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musingsdeme · 7 years

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Pantry

Happy Birthday to the absolutely incredible @alullabytoleaveby. I am late, but it’s not less filled with love for that. For your birthday I give you, two dorks in love being domestic as hell.

ao3

Cas reads the cereal boxes. The backs of them. The long, indecipherable lists of the ingredients, and the percent daily calcium intake, and the weird little blurbs on the front with weird cartoon characters; Cas reads them all. He reads them all painstakingly. Dean knows this because he has been standing in the cereal aisle, watching Cas read the cereal boxes painstakingly for, he looks down and consults his watch, thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds. It was cute for two minutes. Cas had that little furrow between his brows and he was squinting as he read. There was something just fucking…fucking endearing as shit about Cas giving that much attention to fucking breakfast food. But Christ, it’s been fucking, Dean looks at his watch again, fourteen and a half minutes, and how long can the guy keep critiquing Tony the goddamn Tiger.

“Casssssss,” Dean whines, “just pick one already, c’mon.”

Almost in slow motion, Cas lifts his head, looks at Dean, and raises one perfect eyebrow as if to say, “excuse you, foolish mortal.”

Dean blinks, for a moment struck dumb by Cas’ cocked eyebrow and challenging expression, before collecting his thoughts and forcing out an eye roll.

“We’ve been here for fifteen minutes,” he points out, “just grab a box and let’s go. We don’t have all day.”

Cas’ eye brow ticks a centimeter higher because, no, actually, Dean, we do have all day. He’s gracious enough to not point that out. Instead, he spreads his arms, Frosted Mini Wheats in one hand, Cocoa Pebbles in the other. He looks vaguely lordly, loose fitting grey sweater, dark washed jeans, five o’clock shadow, and all.

“Dean,” he begins, “You may not have noticed, but we are standing in an aisle devoted to nothing but cereals—”

Oh shit, Dean thinks, here we go.

“—of different flavors, textures, and dietary benefits, some of which I am not certain are even worth the calories it would take to masticate them. Did you know—”

Dean looks up to the ceiling, hoping to encounter salvation amongst the obnoxious florescent lights and industrial metal work.

“—that there no fewer than sixteen flavors of Cheerios alone?”

He ducks his chin and stares almost conspiratorially at Dean as if there is some secret they both know about the prodigious variety of Cheerios flavors, a dark, disturbing secret. Dean has no fucking clue what that’s about, and he eyes the Fruity Cheerios warily, his nose crinkling: now that he thinks about it, they do seem weird …when the hell did they even start making Fruity Cheerios? Were Fruity Pebbles just not good enough anymore? And, fuck; Dean’s mouth curls, Apple Cinnamon Cheerios? That’s like a fucking travesty and insult to pie.

Wait, no. He shakes his head; he’s not getting sucked into this.

Cas nods sagely at him, apparently pleased that Dean understands that Cheerios, and possibly the entire General Mills corporation, are not to be trusted, and Dean almost bursts out laughing, but catches himself just in time. He bites his lip instead. Laughing will only provoke a Rant, Capital-R Rant, the kind where Cas uses “abomination” at least twice to describe relatively mild inconveniences.

“I’ll grant you, there do not need to be that many flavors of Cheerios,” Dean concedes, Cas smiles, smug.

“But,” Dean continues, “you still gotta pick a box, Cas. If you don’t like it, we’ll get you a different kind next week. It’s not life or death.”

Cas frowns at Dean, then frowns at the boxes in his hands, and then frowns at the sign for aisle fifteen as if it has personally wronged him. He grips the boxes harder than necessary. His mouth twists in frustration. He places them both back on the shelf, stalks away. Dean grabs the cart handle, ready to chase after him, but Cas returns. He shoves a box at Dean’s chest.

His face is blank. Curiously blank. “Strange celestial being is new to earth and does not understand your silly human customs” blank. Except Cas is not new to earth, he understands way more than he lets on, and there is a tiny, almost invisible smirk lurking at the corner of his lips.

He intercepts Dean’s hold on the cart and wheels away, like an ex-angel on a mission, while Dean is left standing in aisle fifteen holding a box of Fiber One Bran Cereal.

“Fiber is important for men of your age, Dean,” Cas calls back as he rounds the corner to aisle fourteen. Dean blinks down at the box, blinks at Cas, looks up at the ceiling for help.

“Son of bitch,” he mumbles, “good for a man of your—that’s rich coming from someone literally older than dirt!” He yells as a woman and her toddler come around the corner.

She draws up, offended. He fumbles the cereal box and blushes, “Not you, ma’am, I was talking to my—that is, I—you’re a beautiful, young, clearly, prime of—”

She scowls at him, wholly unimpressed.

“Right, so I’m gonna just,” he jerks his thumb behind him, “go now, so you, uh, you have a nice—”

Dean grabs the nearest box of Captain Crunch as he turns on his heel and half runs half stumbles out of the cereal aisle.

Cas is not snickering, exactly, but he is contemplating the pastas with way too much glee when Dean rounds the corner. He’s snickering on the inside. Dean knows it. He can feel it.

He narrows his eyes. Cas has a bag of Rigatoni in one hand, and a bag of Linguini in the other, in a row filled with at least four different brands and twenty different styles of pasta. Dean realizes suddenly, with a bone crushing weight of dread, that this is going to be a long, long, long, fucking long ass day.

God he fucking hates grocery shopping.

Dean has legitimate reasons to hate grocery stores. For starters: too many people, two few exits. It’s a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation in terms of manageable escape routes. Then there’s the aisles: rows and rows and rows and rows and fucking rows of metal shelving, stacked full of boxes, and cans, and who knows what else at least three feet deep. The damn things are heavy, full, and the space between them too narrow. If one of the things falls over? Splat. That’s it. Game over. He and every other mother fucker in here will be smashed flat like an Aunt Jemima pancake (two for one in aisle thirteen) in a domino-effect topple. Don’t even get him started on the grocery carts: more like infant death traps and grown man traffic jams. He’s seen little old ladies start screaming matches about who could go first through the aisle with their overstocked carts to buy the last can of cranberry sauce. It was NOT pretty.

You know what else is not pretty? Grocery stores. Everything is beige. What the fuck is up with that? The tile is always this weird off white speckled with brown and black, so you can’t tell what’s decorative and what’s dirt. Sam thinks that Dean’s over exposure to garish motel room décor and livid crime scene carnage has made him wary of anything colored neutrally. Dean thinks that Sam is not properly appalled by the way that grocery store chains use interior design decisions to potentially mask health code violations. He’s threatened, on more than one occasion, to dig out his health inspector badge and take it for a spin, but Sam has, so far, managed to put a kibosh on that idea…so far…

Then there is the music. God, the fucking music. Could they at least turn on a damn radio station instead of this weird pre-ordained mix of top forty and smooth listening? Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Every time he thinks that he’s finally managed to just tune it out enough to be aware of his surroundings and focus on his shopping, an announcement comes on over the speakers five times louder than the music had been, making Dean jump out of his skin and reach for his gun, which would, if he pulled it, cause an entirely new set of issues.

It would be great if the grocery store sold liquor, and even better if Dean could just casually down shots as he worked his way through his shopping list. At least alcohol would take the edge off, never mind that he’s supposed to be giving (modified) sobriety a try.

The real thing he hates about grocery stores, the real goddamn clincher, is that Dean has never been inside one when he didn’t feel like he had a target on his back.

As a kid, he ventured into these places when dad was away on hunts and he and Sam finally ran out of food. He would take the crumpled up bills that dad gave him, walk the however many blocks to the store, holding Sammy with one hand and a shopping basket with the other. Dean was good at math from an early age; it’s easy to be good at math when you have to figure out how far you can stretch five dollars for two weeks of food. The cashiers sometimes looked at him fondly, sometimes suspiciously, and Dean learned quickly that a sure smile would do him a lot better than uncertain eyes. He walked into grocery stores worried how far the money would stretch; he walked out of them praying what they had bought would be enough and feeling the grown up gazes watching him walk off with his little brother in tow. Don’t call the cops, he prayed, don’t call the cops.

When he was in his teens, he chanted the same mantra. Dad’s oversized jacket was Dean’s constant companion. It pulled chicks and a few boys in hidden corners behind the high school, but it also had deep pockets and an inner lining that made it easy to hide bread and peanut butter, and a small carton of milk. He would smirk and smile and use two dollars to buy juice, and his jacket to hide the rest. He hated the families with their full carts and full purses. He knew it was unfair, he knew it was stupid, but he hated the whole damn store. There was enough for him and Sammy here and a hundred kids besides, but fucking god forbid if he got caught leaving with a jar of peanut butter. He sweated more shoplifting the first few times than he did on his first hunt. If he fucked up on a hunt, Dean got hurt. If he fucked up stealing, Sammy went hungry.

As a young man, he hated how he got the money to pay for food. He was proud that he had it, proud that he provided for his brother, provided for himself, but…the money felt dirty sometimes. There were stains on some of the bills, and Dean knew where they came from, who they had come from. It made him cringe. Made him hate the whole damn system. Not to mention that he was wary enough of the world, by this point, to feel claustrophobic in a store this big, a store with so few doors and too many people, any one of whom could be a monster in disguise. It made him feel like something was crawling at the back of his neck. He rushed out of there with his bags in hand and his tarnished pride left behind in the cash drawer.

When he lived on the road with Sam, he avoided grocery shopping. It wasn’t like they needed food for a nonexistent kitchen.

When he lived a year with Lisa, she did the shopping. Dean begged off and she let him. He was a mess, she was probably afraid he’d start shooting up the place.

Now he lives in the bunker, which has an industrial kitchen. Now he lives with Sam who wants all sorts of green, organic tofu nonsense. Now he lives with Cas who, newly fallen, is experiencing the joys (and disappointments) of food for the first time. Now he is living in a home and discovering that he likes…no, he fucking loves, cooking for his family.

So here he is, in the grocery store, shopping with an indecisive, very thorough former angel/brand new human, who has never actually tasted…well, anything, and a grocery list that includes about a hundred things, only about half of which Dean’s actually ever seen, and a very, very long afternoon ahead of him.

Cas fucking loves the grocery store. That much is apparent. Cas likes missions. He especially likes mission that he chooses himself. Hence, his careful, tactical, precise contemplation of every item on their list and some besides. Dean has been a human for going on almost forty years (a man of his age, Cas had said, jerk) and he finds this place overwhelming as fuck. He’s not sure how Cas is managing.

“I’ve made a plan,” Cas says, squinting at a bag of Rotini.

“Huh?”

“You asked why I wasn’t more overwhelmed,” Cas responds, “I googled the store layout before we came, cross checked that with our grocery list, and prepared a “plan of attack.””

Dean blinks, impressed, but not surprised.

Castiel puts the rotini pack on the shelf and picks up a bag of fusili, “I made a flow chart with our planned recipes for the week and our household grocery list, broke that into an ingredient list, organized said list by the products and then adjusted for the organization of aisles at this particular store.”

“That’s intense, Cas.”

Cas shrugs, “I like being prepared. Which of these is more texturally pleasing?”

“I think it’s less about the texture and more about how the shit absorbs the sauce.”

Cas tilts his head, frowns, and considers the bags of pasta in his hands.

“Which of these do you think has better sauce retention?”

Dean chuckles, “I dunno, man.”

Cas rolls his eyes, “You’re the chef in this family.”

Dean’s heart flutters like it does every time Cas calls them a family, but he tries to put that aside and focus on Cas’ question. He scrutinizes the proffered bags.

“Hmmm…” He makes a show of squinting at the contents and purses his lips dramatically

“Dean, this mortal life is finite, and I’d rather not waste it contemplating pasta.”

Dean looks up through his lashes, “Says the guy who spent an hour choosing a cereal.”

“It was hardly an hour, Dean,” huffs Cas.

“Sure it wasn’t.”

“Deeeaaaannnn.”

Dean grins up at Cas, “Neither of these.”

He replaces fusilli and rigatoni with farfalle and penne. Holding each up for Cas before adding them to the cart.

“These ones look like bowties,” he says, “and these you can turn into whistles.”

Cas’ mouth twists, half exasperated, half amused, “And yet neither embodies the quality you suggested we look for in a pasta.”

Dean shrugs, “Like you said, I’m the chef in this family.”

They add four boxes of lasagna noodles because Cas and Dean are making a veggie lasagna for Sam and a lasagna Bolognese for themselves.

“What’s next?” Dean asks leaning over Cas’ shoulder to peer at his list.

Cas smiles at Dean’s proximity, at Dean’s hand on his waist. Dean smiles because Cas smiles. It turns into a feedback loop for a moment.

“You wanted to make chili?”

“Yep,” Dean lets the ‘p’ pop obnoxiously.

“Then the canned goods are next.”

Dean rolls his eyes, “Lead the way.”

Cas does.

The canned goods aisle gives him the creeps. For starters, it reminds him of his trip to 2014, when 2014 was years in the future and not years in the past. He half expects Chuck to appear around the corner, rambling about toilet paper shortages and mass grocery runs. Secondly, it reminds him of his childhood when he invented over a hundred ways to prepare spaghetti-o’s, only about a tenth of which were actually good. Thirdly, they weigh down the damned cart like nobody’s business, and if he’s gonna get crushed to death in a grocery store, this is the aisle where it would happen.

Old habits die hard, so Dean loads down the cart with “worst case scenario the bunker is called the Bunker for a reason” provisions, while Cas squats down to scrutinize canned beans.

“I don’t understand what the difference is,” he complains.

By the time Dean has made a third trip to deposit an armful of emergency rations to the bottom rack of the grocery cart, Cas has built a small pyramid of black beans each with a different label professing a different brand, preservation technique, or flavoring style.

Dean’s knees groan when he squats down to Cas’ level.

“I think we would be better off buying beans that haven’t been preserved in large amounts of sodium.”

His mouth twists in disdain. Dean tries really, really hard not to laugh. He coughs pointedly and clears his throat, while Cas rises quickly to his feet and wheels away dramatically, muttering about heart disease, manufacturing plants, and “not as god intended.”

Dean, much slower to get to his feet, shakes his head and shoves his hands in his pockets, smiling brightly as he follows in Cas’ wake.

There’s a fifty-fifty shot that Cas will be charmed or disgusted by human inventions. Dean’s never sure if he’s going to have a Little Mermaid moment or a Smitey McSmiterson rage fest. Both are endearing because Dean’s just that in love with the dork. Strolling behind Cas as he mutters darkly about dangerous preservatives like the hipster health nut he so surely is, is so bizarrely awesome that, by the time he makes it to the next aisle, Dean’s cheeks hurt from grinning.

Dean is big on samples at the grocery store. One, because they’re free (duh!). Two, because they’re usually shit he’s never gonna buy so he might as well enjoy it as a perk for all the shopping related stress.

He bats his eyes at the little old lady giving out slices of apples, makes small talk with the middle aged man giving out tiny cups of soup, and he grabs five little coffee cups and runs from the exasperated kid at the coffee cart.

At the deli counter, though, you get to ask for what type of sample you want and they’re give it to you.

Dean does it for the hell of it. Cas tries things so that he knows what he likes and doesn’t (Cas’ lack of food experience is a travesty that Dean considers it his mission in life to correct).

Cas’ running commentary and fluid, completely unfiltered facial expressions bring joy to Dean’s life, but generally seem to concern the delicatessen employees.

Dean comes up with a different lie to explain it every time: amnesia, he recently regained his sense of taste, he just woke up from a coma, he’s ending a lifelong commitment to vegetarianism.

Today, Dean tells them that Cas was a monk, living a completely aesthetic life.

“Free from pleasures of the flesh,” Dean shakes his head sorrowfully and then wraps his arm around Cas’ shoulder, “that’s all over now, ain’t it, Cas?”

Cas, who has just bitten into a piece of bella donna cheese, moans appreciatively, and Dean laughs until he can’t breathe.

Cas, who enraptured by the cheese, had missed the exchange, and is not sure why Dean’s laughing so hard, places their order with a lot of side eye to Dean. The poor son of a bitch working the counter has to tolerate Dean’s increasingly hysterical laughter and his increasingly complex array of sexual innuendo about pepperoni and aged cheese.

Dean’s favorite section of the store is, without doubt, the bakery. It smells amazing: flour and butter and yeast. There are shelves filled with muffins, trays of pastry fresh out of the oven. There are bins of bagels in a dozen different flavors, cases of cookies: chocolate chip, macadamia nut, oatmeal raisin, sugar cookies with sprinkles and icing made to look like animals and characters. Cupcakes with frosting piled high sit next to cakes ready to be decorated for birthdays and graduations and welcome homes.

Dean’s never had a grandmother, but he always imagined that if he had had one, her house would have smelled like this, warm and inviting and delicious.

Cas is enraptured by the breads: all the different shapes and textures and smells. He sniffs at them with rapturous eyes and listens carefully to the sound they make when he presses down on the crust.

Dean makes a beeline for the pies. Ugh, the pies. Freshly made that morning and gloriously golden even in the shitty grocery store lighting. He can’t decide between Triple Berry and Apple, so he adds them both to the cart. Cas makes his own contribution of Italian bread, French Brioche, and a dozen croissants. He also, with a kiss to Dean’s cheek, add a box of cookies made to look like the bat signal.

“My husband’s the best,” Dean declares, grinning like a moron and holds up the box as proof to the nearest shopper.

She nods bemusedly as Dean scurries to catch up to Cas, squeezing his ass (Cas has a great ass) and kissing his neck when he does.

The butcher’s shop is a trial. Some days, Dean loves it, some days, he remembers the Mark of Cain or the most recent hunt and he feels bile in the back of his throat. Cas wears a frown not like he’s distressed, more like he’s mentally recreating the physiology of whatever animal they’re looking at and contemplating how best to rebuild it from the parts available, which creeps Dean out, being, himself, a fleshy creature that Cas once rebuilt from available parts. He pats his own chest, making sure that he’s still intact.

“Dean,” Cas says as he eyes the steaks, “it always surprises me the way in which trade has shaped the evolution of food consumption in this country.”

“Does it?”

“Yes. Just a hundred years ago, if you wanted a cow to eat, you would have had to raise it yourself until maturity and then slaughter and preserve the meat…or, of course, an alternative would be to build a trading relationship of some kind with a neighboring human who raised and slaughtered cows and exchange a different slaughtered animal or material good in exchange for dead flesh.”

“That’s fascinating, Cas.”

“The railroad was instrumental in making trade across long distances possible. I recently watched a special on PBS in which…”

Dean places their order while Cas continues the economic history and technological evolution of the cattle industry in the US, which segues into his insistence they purchase free range chicken only, and Dean needing to explain that PETA is not really the best organization to join up with if Cas wants to advocate for animal rights.

Cas loves the produce section as much as Dean loves the bakery, if not more. He loves the textures and colors. He loves his unfiltered ability to touch and investigate everything. Dean loves watching him explore. It’s a good thing too because it takes him forever to make his way through (that’s why the produce section is their last stop).

Cas holds out herbs for Dean to smell and smiles joyfully at Dean’s reactions, be they sneezes or nods of approval. He laughs when Dean juggles oranges, charming a nearby child as well Cas with his antics, and giving a theatrical bow when he’s finished. Cas gives him a kiss and the kid gives him a round of applause, both of which Dean accepts graciously.

He listens to Dean’s opinions of different types of apple with absolute focus, and he shares mini lectures on the uses, both culinary and ritualistic, of different fruits and vegetables and spices. It takes them over a half an hour to gather all the things that Cas wants to try and all the things Sam had asked for and all the things that Dean knows he likes, but it feels like the quickest stop on their trip because they’re both relaxed.

Dean provides commentary on Okay magazine articles while they wait in the checkout line, thinking of Bobby as he does so. Cas rolls his eyes good naturedly, digging their reusable shopping bags out from where they’ve been buried beneath their shopping. Dean is the type of person who goes grocery shopping with reusable bags these days (or, he’s at least married to and brother to people who bring reusable bags to the grocery store). That’s a thing. Cas’ extraction is careful and delicate. Dean helps Cas’ work by providing comedic background noise.

Dean slips an arm around Cas waist while he proffers coupon after coupon after coupon for the cashier. She’s a teenager, but she smiles at them the way that Dean smiles at babies: like they’re the cutest goddamn thing. He’s not sure how he feels about that: he’s a grown man after all, but Cas seems entirely unfazed by the adoration.

The light outside is different when they leave than when they entered: it’s getting on towards dinner time. They load their groceries into the trunk of the Impala, send Sam a text with an ETA so he knows to come up and help unload their stuff when they get home.

Cas reaches over and takes Dean’s hand as they pull out of the parking lot, and Dean laces their fingers more securely together, smiling as Cas turns on the radio and they hit the road.

When they get back, Sam helps them unload everything and unpack everything.

Cas rehashes the conversation that he and Dean had had about the meat industry. Sam, unsurprisingly, perks up eagerly at the topic.

“Have you read Upton Sinclair, Cas? You might really enjoy it.”

“Woah. No,” Dean interjects, throwing up a hand, “Not before I make my Lasagna, you’re not.”

“Good point,” Sam says, suitably contrite.

Cas considers them with squinted eyes and then refocuses on Sam, “Sam?”

“Yeah, Cas?”

“How much do you know about the General Mills Company?”

Dean busts out laughing, doubles over, and can’t stop for ten minutes (“Dean, this isn’t funny! This is a very serious concern.”).

When he does finish laughing, he shoos Sam away from the stove, oven, and counter, (he loves his brother, but Sam could literally burn water), and sets him to chopping vegetables. Dean dons his “Kiss the Cook” apron, puckers up his lips, and Cas obliges him, before returning to his verbal tirade against General Mills.

Dean makes the sauce; Cas makes the pasta; Sam chops anything they need chopped, and keeps their glasses filled with wine.

Dinner is delicious when it’s done. Warm and filling. Fresh vegetables, homemade sauce and sautéed meat; the bread is warm and crisp and Dean uses it to sop up the extra sauce on his plate. They’re all groaning and relaxed by the time they’re done, smiling contentedly.

Dean surveys his family. Sam places the apple pie in the oven (“I can turn on the oven and set a timer without burning down the bunker, Dean.” “This place has survived fifty years but I don’t know if it can survive your cooking.”)

Cas rubs his foot against Dean’s calf under the table and shakes his head fondly at their bickering.

The pie is as good as it smelled earlier, but it can’t beat how warm and content Dean feels eating it here in this company.

When the dishes have been cleaned and the (few) leftovers put away, they curl up in the family room. When Dean kisses Cas, he tastes like apples and cinnamon, and Dean hums in pleasure.

“You know, Cas,” Dean smiles, “I think we might have to go back for more pie.”

Cas shakes his head and smiles, “Next weekend, Dean.”

“It’s a date.”

#I LOVE YOU EMI #deancas #destiel #domestic fluff

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