#yes the title is a cranberries reference let me live in peace about it

[omniscientoranges]

Let it Linger

In which Dean keeps picking up chicks at bars, Cas is not jealous, Dean has a cereal organization system, team free will (2.0) has a movie night, and Cas has some hookups of his own.

8k words

*this is a preview, you can read the whole thing here on ao3

Cas noticed Dean was feeling restless.

Well, it’s not only Cas that noticed, it’s just that Cas is the only one who offered a suggestion to fix it. After an hour or two of Dean pacing around post-hunt and organizing, then re-organizing, then re-re-organizing the cupboard, Cas proposed they go out and find something to do. Dean lit up at that and said Hey, wanna go to a bar? Cas accepted, if only so Dean would stop trying to alphabetize the cereals for a while.

Sam and Jack looked engrossed in binging through The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, so it's just Cas accompanying Dean out tonight. 

Cas doesn’t mind bars, really. They’re actually kind of entertaining once you get used to the drunken yelling and occasional uncoordinated fight. If he lets himself sink far enough back into his seat while watching the crowd it almost feels like the old days. The old old days of watching humanity from afar. Back before hell, or the apocalypse, or the wars fought in the name of it. Back before the Fall, and dying more than once. Back before Dean. It's odd, statistically speaking this past decade and change only amounts to what could be considered the space between one blink and the next if he were human, but to Cas it feels like all that time before was just leading up to now. Like it was all a protracted prologue to get him here. Here, incidentally, being a bar a few stains short of seedy on the outskirts of Kansas. It's not a glamorous life, all things considered, but it's one he finds comfort in. 

Dean holds up two beers in triumph as he weaves his way back to their booth, the smile on his face crinkling the corners of his eyes. He's getting old, Cas thinks, but it's not like I'm particularly young either. 

Dean slips into the seat in front of him and slides one beer across the table, Cas catches it on instinct. "So," Dean starts, "What's the plan for tonight?" 

Cas sighs and looks around the bar, digging his thumbnail under the label of his beer. "I'm not sure," he turns back to Dean with a faint smile. "We could always relax. You did just get your wrist broken by a ghoul, you know." 

"Yeah, but you healed me, so I'm all good." 

""Healed" and "all good" are two very different things, Dean." 

Dean rolls his eyes. "Whatever man, I think I’m fine." His eyes go straight from the roll into scanning the bar. 

Dean's not paying attention, so Cas lets himself look. Lets himself catalog Dean's features for the millionth time - the curve of his nose, the slant of his jawline, the hairs out of place, the freckles painted onto his skin. Cas has still never gotten tired of looking at Dean. He thought he would, at first. He figured it was just a holdover from knitting him back together. Just checking my work, he'd tell himself. A brush of Dean's shoulder every now and then to shift a freckle he realized he'd gotten an inch out of place, or a hand on his back to wipe away the last of the claw mark scars from a werewolf hunt gone bad when he was just a teenager. He'd check Dean's soul most often, make sure it was intact. Still bright, still Dean, still there. 

But as his grace ebbed and waned, and in the times it's been gone altogether, he'd gotten the chance to look past Dean's soul and instead see Dean the way everyone else sees him. The Dean with the goofy smile and bow legs and "delicate features", as he was told by a slightly drunk Sam that their cousin once put it. 

These days, he looks less at Dean's soul and more at just Dean. Cas thinks, somehow, the way the "regular" Dean Winchester makes him feel is more cosmic and divine than anything he could feel looking at his soul - though he's still of the opinion that Dean's soul is one of the few truly beautiful ones his father created. Maybe he's biased, but he can't find it in himself to change his mind. 

“What do you think about her?” Dean asks, and that knocks Cas out of his reverie. He traces where Dean’s eyes are looking and they fall on a woman smiling and talking with her friends on the other side of the bar. Short, dark hair, light eyes, wearing a crop top and a tight skirt. 

“She’s…very under-dressed for the weather.” Cas answers, pointedly ignoring Dean’s question-under-the-question. It's true, there’s no way she’s very warm in that outfit, and it is coming up on winter.

“Ha, yeah, I think that’s kinda the point, Cas.” Dean counters, eyes still on the woman and not on Cas.

Cas wants to snap back with I know that’s the point, Dean, but decides against it. He doesn’t feel like getting into an argument, but something about Dean wanting to pick up people at the bars they go to always makes him, well, Dean calls it “bitchy” but Cas feels he’s just “irritated”. They have had long and tense arguments about it in the car before that Cas always feels a bit ashamed of post-fight. It’s not Dean’s fault, not like he knows.

“Right, well, wish me luck.” Dean stands and walks away with a wink that does not make Cas’ stomach flip, it does not.

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