Cas kisses Dean for the first time when they’re six. Dean’s leaving today to go back to Kansas, and while he swears up and down that he’ll come back, Cas can’t help but be afraid that they’re never going to see each other again. They’ve spent the summer down by the beach, daring each other to wade in up past their knees and shoving sand in every direction and. Cas’s family lives here year-round, but Dean’s family only comes down for the summer. They cling to each other tightly on that last day and Cas messily kisses Dean when he’s about to climb into his mom’s car. It’s supposed to land on Dean’s cheek, but Cas misses and accidentally kisses him half on the lips instead. Dean stammers and blushes, but before his mom shuts the door with an indulgent smile, he leans forwards in his car seat and pecks Cas’s lips. Cas doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.
Four summers after that and they’re ten. Cas is confused all the time, hating the clothes that are picked out and shoved in their closet by Michael and Naomi, and resenting the long braids that tickle the hem of the skirts that are part of the Catholic school uniform. Dean comes in the summer and it’s like freedom, running around in board shorts and loose tank-tops and messy ponytails for three glorious months, broken only by Naomi’s political functions, where Cas is paraded around in frilly dresses and fancy hairstyles that tug too hard on their scalp. They’re confused and scared and angry but Cas doesn’t say anything, knowing that Naomi would shut her “perfect little girl” down if Cas told her that they weren’t a girl.
When they’re fifteen, during a summer filled with two more stolen kisses and one hushed confession in the middle of the night, Dean knocks on Cas’s door the morning before he leaves to find Cas crying, scissors gripped tightly in one hand. On the floor are Cas’s two long braids with their neat satin bows, severed at the nape of his neck and discarded. Dean pries the scissors from his friend’s hands and tilts Cas’s face up to look at him. It’s red and splotchy and Cas’s lip is trembling, but Dean just holds him close and listens when Cas tells him that he can’t take it anymore, that he can’t take lying and forcing himself to be something he’s not just to please his mother. Dean can’t say that he understands, or that he understood the day before when Cas had told him, but when Dean says Castiel instead of the other name, Cas starts crying again, and Dean swears to himself that he’s going to try and understand it, for Cas. When he gets hime, he does hours of research, and texts Cas for hours afterwards.
They don’t see each other, the summer after that. Dean’s parents are getting divorced, and even though he thinks about Cas in the long, sweaty Kansas days, he hasn’t even had a working phone number to call since the end of the semester. He doesn’t know that Cas’s cell phone had gotten disconnected before his parents sent him to conversion therapy with the hopes of ‘curing their daughter’. Cas cries himself to sleep nearly every night that summer, lonely and scared and missing his family. The Novaks move out of their beach house and rent it out to strangers before Michael and Naomi die in a car crash.
When they’re twenty, they see each other again for the first time in years. Cas is finally settling his late parents’ affairs, clearing out their old beach house so he can sell it, and Dean has retreated to his childhood sanctuary, trying to decide if college is really the path he wants to take. When he sees a lean, wiry frame carrying furniture out to a moving van parked in front of the Novaks’ house, he doesn’t think before striding over and grabbing his friend by the shoulder.
“Cas?” He looks so different, his hair expertly cut short and his chest flat and a tattoo peeking out from under his loose collar. Cas stares back at him, the chair in his grip trembling and then crashing to the asphalt.
“Dean?”
Cas kisses Dean for the fourth time in front of his old home, Dean’s hands settled firmly on his waist. When they break apart, Dean murmurs Castiel into the space between their lips, and Castiel kisses him again.
