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“Show me?”
Cas smiled sadly at the hunter, who was comfortably settled on the warm hood of his car. It was a beautiful day in his dream. The sky was that clear, bright blue that only happens at the very start of summer, the sort of sky that made you want to spread your wings and soar up into it. Cas swallowed hard.
“I can’t stand to fly,” he admitted softly, tearing his eyes away from the sky. “I’m not that naive.” Dean’s face fell, and even though Cas knew it wasn’t really him, the hunter looked so crushed that he forced himself to explain. “Men weren’t meant to ride with clouds between their knees.” Ashamed, he fixed his eyes on the dirt on his shoes.
“You’re not a man.” Soft fingers touched Cas’s cheek, and he glanced up to see a tender look on Dean’s face that the hunter would never wear in real life. “You’re an angel.”
Unwelcome tears spilled from Cas’s eyes, but he made no attempt to stop, only shook his head in denial. No one was here to see him break down. “I’m only a man, in a silly red sheet, digging for kryptonite on this one-way street.”
“Oh, so now you understand the Superman reference?” Dean huffed out a laugh, but it was small and strained, and Cas was distressed to see the hunter’s eyes shining wetly as well. “You’re not Superman, you idiot.” his voice was hopelessly affectionate. “You’re my angel.”
Cas shrank back from the kindness and forgiveness in his dream Dean’s face. “I’m only a man,” he insisted, “and this is just a dream.”
“Cas, you’re my angel.” If Dean had ever really look at Cas the way he did now, the angel would have broken under the weight of the love he saw there. The sky stretched around them, endless and inviting, and so unreal, and Cas’s shoulders itched. “You’re my hero. And you know what?” Tenderly, Dean leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. While Cas stared at him in wonder he did it again, gently, longer this time, and then whispered, “Even heroes have the right to dream.”
Between one instant and the next, the blank sky filled with feathers, massive, translucent wings that refracted rainbows across Dean and the car and the dusty road around them. Cas soared upwards on a warm breeze, and his tears blew away from his face as he cried out in delight. Below him he heard Dean laughing, and the sound lifted him higher and higher, until his wings covered the whole sky, and the world below was a riot of color that spun with each beat of his heart and soul and Grace-made wings.
The next morning, Dean got a call on his personal cell phone.
“Hello? Is this Dean Winchester? This is Phil McCafferty, I work for the Nazareth, PA police department. Do you know a man, about six feet tall, white, with kinda messy black hair, and blue eyes? Yes? Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but he passed away last night. I guess he slept out on the street and froze to death; it was pretty cold around here. He had a card with this number and your name on it, so I thought you might be his next of kin. Yes, we’re sure… Mr. Winchester, the body was examined by our town coroner at about eight o’clock this morning; he is deceased... Yes, I’ll hold.”
Dean never picked the phone back up.