have some steady focus point, something to look at that grounds him.
(Cas is always that thing, isn't he? Tied to him by something akin to gravity, always hovering, even when not in sight.
If Dean is the Earth, Cas is the moon.)
Had the circumstances been different Dean would have rolled with this, said something like yeah, you know I love you too, buddy, you're part of the family, but it's the middle of the night and he couldn't sleep so he'd gotten up to...just to do, something, anything, and as he sat at the table with one of the little lamps on, amusing himself by spelling words with re-heated alphabet soup, Cas had come to stand at the doorway and watched him in silence for a few minutes.
Then had spoken the words.
Too easily for it to be easy. Too casually for it not to be anything. His gaze pinning Dean down in his chair with the weight of it, with the meaning of it.
They're a gunshot to the chest.
"What?" He wheezes at last, ashes in his mouth, acid in his throat.
"I just wanted you to know that," Castiel says, and then turns and disappears down the hall.
Dean feels like something has been ripped from him, right out of his gut, carved out with an ice pick of anxiety and terror and also a strange sense of wrongness. A voice that says this made no sense, that Castiel should know better, that Dean can't have known something that isn't true rings in his ears. He feels an intense desire to catch Cas and tell him he's wrong, that he doesn't love him, that he's confused because of this newly human thing, that really they do have kind of a strong bond but it isn't love. It can't be.
(Could it?)
At first, he doesn't stop to consider what he, himself, Dean Winchester, feels. He sits there, dumbfounded, and tries to straighten his world view. The gravity has shifted and the moon has been pulled closer and now the tides of his thoughts are too fast, too soon. His heart is beating an imprint against his ribcage and under the skin of his wrist, pounding away at him as if trying to climb right out of his flesh.
His eyes fall to his bowl of soup, where he'd been sliding letters to the side to spell words. He looks at the letters already there (C S T I L), and he remembers. He remembers the reason there even was alphabet soup in the fridge: Cas had gotten sick and hadn't liked his tomato soup, and Dean, wanting to offer Castiel the full of experience of being pampered and looked after while ill had made him a different batch, this time with alphabet pasta, and they'd sat in bed together cursing the vowels for being the most elusive letters of the broth as they spelled dirty words at each other.
He remembers after, setting their bowls aside and pressing his hand to Castiel's forehead, how his eyes had fluttered shut and he'd leaned into the contact, how his lashes had shadowed over his cheekbones. Somehow he had thought of Cas with snowflakes in his eyelashes, and then wished ardently, a poignant want startling by its strength, that he could be one of them.
He remembers the day he'd seen Castiel on the edge of town, dirty and grimy and injured and red-eyed, remembers that he'd felt such a burst that he'd yelled his name and had run across the street to grab him and pull him into his arms. Hadn't given a single fuck that a car had swerved around him and honked, or that they were clutching each other in public, the crowd of pedestrians parting around them like the red sea.
He remembers purgatory. Searching for him through trees and cliffs, through vampire and werewolf accounts, remembers Castiel had stayed away from him to protect him.
Dean remembers everything Castiel has ever done for him. Wonders how much else there is that he has no idea about.
(They were a force, when together. Dean and Castiel, and yet there was so much he didn't know, had never bothered to simply ask.)
He blinks hard a few times, wipes at his nose with the back of his hand, stands. Things can change, from here on out. Does he want them to? Is he ready for them to?
Is Cas ready for them to?
Dean thinks he would need months, maybe years, to settle into humanity properly, to become his own person, to grow into being Castiel, rather than Castiel, angel of the Lord. The last thing Dean wants to do is skew Castiel's perception, influence him, trap him into something he might not want. It's too much, too soon.
Even if they've been tip toeing around this for years.
He puts the soup away. He dies the dishes. He starts breakfast.
He greets Sam and Kevin good morning and hands them their plates.
When Castiel walks in, Dean shoves a cup of coffee into his hand.
They share a glance, and that's it. Castiel takes a seat, Dean takes a plate of his own, and breakfast is as it always is between the four of them: comfortable, lazily chatty, familial.
Dean hears the three words with every glance Castiel throws his way. They echo in his ears, against his skill, under his ribs.
He doesn't really know what to do, so he does nothing.