Building a Chair in Five Simple Steps

Chapter One (and Only.)

When Castiel appears, Dean is lying flat on the floor and halfway under the bed. For a moment Cas wonders if he should come back later; this seems like the one of the things he and Dean talked about that were Not To Be Interrupted. But after watching Dean's feet kick out in frustration and listening to the unflattering comments towards whatever heavenly being he seemed to think was listening, Cas can't help himself.

"Dean?" he asks hesitantly. There's a bang as Dean's head hits the bottom of the bed in surprise, followed by more creative profanity. With a weird shimmying motion, he inches his way out from under the bed, twisting around to look at Cas. His face is screwed up in the kind of fury that Cas has only seen once before, when Sam spilled a fruit smoothie on the seats of the Impala.

"Uh, I can come back later," Cas starts to say, shuffling backwards hurriedly. Dean is clearly in a Mood.

"No, Cas, it's fine," Dean snaps, shambling to his feet with a wince. Tilting his head in a way that he knows Dean will find endearing and hopefully less likely to yell at him, Cas glances at the bed.
"Am I interrupting something?" he ventures. It's then that he notices the mass of wooden spokes lying forlornly in the corner. It looks like someone threw it there. "Is that part of a wagon wheel?" he asks curiously. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say, because Dean starts laughing the kind of laugh Castiel had previously associated with mental patients and mating jaguars.

"A wagon wheel," he says, his voice unnaturally high. There's a brief pause as he drags his hands over his face, his breath ragged.

"I can escape Hell, kill the Devil, and stop the goddamn apocalypse," Dean says, "but I can't build a mother fucking chair from IKEA!" He closes his eyes, breathing hard, and even without reading his thoughts Cas can practically hear him counting down from ten.

"I can't reach the screw that rolled under the bed," Dean grits out, painfully slow and calm. "Half an hour ago one of them rolled away, and it's all the way at the back, and for half an hour I've been trying to reach it, and-" The screw appears in Castiel's hand, and by the way Dean's eye twitches he's suddenly not sure that was the right thing to do. But Dean reaches out to take it and his hand lingers on Cas's for a minute, and there's a look of infinite sadness on his face.

"For four hours I've been screwing pieces of wood together. Four hours. I want you to understand that. I think it's finally broken me." Dean says. "I thought I could throw away the paper, but then I needed it, but then I was missing a piece, and then I realized I had put it in the wrong place..." Dean covers his face with his hands. "I'm not ashamed to say I cried today. Like a twelve year old girl."

Cas isn't really sure what IKEA is or how it's managed to reduce Dean to the emotional stability of jelly, but he's eager for an opportunity to win his approval. "I can help," he says, taking a step towards it and raising a hand.

"No," Dean shouts, grabbing his arm with a look on his face that Cas finds more than slightly terrifying. "We are not going to take the easy way out here." Dragging Cas over to the corner, he pulls them both down so that they're crouching by the chair. "We are going to finish this goddamn thing the normal, old fashioned way." He stares into Cas's eyes with furious intensity. "Or we are going to die trying."

One hour later.

"Okay, I need the one that looks like a diving snorkel."

"I don't think we have something like that, Dean."

"The instructions say we need it!"

"Those aren't the instructions. I believe those are the...product diagrams."

"Well what the hell have we been building for the past twenty minutes, then?!"

"There's no need for violence, Dean."

Two hours later.

"Dean, Listen to me. I know we've been through a lot before this. We have a bond, and with that bond comes the trust I know you feel towards me. Nothing can ever change that. So when I tell you that we need to be using piece 36B instead of piece 37F, I need you to believe that I will permanently remove the eyebrows from your face if you do not listen to what I am saying."

Two hours and ten minutes later.

"Dean, it was only on the one side."

"Shut up, Cas."

"I brought it right back."

"Cas, you can't just remove a man's eyebrow and then expect to be on speaking terms right after. Now pass me the whiskey, I'm not nearly drunk enough to read this next page of instructions."

Three hours later.

Dean lies sprawled with his back to the wall, a bottle of hard liqueur clenched in his hand. Cas has slid to the floor beside him, his hands clasped loosely in his lap. His trench coat is flung across a table on the opposite side of the room, his tie currently being used to hold two of the chair legs together. It sits in the middle of the floor, a baleful presence, hatred radiating off of its wooden components like heat. Castiel had no idea it was possible for an inanimate object to feel so evil.

"This must be Crowley's doing," Dean croaks beside him. "That's the only explanation. This has to be some kind of psychological warfare."

"Normally I would question the sanity of that statement," Castiel says despondently. "But under such circumstances, I don't seem to care."

There's a slosh of liquid as Dean offers Cas the bottle. After a moment's pause he takes it and empties half its contents into his stomach. It does nothing to plug the gnawing pit of rage that's been growing there over the past few hours.

"I should have never dragged you into this, Cas," Dean says, letting his head fall back to hit the wall with a thud. "Now I'm just going to take you down with me."

"No, Dean," Cas exclaims, sitting up to stare at him urgently. "Don't give up hope now. I have faith that together we can overcome this, just as we always have. Just think of how beautiful it will be when we're finished, Dean."

A wistful smile appears on the hunter's face. "I guess it'll be pretty awesome to sit on."

"That's right," Cas presses, standing up with a new sense of purpose and offering Dean his hand. "Take my hand, Dean Winchester," he says gravely. "And we will build ourselves a chair."

An indeterminate and best-left-unknown length of time later.

Things progressively get better as time goes on, though they're not exactly starting at a high point. Words are said that cannot be unsaid; small pieces of metal fly through the air at eye level, Dean's jacket ends up inexplicably stuffed into one of the air vents. At some point duct tape is introduced, and things go much more quickly from there. When the chair is finally completed they stand before it like Noah before the arc, quiet smiles of pride sealed on their faces. It's slightly uneven, and there's a bite mark on one of the legs, but it's a product of their hands and the raw frustration of an indecipherable instruction manual. Dean offers to let Cas sit down first, but Cas just shakes his head.

"This victory belongs to you, Dean," he says. "You were the one who figured out that the armrest was actually a leg."

Dean sighs a contented sigh, taking a pause to bask in the glory of the moment. "Thanks for sticking with me, Cas. Couldn't have done it without you."

Cas smiles fondly in return. "I would never let you build a chair alone."

Dean wraps his arm around Cas's shoulders with a laugh, admiring their work for a minute longer before stepping forward with new purpose. When Dean lowers himself onto the chair, he draws himself up like a king at his coronation. He settles his hands on his knees and he breaks out the biggest grin that Cas has ever seen. Digging into his pocket, Dean pulls out his phone and tosses it over to Cas.

"Here, Cas, take a pic-"And that's when the chair leg snaps. Castiel's first and last coherent thought in the next five minutes is that he had been right the whole time: it was an armrest after all.

They take the chair into the back parking lot and burn it. It's a nice moment for both of them.