SPN fic: Like Some Junkie Cosmonaut
I AM HOME! I will have things to say about roadtrip and will romanticize the western half o' the US and whatnot and talk about gout and the bluest of waters and POWELL'S BOOKSTORE ♥, but right now you get silly things I wrote while without internet. Yay silly things!
ALSO HOW ABOUT THAT SHERLOCK BBC? JIM, YOU SEXY BITCH. ♥
Title: Like Some Junkie Cosmonaut
Rating: PG-11?
Characters/Pairings: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Crowley.
Warnings: Crack, ex-human-and-misses-it Cas, adoring mockery of the Winchesters, mentions of beating people to death with crowbars, and lots of alcohol.
Summary: It turns out that being a big glowy ball of light in heaven is really, really boring. With Dean in an irritatingly angsty coma and therefore being no fun at all, it's up to Castiel to find something interesting.
Word Count: ~3000.
Note: Also for the prompt "06. You woke me up." for fictictactoe. So I wrote independent!Cas, and a coma. Lol?
Castiel goes back to heaven after averting the apocalypse and regaining his angel status, and finds himself bored. He’s so bored it hurts, so bored that all he wants to do is slip into humans’ pockets of heaven to see what miniature and usually mundane joy they’re living through, because even watching a man knit for three days straight is more interesting than his fellow angels.
He wishes he could say he was never as dull as every other angel, but he still isn’t a good liar. Oh, he’s an amazing liar compared to the angels (no, the rest of the angels, he’s an angel again and sometimes he likes to just stand and stretch his wings out wide and proud and glorious and just feel them), but one of Castiel’s main difficulties with being in heaven is that he’d stopped comparing himself to angels and started comparing himself to men. Particularly two men, who were probably not the most average measurement to use on the scale of humanity, but Castiel couldn’t help it.
Castiel would sit (except he never sat as an angel; he just thinks of it as sitting now, thinks of that pause in existence as sitting) in heaven, look (but not look, more like understand, but he is ruined ruined ruined and prefers looking, so look he says) at another angel, and think how stupid the other was, just because Castiel knows the other’s never even set foot on earth.
For someone who’d lived an eternity, two years was a blink of the eye, a passing breeze, and some of them hadn’t even noticed anything had changed. They just knew Castiel was giving orders, and when they were given, they were obeyed, and their blind obedience sometimes made Castiel want to…to punch things, to shout at them, to drink and grab them with arms angels don’t have and shake them by shoulders angels don’t have and look them in the eyes that angels don’t have but Castiel aches for, to see and watch and communicate with.
Castiel knows, without a doubt, that Dean Winchester has ruined him, woke him up in ways no angel is meant to be woken, and while half of him loathes the man for it, the other half misses him and everything he’d touched and tasted and fought so badly that it’s only another week (on earth) until Castiel slips into Dean’s dreams for the first time in over a year.
It’s almost embarrassing how good it feels to wind himself into the cobwebs of Dean’s dream, and more than a little concerning how he feels more at home watching Dean grab a shovel out of the Impala’s trunk than he does back in heaven.
They’re in the Lawrence cemetery, of course. Castiel isn’t surprised. What does surprise him is when Dean takes out a second shovel and hands it to the supposed-to-be-unseen angel next to him.
“How’s heaven?” Dean asks him, and slams the Impala’s trunk closed as Castiel becomes fully visible.
He considers lying just for the hell of it, but doesn’t. “I’m going to be powerful and bored for all eternity.”
Dean almost smiles, walking over to where Castiel exploded for what was hopefully the final time. “Yeah, that sounds like paradise alright. I’m glad I don’t have to try and fix you this time. You’re a bitch to clean up when blown up, Cas, you really are.”
“I’m sorry I inconvenienced you,” Cas (Cas) says. “Are we digging your brothers up?”
“Yep,” Dean says, and they dig. It’s manual labor, everything heaven doesn’t have and such a thrill that he’s grinning even as the dream-shovel starts slicing his hands and jabbing splinters in his skin until blood is running down his shovel and into the ground. Dean’s shovel is worse, an entire puddle beneath him and filling the hole he’s dug until Dean’s digging up nothing but his own blood.
Castiel stops and puts his own ruined hand on Dean’s. “You understand you’ll never reach them this way. You’ve been to hell, you know it’s-”
And suddenly Castiel is once again standing next to the Impala, watching Dean pull a shovel out and then pull another shovel out for Castiel. “How’s heaven?”
A recurring dream, then. It’s strange that there was nothing in the middle, but Dean has never really made sense to him. His body and organs and cells and molecules and atoms, yes, but his soul? Castiel would need another eternity to understand that part of him.
“Dean, you’re dreaming,” he says.
Dean stares at him like he’s an idiot. “Dude, how stupid do you think I am? Of course I’m dreaming.”
“How do you know?” Castiel asks. Usually Dean’s slow at figuring it out.
“Well, the coma I’m in is a pretty good clue,” Dean says with a smirk, and for the first time in all eternity Castiel is so shocked he finds himself losing all control over his actions and wham, he’s back to being bored and eyeless (but all-seeing, of course) in heaven. All-seeing, and he hadn’t known Dean Winchester was in a coma.
“Screw this,” Castiel mutters, which sends the nearest angels into hysterics and shock (and God, how did he used to be one of them? How?) that only get worse when he takes back his vessel and jumps down to Earth and Dean Winchester.
---
Lisa’s gotten used to the strange people who come to visit Dean’s bedside. She’s used to the fact that she has to pull some things off the door to let a few of them into the room but to never remove anything from Dean’s actual bedside. She’s used to having to put some things on the door so that some people will feel safe coming in. She’s used to the men and women and children who are grateful to Dean, she’s used to the ones who come in just to stare him in the face and say good riddance, and she’s slowly getting used to the pilgrimages that show up and stare and give her offerings that she really doesn’t want.
Lisa’s close to praying Dean wakes up just so she can apologize for Ben and transfer the poor guy into his friend Mr. Singer’s care, because she didn’t want any of this. She wanted to help a friend get back on his feet, but not…not this.
She’s trying to decide if it’d be rude or not to just transfer a still-comatose Dean when a man in a tan trenchcoat appears.
“Oh dear god,” Lisa shrieks, grabbing a nearby bedpan and swinging it towards the man. She slams it right into his head in a blow that would have sent anyone else to the ground and made her grateful they’re in a hospital, but instead, there’s a face-shaped divot in the metal.
“You must be Lisa Braeden,” the man says, still looking at Dean. “I appreciate that you’re protecting Dean, but I’m not here to hurt him, or you.”
Lisa stares at him. “You’re the angel, aren’t you.”
“I am,” the angel says, and without a thought for personal space or at least fifteen magic symbol things, just sits on the end of Dean’s bed. “You can leave if you want.”
“Are you going to wake him up?” Lisa asks. She remembers stories of angels and their miraculous healing powers, of cherubs and messengers of God. “Are you going to heal him?”
The angel actually turns and looks at her, then. He’s frowning, like she just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Dean will wake up when he wants to wake up. That’s how humans work.”
Even the demons didn’t seem to think of someone stuck in a coma for a month and a half like that. She wants to tell him a coma isn’t some kind of extended nap, that it’s a serious brain issue and he might wake up with serious problems, but she doesn’t doubt that the angel won’t give a damn about anything she says.
Lisa Braeden doesn’t even exist to him.
“I can see why he said angels are dicks,” Lisa mutters.
“Ironic, since we’re usually big boring sentient beams of light, but true,” the angel agrees, giving her a look that has some kind of small vicious twist that’s half friendly teasing and half mockery. He does it all without his mouth even moving, and it’s so disturbing that Lisa wonders how Dean could ever have liked this guy.
He stands, looking around the room. “I’ll add some more wards, just in case,” he says, and Lisa can’t tell if anything happens when he presses his hands to the wall, but she can guess he’s satisfied with whatever just happened since he nods, shoots a quick glance at Dean, and then vanishes again.
---
Castiel can’t say he’s surprised that Dean’s less interesting when he’s in a coma, particularly one where he does nothing but feel sorry for himself and angst and continue to have the same dream over and over and over again.
He doesn’t even bother digging with Dean, just stands next to him as he starts digging with his hands until they get down to bare bone. Castiel’s own hands are in his pockets as he watches.
“You should dream up a bar or something,” he tells Dean.
“You’re the worst angel ever,” Dean tells him, the blood already up to his shoulders. “Go back to heaven and learn to be good again. I’m busy.”
“Learning to be good again usually involves torture, so I’ll pass,” Castiel replies. “You’ll never get anywhere just digging, you know. Hell’s another dimension and this portal’s closed. It’s futile.”
“You’re an even worse mental projection,” Dean grumbles.
“You could unearth a zombie horde and we could kill them,” Castiel suggests. “Then you’d have finally dug something up at least.”
“I turned you into some kind of thrill junkie, didn’t I,” Dean says, and looks up at him with a frown, says, “Cas, I-”
And they’re back at the trunk of the Impala. Two shovels, the slam of the trunk. “How’s heaven?”
“Boring, just like overly dramatic Winchesters,” Castiel says, and leaves.
---
One of the best things about being one of the most powerful angels in heaven is that he can find out just about anything in no time at all. Plus the others are scared of him and his disgraceful, potentially contagious habits, so they like to give him what he wants so he’ll leave them alone.
That’s how he finds Sam Winchester stalking an onryo, a soul so furious that it fought its way out of hell just for vengeance, in northern California. He’s by himself, which is always a bad idea when fighting an onryo, since they’re not only ruthless but also inventive, so Castiel decides to help by killing the ghost before it comes across Sam.
When he appears in front of Sam, the man looks more pissed off than anything else. “God, you’re worse than Dean. I can take care of myself, you know.”
“I’m aware of that,” Castiel says, and decides not to add that he had a wonderful time killing the ghost. “Dean’s in a very boring and dramatic coma, by the way.”
“Oh my god, it’s my fault, isn’t it,” Sam says, looking stricken as he sits down hard on the motel bed. “Dean. I should never have-”
Castiel decides to leave.
---
It’s probably inevitable that he finds himself seeking out the most interesting and never-boring creature Castiel knows of who is still alive, for the most part.
The first thing Crowley does when he spots Castiel at the same bar is genuinely grin before strolling on over and buying him a drink. “Angelic lifestyle not suiting you, then?”
“In my real form, I can be classified as sentient radiation,” Castiel states, and takes the glass of…something. It’s brown and not beer, and he doubts it’ll even do anything to him, but he can hope. “I was human enough to have a bug bite just a couple months ago. How do you think it’s going?
“I can sympathize, what with being a big ball of black smoke,” Crowley says, taking the seat next to him and holding up his own glass. “Here’s to stealing people’s bodies just for the chance to feel.”
“Amen,” Castiel says, clinking his own glass against Crowley’s and drinking it down in one gulp as Crowley laughs next to him.
“Angel, I have the feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Crowley says, vicious eyes twinkling, and orders them another round in with booming, I-don’t-give-a-fuck shout, and Castiel can’t help but think yes, I think it is.
---
They actually manage to get drunk, even though it takes a good bar and a half to do it, and Castiel has decided down to his big glowy core that Crowley is the third greatest thing in all of creation, second only to Castiel’s Father and Dean.
“I’ve been meaning to go exterminate some of my less productive minions, want to join in?” Crowley offers, tilting slightly to the left with a manic smile. “I got a new warded crowbar.”
“Of course I want to go kill demons,” Castiel proclaims a bit too loudly for the bar they’re in. “That is, in fact, one of my favorite things to do. But I think my angel sword is always better than a warded crowbar.”
“That’s for stabbing. For stabbing, yes, but I like beating people to death,” Crowley says. “Have you ever bludgeoned someone to death? It’s fun.”
“I have, and I still prefer stabbing. It’s more intimate,” Castiel says.
“Now that I can respect,” Crowley says. “But you’re a fool if you don’t enjoy just walloping someone every now and then.”
“One of the most satisfying moments of my life was punching Dean repeatedly,” Castiel says. “I felt bad afterwards, but that’s because it was Dean.”
“Someone’s got a cruuuush,” Crowley teases.
Castiel glares at him, and considers standing up to loom a bit but decides he might fall down and embarrass himself, so he settles for just glaring. “I do not.”
“Oh angel, you’re still in denial,” Crowley says, and sighs. “Your education’s incomplete. It appears we can’t be the best of friends.”
“Can we still kill demons together at least?”
“Of course we can,” Crowley says, indignant. “I made a deal. I don’t go back on deals. King of the Crossroads here! That’s like saying you flicker!”
“I don’t flicker,” Castiel snaps. “I glow very steadily!”
“Well fine then!” Crowley shouts back, and they go kill demons and pass out on Crowley’s second best couch afterwards.
---
The next time Castiel goes into Dean’s dreams, he brings beer.
“Sam’s on his way here,” Castiel tells him while he’s halfway to drowning in his big pit of blood. “You might as well stop and have a beer while we wait.”
“We?” Dean asks, and looks desperate. “I…Cas, I can’t do that to you. I can’t.”
Castiel has no idea what he’s talking about, so he pulls out a beer and twists off the cap, dangling the open bottle above Dean’s head. “You know you’re in a coma, and you know you’re dreaming, and you know I wouldn’t lie to you. Sam’s on his way, safe and sound. You’ll wake up. Everything will be okay.” He frowns. “Now get out of there and drink with me.”
Something flickers across Dean’s face that makes Castiel wonder how much mockery he’d have to deal with to find out what it means from Crowley, and tries to decide whether it’d be worth it. The look changes into a smile, though, and-
They’re back at the trunk of the Impala.
Dean doesn’t take out the shovels, though. He looks into the trunk, deep and hard, and shuts it with a slam. “I’ll take that beer,” he says.
Castiel feels so warm inside he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he ends up smiling and just handing Dean the beer.
Dean smiles back, and drinks.
Now this is what I’ve been wanting, Castiel thinks, and leans against the Impala with him in comfortable silence, waiting for Sam to whisper into Dean’s ear and wipe away the web of dreams.
---
“Why is it that Cas is the most down-to-earth person in this room?” Crowley asks from the hospital room’s door, which sends the Winchesters into gasping fits and Castiel into a quick press of fingers to the walls to let him in. “Thank you, angel. Are they any less stupid now?”
“They had a good cry, so they’re more reasonably human now,” Castiel tells him.
“Human and stupid are two very different things,” Crowley says, smirking at the Winchesters.
“Cas, are you dating Crowley?” Dean demands.
“Jealous?” Crowley asks, but relents. “No, I only rank third, he’s all yours.”
Dean blinks at him. “Well. Good then,” he says, and somehow they all manage to have a good time doing just about nothing.
---
Castiel has a lurking suspicion that when he was brought back from the dead, it wasn’t to go drinking with his best friend the super-demon and date Dean Winchester and be an awkward second brother to Sam and mock Dean for being comatose after angsting a lot and getting hit in the head with one of Ben Braeden’s foul balls at a little league game.
But, then he thinks about the way their world works, with its Paris Hilton forest gods and pouting fluffy-haired antichrists and the life and times of Chuck Shirley, and thinks that maybe, just maybe, it actually is.
---
And, since it inspired most of this by getting unintentionally stuck on repeat on my cheap six-year-old knock-off MP3 Player for over half an hour while staring out the window at the ever-so-thrilling landscape of Utah via I-70:
ALSO HOW ABOUT THAT SHERLOCK BBC? JIM, YOU SEXY BITCH. ♥
Title: Like Some Junkie Cosmonaut
Rating: PG-11?
Characters/Pairings: Dean/Castiel, Sam, Crowley.
Warnings: Crack, ex-human-and-misses-it Cas, adoring mockery of the Winchesters, mentions of beating people to death with crowbars, and lots of alcohol.
Summary: It turns out that being a big glowy ball of light in heaven is really, really boring. With Dean in an irritatingly angsty coma and therefore being no fun at all, it's up to Castiel to find something interesting.
Word Count: ~3000.
Note: Also for the prompt "06. You woke me up." for fictictactoe. So I wrote independent!Cas, and a coma. Lol?
Castiel goes back to heaven after averting the apocalypse and regaining his angel status, and finds himself bored. He’s so bored it hurts, so bored that all he wants to do is slip into humans’ pockets of heaven to see what miniature and usually mundane joy they’re living through, because even watching a man knit for three days straight is more interesting than his fellow angels.
He wishes he could say he was never as dull as every other angel, but he still isn’t a good liar. Oh, he’s an amazing liar compared to the angels (no, the rest of the angels, he’s an angel again and sometimes he likes to just stand and stretch his wings out wide and proud and glorious and just feel them), but one of Castiel’s main difficulties with being in heaven is that he’d stopped comparing himself to angels and started comparing himself to men. Particularly two men, who were probably not the most average measurement to use on the scale of humanity, but Castiel couldn’t help it.
Castiel would sit (except he never sat as an angel; he just thinks of it as sitting now, thinks of that pause in existence as sitting) in heaven, look (but not look, more like understand, but he is ruined ruined ruined and prefers looking, so look he says) at another angel, and think how stupid the other was, just because Castiel knows the other’s never even set foot on earth.
For someone who’d lived an eternity, two years was a blink of the eye, a passing breeze, and some of them hadn’t even noticed anything had changed. They just knew Castiel was giving orders, and when they were given, they were obeyed, and their blind obedience sometimes made Castiel want to…to punch things, to shout at them, to drink and grab them with arms angels don’t have and shake them by shoulders angels don’t have and look them in the eyes that angels don’t have but Castiel aches for, to see and watch and communicate with.
Castiel knows, without a doubt, that Dean Winchester has ruined him, woke him up in ways no angel is meant to be woken, and while half of him loathes the man for it, the other half misses him and everything he’d touched and tasted and fought so badly that it’s only another week (on earth) until Castiel slips into Dean’s dreams for the first time in over a year.
It’s almost embarrassing how good it feels to wind himself into the cobwebs of Dean’s dream, and more than a little concerning how he feels more at home watching Dean grab a shovel out of the Impala’s trunk than he does back in heaven.
They’re in the Lawrence cemetery, of course. Castiel isn’t surprised. What does surprise him is when Dean takes out a second shovel and hands it to the supposed-to-be-unseen angel next to him.
“How’s heaven?” Dean asks him, and slams the Impala’s trunk closed as Castiel becomes fully visible.
He considers lying just for the hell of it, but doesn’t. “I’m going to be powerful and bored for all eternity.”
Dean almost smiles, walking over to where Castiel exploded for what was hopefully the final time. “Yeah, that sounds like paradise alright. I’m glad I don’t have to try and fix you this time. You’re a bitch to clean up when blown up, Cas, you really are.”
“I’m sorry I inconvenienced you,” Cas (Cas) says. “Are we digging your brothers up?”
“Yep,” Dean says, and they dig. It’s manual labor, everything heaven doesn’t have and such a thrill that he’s grinning even as the dream-shovel starts slicing his hands and jabbing splinters in his skin until blood is running down his shovel and into the ground. Dean’s shovel is worse, an entire puddle beneath him and filling the hole he’s dug until Dean’s digging up nothing but his own blood.
Castiel stops and puts his own ruined hand on Dean’s. “You understand you’ll never reach them this way. You’ve been to hell, you know it’s-”
And suddenly Castiel is once again standing next to the Impala, watching Dean pull a shovel out and then pull another shovel out for Castiel. “How’s heaven?”
A recurring dream, then. It’s strange that there was nothing in the middle, but Dean has never really made sense to him. His body and organs and cells and molecules and atoms, yes, but his soul? Castiel would need another eternity to understand that part of him.
“Dean, you’re dreaming,” he says.
Dean stares at him like he’s an idiot. “Dude, how stupid do you think I am? Of course I’m dreaming.”
“How do you know?” Castiel asks. Usually Dean’s slow at figuring it out.
“Well, the coma I’m in is a pretty good clue,” Dean says with a smirk, and for the first time in all eternity Castiel is so shocked he finds himself losing all control over his actions and wham, he’s back to being bored and eyeless (but all-seeing, of course) in heaven. All-seeing, and he hadn’t known Dean Winchester was in a coma.
“Screw this,” Castiel mutters, which sends the nearest angels into hysterics and shock (and God, how did he used to be one of them? How?) that only get worse when he takes back his vessel and jumps down to Earth and Dean Winchester.
---
Lisa’s gotten used to the strange people who come to visit Dean’s bedside. She’s used to the fact that she has to pull some things off the door to let a few of them into the room but to never remove anything from Dean’s actual bedside. She’s used to having to put some things on the door so that some people will feel safe coming in. She’s used to the men and women and children who are grateful to Dean, she’s used to the ones who come in just to stare him in the face and say good riddance, and she’s slowly getting used to the pilgrimages that show up and stare and give her offerings that she really doesn’t want.
Lisa’s close to praying Dean wakes up just so she can apologize for Ben and transfer the poor guy into his friend Mr. Singer’s care, because she didn’t want any of this. She wanted to help a friend get back on his feet, but not…not this.
She’s trying to decide if it’d be rude or not to just transfer a still-comatose Dean when a man in a tan trenchcoat appears.
“Oh dear god,” Lisa shrieks, grabbing a nearby bedpan and swinging it towards the man. She slams it right into his head in a blow that would have sent anyone else to the ground and made her grateful they’re in a hospital, but instead, there’s a face-shaped divot in the metal.
“You must be Lisa Braeden,” the man says, still looking at Dean. “I appreciate that you’re protecting Dean, but I’m not here to hurt him, or you.”
Lisa stares at him. “You’re the angel, aren’t you.”
“I am,” the angel says, and without a thought for personal space or at least fifteen magic symbol things, just sits on the end of Dean’s bed. “You can leave if you want.”
“Are you going to wake him up?” Lisa asks. She remembers stories of angels and their miraculous healing powers, of cherubs and messengers of God. “Are you going to heal him?”
The angel actually turns and looks at her, then. He’s frowning, like she just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Dean will wake up when he wants to wake up. That’s how humans work.”
Even the demons didn’t seem to think of someone stuck in a coma for a month and a half like that. She wants to tell him a coma isn’t some kind of extended nap, that it’s a serious brain issue and he might wake up with serious problems, but she doesn’t doubt that the angel won’t give a damn about anything she says.
Lisa Braeden doesn’t even exist to him.
“I can see why he said angels are dicks,” Lisa mutters.
“Ironic, since we’re usually big boring sentient beams of light, but true,” the angel agrees, giving her a look that has some kind of small vicious twist that’s half friendly teasing and half mockery. He does it all without his mouth even moving, and it’s so disturbing that Lisa wonders how Dean could ever have liked this guy.
He stands, looking around the room. “I’ll add some more wards, just in case,” he says, and Lisa can’t tell if anything happens when he presses his hands to the wall, but she can guess he’s satisfied with whatever just happened since he nods, shoots a quick glance at Dean, and then vanishes again.
---
Castiel can’t say he’s surprised that Dean’s less interesting when he’s in a coma, particularly one where he does nothing but feel sorry for himself and angst and continue to have the same dream over and over and over again.
He doesn’t even bother digging with Dean, just stands next to him as he starts digging with his hands until they get down to bare bone. Castiel’s own hands are in his pockets as he watches.
“You should dream up a bar or something,” he tells Dean.
“You’re the worst angel ever,” Dean tells him, the blood already up to his shoulders. “Go back to heaven and learn to be good again. I’m busy.”
“Learning to be good again usually involves torture, so I’ll pass,” Castiel replies. “You’ll never get anywhere just digging, you know. Hell’s another dimension and this portal’s closed. It’s futile.”
“You’re an even worse mental projection,” Dean grumbles.
“You could unearth a zombie horde and we could kill them,” Castiel suggests. “Then you’d have finally dug something up at least.”
“I turned you into some kind of thrill junkie, didn’t I,” Dean says, and looks up at him with a frown, says, “Cas, I-”
And they’re back at the trunk of the Impala. Two shovels, the slam of the trunk. “How’s heaven?”
“Boring, just like overly dramatic Winchesters,” Castiel says, and leaves.
---
One of the best things about being one of the most powerful angels in heaven is that he can find out just about anything in no time at all. Plus the others are scared of him and his disgraceful, potentially contagious habits, so they like to give him what he wants so he’ll leave them alone.
That’s how he finds Sam Winchester stalking an onryo, a soul so furious that it fought its way out of hell just for vengeance, in northern California. He’s by himself, which is always a bad idea when fighting an onryo, since they’re not only ruthless but also inventive, so Castiel decides to help by killing the ghost before it comes across Sam.
When he appears in front of Sam, the man looks more pissed off than anything else. “God, you’re worse than Dean. I can take care of myself, you know.”
“I’m aware of that,” Castiel says, and decides not to add that he had a wonderful time killing the ghost. “Dean’s in a very boring and dramatic coma, by the way.”
“Oh my god, it’s my fault, isn’t it,” Sam says, looking stricken as he sits down hard on the motel bed. “Dean. I should never have-”
Castiel decides to leave.
---
It’s probably inevitable that he finds himself seeking out the most interesting and never-boring creature Castiel knows of who is still alive, for the most part.
The first thing Crowley does when he spots Castiel at the same bar is genuinely grin before strolling on over and buying him a drink. “Angelic lifestyle not suiting you, then?”
“In my real form, I can be classified as sentient radiation,” Castiel states, and takes the glass of…something. It’s brown and not beer, and he doubts it’ll even do anything to him, but he can hope. “I was human enough to have a bug bite just a couple months ago. How do you think it’s going?
“I can sympathize, what with being a big ball of black smoke,” Crowley says, taking the seat next to him and holding up his own glass. “Here’s to stealing people’s bodies just for the chance to feel.”
“Amen,” Castiel says, clinking his own glass against Crowley’s and drinking it down in one gulp as Crowley laughs next to him.
“Angel, I have the feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Crowley says, vicious eyes twinkling, and orders them another round in with booming, I-don’t-give-a-fuck shout, and Castiel can’t help but think yes, I think it is.
---
They actually manage to get drunk, even though it takes a good bar and a half to do it, and Castiel has decided down to his big glowy core that Crowley is the third greatest thing in all of creation, second only to Castiel’s Father and Dean.
“I’ve been meaning to go exterminate some of my less productive minions, want to join in?” Crowley offers, tilting slightly to the left with a manic smile. “I got a new warded crowbar.”
“Of course I want to go kill demons,” Castiel proclaims a bit too loudly for the bar they’re in. “That is, in fact, one of my favorite things to do. But I think my angel sword is always better than a warded crowbar.”
“That’s for stabbing. For stabbing, yes, but I like beating people to death,” Crowley says. “Have you ever bludgeoned someone to death? It’s fun.”
“I have, and I still prefer stabbing. It’s more intimate,” Castiel says.
“Now that I can respect,” Crowley says. “But you’re a fool if you don’t enjoy just walloping someone every now and then.”
“One of the most satisfying moments of my life was punching Dean repeatedly,” Castiel says. “I felt bad afterwards, but that’s because it was Dean.”
“Someone’s got a cruuuush,” Crowley teases.
Castiel glares at him, and considers standing up to loom a bit but decides he might fall down and embarrass himself, so he settles for just glaring. “I do not.”
“Oh angel, you’re still in denial,” Crowley says, and sighs. “Your education’s incomplete. It appears we can’t be the best of friends.”
“Can we still kill demons together at least?”
“Of course we can,” Crowley says, indignant. “I made a deal. I don’t go back on deals. King of the Crossroads here! That’s like saying you flicker!”
“I don’t flicker,” Castiel snaps. “I glow very steadily!”
“Well fine then!” Crowley shouts back, and they go kill demons and pass out on Crowley’s second best couch afterwards.
---
The next time Castiel goes into Dean’s dreams, he brings beer.
“Sam’s on his way here,” Castiel tells him while he’s halfway to drowning in his big pit of blood. “You might as well stop and have a beer while we wait.”
“We?” Dean asks, and looks desperate. “I…Cas, I can’t do that to you. I can’t.”
Castiel has no idea what he’s talking about, so he pulls out a beer and twists off the cap, dangling the open bottle above Dean’s head. “You know you’re in a coma, and you know you’re dreaming, and you know I wouldn’t lie to you. Sam’s on his way, safe and sound. You’ll wake up. Everything will be okay.” He frowns. “Now get out of there and drink with me.”
Something flickers across Dean’s face that makes Castiel wonder how much mockery he’d have to deal with to find out what it means from Crowley, and tries to decide whether it’d be worth it. The look changes into a smile, though, and-
They’re back at the trunk of the Impala.
Dean doesn’t take out the shovels, though. He looks into the trunk, deep and hard, and shuts it with a slam. “I’ll take that beer,” he says.
Castiel feels so warm inside he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he ends up smiling and just handing Dean the beer.
Dean smiles back, and drinks.
Now this is what I’ve been wanting, Castiel thinks, and leans against the Impala with him in comfortable silence, waiting for Sam to whisper into Dean’s ear and wipe away the web of dreams.
---
“Why is it that Cas is the most down-to-earth person in this room?” Crowley asks from the hospital room’s door, which sends the Winchesters into gasping fits and Castiel into a quick press of fingers to the walls to let him in. “Thank you, angel. Are they any less stupid now?”
“They had a good cry, so they’re more reasonably human now,” Castiel tells him.
“Human and stupid are two very different things,” Crowley says, smirking at the Winchesters.
“Cas, are you dating Crowley?” Dean demands.
“Jealous?” Crowley asks, but relents. “No, I only rank third, he’s all yours.”
Dean blinks at him. “Well. Good then,” he says, and somehow they all manage to have a good time doing just about nothing.
---
Castiel has a lurking suspicion that when he was brought back from the dead, it wasn’t to go drinking with his best friend the super-demon and date Dean Winchester and be an awkward second brother to Sam and mock Dean for being comatose after angsting a lot and getting hit in the head with one of Ben Braeden’s foul balls at a little league game.
But, then he thinks about the way their world works, with its Paris Hilton forest gods and pouting fluffy-haired antichrists and the life and times of Chuck Shirley, and thinks that maybe, just maybe, it actually is.
---
And, since it inspired most of this by getting unintentionally stuck on repeat on my cheap six-year-old knock-off MP3 Player for over half an hour while staring out the window at the ever-so-thrilling landscape of Utah via I-70:
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