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They’re working a case in Kansas, two hours away from the bunker. Sam decided early on to drive back to the bunker to do some research on the new evidence they had just collected, leaving Dean and Cas on site, trying to collect more info from the eye-witnesses.
While Dean moves to approach the parents that were there when the kids mysteriously started disappearing and appearing at different parts of the playground, Cas is on the other side of the jungle gym, scanning for magic or angelic activity.
One woman looks up as Dean gets close.
“Agent Burrows!” she exclaims happily before he can introduce himself to the other parents. Dean gives Ms. Derryl a smile. She had been the first person he talked to when arriving at the scene. She seems to be in better spirits than before, clearly having calmed down from her earlier panic attack. Next to her are the other parents: three other women, and one young dad, who is still clutching his three-year-old as if she might disappear again any second.
“Yes, as Ms. Derryl said, I’m agent Burrows, I’m here to investigate… the incident.” He gestures at the playground and all of the parents look around like they're still not too sure what happened.
Together, they explain what happened: They were there, watching their kids play when one after the other started disappearing and appearing within the playground. At first, they thought they weren’t paying enough attention and were hallucinating, but suddenly all the kids started wildly popping up at places and it all got too much for the parents when Ms. Tracy’s son got stuck on top of the climbing wall.
Dean is attentively taking notes, but can’t help but notice Cas, who is still wandering around the playground, looking slightly constipated - not an unusual look on him, but instead of looking slightly endearing, the way he walks is also slightly off.
Cas keeps eyeing the sandpit and it’s driving Dean insane.
On top of the staring, there is also an odd sort of longing in Cas’s eyes that shouldn’t be on any adult face when looking at a sandbox that is specifically designed for children.
But then again it’s Cas, he might be entitled.
“Sorry, would you excuse me, ma’am, I’ll be right back,” he says to one of the witnesses, who gives him a shaky nod. He walks over to Cas, who is now standing above the sandbox, a look of concentration on his face.
“You find anything?”
Cas startles so hard that he nearly trips over his own feet.
“Woah, buddy.” Dean grabs Cas’s arm before he topples into the pit.
He decides not to address Cas’s weird gravitational problems for the moment. “Anything magic or angel-y?”
Because Cas seems to be embarrassed, Dean starts patting off some imaginary dust from Cas’s shoulder and then leaves his hand there for good measure.
“No, nothing of the angel variety.” Cas looks toward the jungle-gym. “There might, however, be some old witch activity. I am not sure yet.”
“Okay, cool. I just finished interviewing the witnesses. They seem pretty spooked, but the kids seem to be alright. Whatever happened, it looks to be attached to this place and not the kids themselves.”
Cas nods, seemingly agreeing. Since Dean still has his hand on Cas’s shoulder, he can feel the angel shifting around his weight and tensing up in odd intervals. Dean frowns and squeezes his shoulder. It’s not like Cas to be fidgety. “You okay, Cas?”
Cas looks up at him with a pinched expression. Finally, he starts speaking again after scanning Dean’s face for a bit too long.
“Most of the energy was gathered around the swingset.”
Which aligns with what Dean heard from the parents, so they head over there to look for some old hex bags.
---
They return to the motel all sweaty from digging small holes in the sun and Dean gets ready for a shower. While they’re not far away from the bunker, Dean still opted for booking a motel for the night, since he doesn’t see a point in driving all the way back just for a shower and a cold beer.
“You’ve driven longer for less,” Cas remarks, but goes silent when Dean glares at him.
“Well, I’m not gettin’ any younger, so deal with it.”
He then feels a little bad for Cas and gestures at the one bed.
“Go take a nap or something while I shower. You look kinda drained.”
Cas looks up at him sharply, as if it’s weird that Dean noticed such a thing, but then concedes and carefully stands up from the chair to slowly take off his jacket. Then his shoes.
Noticing that he is watching Cas undress rather than going into the bathroom, Dean turns around and almost runs into the doorframe, but saves himself at the last second and smoothly shimmies through the door. He then realizes that he forgot to take a change of clothes, and walks out just to see Cas down to his underwear, sitting on the edge of the bed and scratching awkwardly at his back.
Dean clears his throat and gestures to his duffle.
“The- uhm. Clothes.” Which, obviously. He didn’t have to explain that. Cas looks at him weirdly, his hand still wrapped around himself to reach his shoulder blade. “Yup.”
He returns to the bathroom hoping Cas didn’t notice the awkwardness, and purposefully steps into the shower before it has the chance to warm up just to erase the redness he can feel spreading from his face all the way down to his chest.
When he finally finishes showering, he returns to Cas sleeping under the cover on his stomach, his hair wild on the pillow. Suddenly the warm feeling in his chest returns, but not the kind that can be quenched by a cold shower.
Instead of napping, he decides to head out to get some dinner for the two of them just so he can do something for Cas, who looks way too miserable for Dean to do nothing about it.
---
Sam calls the next morning to ask why they haven't returned to the bunker but doesn’t seem too perturbed by Dean’s explanation.
“Alright, fine. Just let me know if you find anything new. I am currently looking at some weird portal spells, but nothing that fits your case has caught my eye yet.”
Sam goes on to tell Dean and Cas what to look for at the playground, and Dean is glad to have some time to watch Cas’s concentration face. He always gets a cute frown when he thinks of something really hard, and the way he hunches over the phone puts his face closer to Dean’s in a way that makes it a little hard to breathe. He almost reaches out to brush back a strand of hair that keeps falling in Cas’s eye in this position but stops himself at the last second and decides to get up to get a beer to do something.
He only glares at Cas when his friend remarks that it’s only 10 am.
---
A bit later they return to the playground, after making sure to fence off the entire area with police tape so no one can watch. Sam sent them a list of possible reasons kids might be teleporting all over the place, and Dean had to explain to Cas why people shouldn’t watch them draw weird ritualistic symbols around a playground in a suburban neighborhood.
“But they aren’t satanic.”
“Yeah, Cas, but they don’t know that.”
So they roll up yellow police tape in the trees surrounding the area and get to work. According to Sam, once one of the warding symbols start to glow, they will know what they’re up against. It’s a new method, but Sam doesn’t want to call Rowena, so Dean doesn’t dispute it. It almost feels like a nice relaxing arts and crafts kind of afternoon with Cas and he has to suppress a chuckle while painting the slide.
Suddenly he hears a thump behind him, and he whirls around, paintbrush up and ready to fight.
All he sees is Cas. Cas in the sandpit. Cas on his back in the sandpit, rolling around. Some of the sand around him is whirling and getting thrown up in the air to the outside of the pit and deep divots start to form around Cas’s writhing form.
After a second of shock, Dean starts sprinting towards him, heart pounding, ready to start fighting the invisible thing that might have tackled Cas.
Before Dean can make his move, however, he notices - Cas is not fighting. His face is relaxed, smiling softly, eyes closed and the little sand dunes around him flick lightly but somehow not threateningly and with Cas’s movements not against him. Dean tries to take a few deep breaths, trying to calm his racing heartbeat, before swallowing a few times, trying to make himself noticed by Cas.
“Cas?”
His voice seems to jolt Cas out of his weird trance - his eyes opening up wide. The angel shoots up into a sitting position, sand flying off of his body. He then immediately tries standing up, but somehow miscalculates his own body weight or rather something seems to be pulling him downwards because he stumbles back before he can fully right himself. Instinctively Dean thrusts out a hand to steady him, and then helps Cas up - and needs his second arm to steady both of them. Damn, since when is Cas so heavy ?
After a few seconds of awkward silence, Cas finally looks up. “I am… not being attacked.”
Dean stares at him, incredulously. “I can see that. Now.”
“Yes.”
Dean almost laughs. The ridiculousness of seeing a guy tossing around in a sandpit like it’s his happy place feels like a set up to a joke, but the chuckle dies in his throat, once he notices Cas’s genuine embarrassment. The angel is looking at anything but him, and Dean swears he can see him actually blushing. Suddenly Dean feels the overwhelming urge to comfort him, to reach out and make everything okay for his friend. It aches in Dean’s chest to see Cas so frazzled to the point of uncomfortable.
Before the silence gets too overwhelming and awkward, Dean hears a strange buzzing sound. When he turns around, both Cas and Dean watch as one of the crudely drawn symbols start to emanate a light glow and buzzing. Rushing towards it in order to take a picture for Sam to identify it Dean concentrates back on the case though still keeping the incident in mind for later. There must be something going on with Cas and Dean wants to find out what. But first, he has to make sure no more children discover the wonders of teleportation.
Sam calls almost immediately upon receiving the picture, talking Dean through the next steps. While Dean is on the phone Cas is inspecting the glowing sigils, oblivious to the fact that sand is still covering a bit of his trenchcoat. The low glow illuminates Cas’s face, basking him in an eerie light and Dean remembers, not for the first time, that Cas is not quite human. But when Cas looks back at him, Dean can’t help but smile reassuringly. Cas may not be human, but he is here, and he is Dean’s friend and he will do anything to protect him.
Sam’s voice jerks him out of his head after his brother asks the same question for the third time and he focuses back on the task ahead.
The case seems pretty clean cut from this point on. According to Sam, the warding shows that there’s a simple spell on the playground which was reactivated by some weird weather phenomenon in the area. Apparently, it was put on there by witches that were long gone.
Sam instructs them to put together some ingredients which are easy enough to obtain in a nearby grocery store and oddly enough a pet store and they then smoke the area out to dispel the last traces of the curse. The only thing is, that it will take a lot of waiting around and probably the whole night at the playground with Cas, who refuses to let Dean do it by himself.
“You know I’ve been doing this kind of stuff my whole life?”
“Yes, but I also know that you usually have Sam by your side. It’s always safer to have someone there with you.”
“The most dangerous things here are mosquitoes.”
“Then I will protect you from those.”
Dean doesn’t really know what to say to that. Cas sounds terribly earnest and it moves something deep down in Dean which he is not at all ready to address. So he quickens his pace and smokes out another part of the playground, hearing Cas do the same by the swingset.
Like anticipated, it’s quite a boring night. They switch tactics at some point, leaving the bowls at different corners of the playground and moving them around every 20 minutes. They both sit down on the swingset while waiting. At first, they both sit in comfortable silence, but after a while, Dean starts wondering about what happened. The memory is jogged by both of them staring at the sandpit in silence for a while.
“So, Cas,” Dean says.
“Yes, Dean?”
“What about that sandpit fight?” Dean asks, trying his best to not sound too judgemental.
There’s silence and then Cas clears his throat, attempting to speak but then rethinking it. He then suddenly stands up abruptly.
“I am going to change the bowls. It’s been 20 minutes,” he says, not looking at Dean.
While Cas replaces the bowls, Dean swings lightly and thinks about why it would be so hard for Cas to talk to him about this. He has never really seen Cas be so embarrassed about something, and he doesn’t want him to think that he can’t talk to Dean about whatever is bothering him. Maybe it’s an angel thing. Cas is walking back.
“Hey Cas, is it an angel thing?”
Cas hesitates a bit before gingerly sitting back down on the other swing next to Dean. “Yes, it’s an ‘angel thing’.”
Dean automatically mirrors the air quotes with his own fingers and smiles while looking down, while still swinging back and forth. He can feel Cas is watching him intently.
“I- ” Cas stops, considers, and starts again. “My wings have been itching lately. And I thought a dust bath might relieve it.” Dean can’t help but look at Cas at that and sees Cas’s almost guarded and vulnerable expression as if he’s expecting Dean to start laughing any second now. Dean schools his facial expression to be as neutral as possible, but it’s hard to keep down a small twitch he can feel tugging at his mouth corners.
“ - I haven’t really done it in a while, especially in my human vessel so it was…” Cas pauses. “More awkward than expected.”
“Yeah, I’d say.”
“Dean.”
Dean holds up his hands. “Hey hey, no judgment, you do what you gotta do.”
Cas eyes him warily but seems to accept it.
After a moment he says, “they’re still itching.” As if to make a point, he raises his arm awkwardly to scratch at his back.
Dean raises his eyebrows and thinks about what to say to that. He stops swinging.
“Anything I can do about that?”
Cas looks surprised as if he hasn’t even considered Dean being able to help with his issue. He frowns and then looks up at Dean with a determined look on his face.
“I do think you can help me, actually.”
Later, a mosquito lands on Dean, and Cas smites it so hard that Dean’s arm hair singes a little. He looks so horrified that Dean lets him heal it while trying not to laugh too hard.
---
The next morning, Sam is waiting for Dean and Cas to get home. They were supposed to be back two hours ago, and Sam is getting antsy, not having heard anything from them since they told him that they were done with the case the previous night.
When they finally do get home Sam hears the car and heads up to the garage to greet them and to find out what the hold up was.
“We dropped by a hardware store on the way,” Dean says, after Sam doesn’t even bother with a hello. Before Sam can ask for clarification, Dean just holds up a finger in a ‘wait’ motion, and tells him, “Can you help me get some stuff outta the trunk?”
He leads Sam back to the Impala, passing a disgruntled Cas on the way.
“I told you to go to your room, Cas.”
“I can help unpack.”
“Yes, I know you can , but I don’t want you to. Go take a nap or watch another one of those cat videos you keep sending me,” Dean says, not leaving Cas room to argue.
“Should I send you more?” Cas asks, before Dean gently, but decisively pushes him towards the stairs. Sam can see his ears turning red as he mumbles, “Yeah, whatever,” at Cas, so quiet that Sam almost can’t hear.
Once Cas is gone, Dean opens up the trunk and thrusts a few wooden planks at Sam. When Sam can’t take any more pieces and they’re stacked up until under his chin, Dean bends down and hauls out big heavy sacks of something Sam can’t quite identify. Dean puts them down to close the trunk, and while the sacks are down Sam can make out Chinchilla bath sand printed on the front and he tries to run through the ingredients he knows they needed for the spells and comes up short.
“So did you need this stuff for the ritual? Did my method not work?” Sam finally asks, while they carry the stuff back down the stairs from the garage.
“That? Oh no, your thing worked perfectly fine, we cleared the playground this morning. No more reappearing children anywhere. This is uhm- “ he looks away, mumbling, “it’s for Cas.”
“It’s for Cas?”
Dean visibly concentrates harder on his steps, avoiding eye contact with Sam.
“Yes. For Cas. Now shut up and carry this to the garden.”
The “Garden” as they like to call it, is a little patch outside that is only accessible through the bunker. Cas recently claimed it for himself and is planning on using it to plant some flowers and vegetables. Although he hasn’t quite figured out tomatoes yet, as he keeps explaining to Sam.
They dump all the stuff just on the edge of the Garden, as Dean instructs. Before Sam can inhale to ask a question, Dean seems to have anticipated Sam’s curiosity and he beats him to it.
“Cas needs to like. Clean his wings or whatever. So it’s a bath for him.” Dean starts adjusting some of the wood planks on the floor.
“Oh, okay,” Sam says. It does make sense. He always wondered if there was some kind of maintenance associated with wings in the corporeal form. Before he can ask more questions about it, Dean interrupts him yet again.
“But don’t go bothering or asking Cas about it. He gets super embarrassed about it for some reason.”
Oh, Sam thinks, oooh.
“So is it like… an intimate thing? For an angel to bathe their wings?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Dean says, clearly uncomfortable. Oh, Sam is going to milk this.
“Why did he share it with you then?”
He can’t quite keep the smirk out of his voice, and even before he finishes, Dean roughly shoulders him aside to leave the room, grumbling.
---
Turns out Dean decides to be totally weird about it. Sam doesn’t actually think that it’s such a big deal that Dean’s helping out his buddy. But every time he brings up anything near the topic of sand baths or wing baths, especially when Cas is around, Dean gives him a death glare to rival Claire’s and gets all huffy and doesn’t stick around to make dinner for Sam, which is really quite unfortunate.
---
A few days later Sam finds another case while scrolling through his newsfeed. It doesn’t seem too urgent, but still, something to look into, so he closes his laptop and grabs his coffee to drink it on the way to find his brother. He checks all the usual areas he’d expect for Dean to be at this time - the kitchen, his bedroom, Dean’s Dean Cave, hell, even Cas’s room, but he’s not anywhere. Cas is also suspiciously absent.
It was unusual for Dean to leave without telling Sam, but he definitely wouldn’t leave without telling Cas.
When he gets to the top of the stairs, the sliding doors leading to the garden are opened up a little way, meaning somebody must be outside, or Cas forgot to close the door again. Not wanting to startle Cas if he’s there, Sam squeezes through the gap without opening the screeching doors further.
At first, he can’t see Cas anywhere, but before he can sigh and go back inside to find Cas to reprimand him about leaving the door open again, he hears a low thud to his right. There’s a bit more rustling, and then the murmuring of low voices. He then makes out the familiar cadence of his brother’s voice and the low rumble of Cas responding.
Huh, weird.
Sam carefully steps closer to the sound, closer to the corner that leads into a little niche in the Garden that Cas used as a place to store his gardening tools. When Sam peeks around the corner, he definitely doesn’t see tools.
He does see the assembled big sandbox that Dean has built. In it are Dean and Cas, their backs facing the doorway.
Sam almost goes back inside, but then decides to just see what exactly they’re doing.
Cas sits shirtless, wings sprawled around him completely relaxed. Sam has to stop himself from gasping because of the sheer size of them, and the way the black feathers reflect in the sun, shimmering rainbow colours, a bit like an oil spill. What then draws his attention back is Dean, sitting behind Cas, carding his finger through the feathers. Gently, but methodically. At one point he takes some of the sand and sprinkles it on Cas’s wings.
“Stop it, Dean,” Cas mumbles, but Sam hears the smile in his voice. To Sam’s horror Dean giggles and scratches at another part up in Cas’s plumage, which makes Cas’s feathers poof up a bit, and Cas makes a sound that Sam feels like he shouldn’t have heard. Dean then goes back to grooming, and Cas’s shoulders relax as he falls back into Dean a bit, Dean seemingly not minding their closeness. He even turns his head a bit, almost burying his nose in the angels hair. If Sam could see Dean’s face better he swears he would see his brother smiling from how relaxed his shoulders are. And those are definitely Dean’s smiling shoulders.
Suddenly Sam realises he’s been staring at this for way too long and that it’s slightly creepy. It would be way too awkward to announce himself now, besides those two definitely deserve a little break.
Sam leaves, case forgotten and something new to research on his mind.
---
Dean enters the kitchen to prepare dinner humming. It’s been a good afternoon and Cas finally gave him some ripe tomatoes that don’t look too weird to eat, so he starts pulling some frozen patties out of the freezer to prepare some burgers. And maybe a salad. Just to showcase the tomatoes of course and to please Sam.
Speaking of Sam, he’s been oddly quiet in recent days. Every time Dean walks by, his brother tenses up, and the mood shifts into a more tense atmosphere, like someone is about to say something monumental. But nothing is ever said, and one time Dean started talking about one of Cas’s cat videos just to break the tense silences and that is not a conversation Dean was ready to have with his brother because there is nothing more awkward than describing a cat video to someone who hasn’t seen it.
So things around the bunker have been weird. With Sam at least. Cas however, has been in the best mood he has been in a long while. His face is relaxed, wearing that sort of small smile that used to be so rare, he is the picture of serenity. Sometimes Dean has to stop himself from staring at Cas doing mundane things across the room, and sometimes he completely forgets to stop himself and only does so when Cas finally catches his eye and gives him an even better small smile. It’s not something Dean can handle easily.
Ever since Dean was permitted to touch Cas’s wings for the first time, and actually see his wings during their sessions, Dean can’t stop thinking about it. At night he dreams about the silkiness between his fingers, the way it feels to remove debris and old feathers out of Cas’s plumage. The way Cas shivers when Dean finds a particularly sore spot and manages to clean it out and the way Cas leans into him and his arms more and more as the sessions get longer and longer. The way it ultimately ends with Cas slightly dozing in his arms and sometimes with his head in Dean’s lap, completely relaxed, and Dean is able to openly admire him in a way he was never able to before.
It gets to the point where Dean craves it, but Cas seems to crave it too, and they can’t stop themselves from being apart for too long. It’s like being pulled by a magnet every time they’re near each other and it’s not like Dean hasn’t felt it before, it’s just unbearably irresistible at this point, especially when Cas looks rumpled and content which happens often when Dean’s hands are on him.
---
One evening while Dean and Cas are sitting on the couch watching a movie they’ve seen at least three times already, Sam bursts in.
He does a double-take at Dean and Cas sitting so close together but then proceeds to just sit down in one of the perpendicular recliner chairs while Cas doesn’t even bother to detach himself from Dean’s side.
Sam has that restless ‘I have something to tell you’ energy that Dean often tries to ignore in order to have a nice evening. However, after about a minute of Sam shifting around and clearing his throat about three times, he finally pauses the movie and looks over Cas’s head at his brother.
“What, Sam.”
“So I did some research,” Sam says.
“You really need to find another hobby.”
“Yes, but get this -”
“Fishing? I think you might like fishing.”
“Dean -”
“Oh, what about bowling, I saw a new place only half a mile from here recently, you could take Eileen.” Dean shifts around, making Cas, who was laying his head on Dean’s shoulder grumble and readjust his position.
Sam huffs impatiently.
“Okay, but seriously I gotta tell you something, uh.” Sam pauses. “I don’t know, Cas, can I talk to Dean alone for a moment?”
Cas frowns.
“Please?” Sam asks. At least he looks a bit apologetic.
Dean softly squeezes Cas’s side, hidden from Sam’s view.
“You could get those chips I know you snuck into the cart last time we were shopping,” Dean says to Cas, who looks at him in betrayal.
“I do kind of want to find out what grilled cheese flavored chips taste like?” Dean adds tilting his head, and that gets Cas up, using Dean’s knee for leverage.
Sam watches Cas walk out before he picks up his laptop and moves to the couch, but sits farther away from Dean than Cas did.
“I know what you’re doing,” Sam says, almost whispering even though Cas has clearly left the room.
“ What?” Dean says in a normal voice.
“I know that you’ve been helping out Cas with his wing ‘grooming’”
Dean can feel his face getting warm, and his heart pounds. He thinks of the case, a month back, thinks of Cas not even bothering to hide his affection for Dean anymore and Dean wanting to finally be able to just say and do what he wants in his own house. Bunker. Whatever. So after a moment, he looks back up at Sam.
“Yeah? So what?”
Sam stares at him, a slightly tense look on his face.
“So I’ve been doing research and Dean -” Sam looks even more constipated now, “I don’t know how to tell you this but basically; wing grooming is a-a really intimate ritual between angels who are-” he glances to the doorway and leans more forward, “who are mated. Which they do,” Sam whispers the last part, “for life.”
Dean can feel himself blushing harder, and this time he can’t keep looking at Sam. Instead, he looks at the TV screen which is paused on a picture of a tree.
He lets the silence linger for a moment, before taking a breath. He can do this.
“I know,” he finally says, quietly.
“You know.”
“... yes.”
He looks back up to look into Sam’s incredulous face. Cas chooses that moment to show back up, two bags of chips in his hands. He frowns at Sam and then gestures at him to move to the other end of the couch so he can sit back down next to Dean.
“I also got Red Beet chips,” Cas says, settling back down, frowning at one of the bags.
“That is disgusting,” Dean says, and grabs it. Yeah, it’s not like they were trying to hide it, but the fact that Sam now knows for sure still feels like a major stone lifted off his chest and makes warmth bloom in his chest. He settles further back in the cushion, more relaxed than he remembers being ever, and restarts the movie.
He tries one of the beetroot chips, makes a face. Cas rolls his eyes and takes the bag from him, tossing him the grilled cheese flavored ones, which Dean greatly prefers.
During the movie Dean lets himself relax into a position Cas and him often find themselves in recently, cuddled up close to each other, Cas commentating the historical inaccuracies while Dean fondly kisses the top of Cas’s head every time he does so. The only difference is that this time Sam is there. Sam, who took a few moments to apparently get over himself and is now texting someone viciously.
Before the movie ends, Sam gets up, never having paid attention to it, and starts to leave, muttering something about facetiming Eileen.
Dean smiles to himself and looks forward to helping Cas groom his wings whenever he needs him to do so and also to spending the rest of his life with a man who apparently enjoys red beet- flavored chips.
The next day Dean, Cas, Sam, and Eileen go on a double date to the bowling alley.