Everything That Matters - Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Dean had kept his promise to Sam because he hadn’t the heart to hunt anymore. He’d lost everything when Sam had jumped into the pit, and anything that reminded him of his old life felt like a knife in his chest.
Even the Impala held too many memories, but while sitting behind the wheel hurt like a motherfucker every single time, Dean figured it was penance. After all, Sam was facing worse in hell.
Being with Lisa and Ben had been easier for the most part. Dean had his memories of that one weekend with Lisa, and memories of saving them with Sam, but for the most part, he worked from a clean slate with them.
And yet, Dean had never quite been able to shake the fear that he was going to lose this, too-that he’d fuck up all over again and lose Ben and Lisa, and everything he’d worked so hard to build.
After two days of Cas staying with him, Dean headed towards Lisa’s house instead of going right home after work. He pulled into the driveway and parked, thinking, “Just like old times,” with only a hint of bitterness.
He should have gone straight home because Dean suspected that while Cas might be a soldier, he’d never lived as a bachelor. If Dean didn’t bring food, or if there weren’t leftovers in the fridge, there was a good chance that Cas just wouldn’t eat.
In fact, Dean suspected that Cas would live on alcohol, cigarettes and coffee, with the occasional burger or slice of pizza to take the edge of hunger off. It gave him new respect for Lisa, who had shepherded him towards a normal life, with only the occasional ass kicking.
Dean wanted to do the same thing for Cas, but he wasn’t sure he had it in him.
After a moment’s consideration, Dean climbed out and rang the doorbell. He knew Lisa wouldn’t mind if he just walked in, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so at this point.
Lisa wore a puzzled frown when she opened the door. “I thought you had a friend in town. Did he leave already?”
“No, I just-” Dean stopped. “I, uh, I thought I’d come by to see if you needed anything.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Come on in. Do you want something to drink? Maybe a beer?”
“Yeah, that would be great,” Dean agreed. “Thanks.”
“Any time. You know that.” She led him into the kitchen, and it all felt so fucking familiar, it made Dean’s chest hurt. “What happened with your friend?”
“He’s sleeping, mostly,” Dean replied. He didn’t think he needed to tell Lisa that Cas had been awake for about six of the last 72 hours. “He’s had a rough time.”
“So you said.” Lisa sat down at the table in the seat across from him. “Did you start smoking?”
“Huh?”
“Cigarette smoke, Dean.”
Dean pulled his shirt up to sniff at it, making a face when he caught the whiff of cigarettes. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, Lisa. I told him to take it outside, but I guess-”
She covered his hand with her own to stop him. “Stop. My mom smokes, my sister smokes-Ben has been exposed to it before. I’m not faulting you.”
Dean shook his head, unable to explain his anxiety. He had no legal relationship to Ben; Dean had long ago accepted that he wasn’t Ben’s biological father. But Ben-and Lisa, to a certain extent-was still one of his ties to humanity. Spending time with Ben reminded Dean on a weekly basis that what he’d given up-everything he’d given up-was worth it.
And whether Lisa would do it or not-and Dean knew she wouldn’t-if she decided that he wasn’t good for Ben, she could cut ties and move on, and Dean would be left with nothing.
Cas’ sleeping on his couch threatened everything Dean had built, in a way. Every bad memory Dean had pushed aside, the promise he’d made to Sam about trying to have a normal life, was now threatened with Cas’ presence.
“You’re a part of Ben’s life,” Lisa said quietly when Dean didn’t respond. “You’re the closest thing to a father that he’s ever going to have.”
“I know.” Dean swallowed hard. “Did I ever tell you that Sam made me promise to find you and Ben after it was all over?”
Lisa shook her head, kindly not commenting on the fact that Dean didn’t talk about Sam. “No, you didn’t.”
“I told him I’d try to have that picket fence, apple pie life we thought-” Dean stopped, took a breath. “When we first started hunting together, Sam and me, he was the one who wanted a normal life. By the end, though, Sam couldn’t imagine doing anything else, you know?”
“It’s hard to imagine any other life but the one you have,” Lisa replied gently. “I can’t imagine not having Ben.”
Dean nodded. “Yeah, that’s it exactly. So, I promised.”
He left unsaid the fact that he’d screwed it up, but Lisa seemed to pick up on it anyway. “You kept your promise, Dean. We didn’t work out, but that wasn’t because of you.”
He met her eyes. “It was partly me.”
“It was both of us,” she corrected him. “Trust me on this one. Just because we work better as friends, doesn’t mean you fucked up.”
Lisa didn’t often swear; she’d cleaned up her language in front of Ben, from what she’d said, and her swearing now made him laugh. “Yeah.”
“You hearing me?”
“Yeah,” he repeated. “I hear you. Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it. I still owe you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Dean replied. And maybe that was another reason why they hadn’t worked out-he’d always wondered how much of her acceptance of his return was gratitude, and how much was full-out acceptance.
She smiled. “That’s what you keep saying, but you gave me my son back, Dean. I can’t help it.”
“What do you have going on tonight?” Dean asked, because he still didn’t have any desire to go home and face Cas and the memories he brought along with him.
“Not a thing, for a change,” Lisa replied. “Ben’s staying with a friend tonight. Want to watch a movie with me?”
Dean grinned, at least partially in relief. “Yeah. That would be great.”
In the camp, Cas had pretty much come and gone as he pleased. That Dean-the Dean of 2014-had ignored him unless he’d needed something. Cas had gone on raids and popped pills and organized orgies, pretty much in that order, while Dean had tortured and killed.
Dean had been everything to him, and then Dean had become their fearless leader, the one who dispensed orders and nothing more.
Now, Dean basically let Cas sleep, waking him up in the morning to eat something, and then again in the evening to eat a little more. He was careful, solicitous, and Cas had no fucking clue what to do with that.
On the fourth day, Cas took the set of keys Dean left for him and went for a walk, because he found he couldn’t sleep anymore, and he didn’t know what else to do.
Cicero was a smallish sort of town, but it seemed to be thriving. Cas didn’t see as many “For Lease” or “For Sale” signs as he had in other towns that had been hard-hit by the apocalypse, or the recession, or whatever the hell was going on that caused ordinary citizens to board up their houses and businesses and get the fuck out of Dodge.
He had enough money in his pocket for another pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee, and he stopped first at a gas station, then at a little corner café. Cas thought it tasted like heaven, and he sat outside, sipping his coffee and smoking a cigarette.
Cas was trying to make the rest of the pack last as long as possible, because while there were ways of getting ready cash, he didn’t know that he was quite ready to do much more than sleep and eat and dream away the days.
When he started walking again, he caught sight of a few “Help Wanted” signs, and resolutely ignored them. Even the idea of working-of doing anything other than getting wasted and shooting Croats-had panic clawing at his chest.
From the moment of his creation, Cas had fought evil. He’d done the will of his Father, and then he’d done the will of Dean, and fuck if he was going to take another master. Cas didn’t know if he’d ever be ready to follow the will of another.
Cas had finished his coffee and two cigarettes by the time he turned back towards Dean’s apartment building, and he had to admit that he didn’t have any clearer picture of what lay before him than he had before. In the end, everything depended on Dean, and Dean’s reaction, just as it always had. In the end, Cas felt alone-just as he’d been for far too long.
No one had warned him about this part of being human-being utterly, utterly alone, without the voices of the host, without the assurance of faith in the will of God, without even the certainty that revelation brought.
There was no one and nothing that could dim that knowledge. Nothing that might ease his loneliness.
Not even Dean.
On the fifth day, Dean realized that he was counting the days that Cas had been staying with him. Each day, as he trudged up the stairs to his apartment, Dean thought of it as day-whatever in the Cas-watch. He wondered if this would be the day that Cas pried himself off of the couch and assumed some semblance of a normal life.
And every day, Dean wondered why the fuck he’d even thought that Cas knew what a normal life looked like.
Dean wondered what the fuck he was doing, taking in an ex-angel anyway. Dean was trying to keep his promise to Sam; Cas seemed to have no idea what was coming next.
Any way he looked at it, Dean owed Cas, and so he did what he could. On this day, the fifth day, Dean brought home a couple of burgers and nudged Cas so persistently he had no choice but to get up.
“You have to be hungry,” Dean said when Cas grumbled and pulled a pillow over his head. It was Dean’s second-best pillow, the one he normally would have wrapped himself around if he’d still been sleeping in motel beds. “I bought burgers.”
Cas grunted, and the pillow stayed where it was. “Go away.”
“Not until you eat,” Dean replied, remembering what Lisa had done for him when he’d said nearly the same thing. He’d ordered her to leave, and she hadn’t listened, instead nudging him awake in her spare bed, insisting that Dean eat dinner with them and shower and change clothes.
Later, she’d made him do everybody’s laundry, and she’d cajoled him into cooking with her, and then going grocery shopping with her. Slowly, but surely, Lisa had taught him how to look for sales, and what fresh produce looked like-even if Dean didn’t plan on utilizing that knowledge-and how to choose packages of meat that would give the most bang for the buck.
Months later, Dean had realized that he was actually living that picket-fence life Sam had asked him to try, without ever realizing that’s what he was going for. Lisa had moved him along that road until he was so far down it that diner meals and motel rooms seemed like a world away.
Cas brought it all back in a way that Dean didn’t want to acknowledge.
He set out the two cheeseburgers on the table, the double-order of fries in the middle next to the bottle of ketchup. “Ice water is next,” Dean warned from tiny, second-hand table. “Come on, Cas.”
Cas joined him reluctantly, his expression sullen as he picked up the cheeseburger. Dean held his tongue until Cas bit into it and moaned in ecstasy. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dean replied smugly, fully aware that Harry’s cheeseburgers were a little slice of heaven. “I’d say I told you so, but I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Cas practically inhaled the burger, and just slightly more than half the fries. Dean had to speed up his own pace in order to make certain that Cas didn’t chow down more than his share. “That’s what you get for not eating all day,” he said. “You’re too hungry to really enjoy dinner.”
“Who said I didn’t enjoy it?” Cas shot back, stealing another fry from the pile Dean had clearly marked as his own. “It was great.”
“You hoovered it,” Dean felt inclined to point out. Lisa said practically the same thing to Ben every time they had a meal together.
“Don’t eat so fast, or you’ll choke,” was the warning, and he felt inclined to pass it along to Cas now.
Cas snorted. “You learn to eat fast, or you learn to do without.”
“That’s not the way it is now.” The words left Dean’s mouth before he could think better of them. He knew from experience that there were some things a person had to experience firsthand in order to really accept it.
Cas paused with a fry, loaded with ketchup, halfway to his mouth. “I know that,” he said after a moment, “if only because there’s no shortage of toilet paper.”
Dean grinned. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Where is Chuck?” Cas asked, and Dean realized that until that moment, he’d never asked himself the same question. He’d never asked because he didn’t want to know. When he’d left hunting behind, he’d avoided any reminders of that old life, and that included news about old friends and allies.
“I don’t know,” he finally admitted, because lying would be too hard. He’d have to make up some story about Chuck, and how he was happy-maybe with Becky-when the truth was that he didn’t know. Dean didn’t know, and maybe he didn’t care.
No, that wasn’t true. Dean did care, maybe too much, but it was easier not to know.
Cas nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
Dean felt the need to justify his decision to Cas, although there was no real reason to. “When I came back to Cicero, it was easier if I forgot about the rest of it.”
“I understand, Dean.” And now, Cas’ eyes seemed to focus on him with that same ancient wisdom he’d shown back when he’d been an angel. For the first time, Dean could see the man-no, not a man, an angel-who had shown up in the barn. He’d thrown everything he had at Cas, and it still hadn’t been enough to stop him.
Sometimes, Dean forgot what Cas had been at the beginning, especially now that he was human.
“Yeah, maybe.” Dean looked away, feeling like an idiot for no reason at all.
“We all use different things to forget, Dean,” Cas observed. And for the moment, Dean could forget that this was drug-addled Cas he was talking to, and remember Castiel, angel of the Lord, who always seemed to have an answer.
Dean nodded. “I guess so. Too bad you can’t forget forever, huh?”
The problem with a non-post-apocalyptic world, in Cas’ opinion, was that there were all sorts of rules in place to prevent him from getting his hands on the decent drugs. The cheapest, easiest high would be cold meds, but there were restrictions on those.
The restrictions were a pain in his ass, was what they were.
Signing for the cold meds with the pharmacist put a crimp in Cas’ plans, so he lifted a package of Coricidin. Take enough of them, and a person could get high, although he knew he stood a chance of taking a really bad trip. Cas had become an expert at making do, however, and he had an idea of how much he could take before he became a danger to himself or others.
And that was the key, he’d realized over the years. Take just enough to dull the pain, and not enough to get someone killed, which would only add to his burden.
Cas knew Dean well enough to know when the other man was just treading water. Dean wasn’t unhappy, he wasn’t suffering, and he certainly wasn’t torturing demons or killing Croats-but this was Dean. And Cas didn’t think that Dean could be happy without Sam.
Lying down on the couch, Cas turned on the TV and flipped through channels listlessly. He stopped on some sort of science fiction movie about giant bugs.
He fell asleep about halfway through, waking up only when Dean shook him. “Dean?”
“Yeah. You been sleeping all day?”
“I went for a walk earlier,” Cas admitted.
“It’s a nice day,” Dean replied noncommittally.
Cas put an arm over his eyes. “Hot, though.”
“It’s summer, so yeah.”
Cas couldn’t remember having a more inane conversation with Dean. “Are we going to talk about the weather?”
“If that’s what there is to talk about,” Dean replied. “I grabbed some sandwiches if you’re hungry.”
Cas wasn’t hungry, but he knew that Dean wasn’t going to let him get away with not eating. He pushed himself off the couch, stumbling a little from lightheadedness. When he glanced up, Cas saw Dean watching him with concern clear in his eyes.
“Did you eat today?” Dean asked.
Cas shrugged. “I ate breakfast.”
“Right.” Dean started unpacking the food as Cas sat at the table. “Good thing I brought home dinner, then.”
Cas started in on his sandwich, watching Dean as he grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge, setting one down in front of Cas.
They ate and drank in awkward silence. “What is it you do here, Dean?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not hunting,” Cas pointed out. “You’re-what-fixing cars?”
Dean frowned. “Yeah, I fix cars. My dad fixed cars. There’s nothing wrong with being a mechanic.”
“Didn’t say there was.” Cas gave him a long look. “But you’re a hunter. You-”
“I tortured demons, and I shot people in cold blood,” Dean replied, his voice cold. “Is that what you were going to say?”
Cas wanted to tell Dean that he’d done what was necessary to survive, but he couldn’t force the words out. Instead, he opted for a different kind of truth. “You’re not the same man.”
“No, I’m not,” Dean replied quietly. “But a lot of that is because of Ben and Lisa. I don’t hunt anymore because that’s not who I am.”
Cas didn’t know that he bought it, but he was willing to wait and see.
Dean had stopped after two drinks for so long, he’d forgotten how fucking good that third drink tasted going down.
During the first couple of weeks at Lisa’s, Dean had noticed that Lisa’s expression sharpened with concern when he poured the third drink. The concern grew more concentrated when Dean grabbed the fourth. By the time the third week had passed, Dean had noticed that Ben wore the same expression.
After the first month had passed, Dean had trained himself to stop at two drinks because if nothing else, he never wanted to put Ben in the same position he’d been in while looking after his dad.
John Winchester could be a mean drunk, and even though Dean thought his dad was probably the better man in a lot of ways, Dean had sworn that Ben would never have to clean up after him. Ben would never have to help Dean to his bed, and he’d never have to throw away the empties or make excuses or explanations.
This much Dean would do right.
It had been nearly two years since Dean had drunk more than a couple of beers, or a couple of fingers of whiskey. Cas being here, and being like he was, made Dean remember the man he’d been two or three years ago.
So, when Cas poured Dean a third drink, Dean took it, because he couldn’t think of a reason to refuse.
“I have to go to work tomorrow,” he said, even as he sipped from the glass of Johnnie Walker.
Cas grinned at him, a patently false grin with the brittleness of a thousand broken promises. “So, play hooky.”
“Some of us have to pay the rent,” Dean replied, but he didn’t put the drink down.
And that third drink felt so fucking good on the way down, Dean wondered why he’d ever stopped at two.
“What is it about this place? This life?”
Dean eyed him. “Didn’t we have this conversation already?”
“I might have forgotten what you said,” Cas admitted.
Dean shrugged and studied the amber liquid in his glass. “I promised Sam. That’s all that matters.”
“There has to be more to it than that,” Cas replied, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “You stayed, Dean. I never thought of you as the staying kind.”
“Sometimes you have to make a change,” Dean replied. He tossed back the rest of his drink and gave serious consideration to not giving out any additional information. Dean probably would have kept his mouth shut if he hadn’t been a little buzzed.
“You want to give me the truth?”
Dean smiled and shook his head. “I promised Sam.”
“And?”
“And Ben’s not my son.” The words tumbled out of Dean’s mouth before he could stop them. “The timing was right, and he could be-could have been-my kid, but he’s not. I have no legal tie to him. If Lisa decides to cut off contact, that’s it, man. We’re done.”
“Would she do that?”
“No.” Dean didn’t even have to think about it. “No, she wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean I won’t fuck it up and lose everything again.”
Cas stared into his drink. “But if it’s not going to happen-”
“Doesn’t mean it won’t.” Dean rubbed his eyes. “Never thought I’d let Sam go down to the pit and not try to get him back, but I promised.”
“We all break promises,” Cas said.
“Not this one.” Dean set the glass down with a little more force than absolutely necessary. “This is one I’m going to keep.”
Chapter Three