#i've had exams every week for like the last month ahhhhhgh

[quiescentcastiel]

*AC/DC screech* BACK IN CRACK!!! (ok that sounded better in my head. also it’s actually fairly canon-ish) (side note: suck it metatron)

Round 5 of @mittensmorgul‘s Great Fic Writer Scavenger Hunt pairs the tropes “Birds of a Feather“ and “Dean Winchester Blames Himself For Everything Ever“

Dean reached out to Cas who was standing, hunched shoulders shaking, in the middle of the bunker’s kitchen.

“We can get through this,” he said, “It’s not like you haven’t been human before, right?”

“But this is it now.” Cas’ voice was rough but barely above a whisper. “I’m human now, until I die.”

“Cas…” Dean gently turned Cas around to face him, but the angel couldn’t meet his eye. Sighing, Dean instead acted upon what he couldn’t put into words and enfolded Cas in his arms. Cas’ trembling became more pronounced, and his sobs echoed throughout the kitchen.

In the days following, both Sam and Dean did their best to acclimatize Cas to being human again and make him feel comfortable. Neither Cas nor Dean spoke about what’d happened that day.

A week had passed by since Cas turned human, and he still couldn’t seem to figure out how to work the bunker’s coffee maker. When he went to see if Dean would give him a hand, Cas found him in his bedroom, laying on his bed with his headphones on. He didn’t open his eyes, even when Cas called his name a couple times.

Cas walked over to Dean and gently laid his hand on Dean’s shoulder. In an instant, Dean’s eyes flashed open, and he had Cas’ wrist in a tight grip. But as he realized who it was, Dean relaxed and pushed his headphones down to rest on his neck.

“I’m sorry, Dean. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Naw, it was my bad,” said Dean, sitting up and shifting over to the edge of the bed. “I should know better than to listen to music loud enough that I can’t hear who’s sneaking up on me.”

“What were you listening to?” Cas asked, now unsure if coffee was a good enough excuse to bother Dean.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“No, just Yes.”

“Who?”

“No, not the Who, Yes,” Dean insisted. He looked up at Cas who wore a mask of consternation, and his face split into a wide grin. “I’m sorry, buddy. It’s not fair of me to play Who’s On First with a man who doesn’t even know what’s going on.”

Cas realized that Dean had just been messing with him, and he sighed. “There’s so much I don’t know... so many human customs and such. I just-”

“It’s ok, Cas. Here, I’ll teach you.” He patted the bed next to him. “Your first lesson’ll be on good music.”

Cas sat next to Dean, not close enough that they were touching but enough that the air between them seemed to tingle. Dean placed the headphones over Cas’ ears.

“The band’s name is Yes. Here, lemme start the song from the beginning.”

They fell into a sort of routine of daily ‘lessons’, as Dean jokingly called them. He played Cas his music, made him read various books, and showed him all sorts of movies. Hell, Dean even took him shopping to get a new wardrobe filled with flannel and second-hand jeans.

Cas hung out with Sam too, but they found that they didn’t have quite as much in common. Cas groaned and complained the few times that Sam had tried to wake him up for a morning run, and Sam could only grimace at Cas’ unhealthy taste in food.

There was one thing neither Sam or Dean had quite touched though, and that was hunting. The brothers had hit a few small cases without him, always hurried along by Dean who didn’t like leaving Cas alone in the bunker too long, despite Sam arguing that some space would do him good. Cas had never asked to come along, though he’d been perfectly willing to let Dean teach him how to shoot and tell him all the ways to kill ghosts.

A couple months after Cas turned human, Sam found a case in a small town a couple of states over.

He explained to Dean; “Some guy took a nosedive into a port-a-potty, died, then a couple hours later was reported robbing a dispensary the next town over.”

Dean’s ‘disgusted’ face was growing stronger and stronger.

“Sounds like a shape-shifter,” said Cas who had just walked into the room.

“That’d...” Sam looked up, surprised, “that’d be my guess.”

Dean, still thinking about dying in a port-a-potty, gave a little shudder and turned to Cas.

“Hey... you wanna come along?” he asked. It was sudden and un-thought-through, and they all knew it.

“I... I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Sure you are,” said Dean. “Anyways, hunting’s always a good way to get back on your feet.”

Sam’s voice was less confident. “Shifters are usually a pretty small case, I suppose.”

Cas gave them a tentative smile. “Alright.”

Much to Sam’s chagrin, Cas and Dean sang along to Dean’s rock tapes all the way to the case. After they’d arrived, they checked into a motel late at night and all immediately crashed.

Sam was the first one to wake up the next morning, but he was loud enough getting up that he woke everyone else up too. Once dressed and in their fed suits, they all stopped into a small diner for some breakfast. Both Cas and Dean ordered a cheeseburger, while Sam got a fruit smoothie.

“Guys,” Sam complained, “burgers aren’t a breakfast food!”

Dean rolled his eyes, and Cas said, “As far as I’ve learned, anything can be a breakfast food.”

“Yeah, if you want to die at 40.”

Cas frowned. “Anyways, if you’ll excuse me, you two were taking too long in the bathroom this morning, and I needed to use it.” He got up from the diner booth and walked off.

After watching Cas step into the bathroom, Sam immediately turned to Dean.

“Don’t you think it’s strange how much Cas is like you now that he’s human?”

Dean scoffed. “He’s not like me! I mean, maybe we have some same interests, but that’s because what I like is cool.”

Sam rolled his eyes.

“Hey,” said Dean, “just because you’re jealous that he’s not into your healthy green crap doesn’t mean this is about me.”

“He’s exactly like you!” Sam exclaimed.

“We’ve been hanging out; he’s probably just picking up on some of my habits.”

“He’s practically imitating you.”

Dean looked meaningfully over Sam’s shoulder to signal to him Cas’ return, but whispered fiercely at the last minute; “No he’s not!”

Cas slid into the booth next to Dean, and Sam smiled innocently at him. “So Cas, you’ve been human a little while now; you’ve experienced some human things.” Sam waited for Cas’ nod, flicked Dean a condescending look, then continues with, “so what’s your favorite song?”

Cas, appearing completely ignorant of what’s going on between the brothers, considered for a moment before replying. “It’s a tie between Zep’s Ramble On and Traveling Riverside Blues.”

The smile on Sam’s face widens. “Favorite food?” he asked.

“Pie!” Cas answered immediately.

Dean frowned. He could see he was loosing this argument, so he decided to ask his own questions. “Favorite kinda car?”

“The Impala, of course!”

“Well,” that was a dumb question, “obviously! How about you’re favorite color?”

Cas tilted his head a little. “I kinda like pink.”

“See!” Dean jumped on this. “He’s nothing like me.”

Sam raised an eyebrow and said nothing more than, “Uh-huh.”

“Dean?” asked Cas. Fortunately, the waitress interrupted Cas with their orders, and nothing more was said.

Sam was right; the case was a small one. Shapeshifters could sometimes be tricky, but this one was stupid enough that the boys were able to track it to an old warehouse pretty quickly. They all split up in hopes of being able to ferret out what was currently an 80 year old man.

But after looking around for a couple minutes, none of them could find any sign of the shifter. Sam, Dean, and Cas all met back up in the middle of the warehouse.

“Did you see him?”

“No.”

“You, Cas?”

“Not a sign.”

“Dean! Sam!” Cas yelled, limping around a stack of boxes.

Immediately, Sam and Dean drew their weapons and stepped back from the first Cas.

“Oh, Cas,” Dean groaned. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t’ve made everyone split up; I just figured that this shifter wasn’t quick enough to pull this. Hell, if I hadn’t made you come along with us you wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s all my fault.”

He looked up at the first Cas who said, “Dean... It’s all good.”

He looked over at the second Cas who said, “It’s not your fault, Dean. It’s mine.”

Dean whirled around and shot the first Cas.

“Dean?!” protested Sam.

Cas, the real one, said in a small voice, “How did you know?”

“Cas, you’re just like me; You blame yourself for everything.”

After they got back home, Dean went to talk to Cas. He found him sitting at the table in the kitchen, looking tired.

“Here we are again,” Dean said, the first reference to that night that either of them had made. Cas looked up, a small smile on his face. Dean sat down opposite him. “I should’ve been more careful with your life. You’re human now, and I could’ve been wrong.”

“You were right though; I am too much like you. I just thought that, being human now, if I was more like you, I wouldn’t be such a burden.”

“Cas...” Dean sighed. “You know I care about you no matter who you are.”

“It’s just the last time I ended up here in the kitchen I just felt so different, so out of place. I thought if I was more like you, you wouldn’t want me to be an angel again. I lost my grace because of how much I love you, and I’m not turning back.”

Dean spoke quietly, “Of course I love you too, Cas, no matter what. But I don’t understand, are you saying it’s my fault you lost your grace?”

Cas’ eyes widened. “It’s not your fault, Dean. I did it for you. I made my choice; I want to be human so that I can be with you, so I don’t have to watch you grow old without me.”

Dean smiled and took Cas’ hand in his. They were very much alike.

“You weren’t lying about pie being your favorite food though, right?” Dean asked. Cas just laughed and shook his head.