Humble Pie [6/20]
A/N: Whoop, forgot to post this the first time around! Apologies for confusing y'all =]
Dean wakes to the sound of coughing.
His first thought is Sam, so his response is to yell fuzzily “Y’okay?”, roll over, and attempt to go back to sleep.
His second thought is that he hasn’t had a reply, and the coughing has now developed into retching, which probably means that Sam’s not okay.
Shit.
He gets up reluctantly, because, seriously, he’s exhausted, and the last thing he wants to be doing right now is looking after someone who’s currently barfing their brains out. But when he gets outside his bedroom door, he finds that it’s not Sam - it’s Castiel.
So what the hell does he do now?
Luckily, it doesn’t last long, and Castiel hasn’t actually got to the vomiting stage. His dry retching dissolves back into coughs that wrack his whole, thin body, and suddenly Dean realizes that they’ve had him - what, three days? - and not once have they fed him.
Castiel looks up at him, watery-eyed, and his face is worryingly pale. There’s a purple bruise blossoming below his left eye, and a small cut on his cheekbone has seeped blood onto his face. Dean glances down at his father’s wedding ring on his right hand. It’s slightly too large for him, but he never takes it off, not for anyone. Wearing it makes him feel close to both his parents. It makes them feel like the family they never really were. And it’s cheesy and pathetic and whatever, so Dean never talks about it. But he won’t take it off, either.
The ring must’ve caught Castiel’s face when he hit him. He’s washed his hands since then, so there’s no blood left crusting the band of gold, but weirdly he can still almost feel it, the phantom presence of another man’s blood.
“You finished?” he asks unsympathetically, and Castiel tries to glare witheringly for a moment, but he’s shaking too badly, so he contents himself with just nodding and folding back in on himself, hunching up against the wall and looking defiantly at the floor. His shirt’s slipped to reveal the top of his chest, and Dean can see his collarbone standing out prominently under his pale skin.
Dean swallows slightly, because it makes him feel like a complete bastard. Because he’s been here, sleeping and eating and generally lazing about, while Castiel was busy starving.
“Hey, uh … When was the last time you ate?” he asks awkwardly, and Castiel looks up at him in surprise, an expression of a sort of pained confusion on his face. “It’s just an innocent question,” Dean assures him, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “I just realized, we haven’t exactly fed you.”
“Your brother gave me some water yesterday,” Castiel says. His voice is slightly hollow, deep and rough from coughing. “But … The last time I ate was sometime four or five days ago.”
Dean resists the urge to swear and clears his throat instead. “Right. Okay then. I’ll… I’ll fix you something to eat.”
He can feel Castiel’s eyes on him as he bustles around the kitchen again, and he feels awkward, almost apologetic, like every noise he makes is too loud, every movement too jerky, every moment he spends in indecision another moment Castiel must deal with the hunger gnawing at his belly. It doesn’t take him long to get together a quick sandwich (using the last of the ham, he notes, and they still need more instant coffee granules), but it feels like an age before he’s finally sitting on a chair and watching the other man divide the sandwich methodically into small chunks.
“What’re you doing?” he asks eventually, as Castiel finishes chewing the first of six small hunks of sandwich.
Castiel looks up at him, his eyes calculating, like he expects every word that comes out of Dean’s mouth to be some kind of a trap. It seems, however, that he deems the question to have no evil intent behind it, because he looks back down to his food, saying quietly: “It’s something my brother taught me. To make it last.”
Dean doesn’t ask any more questions after that, doesn’t ask how many times Castiel has gone without food before so that he knows almost instinctively what to do afterwards, doesn’t ask about the man Castiel referred to as his brother, doesn’t ask about any of these things. He just watches the man he practically attacked yesterday eat his first meal in five days.
And he looks, really looks. He sees the careful precision with which Castiel does everything, sees his nervousness hidden behind the wall of defiance that he’s built up, sees the man’s fragility and strength, all rolled into one. And thinks about his hand on his throat, fist in his face, thinks about the hurt he’s already caused by being violent or angry or even just careless.
It makes him feel sick.
He doesn’t realize that Castiel has stopped eating and is looking back up at him until he speaks. “Why?” he asks.
Dean blinks in surprise. “Come again?”
Castiel’s face remains impassive and yet still earnest. “Why are you doing all this?”
Now it’s Dean’s turn to think. “Well,” he says, “it’d be kinda awkward if you died. I mean-”
“No,” Castiel cuts in forcefully. “That’s not what I meant. Yesterday. Why didn’t you finish what you started?”
Dean swallows slightly. For a moment, he considers lying. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, actually,” he admits finally, running a hand over his face.
Castiel tilts his head slightly, a frown forming between his eyebrows, and he looks for all the world like he’s trying to work Dean out. Dean tries to meet his stare as confidently as he can, and there’s a long pause that begins like a staring contest but turns into something more halfway through, and when Dean finally breaks the contact, he doesn’t feel like he’s lost - for some reason, he feels like both of them have won and both of them have lost, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, and what was he thinking about to begin with and why was it so important?
“Will you try again?” Castiel asks gravely, and Dean almost laughs at the absurdity of it all. Him, sitting here with an angel, discussing whether he’s going to try to force him to work again or not.
“No,” he finds himself saying, perfectly seriously. And it’s true, he realizes. He doesn’t know why he didn’t see it before.
Castiel looks away, bitterness flashing across his face for a second. “I highly doubt that.”
“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, almost softly, comfortingly, because, for some, strange, fucked-up reason, he doesn’t want Castiel to dislike him. He doesn’t want Castiel to … to think of him as the bad guy, as a monster. “Good things do happen.”
Their eyes lock again, and this time it’s not awkward at all.
Sam appears, bleary-eyed and with bed-hair, around the time that Castiel finishes his food. He stumbles into the kitchen, searches for the coffee - “We’ve run out, Sammy.” - and finally settles for a piece of toast and marmalade before falling into a chair and glaring at Dean.
“What?” Dean asks, as innocently as he can.
“You finished the coffee.”
He can’t help but grin at that. “Hey, I got to it first, dude. No arguing with that.” He looks his brother up and down for a moment, taking in the dark shadows under his eyes and the slump of his shoulders. “You look like shit, man.”
“I feel like it. I’m not sure if I got any sleep last night.”
“What? Why not?”
Sam looks at him like he’s a complete and utter idiot who’s just missed the most blindingly obvious thing in the history of blindingly obvious things (otherwise known as, Bitchface #101). “Because I just spent the night illegally ferrying American citizens into slavery. Do you even have a conscience?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s a squashed little thing that lives in my left ear and tries to get a word in edgeways sometimes. I never really listen that much.”
“This isn’t a time for joking, Dean. This is serious. I’ve been thinking, and-”
“Oh no.” Dean leans forwards on the table, resting his head in his hands and rubbing his eyes. “Things always go wrong when you think.”
Cue Bitchface #74. “Stop it, okay? You said we’d get some sleep and talk about it in the morning. Well, it’s morning.”
“Knew that one would come back and bite me in the ass,” Dean mutters, but he makes no attempt to stop his brother. Sam’ll have his rant one way or another, he may as well just shut up and listen. “Fine, whatever. Shoot. Just make it quick, ’cause I need a shower before all the hot water goes.”
Sam nods his appreciation before plunging right in. “I was thinking, we could talk to Ash. He was talking to me the other day, said he’d been looking into Divinity a little. He’d know if anything was going on, and even if he didn’t, he’d be able to find out.”
Dean blinks; that’s actually a good idea. “Awesome. And then, when he confirms it’s all a load of bullshit, we’ll be able to go back to how we were.”
“Right,” says Sam. “But what if he doesn’t, Dean? What if there’s some truth to this?”
Dean can’t pretend the thought hasn’t crossed his mind once or twice on the drive back. It’s what your mind naturally goes to, isn’t it, the worst case scenario? But, the thing is, Dean’s been around a while, he’s seen a hell of a lot of things in his time, done some stuff he’s not so proud of, and, yeah, people got hurt. Lots of people, sometimes. But he doesn’t let it keep him awake at night - or he’d never admit to it, anyway. He’d never admit to some of the nightmares he has. Nightmares where he’s the bad guy. And he likes it.
But, the point is, if he didn’t do this stuff, it’d be Sam who lost out. Sam, who wanted to be a lawyer, who could technicallystill be a lawyer, Sam who loved Jess, who likes Madison now, Sam who should never have gotten back involved in all this shit, who wouldn’t have, were it not for Dean. Sam whose life has been continually screwed up and screwed over by Dean, the very guy who was always supposed to look out for him.
Dean owes him, and he can’t do this without him. And so Sam does, has, and will always come before everything else. Including the whole damn world and Dean’s peace of mind.
“There isn’t,” he says stoically. And even if there is, that’s not the point. Sam’s the point, and if doing these jobs, whatever they are, means Sam’s just that little bit safer, means Sam’s got just that little bit more money in his college fund … Well. It’ll be worth it. Dean will see the whole world burn before he takes anything else away from his little brother.
“Let’s get on down to the Roadhouse,” he suggests, standing abruptly. “I’ll take a shower while you phone Ash and see if he’s got anything.”
“Sure.”
“Now that’s what I call multi-tasking,” he grins before disappearing into the bathroom.
The grin fades as soon as he gets inside and locks the door, but that’s not the point.
Ash calls this afternoon, and, damn, but that guy works fast. Sam doesn’t tell Dean exactly what was said - the look on his face tells Dean more than enough. Ash has found something he thinks they should take a look at.
Of course, it could be nothing.
Then again, Dean’s not exactly one to take chances. And since when has he actually had a scrap of luck?
So four-thirty sees them back on the road and driving over to the Harvelles’ place. It’s not far, and with Dean’s usual illegal driving they’ll get there a little before five - thankfully, because, so far, the journey has been less than comfortable. Dean’s got music on, obviously, because, seriously, not even the end of the world could stop him playing good old-fashioned rock, but neither of them are really listening to it because they’re both deep in thought.
Sam’s thinking about … whatever it is he’s thinking about. A subtle glance in his direction reveals the brooding, troubled expression currently clouding his features. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that he’s probably slap bang in the middle of a moral dilemma of epidemic proportions right now.
Dean resists the urge to snort. He doesn’t have even the tiniest moral dilemma. His only problem is, what if Sam’s right? Not from a moral point of view, obviously, he’s beyond all that. But, if Sam is right, and he’s not comfortable with … doing that kind of thing for Divinity Inc. (and, let’s face it, he’s made it pretty clear already that he’s not), then what the hell are they going to do for money?
My prediction was slightly out; they arrive at 5:13 exactly, exiting the Impala in silence. Inside the Roadhouse, it’s warm and comfortable as usual, but Jo comes up to them almost immediately, which is less normal.
“Ash is in his office,” she says plainly. “He hasn’t come out since you called him. What’ve you got him doing?”
“Sorry, sweetheart, that’s classified.”
“Sure it is. What’s up, Dean? You haven’t shown up in months, and now suddenly you stroll in two days in a row? I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Of course, we know that, we never said you were,” Sam cuts in smoothly, his smile as open and honest as ever, and Dean has to admire his skill at disarming tricky situations so easily. “My brother’s an idiot, and rude, but, Jo, we really need to see Ash about something and it’s kind of private. I’m sorry.”
Jo eyes him up and down, and Dean feels slightly intimidated - damn it, she’s turning into her mother. “Uh-huh,” she says finally, “whatever. Just don’t bring any trouble here, okay?”
“No ma’am,” Dean says, and he’s gone before she can decide whether he’s being sarcastic or not.
Dean knows better than to push past the ‘Dr. Badass is ‘in’’ sign without being invited into Ash’s office, so he raps on the door with his knuckles. He’s got a pretty good rhythm going before Ash yells his customary “Y’ello?” and Dean figures he can probably brave the lion’s den.
“Hey, man, how’s it goin’?” Ash is seated at his computer (if it can even be called that, it’s more like a schizophrenic heap of wires and junk that beeps occasionally and looks horribly like some kind of IED), a can of beer in one hand, eyes glued to the screen as he scrolls ferociously. “Wondered when you guys would turn up.” He pauses for a moment, and it’s the first time Dean’s ever seen him looking anything that is even approximately worried. “Uh. Any particular reason why you two’re interested in Divinity Inc.?”
Dean glances at Sam, who sighs and takes the reigns.
“Look, it’s probably just nothing. I saw something the other day and … Well, it kind of worried me a bit, so I just wanted to check it out, y’know, see if there’s any truth to it … What, have you found something?”
“You could say that,” Ash says, taking a swig of beer. “I’ve found something all right. But the question is, what?”
But whatever he’s about to say next is cut off by two things happening at once. And this is where it all starts getting complicated, so I’ll try to slow it down for you.
Dean’s phone rings. That’s the first thing, and it’s not particularly important, but he’s used to picking up his cell wherever he is because it could be a client, and he doesn’t want to piss them, of all people, off.
So he answers it.
And it’s not a client.
Actually, he’s not all that sure who it is.
“Dean Winchester,” says the voice on the other end of the phone, and there’s some kind of a smile hidden in there. “You have twenty seconds to leave the building. I suggest you leave now.”
And Dean misses the sound of the line going dead because of the shouting.
Dean wakes to the sound of coughing.
His first thought is Sam, so his response is to yell fuzzily “Y’okay?”, roll over, and attempt to go back to sleep.
His second thought is that he hasn’t had a reply, and the coughing has now developed into retching, which probably means that Sam’s not okay.
Shit.
He gets up reluctantly, because, seriously, he’s exhausted, and the last thing he wants to be doing right now is looking after someone who’s currently barfing their brains out. But when he gets outside his bedroom door, he finds that it’s not Sam - it’s Castiel.
So what the hell does he do now?
Luckily, it doesn’t last long, and Castiel hasn’t actually got to the vomiting stage. His dry retching dissolves back into coughs that wrack his whole, thin body, and suddenly Dean realizes that they’ve had him - what, three days? - and not once have they fed him.
Castiel looks up at him, watery-eyed, and his face is worryingly pale. There’s a purple bruise blossoming below his left eye, and a small cut on his cheekbone has seeped blood onto his face. Dean glances down at his father’s wedding ring on his right hand. It’s slightly too large for him, but he never takes it off, not for anyone. Wearing it makes him feel close to both his parents. It makes them feel like the family they never really were. And it’s cheesy and pathetic and whatever, so Dean never talks about it. But he won’t take it off, either.
The ring must’ve caught Castiel’s face when he hit him. He’s washed his hands since then, so there’s no blood left crusting the band of gold, but weirdly he can still almost feel it, the phantom presence of another man’s blood.
“You finished?” he asks unsympathetically, and Castiel tries to glare witheringly for a moment, but he’s shaking too badly, so he contents himself with just nodding and folding back in on himself, hunching up against the wall and looking defiantly at the floor. His shirt’s slipped to reveal the top of his chest, and Dean can see his collarbone standing out prominently under his pale skin.
Dean swallows slightly, because it makes him feel like a complete bastard. Because he’s been here, sleeping and eating and generally lazing about, while Castiel was busy starving.
“Hey, uh … When was the last time you ate?” he asks awkwardly, and Castiel looks up at him in surprise, an expression of a sort of pained confusion on his face. “It’s just an innocent question,” Dean assures him, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “I just realized, we haven’t exactly fed you.”
“Your brother gave me some water yesterday,” Castiel says. His voice is slightly hollow, deep and rough from coughing. “But … The last time I ate was sometime four or five days ago.”
Dean resists the urge to swear and clears his throat instead. “Right. Okay then. I’ll… I’ll fix you something to eat.”
He can feel Castiel’s eyes on him as he bustles around the kitchen again, and he feels awkward, almost apologetic, like every noise he makes is too loud, every movement too jerky, every moment he spends in indecision another moment Castiel must deal with the hunger gnawing at his belly. It doesn’t take him long to get together a quick sandwich (using the last of the ham, he notes, and they still need more instant coffee granules), but it feels like an age before he’s finally sitting on a chair and watching the other man divide the sandwich methodically into small chunks.
“What’re you doing?” he asks eventually, as Castiel finishes chewing the first of six small hunks of sandwich.
Castiel looks up at him, his eyes calculating, like he expects every word that comes out of Dean’s mouth to be some kind of a trap. It seems, however, that he deems the question to have no evil intent behind it, because he looks back down to his food, saying quietly: “It’s something my brother taught me. To make it last.”
Dean doesn’t ask any more questions after that, doesn’t ask how many times Castiel has gone without food before so that he knows almost instinctively what to do afterwards, doesn’t ask about the man Castiel referred to as his brother, doesn’t ask about any of these things. He just watches the man he practically attacked yesterday eat his first meal in five days.
And he looks, really looks. He sees the careful precision with which Castiel does everything, sees his nervousness hidden behind the wall of defiance that he’s built up, sees the man’s fragility and strength, all rolled into one. And thinks about his hand on his throat, fist in his face, thinks about the hurt he’s already caused by being violent or angry or even just careless.
It makes him feel sick.
He doesn’t realize that Castiel has stopped eating and is looking back up at him until he speaks. “Why?” he asks.
Dean blinks in surprise. “Come again?”
Castiel’s face remains impassive and yet still earnest. “Why are you doing all this?”
Now it’s Dean’s turn to think. “Well,” he says, “it’d be kinda awkward if you died. I mean-”
“No,” Castiel cuts in forcefully. “That’s not what I meant. Yesterday. Why didn’t you finish what you started?”
Dean swallows slightly. For a moment, he considers lying. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, actually,” he admits finally, running a hand over his face.
Castiel tilts his head slightly, a frown forming between his eyebrows, and he looks for all the world like he’s trying to work Dean out. Dean tries to meet his stare as confidently as he can, and there’s a long pause that begins like a staring contest but turns into something more halfway through, and when Dean finally breaks the contact, he doesn’t feel like he’s lost - for some reason, he feels like both of them have won and both of them have lost, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, and what was he thinking about to begin with and why was it so important?
“Will you try again?” Castiel asks gravely, and Dean almost laughs at the absurdity of it all. Him, sitting here with an angel, discussing whether he’s going to try to force him to work again or not.
“No,” he finds himself saying, perfectly seriously. And it’s true, he realizes. He doesn’t know why he didn’t see it before.
Castiel looks away, bitterness flashing across his face for a second. “I highly doubt that.”
“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, almost softly, comfortingly, because, for some, strange, fucked-up reason, he doesn’t want Castiel to dislike him. He doesn’t want Castiel to … to think of him as the bad guy, as a monster. “Good things do happen.”
Their eyes lock again, and this time it’s not awkward at all.
Sam appears, bleary-eyed and with bed-hair, around the time that Castiel finishes his food. He stumbles into the kitchen, searches for the coffee - “We’ve run out, Sammy.” - and finally settles for a piece of toast and marmalade before falling into a chair and glaring at Dean.
“What?” Dean asks, as innocently as he can.
“You finished the coffee.”
He can’t help but grin at that. “Hey, I got to it first, dude. No arguing with that.” He looks his brother up and down for a moment, taking in the dark shadows under his eyes and the slump of his shoulders. “You look like shit, man.”
“I feel like it. I’m not sure if I got any sleep last night.”
“What? Why not?”
Sam looks at him like he’s a complete and utter idiot who’s just missed the most blindingly obvious thing in the history of blindingly obvious things (otherwise known as, Bitchface #101). “Because I just spent the night illegally ferrying American citizens into slavery. Do you even have a conscience?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s a squashed little thing that lives in my left ear and tries to get a word in edgeways sometimes. I never really listen that much.”
“This isn’t a time for joking, Dean. This is serious. I’ve been thinking, and-”
“Oh no.” Dean leans forwards on the table, resting his head in his hands and rubbing his eyes. “Things always go wrong when you think.”
Cue Bitchface #74. “Stop it, okay? You said we’d get some sleep and talk about it in the morning. Well, it’s morning.”
“Knew that one would come back and bite me in the ass,” Dean mutters, but he makes no attempt to stop his brother. Sam’ll have his rant one way or another, he may as well just shut up and listen. “Fine, whatever. Shoot. Just make it quick, ’cause I need a shower before all the hot water goes.”
Sam nods his appreciation before plunging right in. “I was thinking, we could talk to Ash. He was talking to me the other day, said he’d been looking into Divinity a little. He’d know if anything was going on, and even if he didn’t, he’d be able to find out.”
Dean blinks; that’s actually a good idea. “Awesome. And then, when he confirms it’s all a load of bullshit, we’ll be able to go back to how we were.”
“Right,” says Sam. “But what if he doesn’t, Dean? What if there’s some truth to this?”
Dean can’t pretend the thought hasn’t crossed his mind once or twice on the drive back. It’s what your mind naturally goes to, isn’t it, the worst case scenario? But, the thing is, Dean’s been around a while, he’s seen a hell of a lot of things in his time, done some stuff he’s not so proud of, and, yeah, people got hurt. Lots of people, sometimes. But he doesn’t let it keep him awake at night - or he’d never admit to it, anyway. He’d never admit to some of the nightmares he has. Nightmares where he’s the bad guy. And he likes it.
But, the point is, if he didn’t do this stuff, it’d be Sam who lost out. Sam, who wanted to be a lawyer, who could technicallystill be a lawyer, Sam who loved Jess, who likes Madison now, Sam who should never have gotten back involved in all this shit, who wouldn’t have, were it not for Dean. Sam whose life has been continually screwed up and screwed over by Dean, the very guy who was always supposed to look out for him.
Dean owes him, and he can’t do this without him. And so Sam does, has, and will always come before everything else. Including the whole damn world and Dean’s peace of mind.
“There isn’t,” he says stoically. And even if there is, that’s not the point. Sam’s the point, and if doing these jobs, whatever they are, means Sam’s just that little bit safer, means Sam’s got just that little bit more money in his college fund … Well. It’ll be worth it. Dean will see the whole world burn before he takes anything else away from his little brother.
“Let’s get on down to the Roadhouse,” he suggests, standing abruptly. “I’ll take a shower while you phone Ash and see if he’s got anything.”
“Sure.”
“Now that’s what I call multi-tasking,” he grins before disappearing into the bathroom.
The grin fades as soon as he gets inside and locks the door, but that’s not the point.
Ash calls this afternoon, and, damn, but that guy works fast. Sam doesn’t tell Dean exactly what was said - the look on his face tells Dean more than enough. Ash has found something he thinks they should take a look at.
Of course, it could be nothing.
Then again, Dean’s not exactly one to take chances. And since when has he actually had a scrap of luck?
So four-thirty sees them back on the road and driving over to the Harvelles’ place. It’s not far, and with Dean’s usual illegal driving they’ll get there a little before five - thankfully, because, so far, the journey has been less than comfortable. Dean’s got music on, obviously, because, seriously, not even the end of the world could stop him playing good old-fashioned rock, but neither of them are really listening to it because they’re both deep in thought.
Sam’s thinking about … whatever it is he’s thinking about. A subtle glance in his direction reveals the brooding, troubled expression currently clouding his features. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that he’s probably slap bang in the middle of a moral dilemma of epidemic proportions right now.
Dean resists the urge to snort. He doesn’t have even the tiniest moral dilemma. His only problem is, what if Sam’s right? Not from a moral point of view, obviously, he’s beyond all that. But, if Sam is right, and he’s not comfortable with … doing that kind of thing for Divinity Inc. (and, let’s face it, he’s made it pretty clear already that he’s not), then what the hell are they going to do for money?
My prediction was slightly out; they arrive at 5:13 exactly, exiting the Impala in silence. Inside the Roadhouse, it’s warm and comfortable as usual, but Jo comes up to them almost immediately, which is less normal.
“Ash is in his office,” she says plainly. “He hasn’t come out since you called him. What’ve you got him doing?”
“Sorry, sweetheart, that’s classified.”
“Sure it is. What’s up, Dean? You haven’t shown up in months, and now suddenly you stroll in two days in a row? I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Of course, we know that, we never said you were,” Sam cuts in smoothly, his smile as open and honest as ever, and Dean has to admire his skill at disarming tricky situations so easily. “My brother’s an idiot, and rude, but, Jo, we really need to see Ash about something and it’s kind of private. I’m sorry.”
Jo eyes him up and down, and Dean feels slightly intimidated - damn it, she’s turning into her mother. “Uh-huh,” she says finally, “whatever. Just don’t bring any trouble here, okay?”
“No ma’am,” Dean says, and he’s gone before she can decide whether he’s being sarcastic or not.
Dean knows better than to push past the ‘Dr. Badass is ‘in’’ sign without being invited into Ash’s office, so he raps on the door with his knuckles. He’s got a pretty good rhythm going before Ash yells his customary “Y’ello?” and Dean figures he can probably brave the lion’s den.
“Hey, man, how’s it goin’?” Ash is seated at his computer (if it can even be called that, it’s more like a schizophrenic heap of wires and junk that beeps occasionally and looks horribly like some kind of IED), a can of beer in one hand, eyes glued to the screen as he scrolls ferociously. “Wondered when you guys would turn up.” He pauses for a moment, and it’s the first time Dean’s ever seen him looking anything that is even approximately worried. “Uh. Any particular reason why you two’re interested in Divinity Inc.?”
Dean glances at Sam, who sighs and takes the reigns.
“Look, it’s probably just nothing. I saw something the other day and … Well, it kind of worried me a bit, so I just wanted to check it out, y’know, see if there’s any truth to it … What, have you found something?”
“You could say that,” Ash says, taking a swig of beer. “I’ve found something all right. But the question is, what?”
But whatever he’s about to say next is cut off by two things happening at once. And this is where it all starts getting complicated, so I’ll try to slow it down for you.
Dean’s phone rings. That’s the first thing, and it’s not particularly important, but he’s used to picking up his cell wherever he is because it could be a client, and he doesn’t want to piss them, of all people, off.
So he answers it.
And it’s not a client.
Actually, he’s not all that sure who it is.
“Dean Winchester,” says the voice on the other end of the phone, and there’s some kind of a smile hidden in there. “You have twenty seconds to leave the building. I suggest you leave now.”
And Dean misses the sound of the line going dead because of the shouting.