Rewritten

Chapter 8

The front door bangs open, and Past Dean himself jogs down the steps. “Hey. Me-myself-and-I,” he begins. “We need to talk.” He’s wearing the expression Dean always uses when he’s pissed, but trying to keep from yelling because it’s an important topic. Great.

Sam lifts his eyebrows at Dean. “I’m gonna go and… see if Bobby has anything else he wants sorted,” he says none-too-subtly.

“Thanks, Sammy,” Dean calls behind him. “Run away!”

“Hey, this is your business,” Sam snickers, passing Past Dean and clapping him on the shoulder as he walks. “This is between you and you.”

Past Dean watches him enter the house, and then turns to advance on Dean. “What the fuck.” No question mark. A sentence.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Yeah, don’t deny it. I know everything about you, and how you feel about Cas. Let’s not bullshit ourselves here.”

“You kissed him? What the hell were you thinking?!” Past Dean demands, throwing his hands up. “First of all, did it ever occur to us that you might have freaked him out? That he didn’t fee—”

“Oh, he feels the same, believe me,” Dean says, remembering the pressure against his hip and how frantically they’d had to scramble apart when they’d heard the Impala outside. He has absolutely no control over the leer that spreads across his face, and wouldn’t stop it if he could because screwing with his past self is a little too much fun.

Past Dean jerks back slightly, blinking. “What happened between y—You know what? Don’t think I wanna know.” He takes a deep breath, steadying himself on Baby’s hood. “Just think about this a minute, uh, me. If you end u—”

“No, you think about this a minute,” Dean orders him. “Think about how many times we’ve looked at him that way. Think about how there wasn’t anything at all between us and Jimmy. Think about the way he looked at us when he came to bring us back from 1973. And now think of any other angel we’ve met – can you honestly think of any of them, even Anna, looking at us that way? Hell, think of any humans too – nobody looks at us like that. Except Cas.”

Past Dean shuffles uncomfortably, drumming his fingertips on the Impala’s hood. “It’d be too much of a change, anyway,” he mutters, head down. “Who knows what we’d change?”

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “I’ve got a theory, though. I don’t think it’d change much. We’re already so close, it’s kind of pathetic.”

“I…” Past Dean meets his gaze. “Are you sure?”

Dean nods.

“Fine.” Past Dean shuts his eyes. “Okay. But—If this fucks things up, can you have Cas send you back here to fix things back the way they should’ve been? How they happened, or will happen, whatever?”

“I will. And Dean? You know part of this is you too,” Dean says, amazed at how much he and Sam are on the same wavelength. “He knows how we feel now. Don’t push him away.”

A slight flush rises in Past Dean’s cheeks. “Shut up,” he scoffs.

“I mean it, dammit,” Dean insists.

Past Dean sighs. “I’ll try,” he says after a moment.

They stand in silence, a weird sort of camaraderie between them. It’s the kind of uneasy solidarity between enemies teaming up to take someone on – the kind of uncomfortable solidarity, in fact, that existed between himself and Crowley before.

It occurs to Dean that his past self still doesn’t even know Crowley. How weird.

“So tell me something,” Past Dean says. “I don’t… Do I ever…”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Let Michael wear you?”

Past Dean looks uncertain. “Yeah.”

“What do you think?” And that’s all Dean will tell him, but judging from his expression, it’s enough for Past Dean to feel a little more at ease.