The thing is, after Cas moved in, Sam has gotten more blackmail material against Dean than he knows what to do with. Pictures snapped of the two of them sleeping together on the couch, legs tangled and faces relaxed into easy smiles. Or the way they cook breakfast together in the mornings, Cas working over the stove while Dean clings to his back like a particularly sleepy limpet. Or the fact that, more than once, Sam has gotten out of bed late at night for a glass of water and found Dean trying to teach Cas how to dance to old records playing softly in the corner, his eyes bright and laugh quiet as he guides Cas’ footsteps with gentle prodding. Basically, it’s completely sickening just how utterly and completely ridiculously cute they are, and Sam wants to gag with the very idea of his older brother being cute about anything, but the very worst thing about it is, is that even with the blackmail material of his life, he doesn’t want to use it, because for the first time in so long, he knows that Dean is, well and truly, happy.
Within the first week of them ‘officially’ beginning to share the bed, Dean learns that Cas is the biggest blanket hog he’s ever met in his life bar none. Every night, he wakes around 2 am, shivering and miserable, to find Cas cocooned in sheets on the other side of the bed, like a freaking caterpillar. Dean will tug at the blankets until he can slide himself under the bare minimum Cas will release, and try to get back to sleep, but it’s nearly impossible. Finally, one night, he shakes Cas’ shoulder roughly until Cas wakes up, tells him off. Cas just stares at him, sleepy but bemused, and finally lifts an arm and tugs Dean right into his chest. He’s warm, and soft, and Dean can hear Cas’ heartbeat right against his ear. “Happy now?” Cas grumbles, and falls back asleep before Dean can complain. They sleep every night tangled together after that.
The first thing Dean teaches Cas to cook are pancakes. He presses up behind him in his bathrobe, early morning chill still hanging in the air, rests his chin on Cas’ shoulder and guides his arm into flipping the pancakes, one by one. “You’re a natural,” he says with a grin when Cas manages to flip the third one by himself without it folding double. “There you go.” Cas tries to hide his pleased smile at the compliment, but Dean sees it anyway, wraps his arms a little tighter around Cas’ waist and squeezes.
“We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time eating and sleeping. The second is to tell yourself, "Someone like me will never manage to perfect themselves." In the Buddhist context, such laziness makes you feel that it's pointless even trying, you'll never attain any spiritual realization. Discouragement makes you prefer not even to begin making any effort. And the third kind... is to waste your life on tasks of secondary importance, without ever getting down to what's most essential. You spend all your time trying to resolve minor problems, one after another in an endless sequence, like ripples on the surface of a lake. You tell yourself that once you've finished this or that project you'll start giving some meaning to your life. ”
—Matthieu Ricard, in his book of conversations with his philosopher father, “The Monk and the Philosopher”
An excerpt from the post The Three Kinds of Laziness by Gary Tan.
