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English
Series:
Part 3 of all of us walk so blind in the sun
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Published:
2025-09-17
Completed:
2025-09-17
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5,185
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2/2
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31
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i'm loud and alive, singing you all night

Summary:

Cas and Dean have been sharing a body for a while now.

Sam has some questions.

Later, Dean and Cas finally have a moment to themselves.

Notes:

outside, magnolias
cup their sepals
like good hands.

inside, we spade
like leaves: tenderly,
and only at each other’s bidding.

From ‘what lesbian porn has done for me’ by Destiny O. Birdsong.

“There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.”
From ‘A Glimpse’ by Walt Whitman.

Title from ‘Sunblind’ by Fleet Foxes

Chapter 1: outside, magnolias

Summary:

This chapter is totally PG! All the Explicit stuff is in Chapter 2!

Chapter Text

It takes a whirlwind few weeks and several bulk pallets of borax to get the Leviathan population under control. Dean was sure they’d be playing whack-a-mole for a while with the stragglers, but felt confident that they were on their way to a rather decisive victory, especially considering the intel that Cas provided – that Leviathan cannot procreate. There is a static number of them, just like angels, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.

 

Their campaign of attrition didn’t leave much time for relationship building, but Dean found that he wasn’t insecure for the lack of devoted time with Cas. Even burning the candle at both ends – taking full advantage of the fact that he no longer needed to sleep – Dean was more energetic and invigorated than he had been in years. And despite the potentially apocalyptic crisis they were in the midst of, he found himself happy, without caveat, for what might be the first time in his adult life.

 

Of course, this got his brother’s attention.

 

About halfway through October, Sam broached the subject. He had to turn the music down – they could play music again, because the daily round of healing had finally fixed his migraine problem sometime in late September – to get Dean’s attention. Dean had been ‘lost in thought’ – perhaps literally, speaking to Cas in a kind of sensory shorthand.

 

“Dean.” Sam waited a few beats before trying again. “Dean, hey. Earth to Dean.”

 

“Hmm?” Dean answered, focus returning as both he and Cas noticed Sam trying to talk to him. “Yeah, sorry. What’s up?”

 

“Look, I don’t know if now’s a good time, but I don’t really know when a good time would be, so.” Sam started strong but quickly lost the thread. He started over. “Just. Can I talk to you about something? Can we talk?”

 

“Yeah?” Dean looked over at him quizzically before turning back to the road, “Okay, yeah. What do you wanna talk about?”

 

“Cas. You and Cas,” Sam replied, and he must have sensed the immediate rictus of tension in Dean’s posture, because he hurried to continue. “Nothing bad! Honestly, nothing bad. I just…I have some questions?”

 

And Dean recognized the knee-jerk reflex to refuse, or to put himself on defense. And he let it go. Of course, Sam would have questions. It isn’t as if Dean had offered much of an explanation since that first day or two, and a lot had changed since then. Probably more than Sam or Bobby could even guess, but some changes were obvious – his mood, his physical strength and stamina, his blasé attitude towards sleep.

 

“Fire away,” Dean exhaled, the impulse to be short with Sam exiting with his spent breath.

 

“You two are different. Now. Than when you first. When he first. Than you were,” Sam said, haltingly, like every clause was a battle. Dean waited for the ‘question’ part, but it seemed Sam had finished his thought.

 

“…Yeah? Yeah, we are. Am I missing the question part?” Dean asked, laughing a little, to lighten the mood, and he felt Cas in every minute contraction of his diaphragm.

 

“I’m having a hard time explaining myself, sorry,” Sam muttered, looking a bit defeated.

 

“No, hey. I know I haven’t been the most…open…in the past. But this is important. And if you’ve got questions? I want to answer ‘em, okay?”

 

“You are different,” Sam chuckled, looking over at him with a genuine smile, but something disbelieving in his eyes, something not quite afraid, but perhaps…assessing?

 

“I am.” Dean answered, sincere, holding Sam’s gaze for a beat before returning his visual attention to driving.

 

“Right.” Sam huffed breathlessly, sort of the half-finished front end of a laugh. “And it’s you, that’s different? It’s not just, that it’s you and Cas?”

 

Dean furrowed his brow, trying to parse the question, and Cas helped him, both of them spinning the wool tangle of words into a neat spool of yarn in his brain.

 

“It’s me. And it’s me and Cas. And it’s Cas.” Dean settled on, and Sam’s silence remained confused. “I’m different, and Cas is different. And also, we’re us. But that’s not what’s different, exactly. It’s just…also true?” Dean tried to explain it.

 

“Okayyyy…” Sam took that in, trying to channel some meaning from it to spark another inquiry. To go deeper. “You seem…you seem good different.” Sam remembered to add the actual question on. “Are you?”

 

“Yeah, I’m good. It’s a good different.”

 

“But…but what’s it like?” Sam asked, verging on desperate with his inability to convey what he meant, his difficulty conjuring the right questions. “What’s it like, with him in there, you know?”

 

“Like literally, what is it like?” Dean clarified, and Sam groaned in frustration. “I’m not trying to be difficult here, man, I just, is that what you’re asking, like literally, what is it like?”

 

“Yes?” Sam answered, running a hand through his own hair and leaving it a bit of a mess. “Yeah, I guess.”

 

“Okay…well. At first, it was like, I don’t know. Like he lived in the back of my mind, and I could go talk to him, or let him take the wheel for a little while – like when we’d heal you – but. He just didn’t seem comfortable. And we thought about some ways we could do this differently. So now he’s all spread out, you know? Like another layer on things.”

 

“So is he…is he listening, right now?”

 

“Yeah?” Dean answered, not sure what Sam was getting at.

 

“Is he always?”

 

“Yeah, I guess? If he wants to be?” Cas pulsed heavier in his blood, a comforting weight in his veins.

 

“And that doesn’t…doesn’t bother you? Or, or make you. I don’t know. Uncomfortable?” Sam asked, and to his credit, he wasn’t asking leading questions. He genuinely seemed curious, like any answer would be accepted.

 

“Before all this went down, I mighta thought it would. You know me, not really an open book,” Dean joked, but neither Sam nor Cas found it very funny. “But no, it doesn’t. It’s uh. It’s hard to explain, but it’s…nice.”

 

“Yeah?” Sam asked, and Dean was relieved to hear the hope there. Sam smiled, just a little, but enough to make Dean feel like he could continue.

 

“Yeah,” He exhaled through a helpless grin. “I’m just not so damn worried all the time, you know? I used to spend so much time thinking about stuff, thinking about all the bad shit that could happen, thinking about all the people I’ve hurt,” Sam opened his mouth to protest that point, but Dean steamrolled past him, “Thinking about what I had to do to make it right. And he just. He pulls me out of it. Like it’s nothing.” Dean snapped his fingers for emphasis.

 

Sam nodded, slow and contemplative.

 

“And at first, he was so…so guilty, man,” Dean felt a twinge under his sternum, his own sympathetic reaction to remembering those early days, when Cas was inconsolably remorseful. Cas responded to those feelings by easing the tension in his chest, opening him up a bit, letting the air into his lungs a little easier. Dean took a grateful breath. “I’d never really seen how he thought about things, before. How much he blamed himself for. And how much he was willing to give up, to protect us.” Cas arched a metaphysical brow, a suggested correction, and a smile tugged at the corner of Dean’s mouth as he took the note as offered. “To protect me. I think he would still be feeling that way, if we didn’t end up, uh, rooming together, you know?”

 

“I’m…glad. That you both seem happy with things how they are,” Sam started, twisting his fingers in his lap. Staring down and away from Dean. “I just, I needed to make sure. ‘Cause how you guys are…I mean, obviously, that’s not how it was, for me.”

 

“Sam, I get it,” Dean assured him. “I promise, nobody’s wearing anybody, it’s not like that, okay?”

 

“Yeah, I know,” Sam shrugged, looking up at him, smiling just a bit. “I know you pretty well, Dean. I’d know, if you weren’t running the show.”

 

Dean and Cas both flinched at the word choice, and Sam cocked his head curiously at the reaction.

 

“I can…appreciate…what you’re trying to say, but um. I don’t really look at it like that, anymore. It’s not, like, one of us driving and the other taking a back seat. We’re sharing. All the time.” Dean explained, and Sam’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

 

“Oh,” Sam breathed, still cartoonishly shocked as he processed this. “Wow.”

 

“Look, I know it’s a lot, but if I hadn’t said anything, would you even have – “ Dean started, nervous and eager to defend himself, to defend himself and Cas. But Sam interrupted, shaking his head firmly.

 

“No, no, I get it – really. It’s like, uh, like Dax, right?”

 

“Dax? Dude, are you comparing me to Deep Space Nine right now?”

 

“No,” Sam grinned wickedly, “I’m comparing you to a character in Deep Space Nine. Or, well, two characters? That’s kind of the point of the comparison.”

 

“Cas isn’t a friggin’ space worm, Sam,” Dean hissed, glaring daggers at him as he rolled to a stop at a red light.

 

“Sorry, sorry,” Sam raised his hands in mock surrender. “But you get what I mean, right? Like, you guys are kind of both holding the game controller. You’ve each got a hand on the ball. Two straws in one milkshake? It’s all one big three legged race?” With each new comparison, Dean’s melodramatic glower deepened, and Sam’s impish grin grew.

 

“Yeah, Sam. If that’s how you gotta picture it to wrap your brain around it, sure.” Dean sniffed, turning his head imperiously.

 

“Seriously, though,” Sam said after a few minutes, during which Dean had assumed the conversation to be over. “What’s that like?”

 

“It’s…” Dean thought about it, in tandem with Cas, trading feelings back and forth, a show and tell of sensations that took only a few synaptic flickers to complete. He passed Cas his own sense of security, the absence of loneliness, like a round stone worn smooth by a river’s current, and Cas took it, contemplating it, as he presented Dean with his own feelings of acceptance, of home, a leggy green seedling in a Dixie cup, like Dean had cared for once for a classroom project in some long forgotten elementary school he’d only attended for a month or so. “It just feels right,” Dean sighed.

 

Sam stared at him, and he was aware of it, even as he continued to be aware of Cas, internally, the way they were still sharing things, taking turns inspecting one another’s joys and reliefs and hopes. Dean, showing Cas how little alcohol interested him, now that they were sharing. Cas, delighted, explaining in bright streaks of teal and flecks of brown-grey, like the delicate shell of a song thrush’s egg, how wonderful it was to taste things from Dean’s perspective, to touch things with his hands, to hear sounds with his ears.

 

Something in the watching must have filled in the blanks for Sam, because his puzzled expression melted into something admiring, illuminated from within by hard won understanding.

 

“Thanks for talking through it with me,” Sam said, and Dean made a dismissive sort of ‘it was nothing’ gesture with his hand, but Sam kept going. “Seriously, thanks. And, um. I’m glad it worked out like that, for you two. I’m glad you’re happy.”

 

“Me too,” Dean said, quieter than he’d intended, throat unexpectedly tight. The rest of the drive, Sam contented himself with reading something on his phone, and Dean sat with his thoughts, his thoughts, not Castiel’s, and wondered if there might be some logical endpoint to them, something that was missing – but only because he hadn’t really looked for it. Cas, buzzing on the edges of these thoughts, but not intruding, perhaps thinking thoughts of his own, seemed by his very existence, his very presence, to agree.

Chapter 2: inside, we spade like leaves

Chapter Text

On the last warm day of October, Dean planned to spend his time working on Baby.

 

Bobby took his truck into town to pick up another shipment of borax, and to get some groceries from the Hy-Vee. Sam stayed inside, typing up notes he’d made about the Leviathan in the last month, calling up every hunter Bobby had in his brittle rolodex and filling them in on how to spot Leviathan and what to do to take them down, updating the ones who already know about Leviathan with anything that’s new since he last called.

 

For all intents and purposes, Dean had the day to himself (and Cas).

 

Sometimes they still chatted back and forth with words – especially in the mornings, when they were both still getting their bearings with one another, since Dean has taken to sleeping at least a few hours a night, just because he liked to. But most of the time, they communicated in seamless physical shorthand, in the prickle of goosebumps, the rhythm of heartbeats, the flex of fingers. When these touches and assurances weren’t sufficient, to convey their ideas and emotions, they’d skip speaking and go straight on to sharing outright, thoughts and images changing hands at the speed of light.

 

Dean chattered mindlessly at Cas while he changed Baby’s oil, firing off memories as they occurred to him – the first time he ever changed a car’s oil, myriad times he’d done so since, one funny time when Sam snuck up behind Dean and accidentally made him spill the dirty oil all down the front of his own shirt – and Cas relished them all, spun them around one another, like marbles rolling together and clicking glass-bright in a child’s palm. In observing these parts of Dean, these memories and the emotions embedded therein, he was inherently transforming them, adding dimensions of his own, before offering them back to Dean, shiny and freshly loved.

 

Once the oil was changed, Dean took a look at everything else under the hood, inspecting everything closely, nipping any emerging rust spots in the bud before they could bloom. Cas sent him a complimentary thought, complex and angelic. Even though they were wound so tightly together, there were still these gaps in understanding that Dean secretly enjoyed. When Cas’s thoughts came to him like this, it was like being gifted an ornate puzzle box, or posed a particularly clever riddle, and he savored not only the solution, but the work it took to reach that solution.

 

Initial inspection of this particular thought left him with the now familiar impression that it was about Dean, a kind of sea-sparkle of green tinging the whole idea. Beyond that, there was something akin to fatherhood being expressed, and he wasn’t sure what to make of that component yet, so he skipped past it. There was a note of admiration, a songlike sound that he knew in his bones to be praise, and he’d learned by now to take that as an analog for vocal tone, a mode of delivery. It made this entire thought structure a compliment. A compliment for Dean. About something…parental?

 

He dug deeper, looking at the bundle of images and sounds and sensations from another angle, letting himself just live in them for a little while, as his hands continued their meditative work on the car’s inner workings. He pictured monks, washing floors in a sanctuary, nuns tending gardens in the faint light of dawn. He watched, fascinated, as images of parents tending infants danced across his mind, spanning time in its fullness – mothers with babies strapped to their backs as they harvested crops in vast fields, fathers reclining under thick furs pressing infants to their warm chests against the cold. The gallery swelled with such impressions, unique and fleeting and building towards something.

 

When it clicked, he laughed out loud, victorious and flattered.

 

“You like how I take care of my car?” Dean asked aloud, still laughing, whipping the grease rag he’d draped over his shoulder down to wipe his dirty hands.

 

I like how you take care of lots of things. Your car included.

 

Dean smiled, basking in the compliment, and it struck him how such a reaction would have been nearly unimaginable just a few months ago. Such an interaction, even with the body-sharing aspect aside, would be unthinkably vulnerable.

 

He responded internally, as he often did, echoing Castiel’s sentiment back at him, a metaphysical ‘ditto’ of sorts, and Cas flushed like a sunrise at the praise.

 

“You really are cute when you blush,” Dean said, surprising himself with his boldness. The flirtation he’d teased Cas with over a month before slipped out, easy and true. They hadn’t discussed it since then, not in any meaningful way. He’d thought, occasionally and openly, about what it would be like, to have something like that with Cas. He’d gotten as far as letting himself want it, but no farther. In the grand scheme of Dean’s emotional growth, even that felt significant.

 

Dean’s scalp tingled, responding as though fingers were running through his hair, fingernails digging in just enough to make his toes curl in his boots. An image painted itself on the canvas of his mind, not of anything exactly, but pink – every pink, he was sure of it, all in one place, oil-slick and wet-hot like breath. His cheeks did their best to match it, heating up to highlight his own reaction.

 

He spilled out a half-formed thought, a memory of cotton candy, the first time he’d ever had it, swiped from an unattended snack booth at a street fair in Kentucky, the sugary strands sheathed in a thin bubble of plastic, glowing under the carnival lights that studded every surface. How he stuck his hand in the bag and pulled out a hunk for Sam, mesmerized by how light it was in his fingers, how easily it tore from the whole. When he stuck his hand back in to pull out a bite for himself, he let the tips of his fingers skate, dry and delicate, across the surface of the confection, petting it. Letting it be soft in his hand, before drawing a pinch of it to his lips. He darted his tongue out, just to taste, not to consume, and he tasted the saturated barely-flavored tang drifting like melted snow through his saliva. Watched the way the peony pink cloud curled in on itself where drops of his spit lingered, how it darkened, tantalizing and fuchsia, with the leftover wetness.

 

Cas smoothed through his limbs in pleasure as he received the thought, spread the sultry balm of his energy from his shoulders to his fingertips, his hips to his toes, his collarbone to his coccyx. He twirled through Dean, red stripe on a barbershop pole, twining through him vine-like and clingsome. Dazed, panting, Dean sat down in the dirt, propping himself up against the passenger door of the car.

 

The light outside was delicious – South Dakota sunshine had never been so beautiful, golden and thick enough to bottle, like honey. He stared up at the sky, the blue of it, crisp and autumn-heavy, like it had settled lower to Earth than it did in the summer, like he could reach up and touch it. It reminded him of Cas’s eyes, which he would not ever see again, except in his memory, and it should have been a sad thought, something about loss. But it wasn’t. His gut flared with heat, jealously satiated fire, at the realization that Cas would not be in any other body, would not look like any other body, but Dean’s own body. That someday, he will have been part of Dean longer than he ever inhabited Jimmy, longer than he’d ever been anyone but Castiel. He shuddered, lips parting on a moan that came from deep in his belly, low and long.

 

Cas seemed equally thrilled by the thought, when he got ahold of it, and he held onto it for so long, so tightly, that when he eventually passed it back to Dean, it was knotted in dozens of Cas’s own considerations, which Dean would have to untangle on his own.

 

He pulled at the topmost thread, blue as the sky above him, and it was a simple enough thought – Castiel was flattered that Dean had ever admired his eyes, ever considered the blue of them at all. As if to prove his point to Cas, he fired off as many memories of Cas’s eyes as he could, hundreds of split second mental photographs expelled like machine gun shells, and Cas caught them all in his grace, as unharmed by these proverbial bullets as he was by the real thing. The memories collated into a mosaic, a kaleidoscope of sapphire irises, and Cas tucked it away for his own future enjoyment.

 

Pulling on the tangle again, he got the impression that Cas was relieved, that Dean didn’t feel sadness at the loss of Cas’s vessel, didn’t feel regret, or resentment, or simple sorrow. That he did not long for an external Castiel of any kind. It wasn’t as simple as the previous thought had been – there was a lot of math, a lot of geometry here. It was structured like a proof, a lot of statements trudging towards a validated theory. Dean was getting better with thoughts like those, though.

 

The thread underneath required more tugging, knotted back on itself several times, and the longer he spent worrying it between his metaphysical fingers, the more images piled themselves on top of one another, a heap of seemingly unrelated scenes and concepts. A gold-framed mirror, and a crystalline lake, which was also a mirror. The feeling of a hand, touching a face. A hand touching the face that belongs to the same body as the hand. Paper dolls, one taped directly over another, obscuring the one underneath, but not erasing it. The exact sequence of Dean’s DNA – which he only identified because Cas had shown it to him once a few weeks back, so that they could admire it together. The feeling of the tip of one’s tongue, licking a firm line up the back of the bottom row of teeth. Sugar boiling on a stovetop, dissolving in water, and someone nearby cutting cherries in half, pushing out the pits with their thumb, pouring the slick red fruit into the pot and stirring it with a long wooden spoon.

 

He ran a hand over his own face, mimicking one of the images unconsciously, and the sensation made real was the linchpin he needed, binding everything else together, allowing the wheel of the thought to turn as one unit. Cas liked being part of Dean, and more importantly, he liked that Dean liked that he was part of Dean. He almost rolled his eyes at the unnecessary amount of detail Cas had gone into, but his fondness won out. Besides, it would be hypocritical to judge his delivery of such a sensitive topic, because Dean himself was plenty guilty of hiding his own ideas and intentions under mounds of oblique references.

 

The last knot was really a clump of them, a series of furious loops and twists that demanded intricate attention, but the more he interfaced with them, the less he understood. It was entirely physical sensation – no images, no emotional layers, not even a color. It was heart-pounding. It was mouth hanging open, slow round breaths that drive down into the bottom of your lungs, unfocused eyes with lids drooping long-lashed over them. It was feeling your pulse in the palms of your hands, the hollow of your throat, the nexus of your pelvis.

 

He laughed, breathless, still tied up in the knot, body complying with all of the sensations he’d discovered, as it all fell into place. Perhaps Cas himself had not known what he was suggesting, what it was he’d been thinking so hard about, but Dean had experience enough with it for the both of them.

 

If he wasn’t able to share the whole of his heart across their connection, his response might’ve come off as callous, or even mocking, but as it was, Cas could feel the depth of his sincerity, could interpret his mirth as joy alone, not at the expense of Castiel. He sent a single thought back, or rather, a pile of the same thought, all bound up together, sort of like a deck of cards, variations on a theme but all of them a standard size, a standard set of designs. Dean thought back dozens of memories of his own orgasms – by himself, with others, unremarkable ones along with ones that had seismic aftershocks. That one spectacular time he stuck his left hand back and pushed his middle finger up his ass until he could juuust graze his own prostate.

 

He thought all these things, or all of this one thing, at Cas, because it just now occurred to Dean that that’s what this was, that that’s why he was sitting on the ground, jeans suddenly too tight, panting like he’s just sprinted five miles. Because they’d been having sex. Were still having sex.

 

Cas seemed as surprised and delighted by this revelation as Dean had been, more sensations flooded his body, bypassing this quasi-conversational phase altogether. He pressed his eyes closed against the onslaught, fumbled in the dark of his own overwhelm to unbutton and unzip his jeans, not for a second considering that he was about to pull his dick out in the middle of the afternoon, sitting in the middle of a junkyard. It didn’t matter, not at that moment. Nothing outside the confines of his body mattered just then.

 

He wrapped his hand around his cock, which was unbearably hard, and probably had been for some time, even though he hadn’t noticed it until then. There was the familiar ripple of positive sensation. On top of that, or perhaps trailing just behind it, was a sort of inverse wave of pleasure. His own actions on his body were jubilant birdsong, and Castiel’s responsive experience of those sensations were answering calls echoing back to him.

 

Dean had jerked off plenty of times in his life, many many more times than he’d had sex with another person, though he’d done that often enough as well. Never, in his life, had he made noise while masturbating. It seemed like a hat on a hat, he’d always thought. Something that felt performative, or even distracting. But he felt noises bubbling out of him, some rumbling and secondary – belonging to Castiel, but most of them breathy and high, breaking in the back of his throat, that were purely his own.

 

There was no neat box to sort the experience into, really, because it wasn’t just sex, or just masturbation. It was both of them, respectively, jacking off, and both of them fucking each other. He was drowning in it, thrown under the waves of the feeling and every time he thought he could pull himself back to center, another wave would break and push him back down.

 

It felt like it went on forever, eyes shut so tight that his sinuses ached from the pressure, spine arched back so far that his shoulders were digging in to the body of the car, angelic strength nearly denting the door.

 

In reality, it took twenty two desperate dry pumps of his hand around his dick for him to come. His eyes flew open, light slicing across his retinas like a blade, and he watched in distant fascination as his cock twitched and spurted into the air, hand absent, now bracing himself against the earth to keep from falling over. It wasn’t just the muscular release that felt good, or even the flood of chemicals in his brain that had him feeling fuzzy and relaxed. It was watching his body react, feeling Cas watch his body – their body – respond to their touch, letting the carousel of astonishment and gratitude and elation spin around and around, faster and faster, gaudy painted horses chasing each other relentlessly without ever catching up to or passing one another.

 

Coming down from the feeling took ages, mentally and physically. His ears were ringing, and sounds were muffled, like he’d shoved cotton balls in them and every noise trickled in too soft, too distant. His joints were shaking, even his kneecaps were trembling and spasming in the aftermath. He knew, intellectually, that he should wipe himself off and put his now-soft dick away, considering he was half-sitting, half-laying on the ground in broad daylight, but he just couldn’t find the will to move his arms, which seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each.

 

“Next time, we should probably get a room,” Dean giggled, voice raw from the sounds he’d been making.

 

You’d like to do that again?

 

Castiel asked, earnest, but slightly smug. At once surprised that Dean was so comfortable with this particular turn of events, and flattered that Dean had enjoyed himself so thoroughly.

 

“Yeah, I would.” Dean groaned as he dragged himself backwards to sit upright against the car again. His eyes drifted to his spent dick, limp and somewhat coated in his ejaculate. Dean had a pretty good idea who’s decision it was to stare at that in particular. “See somethin’ you like?” Dean teased.

 

Yes!

 

Cas exclaimed, soft and full of wonder, reaching out with Dean’s hand and wiping off his spend, bringing his hand to his mouth and licking it up with the flat of his tongue. To Dean, it tasted straightforwardly bitter, mineral tinged and salt sharp. But he could also experience it secondhand, through Castiel’s own perception, and tasted instead a dark fruity sweetness, like underripe blackberries.

 

“That’s new,” Dean breathed, staring at his now clean hand. He glanced down, tucked himself back into his underwear, refastened his pants. “You need a minute, or, um…you wanna get back to it?” He gestured with a tilt of his head to the car behind him. Cas flushed pink again, butterfly wings shimmering iridescent dust in his mind.

 

I’d like a minute, if that’s alright with you.

 

“Take all the time you need.” Dean smiled to himself, or perhaps to Cas, and leaned his head back against the car door, closing his eyes, letting the sunlight filter through his eyelids.

 

A few minutes passed, Dean just taking in the wind blowing lazily through the trees overhead, rustling through dry patches of grass.

 

A thought occurred to him, and his lips curled up in a mischievous smile.

 

“Hey, Cas, did you like Star Trek IV?”

 

The one with the whales? Yes.

 

“You wanna watch Star Trek Deep Space Nine after dinner? I think Bobby’s got it in a box set or somethin’.”

 

The television show with the symbiotic worm species that Sam compared me to?

 

“Yeah,” Dean laughed, “But I do think you’d like it. And don’t tell Sam I told you this, but I think you’d get a kick out of Dax.”

 

I could be persuaded.

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