Chapter Text
Faint traces of slightly burned baking spices wafted on the air, reaching Dean’s nose as he came through the front door. His lips quirked wryly, knowing full well that what he was smelling had nothing to do with anything actually in the kitchen. Whatever was frustrating his mate was irritating him enough to overpower the takeout Dean had brought home with him, and he dropped the bags on the counter before heading off in search of the muttering he could hear coming from the bedroom.
“God dammit, Jimmy, I swear…” Castiel’s grumbling became more intelligible when Dean poked his head into their shared closet. He grinned at the sight of Castiel’s legs dangling from the attic hatch, about a foot above the top of the stepstool he’d used to reach it. Feet kicked as their owner strained harder to reach whatever object was proving to be stubbornly elusive.
“If you get eaten by the attic, I promise to have a closed-casket for whatever parts of you I can salvage,” Dean called upward, leaning against the doorframe to watch. “Not that it’s not a nice view, I mean.”
After a startled jerk of his legs at being caught off-guard, Castiel huffed a dry laugh. “Your consideration for decorum is noted,” he said, easing his way cautiously out of the hole in the ceiling. His feet searched blindly for the top of the ladder, and Dean quickly reached to grab them and guide them to the step. “Thank you,” Castiel sighed as he emerged, dragging a cardboard box along with him.
“That for the camping trip, I take it?” Dean asked curiously. He took the hefty box from Castiel, sneezing twice in succession as a cloud of dust drifted up from it. At least the burning smell eased up a bit, as Castiel’s good humor began to return and he chuckled at whatever face Dean was making.
“I’m hoping so, at any rate. Jimmy was the last one to use my gear, for a work retreat a while back, and I haven’t checked the box since then. He put it back up there himself when he got back, apparently by tossing it like he was making a free throw.”
“He does have his own stuff now, though, right?” Not wanting to put the dusty box onto the clean bed covers, Dean dropped it on the rug before settling onto his knees to open it and rummage through the contents. “We’re not going to have to share a tent with two more adults and a pup?”
“I’d sooner build us a shelter out of branches and leaves with my own bare hands,” Castiel said as he joined Dean on the floor. “But no, Amelia’s a die-hard camper, and she’s more than equipped to spend an entire season roughing it, let alone a long weekend like this one.”
Dean nodded. “So I take it she’s the one driving this whole thing?” Jimmy and Amelia had been thrilled when he and Castiel had announced their mating, but the initial excitement had been quickly replaced by dismay at the acknowledgment that the entire thing had happened without fanfare or even a lick of the usual traditional courtship nonsense (to use the phrasing Castiel had employed in their defense).
“I never talked to your brother about my ‘intentions,’” Castiel said, rolling his eyes. “We never had any combined gatherings, letting your family get to know mine ahead of our mating.”
“I met Claire,” Dean said with a shrug and a wink. “She approved of me.”
“Oddly enough, a preschooler’s vote of confidence doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight, no matter how precocious the child,” Castiel replied. Pulling tent poles from the box and laying them out in methodical fashion, he added, “Also, she still thinks you’re a Disney prince. Of course she approves.”
“Aw, but, Cas, you were my new dream,” Dean sighed, batting his eyelashes before cracking up in laughter. Castiel flattened his lips in an attempt to look unamused, but the edges of his mouth quivered with the effort to hold back his own mirth.
“Anyway, it’s not as though there’s much point to it now, or that I ever had the slightest inclination toward letting my family have a vote on who I chose to share my life with, but, well…” Grimacing, Castiel unzipped a first aid kit to peer inside critically, then tossed it to the side. “Going along with this now will let them feel satisfied, with a minimum of effort on our part. It’s just a camping trip, away from distractions so they can get to know you better as my mate. You don’t mind too much, do you?”
Truthfully, Dean was more than a little uncomfortable about an intensive “get to know the in-laws” trip with no possibility of escape in the event that things got weird, but he wasn’t going to let Castiel know how reluctant he felt. No matter how many times Castiel swore that he’d never wanted a primly submissive omega to keep his house and obediently bear him litters of fat pups, Dean couldn’t help thinking that he should at least try to make things easier for the guy when it came to dealing with an extended family that might have had different ideas about what an appropriate partner looked like.
“Hey, I like camping,” he said, dodging the meaning behind Castiel’s question. “Just so long as you remember, when we’re putting up the tent, how you were the one to call it ‘minimal effort.’” The look Castiel gave him said clearly that he knew Dean was using humor as a cover, but, mercifully, he didn’t push.
“How about we leave this here, go eat dinner, and deal with the rest of it later? Frankly, I’m having trouble concentrating on anything other than the smell of grilled meat right now,” Castiel said as he stood up and dusted his hands on the front of his jeans. “Roadhouse?”
“Burgers and fries,” Dean confirmed. “And Ellen threw in some pie, but she says it’s in exchange for a jar of the tomatoes you told her you canned from our plants this summer. Since when do the two of you chat about cooking, anyway?”
“I’m a multi-faceted man, Dean,” Castiel said archly, lifting an eyebrow as he grinned and marched out of the room. Sitting back on his heels, Dean let himself take a moment to appreciate the view before following.
When Amelia had given them the directions to the campsite, in case the two vehicles got separated on the road, Dean had assumed that “state park” meant that they’d be camping in a fairly populated area, tamed of the rougher edges of nature. Instead, he saw the asphalt road narrow to a single lane, then turn to gravel, and finally begin to disappear under grass overgrowth before Jimmy’s station wagon came into view, parked at the edge of a treeline. A tiny single-track path heading into the deeper woods was just visible beyond it.
“Cas,” Dean said, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, “you sure this is an actual camping trip, and not just a convenient way to get rid of me if I don’t pass muster?”
“I did tell you Amelia was fond of the outdoors,” Castiel said mildly. When Dean’s eyebrows lifted and he opened his mouth to protest the apparent understatement, Castiel forestalled him with a raised hand. “They’ve brought Claire with them, Dean. They wouldn’t bring a child along if it wasn’t safe. They certainly wouldn’t bring a child if murder was under consideration.”
Dean hummed skeptically as he attempted to park the Impala to the side of the path without damaging the undercarriage. “Just promise me this. If I don’t survive the weekend, at least try to find my body? Dying would be bad enough, but I draw the line at winding up as carrion for whatever’s living out here. Drag the lake, send in bloodhounds, whatever.”
“I’m sure you think you’re being amusing, but could you please stop with that sort of imagery before one or both of us winds up lying awake all night, twitching at every noise?” Leaning over to drop a kiss on Dean’s cheekbone to soften the words of reproach, Castiel climbed out of the car and headed for the trunk to unload it without waiting for a response.
Thankfully, even though most of Dean’s own camping experiences had been in places far more accommodating than this, the basics seemed to be the same. Everything they needed was stashed neatly in their packs, and the hike to the campsite wasn’t all that treacherous after all. They could hear Claire’s high-pitched squeals well before they reached the clearing in which Jimmy was attempting to erect a four-man dome tent by himself, while Amelia chased after their laughing child. Amelia was sweating and red-faced, gripping a bottle of insect repellent.
“Thank God,” Jimmy said when he saw them. “Extra sets of hands. Between the four of us, we might just be able to survive camping with a pup.” One of the tent poles, under tension, popped free as he spoke, and Castiel dropped his bag so he could help with wrestling it into submission.
“Uncle Dean!” Claire cried when she spotted them. She darted toward him, and Dean hastily shrugged out of his own pack so he could catch her before she knocked him on his ass. “Guess what? I have an Elsa sleeping bag! It’s blue and white and shiny.” She giggled as he lifted her in his arms.
“Awesome,” Dean said, making his way toward where Amelia had slumped against a tree. “Here, why don’t we put on some magic cream, too? I bet all princesses wear it when they’re in enchanted forests.”
Claire frowned at him. “The forest isn’t really enchanted, Uncle Dean,” she said, but she allowed Amelia to take her arm and start smearing the repellent into her skin anyway.
“Guess I heard wrong, then,” he said apologetically, smiling sheepishly at Amelia.
“Don’t even try to keep up,” Amelia said ruefully. “Just when you think you’re getting the hang of the conversation, the rules will change and you’ll be lost again.” Claire squirmed her way free and dropped to the ground, running toward her father, and Amelia sighed heavily. “The sleeping bag was the latest crisis. It’s really just a blue sleeping bag, but we had to do some fast creative thinking when she started to melt down this morning because apparently princesses only use pink blankets.”
Castiel called out at that point, gesturing toward their bags. Their own tent, a smaller ridge tent, was much simpler to erect, but even so, by the time they’d finished, sweat was already dampening their tee-shirts and making the fabric stick uncomfortably to their backs. The warmth of summer still lingered in the early autumn afternoon, especially where the trees were too thick to allow much air movement. When Jimmy suggested they hit the nearby lake to cool off, Dean was inside the tent and stripping out of his clothes almost before the thought had finished being verbalized.
In fact, he was so much on board with the idea that it took him a moment to realize he’d been lured into a corner, metaphorically. Claire was poking through the smooth pebbles on the bank, and Castiel and his brother were whooping and splashing each other happily and generally making such an entertaining sight that Dean almost startled when Amelia spoke. Sitting next to him on the flat rock and dangling her feet beside his into the cool water, she murmured, “Mating looks good on Castiel.” The words were innocent enough, but they definitely carried the hints of Serious Talk in the undertones.
“Yeah, maybe,” Dean agreed cautiously. “He looked good before, too.”
“Of course,” Amelia said with a laugh. “I did mate and marry his twin, so it’d be weird of me to disagree.”
Dean huffed a laugh, and they watched the brothers some more. Jimmy had tried to swim under the water and dunk Castiel, and now an all-out war was being waged. Jimmy barely managed to get his head above water and, flailing, call out to Amelia for help before Castiel submerged them both once more. Amelia just rolled her eyes fondly.
“But you know I’m not talking about that,” she went on. “He’s calmer now. Not that he was never relaxed before, I mean, but…well, he’s always been more of an upstream swimmer than Jimmy, as long as I’ve known them. Always had a crusade against something or other, always something to fight against. Or for.”
“Jimmy more of a go-with-the-flow guy?” Dean asked, eyes on the water fight.
“He’s more patient, I think,” Amelia said. “Jimmy’s willing to wait until he thinks he has a good chance of success when he’s working for something. Castiel would probably try to storm a fortress single-handedly if he thought it needed to be pulled down.”
Dean frowned thoughtfully. “I dunno,” he replied. “Cas is stubborn, but he’s not reckless, or at least not too much. He’d find a way to pull down the fortress, but he’d definitely have a plan in his head about the best way to do it.”
“Did he plan how to win you?”
Snap, went the trap in Dean’s head. Walked right into it. “Maybe,” he hedged. “I might have been a little oblivious about it, at least at first.” She didn’t need to know about all the planning in return that he himself had been doing in the meantime, especially since, at least in terms of seduction, it had wound up being sort of irrelevant.
Amelia shook her head, sighing; one corner of her mouth quirked up with humor. “Something to be said for tradition,” she said, lightly teasing. “I know Castiel says he has no room for—what did he say? ‘Antiquated rituals based on archaic views about gender.’ Archaic or not, at least it clears up confusion. Hard to misread a courting gift.”
Dean’s eyes drifted away from the antics in front of him (Jimmy had risen up from underneath Castiel, lifting him onto his shoulders before tossing him through the air to land with a splash) to note how Amelia was toying with a gold bracelet on her wrist. “That how he let you know he was interested?” he asked. “Jewelry?”
“Oh, no,” she said with a grin. “You don’t start with jewelry. That’s too much, too fast. Technically, courting gifts are supposed to start with something perishable, not permanent. Flowers, you know. Candy, or something sweet like that.”
A memory struck Dean. Castiel, sitting at a little table outside of a cafe, beaming up at Dean while holding a plastic box of pie. “This looks positively delicious, Dean. I'm very much looking forward to trying it." He choked on a startled laugh. “Like pie?” he said. “Yeah, there might have been…something like that.” Wait until Cas hears that his omega courted him instead of the other way around.
“Ha! I knew he wasn’t always as radical as he insists!” Amelia hissed happily, pumping her fist. “And the flowers? Oh, but don’t tell me. He’s probably more of a potted plant than a bouquet giver. I’ve seen his garden.”
Dean had been about to deny the allegation, but he caught himself before he could. “Um,” he said. “Would buying me seedlings count? Even if they were vegetables, not flowers?”
“From Castiel? That would absolutely be the kind of thing he’d use to try to court a mate,” she said with a smirk. “And it looks like it worked, didn’t it? He found someone who’d appreciate what he wanted to give, I guess.”
Turning back toward the lake, Dean contemplated his mate; the water wars had reached some sort of truce, and now the twins were floating lazily as they chatted and caught their breath. “In that case, though, what’s the difference between all the formal courting bullshi--uh, nonsense, I mean, and just regular little things you give somebody because you want to make them happy and spend more time with them?”
Amelia was silent for long enough that Dean turned to look at her. She was studying him with a fond expression. “Doesn’t have to be much of a difference at all,” she said. “It’s kind of the whole point, more than just sparkly trinkets or expensive jewelry. They’re ways to show the other person that you’re thinking about them, and that you want to be the one to make them happy.”
The sound of splashing footsteps pulled Dean’s attention forward once more, where Castiel was scaling the bank out of the lake and shaking the water from his hair. A familiar rush of warmth shot through Dean’s chest at the sight of Castiel’s gorgeous smile, pulling a matching grin to his own face before he realized. With water droplets streaming down his bare chest and glistening on his broad shoulders, he looked like some sort of Roman deity emerging from the sea.
“And, of course, it helps with the whole territoriality thing,” Amelia added.
“What?” Dean was only paying the barest attention to her, but the remark startled him from his reverie. When her words registered in his brain, he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s not Cas. I don’t think I’ve ever met a less controlling alpha in my life.”
“I’m not saying he’s overpossessive,” Amelia said quickly. “Jimmy’s not like that either. Believe me, if he ever tried to seriously tell me what to do, I’d be the first to shut that down. But you can’t expect me to believe that when it comes to the person he cares about most, an unrepentant crusader like Castiel doesn’t have a protective streak in him.”
“Okay, what am I walking into here?” said Castiel, stumbling over to the rock and dropping onto the warm surface. “Amelia, you wouldn’t be interrogating Dean, would you? It feels more like a deposition than a vacation over here.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably under the questioning look Castiel was sending him. Ten minutes earlier, he would have been grateful for a reprieve from the awkward conversation, but on the heels of Amelia’s last remark, he couldn’t help but chafe a little at the thought that it looked like he needed to be rescued. “Nah, we’re fine,” he said as breezily as he could manage. “Just enjoying the sunshine. Hearing all the embarrassing stories about you and Jimmy in your awkward teen years, you know.”
The look of shocked betrayal Castiel turned on his sister-in-law made Dean snort, especially when Amelia easily followed his cue, widening her eyes with poorly feigned innocence that screamed mischief. The tension in the air evaporated as quickly as it had appeared, and between the teasing and the renewed water fight that followed, Dean managed to forget all about the tiny seed of concern that had started to take root in his gut.