DVD Extra: In-laws
Title: In-laws
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info, warnings, and disclaimer)
Author: peroxidepest17
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby, and OCs
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~10,700
Warnings: language
Beta: nyoka and zatnikatel
Note: This is part of our collection of DVD extras - outtakes, deleted scenes, missing scenes, and episode tags/codas that take place before, during, or following an aired episode. This coda follows Dreamcatcher.
Author's Note: Thanks to Sonia for helping make this SDCC planning go a little smoother so I could actually settle down a bit and finish this up. Apologies for my whining and all the stress I threw on you, dear.
Summary: Cas is just another piece of the puzzle that fits solidly within the lines of the bizarre pattern Bobby's life is turning out to be.
***
Bobby sips blearily at a mug of black coffee as he shuffles quietly through the house in the late morning hours, his senses instinctively surveying all the myriad sights and sounds that come with having a nest full of Winchesters underfoot. It's a familiar symphony of activity by now, kind of calming in its routine despite everything. Either that or he's just too damn old to expend any extra energy he has being ornery at the boys for making a racket.
He snorts at how odd it is to be an old hunter as he instinctively surveys the wards painted over various doors and windows throughout the house, his trained eyes automatically looking for any damage the markings might have taken over the past week. In the meantime, he uses the other half of his brain to absently make a list of all the things he has to do in order to keep this well-oiled machine of dumbassery limping along to fight another day.
From the distant sounds of power tools and classic rock seeping in from the scrap yard, Bobby surmises that Dean is in the garage finishing up work on that wrecked Focus that got brought in Thursday, clearly in an attempt to be helpful and less free-loading. Bobby suspects that after Dean's little stint in dreamland, the kid is only too happy to be up and about with the sun, doing the useful work of fixing things instead of taking them apart. Or maybe it's something else at the same time, if Dean's raucous singing along to the dulcet tones of Kansas is telling Bobby anything. It seems that despite the nightmares, something good must have happened under that curse at the same time, though Dean and Cas haven't said anything in particular about it either way. But Bobby knows all things Winchester well enough by now to know that the way Dean is swaggering around lately (even on chupacabra hunts, apparently) is meaningful.
Looks like he's finally gotten something off his chest that's been weighing him down for a while now.
What it is or how it got fixed exactly doesn't matter yet, as far as Bobby is concerned. It's just damn good to hear Dean up and about, maybe even on the cusp of happy.
And if Dean is out in the garage playing Greased Lightning with all his car-loving sing-songing heart, then that must mean the heavy clunking around Bobby can hear going on in the basement is Sam, dutifully doing his part to also be useful by single-handedly battling the hell-demon that is Bobby's ancient, top-loading washing machine. Probably because Sam knows full well that fighting the washing machine in order to win clean clothes is their ticket to not overstaying their welcome.
It has been a longstanding Singer Salvage policy that Bobby refuses to tolerate a household that smells like unwashed frat boy. As it so happens, the Winchesters are walking monuments of hot-headed testosterone that can - with time and a lack of commitment to weekly household chores - out-stink any of the oldest, mustiest, most blood-stained tomes or relics that Bobby has collected around his home over the years. As such, he has long ago learned that if the Winchesters neglect doing their laundry for a couple of weeks, the smell will start to overpower the place like a fungus and seep into everything he owns. He's chased the boys (and their father before them) off of his property enough times in the past for them to have learned by now to get the laundry finished at least once every ten days or so if they want to remain under his roof in a peaceable fashion. It's not like he's asking much here with that rule, either. Sam's ridiculous hair clogging up the shower drain is fine; hell, even Dean's late night not-as-quiet-as-they-think shenanigans with his angel are tolerable to a degree, but Bobby's couch starting to smell of Winchester funk is where he absolutely draws the line.
Either way, the boys are clearly making themselves useful today, in whatever little ways they can, given that there just isn't anything to work with on the hunt front right now, Stateside anyway. The rest of the world seems to be one big, stewing mass of chaos, and according to the summit in Colorado that Mira and Tamara reported on, it's only been getting worse.
Which is nothing new, exactly. It seems things are always slated to get worse than they've been before these days. It's like the monsters of the year know they've got to go big or go home if they want to outshine the mess Satan made during his brief stint topside.
Bobby finishes off his coffee with that grimly amusing thought and wanders into the study, where he finds the final piece of the Winchester puzzle. And by that he means Dean's angel, or half-angel, or whatever the hell he is now, sitting cross-legged at the desk, eyes roaming curiously over an old Chinese mariner's hand-drawn map of the Pacific. Bobby picked it up on a trip to Japan back in '82, when he'd been at an antique auction house in search of what he'd believed to be a cursed Noh mask. He'd still been bad with the language and figuring out the ridiculous subway system at the time, and the mask had slipped through his fingers to a rival bidder. But by an incredible stroke of good luck, it had eventually found its way to a kuchiyose miko who had known exactly what to do with it (and with Bobby as well).
The memory is fleeting but not unwelcome, and when Bobby sees Castiel making himself at home with his things just like that - things that bring back some of the rare fond memories a hunter sometimes gets - he's torn between indignation and resignation. On the one hand, who the hell does Cas think he is?
On the other, Bobby knows exactly who he is.
To put it simply, he's the one that Dean finally deigned to bring home.
It's not exactly Meet the Parents hilarious or anything, but Bobby supposes - despite everything Cas has done - that as small a thing as it may be for Cas to be here now, it's big in its own way too. For Dean anyway, and for anyone Dean considers family. Bobby sighs, because he is clearly permanently entrenched in that camp, despite not always liking how that camp smells. Which means the angel will continue to make himself at home amongst Bobby's things, continue spoiling Bobby's goddamn dog, and continue to be another name on the list of mouths Bobby's got to feed out of the pittance he makes junking cars and internet phishing. And since Bobby can remember telling Cas he'd always have a home here as long as he wanted or needed one, in between dodging giant spiders out in California, he only has himself to blame.
At least the angel doesn't stink up the place like the other two.
"Find anything interesting?" Bobby finally asks after a beat of silently watching Castiel comb over every faded black ink squiggle on the map like it may somehow be the key to everything.
The angel looks up at the sound of Bobby's voice, and wide blue eyes study him briefly. For a second, Castiel is less otherworldly and fearsome and more soft around the edges, like he's just a young man taking temporary refuge under Bobby's roof, trying to make sense of a terrifying world while searching for his rightful place in it.
And with that thought, Bobby feels all the rest of his carefully parsed-out indignation fade abruptly. Seems the angel is just another Winchester boy who needs his help after all. And looking at it that way, Bobby realizes it all makes a weird sort of sense, that Cas is just another piece of the puzzle that fits solidly within the lines of the bizarre pattern Bobby's life is turning out to be. Hell, he'd even considered Sam and Dean angels at one point in their lives or another. Sam when he'd been eight months old and gurgling happily in Bobby's lap around a warm bottle; Dean when he'd been eleven and his whole face was lit up at what a joy playing a simple goddamned game of catch was. Cas is just a little more literal in terms of the angelic, but in the end, the three of them are all exactly the same.
Who'd have thought that a surly old drunk like Bobby Singer would be fated to a lifetime of watching over three boys with the faces of angels and the luck of devils?
If God is still out there, he has a real screwed up sense of humor.
Nothing to do but man up and deal with it, then.
And so Bobby puts his empty coffee mug down on the desk with a resigned clack and motions first to Cas, and then to the door. He has errands to run and there's no sense in bothering the other two if they're actually being helpful around the place for once. "C'mon, kid," he grunts at the angel, full well knowing Castiel is older than him (and probably dirt as well). It doesn't change the fact that he's a goddamned kid, though. "Make yourself useful."
Bobby grabs his cap and his keys on the way out the door. Castiel tilts his head at him in confusion, but wordlessly stands and follows him out all the same.
Bobby supposes he should at least be thankful that this Winchester has already learned how to listen to him well enough. The other two didn't come as well-trained.
***
"Milk, eggs, bacon, coffee, whiskey, beer, cheese, bread, canned beans, dog food, chili, chicken noodle soup, peanut butter, jelly, ground beef, Fruit Loops, yogurt," Bobby lists off to Castiel as they rattle down the road towards town in one of Bobby's clunky pickup trucks. He side-eyes Castiel briefly, before turning back to the road. "Oh and some flour, butter, and whatever fruit you want for whatever pie you're making next. You go through the damned ingredients like Dean went through ground beef during his growth spurt."
Castiel is vaguely bewildered by the many facets of that comment he can't immediately comprehend. Bobby doesn't seem to care. "You got all that or what?" he barks when Castiel doesn't respond quickly enough.
Castiel nods from the passenger seat, brow furrowed slightly as he very studiously commits the list to memory, just like he had a few moments ago, when Bobby had thrown out the list of things they required from the hardware store. The grocery list is slightly more mystifying to him than the hardware, mostly because he doesn't know certain things, like what a canned bean is or what the term Fruit Loops means, exactly. The list from the hardware store had been simple enough because they are all things he has known and seen and used in the Winchesters' - and now his - line of work: salt, iron, spray paint, wood, industrial cleaners, various flammable liquids, rope, aerosol cans of poisons and irritants, copper wire, duct tape. These are all the things hunters use for fighting ghosts and monsters, for warding places against evil, for disposing of the bodies of creatures and victims alike, for taking prisoners and interrogating them. They are for fixing other necessary tools as well, and for breaking into places or out of them as the need arises.
Hardware, he seems to understand well enough. However, Castiel is still trying to figure out the apparent plethora of food and the even more plentiful names of food that humans assign to all the things they eat. It is something he fears he will never fully grasp.
"Yogurt?" he asks after a breath of silence between them on the road, as they near the main thoroughfare of town, Sioux Falls is looking quiet and relaxed this morning, on what the inhabitants consider a normal Saturday in late spring.
Bobby shrugs helplessly at the question. "Sam," he says, with a look that is equal parts disbelieving and embarrassed as they turn off the street and into the parking lot of a local hardware store. "Sometimes I don't get that boy," he adds, seemingly for no reason.
Castiel does not know what yogurt is, which is what he had meant by his question, but he lets it go, because knowing that it's for Sam - that it‘s something Sam apparently enjoys - is more than enough to satisfy his curiosity for the moment. It's interesting how he can now tell from Bobby's tone and expression that he's buying it solely because Sam prefers it, even if no one else does (it is certainly not anything Castiel has ever seen Dean eat, or he is certain he would have been invited to try some). Perhaps it's a rare treat for Sam as well, and Bobby wants to indulge them a little on this trip for supplies. The last few days following Dean and Sam's homecoming from the chupacabra hunt had been filled mostly with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or egg-and-bacon sandwiches on slightly stale bread. Dean had made a comment that no matter how low the stores at Bobby's house can get, it seems like there's always more than enough bacon to last the winter.
Castiel is beginning to see that for all his seemingly grudging fondness, Bobby is very happy to spoil the brothers in small ways that - to Castiel in any case - also seem monumental in the grand scheme of things; whether it's bacon to keep Dean going, or occasional yogurt to please Sam's more delicate palate.
Castiel finds that the thought pleases him, warms him from the inside out, even if it doesn't have anything to do with him, at least not directly. Maybe one day, he and Bobby will have a repertoire like that as well. Castiel thinks he would like to be more than just another something of Dean's to this man.
"The hell are you staring at?" Bobby grunts after a moment, pulling the truck into a parking space at the very edge of the hardware store's designated lot, looking as exasperated with Castiel at this moment as he does when Dean leaves his socks on the floor or when Sam has indigestion after dinner and they all must suffer for it.
That he is gracing Castiel with the exact same expression of bad-temper makes that warm feeling in Castiel flare even brighter somehow, inexplicably. "Nothing, I apologize. I will get us a cart," he says simply, as he opens the door and exits the cab.
"Smug idjit," is Bobby's only response as he follows suit.
Castiel feels himself smile just a little bit at the sound of it.
***
There are moments even now, when Castiel feels a roiling sort of frustration with humans and humanity in general, moments where he is forced to remember the immenseness of who and what he had been, the infinite importance of all the things he has witnessed and wrought in millennia of existence. He has razed cities to the ground, watched humanity crawl slowly up from the muck of evolution. Once he had contained multitudes and commanded the power of them all, however briefly.
This feeling of being bigger than humans comes back to him sometimes, when faced with the true smallness of some people.
Bobby - to him, to the Winchesters, and to the hunting community at large - is a person whose knowledge, selflessness, courage, and skill are at once respected, emulated, and admired by all. Castiel is convinced Bobby Singer has been as instrumental in saving the world as Dean and Sam.
However, to a great number of the inhabitants of Sioux Falls, Bobby Singer is nothing more than the crazy drunk who lives in the junkyard on the far outskirts of town. He is a laughingstock, a petty criminal, and a threat to their happily monotonous little lives all at once. He is different from them, and not in a way that they celebrate.
This general sentiment is first made apparent to Castiel by the manager at the hardware store, and the subtle nod he makes at one of the other orange-vested workers when Bobby and Castiel walk through the sliding doors. Castiel feels the orange-vested teenager with the nervous hands following them from that moment on, watching every move they make, checking to make sure Bobby is unarmed, or that he is not stealing anything, or drinking and making a scene.
From there, other customers see Bobby in the aisles and many turn around and flee, or force their eyes downward and refuse to make eye contact. The worst is a pair of middle-aged housewives with small children riding in the seats of their shopping carts; they look at each other and murmur knowingly, judgmentally, before turning questioning eyes on Castiel, then back to Bobby again. Every movement and expression is laced with suspicion and disrespect and none of them - not a single one - seems to understand that their lives, their very existences, would have been snuffed out years ago if not for this man, this crazy drunk who lives in the rubble of abandoned vehicles just on the outside of their small, small worlds. He is a hero, and they treat him no better than some sort of sad spectacle, as if he is less than human for all the things he has sacrificed to keep them safe.
Something about all of it makes an old, powerful discontent sweep over Castiel, makes him as wrathful and vengeful an angel as any of his other brethren. He would smite them for this insult perhaps, if he had the ability to. At least, that is what his mind is telling him he would do, as he imagines - in increasingly creative ways - how he would make them acknowledge how much he disapproves of their disrespect for this man.
Bobby doesn't seem to care, single-mindedly perusing the shelves in search of the right brand of copper wire.
Proving once again that Robert Singer is greater than angels.
Or at least, in this context, half of one.
An angel who is busy imagining laying waste to this hardware store in the name of justice at that. Sometimes Castiel laments that he has truly become an irredeemably corrupt wellspring of evil when he finds himself indulging in moments of malicious fantasy such as this, but Dean promises him that a general hatred for most people is only a sign that Castiel has retained more humanity than not in the end. Castiel finds this concept very confusing, but in some ways, incredibly comforting all at once.
Castiel's mental image of flames and damnation for those who would judge without knowing is suddenly shattered when Bobby comes up behind him and smacks him smartly upside the head with his folded up baseball cap.
"I don't know what the hell you think you're glaring about, but you look like a damned serial killer. Stop it," Bobby barks at him gruffly, pointedly ignoring a scandalized looking family of onlookers as he steers the cart further down the aisle. Castiel follows, rubbing his head curiously and wondering if Bobby is angry with him.
"They disrespect you," he protests, once he catches up. "They don't understand."
Bobby eyes him again, and something about it makes Castiel feel impossibly young, despite their great difference in age. "I don't want them to understand," Bobby says eventually, as he dumps a couple of cans of bug spray into the cart. "That's the whole point, ain't it? We do this so they don't have to understand our lives."
Castiel considers this for a moment, and after a beat, he sees the reason behind it in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't mean he has to like it though, as proven by his pointedly turning to glare at the nervous orange-vested teenager peeking out at them from around the corner of the next aisle.
Bobby huffs a sigh of exasperation when he sees that, mostly because the poor orange-vested kid yelps and goes stumbling backwards into a display of potting soil. "Ignore the peanut gallery for a second and tell me what's next on the goddamned list, will you?" Bobby says as they push past the gangly pile of teenager onto the next aisle. "I'm old and I can't remember everything these days."
Thankfully, he sounds no more vexed with Castiel than he had with Dean last night, after Dean had gotten ketchup smudged on the edge of a 200-year-old tome on Sumerian deities.
Castiel nods, relieved. "Duct tape," he answers faithfully.
***
Twenty minutes later, while they're on their way to the grocery store, Castiel sits silently in the passenger seat beside Bobby and looks confused in that way he sort of does whenever he's trying to parse out humanity and his own reactions to it, like he knows what he's feeling is human, but at the same time, he's not sure what he's supposed to do with it beyond acknowledging it.
Bobby decides he's going to leave the angel to it on his own, so that nothing more is said about any of the townsfolk or their perceptions of Bobby. More particularly, so nothing more is said about Castiel's inexplicably heated indignation at the thought of someone treating Bobby poorly. Because analyzing it might make them realize they're almost family, or being pulled along the bonds of family, and that in the end, they might actually start to like each other on their own merits instead of in deference to Dean's.
In a fit of uncharacteristic optimism, Bobby thinks that if they continue along this path of silence, they can maybe refrain from dealing with all of that garbage for a long, long time. Possibly not until Bobby is on his death bed and no longer has to worry about things like shame and what it means when you've got a son-in-law who may have killed one of your ex-girlfriends but who you find yourself liking (somewhat against your will) anyway.
As long as it stays quiet and businesslike from here on out.
Which means, of course, that it doesn't.
Because almost as soon as Bobby thinks those things, the silence in the cab is suddenly interrupted by an ugly grumbling noise, like a sign from Heaven. An ugly grumbling noise that is coming from Castiel's stomach. At the sound of it, the angel looks down at himself a bit incredulously, like he'd never known he could be that loud from the inside out.
Balls.
Bobby manages to wait until they hit a red light to sigh and look the angel over with some exasperation. "When was the last time you ate?" he asks, because Dean always seems to be asking his boyfriend that, like Cas doesn't remember sometimes, or that he just hates having to do it at all. With the shit Dean is always eating, and Cas taking after him like a baby duck following after its mother, Bobby isn't very surprised.
Castiel looks vaguely uncomfortable at the memory. "Yesterday evening," he admits, though he gets this look on his face that tells Bobby it hadn't been a particularly good experience. "A bacon sandwich." He grimaces as he says bacon. "Half of a bacon sandwich." It says something when Bobby can also tell by that tone that Cas probably took the bacon out, even though Dean has convinced him eating meat is okay because of all that loaves and fishes bullshit. Which means he got left with slightly greasy toast.
Bobby feels slightly guilty at putting off the grocery shopping until now, though he stops himself from getting too broken up about it because it really is hell on the scrapyard's budget to keep these human (mostly) garbage disposals fed properly all the time.
He pauses for a moment to think, still looking the angel over as the red light they're stopped at allows one lonely Subaru through the intersection past them. It looks like Sam isn't the only Winchester who can get sick of bacon after all. Someone really needs to reintroduce Dean to broccoli, if only for Cas's sake.
He wonders what he should do about all this.
Castiel's cheek twitches a little under Bobby's absent scrutiny, which Bobby is okay with, because it's things like that which remind him there's a personality under there for him to start liking after all, and not just the thing that tortured and killed someone who'd been important to him once.
And hey, it's not every day you get to intimidate an ex-angel of the Lord.
"Bobby, please stop… intensing me," Castiel intones eventually, when it gets to be too much.
Bobby blinks. "That's not even a word," he says, because he's not really sure how else to respond to something like that.
"Claire frequently uses the term in our text conversations," Castiel says back, somewhat defensively. "She says it's a long stare of doom that her mother often threatens her with. Particularly when Claire doesn't want to eat her peas. Which is unfair, because they're gross and she's no longer five-years-old." Pause. "I'm not sure what those two things have to do with each other."
Bobby rolls his eyes. Jesus Christ, it's like he's inherited a teenager again, and Sam and Dean had been bad enough on their first times around.
But it's enough of a push that he finds himself coming to a decision, right as the light finally turns green again and he shifts the truck back into gear. And while it's a decision that will probably mean not getting to put off all those deathbed things he'd been contemplating earlier, he also realizes that Cas being sick of bacon is probably one thing on the list of things Dean finds unfathomable, which means he'll be no damn help to the angel about it.
Bobby passes the turn for the Food 4 Less and goes cruising past it without missing a beat.
"Bobby," Castiel points out, ever helpful, "you missed the grocery store."
"It can wait ‘til after lunch," Bobby tells him, pulling into the parking lot of Charlie's Pub a few blocks further up the street. "You're hungry, and shopping hungry gets people fat." According to The Biggest Loser, but no one has to know what kind of television programming Bobby watches when there aren't Winchesters underfoot taking up space and hogging the couch and the TV.
Castiel looks at him with a mixture of utter trust and bewilderment. It reminds Bobby of the time Dean was six and Bobby had tried the whole Tooth Fairy spiel with the kid for the first time. And they just let these things come in to their rooms in the middle of the night and take their teeth? For a lousy quarter?
Kid had tried to sleep with a knife in his hand every night for a week after that first front tooth fell out.
Which is comparable to how Castiel looks like he's about to swear off grocery shopping for the rest of his life.
"Jesus," Bobby mutters as he parks the truck. "Never mind that last bit. We're getting lunch first because I could use something that isn't bacon and bread too," he clarifies.
Castiel seems to accept that, though he still looks wary about the whole fat thing. Bobby decides one out of two ain't bad and gets out of the cab. Castiel follows, eyeing the aged brick building in front of them as if assessing its threat level before entering.
Bobby is professional about ignoring him and heads towards the doors while fishing in his shirt pocket for the emergency cash he keeps there, separate from the hardware cash and grocery cash. He figures this counts as an emergency of some sort. Somewhere. Maybe. "I know it don't look like much, but the place has been in town longer than I have," he explains as the angel falls obediently to heel behind him. "Charlie's known Dean and Sam since Sam was still small enough to sit in a chair and not have his toes touch the floor."
This only seems to puzzle Castiel more. "So the owner of Charlie's is in fact Charlie," he muses out loud, for no apparent reason.
Bobby has to ask, even as he pushes open the door with a jingling of bells and the two of them are overwhelmed by the smell of beer and the sound of sports announcers shouting from the televisions: "What the hell else would he be named?"
Castiel's moue of confusion deepens. "I once asked if McDonald's was an establishment owned by someone by the name of McDonald and Dean laughed at me for five minutes," he explains. "I'm not sure this system makes sense."
Bobby almost laughs at that too, but manages to hold it back well enough. "No one said humanity makes sense, feathers," he drawls, before slipping past a small crowd gathered in front of the big-screen watching basketball highlights, and a group of bruisers lounging around, shooting pool in the middle of the day. A couple of townies are playing darts over by the bar as well, probably either on their lunch breaks or waiting for a shift to start. No one pays much attention to the crazy town drunk skulking into the bar just after eleven in the morning. Or if they do notice, they're all drunks too, and have no place saying a goddamned thing.
It works out.
Bobby automatically heads to the table in the back that gives him the best view of the whole floor. As he grabs a chair and eases into it, a meaty hand suddenly descends on him, grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him backwards.
Castiel bristles in that way that Dean does whenever he thinks he's about to get into a fight, but before the angel can do anything hasty (like smite righteously) a familiar voice hails Bobby with a cheerful, "Singer, you dirty old drunk, how the hell are you?!"
Before Bobby can answer, Charlie Grossman is turning Bobby around and grabbing Bobby's hand, shaking it heartily. The old, ruddy-faced owner of the pub looks genuinely pleased to see them both, like he can't quite contain his excitement and needs to physically let it out by manhandling people. Out of the corner of his eye, Bobby sees Castiel relax, but only by fractions as he stops to assess the new situation more thoroughly.
"Charlie," Bobby greets and shakes the giant man's sizable paw in return. "Been a while."
Charlie looks wounded. "Was worried that meatloaf you had in February wasn't up to snuff, man," Charlie barks. "Two months! Two months since you last stumbled in here to see me. These slacker kids hanging around the place all day and night are poor company, you know."
Bobby is unimpressed with the plea. "Their money's as good as mine," he says, though he's grinning a little.
Charlie grins back. "You kidding me? Your money's ten times more exciting," he says, before his eyes drift over towards Castiel, who still looks like he's ready to step in if Charlie's true purpose here is to take their money or something like that. Charlie doesn't notice, too pleased to see a new potential friend in Cas. "Now I know that's not Dean or Sam Winchester. Don't tell me you picked up another stray recently, Singer."
Bobby eyes Castiel back, who blinks and looks like he has no idea what anyone is talking about anymore. "Stray picked up a stray," Bobby admits after a beat.
Charlie chortles. "You keeping this one too, then?"
Bobby shrugs one shoulder and doesn't say anything more than "Dunno yet," which is as good as an admission. Goddamn Charlie. That was one of those things he'd been saving for his deathbed.
"Well if he eats like the other two, then I'm happy to have him," Charlie declares, before extending a hand to Cas. "Charles Grossman," he says. "You can call me Charlie, if you like."
Castiel looks down at his hand, and after a beat, seems to remember whatever minimal social training he's had learning humanity from Winchesters and takes it in one of his own. "Castiel," he says, then pauses. "Cas, if you like."
Charlie beams at him. "This one has pretty good manners," he remarks to Bobby.
Bobby glares at him half-heartedly. "Don't you run a damn business? Get us some menus before we starve to death."
Charlie guffaws at Bobby's surliness like it's of no consequence to him and putters off to do as he's told. Though once he finally hands a slightly greasy menu to each of them, he doesn't stop talking long enough to let them fully peruse it.
"Got some new stuff there in the middle," the bar owner admits, with a vague wave of his hand. "Midge wanted to take out some of the heavier items ever since she started reading articles on cholesterol and sodium and all that newfangled stuff that didn't exist when we were kids. Healthy Menu, she calls it. Light Eaters' Menu. Like people come in to a place like this looking for stuff like that."
Bobby snorts at him. "She probably just wants to keep you alive, you French-fry loving idjit," he throws back, though not before he notices Castiel's eyebrows go up a little as he flips to the middle of the menu right away.
"I'll have the cheeseburger," Bobby tosses out, because Midge grills up some good burgers, health-food nut or not. "With the onion rings."
Charlie nods before turning to the angel. "Cas?"
Cas puts the menu down. "The same is fine," he says after a beat.
Bobby eyes him. "You sure?"
Castiel looks strangely helpless at the question. "I'm not sure what a lot of this is," he admits after a breath, like he hadn't faced down Heaven and Hell and Purgatory once before and come out standing, like the extensive menu at a rundown pub is more intimidating to him than all three somehow. "The selection seems somewhat overwhelming."
Bobby rolls his eyes. "Then ask," he says. "No one's gonna jump down your throat, son. And just because Dean lets you get away with ordering whatever he orders doesn't mean I'm gonna."
Castiel looks unsure at that, but gamely picks the menu up again at Bobby's behest. Charlie throws Bobby a grin that means the old bastard is completely on to him. Bobby gestures back at him in a way that means 'make some goddamn recommendations or we'll be here for an age'.
"Midge is pretty damn proud of the salmon burger with the pepper and dill zucchini on the side," Charlie throws out, after a beat of Castiel looking more and more bewildered.
Castiel blinks back at him. "Salmon..."
"Comes with tartar sauce and cabbage on a oat bun?" Charlie adds with a shrug. "Today's early-bird special. You get unlimited refills on your side if you order before noon."
Castiel looks questioningly at Bobby. "I've never had any of that," he admits quietly.
"Do you want to try it or not?" Bobby asks, and then he realizes the angel is giving him the patented Winchester puppy eyes, and he feels an unexpected surge of something he damn well isn't going to admit is affection. "It's like the loaves and fishes bullshit," he clarifies, balefully enough to cover himself.
Castiel takes a deep breath, then eventually nods. Grimly, like he's about to march off into some sort of unknown battle where the number and might of his foes is unknown. "That sounds…interesting," he intones. "Thank you, Charlie."
Jesus Christ. Angels.
Charlie grins again and takes back the menus, before waddling off to the kitchen with a shout of, Midge! One cow patty and a special!" at the top of his lungs.
Bobby leans back in his chair while Castiel seems proud for not second-guessing himself without Dean here to tell him what's right or wrong in the land of food (and everything else, really). Bobby loves the kid, but he knows sometimes Dean is very my way or no way. Takes after his daddy in that sense.
Silence washes over them again for a time, Bobby glancing over Castiel's shoulder to catch the Sportscenter report on some Formula One race results, while Castiel peers curiously at the pool players or the darts players in the pub with the kind of interest that makes Bobby think he might actually want to stop and play.
"Hey," he warns, when Castiel looks a little too interested in the pool match currently going down twenty feet to the left. "No hustling on home turf. Locals know where you live, they might not be afraid to come after you for cheating them afterwards." First rule of hustling. He hopes Dean at least had the sense to pass it on.
Castiel shakes his head. "I've never played except in theory," he admits. "Dean tried to teach me once, but we became…sidetracked."
The way he says it, Bobby has no idea if he means sidetracked by the apocalypse or sidetracked by sex. Honestly, he doesn't really want to know.
"But from what I've been able to garner so far, it seems to be a simple game of geometry and physics," the angel continues, unaware of the turn of Bobby's thoughts. "The aim seems to be making triangles."
Bobby supposes that's true enough. "But theory and practice are two different things," he adds. "Just because the concept is simple doesn't mean doing it is."
Castiel nods. "I think I would prefer darts anyway," he admits, though he doesn't take his eyes off of the pool game all the same. "It has more practical application in our everyday use of projectile weaponry, and could serve to improve our accuracy on the job."
Bobby snorts at that, because it seems like such a Cas thing to say. He determinedly ignores how he even knows it's a Cas thing to say in the first place. "But pool pays better," he tells the angel, lowering his voice a little, unable to resist passing along some of the same lessons he'd passed on to John before, and to John's sons afterwards. "Plus it's easy to know whether or not you're bad at darts, but most people tend to think they're better at pool than they are. Makes for easier targets."
Castiel nods and doesn't bother to lower his own voice, even as the television suddenly goes quiet for a moment during a recap of the week's golf highlights. "Yes, the man in the hat who is about to shoot hasn't grasped the concept of the game yet, but he keeps posturing like he has," the angel proclaims solemnly, as if what he's saying is the word of God or something.
Bobby winces, because it sure as hell had echoed off the walls of the suddenly quiet room like it was indeed gospel.
The two men at the pool table turn to glare at them, like a pair of feral dogs.
The man in the hat who hasn't grasped the concept of the game yet (and who is very large, because of course he is), pauses to glare especially darkly at Castiel. "Keep your developmentally-handicapped friend under control, old man," he gripes at Bobby as he lines up his shot.
"Hey, isn't that crazy old man Singer from the junkyard?" his companion, a tall, skinny man in torn jeans pipes up, with a little sneer. "The town weirdos all hang out together on weekends, I guess."
Bobby figures that's true enough, but the angel seems to take exception to it, because it suddenly feels like the temperature around him has dropped several degrees. He's also looking at the pool players with a glint in his eye that one might call a smidge smitey. "You won't talk to him that way," he says, voice rumbling around the edges and through the air immediately surrounding their table like a shockwave.
The man in the hat forgets about lining up his shot and stands straight up, apparently unimpressed with Castiel on a physical level. To his credit, he's not aware of how one shouldn't mess with the nerd angel yet. "You got something to say, pipsqueak?" he demands. "Because I'd watch myself. Little guys talking big might get into trouble."
Castiel's brow furrows. "I wasn't aware it was a crime to admire how badly you could play a very simple game," he says, almost snooty-like, and Bobby turns to him with an incredulous look on his face.
"Would you shut up?" he asks, and Castiel is suddenly bewildered again, like he's not sure why he's the one being yelled at all of a sudden.
The skinny man in torn jeans sputters in laughter. "That's right! Shut up, idiot!" he guffaws at Cas, spraying spit in their general direction as he does.
Bobby turns from Castiel to glower at the skinny man, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, like his turf is being encroached upon. Under the heat of this look, the skinny man abruptly ends up choking on his own spit and going dead silent.
Once, over drinks and shared misery, Rufus had called Sam and Dean piss-poor hunters and sorry sons of bitches, admittedly echoing some of Bobby's own oft-uttered words back at him.
For some reason, Bobby hadn't taken too well to hearing those words come from someone else.
Rufus had laughed at him about it afterwards - around an ice pack on his newly bruised left-eye - and apologized for poking Bobby's inner Momma Bear with a stick.
Bobby had denied it all vehemently.
He hadn't been all that convincing about it back then either.
Now, he thinks he's beginning to see why.
"Just go back to your damn game," he tells the pool players gruffly, because a fight would cause Charlie trouble, besides being completely and utterly unfair when Cas broke them in half. "Maybe you'll improve with the practice."
Hat Guy and Skinny Guy scowl. "I think this crazy old man and his big-mouthed runt need to learn some manners," Hat Guy snarls, apparently not as impressed with Bobby's stink-eye as his beanpole friend is.
They advance menacingly towards the table and don't seem to understand that the big-mouthed runt they're threatening can probably crush them with his pinky if he decides to. Castiel stands instinctively in response to the threat, for better position probably, and Bobby rolls his eyes and stays the hell in his chair. Hat Guy pulls back an enormous arm like he's ready to take a swing at Cas.
Luckily, Hat Guy's fist is saved from a very painful collision with an immovable object by one of Charlie Grossman's thick hands slapping him on the shoulder and pinning his arm in place, mid-air. "Boys, boys," Charlie tsks at them, appearing out of nowhere and shaking his chubby face sadly. "Can't we settle this little disagreement like gentlemen? Midge'll have my balls for breakfast if we break any of the furniture."
Everyone turns to look at him. Even the dart players behind Bobby and Castiel's table.
"Stay out of this, Grossman," Hat Guy growls.
Charlie's hand tightens on his shoulder somewhat, and Bobby knows exactly how strong those hands are from having broken up a hundred drunken brawls over the years, from tossing out a hundred different surly drifters and intoxicated town idiots. Hell, Bobby had been one of them on occasion.
But instead of tossing Hat Guy and his friend out, Charlie merely gestures to the pool table. "Why don't we try pool? You're fighting about it, you might as well put your money where your mouth is." Pause. "Figuratively, of course. Gambling's illegal." He looks between the two parties hopefully. "So? Two on two? Winner gets free lunch?"
Bobby snorts at Charlie. "Seriously?"
Charlie grins back, like this is all some part of a diabolical master plan he's been cooking up for months. "Been a while since I've seen you work, maestro. I do appreciate the look of a good game."
Bobby grudgingly stands. "Yeah, but this idjit next to me's never played a day in his damn life."
Castiel goes from righteous anger to slightly wounded. "I believe I could figure it out," he throws in, before turning back to bristle at Hat Guy and Skinny Guy some more, even with Charlie's impressively rotund figure standing solidly between them.
Charlie shrugs. "Should even the score then, don't you think?"
Bobby feels some of his humor start to return as he goes to grab a few pool cues. "I could do with a free lunch," he admits. Emergency cash is hard to keep on hand when everything these days seems to be something of an emergency.
Hat Guy sputters at the easy exchange between the older men. "We never agreed to this," he grumbles, while Skinny Guy nods in typical yes-man fashion after the fact.
Charlie pats Hat Guy sympathetically. "If I were you, I'd back down too, son. No shame in it. Bobby's a damn fine pool player."
Hat Guy glowers and shrugs Charlie's hand off of his back. "Back down to the town drunk?" he spits, and glare-nods Skinny Guy into position by the table while Bobby hands Castiel his cue. "Like hell. You're on."
Bobby looks at Castiel for a moment, wondering if he should coach the kid a little about how this goes. Then thinks better of it. Cas is a billion years old. He'll figure it out. "Triangles," is his only word of guidance before he grabs the rack and neatly corrals all of the balls on the table into it. "You can break."
Castiel nods.
***
These things Castiel knows:
The sum of all angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.
Quantities are classified into two overarching categories: scalar quantities and vector quantities. Scalar quantities are defined purely by magnitude, while vector quantities suggest magnitude as well as direction. Geometrically speaking, a cross product of two vectors gives a third vector which is perpendicular to both vectors.
Interactions among things occur by forces. Forces cause motion and influence the kinematics of objects. The rules humans associate with these concepts are simple. Castiel believes Sam ascribed them to someone named Newton, though Castiel is certain they are a universal truth and thus cannot be credited to anyone but God. In any case they are as follows:
Force is equal to mass times acceleration.
For every force, there is an equal and opposite force.
An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
A spherical coordinate system is a coordinate system of three-dimensional space where the position of a point is specified by three numbers: the radial distance of that point from a fixed origin, its polar angle measured from a fixed zenith direction, and the azimuth angle of its orthogonal projection on a reference plane that passes through the origin and is orthogonal to the zenith, measured from a fixed reference direction on that plane.
When studying rotational dynamics, the moment of inertia for simple particles is mr2 where r is the distance from the axis of rotation of the particle.
Dissipation embodies the concept of a system where mechanical models lose energy over time, typically from friction or turbulence. The lost energy converts into heat, which raises the temperature of the system. Such systems are called dissipative systems.
The angle of incidence in a collision is equivalent to the angle of reflection.
These things are very simple things. All of them are beautiful to watch in play, as are most of the things God created (though perhaps, to Castiel, their beauty is not equal to Dean's).
Castiel watches these myriad concepts whirl into motion the minute the cue ball strikes the others and sends them bursting apart in perfect mathematical patterns, the bright colored spheres careening into opposite ends of the table in an explosion of force and friction. He studies their movements, their interactions, and then their stillness in a moment of utter fascination.
"Hurry the hell up, nutjob," Hat Guy demands.
Castiel smiles and complies, lining up a shot in the manner Dean had demonstrated to him once before, until they had been distracted by…other things.
He thinks he understands how to play this game perfectly well now.
***
Fifteen minutes later, Castiel is calmly sinking the eight ball in the corner after Bobby's prompt for him to call it, and everyone in the pub is holding their breath watching the little black ball clack into the pocket in order to join a handful of its other brethren.
Bobby snorts, because in truth he's only mildly surprised by the angel's success. "If lunch is free, I think I want some chili cheese on that burger too," he quips, making Charlie guffaw in laughter while Castiel nods in satisfaction to himself and returns to Bobby's side with the pool cue.
"It was relatively simple," he says by way of greeting, and everyone else in the room is too stunned by what they've just seen to process it properly.
Even the darts players have given up all pretense of playing by now and are lingering at the corner of the bar behind Bobby and Charlie, staring avidly at the action going down, darts clutched tightly in their hands and eyes comically wide. Hat Guy and Skinny Guy gape as well, a mixture of incredulity and embarrassed rage coloring their features.
"You hustled us!" Hat Guy manages, red in the face and looking like he still wants to start throwing fists.
"If so, they did a damn poor job of it," Charlie shoots back. "All they got was a couple of lunch specials out of it, and they're probably gone cold by now."
Hat Guy ignores Charlie in favor of staring down Cas, who just kind of blinks back at him like the larger man is nothing more than a smudge of dirt on the bottom of someone's shoe. Bobby supposes it's the inner dick angel in Cas revisiting the surface.
"I'll kill you," Hat Guy says, voice low and in a way that might have been intimidating to regular civilians. "I'm gonna break you and the dirty old man in half with my bare hands!"
Castiel doesn't break eye contact with Hat Guy once as he calmly reaches back and plucks a dart out of one of the slack-jawed darts players' hands. "I believe the terms of our agreement were to settle this peacefully in order to avoid broken things," he begins. As he does, he rotates the dart between his fingers lazily, point to end to point again, before curling his fist around the tail. "However," he adds with a glint in his eye that Bobby is comfortable classifying as all Winchester, "if you insist on a rematch, I might suggest we try darts next."
Castiel suddenly throws his arm out sideways, pitching the dart through the air like a bolt from his damn crossbow, the tip of it flying straight and true and right into the middle of the bulls-eye on the target at the back of the room, a good twenty-five feet away. He doesn't even turn his head away from Hat Guy for a second as he does it.
The room descends into disbelieving silence for the second time that afternoon. Even good-natured Charlie looks a mixture of impressed and wildly intimidated by Castiel.
Skinny Guy and Hat Guy gape, and while they are doing that, Castiel takes a step towards them, unfaltering in his resolve. He gets straight into Hat Guy personal space and declares, in a low, barely audible rumble, "You will never address Bobby Singer with anything other than respect ever again. Is that clear?"
For a moment, the lights in the room flicker.
And from there, Hat Guy understandably stumbles backwards, wide-eyed and incredulous at what Bobby can only assume is the sheer death aura coming off the nerdy looking guy in the dirt-stained jeans. Bobby watches, mildly irritated at the angel's showboating during the last part, while Hat Guy and Skinny guy fall all over themselves scrambling for the door, muttered utterances of "He's really crazy!" and "You're not worth the energy!" tossed over their shoulders on their way out.
Meanwhile, Charlie is looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Thought we got that wiring fixed," he mumbles after a beat.
Castiel turns to Bobby and Charlie placidly. "I would like lunch now, please," he says, easy as that.
Bobby can't resist smacking Cas upside his damned angelic head with his baseball cap on the way back to the table all the same, and from there on out, Charlie brings them fresh food to eat in the relative peace of the pub afterwards (though the darts players don't stop staring at them the whole damn time).
At the very least, they learn from there that Castiel isn't really a fan of fish despite the loaves and fishes bullshit. He does take to his grilled veggies with some scary enthusiasm though, and gets three refills of the stuff through the course of the meal. "I think I like zucchini more than French fries," he declares, somewhat boldly.
Bobby snorts at the light of revelation in the angel's eyes and simply answers, "You better still remember what's on our damned shopping list after all that."
***
They leave Charlie's only after the rotund owner manages to wrench a promise out of Bobby to bring the whole gang by sometime soon, and before long, they're walking through the sliding glass doors of the Food 4 Less, where, thankfully, the present employees and customers seem either too bored or too self-absorbed to pay much attention to either of them, regardless of how they feel about crazy town hermits and denim-clad angels who stare for too long. It makes for quick work of the grocery shopping, and to his delight, Castiel finally discovers what a canned bean is, and what Fruit Loops look like, and that yogurt is a vague term for a substance that has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of iterations all sitting on the shelf beside each other in a display of overwhelming choice.
Bobby tells him to stop staring at the dairy case like a creeper and just get one of the variety packs because it's cheaper and if Sam wants to be choosy he can get his own damn yogurt next time. Castiel selects the package with blueberry and strawberry flavored yogurt in it and thinks he would like to try some of it for himself as well, if Sam would allow it.
After that Bobby piles milk, cheese, and eggs into the cart before eyeing Castiel contemplatively and saying. "Time to split up. You go get whatever it is you need for your Betty Crocker act. I'm gonna go find whiskey. You can catch up to me in the liquor aisle when you're done."
Castiel nods, having now discerned that the signs posted at the top of each aisle will proclaim exactly what is in it. He happily toddles off in search of flour, sugar, and shortening for his next attempt at pie.
He finds each of those items in the baking goods aisle and follows Bobby's example of choosing the versions of them that have the lowest cost per ounce as ascribed by the little yellow price tags. A five-pound bag of flour, a small box of the Stevia Nicks Marcy Ward had recommended, and a tub of something called Crisco - which will apparently add a rich, buttery flavor with fifty percent less saturated fat and zero grams of transfat - later, and all he is left with is the decision of which fruit to use for filling this time. Contemplatively, he gathers everything up in his arms and decides to go to the produce section for apples, perhaps in an attempt to conquer his initial failure with his first apple pie.
Castiel is mildly surprised to find Bobby already perusing the fruits and vegetables when he arrives, the old hunter hastily bagging something green and tucking it into the cart in a way that makes it look like he's trying to hide something. This is definitely not their promised meeting place beside the alcohol.
"Bobby," Castiel says before he gets too close, like Dean has been telling him to do.
Bobby turns and blinks at the angel in much the same way Castiel imagines he would if the angel had snuck up behind him. He recovers quickly, though. "That was fast," he says as Castiel moves to put his items in the cart.
"The labeling system above the aisles is very convenient," Castiel intones back, though stops short when he peers into the contents of their cart and finds, to his surprise, a bag with three large zucchini in it, nestled in-between Sam's box of yogurt and Dean's box of Fruit Loops, as if in secret hiding.
When he glances up again questioningly, Bobby is pointedly not looking him in the eye anymore. "Whiskey," the older man says. "We need a lot of whiskey."
Something about it makes Castiel want to smile. He doesn't, or tries not to, though when Bobby spins the cart around abruptly on him, Castiel wonders if he had done it anyway.
"And beer," Bobby barks.
"And beer," Castiel replies faithfully, and stops briefly to put several green apples in a bag for tonight's pie.
From there, Bobby lets him take over pushing the cart and leads them straight to the alcohol. No one says anything about the sudden addition of zucchini to their shopping list.
Castiel thinks that he enjoys buying groceries very much.
***
When they get back to Bobby's house some time later it's still early in the afternoon, with plenty of time to bake and cook and clean and research, should it come to that. As Castiel unloads the back of the truck in the driveway he can hear the sounds of the brothers bickering wafting out to them from the kitchen, starting with Dean's cheerful, "So, you talk to Mira lately? You know, make sure your dick didn't kill her?" followed by Sam's good-natured, "Have a heart, Dean. Oh wait, you gave it away, my bad," followed by a slight crash and the indistinct noises of their sibling squabbling becoming a physical thing.
"Idjits," Bobby mutters under his breath, as he loads up his arms with as many bags of groceries as he can carry and shoves his way in through the screen door. "That laundry better be done!" he barks loudly at both young men, by way of greeting.
Castiel's lips quirk up slightly as he follows, only to find that Dean has an arm around Sam's neck in the middle of the kitchen, having bent his much larger brother nearly in two in order to give him something Dean likes to call a nuclear noogie. Both Winchesters stop abruptly at the sight of Bobby and Castiel with armfuls of food.
Dean immediately lets Sam go, while Sam immediately straightens and runs a hand through his mussed, slightly static-ridden hair. "Dean!" he complains, while Dean just grins and goes to help alleviate Castiel of his burdens. Sam, once his hair is in place again, dutifully does the same for Bobby.
"I hope there's burgers involved in this equation somewhere," Dean mentions happily, while digging through the bag in order to put things away. "Oh hey, Fruit Loops. Sweet."
He pauses, however, when he sees some of the other things also in the bag. "What the hell is this?" he demands, yanking out the small bag of zucchini nestled alongside the strangely colored rings of breakfast cereal.
Bobby and Castiel don't miss a beat when they both say, "A vegetable, Dean," at exactly the same time, in almost exactly the same way.
Dean and Sam both pause to look at them in response to the unexpectedness of that, their eyebrows arched in confusion and stances somewhat wary, as if they think that perhaps they'd missed something important while they'd been busy doing household chores today.
And maybe they did, but for now, Castiel thinks it will be okay if that something important stays just between him and Bobby. Just for a little while.
Castiel smiles secretly to himself at the thought and wordlessly goes to put his baking materials in the cupboard over the sink while Bobby ignores both of the brothers' inarticulate staring and shoves the box of yogurt squarely into Sam's hands. "Stop gawking and make yourselves useful," he says.
At that, Sam and Dean share a not-so-subtle look with one another while Bobby and Castiel pretend not to notice. "Oookay," they say in tandem and dutifully start to put the groceries in their rightful places all around the kitchen.
Pretty soon most everything is stored exactly where it is supposed to be, and Bobby has declared that there will be chili for dinner tonight, no complaints.
"Awesome," Dean declares, before wiping his hands off on his jeans and heading back out to finish up work on that Focus from earlier. "Ford is a real bitch," he murmurs by way of explanation to Cas, sneaking in a quick kiss when he thinks no one is looking, before he's out the door again.
Soon after that, the faint buzz of the dryer finishing the last load of laundry rattles Sam back into action, because he can now make up all the beds in the house with luxuriously clean sheets. "To be honest, Cas, I never want to wash yours and Dean's sheets for you ever again, man. No offense," he murmurs before he exits the kitchen, leaving Castiel alone with Bobby all over again.
Silence reigns for a moment, but it's not an uncomfortable one by any means. Eventually Bobby clears his throat and asks, "Well, son? What've you got planned now?"
Castiel looks at the bag of zucchini still sitting on top of the counter. "I was thinking," he begins, somewhat hopefully, "that we might learn how to go about cooking these properly."
Bobby considers it. "I think Sam's laptop is still in the living room somewhere," he suggests with a shrug. "Food Network website might have some ideas."
And so the two of them go.
-end-
Next: DVD Extra: Give a Little Whistle
Masterpost: Supernatural: Redemption Road (for full series info, warnings, and disclaimer)
Author: peroxidepest17
Characters/Pairing: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Bobby, and OCs
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~10,700
Warnings: language
Beta: nyoka and zatnikatel
Note: This is part of our collection of DVD extras - outtakes, deleted scenes, missing scenes, and episode tags/codas that take place before, during, or following an aired episode. This coda follows Dreamcatcher.
Author's Note: Thanks to Sonia for helping make this SDCC planning go a little smoother so I could actually settle down a bit and finish this up. Apologies for my whining and all the stress I threw on you, dear.
Summary: Cas is just another piece of the puzzle that fits solidly within the lines of the bizarre pattern Bobby's life is turning out to be.
***
Bobby sips blearily at a mug of black coffee as he shuffles quietly through the house in the late morning hours, his senses instinctively surveying all the myriad sights and sounds that come with having a nest full of Winchesters underfoot. It's a familiar symphony of activity by now, kind of calming in its routine despite everything. Either that or he's just too damn old to expend any extra energy he has being ornery at the boys for making a racket.
He snorts at how odd it is to be an old hunter as he instinctively surveys the wards painted over various doors and windows throughout the house, his trained eyes automatically looking for any damage the markings might have taken over the past week. In the meantime, he uses the other half of his brain to absently make a list of all the things he has to do in order to keep this well-oiled machine of dumbassery limping along to fight another day.
From the distant sounds of power tools and classic rock seeping in from the scrap yard, Bobby surmises that Dean is in the garage finishing up work on that wrecked Focus that got brought in Thursday, clearly in an attempt to be helpful and less free-loading. Bobby suspects that after Dean's little stint in dreamland, the kid is only too happy to be up and about with the sun, doing the useful work of fixing things instead of taking them apart. Or maybe it's something else at the same time, if Dean's raucous singing along to the dulcet tones of Kansas is telling Bobby anything. It seems that despite the nightmares, something good must have happened under that curse at the same time, though Dean and Cas haven't said anything in particular about it either way. But Bobby knows all things Winchester well enough by now to know that the way Dean is swaggering around lately (even on chupacabra hunts, apparently) is meaningful.
Looks like he's finally gotten something off his chest that's been weighing him down for a while now.
What it is or how it got fixed exactly doesn't matter yet, as far as Bobby is concerned. It's just damn good to hear Dean up and about, maybe even on the cusp of happy.
And if Dean is out in the garage playing Greased Lightning with all his car-loving sing-songing heart, then that must mean the heavy clunking around Bobby can hear going on in the basement is Sam, dutifully doing his part to also be useful by single-handedly battling the hell-demon that is Bobby's ancient, top-loading washing machine. Probably because Sam knows full well that fighting the washing machine in order to win clean clothes is their ticket to not overstaying their welcome.
It has been a longstanding Singer Salvage policy that Bobby refuses to tolerate a household that smells like unwashed frat boy. As it so happens, the Winchesters are walking monuments of hot-headed testosterone that can - with time and a lack of commitment to weekly household chores - out-stink any of the oldest, mustiest, most blood-stained tomes or relics that Bobby has collected around his home over the years. As such, he has long ago learned that if the Winchesters neglect doing their laundry for a couple of weeks, the smell will start to overpower the place like a fungus and seep into everything he owns. He's chased the boys (and their father before them) off of his property enough times in the past for them to have learned by now to get the laundry finished at least once every ten days or so if they want to remain under his roof in a peaceable fashion. It's not like he's asking much here with that rule, either. Sam's ridiculous hair clogging up the shower drain is fine; hell, even Dean's late night not-as-quiet-as-they-think shenanigans with his angel are tolerable to a degree, but Bobby's couch starting to smell of Winchester funk is where he absolutely draws the line.
Either way, the boys are clearly making themselves useful today, in whatever little ways they can, given that there just isn't anything to work with on the hunt front right now, Stateside anyway. The rest of the world seems to be one big, stewing mass of chaos, and according to the summit in Colorado that Mira and Tamara reported on, it's only been getting worse.
Which is nothing new, exactly. It seems things are always slated to get worse than they've been before these days. It's like the monsters of the year know they've got to go big or go home if they want to outshine the mess Satan made during his brief stint topside.
Bobby finishes off his coffee with that grimly amusing thought and wanders into the study, where he finds the final piece of the Winchester puzzle. And by that he means Dean's angel, or half-angel, or whatever the hell he is now, sitting cross-legged at the desk, eyes roaming curiously over an old Chinese mariner's hand-drawn map of the Pacific. Bobby picked it up on a trip to Japan back in '82, when he'd been at an antique auction house in search of what he'd believed to be a cursed Noh mask. He'd still been bad with the language and figuring out the ridiculous subway system at the time, and the mask had slipped through his fingers to a rival bidder. But by an incredible stroke of good luck, it had eventually found its way to a kuchiyose miko who had known exactly what to do with it (and with Bobby as well).
The memory is fleeting but not unwelcome, and when Bobby sees Castiel making himself at home with his things just like that - things that bring back some of the rare fond memories a hunter sometimes gets - he's torn between indignation and resignation. On the one hand, who the hell does Cas think he is?
On the other, Bobby knows exactly who he is.
To put it simply, he's the one that Dean finally deigned to bring home.
It's not exactly Meet the Parents hilarious or anything, but Bobby supposes - despite everything Cas has done - that as small a thing as it may be for Cas to be here now, it's big in its own way too. For Dean anyway, and for anyone Dean considers family. Bobby sighs, because he is clearly permanently entrenched in that camp, despite not always liking how that camp smells. Which means the angel will continue to make himself at home amongst Bobby's things, continue spoiling Bobby's goddamn dog, and continue to be another name on the list of mouths Bobby's got to feed out of the pittance he makes junking cars and internet phishing. And since Bobby can remember telling Cas he'd always have a home here as long as he wanted or needed one, in between dodging giant spiders out in California, he only has himself to blame.
At least the angel doesn't stink up the place like the other two.
"Find anything interesting?" Bobby finally asks after a beat of silently watching Castiel comb over every faded black ink squiggle on the map like it may somehow be the key to everything.
The angel looks up at the sound of Bobby's voice, and wide blue eyes study him briefly. For a second, Castiel is less otherworldly and fearsome and more soft around the edges, like he's just a young man taking temporary refuge under Bobby's roof, trying to make sense of a terrifying world while searching for his rightful place in it.
And with that thought, Bobby feels all the rest of his carefully parsed-out indignation fade abruptly. Seems the angel is just another Winchester boy who needs his help after all. And looking at it that way, Bobby realizes it all makes a weird sort of sense, that Cas is just another piece of the puzzle that fits solidly within the lines of the bizarre pattern Bobby's life is turning out to be. Hell, he'd even considered Sam and Dean angels at one point in their lives or another. Sam when he'd been eight months old and gurgling happily in Bobby's lap around a warm bottle; Dean when he'd been eleven and his whole face was lit up at what a joy playing a simple goddamned game of catch was. Cas is just a little more literal in terms of the angelic, but in the end, the three of them are all exactly the same.
Who'd have thought that a surly old drunk like Bobby Singer would be fated to a lifetime of watching over three boys with the faces of angels and the luck of devils?
If God is still out there, he has a real screwed up sense of humor.
Nothing to do but man up and deal with it, then.
And so Bobby puts his empty coffee mug down on the desk with a resigned clack and motions first to Cas, and then to the door. He has errands to run and there's no sense in bothering the other two if they're actually being helpful around the place for once. "C'mon, kid," he grunts at the angel, full well knowing Castiel is older than him (and probably dirt as well). It doesn't change the fact that he's a goddamned kid, though. "Make yourself useful."
Bobby grabs his cap and his keys on the way out the door. Castiel tilts his head at him in confusion, but wordlessly stands and follows him out all the same.
Bobby supposes he should at least be thankful that this Winchester has already learned how to listen to him well enough. The other two didn't come as well-trained.
***
"Milk, eggs, bacon, coffee, whiskey, beer, cheese, bread, canned beans, dog food, chili, chicken noodle soup, peanut butter, jelly, ground beef, Fruit Loops, yogurt," Bobby lists off to Castiel as they rattle down the road towards town in one of Bobby's clunky pickup trucks. He side-eyes Castiel briefly, before turning back to the road. "Oh and some flour, butter, and whatever fruit you want for whatever pie you're making next. You go through the damned ingredients like Dean went through ground beef during his growth spurt."
Castiel is vaguely bewildered by the many facets of that comment he can't immediately comprehend. Bobby doesn't seem to care. "You got all that or what?" he barks when Castiel doesn't respond quickly enough.
Castiel nods from the passenger seat, brow furrowed slightly as he very studiously commits the list to memory, just like he had a few moments ago, when Bobby had thrown out the list of things they required from the hardware store. The grocery list is slightly more mystifying to him than the hardware, mostly because he doesn't know certain things, like what a canned bean is or what the term Fruit Loops means, exactly. The list from the hardware store had been simple enough because they are all things he has known and seen and used in the Winchesters' - and now his - line of work: salt, iron, spray paint, wood, industrial cleaners, various flammable liquids, rope, aerosol cans of poisons and irritants, copper wire, duct tape. These are all the things hunters use for fighting ghosts and monsters, for warding places against evil, for disposing of the bodies of creatures and victims alike, for taking prisoners and interrogating them. They are for fixing other necessary tools as well, and for breaking into places or out of them as the need arises.
Hardware, he seems to understand well enough. However, Castiel is still trying to figure out the apparent plethora of food and the even more plentiful names of food that humans assign to all the things they eat. It is something he fears he will never fully grasp.
"Yogurt?" he asks after a breath of silence between them on the road, as they near the main thoroughfare of town, Sioux Falls is looking quiet and relaxed this morning, on what the inhabitants consider a normal Saturday in late spring.
Bobby shrugs helplessly at the question. "Sam," he says, with a look that is equal parts disbelieving and embarrassed as they turn off the street and into the parking lot of a local hardware store. "Sometimes I don't get that boy," he adds, seemingly for no reason.
Castiel does not know what yogurt is, which is what he had meant by his question, but he lets it go, because knowing that it's for Sam - that it‘s something Sam apparently enjoys - is more than enough to satisfy his curiosity for the moment. It's interesting how he can now tell from Bobby's tone and expression that he's buying it solely because Sam prefers it, even if no one else does (it is certainly not anything Castiel has ever seen Dean eat, or he is certain he would have been invited to try some). Perhaps it's a rare treat for Sam as well, and Bobby wants to indulge them a little on this trip for supplies. The last few days following Dean and Sam's homecoming from the chupacabra hunt had been filled mostly with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or egg-and-bacon sandwiches on slightly stale bread. Dean had made a comment that no matter how low the stores at Bobby's house can get, it seems like there's always more than enough bacon to last the winter.
Castiel is beginning to see that for all his seemingly grudging fondness, Bobby is very happy to spoil the brothers in small ways that - to Castiel in any case - also seem monumental in the grand scheme of things; whether it's bacon to keep Dean going, or occasional yogurt to please Sam's more delicate palate.
Castiel finds that the thought pleases him, warms him from the inside out, even if it doesn't have anything to do with him, at least not directly. Maybe one day, he and Bobby will have a repertoire like that as well. Castiel thinks he would like to be more than just another something of Dean's to this man.
"The hell are you staring at?" Bobby grunts after a moment, pulling the truck into a parking space at the very edge of the hardware store's designated lot, looking as exasperated with Castiel at this moment as he does when Dean leaves his socks on the floor or when Sam has indigestion after dinner and they all must suffer for it.
That he is gracing Castiel with the exact same expression of bad-temper makes that warm feeling in Castiel flare even brighter somehow, inexplicably. "Nothing, I apologize. I will get us a cart," he says simply, as he opens the door and exits the cab.
"Smug idjit," is Bobby's only response as he follows suit.
Castiel feels himself smile just a little bit at the sound of it.
***
There are moments even now, when Castiel feels a roiling sort of frustration with humans and humanity in general, moments where he is forced to remember the immenseness of who and what he had been, the infinite importance of all the things he has witnessed and wrought in millennia of existence. He has razed cities to the ground, watched humanity crawl slowly up from the muck of evolution. Once he had contained multitudes and commanded the power of them all, however briefly.
This feeling of being bigger than humans comes back to him sometimes, when faced with the true smallness of some people.
Bobby - to him, to the Winchesters, and to the hunting community at large - is a person whose knowledge, selflessness, courage, and skill are at once respected, emulated, and admired by all. Castiel is convinced Bobby Singer has been as instrumental in saving the world as Dean and Sam.
However, to a great number of the inhabitants of Sioux Falls, Bobby Singer is nothing more than the crazy drunk who lives in the junkyard on the far outskirts of town. He is a laughingstock, a petty criminal, and a threat to their happily monotonous little lives all at once. He is different from them, and not in a way that they celebrate.
This general sentiment is first made apparent to Castiel by the manager at the hardware store, and the subtle nod he makes at one of the other orange-vested workers when Bobby and Castiel walk through the sliding doors. Castiel feels the orange-vested teenager with the nervous hands following them from that moment on, watching every move they make, checking to make sure Bobby is unarmed, or that he is not stealing anything, or drinking and making a scene.
From there, other customers see Bobby in the aisles and many turn around and flee, or force their eyes downward and refuse to make eye contact. The worst is a pair of middle-aged housewives with small children riding in the seats of their shopping carts; they look at each other and murmur knowingly, judgmentally, before turning questioning eyes on Castiel, then back to Bobby again. Every movement and expression is laced with suspicion and disrespect and none of them - not a single one - seems to understand that their lives, their very existences, would have been snuffed out years ago if not for this man, this crazy drunk who lives in the rubble of abandoned vehicles just on the outside of their small, small worlds. He is a hero, and they treat him no better than some sort of sad spectacle, as if he is less than human for all the things he has sacrificed to keep them safe.
Something about all of it makes an old, powerful discontent sweep over Castiel, makes him as wrathful and vengeful an angel as any of his other brethren. He would smite them for this insult perhaps, if he had the ability to. At least, that is what his mind is telling him he would do, as he imagines - in increasingly creative ways - how he would make them acknowledge how much he disapproves of their disrespect for this man.
Bobby doesn't seem to care, single-mindedly perusing the shelves in search of the right brand of copper wire.
Proving once again that Robert Singer is greater than angels.
Or at least, in this context, half of one.
An angel who is busy imagining laying waste to this hardware store in the name of justice at that. Sometimes Castiel laments that he has truly become an irredeemably corrupt wellspring of evil when he finds himself indulging in moments of malicious fantasy such as this, but Dean promises him that a general hatred for most people is only a sign that Castiel has retained more humanity than not in the end. Castiel finds this concept very confusing, but in some ways, incredibly comforting all at once.
Castiel's mental image of flames and damnation for those who would judge without knowing is suddenly shattered when Bobby comes up behind him and smacks him smartly upside the head with his folded up baseball cap.
"I don't know what the hell you think you're glaring about, but you look like a damned serial killer. Stop it," Bobby barks at him gruffly, pointedly ignoring a scandalized looking family of onlookers as he steers the cart further down the aisle. Castiel follows, rubbing his head curiously and wondering if Bobby is angry with him.
"They disrespect you," he protests, once he catches up. "They don't understand."
Bobby eyes him again, and something about it makes Castiel feel impossibly young, despite their great difference in age. "I don't want them to understand," Bobby says eventually, as he dumps a couple of cans of bug spray into the cart. "That's the whole point, ain't it? We do this so they don't have to understand our lives."
Castiel considers this for a moment, and after a beat, he sees the reason behind it in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't mean he has to like it though, as proven by his pointedly turning to glare at the nervous orange-vested teenager peeking out at them from around the corner of the next aisle.
Bobby huffs a sigh of exasperation when he sees that, mostly because the poor orange-vested kid yelps and goes stumbling backwards into a display of potting soil. "Ignore the peanut gallery for a second and tell me what's next on the goddamned list, will you?" Bobby says as they push past the gangly pile of teenager onto the next aisle. "I'm old and I can't remember everything these days."
Thankfully, he sounds no more vexed with Castiel than he had with Dean last night, after Dean had gotten ketchup smudged on the edge of a 200-year-old tome on Sumerian deities.
Castiel nods, relieved. "Duct tape," he answers faithfully.
***
Twenty minutes later, while they're on their way to the grocery store, Castiel sits silently in the passenger seat beside Bobby and looks confused in that way he sort of does whenever he's trying to parse out humanity and his own reactions to it, like he knows what he's feeling is human, but at the same time, he's not sure what he's supposed to do with it beyond acknowledging it.
Bobby decides he's going to leave the angel to it on his own, so that nothing more is said about any of the townsfolk or their perceptions of Bobby. More particularly, so nothing more is said about Castiel's inexplicably heated indignation at the thought of someone treating Bobby poorly. Because analyzing it might make them realize they're almost family, or being pulled along the bonds of family, and that in the end, they might actually start to like each other on their own merits instead of in deference to Dean's.
In a fit of uncharacteristic optimism, Bobby thinks that if they continue along this path of silence, they can maybe refrain from dealing with all of that garbage for a long, long time. Possibly not until Bobby is on his death bed and no longer has to worry about things like shame and what it means when you've got a son-in-law who may have killed one of your ex-girlfriends but who you find yourself liking (somewhat against your will) anyway.
As long as it stays quiet and businesslike from here on out.
Which means, of course, that it doesn't.
Because almost as soon as Bobby thinks those things, the silence in the cab is suddenly interrupted by an ugly grumbling noise, like a sign from Heaven. An ugly grumbling noise that is coming from Castiel's stomach. At the sound of it, the angel looks down at himself a bit incredulously, like he'd never known he could be that loud from the inside out.
Balls.
Bobby manages to wait until they hit a red light to sigh and look the angel over with some exasperation. "When was the last time you ate?" he asks, because Dean always seems to be asking his boyfriend that, like Cas doesn't remember sometimes, or that he just hates having to do it at all. With the shit Dean is always eating, and Cas taking after him like a baby duck following after its mother, Bobby isn't very surprised.
Castiel looks vaguely uncomfortable at the memory. "Yesterday evening," he admits, though he gets this look on his face that tells Bobby it hadn't been a particularly good experience. "A bacon sandwich." He grimaces as he says bacon. "Half of a bacon sandwich." It says something when Bobby can also tell by that tone that Cas probably took the bacon out, even though Dean has convinced him eating meat is okay because of all that loaves and fishes bullshit. Which means he got left with slightly greasy toast.
Bobby feels slightly guilty at putting off the grocery shopping until now, though he stops himself from getting too broken up about it because it really is hell on the scrapyard's budget to keep these human (mostly) garbage disposals fed properly all the time.
He pauses for a moment to think, still looking the angel over as the red light they're stopped at allows one lonely Subaru through the intersection past them. It looks like Sam isn't the only Winchester who can get sick of bacon after all. Someone really needs to reintroduce Dean to broccoli, if only for Cas's sake.
He wonders what he should do about all this.
Castiel's cheek twitches a little under Bobby's absent scrutiny, which Bobby is okay with, because it's things like that which remind him there's a personality under there for him to start liking after all, and not just the thing that tortured and killed someone who'd been important to him once.
And hey, it's not every day you get to intimidate an ex-angel of the Lord.
"Bobby, please stop… intensing me," Castiel intones eventually, when it gets to be too much.
Bobby blinks. "That's not even a word," he says, because he's not really sure how else to respond to something like that.
"Claire frequently uses the term in our text conversations," Castiel says back, somewhat defensively. "She says it's a long stare of doom that her mother often threatens her with. Particularly when Claire doesn't want to eat her peas. Which is unfair, because they're gross and she's no longer five-years-old." Pause. "I'm not sure what those two things have to do with each other."
Bobby rolls his eyes. Jesus Christ, it's like he's inherited a teenager again, and Sam and Dean had been bad enough on their first times around.
But it's enough of a push that he finds himself coming to a decision, right as the light finally turns green again and he shifts the truck back into gear. And while it's a decision that will probably mean not getting to put off all those deathbed things he'd been contemplating earlier, he also realizes that Cas being sick of bacon is probably one thing on the list of things Dean finds unfathomable, which means he'll be no damn help to the angel about it.
Bobby passes the turn for the Food 4 Less and goes cruising past it without missing a beat.
"Bobby," Castiel points out, ever helpful, "you missed the grocery store."
"It can wait ‘til after lunch," Bobby tells him, pulling into the parking lot of Charlie's Pub a few blocks further up the street. "You're hungry, and shopping hungry gets people fat." According to The Biggest Loser, but no one has to know what kind of television programming Bobby watches when there aren't Winchesters underfoot taking up space and hogging the couch and the TV.
Castiel looks at him with a mixture of utter trust and bewilderment. It reminds Bobby of the time Dean was six and Bobby had tried the whole Tooth Fairy spiel with the kid for the first time. And they just let these things come in to their rooms in the middle of the night and take their teeth? For a lousy quarter?
Kid had tried to sleep with a knife in his hand every night for a week after that first front tooth fell out.
Which is comparable to how Castiel looks like he's about to swear off grocery shopping for the rest of his life.
"Jesus," Bobby mutters as he parks the truck. "Never mind that last bit. We're getting lunch first because I could use something that isn't bacon and bread too," he clarifies.
Castiel seems to accept that, though he still looks wary about the whole fat thing. Bobby decides one out of two ain't bad and gets out of the cab. Castiel follows, eyeing the aged brick building in front of them as if assessing its threat level before entering.
Bobby is professional about ignoring him and heads towards the doors while fishing in his shirt pocket for the emergency cash he keeps there, separate from the hardware cash and grocery cash. He figures this counts as an emergency of some sort. Somewhere. Maybe. "I know it don't look like much, but the place has been in town longer than I have," he explains as the angel falls obediently to heel behind him. "Charlie's known Dean and Sam since Sam was still small enough to sit in a chair and not have his toes touch the floor."
This only seems to puzzle Castiel more. "So the owner of Charlie's is in fact Charlie," he muses out loud, for no apparent reason.
Bobby has to ask, even as he pushes open the door with a jingling of bells and the two of them are overwhelmed by the smell of beer and the sound of sports announcers shouting from the televisions: "What the hell else would he be named?"
Castiel's moue of confusion deepens. "I once asked if McDonald's was an establishment owned by someone by the name of McDonald and Dean laughed at me for five minutes," he explains. "I'm not sure this system makes sense."
Bobby almost laughs at that too, but manages to hold it back well enough. "No one said humanity makes sense, feathers," he drawls, before slipping past a small crowd gathered in front of the big-screen watching basketball highlights, and a group of bruisers lounging around, shooting pool in the middle of the day. A couple of townies are playing darts over by the bar as well, probably either on their lunch breaks or waiting for a shift to start. No one pays much attention to the crazy town drunk skulking into the bar just after eleven in the morning. Or if they do notice, they're all drunks too, and have no place saying a goddamned thing.
It works out.
Bobby automatically heads to the table in the back that gives him the best view of the whole floor. As he grabs a chair and eases into it, a meaty hand suddenly descends on him, grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him backwards.
Castiel bristles in that way that Dean does whenever he thinks he's about to get into a fight, but before the angel can do anything hasty (like smite righteously) a familiar voice hails Bobby with a cheerful, "Singer, you dirty old drunk, how the hell are you?!"
Before Bobby can answer, Charlie Grossman is turning Bobby around and grabbing Bobby's hand, shaking it heartily. The old, ruddy-faced owner of the pub looks genuinely pleased to see them both, like he can't quite contain his excitement and needs to physically let it out by manhandling people. Out of the corner of his eye, Bobby sees Castiel relax, but only by fractions as he stops to assess the new situation more thoroughly.
"Charlie," Bobby greets and shakes the giant man's sizable paw in return. "Been a while."
Charlie looks wounded. "Was worried that meatloaf you had in February wasn't up to snuff, man," Charlie barks. "Two months! Two months since you last stumbled in here to see me. These slacker kids hanging around the place all day and night are poor company, you know."
Bobby is unimpressed with the plea. "Their money's as good as mine," he says, though he's grinning a little.
Charlie grins back. "You kidding me? Your money's ten times more exciting," he says, before his eyes drift over towards Castiel, who still looks like he's ready to step in if Charlie's true purpose here is to take their money or something like that. Charlie doesn't notice, too pleased to see a new potential friend in Cas. "Now I know that's not Dean or Sam Winchester. Don't tell me you picked up another stray recently, Singer."
Bobby eyes Castiel back, who blinks and looks like he has no idea what anyone is talking about anymore. "Stray picked up a stray," Bobby admits after a beat.
Charlie chortles. "You keeping this one too, then?"
Bobby shrugs one shoulder and doesn't say anything more than "Dunno yet," which is as good as an admission. Goddamn Charlie. That was one of those things he'd been saving for his deathbed.
"Well if he eats like the other two, then I'm happy to have him," Charlie declares, before extending a hand to Cas. "Charles Grossman," he says. "You can call me Charlie, if you like."
Castiel looks down at his hand, and after a beat, seems to remember whatever minimal social training he's had learning humanity from Winchesters and takes it in one of his own. "Castiel," he says, then pauses. "Cas, if you like."
Charlie beams at him. "This one has pretty good manners," he remarks to Bobby.
Bobby glares at him half-heartedly. "Don't you run a damn business? Get us some menus before we starve to death."
Charlie guffaws at Bobby's surliness like it's of no consequence to him and putters off to do as he's told. Though once he finally hands a slightly greasy menu to each of them, he doesn't stop talking long enough to let them fully peruse it.
"Got some new stuff there in the middle," the bar owner admits, with a vague wave of his hand. "Midge wanted to take out some of the heavier items ever since she started reading articles on cholesterol and sodium and all that newfangled stuff that didn't exist when we were kids. Healthy Menu, she calls it. Light Eaters' Menu. Like people come in to a place like this looking for stuff like that."
Bobby snorts at him. "She probably just wants to keep you alive, you French-fry loving idjit," he throws back, though not before he notices Castiel's eyebrows go up a little as he flips to the middle of the menu right away.
"I'll have the cheeseburger," Bobby tosses out, because Midge grills up some good burgers, health-food nut or not. "With the onion rings."
Charlie nods before turning to the angel. "Cas?"
Cas puts the menu down. "The same is fine," he says after a beat.
Bobby eyes him. "You sure?"
Castiel looks strangely helpless at the question. "I'm not sure what a lot of this is," he admits after a breath, like he hadn't faced down Heaven and Hell and Purgatory once before and come out standing, like the extensive menu at a rundown pub is more intimidating to him than all three somehow. "The selection seems somewhat overwhelming."
Bobby rolls his eyes. "Then ask," he says. "No one's gonna jump down your throat, son. And just because Dean lets you get away with ordering whatever he orders doesn't mean I'm gonna."
Castiel looks unsure at that, but gamely picks the menu up again at Bobby's behest. Charlie throws Bobby a grin that means the old bastard is completely on to him. Bobby gestures back at him in a way that means 'make some goddamn recommendations or we'll be here for an age'.
"Midge is pretty damn proud of the salmon burger with the pepper and dill zucchini on the side," Charlie throws out, after a beat of Castiel looking more and more bewildered.
Castiel blinks back at him. "Salmon..."
"Comes with tartar sauce and cabbage on a oat bun?" Charlie adds with a shrug. "Today's early-bird special. You get unlimited refills on your side if you order before noon."
Castiel looks questioningly at Bobby. "I've never had any of that," he admits quietly.
"Do you want to try it or not?" Bobby asks, and then he realizes the angel is giving him the patented Winchester puppy eyes, and he feels an unexpected surge of something he damn well isn't going to admit is affection. "It's like the loaves and fishes bullshit," he clarifies, balefully enough to cover himself.
Castiel takes a deep breath, then eventually nods. Grimly, like he's about to march off into some sort of unknown battle where the number and might of his foes is unknown. "That sounds…interesting," he intones. "Thank you, Charlie."
Jesus Christ. Angels.
Charlie grins again and takes back the menus, before waddling off to the kitchen with a shout of, Midge! One cow patty and a special!" at the top of his lungs.
Bobby leans back in his chair while Castiel seems proud for not second-guessing himself without Dean here to tell him what's right or wrong in the land of food (and everything else, really). Bobby loves the kid, but he knows sometimes Dean is very my way or no way. Takes after his daddy in that sense.
Silence washes over them again for a time, Bobby glancing over Castiel's shoulder to catch the Sportscenter report on some Formula One race results, while Castiel peers curiously at the pool players or the darts players in the pub with the kind of interest that makes Bobby think he might actually want to stop and play.
"Hey," he warns, when Castiel looks a little too interested in the pool match currently going down twenty feet to the left. "No hustling on home turf. Locals know where you live, they might not be afraid to come after you for cheating them afterwards." First rule of hustling. He hopes Dean at least had the sense to pass it on.
Castiel shakes his head. "I've never played except in theory," he admits. "Dean tried to teach me once, but we became…sidetracked."
The way he says it, Bobby has no idea if he means sidetracked by the apocalypse or sidetracked by sex. Honestly, he doesn't really want to know.
"But from what I've been able to garner so far, it seems to be a simple game of geometry and physics," the angel continues, unaware of the turn of Bobby's thoughts. "The aim seems to be making triangles."
Bobby supposes that's true enough. "But theory and practice are two different things," he adds. "Just because the concept is simple doesn't mean doing it is."
Castiel nods. "I think I would prefer darts anyway," he admits, though he doesn't take his eyes off of the pool game all the same. "It has more practical application in our everyday use of projectile weaponry, and could serve to improve our accuracy on the job."
Bobby snorts at that, because it seems like such a Cas thing to say. He determinedly ignores how he even knows it's a Cas thing to say in the first place. "But pool pays better," he tells the angel, lowering his voice a little, unable to resist passing along some of the same lessons he'd passed on to John before, and to John's sons afterwards. "Plus it's easy to know whether or not you're bad at darts, but most people tend to think they're better at pool than they are. Makes for easier targets."
Castiel nods and doesn't bother to lower his own voice, even as the television suddenly goes quiet for a moment during a recap of the week's golf highlights. "Yes, the man in the hat who is about to shoot hasn't grasped the concept of the game yet, but he keeps posturing like he has," the angel proclaims solemnly, as if what he's saying is the word of God or something.
Bobby winces, because it sure as hell had echoed off the walls of the suddenly quiet room like it was indeed gospel.
The two men at the pool table turn to glare at them, like a pair of feral dogs.
The man in the hat who hasn't grasped the concept of the game yet (and who is very large, because of course he is), pauses to glare especially darkly at Castiel. "Keep your developmentally-handicapped friend under control, old man," he gripes at Bobby as he lines up his shot.
"Hey, isn't that crazy old man Singer from the junkyard?" his companion, a tall, skinny man in torn jeans pipes up, with a little sneer. "The town weirdos all hang out together on weekends, I guess."
Bobby figures that's true enough, but the angel seems to take exception to it, because it suddenly feels like the temperature around him has dropped several degrees. He's also looking at the pool players with a glint in his eye that one might call a smidge smitey. "You won't talk to him that way," he says, voice rumbling around the edges and through the air immediately surrounding their table like a shockwave.
The man in the hat forgets about lining up his shot and stands straight up, apparently unimpressed with Castiel on a physical level. To his credit, he's not aware of how one shouldn't mess with the nerd angel yet. "You got something to say, pipsqueak?" he demands. "Because I'd watch myself. Little guys talking big might get into trouble."
Castiel's brow furrows. "I wasn't aware it was a crime to admire how badly you could play a very simple game," he says, almost snooty-like, and Bobby turns to him with an incredulous look on his face.
"Would you shut up?" he asks, and Castiel is suddenly bewildered again, like he's not sure why he's the one being yelled at all of a sudden.
The skinny man in torn jeans sputters in laughter. "That's right! Shut up, idiot!" he guffaws at Cas, spraying spit in their general direction as he does.
Bobby turns from Castiel to glower at the skinny man, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, like his turf is being encroached upon. Under the heat of this look, the skinny man abruptly ends up choking on his own spit and going dead silent.
Once, over drinks and shared misery, Rufus had called Sam and Dean piss-poor hunters and sorry sons of bitches, admittedly echoing some of Bobby's own oft-uttered words back at him.
For some reason, Bobby hadn't taken too well to hearing those words come from someone else.
Rufus had laughed at him about it afterwards - around an ice pack on his newly bruised left-eye - and apologized for poking Bobby's inner Momma Bear with a stick.
Bobby had denied it all vehemently.
He hadn't been all that convincing about it back then either.
Now, he thinks he's beginning to see why.
"Just go back to your damn game," he tells the pool players gruffly, because a fight would cause Charlie trouble, besides being completely and utterly unfair when Cas broke them in half. "Maybe you'll improve with the practice."
Hat Guy and Skinny Guy scowl. "I think this crazy old man and his big-mouthed runt need to learn some manners," Hat Guy snarls, apparently not as impressed with Bobby's stink-eye as his beanpole friend is.
They advance menacingly towards the table and don't seem to understand that the big-mouthed runt they're threatening can probably crush them with his pinky if he decides to. Castiel stands instinctively in response to the threat, for better position probably, and Bobby rolls his eyes and stays the hell in his chair. Hat Guy pulls back an enormous arm like he's ready to take a swing at Cas.
Luckily, Hat Guy's fist is saved from a very painful collision with an immovable object by one of Charlie Grossman's thick hands slapping him on the shoulder and pinning his arm in place, mid-air. "Boys, boys," Charlie tsks at them, appearing out of nowhere and shaking his chubby face sadly. "Can't we settle this little disagreement like gentlemen? Midge'll have my balls for breakfast if we break any of the furniture."
Everyone turns to look at him. Even the dart players behind Bobby and Castiel's table.
"Stay out of this, Grossman," Hat Guy growls.
Charlie's hand tightens on his shoulder somewhat, and Bobby knows exactly how strong those hands are from having broken up a hundred drunken brawls over the years, from tossing out a hundred different surly drifters and intoxicated town idiots. Hell, Bobby had been one of them on occasion.
But instead of tossing Hat Guy and his friend out, Charlie merely gestures to the pool table. "Why don't we try pool? You're fighting about it, you might as well put your money where your mouth is." Pause. "Figuratively, of course. Gambling's illegal." He looks between the two parties hopefully. "So? Two on two? Winner gets free lunch?"
Bobby snorts at Charlie. "Seriously?"
Charlie grins back, like this is all some part of a diabolical master plan he's been cooking up for months. "Been a while since I've seen you work, maestro. I do appreciate the look of a good game."
Bobby grudgingly stands. "Yeah, but this idjit next to me's never played a day in his damn life."
Castiel goes from righteous anger to slightly wounded. "I believe I could figure it out," he throws in, before turning back to bristle at Hat Guy and Skinny Guy some more, even with Charlie's impressively rotund figure standing solidly between them.
Charlie shrugs. "Should even the score then, don't you think?"
Bobby feels some of his humor start to return as he goes to grab a few pool cues. "I could do with a free lunch," he admits. Emergency cash is hard to keep on hand when everything these days seems to be something of an emergency.
Hat Guy sputters at the easy exchange between the older men. "We never agreed to this," he grumbles, while Skinny Guy nods in typical yes-man fashion after the fact.
Charlie pats Hat Guy sympathetically. "If I were you, I'd back down too, son. No shame in it. Bobby's a damn fine pool player."
Hat Guy glowers and shrugs Charlie's hand off of his back. "Back down to the town drunk?" he spits, and glare-nods Skinny Guy into position by the table while Bobby hands Castiel his cue. "Like hell. You're on."
Bobby looks at Castiel for a moment, wondering if he should coach the kid a little about how this goes. Then thinks better of it. Cas is a billion years old. He'll figure it out. "Triangles," is his only word of guidance before he grabs the rack and neatly corrals all of the balls on the table into it. "You can break."
Castiel nods.
***
These things Castiel knows:
The sum of all angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.
Quantities are classified into two overarching categories: scalar quantities and vector quantities. Scalar quantities are defined purely by magnitude, while vector quantities suggest magnitude as well as direction. Geometrically speaking, a cross product of two vectors gives a third vector which is perpendicular to both vectors.
Interactions among things occur by forces. Forces cause motion and influence the kinematics of objects. The rules humans associate with these concepts are simple. Castiel believes Sam ascribed them to someone named Newton, though Castiel is certain they are a universal truth and thus cannot be credited to anyone but God. In any case they are as follows:
Force is equal to mass times acceleration.
For every force, there is an equal and opposite force.
An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
A spherical coordinate system is a coordinate system of three-dimensional space where the position of a point is specified by three numbers: the radial distance of that point from a fixed origin, its polar angle measured from a fixed zenith direction, and the azimuth angle of its orthogonal projection on a reference plane that passes through the origin and is orthogonal to the zenith, measured from a fixed reference direction on that plane.
When studying rotational dynamics, the moment of inertia for simple particles is mr2 where r is the distance from the axis of rotation of the particle.
Dissipation embodies the concept of a system where mechanical models lose energy over time, typically from friction or turbulence. The lost energy converts into heat, which raises the temperature of the system. Such systems are called dissipative systems.
The angle of incidence in a collision is equivalent to the angle of reflection.
These things are very simple things. All of them are beautiful to watch in play, as are most of the things God created (though perhaps, to Castiel, their beauty is not equal to Dean's).
Castiel watches these myriad concepts whirl into motion the minute the cue ball strikes the others and sends them bursting apart in perfect mathematical patterns, the bright colored spheres careening into opposite ends of the table in an explosion of force and friction. He studies their movements, their interactions, and then their stillness in a moment of utter fascination.
"Hurry the hell up, nutjob," Hat Guy demands.
Castiel smiles and complies, lining up a shot in the manner Dean had demonstrated to him once before, until they had been distracted by…other things.
He thinks he understands how to play this game perfectly well now.
***
Fifteen minutes later, Castiel is calmly sinking the eight ball in the corner after Bobby's prompt for him to call it, and everyone in the pub is holding their breath watching the little black ball clack into the pocket in order to join a handful of its other brethren.
Bobby snorts, because in truth he's only mildly surprised by the angel's success. "If lunch is free, I think I want some chili cheese on that burger too," he quips, making Charlie guffaw in laughter while Castiel nods in satisfaction to himself and returns to Bobby's side with the pool cue.
"It was relatively simple," he says by way of greeting, and everyone else in the room is too stunned by what they've just seen to process it properly.
Even the darts players have given up all pretense of playing by now and are lingering at the corner of the bar behind Bobby and Charlie, staring avidly at the action going down, darts clutched tightly in their hands and eyes comically wide. Hat Guy and Skinny Guy gape as well, a mixture of incredulity and embarrassed rage coloring their features.
"You hustled us!" Hat Guy manages, red in the face and looking like he still wants to start throwing fists.
"If so, they did a damn poor job of it," Charlie shoots back. "All they got was a couple of lunch specials out of it, and they're probably gone cold by now."
Hat Guy ignores Charlie in favor of staring down Cas, who just kind of blinks back at him like the larger man is nothing more than a smudge of dirt on the bottom of someone's shoe. Bobby supposes it's the inner dick angel in Cas revisiting the surface.
"I'll kill you," Hat Guy says, voice low and in a way that might have been intimidating to regular civilians. "I'm gonna break you and the dirty old man in half with my bare hands!"
Castiel doesn't break eye contact with Hat Guy once as he calmly reaches back and plucks a dart out of one of the slack-jawed darts players' hands. "I believe the terms of our agreement were to settle this peacefully in order to avoid broken things," he begins. As he does, he rotates the dart between his fingers lazily, point to end to point again, before curling his fist around the tail. "However," he adds with a glint in his eye that Bobby is comfortable classifying as all Winchester, "if you insist on a rematch, I might suggest we try darts next."
Castiel suddenly throws his arm out sideways, pitching the dart through the air like a bolt from his damn crossbow, the tip of it flying straight and true and right into the middle of the bulls-eye on the target at the back of the room, a good twenty-five feet away. He doesn't even turn his head away from Hat Guy for a second as he does it.
The room descends into disbelieving silence for the second time that afternoon. Even good-natured Charlie looks a mixture of impressed and wildly intimidated by Castiel.
Skinny Guy and Hat Guy gape, and while they are doing that, Castiel takes a step towards them, unfaltering in his resolve. He gets straight into Hat Guy personal space and declares, in a low, barely audible rumble, "You will never address Bobby Singer with anything other than respect ever again. Is that clear?"
For a moment, the lights in the room flicker.
And from there, Hat Guy understandably stumbles backwards, wide-eyed and incredulous at what Bobby can only assume is the sheer death aura coming off the nerdy looking guy in the dirt-stained jeans. Bobby watches, mildly irritated at the angel's showboating during the last part, while Hat Guy and Skinny guy fall all over themselves scrambling for the door, muttered utterances of "He's really crazy!" and "You're not worth the energy!" tossed over their shoulders on their way out.
Meanwhile, Charlie is looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Thought we got that wiring fixed," he mumbles after a beat.
Castiel turns to Bobby and Charlie placidly. "I would like lunch now, please," he says, easy as that.
Bobby can't resist smacking Cas upside his damned angelic head with his baseball cap on the way back to the table all the same, and from there on out, Charlie brings them fresh food to eat in the relative peace of the pub afterwards (though the darts players don't stop staring at them the whole damn time).
At the very least, they learn from there that Castiel isn't really a fan of fish despite the loaves and fishes bullshit. He does take to his grilled veggies with some scary enthusiasm though, and gets three refills of the stuff through the course of the meal. "I think I like zucchini more than French fries," he declares, somewhat boldly.
Bobby snorts at the light of revelation in the angel's eyes and simply answers, "You better still remember what's on our damned shopping list after all that."
***
They leave Charlie's only after the rotund owner manages to wrench a promise out of Bobby to bring the whole gang by sometime soon, and before long, they're walking through the sliding glass doors of the Food 4 Less, where, thankfully, the present employees and customers seem either too bored or too self-absorbed to pay much attention to either of them, regardless of how they feel about crazy town hermits and denim-clad angels who stare for too long. It makes for quick work of the grocery shopping, and to his delight, Castiel finally discovers what a canned bean is, and what Fruit Loops look like, and that yogurt is a vague term for a substance that has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of iterations all sitting on the shelf beside each other in a display of overwhelming choice.
Bobby tells him to stop staring at the dairy case like a creeper and just get one of the variety packs because it's cheaper and if Sam wants to be choosy he can get his own damn yogurt next time. Castiel selects the package with blueberry and strawberry flavored yogurt in it and thinks he would like to try some of it for himself as well, if Sam would allow it.
After that Bobby piles milk, cheese, and eggs into the cart before eyeing Castiel contemplatively and saying. "Time to split up. You go get whatever it is you need for your Betty Crocker act. I'm gonna go find whiskey. You can catch up to me in the liquor aisle when you're done."
Castiel nods, having now discerned that the signs posted at the top of each aisle will proclaim exactly what is in it. He happily toddles off in search of flour, sugar, and shortening for his next attempt at pie.
He finds each of those items in the baking goods aisle and follows Bobby's example of choosing the versions of them that have the lowest cost per ounce as ascribed by the little yellow price tags. A five-pound bag of flour, a small box of the Stevia Nicks Marcy Ward had recommended, and a tub of something called Crisco - which will apparently add a rich, buttery flavor with fifty percent less saturated fat and zero grams of transfat - later, and all he is left with is the decision of which fruit to use for filling this time. Contemplatively, he gathers everything up in his arms and decides to go to the produce section for apples, perhaps in an attempt to conquer his initial failure with his first apple pie.
Castiel is mildly surprised to find Bobby already perusing the fruits and vegetables when he arrives, the old hunter hastily bagging something green and tucking it into the cart in a way that makes it look like he's trying to hide something. This is definitely not their promised meeting place beside the alcohol.
"Bobby," Castiel says before he gets too close, like Dean has been telling him to do.
Bobby turns and blinks at the angel in much the same way Castiel imagines he would if the angel had snuck up behind him. He recovers quickly, though. "That was fast," he says as Castiel moves to put his items in the cart.
"The labeling system above the aisles is very convenient," Castiel intones back, though stops short when he peers into the contents of their cart and finds, to his surprise, a bag with three large zucchini in it, nestled in-between Sam's box of yogurt and Dean's box of Fruit Loops, as if in secret hiding.
When he glances up again questioningly, Bobby is pointedly not looking him in the eye anymore. "Whiskey," the older man says. "We need a lot of whiskey."
Something about it makes Castiel want to smile. He doesn't, or tries not to, though when Bobby spins the cart around abruptly on him, Castiel wonders if he had done it anyway.
"And beer," Bobby barks.
"And beer," Castiel replies faithfully, and stops briefly to put several green apples in a bag for tonight's pie.
From there, Bobby lets him take over pushing the cart and leads them straight to the alcohol. No one says anything about the sudden addition of zucchini to their shopping list.
Castiel thinks that he enjoys buying groceries very much.
***
When they get back to Bobby's house some time later it's still early in the afternoon, with plenty of time to bake and cook and clean and research, should it come to that. As Castiel unloads the back of the truck in the driveway he can hear the sounds of the brothers bickering wafting out to them from the kitchen, starting with Dean's cheerful, "So, you talk to Mira lately? You know, make sure your dick didn't kill her?" followed by Sam's good-natured, "Have a heart, Dean. Oh wait, you gave it away, my bad," followed by a slight crash and the indistinct noises of their sibling squabbling becoming a physical thing.
"Idjits," Bobby mutters under his breath, as he loads up his arms with as many bags of groceries as he can carry and shoves his way in through the screen door. "That laundry better be done!" he barks loudly at both young men, by way of greeting.
Castiel's lips quirk up slightly as he follows, only to find that Dean has an arm around Sam's neck in the middle of the kitchen, having bent his much larger brother nearly in two in order to give him something Dean likes to call a nuclear noogie. Both Winchesters stop abruptly at the sight of Bobby and Castiel with armfuls of food.
Dean immediately lets Sam go, while Sam immediately straightens and runs a hand through his mussed, slightly static-ridden hair. "Dean!" he complains, while Dean just grins and goes to help alleviate Castiel of his burdens. Sam, once his hair is in place again, dutifully does the same for Bobby.
"I hope there's burgers involved in this equation somewhere," Dean mentions happily, while digging through the bag in order to put things away. "Oh hey, Fruit Loops. Sweet."
He pauses, however, when he sees some of the other things also in the bag. "What the hell is this?" he demands, yanking out the small bag of zucchini nestled alongside the strangely colored rings of breakfast cereal.
Bobby and Castiel don't miss a beat when they both say, "A vegetable, Dean," at exactly the same time, in almost exactly the same way.
Dean and Sam both pause to look at them in response to the unexpectedness of that, their eyebrows arched in confusion and stances somewhat wary, as if they think that perhaps they'd missed something important while they'd been busy doing household chores today.
And maybe they did, but for now, Castiel thinks it will be okay if that something important stays just between him and Bobby. Just for a little while.
Castiel smiles secretly to himself at the thought and wordlessly goes to put his baking materials in the cupboard over the sink while Bobby ignores both of the brothers' inarticulate staring and shoves the box of yogurt squarely into Sam's hands. "Stop gawking and make yourselves useful," he says.
At that, Sam and Dean share a not-so-subtle look with one another while Bobby and Castiel pretend not to notice. "Oookay," they say in tandem and dutifully start to put the groceries in their rightful places all around the kitchen.
Pretty soon most everything is stored exactly where it is supposed to be, and Bobby has declared that there will be chili for dinner tonight, no complaints.
"Awesome," Dean declares, before wiping his hands off on his jeans and heading back out to finish up work on that Focus from earlier. "Ford is a real bitch," he murmurs by way of explanation to Cas, sneaking in a quick kiss when he thinks no one is looking, before he's out the door again.
Soon after that, the faint buzz of the dryer finishing the last load of laundry rattles Sam back into action, because he can now make up all the beds in the house with luxuriously clean sheets. "To be honest, Cas, I never want to wash yours and Dean's sheets for you ever again, man. No offense," he murmurs before he exits the kitchen, leaving Castiel alone with Bobby all over again.
Silence reigns for a moment, but it's not an uncomfortable one by any means. Eventually Bobby clears his throat and asks, "Well, son? What've you got planned now?"
Castiel looks at the bag of zucchini still sitting on top of the counter. "I was thinking," he begins, somewhat hopefully, "that we might learn how to go about cooking these properly."
Bobby considers it. "I think Sam's laptop is still in the living room somewhere," he suggests with a shrug. "Food Network website might have some ideas."
And so the two of them go.
-end-
Next: DVD Extra: Give a Little Whistle