#im also not spell checking haha it's 4am!!!!!!!!!

[clairenatural]

(~800 words. fluff)

One month. 29 days. 

Castiel opens his eyes and it has been one month, or 29 days, or forty-nine thousand, seven hundred and--he checks the alarm clock--seventy minutes since he woke up unmarried for the last time. 

Next to him--or, rather, on top of him, left leg and half of his upper body flung over Castiel like a large koala--Dean stirs. He tightens his grip across Castiel’s chest and mumbles something unintelligible into his neck, and Castiel gets the message. They don’t have to be up this early. Not today. He chases all thoughts of movement from his mind, tilts his head down just enough to press a kiss into his husband’s messy hair, and falls back asleep. 

When he wakes up next it’s to sun from the window and Dean blinking up at him. He looks down and Dean smiles, slow and easy, and pushes himself up onto his elbows. “Hey,” he says, the first words of their morning, voice sleep-rough but tone achingly soft. “We’ve been married for a month.”

Castiel could point out that they haven’t been married for the full 29 days--they won’t be until 4:32pm, a full 696 hours since Rowena pronounced them husbands and they shared their first married kiss. He could, but he doesn’t, because Dean is grinning down at him, brighter than the light spilling in through the curtains. He just smiles back, and when Dean leans down to kiss him he kisses back, and when they both stumble out of their bedroom some time later they only have four hours to go, anyway. 

Not for the first time, he marvels that, for a species that doesn’t experience much of it, humans pay little attention to the minutiae of time.

Castiel, though--there was a time, before he made that final decision, before he had Jack weave the rest of his grace into the ring that sits on Dean’s left hand--that he could count every second passing. All of them, and all that ever had been, all at once. The constant, steady, thrumming heartbeat of the universe. He can’t do it all anymore, but when it matters--and this does matter--he can still count.

He doesn’t think about that. Instead, he watches Dean make him coffee, and he drinks the coffee while Dean makes him eggs. Forty-nine thousand, seven hundred and three minutes ago (he may be off by a few; that part of the day was somewhat a blur), Jack had lost his tie. He didn’t want to wear a different one. He wanted to be matching. 

Forty-nine thousand, six hundred and fifty minutes ago they’d found it, in a duffle bag in the trunk of the impala, because Dean had packed the wrong one in with Jack’s emergency case FBI suit. It’s blue, He’d defended himself. They’re all blue. 

Castiel remembers sighing. Yes. But this is the blue one that matches. 

Dean hands him a plate of eggs and bacon, done the way Castiel likes best, and sits down across from him the way they’ve done thousands of times. Castiel reaches out with his left hand for Dean’s left, and Dean rolls his eyes but accepts it, linking their fingers together across the table. It makes breakfast more difficult, but neither of them care, because just 29 days ago there was nothing significant about those hands in particular but now, glinting in the early afternoon sun, there is and always will be.

It’s a slow day. They don’t have plans--or, rather, they have plans to not have plans. Dean grabs a few sandwiches, a six-pack and a large blanket and they leave their little house around 3pm, walking to a small park. They sit on the blanket, and they eat, and they drink, and they laugh. An errant tennis ball lands at the edge of their blanket and a golden retriever lopes over to get it, and Dean grins and and takes a moment to ruffle the fur on its head before the dog is called away. 695 hours and thirty two minutes ago, they were standing together outside the doors of the barn that would serve as ceremony room. 695 hours and thirty minutes ago, Dean took his hand and squeezed it before pushing the doors open and beginning to walk. Now, Castiel watches him and the dog, and the same love is warm in his chest.

He’s watching the time tick down on his phone, and waiting, and at 4:32 exactly he cuts Dean off in the middle of his sentence to haul him in for a solid kiss, knocking over an empty bottle in the process. Dean raises his eyebrows when they pull back--surprised, but amused. 

“We have been married for forty-one thousand, seven hundred and sixty--” he checks the time “--sixty one minutes.” 

Dean blinks at him.

“One month,” Castiel clarifies, and Dean grins.

“To the minute, huh?”

Two minutes past, by now, Castiel thinks.

“Happy one month anniversary,” he says, instead, and leans in to kiss Dean again.