Fic: Set the fire to the third bar = episode 2
Title: Set the fire to the third bar
Author: Seraphim Grace
Fandom = Supernatural
Pairing = Castiel x Dean (god is love in all its forms)
Rating = NC17
spoilers = yes for season 4, set between Great pumpkin and the one after that I've forgotten the name of
AUish - set in the world of american gods and sandman but also the spn universe, I just stretched it a little
prompts - Dean wonders how much is too much when you've already past that line and just how changed he is from being in hell.
suggested by keire_ke
Set the fire to the third bar - episode 2
In which Dean wonders if even the really good coffee is worth all this shit, because he just doesn’t understand any more, and sometimes all you can do is run.
Soundtrack
REM - Drive
Dean expects Castiel to be in the park, perched at the end of the bench with his cold comfort and consternated expression that suggests that he is totally confused by both his human vessel and humanity in general. He’s not.
There are kids in heavy winter coats on the swings, gloved hands tight on the chains and the only sound is the metal creaking of their movement.
He wants Castiel to be there.
Sam is fucking the demon.
His brother, his Sammy, whom he fed and washed and diapered is fucking a demon.
Their mother was killed by a demon.
Jess was killed by a demon.
Dean went to Hell, and Sam is fucking a demon.
It’s a slap in the face, one that hurts even more because he’d been in Hell and he feels everything just that bit more keenly, and it’s Sam, his baby Sammy, with his yeti feet and silly floppy hair who sleeps on his tummy with his socks on and is the only thing that Dean truly loves - and it’s a demon.
It’s a fucking piece of poison black gas wrapped in a meat sack, and you know that this girl, this Vanessa Hudgens look-a-like didn’t volunteer like Castiel’s vessel or is as well cared for.
Demons ride their meat puppets hard and Sam knows that and yet he’s fucking it, and Dean wants to pull his hair out and scream but there are kids on the swings and an amulet in the Widow’s Tree and his car keys are sticking him in the thigh.
He runs his thumb over the raised lines of the hex symbol he uses as a keyring and it makes his mind up for him.
He’s on the road for hours when Castiel appears in the passenger seat, immediately rummaging in the glove compartment for the liquorice. “I suppose it was an inevitability that he would push you too far.”
“Did you know,” Dean is seething, “that he was fucking it?”
Castiel says nothing, prize now found, he leans back against the leather seat and then belts himself in, liquorice held in his palm. “I know only what I’m told.” He says finally, then pops the candy into his mouth. “I knew only that he was with her.”
“Yeah, he was with her,” Dean snarls. “God,” the familiar blasphemy falls out before he realises it. Castiel further furrows his brow but says nothing although he does not normally tolerate it. “He knows better, she’s a fucking demon for fuck’s sake.”
Dean doesn’t even know that he’s saying it, it’s just a comfortable curse word, an irritant only to the angel and although he normally watches it carefully he is undone by anger and hurt and rage.
He doesn’t even realise that he hasn’t turned on his music. His knuckles are white at ten and two. “A fucking demon, Cas, a fucking demon.”
He forces the impala around a truck quickly, too quickly and the typres screech. Castiel grits his teeth and clutches the woven strap of his seatbelt. A few horns bleat in protest but he ignores them. “And I was eating fucking pie.”
“You are not responsible for your brother’s actions.” The angel says and it’s clearly meant to soothe but it doesn’t feel like that - it feels like a platitude.
“I fucking raised him, Cas, who’s responsible if not me?”
“He is,” Castiel says bluntly. “He was given choice and because he can choose he can make mistakes.”
It’s clear he has chosen the wrong word because Dean explodes. “A mistake?!”
“If you can't choose wrongly,” Castiel continues, “there is no point in choice.”
“you’re going to defend him, you?”
“No,” Castiel is calm, “I will defend choice, because it is God’s will that you can choose, but it is meaningless to have choice is there is not a right choice and a wrong choice. Everyone is responsible for their own choices. You brother made his choice himself, you did not make it for him, so you are not responsible.”
“You suck at this,” Dean says and it's honest, “it's like being comforted by the pope or an evangelist hitting you over the head with a bible.”
“He is wrong,” Castiel continues that pops a second piece of liquorice betwee his lips, knowing that Dean has bought them for him. It's a piece of black flashing between white teeth. “You are not to blame.” His tongue is stained dark brown when he licks his lips, the liqorice colouring his saliva with an oily stain across his lower lip, and Dean knows it will taste of liquorice if he kisses him. He doesn't know where that thought came from.
“He will search you out.” Castiel hasn’t noticed the change.
“I just need time.” Dean says, “or I’ll kill him myself." He mutters darkly, almost under his breath. “- With Ruby, even if she wasn't a demon, she’s a skank.” He pulls the car into a service station to get gas. There is a calming reliability to the indicator clicking. "I can’t believe that he’d do that to me.”
“I cannot be with you for all of this, my duties call.” Castiel says, “I am needed elsewhere, but my heart will be with you, and I will make provision, I will come as often as I am able.” His brow further furrows, there has got to be a permanent crease there by now, and he takes another piece of the liquorice. “God loves you, Dean, and does not hold you responsible even if you yourself do.”
Then as Dean unclips his seatbelt there is that terrible emptiness that he only notices when Castiel is gone and he has a dark moment when he wonders, with a wicked selfishness, what the angel gave up to give him this failed attempt at comfort.
Castiel went to Hell for him and Castiel is there when he's needed, but he just puts the feeling away and starts pumping gas letting the caustic chemical smell wash away the lingering afterscent of frankincense.
He stocks up on chips and soda in the gas station store, picking up a few comics that have new issues. He’ll read them and leave them in a motel lobby for some passing kid, keeping the ones that either have really cool art or a hint that the writer has done some real research into their supernatural villain. Those ones he leaves with Bobby.
Bobby, even though he won't admit it, is hopelessly addicted to The Darkness and Dean, who reads it because he buys it for Bobby, finds himself having Jackie Estacado moments, but with a grimace he realises that it's Sam that's gone over to the great Dark.
He adds a few more bags of chips, red liqorice laces, a box of real fruit cereal, microwaves a beef burrito and then a large cup of coffee from the unlabelled coffee maker. He pays for it all with a credit card in the name Richard Gleason.
He takes the paper bag out to the cat, setting it into the back seat and peels the lid off the coffee and takes a long mouthful. Then he damn near spits it out because it has some sweet wierd flavour like he's tipped maple syrup into it. It's the last straw in a particularly shitty day that at least is mostly over.
The only thing that stops him going back into the store in a Denis Leary style rage rant is that it’s not the poor clerk's fault. He drops the whole coffee, lid and all, into the waste bin when the cell rings.
Obviously he's not done being fate's bitch because it's Sam.
He cuts it off without answering.
Sam just rings again.
And again.
And again.
He finally answers. “Dude, where are you? I've been looking all over.”
"I’m at a gas station, about four hours out. Also I’m going to say I’m kinda hurt it’s taken this long for you to even notice.” He leans against the car, his body language promising violence to anyone near. He’s wound like a watch spring. “I saw you." He says, “and if there is a hope in,” he still chokes on the word, “hell that I’m going to forgive you this side of the armageddon you are going to give me time.”
“You’re not my boyfriend,” Sam answers, “and you’re not my dad, you can’t give me those kinds of ultimatums.”
“No, Sammy, I’m your brother, and I went to Hell for you whilst you were balling one it’s whores.” Then he cuts the call.
Sam calls again.
Dean switches the cell off and throws it into the car. He may be fate's bitch but that doesn't make him Sam’s.
He stops in a small town he doesn't bother to learn the name of but it has a cheap hotel with a single room that has everything it needs, a lone double bed with a bland flowery spread. It's called Hotel Dusk which amuses him for some reason. There is a bar and a restaurant, but other than that it's the same as every other hotel he's stayed in.
The paintings of fruit that decorate the place are a cut above the usual standard, but that doesn't change anything other than he wants to remember it in case he comes this way again.
There’s a kid on the stairs, a girl playing with a doll with brightly coloured hair and huge creepy eyes. It looks like a plastic talisman made to keep away Rawheads, just in a pink poodle skirt and pigtails. She matches his annoyed glare with one of her own and he doesn't bother to grin at her.
She’s the kind of girl who’ll grow up to be a stunner, red hair she’ll have to grow into, freckles that will be charming later, but for now make her the butt of the jokes. She’s wearing a charm bracelet where the charms are all religious protective symbols but something suggests that the kid lives here and isn't just another hunter’s brat just passing through.
She has a haunted look that's the same as his own.
He brushes past her on the stairs to his sparse room. The decor is beige and bland and makes a pleasant change from the usual Elvis jungle room that they normally get. He corrects himself, not they, he.
He throws his pack, a thing inherited from John, on the bed and collapses in the chair with his head between his hands for long, long moments awaiting the usual smell of frankincense and christmasses past.
It doesn't come.
Dinner is homemade soup, again reassuring him that this place is unusual. There are great big chunks of meat in it that practically dissolve on the tongue into sweet tasting shreds, and the gravy is thick. It’s all Dean can do not to gag.
One of the first lessons that any soldier learns is to grab food and sleep when they’re offered. So he forces down the soup although it makes him sick, despite that’s it's good - real good, and the bread is freshly baked and thickly spread with real butter.
There is a whole roasted potato and steamed veg to the side on a small plate.
The hunter brat, hood down, red hair pulled up in a pony is dipping her cauliflower into the soup, fork in one hand and bread in the other, shovelling down the food like she hasn't seen it in weeks. Dean forces himself to follow her example and wonders what horrors she has seen that makes her look like that. She’s at most nine years old, and still has her ugly doll tucked under her arm, alone in this place - even if it is nicer than most.
Hunters shouldn't have kids, he thinks.
The Winchester anniversary passed by unnoticed.
It never meant that much to Sam probably because he doesn't remember their mother.
Dean does, just as a soft warmth at odds with the spunky girl he saw make her pact with Azazel in the past. He remembers just enough to miss her and to understand his father’s slavish devotion to both her memory and the son she died for.
He’s never felt so alone in his life.
He won't linger on it though, and returns to the food he doesn't want.
She sits at his table bringing her own wine, bottle and all. Her hair is long and thin about a skinny face that maintains a sort of girlish prettiness. She’s a natural blonde and her expensive cashmere sweater is pleasantly stretched over a small bosom, but her skirt hangs on her hips as if they were a chair.
“You look like you need company." Her voice is a lazy southern drawl. Her too thin wrist slips from the lilac cuff of her sweater. She’s too thin and isn't eating, it’s made worse by her heavy bangle that bats off the muscle of her thumb as she lifts her wine glass.
The wine is as dark as a bloodstain on her lips.
Dean doesn’t bother to answer her.
“Drinking alone is boring,” she says, “and misery loves company. You look like you need a drink.” She pours wine into his empty water glass, a good inch’s worth.
"I won't sleep with you." He says although he's pretty sure that she’s a sure thing.
“Honey," she drawls and he knows she calls him honey so she doesn’t have to learn his name, “I want someone to drink with and you don't want to be alone. What has that got to do with fucking?” She says the word carefully, enunciating the hard syllables through wax coloured lips in her warm molasses voice. “Besides you stink of angel.”
His hand finds the silver letter opener in his belt, cursing that he’s left himself this open, that his anger over Sam's betrayal has left him this vulnerable. He’s pretty sure that in a fight, one on one, that he could take her, but he’s been wrong before. “What are you?”
"Old, honey," she tells him though she couldn't be older than forty, “and I've been around, all I want is someone to drink with, someone who smells of something I lost so I can appreciate my wallowing just that bit more, and besides, honey," she taps her finger against the rim of her glass, “I’ve just eaten.” She brays out a laugh at her private joke, “men today, honey, they think we only want two things, to fuck,” again the word is violent in her mouth, “or to feed, and I, honey,” she uses the petname as a barrier between them, “I just want to get very, very drunk.”
When they move to the bar she switches from wine, not to mint juleps as he might have suspected from her being a grande dame in a Truman Capote novel, to bourbon straight, hold the ice.
Dean can't fault her choice and copies her with his usual flirting nonchalance to the bartender.
They don't talk, other than to order more liquor but each other's presence keeps people from the table, no one hits on her which is how she prefers it, and they completely ignore him.
So when the young man in the threadbare jeans comes in Dean doesn't notice him. He ignores the bartender and sits at their table, turning the chair around to sit on it with the back to his stomach, he’s wiping at his nose like a junky. “Goin’ to get me a soda?” he asks. His hair is dark brown, his eyes black and he looks kind of meditteranean.
“You’re always a pain, Horace.” The woman tells the boy, “I don't know why you're here.”
“I just wanted to see,” Horace answers bluntly, “if you’re not going to get me a drink can I have yours?” He wipes his nose with the side of his hand, sniffling, “I got a funny taste in my mouth." Then he sticks his tongue out to show her.
She slides the glass over the table, and he lifts it, draining it in one. "I don't like this," he says and then scrapes his teeth over his tongue, “and you’ve got it too.”
“Manner’s, Horace,” the woman chides. There is a long familiarity between them, suggesting a very long acquaintance, perhaps even a fondness. “I’ll suppose you’ll want to stay tonight, with me.”
The boy beams, he’s pretty under the twitching Dean thinks to himself, “can I get some chips too?”
“I guess I’ll just take my leave now," Dean tells her, “leave you,” he turns to Horace, “with your Mommy.”
Horace looks confused. “but Sif’s not my Mommy.” He says but Dean leaves him to it.
Horace is waiting against the Impala the next morning, scuffed converse sneakers and a quilted puffer jacket, a handmade wool cap and an offering of coffee. “You’re not supposed to be on your own.” The boy says, “and you could give me a ride.”
“You could get your head read, kid." Dean says but takes the polystyrene cup, which smells of coffee and without the tang of some strange syrup. It’s good coffee too, better than the hotel supplied with breakfast.
“You’re not to be alone,” the kid, Horace, states again.
“Who says,” Dean continues, “your Mommy from the bar.” He’s not in the mood for this kind of crap. He wants to push the kid out of the way and drive to Bobby’s.
“No,” Horace says as if explaining things to a small child, “Castiel.”
Dean starts wondering what this kid is if he knows about Castiel and can so casually drop his name. “There are things after you, you are not to be alone.”
“Then get in,” Dean sayts finally, “but no complaining and no eating the candy.”
It doesn't take long before Dean decides that Horace is in no way dangerous and that he is on acid and not crack as he had previously thought.
He goes from itchy twitchy restlessness to eerie stillness and as Dean presses the gas pedal he grins, and like someone's pet dog, sticks his head out of the window- mouth open and laughing.
Dean has to slow the impala to pull him back inside and the kid sulks even as he starts pulling bits of moth from his teeth. “But I wanna fly,” he whines, “Seth said I flew too much,” he continues to himself, “and they say poor Horace, and it's like flying,” he's petulant, lip out arms crossed. “She made me promise, but I just wanna fly.” His fists are clenched and Dean is torn, part of him, the sensible part he reassures himself, says throw the kid out on the highway, but there's part of him that remembers Sam as small and petulant, whining in the back of the car.
Horace sniffs back a sob, wiping at his nose with the flat of his palm. “I jus' wanna fly.”
Dean remembers how his dad got past Sam's whining because shouting didn't cut it - Sam in the back and Dean riding shotgun. “Look, kid,” he says, “you can put the radio on, you choose.”
Horace lights up like a pinball machine on tilt and starts to push buttons randomly. He pulls exaggerated faces at talk radio and physically groans at Britney's pleas to “hit me baby one more time,” He eventually settles on a nationwide rock station which is playing Queen as part of an all eighties medley. “I like big music,” he announces, “I like the drums, they remind me of home.” And with a grin that’s remarkably hawkish he starts to squawk along to the Princes of the Universe though he knows perhaps one line in three.
He animatedly moves to stiltskin and a song about perfume and paper bags that Dean doesn't know, battering out the drum beat on his thigh with his fingers, his head matching the rhythm and when it plays REM’s “it’s the end of the world as we know it” he laughs raucously and crows, “it's your song,” and his schadenfreude is so infectious that Dean laughs too.
Lunch is a bucket of chicken for each of them, eaten in the car. Horace with his long legs crossed on the passenger seat and the grease and flavouring powder around his mouth and both large cups of soda. “I like the way it fizzles on my tongue,” the boy triumphs as if he has just discovered Atlantis.
Then he helps himself to the remains of Dean's bucket, clever teeth picking out what remains of the meat and sucking the bones clean. “I accept your offering," he says happily smacking his lips around a thigh bone. “And Sif was wrong, there was no smackings and whackings of poor Horace’s tender head.”
Dean grits his teeth. The kid's strange and a little hyper but he doesn’t think that the old woman in he bar was right to suggest he might hit him, he's more likely to just throw him out on the side of the road.
And his original pronouncement was right. Dean doesn’t want to be alone right now.
The kid’s a pleasant distraction, itchy twitchy restlessness and eerie stillness and offkey singing and all.
So when he sees the sign for the ferris wheel he stops and points it out, “you wanna fly?” he asks, “come on, we’ll fly.”
The amusement park is practically deserted and the dollar entry fee is nothing, the boy's companionship paid for that and more, both sodas and the chicken, but the kid's grin is priceless.
Next episode
Author: Seraphim Grace
Fandom = Supernatural
Pairing = Castiel x Dean (god is love in all its forms)
Rating = NC17
spoilers = yes for season 4, set between Great pumpkin and the one after that I've forgotten the name of
AUish - set in the world of american gods and sandman but also the spn universe, I just stretched it a little
prompts - Dean wonders how much is too much when you've already past that line and just how changed he is from being in hell.
suggested by keire_ke
Set the fire to the third bar - episode 2
In which Dean wonders if even the really good coffee is worth all this shit, because he just doesn’t understand any more, and sometimes all you can do is run.
Soundtrack
REM - Drive
Dean expects Castiel to be in the park, perched at the end of the bench with his cold comfort and consternated expression that suggests that he is totally confused by both his human vessel and humanity in general. He’s not.
There are kids in heavy winter coats on the swings, gloved hands tight on the chains and the only sound is the metal creaking of their movement.
He wants Castiel to be there.
Sam is fucking the demon.
His brother, his Sammy, whom he fed and washed and diapered is fucking a demon.
Their mother was killed by a demon.
Jess was killed by a demon.
Dean went to Hell, and Sam is fucking a demon.
It’s a slap in the face, one that hurts even more because he’d been in Hell and he feels everything just that bit more keenly, and it’s Sam, his baby Sammy, with his yeti feet and silly floppy hair who sleeps on his tummy with his socks on and is the only thing that Dean truly loves - and it’s a demon.
It’s a fucking piece of poison black gas wrapped in a meat sack, and you know that this girl, this Vanessa Hudgens look-a-like didn’t volunteer like Castiel’s vessel or is as well cared for.
Demons ride their meat puppets hard and Sam knows that and yet he’s fucking it, and Dean wants to pull his hair out and scream but there are kids on the swings and an amulet in the Widow’s Tree and his car keys are sticking him in the thigh.
He runs his thumb over the raised lines of the hex symbol he uses as a keyring and it makes his mind up for him.
He’s on the road for hours when Castiel appears in the passenger seat, immediately rummaging in the glove compartment for the liquorice. “I suppose it was an inevitability that he would push you too far.”
“Did you know,” Dean is seething, “that he was fucking it?”
Castiel says nothing, prize now found, he leans back against the leather seat and then belts himself in, liquorice held in his palm. “I know only what I’m told.” He says finally, then pops the candy into his mouth. “I knew only that he was with her.”
“Yeah, he was with her,” Dean snarls. “God,” the familiar blasphemy falls out before he realises it. Castiel further furrows his brow but says nothing although he does not normally tolerate it. “He knows better, she’s a fucking demon for fuck’s sake.”
Dean doesn’t even know that he’s saying it, it’s just a comfortable curse word, an irritant only to the angel and although he normally watches it carefully he is undone by anger and hurt and rage.
He doesn’t even realise that he hasn’t turned on his music. His knuckles are white at ten and two. “A fucking demon, Cas, a fucking demon.”
He forces the impala around a truck quickly, too quickly and the typres screech. Castiel grits his teeth and clutches the woven strap of his seatbelt. A few horns bleat in protest but he ignores them. “And I was eating fucking pie.”
“You are not responsible for your brother’s actions.” The angel says and it’s clearly meant to soothe but it doesn’t feel like that - it feels like a platitude.
“I fucking raised him, Cas, who’s responsible if not me?”
“He is,” Castiel says bluntly. “He was given choice and because he can choose he can make mistakes.”
It’s clear he has chosen the wrong word because Dean explodes. “A mistake?!”
“If you can't choose wrongly,” Castiel continues, “there is no point in choice.”
“you’re going to defend him, you?”
“No,” Castiel is calm, “I will defend choice, because it is God’s will that you can choose, but it is meaningless to have choice is there is not a right choice and a wrong choice. Everyone is responsible for their own choices. You brother made his choice himself, you did not make it for him, so you are not responsible.”
“You suck at this,” Dean says and it's honest, “it's like being comforted by the pope or an evangelist hitting you over the head with a bible.”
“He is wrong,” Castiel continues that pops a second piece of liquorice betwee his lips, knowing that Dean has bought them for him. It's a piece of black flashing between white teeth. “You are not to blame.” His tongue is stained dark brown when he licks his lips, the liqorice colouring his saliva with an oily stain across his lower lip, and Dean knows it will taste of liquorice if he kisses him. He doesn't know where that thought came from.
“He will search you out.” Castiel hasn’t noticed the change.
“I just need time.” Dean says, “or I’ll kill him myself." He mutters darkly, almost under his breath. “- With Ruby, even if she wasn't a demon, she’s a skank.” He pulls the car into a service station to get gas. There is a calming reliability to the indicator clicking. "I can’t believe that he’d do that to me.”
“I cannot be with you for all of this, my duties call.” Castiel says, “I am needed elsewhere, but my heart will be with you, and I will make provision, I will come as often as I am able.” His brow further furrows, there has got to be a permanent crease there by now, and he takes another piece of the liquorice. “God loves you, Dean, and does not hold you responsible even if you yourself do.”
Then as Dean unclips his seatbelt there is that terrible emptiness that he only notices when Castiel is gone and he has a dark moment when he wonders, with a wicked selfishness, what the angel gave up to give him this failed attempt at comfort.
Castiel went to Hell for him and Castiel is there when he's needed, but he just puts the feeling away and starts pumping gas letting the caustic chemical smell wash away the lingering afterscent of frankincense.
He stocks up on chips and soda in the gas station store, picking up a few comics that have new issues. He’ll read them and leave them in a motel lobby for some passing kid, keeping the ones that either have really cool art or a hint that the writer has done some real research into their supernatural villain. Those ones he leaves with Bobby.
Bobby, even though he won't admit it, is hopelessly addicted to The Darkness and Dean, who reads it because he buys it for Bobby, finds himself having Jackie Estacado moments, but with a grimace he realises that it's Sam that's gone over to the great Dark.
He adds a few more bags of chips, red liqorice laces, a box of real fruit cereal, microwaves a beef burrito and then a large cup of coffee from the unlabelled coffee maker. He pays for it all with a credit card in the name Richard Gleason.
He takes the paper bag out to the cat, setting it into the back seat and peels the lid off the coffee and takes a long mouthful. Then he damn near spits it out because it has some sweet wierd flavour like he's tipped maple syrup into it. It's the last straw in a particularly shitty day that at least is mostly over.
The only thing that stops him going back into the store in a Denis Leary style rage rant is that it’s not the poor clerk's fault. He drops the whole coffee, lid and all, into the waste bin when the cell rings.
Obviously he's not done being fate's bitch because it's Sam.
He cuts it off without answering.
Sam just rings again.
And again.
And again.
He finally answers. “Dude, where are you? I've been looking all over.”
"I’m at a gas station, about four hours out. Also I’m going to say I’m kinda hurt it’s taken this long for you to even notice.” He leans against the car, his body language promising violence to anyone near. He’s wound like a watch spring. “I saw you." He says, “and if there is a hope in,” he still chokes on the word, “hell that I’m going to forgive you this side of the armageddon you are going to give me time.”
“You’re not my boyfriend,” Sam answers, “and you’re not my dad, you can’t give me those kinds of ultimatums.”
“No, Sammy, I’m your brother, and I went to Hell for you whilst you were balling one it’s whores.” Then he cuts the call.
Sam calls again.
Dean switches the cell off and throws it into the car. He may be fate's bitch but that doesn't make him Sam’s.
He stops in a small town he doesn't bother to learn the name of but it has a cheap hotel with a single room that has everything it needs, a lone double bed with a bland flowery spread. It's called Hotel Dusk which amuses him for some reason. There is a bar and a restaurant, but other than that it's the same as every other hotel he's stayed in.
The paintings of fruit that decorate the place are a cut above the usual standard, but that doesn't change anything other than he wants to remember it in case he comes this way again.
There’s a kid on the stairs, a girl playing with a doll with brightly coloured hair and huge creepy eyes. It looks like a plastic talisman made to keep away Rawheads, just in a pink poodle skirt and pigtails. She matches his annoyed glare with one of her own and he doesn't bother to grin at her.
She’s the kind of girl who’ll grow up to be a stunner, red hair she’ll have to grow into, freckles that will be charming later, but for now make her the butt of the jokes. She’s wearing a charm bracelet where the charms are all religious protective symbols but something suggests that the kid lives here and isn't just another hunter’s brat just passing through.
She has a haunted look that's the same as his own.
He brushes past her on the stairs to his sparse room. The decor is beige and bland and makes a pleasant change from the usual Elvis jungle room that they normally get. He corrects himself, not they, he.
He throws his pack, a thing inherited from John, on the bed and collapses in the chair with his head between his hands for long, long moments awaiting the usual smell of frankincense and christmasses past.
It doesn't come.
Dinner is homemade soup, again reassuring him that this place is unusual. There are great big chunks of meat in it that practically dissolve on the tongue into sweet tasting shreds, and the gravy is thick. It’s all Dean can do not to gag.
One of the first lessons that any soldier learns is to grab food and sleep when they’re offered. So he forces down the soup although it makes him sick, despite that’s it's good - real good, and the bread is freshly baked and thickly spread with real butter.
There is a whole roasted potato and steamed veg to the side on a small plate.
The hunter brat, hood down, red hair pulled up in a pony is dipping her cauliflower into the soup, fork in one hand and bread in the other, shovelling down the food like she hasn't seen it in weeks. Dean forces himself to follow her example and wonders what horrors she has seen that makes her look like that. She’s at most nine years old, and still has her ugly doll tucked under her arm, alone in this place - even if it is nicer than most.
Hunters shouldn't have kids, he thinks.
The Winchester anniversary passed by unnoticed.
It never meant that much to Sam probably because he doesn't remember their mother.
Dean does, just as a soft warmth at odds with the spunky girl he saw make her pact with Azazel in the past. He remembers just enough to miss her and to understand his father’s slavish devotion to both her memory and the son she died for.
He’s never felt so alone in his life.
He won't linger on it though, and returns to the food he doesn't want.
She sits at his table bringing her own wine, bottle and all. Her hair is long and thin about a skinny face that maintains a sort of girlish prettiness. She’s a natural blonde and her expensive cashmere sweater is pleasantly stretched over a small bosom, but her skirt hangs on her hips as if they were a chair.
“You look like you need company." Her voice is a lazy southern drawl. Her too thin wrist slips from the lilac cuff of her sweater. She’s too thin and isn't eating, it’s made worse by her heavy bangle that bats off the muscle of her thumb as she lifts her wine glass.
The wine is as dark as a bloodstain on her lips.
Dean doesn’t bother to answer her.
“Drinking alone is boring,” she says, “and misery loves company. You look like you need a drink.” She pours wine into his empty water glass, a good inch’s worth.
"I won't sleep with you." He says although he's pretty sure that she’s a sure thing.
“Honey," she drawls and he knows she calls him honey so she doesn’t have to learn his name, “I want someone to drink with and you don't want to be alone. What has that got to do with fucking?” She says the word carefully, enunciating the hard syllables through wax coloured lips in her warm molasses voice. “Besides you stink of angel.”
His hand finds the silver letter opener in his belt, cursing that he’s left himself this open, that his anger over Sam's betrayal has left him this vulnerable. He’s pretty sure that in a fight, one on one, that he could take her, but he’s been wrong before. “What are you?”
"Old, honey," she tells him though she couldn't be older than forty, “and I've been around, all I want is someone to drink with, someone who smells of something I lost so I can appreciate my wallowing just that bit more, and besides, honey," she taps her finger against the rim of her glass, “I’ve just eaten.” She brays out a laugh at her private joke, “men today, honey, they think we only want two things, to fuck,” again the word is violent in her mouth, “or to feed, and I, honey,” she uses the petname as a barrier between them, “I just want to get very, very drunk.”
When they move to the bar she switches from wine, not to mint juleps as he might have suspected from her being a grande dame in a Truman Capote novel, to bourbon straight, hold the ice.
Dean can't fault her choice and copies her with his usual flirting nonchalance to the bartender.
They don't talk, other than to order more liquor but each other's presence keeps people from the table, no one hits on her which is how she prefers it, and they completely ignore him.
So when the young man in the threadbare jeans comes in Dean doesn't notice him. He ignores the bartender and sits at their table, turning the chair around to sit on it with the back to his stomach, he’s wiping at his nose like a junky. “Goin’ to get me a soda?” he asks. His hair is dark brown, his eyes black and he looks kind of meditteranean.
“You’re always a pain, Horace.” The woman tells the boy, “I don't know why you're here.”
“I just wanted to see,” Horace answers bluntly, “if you’re not going to get me a drink can I have yours?” He wipes his nose with the side of his hand, sniffling, “I got a funny taste in my mouth." Then he sticks his tongue out to show her.
She slides the glass over the table, and he lifts it, draining it in one. "I don't like this," he says and then scrapes his teeth over his tongue, “and you’ve got it too.”
“Manner’s, Horace,” the woman chides. There is a long familiarity between them, suggesting a very long acquaintance, perhaps even a fondness. “I’ll suppose you’ll want to stay tonight, with me.”
The boy beams, he’s pretty under the twitching Dean thinks to himself, “can I get some chips too?”
“I guess I’ll just take my leave now," Dean tells her, “leave you,” he turns to Horace, “with your Mommy.”
Horace looks confused. “but Sif’s not my Mommy.” He says but Dean leaves him to it.
Horace is waiting against the Impala the next morning, scuffed converse sneakers and a quilted puffer jacket, a handmade wool cap and an offering of coffee. “You’re not supposed to be on your own.” The boy says, “and you could give me a ride.”
“You could get your head read, kid." Dean says but takes the polystyrene cup, which smells of coffee and without the tang of some strange syrup. It’s good coffee too, better than the hotel supplied with breakfast.
“You’re not to be alone,” the kid, Horace, states again.
“Who says,” Dean continues, “your Mommy from the bar.” He’s not in the mood for this kind of crap. He wants to push the kid out of the way and drive to Bobby’s.
“No,” Horace says as if explaining things to a small child, “Castiel.”
Dean starts wondering what this kid is if he knows about Castiel and can so casually drop his name. “There are things after you, you are not to be alone.”
“Then get in,” Dean sayts finally, “but no complaining and no eating the candy.”
It doesn't take long before Dean decides that Horace is in no way dangerous and that he is on acid and not crack as he had previously thought.
He goes from itchy twitchy restlessness to eerie stillness and as Dean presses the gas pedal he grins, and like someone's pet dog, sticks his head out of the window- mouth open and laughing.
Dean has to slow the impala to pull him back inside and the kid sulks even as he starts pulling bits of moth from his teeth. “But I wanna fly,” he whines, “Seth said I flew too much,” he continues to himself, “and they say poor Horace, and it's like flying,” he's petulant, lip out arms crossed. “She made me promise, but I just wanna fly.” His fists are clenched and Dean is torn, part of him, the sensible part he reassures himself, says throw the kid out on the highway, but there's part of him that remembers Sam as small and petulant, whining in the back of the car.
Horace sniffs back a sob, wiping at his nose with the flat of his palm. “I jus' wanna fly.”
Dean remembers how his dad got past Sam's whining because shouting didn't cut it - Sam in the back and Dean riding shotgun. “Look, kid,” he says, “you can put the radio on, you choose.”
Horace lights up like a pinball machine on tilt and starts to push buttons randomly. He pulls exaggerated faces at talk radio and physically groans at Britney's pleas to “hit me baby one more time,” He eventually settles on a nationwide rock station which is playing Queen as part of an all eighties medley. “I like big music,” he announces, “I like the drums, they remind me of home.” And with a grin that’s remarkably hawkish he starts to squawk along to the Princes of the Universe though he knows perhaps one line in three.
He animatedly moves to stiltskin and a song about perfume and paper bags that Dean doesn't know, battering out the drum beat on his thigh with his fingers, his head matching the rhythm and when it plays REM’s “it’s the end of the world as we know it” he laughs raucously and crows, “it's your song,” and his schadenfreude is so infectious that Dean laughs too.
Lunch is a bucket of chicken for each of them, eaten in the car. Horace with his long legs crossed on the passenger seat and the grease and flavouring powder around his mouth and both large cups of soda. “I like the way it fizzles on my tongue,” the boy triumphs as if he has just discovered Atlantis.
Then he helps himself to the remains of Dean's bucket, clever teeth picking out what remains of the meat and sucking the bones clean. “I accept your offering," he says happily smacking his lips around a thigh bone. “And Sif was wrong, there was no smackings and whackings of poor Horace’s tender head.”
Dean grits his teeth. The kid's strange and a little hyper but he doesn’t think that the old woman in he bar was right to suggest he might hit him, he's more likely to just throw him out on the side of the road.
And his original pronouncement was right. Dean doesn’t want to be alone right now.
The kid’s a pleasant distraction, itchy twitchy restlessness and eerie stillness and offkey singing and all.
So when he sees the sign for the ferris wheel he stops and points it out, “you wanna fly?” he asks, “come on, we’ll fly.”
The amusement park is practically deserted and the dollar entry fee is nothing, the boy's companionship paid for that and more, both sodas and the chicken, but the kid's grin is priceless.
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