On These More Familiar Roads--Chapter Two (2/5)--SPN Fic
Navigation: Chapter One--Chapter Two-- Chapter Three
It doesn't take long to get out of the motel. Cas had barely unpacked, and Dean's edginess is wearing off on him. Breakfast comes from a drive-through, and Cas learns that Dean can unwrap a burrito one-handed while driving.
There isn't much conversation. Dean turns the music up and sings along loudly, barely more in-tune than he'd been in the shower, but with the same enthusiasm. Cas faces the window to hide his smile, then turns his attention to the map. As far as Dean could tell from his vision, Sam's being held by demons in an farmhouse in South Dakota, not too far from Sioux Falls. If all goes well-and Cas is trying not to be cynical, but he's not very sure it will-they should be there in a day, with plenty of time to rescue Sam and maybe even find out who was behind raising the Winchesters.
In the meantime, Dean's either taking the 'vision-thing' much better than Cas would have expected, or he's just suppressing all thought of it and hoping it goes away. Cas has had enough experience with Dean's coping mechanisms to guess that he's doing the latter. They need to talk about it, but this isn't the time. From what Dean has said, it sounds like this is the first properly awake day he's had since he'd been brought back, since the demons had kept him drugged and be-spelled most of the time.
So, he lets Dean listen to his music and when he gives Dean his slice of pie at lunch, the look on Dean's face more than makes the sacrifice worth it.
The night comes fairly quickly. They're far enough north that as each day draws closer to winter, Cas can see the difference. Dean looks like he wants to push on, but Cas insists they stop for the night in the next town they come across. Dean makes a point of asking for two doubles at reception, and Cas doesn't say anything, even when his bed is cold and unwelcoming. His dreams are unpleasant that night, and even though he doesn't remember them in the morning, the lingering uneasiness remains.
Dean seems determinedly cheerful in the morning, but it's easy enough to see that his act is starting to crack. Cas wishes he wouldn't do this-don't they know each other well enough that Dean would know it's pointless trying to lie?-but he knows just as well that saying anything would be futile.
Instead, he just watches Dean clean his gun, then a spare handgun that he gives to Cas. The cold metal weight is strange in his hand. He can shoot, or at least he could, but he has a feeling that holding it on someone, even a monster, and pulling the trigger will be more difficult than when he was an angel. Just the idea makes his stomach twist.
They've left the Rockies behind and the flat expanse of the Midwest stretches before them. Dean isn't singing along with the music today. He's tight-lipped and pale, knuckles stark white against the steering wheel.
Cas notices, but says nothing.
He's not sure if he would have recognized through his movements alone that Dean was in pain before he’d Fallen. His knowledge of body language had been fuzzy when he was an angel, and it's only in the last year that he's started to learn the little signs that hinted at someone's emotions or motives. Before, he would have felt Dean's pain, something separate from him, but easy enough to read at a glance or a thought. In retrospect, the casualness with which he'd used his power to understand the world around him almost feels like cheating.
Not that it makes any difference now. Either way, he can sense that Dean is hurting, and he still can't do anything to stop it.
"Do you want me to drive?" he says after a while.
Dean's eyebrows creep towards his hairline. "You can drive?"
"I drove all the way from Chicago to Washington, Dean. I think you can safely assume that my skills are adequate. Also, I have a license."
Somehow, the eyebrows manage to go higher, but now the corners of Dean's eyes are crinkling, tiny wrinkles that Cas had never noticed before radiating out in spider-web cracks. He thinks he likes them.
"Sorry, man, I'm just trying to imagine you in line at the DMV. How did that go?"
"It went perfectly fine." There had been a few awkward moments, since it was still relatively early in Cas' newfound humanity, but he'd passed the test. Barely. He's become a better driver since.
"And what name did you put on the license?"
Cas shifts. "Cas Novak. It was close enough."
Dean glances over at him. "Cas? Not Castiel?"
Cas looks down at his hands. "I'm not Castiel now. Castiel was an angel- I'm just a man."
"Yeah, but you're pretty badass for a puny human."
He looks up at Dean and realizes that he's blushing slightly. And is he imagining the flick of Dean's eyes down Cas' body?
"There's nothing inherently ‘puny’ about being human, Dean. By your standards, perhaps I am less than physically capable, but that's my own fault. I've-gotten soft."
Dean's eyes are back on the road, but he claps a hand on Cas' shoulder. "Hey, I saw what you did to those demons back in Tacoma. That didn't look soft to me."
Cas smiles, just a little, but he doesn't think Dean notices. Dean hasn’t moved his hand and Cas isn't sure if he realizes it's still there or not. The physical contact seems to be helping him, though. Some of the tension eases out of his shoulders and his fingers rest relaxed on the steering wheel. If Cas is being perfectly honest, it's helping him, too. Dean's hand is warm and grounding even through his layers of shirts, and Cas leans into the touch before he's aware of his actions.
For a long while, the car is quiet except from the softer than usual strains of the radio. The miles stretch on, and Cas' vision starts going hazy as he focuses onto the far distance.
Finally, Dean makes a soft noise and his hand slides off Cas' shoulder. Cas blinks as he pulls into a turnout.
"Fine," Dean says, like he's just lost some big argument. "You can drive, but don’t get used to it. This is a one time, the-driver-just-got-pulled-out-of-the-afterlife deal." He gets out and Cas slides into the driver's seat.
"Are you okay, Dean?" he asks carefully as Dean settles next to him.
"What, a guy can't get tired now?"
Cas stifles a sigh. Oh joy. The defensiveness is back; there’s no mistaking that edge to Dean's voice. He ignores it and pulls out onto the road. Dean slumps back against the leather and closes his eyes. Cas tries to focus on the highway, but every few minutes he finds himself glancing over and checking if Dean's still breathing.
They could probably press on and reach the town in Dean's vision before nightfall but they need food and rest, and Dean's clearly not doing as well as he says. He fell asleep not longer after Cas took over driving, and he's still asleep when Cas finds a motel. He wakes up a little when Cas gets out, but doesn't object when Cas goes in to rent a room. He asks for two doubles and pretends he's not hoping they won't need the second one. It's not even a desire for Dean, though that's there too, he just wants to be close. He's been on his own for a while now, but he's only just starting to realize how alone he'd really been.
Dean makes it inside on his own, takes off his shoes, and flops otherwise fully dressed onto the bed closest to the door. Cas carefully edges the comforter out from under him and pulls it over Dean.
"Thanks, mom," Dean mumbles, but he's smiling. He's asleep a few seconds later.
Cas considers showering, but doesn't like the prospect of sleeping with wet hair. Instead, he pulls out his hat and gloves, and goes to find food. It takes a while. It's six o'clock, and it feels like the whole population is trying to eat at one of the town's two restaurants. He finally makes it through the line at Biggerson's to get his take-out. It's starting to snow when he leaves the restaurant, big, fat flakes that settle on his coat without melting. With the cloud cover, it's a little warmer than it was the last few nights, but it's still too cold to linger outside.
Dean wakes up once the smell of burgers starts to fill the room. He looks better than he had when Cas left, and much better than he had earlier that day. He's obviously still exhausted, but he doesn't look like he's in as much pain.
"How are you feeling?" Cas asks as he pushes Dean's burger over to him. Dean tears into it like he hasn't eaten in a month.
He shrugs. "No one ever talks about how tired being dead makes you," he mumbles around a mouthful of burger. He swallows. "It's been a while, but I could swear I didn't feel this bad when you brought me back."
"You were dead for longer this time," Cas says quietly. "And it looks like you were brought back by demons, not angels." He pauses, considering. "There's also the lingering effects of whatever the demons were giving you to keep you compliant. It should be wearing off by now."
Dean mumbles something that Cas can't quite make out and dives back into his food. Cas eats his own burger a little slower. They're going to get to where Dean saw the demons keeping Sam tomorrow, and he's not sure what they'll find. The thought of Sam alone and a prisoner makes his heart clinch, but right now, he's more worried about Dean. He'd throw everything into rescuing his brother and, right now, that might be more than he can give and still keep himself in one piece. Cas isn't much of a fighter, not anymore, and keeping himself and Dean alive in a fight, not to mention Sam, might be too much. Still, that doesn't mean they won't try. He won't-and Dean can't-abandon Sam, even if it kills them.
"It's snowing," he says, since that seems easier than trying to vocalize anything else.
Dean nods, unsurprised. "It'll be snowing tomorrow too. I saw that in my dream."
Cas looks up at him. "You're taking this very calmly."
"Look, I know demons have all kinds of tricks. Back when Yellow-Eyes was trying to make Sam his new general, there was this kid-Andy-who could beam pictures of whatever he wanted you to see into your head. I know these aren't real visions, not even visions like Sam's. This is just some bastard demon trying to lure me into a trap."
"And you're going to take the bait?" Cas has considered this possibility, but he hadn't expected Dean to. He is a little surprised that it doesn't change his own feelings about finding the farmhouse tomorrow.
"Do I really have a choice?" Dean shrugs again and starts picking at the edge of the tinfoil his hamburger had come in. "It's Sammy, Cas." He looks up, meets Cas' eyes. "I'm not going to ask you to come with me, though. If this really is a trap, I'm not leading you into it."
Cas doesn't even hesitate. "I'm staying with you, Dean."
Dean's smile is one of the best things Cas has seen in days. "Thanks, man."
It's still fairly early, so they watch a little TV and Cas dazzles Dean with his newfound knowledge of popular culture, which, while small, is still greater than it was a year and a half ago. He spends the next hour or so catching Dean up on what had happened while he was gone, focusing more on big world events than what he'd been doing. Dean doesn't ask, but Cas can read his curiosity from across the room whenever Cas strays too close to something personal. He ignores it. There'll be time for that later if they’re not dead tomorrow. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Finally, they start to settle into bed. Cas is just about to flick off the bed stand light when Dean's voice stops him.
"Dammit, Cas, there's no way to say this and not sound like a total girl. Uh, are you still cold?"
"Very," Cas replies without thinking, and then the implications of what Dean said sink in. They don't have long to register because there's movement to his left, and then the bed dips as Dean slides in next to him.
"This okay?" Dean asks, voice deeper than usual, rough with nerves, and Cas' breath catches slightly.
"Yeah. Like you said, it's-it's cold."
Dean is warm next to him, even through two layers of fabric. Cas edges closer before he realizes that a, he's snuggling, and b, he has no idea how close Dean had really wanted to be to him. Dean makes a sleepy, contented noise deep in his throat, though, and moves towards him, and that's enough for Cas.
He's almost asleep when Dean mutters something into Cas' shoulder.
"Dean?" His own voice is barely more than a whisper.
"This is nice." Dean sounds like he's barely conscious. "You keep the nightmares away, you know that? You always have."
"Go to sleep, Dean." In the dark, Cas smiles.
Cas wakes up when the first dim light creeps through the curtains. Dean's still asleep, flat on his stomach with one arm wrapped around his pillow and the other thrown across Cas' chest. Cas edges free and pads into the bathroom.
He takes a long shower, turning his face up to the stream so it beats at his eyelids, the water drowning out everything else. His hand drifts to his groin, and he strokes himself quickly, lost in the still new sensations. Later, when he's drying himself off, struggling to get dressed as quickly as he can in the chilly bathroom, he tries to pretend that he hadn't been thinking of Dean as he came.
Dean's still asleep, so he goes out and checks on the car, then goes to find coffee. The snow stopped falling some time in the night, but the gunmetal gray sky promises that more is on the way. He's never driven in the snow before, so hopefully Dean will feel well enough to drive today, among other things. If he's in the same shape he was yesterday, rescuing Sam has officially become a suicide mission.
The coffee is warm in his hands and Cas flexes his fingers against the cups on his way back to the motel. It's still early, and the town is quiet except for the crunch of snow under his boots.
It's dark in the motel room after the glaring whiteness outside, and it takes his eyes a second to adjust. Dean's still wrapped in a pile of blankets on the bed-it looks like he’d taken advantage of Cas' absence to wrap the rest of the comforter around him.
Cas sets the coffee down on the nightstand, and carefully reaches for what he hopes is Dean's shoulder. It's a little hard to tell under all the blankets.
"Dean?"
Dean startles awake, arms flailing out only to be caught by the blankets. He rolls away from Cas, and his eyes are wide and bright even in the dim light.
"It's okay, it's me," Cas says carefully.
Dean lets out a ragged breath, and some of the tension drains out of his face. "Cas?"
"Are you alright?"
It takes a second but Dean manages to untangle his arms from the sheet. He drags a hand over his face and through his hair, pushing it up into messy spikes. Cas tries to ignore how adorable that makes him look, because if there's one thing that Dean isn't, it's adorable.
"Just a nightmare," he says finally. "Thanks for waking me up."
Cas nods. "I have breakfast."
He'd found an apple turnover for Dean, the kind he'd imagined Dean would like when he was working in the convenience store. From the way Dean's whole face brightens when he sees it, Cas decides he probably wasn't mistaken. Cas picks at his own muffin, his stomach too tight and uncomfortable to eat much.
Hunting down the demons in Seattle was one thing. He'd been desperate to chase down his vision of Dean and barely even thought about the consequences. This is different. Now, there's Dean to worry about too, not to mention that the whole thing is probably a trap.
He can tell Dean's concerned too, though he doesn't show it. He eats his turnover with enthusiasm and more explicit noises than Cas really needed to hear this early in the morning-at least when they're not directed at him-and finishes off the sad remains of Cas' muffin. He's louder than usual as they pack the car, banging the trunk shut with a flourish and whistling until it grates on Cas' nerves.
Dean does apparently feel well enough to drive, and has no problems with the snow. Cas settles back into his seat, glancing over at Dean. Dean's focused on the road and his unconcerned, carefree mask is starting to slip again. "Just a nightmare," he'd said, but Cas knows what his nightmares are like.
"You mind if we listen to some tunes?" Dean asks after they've been driving for about a quarter of an hour. Cas had been wondering what had taken him so long, but he's a little touched that Dean's actually asking. From what he'd heard, that was more consideration than he gave Sam when it came to his music.
Cas nods, and Dean smiles at him, for a second honest and happy, as he reaches over to fiddle with the radio dial.
He goes through four channels before making a disgusted noise and giving up. "Seriously? It's the middle of freakin' November and they're already playing Christmas songs? Here-" He holds out a hand. "Grab one of the tapes."
Cas reaches underneath his seat and pulls out one of the tapes at random. Despite Dean's best efforts a few years ago, he has no real favorites from Dean's collection. The music fills up the car and Cas only half listens to the heavy beat, focusing instead on watching the white fields flash by, or, when he can get a chance without looking too obvious, stealing a glance at Dean. When "Highway to Hell" comes on and Dean fast-forwards through the song, Cas pretends not to notice that either.
It's over two hundred miles from the town they stopped in for the night to the turnoff toward the even tinier town in Dean's vision. Just past Mitchell, they turn north off I-90 onto a highway that's more narrow country road than anything else. Cas has no idea how they'll be able to find one farmhouse out here, but Dean seems to know where they're going.
They follow the road for a few miles before Dean pulls off onto a snow-covered dirt road. "I think this is it," he says, but he doesn't sound very sure. Cas swallows and nods.
After a few minutes, a two-story house comes into view at the end of the road. There are no trees, no cover, no way to hide their approach. They're exposed and vulnerable. If any demons are watching from the house, they've probably already spotted them.
"Oh, fuck it," Dean says, and accelerates. They're going as fast as they can on the snowy road, but Cas isn't sure if the extra speed will make a difference. The memory of Dean driving into Stull Cemetery, reckless and desperate, comes back to him, and Cas' fingers tighten against the seat.
"Why don't you get the bag out of the backseat?" Dean says, and he sounds perfectly calm.
He twists around and pulls the duffle bag holding the weapons Dean's cleaned and oiled in the last few days into his lap. Dean's favorite gun and Ruby's knife aren't there, just an angel sword and the handgun Dean had picked out for him. Cas slips the gun into his waistband, like he's seen Dean do a hundred times, and picks up the sword. Once he would have been able to tell which of his brothers or sisters the sword had belonged to. Now it's just cold, lifeless metal.
"Cas," Dean says, and he sounds almost hesitant. "Cas, if this doesn't go the way we want-I just want you to know that I'm glad you're here. You didn't have to be, I know you have your own life now, but still, thanks." His eyes flick away from the house, just for a second, finding Cas' face, and he looks so lost under the tough mask he's putting on that it makes Cas' insides twist painfully.
"I wouldn't leave you, Dean," he says. "Not now." More like he couldn't leave, but he's not going to tell Dean that. He's learning there's a fine line between what he wants to say and what Dean wants to hear.
They slide a little on the snow as Dean brakes, already reaching for the door handle. They're out of the car almost before Dean's parked, boots squelching in the mushy snow.
The house looks deserted, one more family farm that's lost everything, but there are dark tire tracks on the road and the snow by the front door is already trampled into slush.
Dean breaks down the door in one smooth movement and Cas follows him inside, gripping his sword tightly enough that his knuckles are white against the metal.
Inside, the house feels as deserted as it looks from the outside. It's dark and cold, and Cas shivers even under his four layers of clothes. In front of him, Dean's a comforting, solid shape.
They move through the rooms quickly, scanning them with a tactical team's precision, and Cas barely has time to wonder how long it'd taken Dean to learn how to do this. He's truly scared for the first time since he became human, and it's unexpectingly visceral. His unease is a solid weight sitting in his stomach and his heart is pounding, breath coming in short inhales made painful by the frozen air.
The house seems perfectly ordinary. It's mostly bare of furniture and there are no pictures or knickknacks, nothing to distinguish its previous owners, human or otherwise. There are no signs of demons, and Cas isn't sure if he should be worried or comforted.
The basement is the last room. Dean takes the stairs two at a time, and Cas follows almost as quickly. It's pitch black, and Cas is too busy trying to make sure he doesn't trip on the stairs to realize that the sound of Dean's footsteps has stopped. He just barely catches himself before he bumps into Dean's back.
"Dammit, hang on." There's long pause, then Dean finds the flashlight in his jacket. The light makes Cas blink, but at least they can see what they're up against.
It’s empty. If there was anything living-or not-it's gone. Something has been here, though.
The room is set up like the one he found Dean in. There’s stone altar in the center of the basement, surrounded by candles, with wards and sigils painted on the floor and walls. He recognizes them as signs to ward off angels and detection by magic. Whatever they'd been doing here, they didn't want to be discovered.
"Sam was here," Dean says quietly, looking down at the altar. There are a few drops of congealing blood on it, not enough to be from a significant wound, but still proof that the altar had been used, and recently.
"They knew we were coming. If they gave you that vision, then they probably knew just how long it would take for you to get here."
Dean's still standing frozen, staring at the blood like if he looks at it long enough, it'll tell him what happened.
"It was all a diversion, wasn't it? They're playing with us."
"Probably. Come on, Dean, we need to get out of here."
Dean doesn't seem particularly willing to move, so Cas grabs his arm and tugs him in the direction of the stairs. He doesn't resist, letting Cas lead him back up the steps and through the deserted house. Cas knows he's probably gripping Dean’s arm a little too tightly but he can't shake the feeling that if he lets go, Dean might just slip away. He holds on.
The car is where they left it and there are no signs of attacking demons. Still, Cas' heart is still pounding when he slides into the driver's seat and that Dean doesn't protest doesn't help. Cas eases the Impala back out onto the highway, not daring to look over at Dean until the tires hit asphalt.
They drive in silence until they reach the intersection with the highway.
"Where do we go now?" Cas asks, idling at the stop sign. Mitchell's closer, but Sioux Falls is familiar. Of course, if this were a trap, the demons might assume that they'd head for Bobby's old house. They should probably just keep driving until they're far, far away from here.
Dean's still and pale in the passenger's seat. "Does it really matter?" he says finally. "Sam could be anywhere. The demons have him and I've got no way of tracking him down. It doesn't matter where the fuck we go, because the demons are always going to be one step ahead of us and we're going to be stuck playing their games."
"I'm going to Sioux Falls," Cas says, and turns east. Dean's gone quiet again, but his words are still echoing in the car. He's right, of course. It's almost painfully easy for the demons. They know that Dean will jump at any clue they give him about his brother’s whereabouts and they also know that he's still half dead, his only ally a comparatively helpless ex-angel. The demons could lead them in circles until they died of old age and they still would never find Sam. They're going to have to be proactive.
"I used a spell to find you," Cas says quietly. "I can try it again, see if we can locate Sam that way."
"Is it dangerous for you?" Dean's frowning, obviously wrestling between his two prime directives of ‘Look out for Sammy’, and ‘Anything Witch-y is Evil.’
"It's tiring," Cas admits. "But not dangerous. It uses the power of my soul, not anything demon."
"When can you try it?"
Cas hesitates. "I can do it tonight, I think."
The light touch of Dean's hand on his shoulder makes Cas jump. "Thanks, man. You know what this means to me."
Cas just nods and focuses on the road.
Once they're in town, Cas checks them into a motel and Dean brings in their bags. He's doing a little better, and Cas guesses he just hadn't reacted well to finding nothing. If he'd been thinking along the same lines as Cas, he'd probably been expecting, if not Sam, at least some sort of a fight. The casual teasing was much, much worse, as was the reminder that the demons had Sam, and there was nothing they could do about it.
He sets up the spell more quickly than he did the first time. Dean's watching from a safe distance, which makes Cas smile a little-it's not like he's working with explosives.
Once again, the words of the spell are difficult at first, but quickly begin to flow faster than Cas' brain can process them. It feels a little like falling. Sparks dance at the corners of his vision and he grips the edge of the table hard, trying to center himself.
All he gets is a flash. For a fraction of a second, he sees Sam, face bloodied, still as death except for the flicker behind his eyelids, like he's dreaming. Around him, there's nothing but darkness, no sign that could point them towards where the demons are holding him. Cas can feel it the instant that another force takes over the spell. Pain lances through his head and everything goes black. He falls to the floor, but he’s not aware of it, still trapped in the darkness in his head.
"Cas? Come on, Cas, talk to me!"
Someone's shaking him, hands rough and panicked on his shoulders. It hurts to open his eyes, but he can't ignore Dean.
"You back with me?" Dean's breathing hard, and hasn't let go of Cas yet. His fingers are digging into the muscle hard enough to hurt.
"I'm fine," Cas gasps, which is more or less true. His head is pounding, but he's alive. "Sam's alive," he manages, "but whatever has him is powerful. They blocked me. I wasn't able to get anything."
Dean lets his hands fall away as he sits back on his heels. They're on the floor, Cas realizes, the rough carpet scratching against his back.
"I blacked out?"
"Dude, you practically had a seizure. Another couple of seconds, and I was calling 911."
"Oh." Cas tries to sit up, but his muscles don't seem to want to work yet. "Help me up?"
Dean gets an arm around him and pulls him up onto his feet without much difficulty. Cas is barely standing before there's a rush of static in his ears, and black spots obscure his sight. He grabs for Dean, hands fisting in his shirt, trying to keep himself upright.
"Whoa, I got you." Dean maneuvers him over to the bed and lets him sink down onto the comforter.
"I'm sorry, I don't think I can use that spell again." Cas' voice sounds faint in his own ears.
"Just stay with me, okay? I'm gonna get you water. Don't you dare fall asleep."
Actually, falling asleep sounds nice. Cas settles back against the pillows and tries to focus on his breathing. It's a long time before Dean comes back, or maybe it just feels like it. He's got a glass of water and two aspirin, which stick a little in Cas' throat when he tries to swallow them. By now, the buzzing in his ears has quieted and he can see normally. His head still hurts, but it's better.
"Are you going to be okay?" Dean's still sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning at him.
"I'll be fine." He shifts, rolling over on his side so he's facing Dean. "I just need some rest."
Dean's frown stays fixed in place.
"It's not a concussion," Cas tells him. "I had acute psychic trauma, not brain damage."
"Still..." Dean doesn't look convinced.
"Why don't you go out and find food? I'll be fine here."
"I'll stick around for a while. Let me know if you need anything." The bed shifts as Dean stands. Cas rolls over, buries his face into the pillow, and sleeps.
When he wakes up, it's dark and Dean's gone. For a second, he panics, and then he remembers that he’d told Dean to go get food. He'll be back soon.
There's a wave of dizziness when he stands, but it passes. He makes it into the bathroom, refills the glass Dean had left by the sink, and splashes water on his face. It's cold enough to make his breath catch, but it chases away the lingering drowsiness. He carries the glass back to bed, and settles in to wait for Dean.
He makes it through two episodes of some cooking show before he starts to worry.
Back before they left Tacoma, Dean had picked out one of the burner phones in the glove box and given Cas the number. He digs his phone out of his bag with hands that are certainly not shaking and finds Dean's number in speed-dial.
Dean answers just before it's about to go to voice mail. "Cas?" He sounds surprised, and the word's maybe a little slurred. "You okay?"
"I just wanted to make sure you were alright." It doesn't come off as suave as Cas had hoped, but it's better than it could have been.
"Oh, geeze, I was going to get you food, wasn't I?"
"It's all right, I'm not particularly hungry." He pauses, listening. There's a low rumble of background noise behind Dean's voice, and it takes Cas a moment to place the sounds. "Are you in a bar?"
There's a short pause. "Yeah," Dean says finally. "That a problem?" The defensiveness in his voice makes Cas wince.
He closes his eyes, but it doesn't do anything to help the reemergence of his headache. "No, of course not. Just be careful. We don't know if there are still demons in the area."
"Yeah, of course. I'll be back soon. You gonna be okay?"
"I'll be fine."
Dean hangs up. Cas stares at his phone for a second, then sets it down on the bedside table. It's Dean's choice if he wants to go out and drink until he forgets, which is what Cas is fairly sure he's doing. He's a grown man. It's not like Cas has ever been able to tell him what to do, even when he was an angel.
Cas groans and gets out of bed. He pads over to the window, pulling back the curtain just enough so he can see the Impala parked outside. At least he doesn't have to worry about Dean driving back. He lies back down and tries to focus on his breathing again. It must work, because the next thing he knows, the door is crashing open and Dean's stumbling inside.
"Hey Cas," Dean slurs, and he sounds happy, at least. "You didn't have to wait up, buddy."
"I didn't," Cas tells him, but Dean's not paying attention. He's trying to get his shoes off without falling, which is apparently more difficult than Cas would have thought.
He watches him for a minute before he takes pity on him. "Sit." He pushes Dean down onto the edge of the bed.
"Ooh, you're bossy," Dean says. "I like it when you're bossy."
Cas resists the temptation to roll his eyes. "Give me your foot." It takes a second to untangle the laces and pull Dean's shoe off. The second one is easier. Dean hadn't tried to take that one off yet and the knot isn't snarled beyond recognition.
When his shoes are off, Dean plops backwards with a sigh. Cas sits carefully on the other bed. "Did you have a good evening?" he asks.
"It was...awesome," Dean says, making a sweeping gesture with his hands for emphasis.
"Well, at least you're a happy drunk."
""M not drunk!" Dean sounds genuinely offended, and Cas stifles a smile.
"You're sure about that?"
"Absolutely. I may be a little, uh, tipsy, but that's just 'cause being dead makes your tolerance go-" He imitates the sound of something falling, followed by an explosion. He frowns. "It's sad, really."
For a second, neither of them speaks. Then Dean reaches out towards Cas. "Come 'ere. I wanna tell you a secret."
Cas lets Dean pull him onto the bed. He settles back against the headboard, trying to keep a respectable distance between him and Dean. It's surprisingly difficult.
"See, I've been thinking about it, ever since I woke up." Dean's voice is pitched to a stage whisper. "I don't know where I was."
It takes Cas a minute, trying to trace back through what Dean had said to-oh.
"You don't remember where your soul went?" he asks, just to clarify.
Dean shakes his head. "Not a freakin' clue."
"I'm sure you were in Heaven," Cas says carefully. Maybe Dean will take it at face value and let it go. Cas isn't sure either of them is going to like this train of thought if it plays out.
Dean snorts. "Yeah, like they'd let me upstairs after everything Sammy and me did to mess up their Apocalypse. Nah, I think I went the other way."
Cas freezes. Just because he'd been thinking about it didn't mean that Dean should have been. He'd wondered about where the boy's souls had gone a few times. The first time he contemplated that particular metaphysical question was also the first time he got drunk as a human. He avoided both after that.
"And if it was just Hell," Dean went on, "I could deal with that. But what if I started torturing again? A year and a half-that's a long time. How many souls-" He breaks off, shuddering.
Cas says nothing, but he reaches out and finds Dean's shoulder, giving it what he hopes is a comforting squeeze.
Dean's not finished, though.
"And then there's you."
Cas' breath catches. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, if I wasn't headed towards Hell before, I sure am now." Dean pulls away from him, propping himself up on one elbow so he can look at Cas. Which he does, with enough intensity to make Cas squirm. It's equal parts awkward and arousing, and he's trying very hard to focus on the former.
"You show up with your stupid hair, like some stupid knight in shining armor, and I can't-" Dean swallows hard. "You used to be a fuckin’ angel, and if that’s not messed up-I can't deal with this."
"Dean, I don't understand. Are you-are you angry with me?" He'd thought everything was going well, or at least as well as could be expected with Sam missing, Dean weak from his resurrection, and Cas, well, whatever the Hell Cas is now. Maybe he was wrong.
"Angry?" Dean's face is written over with confusion and maybe a little bit of hurt. "Why the Hell would I be angry with you?"
Cas frowns. "Then-"
Dean sits up, then bends down, one hand going in Cas' hair and the other framing his jaw as he leans down. Cas can see it coming. He has more than enough time to push Dean off, to tell him that he's drunk and needs to go to sleep, to stop this before anything happens. But he doesn't.
Instead, he meets Dean halfway, pulls him closer, his hands catching on Dean's jacket.
Dean's lips aren't quite as soft as Cas had imagined they might be, and he tastes of liquor, but it doesn't matter. Cas groans against him and Dean presses forward, licking into his mouth. It's not a very coordinated kiss, even in Cas' very limited experience, but it's good, and he lets it go on for longer than he should.
"Wait," he finally gasps, turning his head away from Dean. "We need to stop. You only want this because you're drunk. I'm not going to let you do something you'll regret in the morning." Because, dammit, one of them has to behave like a responsible adult. Cas just really, really wishes it didn't have to be him.
"I always want you," Dean mumbles against his ear, and while Cas would like to think he's telling the truth, he's known Dean for a long time. He's drunk and self-doubting, and Cas just happens to be the one here, too caught up in his own feelings to turn him away from the beginning like he'd needed to. Fuck.
"Come on." He pushes at Dean, and he backs up obediently. Cas is just going to have to ignore the hurt and confusion on his face, because he can't go through with this if he pays too much attention to it. “Get under the covers.”
Dean obeys, but he doesn’t pull the blankets over himself. “You gonna join me?”
Cas thinks maybe he’s trying to sound seductive, but it comes out a little too slurred to have the desired effect.
“No,” Cas tells him, and turns around, tugging back the comforter of his own bed.
“Please-” Dean catches at the back of his shirt. “Please, Cas, I just don’t wanna be alone.”
Cas is a coward. A horrible, craven coward. He walks around the foot of Dean’s bed and slides in next to him, trying to ignore how nice Dean’s warmth is against the cold air. They’ve done this before and it managed to stay perfectly innocent. He tries not to tense as Dean wraps around him with what feels like more arms and legs than he should possess, but it seems like Dean’s odd mood has passed.
“Did I ever tell you that you smell really nice?” Dean mumbles, voice muted by Cas’ shoulder. Or maybe it hasn’t. “Like, really nice.”
“Go to sleep, Dean.” Cas reaches up and turns off the light. By the time he’s managed to arrange himself in some semblance of comfort, Dean’s already snoring.
Cas doesn’t sleep well. It takes him a long time just to fall asleep and even then it doesn’t last. He wakes up a few hours later, jittery and uncomfortable, and when he realizes that there’s no way he’s going to get more sleep tonight, he carefully extricates himself from Dean’s grip, and gets up.
Sam’s laptop is out in the Impala, and it’s cold enough Cas is fairly sure he can feel frostbite spreading across his skin while he’s trying to find it. It doesn’t want to start either, and it takes several long minutes of careful prodding to get it to work. Cas has limited experience with computers. He’s seen April’s children use them often enough that he thinks he understands the basics and, before that, he’d watched Sam and Dean research, though he hadn’t paid much attention to their methods at the time. Still, he knows the things to look for.
Dean wakes up a little after eight, bleary-eyed and faintly green. He vanishes into the bathroom as soon as he’s awake, and Cas is just about to start getting worried when he comes back out, less green but still a little unsteady.
“Morning,” Dean says, and it sounds like he’s been gargling broken glass.
Cas hesitates. Dean isn’t acting like anything happened last night, and while Cas would love to think it’s because of his self-confidence and ease of accepting possibly new and/or suppressed aspects of his personality, it’s Dean. Cas isn’t going to get his hopes up.
“Feeling better?” he asks, closing the laptop and standing. His vertebrae reorient with a satisfying pop as he stretches. Motel chairs are not meant for overnight researching marathons.
“Not really,” Dean says. “Guess I made it home okay last night?”
“You don’t remember?” Cas says carefully.
Dean shakes his head. “Not a thing.” He pauses, considering. “I didn’t do anything stupid, did I?”
Cas can still feel the echo of Dean’s lips against his own. He shakes his head.
“Well, that’s something.” He sits across the table from Cas, covering his face with his hands. Cas knows he’s hovering, so he sits too and tries not to stare.
“Will you be all right?” He’s aching to reach out and touch him, to be the thing anchoring Dean in reality and not whatever self-loathing universe he’s trapped himself in. That’s all he’s ever wanted.
“It’s just a hangover, Cas, I’ll be fine,” Dean snaps, harsher than Cas hopes he means.
“I did some research last night,” Cas says, and waits carefully for Dean’s reaction.
Dean lifts his head off his arms and looks at him. His eyes are bloodshot, and Cas isn’t sure it’s just from last night’s overindulgence.
“It took me a while to learn how to use the search engines, but I think I was able to locate a series of demonic omens. It’s not a guarantee, but I hope I may have found where the demons are holding Sam, or where they were, at least.”
Dean blinks at him. “I don’t know what to be more impressed by,” he says finally. “That you used the computer or that you found the bastards.”
“May have found them. I’m not sure yet.”
“Where?”
Cas turns the computer around.
“New Mexico?” Dean frowns. “Well, that’s not far away at all.”
“It could be another trap.” Cas has been turning it over in his head for the better part of the morning. He can’t put it past the demons to lay a false trail, but the omens looked too messy, too imprecise to be deliberate. A few barely-reported strange cattle deaths, a freak winter thunderstorm, and two disappearances in a fifty-mile radius were not exactly a glaring pattern.
Dean shrugs. “So? As far as traps go, their last one kind of sucked.”
“They weren’t trying to hurt you,” Cas tells him. “They were trying to demoralize you. And it worked.”
He gets a glare for that. “Wow, Cas, thanks.”
“You mean to tell me that you would have drunk as much as you did last night if you’d found Sam, or even if you’d just been able to kill some demons?”
Dean shoves that laptop across the tiny table to him and lets his head fall back onto his arms. “Getting drunk isn’t exactly a new coping strategy for me. You know that. It’s time-honored Winchester tradition.” His forearm muffles his voice, and Cas has to strain to hear.
He really doesn’t know what to say to that. So, he decides to use the other Winchester tradition: ignore and repress. “We should get ready to leave,” he says. “Like you said, it’s a long way to New Mexico.”
Dean groans and pushes himself upright. “Do you want to drive again?” Cas must look shocked, because Dean quickly backtracks. “Just until the headache’s gone. This isn’t a permanent thing.”
Cas nods and closes the laptop. There isn’t too much to take back out to the Impala-it had been too cold the night before to take the time to bring anything but the necessities into the motel room. They’re checked out by nine o’clock, Cas easing the Impala out onto the thankfully well-snowplowed highway.
“So, how much of the human experience have you, you know, experienced?”
“What?” Cas glances over at Dean, who’s huddled up in the passenger seat, his eyes hidden by over-large sunglasses that look a little ridiculous on him. He’s grinning, wide and just a little lewd, and Cas can’t help but think of the way he looked the night before, right after they kissed. It’s tempting to kiss him again and wipe that smug look off his face, but he knows he can’t. Instead, he settles for turning back to the road, fingers tight on the steering wheel.
“Come on, it’s been, what, a year and half since you lost your angel mojo? You can’t tell me you’ve spent that whole time living a life of quiet contemplation.”
“I haven’t found the occasion to engage in many activities. I have been to a movie theater.” He’d gone with April and her children once, and now, he can’t even remember what film they’d seen. All he can remember is how bright and loud the movie was, the taste of the fake butter on his popcorn, how he’d wished, even with people he’d learned to care about around him, that it was Dean sitting next to him, stealing his popcorn and whispering in his ear.
“Well, that’s something, I guess.” Dean doesn’t look convinced. “You need to get out more.”
“I ‘get out.’” Cas doesn’t know why he’s arguing. He knows that his life as a human had, until recently, been quite uneventful. Still, it’s not like he sat around missing his friends and family until Dean came back into his life. He had a job. He watched TV. He learned how to read humans other than the Winchesters, began to try and understand their motives and desires. He’s starting to understand his own.
Dean huffs out a soft laugh, then purses his lips, considering. “So, I’m guessing you still haven’t gotten laid?”
“And if I had, would that be any of your business?” Cas hopes he isn’t blushing. He’s had a few offers, or he thinks he has-understanding human flirtation is still something of a mystery to him-but he hasn’t acted on any of them. Perhaps he’s been foolish, but he’d rather wait for something more than a one-night stand, and he’s found other means to satisfy the cravings for release he’s experienced now that he’s fully human.
Dean smirks, raising his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, man.” He reaches for the radio. “Let’s have some tunes.”
The snow lasts as they head south, driving past endless, wide, white fields. Zeppelin IV lasts them for most of the morning, and after they stop for lunch in a truck-stop diner on the Iowa/Nebraska border, they drive on in silence. Dean drives after they stop and Cas doesn’t contest. He’s tired, and his eyes hurt from watching the snow-covered countryside.
They start traveling east at Kansas City, and when they turn onto smaller highways, avoiding the signs for Highway 70 and Lawrence, Cas doesn’t say anything. He does wonder, though, how many times in the thousands and thousands of miles that Dean and his brother had traveled, they’d taken a longer route just to avoid their hometown.
They make it as far as Wichita before Dean wordlessly calls it a night by pulling into the next cheap-looking motel they pass. Miraculously, the heater actually works, and when Dean orders Chinese take-out, Cas decides it’s not too bad of a night. They watch TV while they’re eating, and Cas magnanimously lets Dean take control of the remote. Dean, it turns out, is incapable of watching a show without commenting on it, even when he’s flipping through channels every few minutes. That, or he just feels like it’s his responsibility to educate Cas about the intricacies of pop culture.
Still, Cas can’t shake the feeling that something’s off.
“Is everything alright?” he asks finally.
Dean freezes with a spring roll halfway to his mouth. “What? Why?”
Cas shrugs. “You’ve just been in such a good mood today, and after last night-”
“You’re worried because I’m in a good mood? Wow, that really says a lot about the last couple of years we’ve known each other, doesn’t it?” Dean’s sharp laugh is more than a little bitter and Cas’ stomach sinks. He hadn’t meant it like that and he’s fairly sure Dean knows it, too.
“Just stop it.” It comes out a little harsher than Cas had intended and he mentally winces. “Sorry, just please, talk to me.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” Dean says, and Cas would brush it off as denial except that his words are careful, hesitant, like he’s scared of letting them out. “It’s just, I learned a long time ago what this is like. Sam’s gone, and whatever I can do, it’s not gonna be soon enough. And I do-” He swallows, then twitches his shoulders upwards helplessly. “I get so focused on ‘rescue Sammy’ that I make stupid mistakes. I can’t afford to do that now.”
“That sounds surprisingly well-adjusted.”
Dean smiles weakly. “Well, I’ve got to start sometime, don’t I? And we’re close, I know it. Those sons of bitches don’t know how close we are. This time, we’ll be able to get the jump on them.”
Cas falls asleep not long after that. When he wakes up, there’s a split second of panic as he tries to orient. It’s still dark outside, but Dean had fallen asleep with the TV on and its flickering light casts odd shadows across their beds. Cas’ heart is still pounding from whatever had woken him up, but the motel room is quiet. Dean must have muted the TV when Cas fell asleep.
Then Dean moans, or sobs, really, and shifts fretfully. Cas has heard that noise before, back when he first pulled Dean out of Hell and he hadn’t started to drown out the nightmares with alcohol yet.
Cas slips out of bed and closes the distance between them. “Dean?” He hesitates before reaching for his shoulder-he’s not sure if Dean will react like he had when Cas had found him in the apartment building, and he doesn’t want to get punched again. “Dean!”
Dean’s eyes open and he flinches away from Cas. “What-” He’s out of breath, like he’s been running, and his eyes are a little too bright, even in the dim light. “What’s wrong?”
“You were dreaming. It didn’t sound pleasant.”
Dean pulls himself up and settles his back against the headboard. “I had another vision-dream-whatever,” he says, and Cas waits, because it’s impossible that this is good news. “I saw Sam. They’re-they’re torturing him. I think they’re trying to get him to join them, I don’t know.”
“Did you see anything else? Anything that could lead us to them?”
Dean shakes his head.
Cas sinks onto the edge of the bed. “We’ll find him, Dean, I promise.”
Dean’s still breathing hard, body shaking with each ragged inhale and exhale. They’re only a few inches away, but they’re like magnets with the same charge, the same force that could pull them together forming a barrier between them. For a second, Cas wonders what would happen if he tries to breach the space, if he pulls Dean against his chest and holds him until Dean’s panic fades. Then Dean’s moving, pulling away from Cas and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Cas stands quickly.
“We need to get moving,” Dean says, throwing Cas’ over-shirt at him. Cas can’t argue with that and they pack the car in silence.
They’re on the road in half an hour, stopping on the outskirts of town to gas up and caffeinate. Cas stays by the Impala while Dean goes into the store. He waits for the click of the pump, his breath freezing in the air, and tries to figure out how long it’ll take to get to New Mexico. There’s no guarantee they’ll even find Sam once they get there, and Cas isn’t sure what their next step will be if the demons have already moved on. The assembled forces of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory couldn’t force Dean to give up the hunt for his brother.
The only question is how much Dean will self-destruct in the process. Cas would sacrifice himself in a second if it could mean saving Sam, but he can’t lose Dean.
“Everything okay?”
Cas jumps, realizing that the pump had stopped a long time ago, and that Dean’s looking at him oddly, two cheap Styrofoam cups of coffee in his hands. Cas nods, hooking up the pump as quickly as he can, cold fingers fumbling when he tries to replace the gas cap.
Once they’re on the highway, Dean glances over at Cas. “So it looks like we can get there by mid-morning, if we push it.”
“Good.” Cas cups his hands around his coffee, letting the warmth sink into his skin. “Dean-” He breaks off, trying to find the right way to form his thoughts. Learning how to say things in the least painful way is more difficult than he expected. It was something he’d only rarely thought about as an angel, but now, especially with Dean, it seems incredibly important. “Sam is strong. Whatever the demons want from him, he’ll be able to resist.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.” Dean’s watching the road, eyes fixed somewhere at the edge of the yellow pools of light cast by the Impala’s headlights. There’s an edge of something unpleasant in his voice that sounds dangerously close to skepticism.
Cas could tell him that he knows he’s right, that he’s seen all the things Sam suffered in the Cage, and that not even centuries of torture broke him, but he doesn’t. If Dean doesn’t already know the details then it’s not Cas’ place to share them. He frowns and settles for sending up an unheard prayer that they find Sam before time proves either of them right.
Behind them, the sky is starting to lighten, dark blue shot with cotton candy pink, but ahead the road is still dark. Cas guesses it will be for a while.
Next
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It doesn't take long to get out of the motel. Cas had barely unpacked, and Dean's edginess is wearing off on him. Breakfast comes from a drive-through, and Cas learns that Dean can unwrap a burrito one-handed while driving.
There isn't much conversation. Dean turns the music up and sings along loudly, barely more in-tune than he'd been in the shower, but with the same enthusiasm. Cas faces the window to hide his smile, then turns his attention to the map. As far as Dean could tell from his vision, Sam's being held by demons in an farmhouse in South Dakota, not too far from Sioux Falls. If all goes well-and Cas is trying not to be cynical, but he's not very sure it will-they should be there in a day, with plenty of time to rescue Sam and maybe even find out who was behind raising the Winchesters.
In the meantime, Dean's either taking the 'vision-thing' much better than Cas would have expected, or he's just suppressing all thought of it and hoping it goes away. Cas has had enough experience with Dean's coping mechanisms to guess that he's doing the latter. They need to talk about it, but this isn't the time. From what Dean has said, it sounds like this is the first properly awake day he's had since he'd been brought back, since the demons had kept him drugged and be-spelled most of the time.
So, he lets Dean listen to his music and when he gives Dean his slice of pie at lunch, the look on Dean's face more than makes the sacrifice worth it.
The night comes fairly quickly. They're far enough north that as each day draws closer to winter, Cas can see the difference. Dean looks like he wants to push on, but Cas insists they stop for the night in the next town they come across. Dean makes a point of asking for two doubles at reception, and Cas doesn't say anything, even when his bed is cold and unwelcoming. His dreams are unpleasant that night, and even though he doesn't remember them in the morning, the lingering uneasiness remains.
Dean seems determinedly cheerful in the morning, but it's easy enough to see that his act is starting to crack. Cas wishes he wouldn't do this-don't they know each other well enough that Dean would know it's pointless trying to lie?-but he knows just as well that saying anything would be futile.
Instead, he just watches Dean clean his gun, then a spare handgun that he gives to Cas. The cold metal weight is strange in his hand. He can shoot, or at least he could, but he has a feeling that holding it on someone, even a monster, and pulling the trigger will be more difficult than when he was an angel. Just the idea makes his stomach twist.
They've left the Rockies behind and the flat expanse of the Midwest stretches before them. Dean isn't singing along with the music today. He's tight-lipped and pale, knuckles stark white against the steering wheel.
Cas notices, but says nothing.
He's not sure if he would have recognized through his movements alone that Dean was in pain before he’d Fallen. His knowledge of body language had been fuzzy when he was an angel, and it's only in the last year that he's started to learn the little signs that hinted at someone's emotions or motives. Before, he would have felt Dean's pain, something separate from him, but easy enough to read at a glance or a thought. In retrospect, the casualness with which he'd used his power to understand the world around him almost feels like cheating.
Not that it makes any difference now. Either way, he can sense that Dean is hurting, and he still can't do anything to stop it.
"Do you want me to drive?" he says after a while.
Dean's eyebrows creep towards his hairline. "You can drive?"
"I drove all the way from Chicago to Washington, Dean. I think you can safely assume that my skills are adequate. Also, I have a license."
Somehow, the eyebrows manage to go higher, but now the corners of Dean's eyes are crinkling, tiny wrinkles that Cas had never noticed before radiating out in spider-web cracks. He thinks he likes them.
"Sorry, man, I'm just trying to imagine you in line at the DMV. How did that go?"
"It went perfectly fine." There had been a few awkward moments, since it was still relatively early in Cas' newfound humanity, but he'd passed the test. Barely. He's become a better driver since.
"And what name did you put on the license?"
Cas shifts. "Cas Novak. It was close enough."
Dean glances over at him. "Cas? Not Castiel?"
Cas looks down at his hands. "I'm not Castiel now. Castiel was an angel- I'm just a man."
"Yeah, but you're pretty badass for a puny human."
He looks up at Dean and realizes that he's blushing slightly. And is he imagining the flick of Dean's eyes down Cas' body?
"There's nothing inherently ‘puny’ about being human, Dean. By your standards, perhaps I am less than physically capable, but that's my own fault. I've-gotten soft."
Dean's eyes are back on the road, but he claps a hand on Cas' shoulder. "Hey, I saw what you did to those demons back in Tacoma. That didn't look soft to me."
Cas smiles, just a little, but he doesn't think Dean notices. Dean hasn’t moved his hand and Cas isn't sure if he realizes it's still there or not. The physical contact seems to be helping him, though. Some of the tension eases out of his shoulders and his fingers rest relaxed on the steering wheel. If Cas is being perfectly honest, it's helping him, too. Dean's hand is warm and grounding even through his layers of shirts, and Cas leans into the touch before he's aware of his actions.
For a long while, the car is quiet except from the softer than usual strains of the radio. The miles stretch on, and Cas' vision starts going hazy as he focuses onto the far distance.
Finally, Dean makes a soft noise and his hand slides off Cas' shoulder. Cas blinks as he pulls into a turnout.
"Fine," Dean says, like he's just lost some big argument. "You can drive, but don’t get used to it. This is a one time, the-driver-just-got-pulled-out-of-the-afterlife deal." He gets out and Cas slides into the driver's seat.
"Are you okay, Dean?" he asks carefully as Dean settles next to him.
"What, a guy can't get tired now?"
Cas stifles a sigh. Oh joy. The defensiveness is back; there’s no mistaking that edge to Dean's voice. He ignores it and pulls out onto the road. Dean slumps back against the leather and closes his eyes. Cas tries to focus on the highway, but every few minutes he finds himself glancing over and checking if Dean's still breathing.
They could probably press on and reach the town in Dean's vision before nightfall but they need food and rest, and Dean's clearly not doing as well as he says. He fell asleep not longer after Cas took over driving, and he's still asleep when Cas finds a motel. He wakes up a little when Cas gets out, but doesn't object when Cas goes in to rent a room. He asks for two doubles and pretends he's not hoping they won't need the second one. It's not even a desire for Dean, though that's there too, he just wants to be close. He's been on his own for a while now, but he's only just starting to realize how alone he'd really been.
Dean makes it inside on his own, takes off his shoes, and flops otherwise fully dressed onto the bed closest to the door. Cas carefully edges the comforter out from under him and pulls it over Dean.
"Thanks, mom," Dean mumbles, but he's smiling. He's asleep a few seconds later.
Cas considers showering, but doesn't like the prospect of sleeping with wet hair. Instead, he pulls out his hat and gloves, and goes to find food. It takes a while. It's six o'clock, and it feels like the whole population is trying to eat at one of the town's two restaurants. He finally makes it through the line at Biggerson's to get his take-out. It's starting to snow when he leaves the restaurant, big, fat flakes that settle on his coat without melting. With the cloud cover, it's a little warmer than it was the last few nights, but it's still too cold to linger outside.
Dean wakes up once the smell of burgers starts to fill the room. He looks better than he had when Cas left, and much better than he had earlier that day. He's obviously still exhausted, but he doesn't look like he's in as much pain.
"How are you feeling?" Cas asks as he pushes Dean's burger over to him. Dean tears into it like he hasn't eaten in a month.
He shrugs. "No one ever talks about how tired being dead makes you," he mumbles around a mouthful of burger. He swallows. "It's been a while, but I could swear I didn't feel this bad when you brought me back."
"You were dead for longer this time," Cas says quietly. "And it looks like you were brought back by demons, not angels." He pauses, considering. "There's also the lingering effects of whatever the demons were giving you to keep you compliant. It should be wearing off by now."
Dean mumbles something that Cas can't quite make out and dives back into his food. Cas eats his own burger a little slower. They're going to get to where Dean saw the demons keeping Sam tomorrow, and he's not sure what they'll find. The thought of Sam alone and a prisoner makes his heart clinch, but right now, he's more worried about Dean. He'd throw everything into rescuing his brother and, right now, that might be more than he can give and still keep himself in one piece. Cas isn't much of a fighter, not anymore, and keeping himself and Dean alive in a fight, not to mention Sam, might be too much. Still, that doesn't mean they won't try. He won't-and Dean can't-abandon Sam, even if it kills them.
"It's snowing," he says, since that seems easier than trying to vocalize anything else.
Dean nods, unsurprised. "It'll be snowing tomorrow too. I saw that in my dream."
Cas looks up at him. "You're taking this very calmly."
"Look, I know demons have all kinds of tricks. Back when Yellow-Eyes was trying to make Sam his new general, there was this kid-Andy-who could beam pictures of whatever he wanted you to see into your head. I know these aren't real visions, not even visions like Sam's. This is just some bastard demon trying to lure me into a trap."
"And you're going to take the bait?" Cas has considered this possibility, but he hadn't expected Dean to. He is a little surprised that it doesn't change his own feelings about finding the farmhouse tomorrow.
"Do I really have a choice?" Dean shrugs again and starts picking at the edge of the tinfoil his hamburger had come in. "It's Sammy, Cas." He looks up, meets Cas' eyes. "I'm not going to ask you to come with me, though. If this really is a trap, I'm not leading you into it."
Cas doesn't even hesitate. "I'm staying with you, Dean."
Dean's smile is one of the best things Cas has seen in days. "Thanks, man."
It's still fairly early, so they watch a little TV and Cas dazzles Dean with his newfound knowledge of popular culture, which, while small, is still greater than it was a year and a half ago. He spends the next hour or so catching Dean up on what had happened while he was gone, focusing more on big world events than what he'd been doing. Dean doesn't ask, but Cas can read his curiosity from across the room whenever Cas strays too close to something personal. He ignores it. There'll be time for that later if they’re not dead tomorrow. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Finally, they start to settle into bed. Cas is just about to flick off the bed stand light when Dean's voice stops him.
"Dammit, Cas, there's no way to say this and not sound like a total girl. Uh, are you still cold?"
"Very," Cas replies without thinking, and then the implications of what Dean said sink in. They don't have long to register because there's movement to his left, and then the bed dips as Dean slides in next to him.
"This okay?" Dean asks, voice deeper than usual, rough with nerves, and Cas' breath catches slightly.
"Yeah. Like you said, it's-it's cold."
Dean is warm next to him, even through two layers of fabric. Cas edges closer before he realizes that a, he's snuggling, and b, he has no idea how close Dean had really wanted to be to him. Dean makes a sleepy, contented noise deep in his throat, though, and moves towards him, and that's enough for Cas.
He's almost asleep when Dean mutters something into Cas' shoulder.
"Dean?" His own voice is barely more than a whisper.
"This is nice." Dean sounds like he's barely conscious. "You keep the nightmares away, you know that? You always have."
"Go to sleep, Dean." In the dark, Cas smiles.
Cas wakes up when the first dim light creeps through the curtains. Dean's still asleep, flat on his stomach with one arm wrapped around his pillow and the other thrown across Cas' chest. Cas edges free and pads into the bathroom.
He takes a long shower, turning his face up to the stream so it beats at his eyelids, the water drowning out everything else. His hand drifts to his groin, and he strokes himself quickly, lost in the still new sensations. Later, when he's drying himself off, struggling to get dressed as quickly as he can in the chilly bathroom, he tries to pretend that he hadn't been thinking of Dean as he came.
Dean's still asleep, so he goes out and checks on the car, then goes to find coffee. The snow stopped falling some time in the night, but the gunmetal gray sky promises that more is on the way. He's never driven in the snow before, so hopefully Dean will feel well enough to drive today, among other things. If he's in the same shape he was yesterday, rescuing Sam has officially become a suicide mission.
The coffee is warm in his hands and Cas flexes his fingers against the cups on his way back to the motel. It's still early, and the town is quiet except for the crunch of snow under his boots.
It's dark in the motel room after the glaring whiteness outside, and it takes his eyes a second to adjust. Dean's still wrapped in a pile of blankets on the bed-it looks like he’d taken advantage of Cas' absence to wrap the rest of the comforter around him.
Cas sets the coffee down on the nightstand, and carefully reaches for what he hopes is Dean's shoulder. It's a little hard to tell under all the blankets.
"Dean?"
Dean startles awake, arms flailing out only to be caught by the blankets. He rolls away from Cas, and his eyes are wide and bright even in the dim light.
"It's okay, it's me," Cas says carefully.
Dean lets out a ragged breath, and some of the tension drains out of his face. "Cas?"
"Are you alright?"
It takes a second but Dean manages to untangle his arms from the sheet. He drags a hand over his face and through his hair, pushing it up into messy spikes. Cas tries to ignore how adorable that makes him look, because if there's one thing that Dean isn't, it's adorable.
"Just a nightmare," he says finally. "Thanks for waking me up."
Cas nods. "I have breakfast."
He'd found an apple turnover for Dean, the kind he'd imagined Dean would like when he was working in the convenience store. From the way Dean's whole face brightens when he sees it, Cas decides he probably wasn't mistaken. Cas picks at his own muffin, his stomach too tight and uncomfortable to eat much.
Hunting down the demons in Seattle was one thing. He'd been desperate to chase down his vision of Dean and barely even thought about the consequences. This is different. Now, there's Dean to worry about too, not to mention that the whole thing is probably a trap.
He can tell Dean's concerned too, though he doesn't show it. He eats his turnover with enthusiasm and more explicit noises than Cas really needed to hear this early in the morning-at least when they're not directed at him-and finishes off the sad remains of Cas' muffin. He's louder than usual as they pack the car, banging the trunk shut with a flourish and whistling until it grates on Cas' nerves.
Dean does apparently feel well enough to drive, and has no problems with the snow. Cas settles back into his seat, glancing over at Dean. Dean's focused on the road and his unconcerned, carefree mask is starting to slip again. "Just a nightmare," he'd said, but Cas knows what his nightmares are like.
"You mind if we listen to some tunes?" Dean asks after they've been driving for about a quarter of an hour. Cas had been wondering what had taken him so long, but he's a little touched that Dean's actually asking. From what he'd heard, that was more consideration than he gave Sam when it came to his music.
Cas nods, and Dean smiles at him, for a second honest and happy, as he reaches over to fiddle with the radio dial.
He goes through four channels before making a disgusted noise and giving up. "Seriously? It's the middle of freakin' November and they're already playing Christmas songs? Here-" He holds out a hand. "Grab one of the tapes."
Cas reaches underneath his seat and pulls out one of the tapes at random. Despite Dean's best efforts a few years ago, he has no real favorites from Dean's collection. The music fills up the car and Cas only half listens to the heavy beat, focusing instead on watching the white fields flash by, or, when he can get a chance without looking too obvious, stealing a glance at Dean. When "Highway to Hell" comes on and Dean fast-forwards through the song, Cas pretends not to notice that either.
It's over two hundred miles from the town they stopped in for the night to the turnoff toward the even tinier town in Dean's vision. Just past Mitchell, they turn north off I-90 onto a highway that's more narrow country road than anything else. Cas has no idea how they'll be able to find one farmhouse out here, but Dean seems to know where they're going.
They follow the road for a few miles before Dean pulls off onto a snow-covered dirt road. "I think this is it," he says, but he doesn't sound very sure. Cas swallows and nods.
After a few minutes, a two-story house comes into view at the end of the road. There are no trees, no cover, no way to hide their approach. They're exposed and vulnerable. If any demons are watching from the house, they've probably already spotted them.
"Oh, fuck it," Dean says, and accelerates. They're going as fast as they can on the snowy road, but Cas isn't sure if the extra speed will make a difference. The memory of Dean driving into Stull Cemetery, reckless and desperate, comes back to him, and Cas' fingers tighten against the seat.
"Why don't you get the bag out of the backseat?" Dean says, and he sounds perfectly calm.
He twists around and pulls the duffle bag holding the weapons Dean's cleaned and oiled in the last few days into his lap. Dean's favorite gun and Ruby's knife aren't there, just an angel sword and the handgun Dean had picked out for him. Cas slips the gun into his waistband, like he's seen Dean do a hundred times, and picks up the sword. Once he would have been able to tell which of his brothers or sisters the sword had belonged to. Now it's just cold, lifeless metal.
"Cas," Dean says, and he sounds almost hesitant. "Cas, if this doesn't go the way we want-I just want you to know that I'm glad you're here. You didn't have to be, I know you have your own life now, but still, thanks." His eyes flick away from the house, just for a second, finding Cas' face, and he looks so lost under the tough mask he's putting on that it makes Cas' insides twist painfully.
"I wouldn't leave you, Dean," he says. "Not now." More like he couldn't leave, but he's not going to tell Dean that. He's learning there's a fine line between what he wants to say and what Dean wants to hear.
They slide a little on the snow as Dean brakes, already reaching for the door handle. They're out of the car almost before Dean's parked, boots squelching in the mushy snow.
The house looks deserted, one more family farm that's lost everything, but there are dark tire tracks on the road and the snow by the front door is already trampled into slush.
Dean breaks down the door in one smooth movement and Cas follows him inside, gripping his sword tightly enough that his knuckles are white against the metal.
Inside, the house feels as deserted as it looks from the outside. It's dark and cold, and Cas shivers even under his four layers of clothes. In front of him, Dean's a comforting, solid shape.
They move through the rooms quickly, scanning them with a tactical team's precision, and Cas barely has time to wonder how long it'd taken Dean to learn how to do this. He's truly scared for the first time since he became human, and it's unexpectingly visceral. His unease is a solid weight sitting in his stomach and his heart is pounding, breath coming in short inhales made painful by the frozen air.
The house seems perfectly ordinary. It's mostly bare of furniture and there are no pictures or knickknacks, nothing to distinguish its previous owners, human or otherwise. There are no signs of demons, and Cas isn't sure if he should be worried or comforted.
The basement is the last room. Dean takes the stairs two at a time, and Cas follows almost as quickly. It's pitch black, and Cas is too busy trying to make sure he doesn't trip on the stairs to realize that the sound of Dean's footsteps has stopped. He just barely catches himself before he bumps into Dean's back.
"Dammit, hang on." There's long pause, then Dean finds the flashlight in his jacket. The light makes Cas blink, but at least they can see what they're up against.
It’s empty. If there was anything living-or not-it's gone. Something has been here, though.
The room is set up like the one he found Dean in. There’s stone altar in the center of the basement, surrounded by candles, with wards and sigils painted on the floor and walls. He recognizes them as signs to ward off angels and detection by magic. Whatever they'd been doing here, they didn't want to be discovered.
"Sam was here," Dean says quietly, looking down at the altar. There are a few drops of congealing blood on it, not enough to be from a significant wound, but still proof that the altar had been used, and recently.
"They knew we were coming. If they gave you that vision, then they probably knew just how long it would take for you to get here."
Dean's still standing frozen, staring at the blood like if he looks at it long enough, it'll tell him what happened.
"It was all a diversion, wasn't it? They're playing with us."
"Probably. Come on, Dean, we need to get out of here."
Dean doesn't seem particularly willing to move, so Cas grabs his arm and tugs him in the direction of the stairs. He doesn't resist, letting Cas lead him back up the steps and through the deserted house. Cas knows he's probably gripping Dean’s arm a little too tightly but he can't shake the feeling that if he lets go, Dean might just slip away. He holds on.
The car is where they left it and there are no signs of attacking demons. Still, Cas' heart is still pounding when he slides into the driver's seat and that Dean doesn't protest doesn't help. Cas eases the Impala back out onto the highway, not daring to look over at Dean until the tires hit asphalt.
They drive in silence until they reach the intersection with the highway.
"Where do we go now?" Cas asks, idling at the stop sign. Mitchell's closer, but Sioux Falls is familiar. Of course, if this were a trap, the demons might assume that they'd head for Bobby's old house. They should probably just keep driving until they're far, far away from here.
Dean's still and pale in the passenger's seat. "Does it really matter?" he says finally. "Sam could be anywhere. The demons have him and I've got no way of tracking him down. It doesn't matter where the fuck we go, because the demons are always going to be one step ahead of us and we're going to be stuck playing their games."
"I'm going to Sioux Falls," Cas says, and turns east. Dean's gone quiet again, but his words are still echoing in the car. He's right, of course. It's almost painfully easy for the demons. They know that Dean will jump at any clue they give him about his brother’s whereabouts and they also know that he's still half dead, his only ally a comparatively helpless ex-angel. The demons could lead them in circles until they died of old age and they still would never find Sam. They're going to have to be proactive.
"I used a spell to find you," Cas says quietly. "I can try it again, see if we can locate Sam that way."
"Is it dangerous for you?" Dean's frowning, obviously wrestling between his two prime directives of ‘Look out for Sammy’, and ‘Anything Witch-y is Evil.’
"It's tiring," Cas admits. "But not dangerous. It uses the power of my soul, not anything demon."
"When can you try it?"
Cas hesitates. "I can do it tonight, I think."
The light touch of Dean's hand on his shoulder makes Cas jump. "Thanks, man. You know what this means to me."
Cas just nods and focuses on the road.
Once they're in town, Cas checks them into a motel and Dean brings in their bags. He's doing a little better, and Cas guesses he just hadn't reacted well to finding nothing. If he'd been thinking along the same lines as Cas, he'd probably been expecting, if not Sam, at least some sort of a fight. The casual teasing was much, much worse, as was the reminder that the demons had Sam, and there was nothing they could do about it.
He sets up the spell more quickly than he did the first time. Dean's watching from a safe distance, which makes Cas smile a little-it's not like he's working with explosives.
Once again, the words of the spell are difficult at first, but quickly begin to flow faster than Cas' brain can process them. It feels a little like falling. Sparks dance at the corners of his vision and he grips the edge of the table hard, trying to center himself.
All he gets is a flash. For a fraction of a second, he sees Sam, face bloodied, still as death except for the flicker behind his eyelids, like he's dreaming. Around him, there's nothing but darkness, no sign that could point them towards where the demons are holding him. Cas can feel it the instant that another force takes over the spell. Pain lances through his head and everything goes black. He falls to the floor, but he’s not aware of it, still trapped in the darkness in his head.
"Cas? Come on, Cas, talk to me!"
Someone's shaking him, hands rough and panicked on his shoulders. It hurts to open his eyes, but he can't ignore Dean.
"You back with me?" Dean's breathing hard, and hasn't let go of Cas yet. His fingers are digging into the muscle hard enough to hurt.
"I'm fine," Cas gasps, which is more or less true. His head is pounding, but he's alive. "Sam's alive," he manages, "but whatever has him is powerful. They blocked me. I wasn't able to get anything."
Dean lets his hands fall away as he sits back on his heels. They're on the floor, Cas realizes, the rough carpet scratching against his back.
"I blacked out?"
"Dude, you practically had a seizure. Another couple of seconds, and I was calling 911."
"Oh." Cas tries to sit up, but his muscles don't seem to want to work yet. "Help me up?"
Dean gets an arm around him and pulls him up onto his feet without much difficulty. Cas is barely standing before there's a rush of static in his ears, and black spots obscure his sight. He grabs for Dean, hands fisting in his shirt, trying to keep himself upright.
"Whoa, I got you." Dean maneuvers him over to the bed and lets him sink down onto the comforter.
"I'm sorry, I don't think I can use that spell again." Cas' voice sounds faint in his own ears.
"Just stay with me, okay? I'm gonna get you water. Don't you dare fall asleep."
Actually, falling asleep sounds nice. Cas settles back against the pillows and tries to focus on his breathing. It's a long time before Dean comes back, or maybe it just feels like it. He's got a glass of water and two aspirin, which stick a little in Cas' throat when he tries to swallow them. By now, the buzzing in his ears has quieted and he can see normally. His head still hurts, but it's better.
"Are you going to be okay?" Dean's still sitting on the edge of the bed, frowning at him.
"I'll be fine." He shifts, rolling over on his side so he's facing Dean. "I just need some rest."
Dean's frown stays fixed in place.
"It's not a concussion," Cas tells him. "I had acute psychic trauma, not brain damage."
"Still..." Dean doesn't look convinced.
"Why don't you go out and find food? I'll be fine here."
"I'll stick around for a while. Let me know if you need anything." The bed shifts as Dean stands. Cas rolls over, buries his face into the pillow, and sleeps.
When he wakes up, it's dark and Dean's gone. For a second, he panics, and then he remembers that he’d told Dean to go get food. He'll be back soon.
There's a wave of dizziness when he stands, but it passes. He makes it into the bathroom, refills the glass Dean had left by the sink, and splashes water on his face. It's cold enough to make his breath catch, but it chases away the lingering drowsiness. He carries the glass back to bed, and settles in to wait for Dean.
He makes it through two episodes of some cooking show before he starts to worry.
Back before they left Tacoma, Dean had picked out one of the burner phones in the glove box and given Cas the number. He digs his phone out of his bag with hands that are certainly not shaking and finds Dean's number in speed-dial.
Dean answers just before it's about to go to voice mail. "Cas?" He sounds surprised, and the word's maybe a little slurred. "You okay?"
"I just wanted to make sure you were alright." It doesn't come off as suave as Cas had hoped, but it's better than it could have been.
"Oh, geeze, I was going to get you food, wasn't I?"
"It's all right, I'm not particularly hungry." He pauses, listening. There's a low rumble of background noise behind Dean's voice, and it takes Cas a moment to place the sounds. "Are you in a bar?"
There's a short pause. "Yeah," Dean says finally. "That a problem?" The defensiveness in his voice makes Cas wince.
He closes his eyes, but it doesn't do anything to help the reemergence of his headache. "No, of course not. Just be careful. We don't know if there are still demons in the area."
"Yeah, of course. I'll be back soon. You gonna be okay?"
"I'll be fine."
Dean hangs up. Cas stares at his phone for a second, then sets it down on the bedside table. It's Dean's choice if he wants to go out and drink until he forgets, which is what Cas is fairly sure he's doing. He's a grown man. It's not like Cas has ever been able to tell him what to do, even when he was an angel.
Cas groans and gets out of bed. He pads over to the window, pulling back the curtain just enough so he can see the Impala parked outside. At least he doesn't have to worry about Dean driving back. He lies back down and tries to focus on his breathing again. It must work, because the next thing he knows, the door is crashing open and Dean's stumbling inside.
"Hey Cas," Dean slurs, and he sounds happy, at least. "You didn't have to wait up, buddy."
"I didn't," Cas tells him, but Dean's not paying attention. He's trying to get his shoes off without falling, which is apparently more difficult than Cas would have thought.
He watches him for a minute before he takes pity on him. "Sit." He pushes Dean down onto the edge of the bed.
"Ooh, you're bossy," Dean says. "I like it when you're bossy."
Cas resists the temptation to roll his eyes. "Give me your foot." It takes a second to untangle the laces and pull Dean's shoe off. The second one is easier. Dean hadn't tried to take that one off yet and the knot isn't snarled beyond recognition.
When his shoes are off, Dean plops backwards with a sigh. Cas sits carefully on the other bed. "Did you have a good evening?" he asks.
"It was...awesome," Dean says, making a sweeping gesture with his hands for emphasis.
"Well, at least you're a happy drunk."
""M not drunk!" Dean sounds genuinely offended, and Cas stifles a smile.
"You're sure about that?"
"Absolutely. I may be a little, uh, tipsy, but that's just 'cause being dead makes your tolerance go-" He imitates the sound of something falling, followed by an explosion. He frowns. "It's sad, really."
For a second, neither of them speaks. Then Dean reaches out towards Cas. "Come 'ere. I wanna tell you a secret."
Cas lets Dean pull him onto the bed. He settles back against the headboard, trying to keep a respectable distance between him and Dean. It's surprisingly difficult.
"See, I've been thinking about it, ever since I woke up." Dean's voice is pitched to a stage whisper. "I don't know where I was."
It takes Cas a minute, trying to trace back through what Dean had said to-oh.
"You don't remember where your soul went?" he asks, just to clarify.
Dean shakes his head. "Not a freakin' clue."
"I'm sure you were in Heaven," Cas says carefully. Maybe Dean will take it at face value and let it go. Cas isn't sure either of them is going to like this train of thought if it plays out.
Dean snorts. "Yeah, like they'd let me upstairs after everything Sammy and me did to mess up their Apocalypse. Nah, I think I went the other way."
Cas freezes. Just because he'd been thinking about it didn't mean that Dean should have been. He'd wondered about where the boy's souls had gone a few times. The first time he contemplated that particular metaphysical question was also the first time he got drunk as a human. He avoided both after that.
"And if it was just Hell," Dean went on, "I could deal with that. But what if I started torturing again? A year and a half-that's a long time. How many souls-" He breaks off, shuddering.
Cas says nothing, but he reaches out and finds Dean's shoulder, giving it what he hopes is a comforting squeeze.
Dean's not finished, though.
"And then there's you."
Cas' breath catches. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, if I wasn't headed towards Hell before, I sure am now." Dean pulls away from him, propping himself up on one elbow so he can look at Cas. Which he does, with enough intensity to make Cas squirm. It's equal parts awkward and arousing, and he's trying very hard to focus on the former.
"You show up with your stupid hair, like some stupid knight in shining armor, and I can't-" Dean swallows hard. "You used to be a fuckin’ angel, and if that’s not messed up-I can't deal with this."
"Dean, I don't understand. Are you-are you angry with me?" He'd thought everything was going well, or at least as well as could be expected with Sam missing, Dean weak from his resurrection, and Cas, well, whatever the Hell Cas is now. Maybe he was wrong.
"Angry?" Dean's face is written over with confusion and maybe a little bit of hurt. "Why the Hell would I be angry with you?"
Cas frowns. "Then-"
Dean sits up, then bends down, one hand going in Cas' hair and the other framing his jaw as he leans down. Cas can see it coming. He has more than enough time to push Dean off, to tell him that he's drunk and needs to go to sleep, to stop this before anything happens. But he doesn't.
Instead, he meets Dean halfway, pulls him closer, his hands catching on Dean's jacket.
Dean's lips aren't quite as soft as Cas had imagined they might be, and he tastes of liquor, but it doesn't matter. Cas groans against him and Dean presses forward, licking into his mouth. It's not a very coordinated kiss, even in Cas' very limited experience, but it's good, and he lets it go on for longer than he should.
"Wait," he finally gasps, turning his head away from Dean. "We need to stop. You only want this because you're drunk. I'm not going to let you do something you'll regret in the morning." Because, dammit, one of them has to behave like a responsible adult. Cas just really, really wishes it didn't have to be him.
"I always want you," Dean mumbles against his ear, and while Cas would like to think he's telling the truth, he's known Dean for a long time. He's drunk and self-doubting, and Cas just happens to be the one here, too caught up in his own feelings to turn him away from the beginning like he'd needed to. Fuck.
"Come on." He pushes at Dean, and he backs up obediently. Cas is just going to have to ignore the hurt and confusion on his face, because he can't go through with this if he pays too much attention to it. “Get under the covers.”
Dean obeys, but he doesn’t pull the blankets over himself. “You gonna join me?”
Cas thinks maybe he’s trying to sound seductive, but it comes out a little too slurred to have the desired effect.
“No,” Cas tells him, and turns around, tugging back the comforter of his own bed.
“Please-” Dean catches at the back of his shirt. “Please, Cas, I just don’t wanna be alone.”
Cas is a coward. A horrible, craven coward. He walks around the foot of Dean’s bed and slides in next to him, trying to ignore how nice Dean’s warmth is against the cold air. They’ve done this before and it managed to stay perfectly innocent. He tries not to tense as Dean wraps around him with what feels like more arms and legs than he should possess, but it seems like Dean’s odd mood has passed.
“Did I ever tell you that you smell really nice?” Dean mumbles, voice muted by Cas’ shoulder. Or maybe it hasn’t. “Like, really nice.”
“Go to sleep, Dean.” Cas reaches up and turns off the light. By the time he’s managed to arrange himself in some semblance of comfort, Dean’s already snoring.
Cas doesn’t sleep well. It takes him a long time just to fall asleep and even then it doesn’t last. He wakes up a few hours later, jittery and uncomfortable, and when he realizes that there’s no way he’s going to get more sleep tonight, he carefully extricates himself from Dean’s grip, and gets up.
Sam’s laptop is out in the Impala, and it’s cold enough Cas is fairly sure he can feel frostbite spreading across his skin while he’s trying to find it. It doesn’t want to start either, and it takes several long minutes of careful prodding to get it to work. Cas has limited experience with computers. He’s seen April’s children use them often enough that he thinks he understands the basics and, before that, he’d watched Sam and Dean research, though he hadn’t paid much attention to their methods at the time. Still, he knows the things to look for.
Dean wakes up a little after eight, bleary-eyed and faintly green. He vanishes into the bathroom as soon as he’s awake, and Cas is just about to start getting worried when he comes back out, less green but still a little unsteady.
“Morning,” Dean says, and it sounds like he’s been gargling broken glass.
Cas hesitates. Dean isn’t acting like anything happened last night, and while Cas would love to think it’s because of his self-confidence and ease of accepting possibly new and/or suppressed aspects of his personality, it’s Dean. Cas isn’t going to get his hopes up.
“Feeling better?” he asks, closing the laptop and standing. His vertebrae reorient with a satisfying pop as he stretches. Motel chairs are not meant for overnight researching marathons.
“Not really,” Dean says. “Guess I made it home okay last night?”
“You don’t remember?” Cas says carefully.
Dean shakes his head. “Not a thing.” He pauses, considering. “I didn’t do anything stupid, did I?”
Cas can still feel the echo of Dean’s lips against his own. He shakes his head.
“Well, that’s something.” He sits across the table from Cas, covering his face with his hands. Cas knows he’s hovering, so he sits too and tries not to stare.
“Will you be all right?” He’s aching to reach out and touch him, to be the thing anchoring Dean in reality and not whatever self-loathing universe he’s trapped himself in. That’s all he’s ever wanted.
“It’s just a hangover, Cas, I’ll be fine,” Dean snaps, harsher than Cas hopes he means.
“I did some research last night,” Cas says, and waits carefully for Dean’s reaction.
Dean lifts his head off his arms and looks at him. His eyes are bloodshot, and Cas isn’t sure it’s just from last night’s overindulgence.
“It took me a while to learn how to use the search engines, but I think I was able to locate a series of demonic omens. It’s not a guarantee, but I hope I may have found where the demons are holding Sam, or where they were, at least.”
Dean blinks at him. “I don’t know what to be more impressed by,” he says finally. “That you used the computer or that you found the bastards.”
“May have found them. I’m not sure yet.”
“Where?”
Cas turns the computer around.
“New Mexico?” Dean frowns. “Well, that’s not far away at all.”
“It could be another trap.” Cas has been turning it over in his head for the better part of the morning. He can’t put it past the demons to lay a false trail, but the omens looked too messy, too imprecise to be deliberate. A few barely-reported strange cattle deaths, a freak winter thunderstorm, and two disappearances in a fifty-mile radius were not exactly a glaring pattern.
Dean shrugs. “So? As far as traps go, their last one kind of sucked.”
“They weren’t trying to hurt you,” Cas tells him. “They were trying to demoralize you. And it worked.”
He gets a glare for that. “Wow, Cas, thanks.”
“You mean to tell me that you would have drunk as much as you did last night if you’d found Sam, or even if you’d just been able to kill some demons?”
Dean shoves that laptop across the tiny table to him and lets his head fall back onto his arms. “Getting drunk isn’t exactly a new coping strategy for me. You know that. It’s time-honored Winchester tradition.” His forearm muffles his voice, and Cas has to strain to hear.
He really doesn’t know what to say to that. So, he decides to use the other Winchester tradition: ignore and repress. “We should get ready to leave,” he says. “Like you said, it’s a long way to New Mexico.”
Dean groans and pushes himself upright. “Do you want to drive again?” Cas must look shocked, because Dean quickly backtracks. “Just until the headache’s gone. This isn’t a permanent thing.”
Cas nods and closes the laptop. There isn’t too much to take back out to the Impala-it had been too cold the night before to take the time to bring anything but the necessities into the motel room. They’re checked out by nine o’clock, Cas easing the Impala out onto the thankfully well-snowplowed highway.
“So, how much of the human experience have you, you know, experienced?”
“What?” Cas glances over at Dean, who’s huddled up in the passenger seat, his eyes hidden by over-large sunglasses that look a little ridiculous on him. He’s grinning, wide and just a little lewd, and Cas can’t help but think of the way he looked the night before, right after they kissed. It’s tempting to kiss him again and wipe that smug look off his face, but he knows he can’t. Instead, he settles for turning back to the road, fingers tight on the steering wheel.
“Come on, it’s been, what, a year and half since you lost your angel mojo? You can’t tell me you’ve spent that whole time living a life of quiet contemplation.”
“I haven’t found the occasion to engage in many activities. I have been to a movie theater.” He’d gone with April and her children once, and now, he can’t even remember what film they’d seen. All he can remember is how bright and loud the movie was, the taste of the fake butter on his popcorn, how he’d wished, even with people he’d learned to care about around him, that it was Dean sitting next to him, stealing his popcorn and whispering in his ear.
“Well, that’s something, I guess.” Dean doesn’t look convinced. “You need to get out more.”
“I ‘get out.’” Cas doesn’t know why he’s arguing. He knows that his life as a human had, until recently, been quite uneventful. Still, it’s not like he sat around missing his friends and family until Dean came back into his life. He had a job. He watched TV. He learned how to read humans other than the Winchesters, began to try and understand their motives and desires. He’s starting to understand his own.
Dean huffs out a soft laugh, then purses his lips, considering. “So, I’m guessing you still haven’t gotten laid?”
“And if I had, would that be any of your business?” Cas hopes he isn’t blushing. He’s had a few offers, or he thinks he has-understanding human flirtation is still something of a mystery to him-but he hasn’t acted on any of them. Perhaps he’s been foolish, but he’d rather wait for something more than a one-night stand, and he’s found other means to satisfy the cravings for release he’s experienced now that he’s fully human.
Dean smirks, raising his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, man.” He reaches for the radio. “Let’s have some tunes.”
The snow lasts as they head south, driving past endless, wide, white fields. Zeppelin IV lasts them for most of the morning, and after they stop for lunch in a truck-stop diner on the Iowa/Nebraska border, they drive on in silence. Dean drives after they stop and Cas doesn’t contest. He’s tired, and his eyes hurt from watching the snow-covered countryside.
They start traveling east at Kansas City, and when they turn onto smaller highways, avoiding the signs for Highway 70 and Lawrence, Cas doesn’t say anything. He does wonder, though, how many times in the thousands and thousands of miles that Dean and his brother had traveled, they’d taken a longer route just to avoid their hometown.
They make it as far as Wichita before Dean wordlessly calls it a night by pulling into the next cheap-looking motel they pass. Miraculously, the heater actually works, and when Dean orders Chinese take-out, Cas decides it’s not too bad of a night. They watch TV while they’re eating, and Cas magnanimously lets Dean take control of the remote. Dean, it turns out, is incapable of watching a show without commenting on it, even when he’s flipping through channels every few minutes. That, or he just feels like it’s his responsibility to educate Cas about the intricacies of pop culture.
Still, Cas can’t shake the feeling that something’s off.
“Is everything alright?” he asks finally.
Dean freezes with a spring roll halfway to his mouth. “What? Why?”
Cas shrugs. “You’ve just been in such a good mood today, and after last night-”
“You’re worried because I’m in a good mood? Wow, that really says a lot about the last couple of years we’ve known each other, doesn’t it?” Dean’s sharp laugh is more than a little bitter and Cas’ stomach sinks. He hadn’t meant it like that and he’s fairly sure Dean knows it, too.
“Just stop it.” It comes out a little harsher than Cas had intended and he mentally winces. “Sorry, just please, talk to me.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” Dean says, and Cas would brush it off as denial except that his words are careful, hesitant, like he’s scared of letting them out. “It’s just, I learned a long time ago what this is like. Sam’s gone, and whatever I can do, it’s not gonna be soon enough. And I do-” He swallows, then twitches his shoulders upwards helplessly. “I get so focused on ‘rescue Sammy’ that I make stupid mistakes. I can’t afford to do that now.”
“That sounds surprisingly well-adjusted.”
Dean smiles weakly. “Well, I’ve got to start sometime, don’t I? And we’re close, I know it. Those sons of bitches don’t know how close we are. This time, we’ll be able to get the jump on them.”
Cas falls asleep not long after that. When he wakes up, there’s a split second of panic as he tries to orient. It’s still dark outside, but Dean had fallen asleep with the TV on and its flickering light casts odd shadows across their beds. Cas’ heart is still pounding from whatever had woken him up, but the motel room is quiet. Dean must have muted the TV when Cas fell asleep.
Then Dean moans, or sobs, really, and shifts fretfully. Cas has heard that noise before, back when he first pulled Dean out of Hell and he hadn’t started to drown out the nightmares with alcohol yet.
Cas slips out of bed and closes the distance between them. “Dean?” He hesitates before reaching for his shoulder-he’s not sure if Dean will react like he had when Cas had found him in the apartment building, and he doesn’t want to get punched again. “Dean!”
Dean’s eyes open and he flinches away from Cas. “What-” He’s out of breath, like he’s been running, and his eyes are a little too bright, even in the dim light. “What’s wrong?”
“You were dreaming. It didn’t sound pleasant.”
Dean pulls himself up and settles his back against the headboard. “I had another vision-dream-whatever,” he says, and Cas waits, because it’s impossible that this is good news. “I saw Sam. They’re-they’re torturing him. I think they’re trying to get him to join them, I don’t know.”
“Did you see anything else? Anything that could lead us to them?”
Dean shakes his head.
Cas sinks onto the edge of the bed. “We’ll find him, Dean, I promise.”
Dean’s still breathing hard, body shaking with each ragged inhale and exhale. They’re only a few inches away, but they’re like magnets with the same charge, the same force that could pull them together forming a barrier between them. For a second, Cas wonders what would happen if he tries to breach the space, if he pulls Dean against his chest and holds him until Dean’s panic fades. Then Dean’s moving, pulling away from Cas and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Cas stands quickly.
“We need to get moving,” Dean says, throwing Cas’ over-shirt at him. Cas can’t argue with that and they pack the car in silence.
They’re on the road in half an hour, stopping on the outskirts of town to gas up and caffeinate. Cas stays by the Impala while Dean goes into the store. He waits for the click of the pump, his breath freezing in the air, and tries to figure out how long it’ll take to get to New Mexico. There’s no guarantee they’ll even find Sam once they get there, and Cas isn’t sure what their next step will be if the demons have already moved on. The assembled forces of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory couldn’t force Dean to give up the hunt for his brother.
The only question is how much Dean will self-destruct in the process. Cas would sacrifice himself in a second if it could mean saving Sam, but he can’t lose Dean.
“Everything okay?”
Cas jumps, realizing that the pump had stopped a long time ago, and that Dean’s looking at him oddly, two cheap Styrofoam cups of coffee in his hands. Cas nods, hooking up the pump as quickly as he can, cold fingers fumbling when he tries to replace the gas cap.
Once they’re on the highway, Dean glances over at Cas. “So it looks like we can get there by mid-morning, if we push it.”
“Good.” Cas cups his hands around his coffee, letting the warmth sink into his skin. “Dean-” He breaks off, trying to find the right way to form his thoughts. Learning how to say things in the least painful way is more difficult than he expected. It was something he’d only rarely thought about as an angel, but now, especially with Dean, it seems incredibly important. “Sam is strong. Whatever the demons want from him, he’ll be able to resist.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.” Dean’s watching the road, eyes fixed somewhere at the edge of the yellow pools of light cast by the Impala’s headlights. There’s an edge of something unpleasant in his voice that sounds dangerously close to skepticism.
Cas could tell him that he knows he’s right, that he’s seen all the things Sam suffered in the Cage, and that not even centuries of torture broke him, but he doesn’t. If Dean doesn’t already know the details then it’s not Cas’ place to share them. He frowns and settles for sending up an unheard prayer that they find Sam before time proves either of them right.
Behind them, the sky is starting to lighten, dark blue shot with cotton candy pink, but ahead the road is still dark. Cas guesses it will be for a while.
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