Chapter Text
“I think I want to build a house.”
Cas looks up from his book, surprised: probably both that Dean spoke, and by the words that he said. “What about the bunker?”
“Not enough windows.” Dean shifts, hospital gown crinkling. His jello cup sits half-eaten on the white tray in front of him. “Now that there’s no Devil or God or cosmic threat—I want windows.”
Shutting his book, laying it on his lap, Cas asks, “Do you have a property in mind?”
“Yeah.” Dean picks up the jello cup again, spooning the red, wobbly stuff into his mouth. “Yeah, I know a place. I’ll show you when I get the green light outta here.”
And that’s that.
Once upon a time, a human met an angel in a barn.
And then, ten years later, the angel had to watch the human nearly die in one.
The angel begged his son (who was also the new God—long story) to let him go back down to Earth. To let him save the human. But the son, now a powerful and strictly hands-off kind of god, told the angel he couldn’t go back down to Earth: not without some consequences.
So the angel stopped being an angel. He came back down to Earth, to the barn, not with the fury of Heaven behind him, but with a single-minded, very mortal determination not to let the human die. He helped the human’s brother pull him off the rebar, and he pressed a hand to the human’s wound in the backseat of the Impala while the brother drove like a bat out of Hell. Blood covered his hands and arms and legs as the human bled and bled and bled.
“Me too,” the human whispered, over and over like a devoted prayer, even as his eyes rolled back in his head. “Me too, Cas.”
The angel held the human tighter and realized that his now very human heart would break if this man died. If he slipped into the darkness and never returned.
The angel realized, in his own way, how the human probably felt when he had done just that.
They’re not talking about it.
Which is fine by Dean, really. If he tried—if he put how he felt into words when Cas got swallowed up by that goo, if he really dug into how it felt to have Cas lay it all on the table yet gave him no chance to—
Well. Doesn’t matter because they’re not talking about it. It’s best that way, so that Dean doesn’t break something he can’t fix.
The house is a sad little thing off of 140 Road—straight shot from the bunker into town. Two stories, paint and siding peeling off in flakes, the front porch crumpled and bowed.
Cas gently rolls the Impala to the curb and turns off the engine. Patiently, he waits for Dean to observe it through the window. Even the “For Sale” sign is sagging to one side, like someone couldn’t be bothered to properly hammer it into the ground.
“It has good bones.”
Dean lets out a startled snort. “Good bones, huh?”
Cas shrugs. “While you were in your coma at the hospital, there was a show that was playing on the television. Joanna and Chip were renovating a house, and a house that looked as if it was about to fall over, Joanna said, ‘This house has some good bones.’ It seemed relevant to this situation.”
“It’s not gonna fall over,” Dean says.
“The roof is at a right angle.”
“So we’ll hire roofers for that part of it.”
“Dean,” Cas says, with a little less patience, “do you know how to renovate a house?”
“No.” Dean shifts in his seat, wincing at the pull of his spine. It’s still sore after his rebar vs. man contest. “But I know how to use YouTube.”
Cas’s eyes travel up and down Dean, like an X-ray scanning images of every bit of Dean’s body. “You still haven’t fully recovered.”
“PT at the hospital told me to keep moving, didn’t she?” Dean unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out of the passenger door. He rests his arms on Baby’s hood and gets a full look at the house in the dying sunlight.
It’s ugly. It’s beautiful. It’s beyond repair. It’s begging to be fixed.
When Dean woke up in that hospital, alive and breathing with wires attached to every part of his body like he’d gone full robot, it was the weakest he’d ever felt. And when he felt Cas’s hand hold his, and it was warm—human warm, not the usual clammy ‘I don’t really need blood to pump through my veins’ angel kind of warm—it felt like waking up. You’ll be okay, Dean, Cas had said. And Dean believed him. Held onto it. Even when recovering from the wound in his back felt like it’d split him in two. Even when walking felt impossible and shaky, and like he’d never be able to stand on his own two feet again.
Cas gets out of the car, too, and his dark head momentarily cuts into Dean’s view. This thing between them, that complicated and beautiful and ugly thing that’s beyond repair.
It’s begging for someone to fix it. Dean just doesn’t know if he can.
But he might be able to fix a house.
“I’ll help you.” Cas turns to Dean. It’s like the last gasp of his grace, still having eyes that blue. “Where do we start?”
We. Dean swallows what feels like razors in his throat. “Buying it would be a good first step.”
Dean still has nightmares.
They got better while he was in the hospital. Hopped up on meds, nurses waking him up to check his vitals every couple of hours—it all stopped him from getting any kind of decent sleep. But now that he’s back in the bunker, back where…
Point is, he’s having—those nightmares again.
When he jolts awake, sheets tangled around his legs and shirt soaked with sweat, his dim bedroom light is on. Sam’s standing over the bed, eyes unfocused and bleary, his hand on Dean’s shoulder.
“Nightmare,” Sam explains, voice rough with sleep. “Screaming.”
Dean scrubs a hand over his face and sits up. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“You still want me to wake you up, right? If I hear you?”
“Sure, Sammy.” He pushes at his brother’s arm. “Go back to sleep. I’m fine.”
Sam mutters something unintelligible. He’s always been this way, even as a kid: useless between the hours of midnight and five. Shuffling out of the bedroom, the door clicks behind him.
Too awake to sleep, Dean goes to the kitchen. He turns on all of the lights, even the one built into the microwave. Filling up a glass of water from the jug in the fridge, he sits at the table and lets the condensation slowly seep through the glass and onto his palms.
Why does this feel like a goodbye?
Dean takes a shaky sip, the water feeling as if it’s sticking to his throat.
Because it is.
“He’s here,” Dean whispers to himself. Fingers pressed into his forehead, like tiny pressure points, trying to embed it into his brain. To make himself believe it. “He’s right here. He’s fine.”
He’s here. He’s human. He’s fragile.
He could leave at any moment.
Dean puts his empty glass in the sink. Turning off the lights, he leaves the kitchen. The hallway lights lead the way back to his room.
Passing by his door, he goes to the one next to his. It’s ajar; an invitation. Cas is sitting upright in bed, his lamp on, a worn, library copy of The Martian in his hands. He looks up at Dean in the doorway.
Dean sighs, his shoulders sagging. And in the moment between him shutting the door and walking towards the bed, Cas has already closed his book and moved towards the wall.
Dean folds himself into the sheets. They lay there, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the ceiling. He doesn’t turn off the light; neither of them really likes sleeping in the dark anymore.
“Can you—” Dean’s voice hitches. He exhales sharply through his nose. “Just…”
Thankfully, Cas understands. Rolling over onto his side, he puts an arm around Dean’s shoulders. Dean relaxes into the hold, telling himself that this is fine. That they’re allowed this. That it won’t change anything; won’t crack open the Pandora’s box of shitstorm between them.
He feels Cas’s chest rise and then fall, his breath breezy against Dean’s arm. A steady rhythm.
Closing his eyes, Dean falls asleep.
They get the keys from a very excited realtor after signing the papers. Apparently, the house had been on the market for three years. Apparently, they’re the only ones to have ever made an offer on it. Apparently, that’s why they practically got it for a dime and the lint from Dean’s back pocket.
They make plans to go to the house and clean it out before starting any renovations. Sam thinks they’re nuts. Dean knows this because Sam tells them they’re nuts over toast and eggs.
“And if you hurt your back, hauling something around?” Sam asks, waving a butter knife in the air. “We’re already drowning in hospital bills.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Then come help if you’re so worried.”
“He can’t,” Cas says, next to Dean. “Eileen called yesterday with a case.”
Grinning, Dean leans back, draping his arm over Cas's chair. “A ‘case’, huh? Didn’t know that was the new ‘Netflix and chill’.”
“You’re such an old man,” Sam says, and stretches out to push his foot into the leg of Dean’s chair, nearly knocking him off balance. Without looking up from his eggs, Cas grabs Dean’s shoulder to steady him.
Turns out they didn’t need the key after all, since it was never locked. Instead, Cas has to shove his shoulder against the door a few times before it unsticks. It opens to a foyer that maybe once was welcoming—a staircase that glides to the second floor, a hallway that leads to the kitchen in the back of the house, a dusty, broken mirror hanging on the wall—but now sits stale.
“Home sweet home,” Dean says.
Cas coughs away the dust.
The realtor did a walkthrough with them a week ago, but Dean insists they do it again, just to figure out where to start. To the left of the foyer is the living room. It has a window, huge with a little bench seat, that made Dean fall in love with the house in the first place. There’s even intricately stained glass on the border of that window that’s only slightly cracked in places. Past the living room is the formal dining room (with original built-ins and a chandelier, albeit a broken one), then the galley kitchen with a breakfast nook complete with a window that looks out to the overgrown backyard, and a mud room. There’s stairs that lead down to the basement, but that’s mostly unfinished and probably needs a proper salt and burn at some point.
Upstairs is even less to write home about: two bedrooms and a bathroom with a yellow bathtub and sink, and a toilet with an unspeakable smell that makes even Cas’s nose curl. There is a nice wardrobe in the master bedroom that the previous owners left; carved reindeer across the top, painted red and blue flowers with vibrant green stems that curl around the border of the faded wood. It’s probably the only salvageable piece of furniture in the whole house.
And Cas had looked at it for a good, long while before deciding, quietly, “I like this.”
After becoming human, Cas doesn’t voice a lot of opinions. Dean knows he has them, he’s just… quiet about them, for whatever reason. About what he likes to eat, or what kind of clothes he likes to wear, or even if he likes a firm or soft mattress. He just doesn’t talk about that stuff—like he’s not allowed to.
So Cas said he liked the wardrobe, and then Dean had turned to the realtor and told her they’d put in an offer.
They decide to start with the living room first. There’s only a few pieces of furniture to move; it’s mostly piles of stuff. Newspapers, journals, books. Probably smart to use gloves to move junk that old, but Dean didn’t think to bring any. He makes a mental note for next time.
“Looked up who used to own this place,” he tells Cas as he bends down at the waist, sorting through the piles of papers. “Older couple, last lived here in 2005. Husband died first, then the wife lived here until her son put her in a nursing home. The son tried to sell the house after that, but it needed a lot of repairs even then, and no one wanted to take it on. So it just sat here, slowly getting worse.”
Cas squats on the ground and shovels Dean’s water-damaged newspaper pile into a garbage bag. “So the son decided to abandon the house?”
“Yeah. Humans do that sometimes; ignore shit. Could have been too painful to deal with, maybe he hoped that it’d sell and he wouldn’t have to deal with it.” Dean tosses a yellowed book, its cover unrecognizable, into the garbage bag. “Kind of like having a corpse in your closet.”
“Or mice.”
“Not following the analogy, dude.”
“These are mouse droppings.” Cas holds up a newspaper, showing Dean the evidence. “I think we should be wearing gloves.”
Dean has another nightmare. Sam’s still on the hunt, so he doesn’t shake him awake; Cas does. The lamplight cuts across his face, casting it half in shadow.
It’s the remnants of the nightmare, the chasing monsters that have Dean’s fist flying towards Cas’s face. Like he was expecting it, Cas catches his wrist in a grip hard enough to bruise. Dean’s arm shakes.
The anger nearly spills out of Dean, then. That toxic, radioactive sludge that he carries at the bottom of his gut. He wants his blows to land. He wants Cas to bleed. He wants Cas to punch back. He wants—
Dean rises from the mattress. Cas’s eyes go a little wider. He’s still pliant, waiting. Ready to give Dean whatever he needs; let Dean push him in whatever direction he’d like.
Angels are good at that, Dean supposes: supplication.
The moment hovers on a knife’s edge.
“Dean…” It’s soft. It holds a question.
Dean untangles himself from Cas’s grip.
“I need water.”
Cas nods. He lifts his knee off the bed and walks back a few steps, offering a wide berth.
Dean doesn’t meet his eyes as he passes.
In another life, Dean would be good at this.
He’d just snap his fingers, pick up a hammer, and—poof. House. Turns out, in this life, he needs to YouTube… a lot. Cas gets a wild hair that he can do it all by himself (“I’m older than the Earth, Dean, I know how to hang sheet rock.”) and more often than not, Dean’s trailing behind him with a YouTube video pulled up to fix all of Cas’s mistakes.
It’s good motivation, Dean supposes. He might abandon the project altogether if no one was around to keep him on task.
“There’s a case,” Cas tells Dean, right in the middle of yanking a rotting cabinet off the wall.
Dean nearly drops his corner. His back’s already aching from the physical labor, so it’s a close thing. “Whaddaya mean?”
“Claire called. There’s a case she’d like help on.”
Cas sets down the cabinet with Dean on the floor, and straightens without a wince, like the weight didn’t mean a thing. Dean, on the other hand, stays hunched over and waits for his lower back to stop screaming at him.
“What kind of case?” he asks.
“Is your back hurting?”
“Yeah, and water’s still wet. Next question.”
Cas’s face scrunches up—his way of looking worried—and he holds out both hands. Dean rolls his eyes but grabs the offered hands anyway and uses Cas’s counterbalanced weight to slowly stand up straight.
“Nerve or muscle?” Cas asks.
“Both,” Dean says, trying to arch his back, stretch it out a little—as if that’d make any sort of difference. “What kind of case?”
Cas sighs, his lips pinched. “A vampire nest that Claire and Kaia located. They want extra hands.”
“They know you’re not smiting anymore, right?”
“I think they just want me as a warm body with a machete.”
Dean snorts out a laugh. He rubs at his lower back. “When you leaving?”
“Tonight.”
“Well. Pack garlic.”
Cas smiles at that.
Dean clears his throat. “I’ll go pop some Tylenol, then we’ll attack the next cabinet.” He rounds the corner, leaving the kitchen and going to where his bag sits on the sagging couch. It takes a few tries to untwist the cap of the Tylenol, and he curses under his breath.
Cas can take a case, of course he can. He’s strong and capable, despite not being an angel anymore. Honestly, it was kind of stupid of Dean to assume he’d be happy to just work on this doomed house project until kingdom come.
While Cas is gone, Dean means to keep himself busy. But without him, the wheels kind of come off the cart.
He spends a lot of time in the house on the crappy, sagging couch. Spends a lot of time sorting through the trash and finding out what kind of people used to live in the house. The wife, Rebecca, was an ER nurse. Worked at the Smith County hospital for a while, mostly the night shift. Morgan, the husband, was a contractor. He was a meticulous kind of guy and kept journal entries of all the repairs he made on the house, so that was useful, at some point in the century. And based on all the letters they got, they were popular people. They kept most of them in a hat box, the lid barely able to be closed: letters asking for them to visit, how much a family member missed them, thanking them for the present for so-and-so’s birthday, or Christmas, or anniversary.
There’s a few photos of them, too. Smiling and happy and looking like normal people.
Rebecca kept a diary. Dean feels weird reading it, so he only sneaks a glance at an entry or two as he flips through the pages. It’s just mundane stuff, mostly about Morgan.
She clearly loved him.
Dean gets to the last entry in the diary, a few pages away from the end.
Morgan died yesterday, it says, and it feels like I died with him.
Diary lying on his lap, Dean looks up at the peeling floral wallpaper. He’s sat immobile before, with that feeling of his muscles going numb and cold. With his phone buzzing on the ground next to him, again and again, with Sam’s name on the screen.
He almost died on that rebar. But that wasn’t really the start of it, was it? He was bleeding out weeks before that.
With shaky hands, he pulls his phone out of his jeans pocket. He presses one of the two numbers he has on speed dial. After two rings, Cas answers.
“Dean?” His voice is laced with concern. “Is everything okay?”
No.
“Yup,” Dean replies. He drags a hand over his mouth. “Just—sorting through Rebecca's trash.”
“Rebecca?”
“The old owner of the house.”
“Oh,” Cas says. “Okay.”
“They had a happy and normal life. They were well-liked. Boring people, probably, but the kind of boring that other people like to depend on.” Dean stands, and his back screams at him for sitting on the stupid, crappy, sagging couch for so many hours. “You know, because boring means you’re not gonna make any half-cocked decisions at the jerk of a knee. Boring people like that don’t have reflexes at all, actually. Like, if a vamp or ghoul came bursting through their door, they’d have died, right? But that doesn’t happen a lot. There’s no reason to really know how to fight. They were just boring people in a boring town and one of them died because he was old, and it was sad but it was normal. And then Rebecca died, too, and now I’m sitting in their house reading their mail.”
There’s a long stretch of silence over the receiver. “Dean,” Cas says. But it’s softer and less sure this time.
“And I don’t know what to do with it, you know? Because you—you died and—then I almost died, and you came back, and—that’s not fucking normal, right? That’s not—” Dean presses fingers into the corners of his eyes. “You said that anger isn’t what drives me. But that’s all I feel, Cas, all the time. I’m so fucking angry at—”
At you.
He doesn’t say it, but he knows that Cas can piece it together anyway. It’s why he’s been hanging around Dean with that sad, sorry look on his face. Why Cas hangs around at all.
“Say hi to Claire for me, okay?” Dean asks, voice rough.
Before Castiel can give an answer, Dean ends the call.