Chapter Text
Castiel couldn’t help but think as he said that about how they’d picked the lego kits out with that exact intention for Dean and Jack. It could be the same with Dean and himself and the pies.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean said. “How hard can it be?”
The stove and oven was small, but it had two racks. They could do two pies in the oven, baked style, and then the cherry fluff pie was cold from start to finish. The graham cracker crust promised that baking was not needed. Maybe the should start with the baked pies? But first he had to get the last of the groceries cleared away and in their place. While Castiel sorted out the ingredients that they would need for pie and put the other items away, Dean had picked up the jar of pecan pie filling and was contemplating the label.
“Did you get extra pecans?” Dean asked. “Looks like you can put extra on top for a nice finish.”
Castiel pulled a bag of nuts out, bought for just that purpose. Dean held his hands out like he was expecting Castiel to toss him the bag and he would catch it. So Castiel did and Dean plucked the bag out of its trajectory.
“Looks like you don’t need to do anything with this but pour into the pie crust and top with the extra nuts,” Dean said.
So they got started. The pecan pie was as easy as Dean said. Pour, top, bake. It slid into the oven before too much longer and fragrant, sugary butter smells soon filled the place. The blueberry pie was more complicated. Dean set himself to work on that one, even though Castiel fussed at him to sit, that Dean should be resting. Dean argued that he wasn’t fragile or anything, he wanted to do it. Apparently they needed a top as well as the pre-formed bottom crust and he didn’t trust Cas not to mess it up, in not so many words. Castiel had gotten the flat but rolled up crusts for that purpose, but the first one in the box broke into pieces when Castiel attempted to unroll it. They only had the one other flat crust.
“Must be too cold,” Dean said, after he consulted his phone. He’d done the smart thing and looked up instructions for how to handle pie crust. “Says here if we wait a bit, it’ll be easier to handle.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t think to look how to make a pie on the internet,” Castiel said.
“Sammy always says you gotta research everything.”
A while later, they’d been working together, the scent of the first pie filling the apartment. Almost as if Dean had enjoyed their time together. Dean was telling him about a cabin that Bobby’s husband Rufus owned, in Montana, how it was near a river. They’d stopped there a while on their trip from South Dakota to California. Dean had been able to go fishing nearly every day for that time. It had been a precious time to Dean, it sounded like. Something he’d rarely gotten to do- take a vacation. In turn, Castiel explained how he and Jack hadn’t been able to take any time for that kind of thing- that so much of Castiel’s time had been spent on getting Jack settled, therapist’s appointments, generally taking care of his son’s trauma.
“You’re a good dad,” Dean said, after a while of this. “Taking care of your kid, making sure he’s got what he needs. My dad, he did the best he could, but when he lost my mom, he wasn’t the same. You know, we hopped around a lot. Town to town.”
Castiel thought about the report again, the one Charlie had given him, with the whole story of Dean and his brother being taken from town to town throughout his childhood- no stability, no security. Even if it had been the father’s ‘best he could’ it it still wasn’t good enough. Castiel ached for his soulmate’s childhood and how he’d gotten so little in life. He vowed that he’d make up for that all somehow and make sure the child growing inside Dean would never face the same. Castiel thought about John Winchester had pinned so many of his sins onto his son’s name. Castiel wanted to say something about how he treated Jack was simply the least he could do, that if the bar was how Dean was treated growing up, then that bar was lying in a trench dug into hell’s basement.
He didn’t have a chance though, because Dean looked up from the blueberry pie he’d been weaving a lattice top onto, following the instructions from a webpage, and said, “Looks like this one is ready to go into the oven.”
As they’d worked together on the pies, Dean had somehow gotten a smear of blueberry filling on the tip of his nose and without thinking, Castiel had grabbed a clean rag, moistened it and wiped the pie filling away. But that brought them close together. Staring into each other’s eyes. It was intense. Almost too intense. He wanted to break the staring contest but he didn’t know how. He had never known peace since he’d met Dean, Castiel thought. He never wanted to again. Not if it meant this kind of moment where he just drowned in feelings like this. Dean, he was everything. He was so beautiful, even a little messy from baking. Dean was standing so that his rounded belly was about an inch away from Castiel’s flat abdomen. It would take so little movement to close the distance between them. Just an inch. Not even a step. Castiel had such an urge to move forward. Lean his head in and press his lips to Dean’s.
Breaking the silence, Dean said, “Not for nothing Cas, but the last time you looked at me like that, I got laid.”
Startled, Castiel stepped back. That wasn’t Dean coming on to him. That was Dean making a quip to break the tension. Dean was right. They were too close. It was too soon. The trust hadn’t been built between them yet, despite that they were soulmates. Even if there was the trust, there would be no getting laid. Not tonight. Certainly absolutely not while Dean was officially on bed rest. That wouldn’t be medically advisable. Assuming he and Dean could make their moves towards each other’s hearts and become the mates that their souls had already decided they were, then they would still be waiting until Dean’s medical professionals had cleared him for such activity. For now, it was too soon, far too soon, even though Castiel wanted it so badly. Thankfully, the apron they’d found earlier, put on to protect Castiel’s clothes, an apron he’d never noticed in the kitchen before, was thick enough to fully conceal Castiel’s sudden, aching, raging erection.
Dean was right. Castiel was looking at Dean that way. Castiel willed himself to limpness and control, finally resorting to mentally naming the bones of the hand in long memorized order. Proximal row of carpal bones, from radial to ulnar- the scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, and pisiform. Distal row of carpal bones comprises the trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate. And so on. It wasn’t the least sexual thing he could think of, but it was neutral, soothing and easily brought to mind and he had to get his arousal in hand, so to speak.
When he felt a little more in control of himself, instead of making a move or even saying something more appropriate to the situation, what he said was, “I’ll get the pie into the oven. Why don’t you unpack some more of the bags from the store?”
So while Castiel fussed in the kitchen, cleaning up and wiping up the table, once the pie was resting on the second shelf under the pecan pie, Dean stepped back into the living room part of the studio apartment and dug into the red and white plastic bags. He pulled out pillows, blankets. So many of them. Castiel realized he must have wandered the bedding and home goods departments of the store in a daze, because here in the apartment, it seemed excessive.
“You nesting, Cas?” Dean asked. He pulled out another pillow, this one a throw pillow covered in velvet. Castiel remembered picking that one out, delighting in how soft the fabric was, how squishy the stuffing. He hadn’t thought about the color of it, but it was in a deep burgundy red, much like the color of the solid flannel shirt Dean had been wearing. Maybe that red was a favorite color?
“I thought you would want to,” Castiel said. Dean set the pillow next to himself on the sofa instead of tossing it onto the bed, like he had the others.
Finally, Dean got to the last bag and retrieved the stuffed cheeseburger toy. He looked questioningly at it and then up at Castiel but did not set it down.
“It’s a gift. For you. It was clear you like cheeseburgers,” Castiel said.
“That I do,” Dean said. He didn’t set the toy down, but let it sit on his lap, or on his lap such as it was available, not taken up by their child growing within. “You ready to watch the movie yet?”
***
Dean picked Tombstone, which was the only logical choice to share with Cas. Even though they looked nothing alike, there was something about Doc Holliday in the movie that reminded Dean, at least a little, of Cas. Part of him wanted to hear Cas use his deep, gravelly voice to say, “I’m your huckleberry.”
Dean was all kind of confused at the moment. In the space of about a full day, no more, Cas had gone from lost, a missed connection, to found again. To all but an enemy when they’d come face to face in the hospital, something that seemed to be based only in confusion and miscommunication, not fact. But there had been real fear, real anger. Yet here they were again, talking. Making pies together, pies that were in the oven right now, baking, filling the place with their delicious scents. They’d talked, a little more, sharing their pasts. Dean didn’t dare yet share his real hopes for the future, but the past was safe enough, gone and not able to hurt him. Then the connection, the immediate chemistry between them reared its ugly head again. He didn’t want this chemistry. It made him angry that maybe he might be falling in love a little with his soulmate.
He and Cas had been staring into each other’s eyes. They might have been on the verge of kissing. Dean was an expert in how that particular dance went, the staring, the closeness, the kissing. Then, the moving of bodies, towards each other and into each other. Like the stupid philosophy book he was reading for that class- two half persons trying shove themselves back together to become one creature. A dance as old as time. Dean couldn’t force himself to break away, so he’d made that quip. Yeah, maybe it was dumb, but he couldn’t help it. Luckily, Cas had seemed to realize and he’d stepped back. Broken the pattern.
Maybe that was what they needed. A little pattern breaking.
And then, there were all those pillows and blankets. It was clear what that was about. Castiel was set on providing for Dean and that meant a nest. He wasn’t quite comfortable enough with Cas to build a nest there on the sofa and invite him in for nesting, nothing like that. So he threw the pillows onto the bed for later. That last pillow though, he couldn’t help but like it, the soft fabric and stuffing. One pillow on a sofa was just a throw, just a decoration, not a nest. Finally came the stupid cheeseburger pillow toy thing. Sort of a hybrid between a pillow and a toy, round and cute. You could pretend it was a pillow. Dean hadn’t been allowed toys of his own really. Only ones shared with Sam and even then, not a lot. Somehow the bag of them would keep ‘getting left’ at the last place they stayed. Even Sam’s last teddy bear disappeared after a while. There was a lego stuck in the heater vent of the Impala and an Army guy crammed into the ashtray in a way that couldn’t be gotten out, so Dean knew there had to have been toys. He just couldn’t ever remember playing with them. He wasn’t playing with them, he was keeping Sam entertained and out of Dad’s hair with them, which was a different kind of thing.
This cheeseburger thing was a gift, for him. Not part of a nest, which was just another kind of Cas doing the Alpha provider thing. It wasn’t practical, like food. It wasn’t for anything but for him to have.