a thread of my favorite moments from hustle - @JACKSKLlNE’s incredible deancas au - accompanied by gifs i thought fit well with the quotes

fair warning: there will be MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!! there will also be heartbreak. proceed w caution.

“Hey, Dean?” Dean turns his head and the expression on Cas’s face is so unabashedly sincere that it makes him ache. The shadows on his features dance in the flickering candlelight, and the air feels heavy with something nameless. Castiel smiles. “Happy birthday.”

So badly he wants to take Cas’s words and hold onto them for dear life, to carve them into his bones so he can keep them close until he’s nothing but dust.

But he doesn’t, because Dean Winchester doesn’t get to keep the things he loves.

You were a vision then, in the moonlight, and I wanted to kiss the cold away right there, but you looked like you liked the bite of it, how alive it made you feel.

If things end badly, though, and you’re reading this too late, please just do one last thing for me.
Please just smile.
You’ll be alright without me, Dean.
You will.
Yours, Castiel

Whenever Castiel had happened upon one of those terrible dreams, he’d ease it away with a barely-there touch on Dean’s forehead before leaving without a word. If Dean had known why so many of his nightmares were cut short, fading away without a trace, he didn’t let on.

In an instant he is there, standing in front of his best friend, pulling him into a bone-crushing hug, and his entire being sings with it.

Castiel wears a matching grin, toothy and big enough to scrunch up his face in all the right places, and in the hazy blue light of the waning winter moon, their twin smiles glow like headlights.

His eyes are utterly saturated in fondness and sincerity, the blue of them inviting as warm waters and Dean thinks he could just stay like this forever, out at sea for the rest of his life but never lost, not ever.

For nearly as long as they have known each other, Dean has been more his home than anything else in the universe.

—and, he doesn’t run, he never will, because, despite every ugly tragedy that has burrowed it’s way deep into his soul, Dean is still radiant, a beacon in the treacherous waters of this miserable little world.

Castiel has never seen someone shine so brightly in all his eons, and it’s devastating.

Their lips touch and it’s cosmic, galaxies erupting into existence behind Castiel’s closed eyelids just when he’d thought he’d never see stars being born again.

Between breaths Dean says Castiel’s name, and in the growing darkness it sounds heartachingly familiar. It sounds like a prayer.

In the silence before daybreak, in the candlelit room walled in from the scrutiny of the stars, between shallow breaths of mourning lovers, there is no squeeze of the trigger. There is no mortal thunderclap, no stopping of hearts, no spilling of blood.

Dean has always been like this, an unstoppable force, a whirlwind of thrown caution, of steadfast affection, and of good intentions with more than a hint of self-destruction, and he had pulled Castiel in, enraptured him, and made him fall in every way imaginable.

“You’re it for me, Cas, you understand? You’re everything. You have been for a long time.“

Castiel laughs hollowly. “Or maybe I’ve just ruined you.”

“If the way I feel now is me in ruins, then I understand why empires fall.”

There is no deer in sight this time, no low hum of road music, but still, in the darkness outside, it begins to snow.

ilysm mikey thank you for this story