Chapter Text
At first, it was weird to have Cas over so much.
Ben didn’t mind him, ‘cause he was nice, but it still felt strange to come home and see Daddy and Cas sitting at the table and talking. Seeing Cas without Jack didn’t feel right, like seeing a teacher outside of school. Slowly, though, as Cas came over for more dinners, Ben got used to it.
He actually liked when Cas was around, because then Daddy got extra-super happy. Daddy was happy anyways, and he was even more happy now that Al was gone, but sometimes he still got quiet and sad. He stopped getting so down after he went to see a ther-a-pist lady named Ms. Barnes, but for a while Ben wasn’t sure what kind of Daddy he’d be seeing after school: a happy one or a sad one.
When Cas was around, though, Daddy was always happy. He laughed a lot, which Ben liked, ‘cause Daddy’s laugh was loud and deep and it made Ben smile even when he didn’t mean to. Ben was surprised when Cas laughed the first time too, but he decided he liked it. Daddy and Cas laughed a lot when they were together. Ben had never seen Cas smile so much, but he did it almost all the time when he was at Ben’s house.
Cas did other things, too, and Ben was glad. He sat with Daddy at the table when Daddy wasn’t feeling hungry, and he talked all soft and nice to him to make sure Daddy ate all his food like he was supposed to. Ben used to be able to do that by acting sad when Daddy didn’t eat, but it didn’t always work. With Cas, it felt like he had an ally. Between the two of them, Daddy finished what was on his plate almost every night.
Ben was happy when he hugged Daddy the day school ended and realized he couldn’t feel Daddy’s ribs anymore. He told Daddy, and Daddy just smiled and kissed him on the forehead and held him for a long time. When Ben told Cas later, Cas did his wrinkly-nose smile and winked.
Cas started coming over a lot more when Ben didn’t have school. Daddy didn’t work on the weekends or late at night anymore, but he still had to go to the garage for a couple hours every day. Cas took Ben to the park a couple times, and he bought him ice cream without Ben even having to ask. He even picked Ben up and put him on his shoulders when they found a bird’s nest, and he listened real close as Ben told him about the three little eggs inside.
Cas was much nicer than Al. He played with Ben when Ben asked, and soon Ben forgot why he had to feel nervous every time he asked Cas to help him get something off the counter or for help with his homework. Cas never yelled at Ben, except that one time when Ben tried to grab a lid he hadn’t known was hot. And that time, he hugged Ben after and said he was sorry for raising his voice.
That was the other new thing that Cas did: he apologized. When he accidentally tripped over Ben while Ben was playing on the floor with his dinosaurs, or when he accidentally ate the apple Ben had been saving for his lunch, or when he couldn’t play ‘cause he was busy with work. He apologized a lot, even though Ben wasn’t sure grown-ups really did that to kids. Maybe it was just Al that was weird.
Cas apologized to Daddy, too. One time, when the leaves were starting to turn colors and Ben was starting to see back-to-school ads—which he hated—on TV again, Daddy and Cas had a fight. Ben didn’t know what they were fighting about, but he remembered going to the stairs to hide in his room without needing to be told. Except Daddy never told him to go hide, since he was too busy yelling at Cas. Daddy almost never yelled, and he definitely hadn’t done it to Al, so Ben stayed on the stairs because he was scared something might happen to Daddy.
Cas raised his voice, which was scary, and when Daddy said something that annoyed him, he flung his arms out and asked Daddy what he could have done about it. Except Daddy didn’t answer, because he was too busy flinching and putting his hands up to block Cas’s fists. Only Cas didn’t hit him. Instead, he got all soft and quiet and asked if he could hug Daddy, and then he apologized a lot.
Ben watched all of it from the stairs, silent and unmoving in case he wasn’t s’posed to be there. Daddy started crying, but it wasn’t the bad kind of crying, like when he was scared or sad or his bruises hurt. He was just crying, and Cas was just holding him, and he was whispering things in a nice voice and saying he was sorry a lot.
Ben liked that even more than when Cas apologized to him. It was good that Daddy got apologized to instead of always being the one to be sorry. He deserved it.
That was the first time Ben realized Daddy liked Cas the way Ben liked that girl named Grace at his school. He walked into the kitchen after finishing his homework once and saw Daddy and Cas kissing, even though they stopped when Ben complained that it was gross. Afterward, Daddy sat him down and asked him if he was okay with Cas sticking around a little more. He seemed kinda nervous, but when Ben said he liked Cas being at the house, Daddy seemed very happy.
After that, Cas was around a lot more. And he and Daddy kissed a lot more too, much to Ben’s disgust.
Sometimes, Cas stayed the night, sleeping in the bed in the big room with Daddy where he and Al used to stay. Ben woke up one night to the sound of Daddy screaming, and he got out of bed real fast because he was scared that something was happening. But when he peeked into the room, he saw the light on and Cas hugging Daddy really tightly, talking to him in that quiet voice he used when Daddy was scared or Ben had fallen and scraped his knee. Ben was tempted to go in and ask to sleep with them, ‘cause Daddy’s yelling had scared him a lot, but he was a big boy and he didn’t want to bother them, so he went back to bed on his own. In the morning he watched Cas hug Daddy from behind while Daddy made eggs, and everything felt better again.
They celebrated Christmas, which included Cas, much to Ben’s delight. He and Daddy kissed a lot, which was gross, but he didn’t make too many gagging noises because he liked seeing Daddy so happy. Besides, he was too busy playing with Jack and the new dinosaurs he’d gotten from Cas. They made an army and used it to fight each other, snarling and roaring and knocking plastic figures together until Daddy called them both to breakfast.
It was two months after Christmas, during a weeklong break from school, that Daddy told him they were gonna be moving. Ben helped him pack up some of the stuff from the house while big buff guys put the rest of it in a big truck that was gonna go to a donation place. With Baby full of their stuff and the house empty, Daddy drove Ben across town to Cas’s house.
Cas’s house was even better than the place they’d lived in before. There was no one living on the other side of the walls, waking them up with loud music or the skunk-smell of weed. Cas lived by himself in a big field, and the first day they moved in, he presented Ben with a puppy and told him to run outside and play with it. Ben did exactly that almost every day until he had to go back to school, running all over the big tree-lined field with the brown, floppy-eared puppy bounding after him.
The puppy, which Ben named Zeppelin after his favorite band, became his second-best friend. Jack was still his best best friend, and now that they were living with Cas, he saw Jack a lot more. Ben and Jack and Zeppelin could run around for hours outside on the weekends, getting so tired that they all fell asleep on the couch at lunchtime.
Daddy was happier at Cas’s house, too. He listened to the rock songs Al wouldn’t let him play, and he cooked a lot more stuff in the big kitchen Cas had. He was less jumpy and he smiled more. Ben liked how happy he was just as much as he liked the actual house itself.
One night, almost a year after they moved into Cas’s house, Daddy was putting dishes away for the night when he dropped a plate and broke it. Ben heard the crash and hurried in to investigate, surprised when he saw Daddy kneeling on the floor with a bunch of shards of white around him, tears streaming down his face.
Ben took one look at the cuts on Daddy’s hands from where he’d been trying to pick up the pieces, and he panicked. “Cas!” he shouted without thinking, scared and hoping the other man came quickly. “Cas, Papa, Daddy got hurt!”
“Ben, no,” Daddy said, his voice all choked up and tight. But it was already too late, ‘cause Cas was running, his feet pounding on the shiny wood floors as he came hurrying to see what had happened.
Daddy seemed really scared for some reason, and it took Cas a second to make him stop panicking. He gave him a big, tight hug and kissed him on the head like Daddy did when Ben was upset, saying, “It’s okay, baby, you’re okay. You don’t need to be scared, honey, you’re safe. You’re safe. It’s okay.”
Ben wouldn’t understand until much later that Daddy was scared Cas was gonna hit him ‘cause he broke a plate. He would be even older when he finally understood that recovery—especially from something like abuse—wasn’t linear, and that Daddy would sometimes get scared and quiet again, and that was okay.
That night, Cas kissed him on the forehead and told him to play with Zeppelin while he made Daddy’s hands stop bleeding. Ben crept into the bedroom later and listened to them in the bathroom, Cas talking soft and gentle and Daddy crying with little hitching breaths. Zeppelin slept in Ben’s bed that night, ‘cause Ben didn’t wanna be alone.
The next morning, Daddy slept in and Cas made breakfast instead. As he put butter and Ben’s favorite mango jam on some toast, he said, “Ben, honey, do you remember anything about last night?”
“When Daddy dropped the plate?” Ben asked, watching as Cas slid some sizzling sausages onto the plate next to the toast.
“Yes, honey, but after that. When you called for me. Do you… Do you remember what you said?” Cas asked. He seemed kinda nervous for some reason. He didn’t look Ben in the eyes as he handed him the plate of breakfast.
“Thank you. No, I don’t remember,” Ben said. He began to cut the sausages, making the pieces a little bigger than usual ‘cause he was hungry and Daddy wasn’t there to tell him to eat smaller bites.
“You called me a name,” Cas said. “Do you remember?”
Oh. Yeah, Ben remembered. “Papa,” he said, taking a big bite of sausage. He glanced up at Cas, hoping the name didn’t make him mad. “Some of the kids at school call their dads that, and I can’t call you Daddy. Is Papa okay?”
“Yes,” Cas said, and his voice was kinda weird and choked. “Yes, honey, that’s okay for you to say.”
Ben grinned at him, and Papa laughed weakly and told him to swallow his food. His voice was all warm and happy, though, so Ben knew he wasn’t mad about anything. Later, when Daddy woke up, Papa told him about their conversation and then they hugged for a really long time. Ben left them to it, since Jack was coming over soon and he wanted to show him the new dinosaur chew toy they’d bought for Zeppelin.
As he ran down the steps of the house with the dog trailing happily behind him, Ben looked up at the big, bright blue sky and the wide, flat field their house was built on. There was a layer of yellow spread all around, millions of dandelions sprouting under the gentle care of springtime.
Ben spotted Jack getting off his bike at the road and took off into a run, Zeppelin bounding after him. In the wake of his path, the yellow dandelion heads bobbed softly in the wind.