SPN: Screwball [mild Dean/Castiel]
Title: “Screwball”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: indefinitely post-6x22
Summary: Some time after Castiel ceases to be a God, he struggles to fit back into his human family. Meanwhile, Sam thinks he is becoming invisible, Dean is tired, Bobby grumbles, and monster souls are running amok. [mild Dean/Castiel]
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to CW and Eric Kripke.
A/N: This is really (and I do mean really) disjointed, weird and basically plotless.
SCREWBALL
Yes, there are two paths you can go by,
But in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on.
Led Zeppelin. ‘Stairway to Heaven’
There were snowy plains of dust on the carpet. Castiel could see every speck.
“There’s something Sammy here wants to tell you,” Dean said.
Sam tilted his head back and laid his palms flat against the wall. The wallpaper was blue and ugly and traditionally dotted with tiny cartoonish flowers.
“Sorry I stuck a knife in you.”
There were roaches in the bathroom. Castiel could hear them crawling about. The faucet leaked. The sound of dripping water weighed down on him. He looked up at Sam like he’d never seen him before.
“Sorry I misplaced your soul.”
And:
“Sorry I ruined the wall.”
And:
“Sorry I threatened to kill you. And your brother. And Bobby.”
And maybe even:
“Sorry I tried to purge the world of the unfaithful,” which admittedly had seemed like a good idea at the time, except most of the world would have qualified for the unfaithful as per their reluctance to accept Castiel as their new paterfamilias.
“What happened to ‘we don’t talk about it, we deal with it’?” Sam asked, narrow-eyed and poised like a marathon runner ready to bolt.
Dean grinned humourlessly. “Capital punishment. Not only do we get to feel the feelings, but we also have to discuss them. Bobby’s idea.”
Sam flashed his brother the you-miss-hell-don’t-you kind of a look. Castiel thought it was the sort of punishment Crowley could have come up with.
--
“Have a beer,” Dean said, stretched on the hood of his car under the starless sky, with Sam snoring quietly inside.
Castiel said: “I don’t drink… anymore,” except he didn’t, too busy looking at the black void overhead, and anyway, he didn’t really drink when he was angel, but he didn’t know what the hell he was anymore. He picked up the bottle. It was cool and damp, but the beer inside tasted cheap and diluted.
“So what’s it feel like being a God?”
“Lonely.”
Clouds came over the dead sky, making it look even more desolate. Sam grunted in his sleep and attempted to shift into a more comfortable position. Castiel thought vaguely that he could tangle himself in a knot, what with him being so long and all, as if made up of rubber bands crudely stitched together.
“What’s it feel like not being a God?” Dean prodded.
Somewhere between “fucking amazing” and “horribly wrong”, Castiel decided, but didn’t say a word. Instead, he leaned into Dean and kissed him on the mouth, drawing an almost instinctive response out of him. For a nanosecond, Dean was actually very nearly kissing back, lips pliant and hungry like those of a person missing someone important.
Then Dean pushed him away and punched him in the face and took a huge swig out of his bottle, washing all of the kiss away.
“Testing a theory,” Castiel said preemptively.
“What the-?”
“Just something Balthazar once said. Two bulletproof ways to get you to hit somebody.”
“There’s more than two,” Dean grumbled, interested despite himself. “What’s the other one?”
Castiel glanced at Sam who miraculously hadn’t woken up and continued to weave a spider-web out of his body parts.
“Badmouth your brother.”
Dean considered that. Then he promised to beat Cas into a pulp anytime without any prior agreement or instigation on his part. Because they were friends and dysfunctional. All that with the sweetest of smiles. Like kindergarten, except Castiel had never been in one.
--
“We have a buttload of monster souls to catch,” Dean began.
Sam finished: “And you have suddenly developed a knack for stating the obvious.”
He had been up all night, surfing the net for all kinds of weird happenings that might be tied to Purgatory escapees. Coffee didn’t seem to work.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Yes, please.” That was how Sam usually didn’t tell Dean that he barely saw him past the flames that methodically consumed the motel room or the street or the entire fucking world. He felt as if his eyeballs were baking. He forced a crooked smile and knew that Dean didn’t believe it for a second.
--
“It’s easier to get a person out of hell than to get hell out of a person,” Castiel reasoned. Dean reckoned they both had a first-hand experience.
He asked why Cas hadn’t pulled Adam out while he’d been at it. Castiel answered, “Who’s Adam?” For a moment, both of them were unsure if it was a display of sarcasm or unfiltered honesty.
“Balthazar once said you were in love.”
Castiel stared at a lopsided cheeseburger sitting in a cardboard takeout box, and remembered the overwhelming taste of fat, chewy meat. There wasn’t a variety of options: either eat it or not. Cas was stuck between the two.
“Just didn’t say with whom. I mean, he said ‘you’. But was it a plural ‘you’ as in ‘you humans’ or ‘you Winchester morons’-?”
“Or ‘you, Dean Winchester’, second person singular,” Castiel said, distractedly. The cheeseburger was eating up the storage space in his mind, destroying what was left of his brain cells. He looked at it with undisguised enmity. He wasn’t up for such challenges. Yet.
--
Dean was in another part of town, checking a lead on the escaped souls, when Sam spaced out in the water while hunting a selkie and nearly drowned. Castiel had no idea what to do, so he gave him a CPR. He was learning, slowly, and when he desperately forced air into Sam’s lungs and felt it nesting there, planning to stay, it was almost worth it.
Later Dean thought: daisy chain. It made him vaguely uncomfortable because he had signed a metaphorical contract with himself that stipulated that he should not think about any mouth-to-mouth contact with certain semi-angelic beings within a hundred-mile radius of him.
While Sam thought: ugh. He wasn’t up for much thinking lately.
--
Sam was seeing one of Bobby’s psychic friends when Castiel contracted his first flu. He thought he liked broken bones and lacerated wounds better.
“Welcome to the joyously infectious world of humanity,” Dean commented.
Castiel was beginning to understand Pestilence. Right now he felt like a huge Petri dish full of diseases waiting to happen.
Dean got him some pills that seethed and foamed as they melted in a glass of water and turned into a fizzy drink. Castiel hated the taste of it, and hated being weak, and hated Dean a little, and he flat out told him. Dean sniggered and said it was the freedom of being human. Ish.
Afterwards Castiel fell asleep to see fevered dreams of Dean sitting by him and talking quietly, while Dean sat by him and talked quietly.
--
Castiel was out doing some soul-searching (both literal and figurative) when Sam asked point-blank what they were going to do about Cas. Should they help him get his mojo back? Should they just leave things the way they were?
Dean said he could manage two brothers who fucked up and tried to bring about the end of the world just fine, thank you very much.
They left it at that. Bobby called them idjits, and there was enough crude affection in his tone to confuse them into believing that he shared Dean’s conviction.
--
Castiel asked Dean why people had sex. Dean choked on his drink and fired off, “Because!” and then added: “I don’t know. To get some action.”
“Action?”
“Dude, if you’re out for some in-depth psychoanalytical bullshit, I suggest you go ask Sam.”
Castiel said he already had. Sam had told him to ask Dean. Sam was smart.
--
Sam dreamt excessively about Jessica much in the same way Dean didn’t dream about Lisa. That must have had something to do with Sam leaving his guilt in the cage and Dean still carrying his around. His was fresher.
Sometimes Sam dreamt Jessica was Lucifer, had always in fact been Lucifer. He never screamed when he woke up because he was never sure he had woken up for real, and it would have been kind of silly to scream if still inside a nightmare.
--
Come to think of it, Dean’s deal wasn’t the worst when it came to making out with supernatural beings. After all, Bobby had kissed Crowley. Hell, Dad must have kissed Azazel. And Cas had kissed that hellbitch, Meg.
“Anyone else?” Dean asked, pushing for casual without much success.
Cas gave him a serious, mildly surprised look and said: “You,” like Dean could ever forget.
--
Sam was floating on his back in fire, brimstone and blood, the miasma of hell rising from beneath him. Lucifer was calling him home. He would have answered the call, but his brother was acting strange, and Sam turned back and swam towards Dean. Except Dean wasn’t there because Sam had said yes and now Lucifer was all there was.
--
Castiel decided he did not like being human(ish) because it made his mouth taste strange. Back in his first spell as a human, he hadn’t really noticed it, having been drinking and moping too hard. Now he seemed to have all the time in the world to run the tip of his tongue across his teeth, to feel their slippery foreignness, to wince at the profusion of tastes that had been mixing together and clinging to his palate since the metaphorical human forever.
“Humans brush their teeth,” Dean said to that, and dragged Castiel off to the bathroom.
He plucked a toothbrush out of the holder, washed it briskly, then squirted a generous amount of toothpaste onto it and handed it to Cas. Cas asked whose toothbrush it was, to which Dean answered, like it was the most natural idea in the world, “Yours.” Castiel saw that the brush had never been used.
After brief hesitation he opened his mouth and pressed the bristle against his back teeth. He moved the brush a few times, pressing harder. The toothpaste had a minty taste and it muffled Castiel’s teeth up with a sensation of cold. He pulled the brush out and stared at it. The bristle was somewhat disheveled and dripping with foam. He put it back in and tried the other side of his mouth. The coldness melted quickly. Some foam dribbled down his chin and left a long white trail along his arm, almost down to the elbow. He almost choked on the minty stuff and spat vigorously into the sink. He rinsed - the water was cold and it numbed his mouth - and washed his face, blinking rapidly against the water, disoriented, and then he looked up at Dean inquiringly and asked how often he would have to do this.
“Three times a day,” Sam’s disembodied voice declared from the nearby. “Don’t forget to floss.”
“Neatfreak,” Dean barked, and then tugged at the loosened knot of Castiel’s tie. “Humans change their clothes more often than once in a lifetime, too.”
--
An encounter with a runaway soul landed Bobby in a hospital. He lay in bed and bitched about it, and he bitched most of all when they tried to leave Sam to babysit him. Neither he, nor Sam were dumb enough to misunderstand the purpose of that: it was in fact Sam who needed to be babysat.
Sam made a dead set against this idea, unwilling to plead disability when his brother was out cleaning up the mess (albeit, for once, not his mess). At this point, he would have likely chained himself to Dean, so Castiel urged them both to go and stayed to watch over Bobby.
Bobby glared at him. A lot. Not even the bottle of Jim Beam that Castiel had sneaked in against better judgment could break the ice. Then Bobby said:
“Why is that every time I get my ass handed to me by some two-bit monster, you’re unfit to heal me?”
And he handed Castiel the uncorked bottle. Castiel knew enough of the effed-up human psychology to understand that things would probably be okay between them again someday.
--
When looking for Crowley, Sam and Dean found a hellhound. It scratched at people’s doors and whined plaintively, forsaken and beside itself with starvation, but it didn’t hurt anyone. It appeared to bide its time, and as it saw the Winchesters, it knew the wait was over. It followed them around and got under Sam’s feet, growling and yapping at anyone who tried to approach its chosen master. The absurdity of the situation was exacerbated by the fact that no one, including the brothers, could see the hound. Sam believed it was small, a hellpuppy if their kind happened to have a childhood at all.
Sam remembered Bones. He always wanted to have a dog.
Dean refused to sleep in the same room as the hellhound. Every time he heard its claws scratch against the floorboards, he felt like running for the hills, except there was no running from a hellhound. Unreleased screams gnawed out a hole in his throat. He took to wearing a horseshoe in his pocket. Once, when Sam wasn’t looking, he tried to ram an iron nail into the hound’s head. At other times, he spilled holy water on it and even shot it with rock salt. Sam flashed him dirty looks and asked him to leave the pup alone. Dean couldn’t say which one of them had gone insane.
--
Dean spent most of his nights in the car because he couldn’t bear to wake up in the middle of the night and hear Sam talking to the hound. Sam would always murmur so quietly that Dean couldn’t make out a word, but the very idea of his brother communicating so freely with a hell beast gave Dean the creeps.
“I had a dream I was the Marshmallow Man,” Castiel told him the minute he climbed inside the Impala one night. Castiel either slept too much or not enough; when the latter phase hit, he was unconditionally welcome to join Dean in his four-wheeled refuge. “I dream movies now.”
“Tell me when you get to the classics. Like walking naked into a school gym.”
“Which movie is that?”
Dean thought: God, I hate you, and he wasn’t sure if ‘God’ was a reference or an expletive.
Dean said: “It’s all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t damaged the freaking wall-,” and Castiel looked hurt. Castiel had said he was sorry. Castiel probably felt sorry, too. But hell if things ever worked that way with humans.
--
Sam woke up to the sound of a familiar voice and the sensation of fingers sifting through his hair.
“You did all right, Dumbo. You didn’t need a feather to fly. You had it in you all along.”
And a brush of lips across his forehead. A taste of sulfur in his mouth. Loneliness blanketed him. He didn’t need a cloak of invisibility either.
--
“How you been, Clarence?” Meg asked, lips twisted in a brutal curve that could have passed for a smile in a nightmare wonderland.
“God. You?”
“You should have called. I could be your Mary Magdalene.”
--
Dean changed the station and looked questioningly at Castiel. The angel listened to the unmistakable opening chords and felt like he was being interrogated by the Heavenly Host all over again.
“Smoke on the Water,” he said finally.
“Took you long enough,” Dean grumbled. “That’s number 426 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, dude.”
Castiel didn’t think that was very high up on the list, to which he was told that humans had written a hell of a lot of music in their collective lifetime and most of it was crap, so yeah, even the 500th out of 500 would have been awesome. Not to mention it was also the twelfth Greatest Guitar Track out of 100. Castiel smiled a small, unsettled smile at the flood of statistics and resolved never to agrue with Dean about music.
“I could have told you that,” Sam said, from the back seat.
“Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is number 31,” Dean said, in the in-case-you-were-wondering tone.
That one always made Castiel shiver.
--
“I don’t feel like I’m here anymore,” Sam said, watching the clouds.
Dean kept quiet, staring at Lisa’s phone number, which he hadn’t erased from his phonebook.
“Why do you have to climb a stairs to get to heaven, but you can hitch a ride to hell?” Castiel wondered.
“We’re all out,” said Bobby, inspecting a pile of empty beer bottles in the kitchen.
They weren’t listening to each other at all.
--
Dean kissed Castiel on his own accord after they caught another soul. Castiel stared at it like it was a hamburger. Every fibre of his formerly divine being ached for its potential power.
“Tell anyone, and you’re dead,” Dean said.
“You do know I’m awake, right?” Sam piped in, from the back seat. Pretty much like when he was a kid and Dean used to make out with girls and forget about Sammy still being around.
With memories intact, it didn’t hurt that much to be invisible.
--
Sometimes Castiel acted like any other junkie, except his poison was rare and currently even less available than demon blood. He banged his fist against Dean’s solar plexus and clawed at his skin, craving contact with a human soul, but the body, with all its complex structure of skin and bones, presented far too great an impediment.
“I could teach you a thing or two about abstinence,” Sam said conspiratorially, one junkie to another. The room reeked with sulfur.
Castiel’s addictions made him even more undeniably human than his lack of grace and his blooming human impulses. He found comfort in the fact that he was not yet normal enough to find the Winchesters’ lifestyle disturbing.
June - August 2011
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Timeline: indefinitely post-6x22
Summary: Some time after Castiel ceases to be a God, he struggles to fit back into his human family. Meanwhile, Sam thinks he is becoming invisible, Dean is tired, Bobby grumbles, and monster souls are running amok. [mild Dean/Castiel]
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to CW and Eric Kripke.
A/N: This is really (and I do mean really) disjointed, weird and basically plotless.
SCREWBALL
Yes, there are two paths you can go by,
But in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on.
Led Zeppelin. ‘Stairway to Heaven’
There were snowy plains of dust on the carpet. Castiel could see every speck.
“There’s something Sammy here wants to tell you,” Dean said.
Sam tilted his head back and laid his palms flat against the wall. The wallpaper was blue and ugly and traditionally dotted with tiny cartoonish flowers.
“Sorry I stuck a knife in you.”
There were roaches in the bathroom. Castiel could hear them crawling about. The faucet leaked. The sound of dripping water weighed down on him. He looked up at Sam like he’d never seen him before.
“Sorry I misplaced your soul.”
And:
“Sorry I ruined the wall.”
And:
“Sorry I threatened to kill you. And your brother. And Bobby.”
And maybe even:
“Sorry I tried to purge the world of the unfaithful,” which admittedly had seemed like a good idea at the time, except most of the world would have qualified for the unfaithful as per their reluctance to accept Castiel as their new paterfamilias.
“What happened to ‘we don’t talk about it, we deal with it’?” Sam asked, narrow-eyed and poised like a marathon runner ready to bolt.
Dean grinned humourlessly. “Capital punishment. Not only do we get to feel the feelings, but we also have to discuss them. Bobby’s idea.”
Sam flashed his brother the you-miss-hell-don’t-you kind of a look. Castiel thought it was the sort of punishment Crowley could have come up with.
--
“Have a beer,” Dean said, stretched on the hood of his car under the starless sky, with Sam snoring quietly inside.
Castiel said: “I don’t drink… anymore,” except he didn’t, too busy looking at the black void overhead, and anyway, he didn’t really drink when he was angel, but he didn’t know what the hell he was anymore. He picked up the bottle. It was cool and damp, but the beer inside tasted cheap and diluted.
“So what’s it feel like being a God?”
“Lonely.”
Clouds came over the dead sky, making it look even more desolate. Sam grunted in his sleep and attempted to shift into a more comfortable position. Castiel thought vaguely that he could tangle himself in a knot, what with him being so long and all, as if made up of rubber bands crudely stitched together.
“What’s it feel like not being a God?” Dean prodded.
Somewhere between “fucking amazing” and “horribly wrong”, Castiel decided, but didn’t say a word. Instead, he leaned into Dean and kissed him on the mouth, drawing an almost instinctive response out of him. For a nanosecond, Dean was actually very nearly kissing back, lips pliant and hungry like those of a person missing someone important.
Then Dean pushed him away and punched him in the face and took a huge swig out of his bottle, washing all of the kiss away.
“Testing a theory,” Castiel said preemptively.
“What the-?”
“Just something Balthazar once said. Two bulletproof ways to get you to hit somebody.”
“There’s more than two,” Dean grumbled, interested despite himself. “What’s the other one?”
Castiel glanced at Sam who miraculously hadn’t woken up and continued to weave a spider-web out of his body parts.
“Badmouth your brother.”
Dean considered that. Then he promised to beat Cas into a pulp anytime without any prior agreement or instigation on his part. Because they were friends and dysfunctional. All that with the sweetest of smiles. Like kindergarten, except Castiel had never been in one.
--
“We have a buttload of monster souls to catch,” Dean began.
Sam finished: “And you have suddenly developed a knack for stating the obvious.”
He had been up all night, surfing the net for all kinds of weird happenings that might be tied to Purgatory escapees. Coffee didn’t seem to work.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Yes, please.” That was how Sam usually didn’t tell Dean that he barely saw him past the flames that methodically consumed the motel room or the street or the entire fucking world. He felt as if his eyeballs were baking. He forced a crooked smile and knew that Dean didn’t believe it for a second.
--
“It’s easier to get a person out of hell than to get hell out of a person,” Castiel reasoned. Dean reckoned they both had a first-hand experience.
He asked why Cas hadn’t pulled Adam out while he’d been at it. Castiel answered, “Who’s Adam?” For a moment, both of them were unsure if it was a display of sarcasm or unfiltered honesty.
“Balthazar once said you were in love.”
Castiel stared at a lopsided cheeseburger sitting in a cardboard takeout box, and remembered the overwhelming taste of fat, chewy meat. There wasn’t a variety of options: either eat it or not. Cas was stuck between the two.
“Just didn’t say with whom. I mean, he said ‘you’. But was it a plural ‘you’ as in ‘you humans’ or ‘you Winchester morons’-?”
“Or ‘you, Dean Winchester’, second person singular,” Castiel said, distractedly. The cheeseburger was eating up the storage space in his mind, destroying what was left of his brain cells. He looked at it with undisguised enmity. He wasn’t up for such challenges. Yet.
--
Dean was in another part of town, checking a lead on the escaped souls, when Sam spaced out in the water while hunting a selkie and nearly drowned. Castiel had no idea what to do, so he gave him a CPR. He was learning, slowly, and when he desperately forced air into Sam’s lungs and felt it nesting there, planning to stay, it was almost worth it.
Later Dean thought: daisy chain. It made him vaguely uncomfortable because he had signed a metaphorical contract with himself that stipulated that he should not think about any mouth-to-mouth contact with certain semi-angelic beings within a hundred-mile radius of him.
While Sam thought: ugh. He wasn’t up for much thinking lately.
--
Sam was seeing one of Bobby’s psychic friends when Castiel contracted his first flu. He thought he liked broken bones and lacerated wounds better.
“Welcome to the joyously infectious world of humanity,” Dean commented.
Castiel was beginning to understand Pestilence. Right now he felt like a huge Petri dish full of diseases waiting to happen.
Dean got him some pills that seethed and foamed as they melted in a glass of water and turned into a fizzy drink. Castiel hated the taste of it, and hated being weak, and hated Dean a little, and he flat out told him. Dean sniggered and said it was the freedom of being human. Ish.
Afterwards Castiel fell asleep to see fevered dreams of Dean sitting by him and talking quietly, while Dean sat by him and talked quietly.
--
Castiel was out doing some soul-searching (both literal and figurative) when Sam asked point-blank what they were going to do about Cas. Should they help him get his mojo back? Should they just leave things the way they were?
Dean said he could manage two brothers who fucked up and tried to bring about the end of the world just fine, thank you very much.
They left it at that. Bobby called them idjits, and there was enough crude affection in his tone to confuse them into believing that he shared Dean’s conviction.
--
Castiel asked Dean why people had sex. Dean choked on his drink and fired off, “Because!” and then added: “I don’t know. To get some action.”
“Action?”
“Dude, if you’re out for some in-depth psychoanalytical bullshit, I suggest you go ask Sam.”
Castiel said he already had. Sam had told him to ask Dean. Sam was smart.
--
Sam dreamt excessively about Jessica much in the same way Dean didn’t dream about Lisa. That must have had something to do with Sam leaving his guilt in the cage and Dean still carrying his around. His was fresher.
Sometimes Sam dreamt Jessica was Lucifer, had always in fact been Lucifer. He never screamed when he woke up because he was never sure he had woken up for real, and it would have been kind of silly to scream if still inside a nightmare.
--
Come to think of it, Dean’s deal wasn’t the worst when it came to making out with supernatural beings. After all, Bobby had kissed Crowley. Hell, Dad must have kissed Azazel. And Cas had kissed that hellbitch, Meg.
“Anyone else?” Dean asked, pushing for casual without much success.
Cas gave him a serious, mildly surprised look and said: “You,” like Dean could ever forget.
--
Sam was floating on his back in fire, brimstone and blood, the miasma of hell rising from beneath him. Lucifer was calling him home. He would have answered the call, but his brother was acting strange, and Sam turned back and swam towards Dean. Except Dean wasn’t there because Sam had said yes and now Lucifer was all there was.
--
Castiel decided he did not like being human(ish) because it made his mouth taste strange. Back in his first spell as a human, he hadn’t really noticed it, having been drinking and moping too hard. Now he seemed to have all the time in the world to run the tip of his tongue across his teeth, to feel their slippery foreignness, to wince at the profusion of tastes that had been mixing together and clinging to his palate since the metaphorical human forever.
“Humans brush their teeth,” Dean said to that, and dragged Castiel off to the bathroom.
He plucked a toothbrush out of the holder, washed it briskly, then squirted a generous amount of toothpaste onto it and handed it to Cas. Cas asked whose toothbrush it was, to which Dean answered, like it was the most natural idea in the world, “Yours.” Castiel saw that the brush had never been used.
After brief hesitation he opened his mouth and pressed the bristle against his back teeth. He moved the brush a few times, pressing harder. The toothpaste had a minty taste and it muffled Castiel’s teeth up with a sensation of cold. He pulled the brush out and stared at it. The bristle was somewhat disheveled and dripping with foam. He put it back in and tried the other side of his mouth. The coldness melted quickly. Some foam dribbled down his chin and left a long white trail along his arm, almost down to the elbow. He almost choked on the minty stuff and spat vigorously into the sink. He rinsed - the water was cold and it numbed his mouth - and washed his face, blinking rapidly against the water, disoriented, and then he looked up at Dean inquiringly and asked how often he would have to do this.
“Three times a day,” Sam’s disembodied voice declared from the nearby. “Don’t forget to floss.”
“Neatfreak,” Dean barked, and then tugged at the loosened knot of Castiel’s tie. “Humans change their clothes more often than once in a lifetime, too.”
--
An encounter with a runaway soul landed Bobby in a hospital. He lay in bed and bitched about it, and he bitched most of all when they tried to leave Sam to babysit him. Neither he, nor Sam were dumb enough to misunderstand the purpose of that: it was in fact Sam who needed to be babysat.
Sam made a dead set against this idea, unwilling to plead disability when his brother was out cleaning up the mess (albeit, for once, not his mess). At this point, he would have likely chained himself to Dean, so Castiel urged them both to go and stayed to watch over Bobby.
Bobby glared at him. A lot. Not even the bottle of Jim Beam that Castiel had sneaked in against better judgment could break the ice. Then Bobby said:
“Why is that every time I get my ass handed to me by some two-bit monster, you’re unfit to heal me?”
And he handed Castiel the uncorked bottle. Castiel knew enough of the effed-up human psychology to understand that things would probably be okay between them again someday.
--
When looking for Crowley, Sam and Dean found a hellhound. It scratched at people’s doors and whined plaintively, forsaken and beside itself with starvation, but it didn’t hurt anyone. It appeared to bide its time, and as it saw the Winchesters, it knew the wait was over. It followed them around and got under Sam’s feet, growling and yapping at anyone who tried to approach its chosen master. The absurdity of the situation was exacerbated by the fact that no one, including the brothers, could see the hound. Sam believed it was small, a hellpuppy if their kind happened to have a childhood at all.
Sam remembered Bones. He always wanted to have a dog.
Dean refused to sleep in the same room as the hellhound. Every time he heard its claws scratch against the floorboards, he felt like running for the hills, except there was no running from a hellhound. Unreleased screams gnawed out a hole in his throat. He took to wearing a horseshoe in his pocket. Once, when Sam wasn’t looking, he tried to ram an iron nail into the hound’s head. At other times, he spilled holy water on it and even shot it with rock salt. Sam flashed him dirty looks and asked him to leave the pup alone. Dean couldn’t say which one of them had gone insane.
--
Dean spent most of his nights in the car because he couldn’t bear to wake up in the middle of the night and hear Sam talking to the hound. Sam would always murmur so quietly that Dean couldn’t make out a word, but the very idea of his brother communicating so freely with a hell beast gave Dean the creeps.
“I had a dream I was the Marshmallow Man,” Castiel told him the minute he climbed inside the Impala one night. Castiel either slept too much or not enough; when the latter phase hit, he was unconditionally welcome to join Dean in his four-wheeled refuge. “I dream movies now.”
“Tell me when you get to the classics. Like walking naked into a school gym.”
“Which movie is that?”
Dean thought: God, I hate you, and he wasn’t sure if ‘God’ was a reference or an expletive.
Dean said: “It’s all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t damaged the freaking wall-,” and Castiel looked hurt. Castiel had said he was sorry. Castiel probably felt sorry, too. But hell if things ever worked that way with humans.
--
Sam woke up to the sound of a familiar voice and the sensation of fingers sifting through his hair.
“You did all right, Dumbo. You didn’t need a feather to fly. You had it in you all along.”
And a brush of lips across his forehead. A taste of sulfur in his mouth. Loneliness blanketed him. He didn’t need a cloak of invisibility either.
--
“How you been, Clarence?” Meg asked, lips twisted in a brutal curve that could have passed for a smile in a nightmare wonderland.
“God. You?”
“You should have called. I could be your Mary Magdalene.”
--
Dean changed the station and looked questioningly at Castiel. The angel listened to the unmistakable opening chords and felt like he was being interrogated by the Heavenly Host all over again.
“Smoke on the Water,” he said finally.
“Took you long enough,” Dean grumbled. “That’s number 426 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, dude.”
Castiel didn’t think that was very high up on the list, to which he was told that humans had written a hell of a lot of music in their collective lifetime and most of it was crap, so yeah, even the 500th out of 500 would have been awesome. Not to mention it was also the twelfth Greatest Guitar Track out of 100. Castiel smiled a small, unsettled smile at the flood of statistics and resolved never to agrue with Dean about music.
“I could have told you that,” Sam said, from the back seat.
“Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is number 31,” Dean said, in the in-case-you-were-wondering tone.
That one always made Castiel shiver.
--
“I don’t feel like I’m here anymore,” Sam said, watching the clouds.
Dean kept quiet, staring at Lisa’s phone number, which he hadn’t erased from his phonebook.
“Why do you have to climb a stairs to get to heaven, but you can hitch a ride to hell?” Castiel wondered.
“We’re all out,” said Bobby, inspecting a pile of empty beer bottles in the kitchen.
They weren’t listening to each other at all.
--
Dean kissed Castiel on his own accord after they caught another soul. Castiel stared at it like it was a hamburger. Every fibre of his formerly divine being ached for its potential power.
“Tell anyone, and you’re dead,” Dean said.
“You do know I’m awake, right?” Sam piped in, from the back seat. Pretty much like when he was a kid and Dean used to make out with girls and forget about Sammy still being around.
With memories intact, it didn’t hurt that much to be invisible.
--
Sometimes Castiel acted like any other junkie, except his poison was rare and currently even less available than demon blood. He banged his fist against Dean’s solar plexus and clawed at his skin, craving contact with a human soul, but the body, with all its complex structure of skin and bones, presented far too great an impediment.
“I could teach you a thing or two about abstinence,” Sam said conspiratorially, one junkie to another. The room reeked with sulfur.
Castiel’s addictions made him even more undeniably human than his lack of grace and his blooming human impulses. He found comfort in the fact that he was not yet normal enough to find the Winchesters’ lifestyle disturbing.
June - August 2011