[Fic] A Gift, Though Small (R) for kaylbunny
Gift type: Fic
Title: A Gift, Though Small
Author: thevinegarworks
Recipient: kaylbunny
Rating: R
Warnings: Non-explicit sexuality.
Spoilers: Everything; future!fic after 5x10.
Summary: All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious. - Homer, The Odyssey, VI, l. 207 (Or, a Five Times fic but not really.)
Author notes: Written for the prompt: Established relationship, Dean realises Castiel likes reading and starts giving him his favourite books to read.. I'm sorry I couldn't follow your prompts directly and that I couldn't fit everyone's favorite prophet into the mix. There also seems to be a severe lack of actual plot and an overdose of schmoop...oops? I hope you like it anyway! ♥
~ ~ ~
i.
The first one was five years ago - a fabric-bound book of Sumerian history and mythology. It had set Dean back eighty good bucks and he had no idea what the hell you were expected to buy an angel for Christmas, but it was worth it when he awkwardly handed it to Castiel and said, "This is, uh. For you."
Castiel didn't quite smile, more displaced angel than anything soft and human back then, but he'd turned the book over in his hands and said, "thank you, Dean," with such sincerity it nearly made Dean's heart crawl straight out of his chest.
That was the winter that Jo and Ellen were gone. Dean remembers it clearly because it's also the winter he found Sam out on the porch while everyone else ate, flask in his hand and a wetness in his eye. Dean stepped up to bump his shoulder, pointedly didn't ask what was wrong. Sam shrugged and huffed out a harsh choke of laughter.
"One last show, huh?" he'd said.
Dean thought it was fitting that the only halfway normal Christmas either of them had also happened to be the last one either of them was ever going to have. It cut, blade sharp, that knowledge - this time next year they'd be dead. Everyone might be dead. He didn't fucking know anything anymore, but that's one thing he could count on, not surviving the minefield of the next twelve months.
Thankfully, he was wrong.
~ ~ ~
Dean can't say when it was exactly - sometime after that winter but before the archangels dragged Lucifer back down to his prison in Hell.
That first brush of lips - nervous, hesitant, stupidly endearing - wasn't something he marked on his calendar or counted amongst his most riveting daily tasks. Surviving and keeping the world from spinning out of control tended to take the forefront.
But sometime in that short gap he had dug his way through the shitstorm of his life to find the one place he could really uncoil, where he didn't have to watch his back or kill anything or worry about being killed. Where he could just be, and wasn't it ironic that he'd been carrying that place with him for the better part of two years once he found it?
~ ~ ~
ii.
Dean discovered Castiel's encompassing love for books when a hunt in Pittsburgh forced them past the towering columns of Carnegie Library. He'd been faintly concerned at the glazed look on Castiel's face the whole time they wandered row after row after row, trailing after Sam while he leafed through dozens of books for one particular thread of information. He finally pinned Castiel down in a corner of leather-bound encyclopedias and demanded to know what was wrong, what monster was going to jump out of some dark corner and eat them, what bomb the archangels were going to drop next.
Castiel swallowed and blinked, like he was stunned, like he didn't quite know how to swim through the endless words in the endless languages he knew and find the right ones. "I wasn't created to be a soldier, Dean," he finally settled on, the pale dashes of his fingers trailing reverently along cracked spines.
Dean mentally congratulated himself for not picking a sucky present six months before, then nodded and spun around to ask if Sam had found anything.
He had, and they left not ten minutes later. Dean doesn't think he's ever seen Castiel so put out, before or since.
Two days later he'd trudged through the snow back to Carnegie and found the one book Castiel has lingered at the longest. Tore off the barcode, folded it into his jacket, and handed it to a very confused but appreciative angel not half an hour after.
~ ~ ~
It's still dark when Dean wakes up to a wet curl of tongue on his throat and the press of solid weight closing over his body. He thinks it probably says something about how far they've come that his gut instinct doesn't whip out and knock the pressure off him. Instead he breathes in, settles his palms against the bare skin of Cas' shoulders. He has just enough time to inhale a lungful of air that smells like pine, and to think it's Christmas, before Cas is slipping out of his clothes and hovering right in front of Dean's face. He's smirking, almost smiling even. Dean doesn't think he'll ever get used to that. As strange and alien as Cas still is, there is a niche of human warmth that's carved its way into him over the years. He smiles now, and it's not a drug-addled vacant stretch of a grin either because Dean stopped that. It's genuine, just as real as the heat of his mouth closing around Dean's and the thrum of his pulse beneath Dean's fingertips.
"Hi," he says, anticlimactically.
"Hello," Cas replies, slight quirk of his head, quiet glimmer in his eyes. His voice is low and rough, his body obscenely warm. Dean can feel the hardness of him pressed into his stomach and his own body responds in kind, hands moving to Cas' hips, thumbs brushing where it's softer than anything he's ever felt.
"Oh man," Dean groans. His grip shifts, palms over Cas' ass. "This is way better than unwrapping presents."
The frown that appears between Cas' eyebrows says he's confused, but it dissipates into nothing by the time Dean gets a hand in his hair and tips his head up, just enough, and kisses him. It's a slow burn, tongues dragging and exploring, drawn out until Dean's shaking and begging against the hot curve of Cas' throat.
Cas fucks him from behind, slow and lazy in long careful slides, because they've got all the time in the world and the sun isn't even up yet.
~ ~ ~
iii.
The third book Dean ever gave him was vastly different than the Sumerian history book and the untranslated (and stolen, but who was keeping track?) philosophical texts of Aristotle he'd given him before.
In 2011, he bit his lip through a grin as Castiel turned the thin hardback over in his hands, confusion burying into the lines of his frown, the set of his mouth that Dean wanted to kiss. He didn't, but only because Sam was hovering just a yard away, and Bobby just beyond him. "Dean, this -"
"It's a vital component to your budding library," Dean had cut in. He nodded, as if to solidify his point, and Castiel mirrored his grin with a tentative one of his own.
"Thank you, Dean." Honest and sincere, like it meant the world to him, like Dean had just saved his life and soul again.
Calvin and Hobbes' The Lazy Sunday Book took up a permanent residence in the Impala's trunk between the I Ching and Shankara's Advaita Vedanta doctrine.
~ ~ ~
When they make it downstairs, Dean wants to bottle up Sam's expression and keep it in his pocket for whenever he's in need of a good laugh.
He wonders what it is exactly that gave them away - the flush of his skin, the riot of Cas' hair, the slightly dazed blank still buzzing all over his skin. Dean thinks maybe Sam can hear his heartbeat thudding even from here.
If anything were to be said for Cas, it's that the guy has stamina. Dean was almost embarrassed the first time he found that out for himself.
"Uh, the," Sam stammers and fumbles whatever is in his hand. "The food should be ready in about an hour. If you, uh."
"Thank you, Sam," Cas says smoothly, little smile curving one side of his lips. He extends a hand in Dean's direction, palm up. Dean takes it and sort of stumbles down the rest of the stairs.
Stamina and skills.
Bobby's at the stove stirring a wooden spoon through a crock pot. Dean slaps Sam's back on his way past and the kid disappears like a phantom. "Smells like a five-star restaurant in here, Bobby," Dean sighs. It's met with a gentle elbow to the solar plexus and Bobby griping about something or other; Dean laughs, but nabs a sliver of turkey on his way out before Bobby can stop him.
He barely dodges the balled-up towel pitched at his back.
Cas catches it instead.
~ ~ ~
iv.
Poetry, philosophy, more history than anything, which Dean always found odd since Castiel knew this stuff firsthand, since he'd lived it himself. Art and science and fiction, textbooks in a dozen different languages, books on mythology, on witchcraft, on cars and machinery and electronics, to satisfy Castiel's voracious curiosity about the modern world.
Dean felt like he was drowning in all the books Castiel collected over the years.
In 2012, he ran his thumb along the spine of Iliás and Odýsseia in the original Greek as soft footsteps padded behind him and the warm weight of a body settled at his back.
Lucifer was six months gone and the world had settled, much like the calm after a storm. Dean always had felt like this was rather the calm before the storm, the deep breath before the plunge, that something bigger was stewing and hanging just out of reach ready to destroy them all in one devastating sweep - but nothing ever came and the world stayed, for the most part, quiet. Just crazy enough to keep hunting, but quiet enough to sign a three-bedroom lease and live it out. The house was small and imperfect and it didn't have a dishwasher, but it was everything Dean ever thought a home should be.
Walking distance of a lake where he could fish any time he wanted, floor to ceiling bookshelves cluttered tightly with stupid amounts of books, a bathroom he didn't have to share with Sam... None of them knew how Castiel managed to dodge another death sentence, but he'd mentioned something about a forced sabbatical and Dean didn't really plan on questioning it. Gift horses, and all.
"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep," Castiel mumbled into his shoulder. Dean huffed and closed his grip around Castiel's narrow wrist, twisted the sleep-warm skin there.
"How you can pull a Homer quote for every occasion out of your head on cue I'll never understand," he said into the quiet of the room.
"I'm proud you know your classics, Dean."
Dean smirked, snaked his body flush against Castiel's and hummed at the low growl it rewarded him. "Merry Christmas, Cas."
Castiel murmured something against his neck, a word Dean couldn't translate, chased it with a kiss. Pushed Dean against the table and mapped the curve of his spine, bone by bone, mouthed at Dean's neck and pressed his fingers in, slow, slow, and Dean was unraveling by the time Castiel pushed in, stroked at his hair and breathed, "I would burn with you, my Achilles."
~ ~ ~
v.
It's nice to receive more than customary skin mags and motor oil for Christmas these days; now Sam opts for Turtle Wax and The Zeppelin Definitive Collection. Bobby hands out lewd cards stuffed with cash and says to go bananas. Dean tosses Sam a bag of Twizzlers and that digital camera he's been whining about for three months, a new cap to Bobby, and fits a threadbare Santa hat over Cas' bed-wild hair.
"I don't think you have this one yet," he says as he hands over two hundred dollars of Italian leather photo album wrapped in the ink-smudged comics section.
Cas loves it, if the momentary silence and quick stutter of, "Dean, thank - thank you," say anything.
Sam digs out his camera and snaps the first picture that fits into the brass-rimmed frame on the album's cover - Bobby pointing to his new cap, Sam grinning crookedly around a Twizzler, Dean saluting a beer with his arm heavy around Cas' shoulders, and a bright streak of fuzzy red leaning onto Dean's shoulder.
Dean thumbs over the brass lettering above the frame, simple metallic glints spelling out family.
It looks right, he thinks. It fits.
1) The quote Cas says to Dean in the library ("There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep") is from Homer's The Odyssey, XI, l. 310.
2) I would burn with you, my Achilles" is an allusion to the epic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, often thought to be lovers. When they die, they are burned together and their ashes mixed so that they can be together even in death.
Title: A Gift, Though Small
Author: thevinegarworks
Recipient: kaylbunny
Rating: R
Warnings: Non-explicit sexuality.
Spoilers: Everything; future!fic after 5x10.
Summary: All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious. - Homer, The Odyssey, VI, l. 207 (Or, a Five Times fic but not really.)
Author notes: Written for the prompt: Established relationship, Dean realises Castiel likes reading and starts giving him his favourite books to read.. I'm sorry I couldn't follow your prompts directly and that I couldn't fit everyone's favorite prophet into the mix. There also seems to be a severe lack of actual plot and an overdose of schmoop...oops? I hope you like it anyway! ♥
~ ~ ~
i.
The first one was five years ago - a fabric-bound book of Sumerian history and mythology. It had set Dean back eighty good bucks and he had no idea what the hell you were expected to buy an angel for Christmas, but it was worth it when he awkwardly handed it to Castiel and said, "This is, uh. For you."
Castiel didn't quite smile, more displaced angel than anything soft and human back then, but he'd turned the book over in his hands and said, "thank you, Dean," with such sincerity it nearly made Dean's heart crawl straight out of his chest.
That was the winter that Jo and Ellen were gone. Dean remembers it clearly because it's also the winter he found Sam out on the porch while everyone else ate, flask in his hand and a wetness in his eye. Dean stepped up to bump his shoulder, pointedly didn't ask what was wrong. Sam shrugged and huffed out a harsh choke of laughter.
"One last show, huh?" he'd said.
Dean thought it was fitting that the only halfway normal Christmas either of them had also happened to be the last one either of them was ever going to have. It cut, blade sharp, that knowledge - this time next year they'd be dead. Everyone might be dead. He didn't fucking know anything anymore, but that's one thing he could count on, not surviving the minefield of the next twelve months.
Thankfully, he was wrong.
~ ~ ~
Dean can't say when it was exactly - sometime after that winter but before the archangels dragged Lucifer back down to his prison in Hell.
That first brush of lips - nervous, hesitant, stupidly endearing - wasn't something he marked on his calendar or counted amongst his most riveting daily tasks. Surviving and keeping the world from spinning out of control tended to take the forefront.
But sometime in that short gap he had dug his way through the shitstorm of his life to find the one place he could really uncoil, where he didn't have to watch his back or kill anything or worry about being killed. Where he could just be, and wasn't it ironic that he'd been carrying that place with him for the better part of two years once he found it?
~ ~ ~
ii.
Dean discovered Castiel's encompassing love for books when a hunt in Pittsburgh forced them past the towering columns of Carnegie Library. He'd been faintly concerned at the glazed look on Castiel's face the whole time they wandered row after row after row, trailing after Sam while he leafed through dozens of books for one particular thread of information. He finally pinned Castiel down in a corner of leather-bound encyclopedias and demanded to know what was wrong, what monster was going to jump out of some dark corner and eat them, what bomb the archangels were going to drop next.
Castiel swallowed and blinked, like he was stunned, like he didn't quite know how to swim through the endless words in the endless languages he knew and find the right ones. "I wasn't created to be a soldier, Dean," he finally settled on, the pale dashes of his fingers trailing reverently along cracked spines.
Dean mentally congratulated himself for not picking a sucky present six months before, then nodded and spun around to ask if Sam had found anything.
He had, and they left not ten minutes later. Dean doesn't think he's ever seen Castiel so put out, before or since.
Two days later he'd trudged through the snow back to Carnegie and found the one book Castiel has lingered at the longest. Tore off the barcode, folded it into his jacket, and handed it to a very confused but appreciative angel not half an hour after.
~ ~ ~
It's still dark when Dean wakes up to a wet curl of tongue on his throat and the press of solid weight closing over his body. He thinks it probably says something about how far they've come that his gut instinct doesn't whip out and knock the pressure off him. Instead he breathes in, settles his palms against the bare skin of Cas' shoulders. He has just enough time to inhale a lungful of air that smells like pine, and to think it's Christmas, before Cas is slipping out of his clothes and hovering right in front of Dean's face. He's smirking, almost smiling even. Dean doesn't think he'll ever get used to that. As strange and alien as Cas still is, there is a niche of human warmth that's carved its way into him over the years. He smiles now, and it's not a drug-addled vacant stretch of a grin either because Dean stopped that. It's genuine, just as real as the heat of his mouth closing around Dean's and the thrum of his pulse beneath Dean's fingertips.
"Hi," he says, anticlimactically.
"Hello," Cas replies, slight quirk of his head, quiet glimmer in his eyes. His voice is low and rough, his body obscenely warm. Dean can feel the hardness of him pressed into his stomach and his own body responds in kind, hands moving to Cas' hips, thumbs brushing where it's softer than anything he's ever felt.
"Oh man," Dean groans. His grip shifts, palms over Cas' ass. "This is way better than unwrapping presents."
The frown that appears between Cas' eyebrows says he's confused, but it dissipates into nothing by the time Dean gets a hand in his hair and tips his head up, just enough, and kisses him. It's a slow burn, tongues dragging and exploring, drawn out until Dean's shaking and begging against the hot curve of Cas' throat.
Cas fucks him from behind, slow and lazy in long careful slides, because they've got all the time in the world and the sun isn't even up yet.
~ ~ ~
iii.
The third book Dean ever gave him was vastly different than the Sumerian history book and the untranslated (and stolen, but who was keeping track?) philosophical texts of Aristotle he'd given him before.
In 2011, he bit his lip through a grin as Castiel turned the thin hardback over in his hands, confusion burying into the lines of his frown, the set of his mouth that Dean wanted to kiss. He didn't, but only because Sam was hovering just a yard away, and Bobby just beyond him. "Dean, this -"
"It's a vital component to your budding library," Dean had cut in. He nodded, as if to solidify his point, and Castiel mirrored his grin with a tentative one of his own.
"Thank you, Dean." Honest and sincere, like it meant the world to him, like Dean had just saved his life and soul again.
Calvin and Hobbes' The Lazy Sunday Book took up a permanent residence in the Impala's trunk between the I Ching and Shankara's Advaita Vedanta doctrine.
~ ~ ~
When they make it downstairs, Dean wants to bottle up Sam's expression and keep it in his pocket for whenever he's in need of a good laugh.
He wonders what it is exactly that gave them away - the flush of his skin, the riot of Cas' hair, the slightly dazed blank still buzzing all over his skin. Dean thinks maybe Sam can hear his heartbeat thudding even from here.
If anything were to be said for Cas, it's that the guy has stamina. Dean was almost embarrassed the first time he found that out for himself.
"Uh, the," Sam stammers and fumbles whatever is in his hand. "The food should be ready in about an hour. If you, uh."
"Thank you, Sam," Cas says smoothly, little smile curving one side of his lips. He extends a hand in Dean's direction, palm up. Dean takes it and sort of stumbles down the rest of the stairs.
Stamina and skills.
Bobby's at the stove stirring a wooden spoon through a crock pot. Dean slaps Sam's back on his way past and the kid disappears like a phantom. "Smells like a five-star restaurant in here, Bobby," Dean sighs. It's met with a gentle elbow to the solar plexus and Bobby griping about something or other; Dean laughs, but nabs a sliver of turkey on his way out before Bobby can stop him.
He barely dodges the balled-up towel pitched at his back.
Cas catches it instead.
~ ~ ~
iv.
Poetry, philosophy, more history than anything, which Dean always found odd since Castiel knew this stuff firsthand, since he'd lived it himself. Art and science and fiction, textbooks in a dozen different languages, books on mythology, on witchcraft, on cars and machinery and electronics, to satisfy Castiel's voracious curiosity about the modern world.
Dean felt like he was drowning in all the books Castiel collected over the years.
In 2012, he ran his thumb along the spine of Iliás and Odýsseia in the original Greek as soft footsteps padded behind him and the warm weight of a body settled at his back.
Lucifer was six months gone and the world had settled, much like the calm after a storm. Dean always had felt like this was rather the calm before the storm, the deep breath before the plunge, that something bigger was stewing and hanging just out of reach ready to destroy them all in one devastating sweep - but nothing ever came and the world stayed, for the most part, quiet. Just crazy enough to keep hunting, but quiet enough to sign a three-bedroom lease and live it out. The house was small and imperfect and it didn't have a dishwasher, but it was everything Dean ever thought a home should be.
Walking distance of a lake where he could fish any time he wanted, floor to ceiling bookshelves cluttered tightly with stupid amounts of books, a bathroom he didn't have to share with Sam... None of them knew how Castiel managed to dodge another death sentence, but he'd mentioned something about a forced sabbatical and Dean didn't really plan on questioning it. Gift horses, and all.
"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep," Castiel mumbled into his shoulder. Dean huffed and closed his grip around Castiel's narrow wrist, twisted the sleep-warm skin there.
"How you can pull a Homer quote for every occasion out of your head on cue I'll never understand," he said into the quiet of the room.
"I'm proud you know your classics, Dean."
Dean smirked, snaked his body flush against Castiel's and hummed at the low growl it rewarded him. "Merry Christmas, Cas."
Castiel murmured something against his neck, a word Dean couldn't translate, chased it with a kiss. Pushed Dean against the table and mapped the curve of his spine, bone by bone, mouthed at Dean's neck and pressed his fingers in, slow, slow, and Dean was unraveling by the time Castiel pushed in, stroked at his hair and breathed, "I would burn with you, my Achilles."
~ ~ ~
v.
It's nice to receive more than customary skin mags and motor oil for Christmas these days; now Sam opts for Turtle Wax and The Zeppelin Definitive Collection. Bobby hands out lewd cards stuffed with cash and says to go bananas. Dean tosses Sam a bag of Twizzlers and that digital camera he's been whining about for three months, a new cap to Bobby, and fits a threadbare Santa hat over Cas' bed-wild hair.
"I don't think you have this one yet," he says as he hands over two hundred dollars of Italian leather photo album wrapped in the ink-smudged comics section.
Cas loves it, if the momentary silence and quick stutter of, "Dean, thank - thank you," say anything.
Sam digs out his camera and snaps the first picture that fits into the brass-rimmed frame on the album's cover - Bobby pointing to his new cap, Sam grinning crookedly around a Twizzler, Dean saluting a beer with his arm heavy around Cas' shoulders, and a bright streak of fuzzy red leaning onto Dean's shoulder.
Dean thumbs over the brass lettering above the frame, simple metallic glints spelling out family.
It looks right, he thinks. It fits.
1) The quote Cas says to Dean in the library ("There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep") is from Homer's The Odyssey, XI, l. 310.
2) I would burn with you, my Achilles" is an allusion to the epic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, often thought to be lovers. When they die, they are burned together and their ashes mixed so that they can be together even in death.