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"Hello Dean," Cas says, as solemn-eyed and bed-haired as always. Dean spares him a glance, before wordlessly holding up two fingers to the ice-cream truck man. Dean hands the angel a cone, which the other boy takes with his usual strange regard. Cas follows Dean to an innocuous white house, leaning on the edge of a picket fence, and they quietly eat their ices. Dean is methodical with his, licking around the edges of the white top all the way to an even line at the mouth of the cone. Cas, however, has no such restraint and is soon a sticky mess all over.
They are about seven years old, Dean estimates. He is fat. Chubby and filled out in places he knows will soon shift and change with puberty. Cas is no different, blue eyes peeking out under black windswept bangs. The angel is a millennia old but it's hard to remember that when Cas's little white dress shirt is stained pink and brown.
Sam though, Sam was always skinny. Round cheeks, huge eyes, but compared to Dean he was always lankier - smaller even. Sam is no where to be seen here, though, which Dean is not quite sure if it's a good thing, or not.
"Dean." Cas says, intent in the line of his glistening mouth, in the softening of his child-huge gaze.
Dean meets his eyes steadily, crunching the triangle of the last of his cone under baby teeth, "Is this heaven?" Dean asks, remembering fireworks and Sam and a highway that stretched on without end.
"Yes," Cas leans forward, Dean leans back - the game they always play; someone pushes, the other pulls- "And no. This is someone else's. This is no memory of yours. We must leave."
Dean huffs something that sounds like of course you'd know that and pushes himself onto his feet. And this time, for this Cas and not, not for the hundreds of the other Cas's who hadn't known (hadn't known to eat ice-cream with messy open bites, hadn't know not to squint at the sidewalk like it held the secrets of the universe, hadn't know the answer ), he closes his eyes and lets sticky fingers press gently to his forehead.