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“Don’t you two go doing anything I wouldn’t do,” Gabriel said, standing in the doorway and jingling his keys. He made eyebrows at Castiel like he and Dean weren’t sitting cross-legged in pajama bottoms on his pink-comforter-ed, living-room bed with giant bowl of popcorn between them. Dean’s pajamas had Jack Skellington on them. Castiel’s (a gift from Dean) had Donald Duck. Dean was concentrating on his sketchbook in his lap, but every few minutes, he’d reach over to grab another massive handful of popcorn and not-so-carefully maneuver it around the cannula under his nose. By the bed, a little oxygen concentrator hummed contentedly.
“Honestly, Gabriel?” he said. He knew they looked more like two kids at a slumber party than two grown men in a relationship, and just then, he cared very little. Dean looked soft and sleep-ready and relaxed. He’d spent the night many times, but Castiel had found that he got tired very easily in the evenings. If Castiel let him near a soft surface long enough, he was liable to fall asleep on him. “It’s a miracle we’re both still awake. I doubt we’ll get up to any mischief.”
Dean said, “Besides, what exactly would you not do?” and stuffed another wad of popcorn in his mouth. “If you can find something—I’m not gonna lie, I’m gonna do my damnedest to do it, man.”
“Don’t test him, Dean. He’ll do it.” Dean grinned, tongue between his teeth. Sometimes Castiel wished Dean and Gabriel’s relationship wasn’t so antagonistic, but he kept telling himself—Gabriel liked Dean. Dean liked Gabriel. They’d both reassured him when he was in one doom-spiral or another. They just had very conflicting levels of calculated asshole in them.
Gabriel blew out a raspberry. “Well I wouldn’t sit around on a Friday night drawing cartoons, Dean-o, so I guess you’re already there. I’ll see you squares in the morning. Don’t wait up.”
After Gabriel slammed the door, Castiel looked down at Dean’s sketchpad again, where his own face had mysteriously appeared in graphite, as it was wont to do around Dean. Dean’s style was—smooth. Bubbly. Fluid and bright. Castiel always looked like a prince under his careful hand, even when he wasn’t actually dressed as one. It was in the way he made his eyelids squint up when he smiled, the way his cheeks rounded out, the way his eyes—big and a little bit doe-y—sort of…sparkled.
“You always draw me,” Castiel said.
“Yep,” Dean said, squinting up at him and erasing one of the smile lines under his nose before he carefully, carefully redrew it.
“Why?” It came out harsher than he meant, so he said, “I mean. That was one of the first things that ever really—made me think you liked me too. When you drew me. But I couldn’t figure it out.”
Dean started another, smaller sketch a little under Castiel’s face on the same page. The quick, sure motions of his pencil across the paper made his shirt puff open a little bit with every stroke, and Castiel could see the firmness of his chest and the criss-crossing lines of multiple surgical scars under his loose sleeping shirt. Under his hand, a quick cartoon appeared, and Castiel recognized a sketchy Dean planting a kiss on a sketchy Cas’s cheek. Both of them were blushing and it was almost unbearably cute before Dean drew more quick little hearts swirling around their heads, at which point it became cavity-inducing.
Castiel rolled his eyes, but he also blushed, just like the drawing of him. Damnit.
“Dean,” he said.
“That’s why.” Dean said, nudging Cas’s cheek with his dominant hand, well-worn pencil smelling woodsy and musky and Dean-like so close to his nose. “Because you’re fuckin’—adorable.” Dean replicated the drawing himself too, kissing Castiel right under his eye. The smooth plastic of the nasal cannula rubbed against his cheek and Dean’s breath smelled like cheap popcorn butter, but it did nothing to kill whatever was rising in Cas, and his breath hitched out of him.
“Do you remember the first thing I ever drew you as?” Dean whispered into his ear. “That very first time.”
As if he could forget.
“It was Prince Phillip,” he said, without hesitation. “From Sleeping Beauty. And I almost had a heart attack.” Dean huffed out a laugh before Castiel realized what he’s said and blanched to white. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—” Dean laughed harder. “I just mean that you surprised me.”
“A heart attack,” he murmured. “That would just—”
“Shut up.”
“That would be the worst thing.”
“Shut up.”
He sullenly flicked a piece of popcorn off the pile in the bowl, and it hit Dean in the stomach. Dean picked it up from where it landed between his legs and popped it in his mouth.
“I had to do something back then, dude. Drawing’s just the way it comes out sometimes. You were adorable and unobtainable and I was weak. So you’re a prince.”
Castiel didn’t know how to tell Dean that he had it wrong—he was the prince. He was the one that was steadfast and stalwart and true, and it was getting easier to say things like that, but it was embarrassing to admit now that for the first few months of their relationship, Castiel had genuinely believed the Dean was infallible. He could’ve walked across the top of the water in the Small World canal the first time they’d ever spoken, and Castiel wouldn’t have been surprised. He didn’t know how to say it, so he just leaned in and deepened the kiss from earlier, shoving the popcorn enough that it toppled off the comforter and scattered all over the floor, rolling under the bed, the sofa, toward the television. Dean set his sketchpad carefully on the bedside table when Castiel almost shoved it out of his lap.
Dean breathed out, “Hey, man, you’re gonna have grease stains all over your brother’s nice carpet.”
But he went willingly, leaning until he was flat on his back and propped a little against the pillows at the head of the bed, covering a couple of the printed pink princesses underneath them. Cas settled himself between Dean’s legs, taking the brunt of his own weight on his knees and forearms in silent fear of hurting Dean underneath him. They languorously swapped saliva for a while in the low lamplight as the smell of butter pervaded the room. Castiel didn’t expect things to go much farther than this, because they were both tired and Dean had passed out in the middle of make-out sessions before. So it was a worrisome surprise when Dean started squirming, breathing in sharp and hard, and said, “Shit, shit, shit. Dude.”
Castiel pulled away immediately, glancing up and down, up and down Dean’s torso, looking for injuries and searching his face for distress. But actually, looking closer, Dean seemed a little bit—blissed out, if anything, pupils blown and face wet from where Castiel’s kisses had gotten off track.
Castiel said, “What? What is it?”
Dean grabbed his hand by the wrist and, completely without ceremony, put it palm-down between his legs. Castiel did a ridiculous, perfunctory pat-down like he was searching Dean’s pockets for change, and he was still looking for some kind of medical malfunction when he realized—
Dean was hard.
Properly hard.
This hadn’t happened since they’d gotten together—Dean had been in bad health off and on for months. And even though he assured Castiel that it could and did happen in the right circumstances, the blowjobs and handjobs Dean generously doled out on occasion and the very very careful maneuvers Cas had attempted in return had gotten them absolutely nowhere on that front so far.
And now it happened when they weren’t even trying.
“Oh my god,” Castiel said. Dean grinned, and pumped his hips up weakly, rubbing the beginnings of his promising erection against Castiel’s palm through the thin fabric of his Jack Skellington pajama bottoms.
“I know!”
“Oh my god—is it—”
“Ah—” Dean said. “Jesus. Oh Christ, it feels awesome.”
“What should I—?”
“What do you mean, ‘what should I’?” Dean panted. “Touch me.”
A spark of arousal shot through him, his own body taking more interest than it had before, just being between Dean’s legs. “Is it because of the oxygen?”
“Oh my god, who cares.”
“I’m just thinking of the variable in case we need to repeat the experience,” Cas said. “I know you said it took some of the strain off your heart, so—”
Dean groaned. “Cas you’re killing it!” he wailed.
Cas dropped his own pelvis and ground down a little, the most immediate thing he could think to do because oh god please do not go away please. The response was intense and immediate. Dean groaned. Cas swiveled his hips inexpertly. It’d been a long time since he’d had to do this for someone else, and Cas was almost afraid to jinx it. He didn’t want to reach under Dean’s pajama pants to find that he’d gone soft because Cas wasn’t fast or good enough. He closed his eyes and lowered his face to Dean’s collarbone so he wouldn’t see the panic pick up behind his eyes where he could feel it slowly building. His face felt steamy and hot the more his breathing picked up against Dean’s skin.
“Cas,” Dean said, sounding utterly pained, because of course he knew anyway. “Holy shit. Breathe. Please. Stop thinking so fucking hard. It’s my dick. It’s not complicated.”
Cas huffed out a breathy, high-pitched little ah sound. “I don’t want to screw it up.”
“You won’t.”
“How do you—”
“No dude. You literally cannot screw it up,” he ground out, gasping when one slow rotation of Cas’s hips must’ve felt better than the others. Cas made his very best effort to do the exact same thing again, tongue pushing up against his teeth in concentration, toes curling as the muscles in his calves went taut with the effort. “It’s a miracle that I even have a hard-on, dude. Even if I can’t—y’know. Come. It’s not a big deal. It feels amazing.” Castiel bit his lip.
“Besides.” Dean brought one his hands up, and Castiel’s scalp felt hypersensitive where his thick fingers clutched at his hair. The tug was amazing. Castiel wanted to melt into it. “It’s just you and me here, man.” And with that, Castiel tamped down the panic and found the fortitude to look up, increasing the delicious pull on his scalp when Dean didn’t let go.
“I want you to come,” Castiel said, and he’d probably never been surer of anything in his entire life. The sky was blue, grass was green, Disney was a money-grubbing multimillion-dollar corporation, Frozen was grossly overrated, and Dean deserved to come his brains out.
At the confident pronouncement, Dean looked down his nose, licked his lips, huffed out a breath. “Yeah,” he said shakily. “Yeah, okay.” The only light in the room was a dim lamp on Castiel’s bedside table that reflected low off the feather mural on Castiel’s wall and even lower off of Dean’s blown, green-rimmed pupils. Down below, Castiel could feel him—harden just that little bit more against the join of his thigh.
Castiel made his decision abruptly, resolutely, feeling a sudden and impulsive desire to take charge sing uncharacteristic in his blood, and in a second, he was slinking down between Dean’s thighs further, letting his body drag along Dean’s cock as he went, as if he personally would lose the battle Dean was fighting against his body all the time if he ever lost contact. Dean’s body needed all the moral support it could get.
He knew he wasn’t sexy. He was jerky and clunky and awkward. He hadn’t given a blowjob since college and he’d barely been asked to reciprocate since he’d blown his load way too fast the first time he and Dean were ever together. He wondered if he should take his shirt off—his pants off? He wondered if he should smooth his hair out. Was he being too rough with Dean, too gentle? Should he have taken Dean’s shirt off? He fingered at the hem of Dean’s shirt questioningly for a second, sort of pushing at it, and Dean looked like he had half a mind to follow instructions and strip down right there, when he remembered the nasal cannula, puffing away under his nose.
“It’d get tangled. I’d crimp the tubing. It’d be a mess.”
Shirt on, then. But pants off. Definitely pants off.
Cas had to struggle with the knot on Dean’s pajama bottoms, cursing his lack of fingernails as he fiddled with it right over the hard line of Dean’s erection. Dean pumped his hips against Castiel’s struggling hands weakly, which wasn’t helping at all either, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He groaned and threw his forearm dramatically over his eyes.
“Dude. Oh my god. Dude, seriously, how are we this bad at this. We’ve been together for months.”
“We haven’t exactly been practicing this, Dean.”
“It should be easy,” Dean groaned. “We fit together so well otherwise. Just gotta be ourselves. You remember in The Lion King? Mufasa in the clouds. James Earl Jones.” He deepened his voice and started, “Castiel, remember who you—”
But Castiel had finally managed the pajama pants, pulling down the boxers with them to mid-thigh and completely forgetting his plan to remove them all the way. He made his first skin-to-skin contact with Dean’s erect cock right in the middle of another one of his Disney references, and Dean sounded like he was already coming undone, strangled groan escaping him instead his ridiculous quote.
His cock was very nice. Castiel could never think these sorts of compliments without being embarrassed for himself, but Dean was right, it was just him and Castiel here, so he even said it aloud. He had a therapist now, a straight-laced woman named Naomi that he didn’t really like to think about during sex thanks, but she talked about safe spaces whenever he was in her office, and nowhere felt more like a safe space than this. In the low light. On his bed. Under his mural. On his pink comforter, the thing that had held him and Dean together in the hospital when it seemed like the world was coming apart.
“You have a great cock.”
Dean huffed a laugh, cock jumping in Castiel’s fist even as his tummy jumped under Cas’s other hand where he’d pushed up his shirt from underneath. His arm was still slung over his eyes, but he lifted it at the first touch of Castiel’s fingernails under just under his crown and kept it off, choosing instead to look down at Cas with a heated, desperate expression that he’d never really seen before. “Mighty kind of you, Cas. Dunno if I ever told you that you do too. Clearly not a compliment that I pay often enough.”
“Thank you,” Castiel returned, and he reveled in feeling the warm, pulsing hardness in his hand, the healthy flow of blood, the individual veins that he’d never known and wanted very much to be friendly with. He wouldn’t really ever forget that first day in the Haunted Mansion, the sting of rejection he couldn’t help feeling when he’d reached over to find Dean totally soft. Now, logically, he knew why, knew it was totally outside of Dean’s control whether his body decided to cooperate or not, but it still hurt, thinking back. It still hurt. Even now, Dean’s arousal was sort of—uneven. Tenuous. Castiel rubbed his cheek against the head of his cock and felt the sort of desperate way that Dean was clinging to it in the clammy quality of his skin, the way the hardness flagged when Cas stopped paying it enough attention. But all that was there now was for Cas, and it was special. To him. To know that Dean wanted him. That Dean, despite all this, was hard for him.
He popped the head into his mouth, propped himself up on his elbows, and set about making Dean come. Dean let out a strangled cry and pulsed in his mouth, hot against his tongue. He let Cas take control, chest rising and falling rapidly and pants still stuck around his thighs. Every once in a while, he’d just say, “Shit,” panted and desperate, on repeat. “Shit shit shit. Shit.”
“I finally found something,” Castiel said between long, flat-tongued licks up his shaft, “that you don’t have a goddamn Disney reference for.”
And Dean gave his head a half-hearted smack, laughed breathlessly as the sweat dripped down his brow.
It carried on. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty. Castiel had kind of expected it to go the other way—for Dean to be so worked up that he came in a second and left Cas to jerk off over his stomach like he’d wanted to since he first felt Dean hard in his pants. But it was a visible effort for Dean to maintain, and it went on so long that eventually Cas started flagging and went soft himself. The longer it went, the less Dean seemed able to keep it up, the more energy he seemed to consume just keeping himself erect. There were moments that were better, where it seemed like Castiel was making progress and his aching jaw was not for naught. But Dean was exhausted, and it was clear. And Castiel’s throat was sore.
“Cas,” Dean said eventually. “It feels great, seriously. But maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
Castiel popped off his most recent attempt at deepthroating panting, and he stretched his jaw to the sides to pop it. He said, “You’ve got to believe in happy endings, Dean,” and grinned. Dean laughed breathlessly, reaching down to pet his forehead.
“Cas,” he breathed. Just that. Just quiet.
“What was it you sang?” His voice was wrecked from a half an hour of giving totally unpracticed head, but it just made it funnier when he ground out, “Have faith in your dreams and one day, your rainbow will come shining through.”
Dean was still hard between his legs, so Cas resolved—one last go. One last go. And he took him as far as he could down his throat in one fell swoop, choking a little and constricting tight. The only difference was that this time, Dean was cackling and Castiel was still humming the chorus of that godforsaken song, all the way down, right up until he was nose-to-torso—a dream is a wish your heart makes that Dean could probably feel reverberating at the base of his spine.
But the result was instantaneous. Dean found a renewed bout of energy, thrusting his hips up in time with Castiel’s frantic downward momentum and—
He came laughing, spilling down Castiel’s throat and quivering weakly in his thighs in way that was clearly pure relief more than it was pleasure. Castiel swallowed.
“You—made—the—Disney—joke,” he wheezed, eyes already closing. “Put that on the record. It was you, not me.”
“What can I say,” Castiel deadpanned. “You’re rubbing off on me.”
And Dean laughed again, an unguarded snort that Castiel had never thought he could get out of anyone. Much less someone like Dean. Who’d have thought? Castiel could be funny.
“Yeah, you bet I am.”
Dean was covered in sweat, so Castiel navigated the popcorn minefield to be a gentleman and got a washcloth to clean him off. Despite his best efforts, he crunched a few pieces into the carpet coming back. He swiped the washcloth in gentle swathes over his face, under the cannula that had gotten kinked despite their best efforts. His pants were still tangled around his thighs, so Castiel gently wiped him down around his spent cock and pulled them up, tied the drawstring that he’d been close to tearing at with his teeth into a neat little bow. He patted his flank and realized he’d been humming under his breath this whole time, soft and gentle.
Dean’s eyes were closed, and Castiel thought he was asleep, but he mumbled, “That must be our song now.”
Castiel pulled down Dean’s shirt over his tummy and shifted the oxygen tubing, but it immediately rucked up again when Dean lifted a sleep-gentle hand to tug at his shirt, urging him down into bed beside him.
“We don’t have a song,” Castiel said. “We’re not married.”
“I think that jizzing down someone’s throat while they’re humming a song escalates that song to ‘Our Song’ status. I don’t make the rules.” Dean pulled at him more urgently.
“Dean. I have to clean up the popcorn before Gabriel gets home.”
Dean pulled again, taking over the humming, “I just had an orgasm and it was awesome and my boyfriend gave it to me. I want to cuddle him now because he didn’t even get to blow his load and he’s such a good guy.” Castiel blushed. Dean was situated at the edge of the bed furthest from the wall, and Cas had to crawl over him when he finally gave in. He rested against the wall behind him as he relaxed, the cold edges of the pilfered feather mural hard against his back and his spine.
“He’s not so good,” Castiel said. “He’s about to leave a whole bowl of popcorn on the floor for his long-suffering brother to clean up when he gets home.” It was a challenge to maneuver the pink comforter out from underneath them, even more of a challenge to do it without messing with Dean’s tubing, but he managed it and reached over Dean to turn off the lamp. Dean turned to him, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”a tuneless, droning hum under his breath as he settled again his face against Castiel’s neck.
“He is,” Dean finally said, with real conviction. “He’s so, so good.”
And Castiel smiled and planted a kiss against his hairline, because somewhere along the line, when Dean started to say shit like that, Cas started to believe him. In the dark, the humming faded into slow, contented breathing.