#noxlee

Dean raised his eyebrow. “Don’t force yourself, man. I’ll finish it if you can’t.”

Cas’s shoulders slumped and he reluctantly passed the last of his sandwich off to Dean. “I wish I could finish it. I would have been able to if I were in angel. Remember that time I ate 467 burgers?”

Dean made a face. That time with Famine was fucked up – he didn’t like to think about it.

He swallowed before answering. “Yeah, but you couldn’t really taste them. Isn’t tasting my sandwich better?”

Cas sighed, watching regretfully as his sandwich disappeared into Dean’s mouth. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Dean hummed around his food, smacking himself on the stomach. “It took a lot of practice to be able to eat this much, Cas.” He patted the food baby forming in his gut. “And it comes at a cost.”

Cas rolled his eyes. “I see no cost.”

Dean snorted but said nothing. He saw how Sam looked at him when he ate. He saw Jack’s curious looks when Dean’s shirts rode up now. He knew he was grosser than he used to be.

But if Cas wanted to pretend Dean was still the hot 30-year-old he first pulled from the pit, Dean wasn’t about to correct him.

  Dean had taken to driving with towels in the back seat of the Impala. Clean towels, if he could manage it, but mostly he just needed something to put down on the seat.

At first it was to protect his baby from any potential gross things he might be covered in after a hunt. Now he was the gross thing.

“It is, like, sixty degrees outside!” Dean said, drying his hands on the thighs of his jeans. “Why the fuck am I sweating? ”

Sam laughed from the passenger seat. He was often sweaty, too, but he’d always been that way. This was a new experience for Dean.

He saw Cas tilt his head in the rearview mirror, cool as a cucumber even with his heavy overcoat. “The sun did heat the car some.”

“Then why aren’t you sweating?”

Cas shrugged. “Residual angel perks?”

Dean snorted. Sam laughed again.

“Dean, you’re being dramatic,” Sam said, pushing his hair off of his damp forehead. “It’s not even that hot.”

“Maybe not to you ,” Dean grumbled.

Jack made a polite throat-clearing noise from behind Dean. He must have picked it up from Sam because Dean was sure Cas didn’t teach him that. Cas never did learn how to gently insert his presence.

“I can help you, Dean,” Jack said in that sweet, pleasant way of his. “I’ve been practicing healing. I’m sure lowering your internal body temperature works basically the same way.”

Dean shook his head but he could feel his mouth form a smile. “Thanks, Jack. But I’ll deal. I think I’m just gettin’ old.”

Sam barked another laugh. “ This is your tip-off? Being sweaty?”

Dean threw up his hands, letting them fall back to the steering wheel with a slap. “I didn’t think I’d get this far, alright? I never thought about what getting old might look like.”

They all got quiet for a moment. Jack, awkwardly. Cas, sadly. Sam, sympathetically.

Dean broke the silence. “It feels like I sat in soup!”

Everyone in the car laughed. Dean included.

  “I think if we hrm we split these books by rg by year we’ll find the thing faster.”

Sam had an eyebrow raised but he grabbed one of the stacks of books. “Yeah… okay… You want 16th or 18th century?”

“Whichever. It’s not like it ruh matters.”

Sam breathed a laugh. “Right.”

Dean shook his head, swallowing yet another burp before diving into their case.

It was so dumb. Dean used to belch with wild abandon. He’d eat food intentionally that he knew would give him the gnarliest burps. He practiced. He could do the alphabet. He would time them. His record was a solid 25 seconds.

Dean didn’t need to try to burp now. It was going to happen. It did always happen, and always at the most inopportune moments. If he took a pause every time he needed to burp now he would never have time to do anything else.

So he’d started talking through burps. He knew that was the ‘polite’ way of doing it. Or at least he assumed. He didn’t actually know any polite people. But Sam hadn’t called him on it yet.

It looked like he wanted to, though, from the twitch of his mouth and the knowing tilt of his eyebrow. Dean wasn’t sure if Sam would tell him it was grosser to talk through his burps or if he would congratulate him on his newfound maturity. So skewed was his scale that he had no idea which direction he’d tipped.

Either way: this was what he was doing. Reading 16th century accounts of black dogs in modern day New Mexico and praying Sam wouldn’t want him to talk because he couldn’t guarantee he could get through a sentence without burping.

He knew he shouldn’t have made burritos for dinner. But it made Cas happy. So Dean would suffer.

Speaking of…

“I looked in the Enochian scripture,” Cas said, coming into the archives. “The only information about black dogs is how to differentiate it from a hellhound. Which we already knew. I take this to mean we can’t kill it in the same way we would kill a hellhound.”

“Super.” Dean sighed, dropping his tome heavily on the table, pushing it toward Cas. “Well, pal, you’re better at Ancient Mesopotamian than me so you could probably ch- hck this one.”

Cas’s eyebrows furrowed. “Are you alright, Dean?”

Sam snorted into his hand. Dean ignored him. “Yeah, Cas, I’m f- gnk -fine.”

Sam threw his head back and laughed at that. Dean threw a bible at him.

Cas still looked confused. “Is it not easier to take a pause when you need to burp?”

Sam was almost crying. “He’s got acid reflux.”

“I do not! ” Dean protested. Acid reflux was for old people. He wasn’t quite that old yet.

“You do!” Sam said, still chuckling. “And it’s fine, I get it too, but you’re like,” Sam gestured at him, shaking his head. “You’re pretending you’re not fully burping through words.”

“Wha- brr -tever.”

Sam almost collapsed out of his chair laughing and Dean was mad. The small smile on Cas’s face at Sam’s obvious joy lessened his anger, some.

He resolved to stop trying to power through burps now, though.

  The sweating was already a problem. Sweating, Dean could deal with. He didn’t want to. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant and Dean wasn’t sure if he should start removing layers or put on even more but the sweat he could deal with.

The getting really hot in the middle of the afternoon for no reason was something he really wanted to fight about.

“I feel like I’m gonna pass out,” he complained to Cas, spread out on one of the recliners in the Dean cave.

It was a rare day off and Dean had been looking forward to spending some quality time with Cas in this leisure room he’d worked so hard on. When he’d been decorating the room, he’d really been doing it with Cas in mind. Showing Cas all the movies he’d missed. Playing games with Cas, drinking complicated drinks with Cas he’d never be able to actually order in public. So this was a rare treat for him.

But a rare day off meant a day when there was nothing to distract him from how uncomfortably and upsettingly hot he suddenly was.

“That’s strange. It’s rather cool in here.” Dean could hear Cas shift as he got closer. “Are you becoming ill?” Cas grabbed his face. “Stick out your tongue.”

Dean swatted him away, averting his eyes away and to the tv. “Get off me, man. Your body temperature is only makin’ it worse.”

Cas sunk slowly back into his own recliner. Dean didn’t have to look at him to know his brow was still furrowed.

Dean sighed. “Look. It’s fine. My body is a piece of shit. I can just–” Dean reached behind his head and pulled at the back of shirt, taking the comfortable henley he’s been wearing off completely. He’d been wearing a white ribbed tank top as an undershirt but, naturally, it was almost completely saturated with sweat.

“Is that better?” Cas asked, his skepticism evident.

Dean sighed. “Not really, no.”

Cas sat quietly. Cheers played on the tv softly in the background. It wasn’t as big or as nice of a tv as the one they’d gotten from the pawn shop, but the kind of things Dean was showing Cas weren’t things you needed to see in high def anyway.

“You can take off the tank top, Dean. I don’t mind.”

Dean hunched further into his chair. “I don’t really wanna show off my gut, Cas, thanks.”

Cas hunched further back into his chair though with what Dean could only assume was an aggressive eye roll. “Are you still on that?”

“On what?”

“On this absurd insecurity.”

Dean huffed in his most dramatically offended way. “‘Scuse me?”

Cas sat forward, turning in his chair so Dean could see him. “You’ve been obsessing over your body recently. It’s annoying.”

Dean crossed his arms, trying not to grimace about how sticky they were and how much hotter this made him. “My body is annoying.”

“Maybe. But your body is human and it’s not its fault.”

Dean snorted, humorlessly.

“Seriously, Dean. It’s natural. It’s good . Think how many times you’ve died in the last decade. If you’d stayed dead, you wouldn’t be experiencing these things. These things mean you’re alive . Which is the most important thing to me.”

Dean uncrossed his arms. Then recrossed them. Then leaned forward and put both hands on his knees.

“I’m happy to be alive, Cas. I am. And I’m happy you’re alive. If you had this shit to deal with, I would probably be snappy about you complaining all the time, too.” Dean sighed. “But I’m just so tired . All the time. And it sucks to know that I’m going to be this tired, fat, sweaty, disgusting lump probably for the rest of my life.”

Cas leaned forward. The recliners weren’t close enough for them to touch comfortably but Cas seemed determined to lay some kind of hand on Dean’s shoulder. “I much prefer this tired, fat, sweaty, disgusting lump to the alternative. I actually much prefer it to most things.”

Dean laughed, blushing and averting his eyes. That was such a weird thing to say. Weird and earnest and blunt and almost insulting... and totally Cas.

“I believe you misunderstood why I think your complaining is annoying, though,” Cas continued, casually.

Dean looked back at him, grinning. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well it’s annoying when you think so little of yourself because that makes it a lot harder for me to convince you that I love you.”

Dean’s breath caught. He’d heard Cas say it before. Of course he had. But on the brink of death. In the thick of a fight. Before some big sacrifice. Never in this casual, almost irritated way. Never when he was melting into cheap polyester after expounding on his body issues. Never in, Cas was right, a way that he might believe it.

But here – in the fortress of Deanitude, with Cheers on in the background, a Sea Breeze in his right hand, and wearing a tank top completely see through in spots – Dean thought he might.

“Prove it.”

Cas raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Prove you love me. Kiss me, right now. In all my disgusting glory.”

Cas rolled his eyes but he put his hand on Dean’s other shoulder and brought him in for a kiss without a second’s hesitation.

He didn’t even flinch when Dean’s clammy hand ran up his back.

If that wasn’t love, Dean didn’t know what was.

  Dean continued to get fatter. He continued to be damp and randomly hot and burp inappropriately. But Cas helped.

He didn’t reassure Dean that he wasn’t gross because Dean knew he was. Instead, he made Dean feel better about being gross.

He held his hand even if Dean was sweaty. He said bless you every time Dean burped. He fed Dean more and more and more.

And one night in bed, when Dean was sitting up shirtless, Cas just started petting his shoulders. They’d started sprouting hair which was a weird development as Dean had been mostly hairless all his life. But Cas had just pet his newly hairy shoulders and absently hummed the Ewok’s theme from Return of the Jedi . It wasn’t a huge leap to think how Cas’s subconscious had arrived there.

When Dean had looked over at him, incredulous, Cas just shrugged and said, “Everyone loves ewoks.”

“Cas, no one liked the Ewoks.”

Cas just frowned. “I love the Ewoks.”