Queen of Nothing [1/4]
Back to masterpost
Deanna waits at BWI baggage claim in the stupid itchy power-bitch suit she wears to match her fake badges. For all that her stylish-yet-sensible low-heeled pumps are supposed to be comfortable, she's walked enough of the terminal and stood here long enough that the balls of her feet are burning against three-for-a-dollar Walgreens pantyhose and ergonomic insoles and she has to shift her weight from foot to foot for relief. Also, she has the mother of all wedgies, which is just going to have to stay where it is until the bag she's waiting for shows up. Bobby heard from Rufus heard from a long line of somebodies that it's going to contain a hex-box containing one motherfucker of a cursed amulet that needs to not go home with the dude who bought it at an auction in New York, where it got sold before anybody else could get their hands on it. All she's got to go on is a blurry security camera photo from LaGuardia of a fat guy and a wheeled suitcase that is probably red. She's praying he'll get hung up getting off the plane and she can just walk out of here with the bag without going through all the Air Marshal bullshit and having to make a scene. She's not actually praying, of course. If she were praying, she'd be praying for her feet not to spontaneously fucking combust before she can get the shoes off.
It's maybe time for new Fed shoes. She watches flight numbers pop up on the information screens and remembers when she bought these and how Sam made fun of her for days on end, because after nearly breaking her ankle in a pair of Pay-Less stilettos in a fight with a vengeful ghost with the worst sense of timing in history, she'd said, 'Fuck this, Mary Ann Turner and her low introductory APR are buying my ass some shoes that won't get me killed.' The ugly-ass things cost eighty bucks on clearance and they came from Naturalizer in the Cherry Hill, New Jersey mall and afterward Sam gave her crap for so long that even Deanna started saying, 'Where's my grandma shoes?' when it was time to suit up for official-type appearances.
She laughs quietly when she thinks of Sam buying her a 'Sheriff Grandma' badge at a haunted gift shop in Georgia and a 'Granny's Ride' license plate holder from a Virginia truck stop mysteriously appearing on the Impala. Then she thinks of pulling Sam's giant puppy-eyed ass out of a thousand and one fires and his giant moosey hands pulling her out of a thousand and one more and how that's never going to happen again because Sammy's down there in that cage and there's not a thing in creation that has both the power and the willingness to get him out of there, and the Arriving Flights screen goes blurry.
"They wouldn't let me take my wine on the plane," says the squat elderly woman in a visor and a Statue of Liberty t-shirt who's walked up next to her. "I never like to check any bags, ever since they lost my granddaughter's suitcase. We never did see it again. And I said to her, I said Janie, I'll bet you money somebody just picked up the durn thing and walked off with it."
"Uh-huh," Deanna says, blinking the sting out of her eyes, tunes out the actual grandma and her suitcase story that just gets longer and longer and watches bags start to creak their way down the belt. The first red bag that comes down has the right last name on it and she rolls it away with the old lady still talking and limps her way to the inconspicuous rental car that's waiting for her in short-term because airports have cameras fucking everywhere. The Impala's questionably safe probably somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania by now and the beige Camry with the creepily silent pushbutton ignition will only trace back to Christine Taylor's MasterCard and a nondescript businesswoman on some grainy cameras with her hair hiding most of her face. And if they see her throwing her shoes into the trunk along with the suitcase, it doesn't really matter.
*
There's nothing Deanna hates more these days than an empty motel room. Maybe empty passenger seats, empty other sides of diner tables. Empty spaces that ought to have Sams in them and she doesn't think she'll ever get used to it. She didn't even get used to it in the Stanford years, and Sam's a lot farther away now than California. It's the worst when she's alone in a motel room that doesn't have anybody bitching and researching, and, hell, right now she'd even take him strung out on demon blood and creeping her right the fuck out because at least he'd be there. She broke the apple-pie half of her promise to him months ago because she was too screwed up and was making Lisa miserable and she's nobody's damn stepmother, no matter how much she wants to want that, and no matter how much Lisa might have wanted to try, there was also some part of her that wanted Ben to have a dad. Deanna would break the other half of the promise if she could, the half where she swore to Sam she'd leave him down there for an eternity of fuck-knows-what that Alistair couldn't come up with in his wildest hellfirey dreams, and damned if she didn't try to go back on her word, but she couldn't, can't. So Sam's still in the cage, and she's got empty rooms and cars and tables.
She's also got Cas, who fills a space but not the space. He fills his own space, not the Sam-space, does awesome with the researching and sometimes hilariously (and sometimes heartbreakingly) okay with the bitching, fills seats and rooms and has her back, but it's not the same. At least he knows it and at least he understands that she's never going to be not screwed-up, because he's screwed-up too. He's also currently two states away, maybe a little less, or should be by now, so there being a second bed without an owner makes the room even emptier. Just Deanna and a hex-box and some beer, a 12-pack because she's not kidding herself. The suitcase is probably on its way back to the airport, slipped in among the luggage leaving on the last shuttle and with any luck leaving the blame for the missing Very Expensive and Very Cursed Thing on the shoulders of the TSA because the internet is really helpful if you need to mock up one of those 'your bag has been inspected' notices. She stayed here specifically to use the airport shuttle for getting rid of the bag, and places with airport shuttles don't tend to have Magic Fingers, so Deanna's stuck with rubbing the burn out of her own feet after she peels off the hose straight into the wastebasket.
Three beers down she's still staring at the same section of (Sam's) laptop screen with the scan Cas emailed from Maine, an old book's details on the amulet. It's just a legend about the witch who made it and its supposed powers, nothing about how to destroy it, and before she started glazing over it was reading like a gruesome fairy tale. Wronged woman, evil scary gift jewelry to asshole ex, revenge blah blah, cheaters dying messy blah blah. Deanna and Cas had split up because someone needed to gank the witch (still hanging around the same town two hundred years later, go figure) and someone needed to chase the amulet before anyone else got their hands on it. She hasn't heard from Cas since a text saying he was alive and the witch wasn't and he was on his way to Maryland, but she knows how he drives and that he'll be later than he thinks because he won't time it assuming he'll need sleep. He doesn't always, but whatever mojo he's got left has been slowly but steadily draining away. Deanna ignores it a little less than Cas does, but they both know it's happening. There's probably some pretty bad shit going down in Heaven but Cas can't get back there to find out, hasn't been able to ever since he winged down into Lisa's back yard while Deanna was raking leaves. She'd be lying if she said leaving Lisa didn't have something to do with Cas being suddenly there and so lost and so frustrated, so she does her best not to say anything about it at all. Like about how he's getting less charmingly inept with technology, for example, like he knows he's going to need it.
"I should be there in three hours," Cas says when she finally gives up not calling because she's out of things to say to Bobby and there's nothing on TV and it's too goddamn quiet.
Deanna can hear road noise, a semi's horn sounding, and that sound will never not send a chill up her spine. "Tell me you're not driving right now."
"You do it all the time, Dee," Cas grumbles absently, and Deanna flinches and feels a knot in her throat because only Sam ever used to call her that. Cas usually remembers not to, and he does now after the fact. "I'm sorry," he says, and she can hear the strain and fatigue in his voice.
"Yeah, well, you can multitask behind the wheel when you've been driving for sixteen years too." It feels thick in her mouth and hollow in her head and doesn't come out jokey-bitchy like she meant it to, but Cas doesn't call her on it.
"I thought I shouldn't lose any more time by stopping again. I was forced to rest for a few hours." He admits that like someone else might say they've wet their pants.
"It's okay. Get here when you get here. I'd rather have you in one piece."
"I'll see you in three hours." Cas hangs up without a goodbye because he still hasn't quite gotten the hang of that.
Deanna exchanges the rest of the Fed costume for a long hot shower and then for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans that damn, are going to need washing pretty soon. She orders a pizza, mostly so that it can be left in the mini-fridge in case Cas is hungry and doesn't want to admit it, but she eats a couple of slices out of habit even though she doesn't really feel like it. She tries to look at the amulet stuff again so Cas won't give her that disapproving-teacher look for admitting she hasn't read it, but she ends up looking at the pictures on Sam's hard drive, mostly college stuff with Sam far away and happy, and falls asleep after a few moments of closing her eyes against a welling sting in them.
When she wakes up, it's with a start, and there's Cas standing over her gripping her wrist against the knife she's got pointed at him. She lets her hand go slack and feels a smile creeping onto her face. "Hey." She doesn't ask how he got in here, whether he picked the lock or mojo'd the door or told the desk she was his wife. "So you're in one piece, how's my baby?"
"Unscathed," Cas says. She lets him take the knife from her and put it back under the pillow.
"I got pizza if you want any."
Cas is still close, smells like the Impala's leather, like home. He shakes his head. "I don't need it."
Deanna rolls onto her back and pokes him in the shoulder. "I said want, asshole, which you better because I got green peppers on half and you know those give me the shits." This is how it is, getting Cas to eat. She's not sure how often he needs to, but she's half afraid he'll just keel over from malnutrition or get rickets or scurvy or something if he's not try this, it's awesome'd into chewing and swallowing.
"Not right now," Cas says, and sits down on edge of her bed to unlace his boots. She nearly laughed at him the first time he got a blister running around in the holy tax accountant shoes, but she didn't because as far as Cas was concerned it might as well have been cancer. They're a still-new pair that match Deanna's floppy weathered worn-in ones, only in a bigger size, and she did laugh when she suggested Cas get cowboy boots like Dr. Sexy and he glared at her and, after some apparent deliberation, gave her the finger. If Cas were Sam, she'd tell him right now that his feet fucking stink, but there is no Sam and stinking feet equals humanity equals things Cas wants to ignore, so she just asks him about the witch and he kicks his (seriously noxious) feet up onto the bed next to her and answers her questions until one or the other of them trails off talking into sleep.
*
Even with the amulet burning a hole in the trunk, they can't get straight back to Bobby's because once they hit Ohio, the Plain Dealer on the racks in every convenience store has nasty headlines about deaths in Elyria and they have to stop. There's a man who died from having every bone in his body broken in a twenty-foot drop down a sidewalk vent, half a dozen assaults in dark alleys, a teacher driven to a psychotic break by her third-graders taunting her. It's not until they find out about the woman whose brain was eaten by spiders that crawled into her ears while she was sleeping and the man whose dick literally fell off that they finally piece together that whatever's doing it is preying on people's worst fears. A businessman gets swarmed to death by killer bees while they're in a restaurant and Deanna's telling Cas she can't believe he's never tried pierogies and pushing a plate toward him. If Sam were here, he'd be looking over his shoulder for clowns. Or maybe the devil.
"It already happened," Deanna says when Cas asks what her biggest fear is, because it is, was, losing Sam, and Cas leans forward and does that half-smile that's actually a frown but stops short of touching her hand and picks up the salt shaker at the last second. "But now, I guess... I don't know." It could be Cas getting sucked back up into heaven, or it could be living a life that doesn't mean jack shit, playing picket fences and pretending there's nothing to fear in the dark until there's grandchildren discussing whether to pull the plug. It's not Hell; it never was, but it could be the parts of her that Hell changed. It could be any of a thousand nightmares, but she can't narrow it down to one. "Maybe that'll make me immune or something." She shrugs and doesn't really believe it. She doesn't ask Cas the question in return because she's pretty sure he might already be living it out in things like hunger and sleep and the fact that he's starting to need a haircut and is stuck down here with her.
The waitress flirts with Cas, which Cas doesn't notice. She's hot enough, a college girl whose nametag says Hailey, and once she hears they're FBI she's full of questions, because she's afraid she'll be next. "My Nana says the town's cursed," she says with wide eyes and a trembling lip. Deanna has to kick Cas under the table when he starts asking what kind of curse and where they can find Hailey's grandma.
"Don't you worry about a thing, hon," Deanna says with her winningest smile, because all they fucking need would be for Hailey to be flipping out enough about bad juju to actually bring more of it into being. "We're gonna figure this out and stop it."
"Why did you kick me?" Cas asks when Hailey's nodded all watery-eyed and given them their check. "If this Nana knows something--"
"Yeah, Granny's worth checking out, but you can't just spout off about rituals in the middle of a lunch rush." Cas has gotten a lot better at not doing things like announcing the existence of demons to small-town sheriffs, better at playing a part when he needs to, but sometimes he's still just a little too angel-literal.
"I apologize," Cas says, more the kind of sorry you say for 'I started the apocalypse' than for 'oops, almost blew our cover,' and Deanna feels like kind of an asshole. Cas seems to have more feelings to hurt than he used to.
"It's okay. You just gotta be more careful. Blondie-bear didn't know anything except she's freaked about what's going down around here and wants to get in your pants."
Cas blinks and licks some sour cream off the side of his hand. "I don't think I want her in my pants." Beat. "That was a joke."
That pulls something loose in Deanna's guts and she can't stop laughing all the way to the parking lot, where Hailey's sitting in her car smoking a cigarette and she smiles at them as they walk by, too much faith and trust behind cheap lipstick.
*
Cas paints extra sigils on the inside of the Impala's trunk to protect the hex-box, symbols he just knows without thinking like he knows a million languages and has a demon encyclopedia in his head. It's kind of awesome how he just looks at her like 'what?' when she's still kind of in awe and trying to catch up with the motions of his hand.
Hailey's grandma doesn't know anything, not really. She's half Erie and thinks the 'curse' is the wrath of her dead relatives for building the Midway Mall on ancestral land, but it wasn't a burial ground or anything and the mall was built in the '60s and the land is only ancestral in the sense that some ancestors used to live there a few centuries ago. She likes Cas a lot, even before he pulls a bunch of Erie history and a couple of phrases out of the angelic wikipedia in his giant brain. Deanna she just glares at, like she can see right through, with brown eyes so dark they look nearly black and it's unnerving. She gives Cas a dreamcatcher when they leave, not one of the crappy mass-produced truck-stop ones but a real one that Deanna can look at and name off all the functions of the crystals and stones caught in the red spiderweb. She knows Cas can too, and he keeps staring at it in his lap with that microscope gaze all the way through Deanna's swearing and multiple U-turns that it takes to get to the mall because the 'Elyria Next 3 Exits' sign off 58 is not only a direction but a description because the place is nothing but exits and whoever built the town doesn't seem to think anyone should actually need to go anywhere in it. She's never asked what Cas dreams about when he sleeps.
The mall is one of those creepy deserted ones with the department stores closed and dark and cleared out, nothing left but a few sad-looking shops selling stuff like Nordic Tracks and sunglasses and wicker furniture, three empty spaces apart from their nearest neighbors. Besides the employees, no one's there but Deanna and Cas, some kids smoking cigarettes around the dry fountain outside the main entrance, and a handful of old people in workout gear using the place as an air-conditioned indoor track.
"Weird place, huh?" Deanna says to the maybe-college-maybe-high-school kid working at the Auntie Anne's, which is the only thing left in the food court besides a dubious-looking Sbarro.
The kid shrugs, runs a hand through his hair and that's probably against health codes, but whatever. "Boring as hell, but I get paid eight bucks an hour to sit around and do my homework." So college kid, probably. Deanna gets the pretzels for free because the guy hasn't even bothered to open the cash register for the day. "They're probably going to taste like ass anyway," the guy says. "I don't even remember the last time we had to order dough."
The pretzels do taste pretty freezer-burnt, but they're okay dipped in the little pots of sauces. Deanna makes Cas try all of them, and he likes the chocolate. "Was that boy flirting with you?" he asks, thankfully without physical air quotes, though Deanna can hear them there anyway.
Deanna shrugs. "Maybe kinda," she says around a mouthful of pretzel and honey mustard. And yeah, she's been known to go for barely-legal, and the kid had the kind of face she wouldn't kick out of bed, but it actually hadn't even occurred to her. "Probably just happy to see somebody who's not old enough to be his grandmother." Cas has a drip of chocolate sauce just below his bottom lip and she reaches out without thinking to brush it away. Cas stares. "You had some, uh." She wipes her finger on a napkin.
She was pretty sure this mall would be a bust, but it's all they've got right now. The EMF has nothing to say for itself until they climb the turned-off escalator and find themselves in front of one of those incense-reeking headshops with tie-dye wall hangings and bongs in the window. The bloodshot-eyed owner introduces himself as 'Bear' and ends up stoned-ranting about being about to get evicted due to not having paid rent on the shop in six months, because of 'the fucking Man, man.'
Bear ends up knocked out and there's a creepy altar in the back room that's nicely flammable. Cas recites something over the flames and slices his palm open while Deanna stands by with a fire extinguisher and waits for his nod. They walk out an emergency exit to the tune of deafening alarms and a rain of sprinklers.
"My worst fear," Cas says back at the motel, his eyes on the cut on his hand that hasn't magically sewn itself back together as Deanna cleans and bandages it, and they both know it's not still there because they haven't broken the spell.
"I know," Deanna says in a near-whisper, and it's only because she's thinking of her mother and skinned knees seven thousand lifetimes ago that she presses her lips to the gauze and tape and accidentally catches a little bit of sweat-salted skin. She imagines running her tongue along the cut itself, seaming it closed.
Cas looks at her with too much feeling for someone who didn't used to show a damn bit of anything, so Deanna tapes off the bandage and lays his hand down and strips off her pantyhose and powerbitch jacket and pulls her itchy Victoria's Secret push-up special out through the arms of her white starched blouse, scratches at the stubble growing up on her legs. She never used to shave until some barbie doll in 8th or 9th grade gave her shit for it and called her a dyke. She'd still rather not, even all these years later, but it's part of blending in for the job, being unremarkable. Nobody remembers too much about a hot lady Fed except that she's a hot lady Fed, as long as she looks the part, and months of leg hair smashed under hose isn't part of the part. She lets her pits do what they want unless they have to look the part too, the rare but nonetheless disturbing times when she has to go out in tight things and flash more than a couple buttons' worth of cleavage to get information. Most guys don't seem to mind, and a guy in Wherever, Nebraska thought it was hot and licked the sweat out of the dark downy hairs. Lisa never minded, stroked manicured-to-look-not-manicured fingers through the should-have-been-bikini-waxed hair on Deanna's upper thighs. Lisa accepted a lot of her, almost all of her, but in the end not quite enough of her. Not the part that can't forget what's out there. Out here.
She knows that Cas knows every cell and follicle. Knows all of her, even the really shitty parts, and he's still here, and that's why she lets go of his hand and gets as far across the room as she can, even though he's staring at his hand like it's betrayed him. Cas doesn't like platitudes any more than she does, and that's all she's got right now, the it'll be okays and the don't worry about its that she knows are empty bullshit. So she just changes back into her kinda-rank jeans and steps into her boots without bothering with socks and goes and gets some subs from the Mr. Hero down the street. Cas picks the peppers and salami out of his Italian like it's an archaeological dig and the lettuce and tomato shouldn't be disturbed.
He catches her rubbing her feet again, because she really needs new Fed shoes, and lays hands on them that don't do anything but transmit a little extra warmth and a slight tickle. She can see him realize the mojo hasn't worked, see the sigh in his shoulders that he doesn't voice. "One time, we lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania-- which is basically either Philly or Jersey depending which way you go-- for about two months while Dad was trying to take down this complete bitch of a witch," Deanna says, breaking off part of what's left of Cas's sandwich. "I had this Metallica shirt from their first big tour ever, and I lost a bet with this guy because I couldn't eat six of those radioactive-pink pickled eggs, which by the way taste like a demon's asshole. Not that I'd know, but I'm pretty sure they do. So I owed him the shirt and two whiz wits, which I'm ordering but don't actually have any money to pay for, but Sammy's brought the jar of eggs along with him and he's eaten like, ten, and just when I'm about to have to figure out how to pay the sandwich cart guy, Sammy projectile-vomits pink eggs all over bet-dude's shoes. And you've seen his grown-up puppy eyes, but imagine them at twelve when he's all short and awkward. Bet-dude just gets disgusted and walks off but the sandwich guy turns out to have little kids at home so he goes all motherly on Sammy and gives us free food. Well, I got free food. Sammy got free ginger ale."
"What happened to the shirt?" Cas asks, and his thumbs are digging into the arch of Deanna's right foot.
"Eventually got disintegrated by some noxious slime," she says with her eyes closing. This would be better if Sam were here to contradict her on the finer points of the story. It would also be better if the touches to her feet weren't going straight to her groin. It's not the first time she's wondered if that's something that can be detected by angelic spidey-senses, pheromones or whatever, but half the time Cas can't even tell when he's being flirted with, so maybe not. She's sure as hell not going to ask right now. What she does ask is where Cas learned to do this, and hopes he doesn't say a porno. Cas starts in about human physiology and names off muscles and Deanna keeps her eyes closed and feels a smile creep onto her face.
Next: Part 2
Deanna waits at BWI baggage claim in the stupid itchy power-bitch suit she wears to match her fake badges. For all that her stylish-yet-sensible low-heeled pumps are supposed to be comfortable, she's walked enough of the terminal and stood here long enough that the balls of her feet are burning against three-for-a-dollar Walgreens pantyhose and ergonomic insoles and she has to shift her weight from foot to foot for relief. Also, she has the mother of all wedgies, which is just going to have to stay where it is until the bag she's waiting for shows up. Bobby heard from Rufus heard from a long line of somebodies that it's going to contain a hex-box containing one motherfucker of a cursed amulet that needs to not go home with the dude who bought it at an auction in New York, where it got sold before anybody else could get their hands on it. All she's got to go on is a blurry security camera photo from LaGuardia of a fat guy and a wheeled suitcase that is probably red. She's praying he'll get hung up getting off the plane and she can just walk out of here with the bag without going through all the Air Marshal bullshit and having to make a scene. She's not actually praying, of course. If she were praying, she'd be praying for her feet not to spontaneously fucking combust before she can get the shoes off.
It's maybe time for new Fed shoes. She watches flight numbers pop up on the information screens and remembers when she bought these and how Sam made fun of her for days on end, because after nearly breaking her ankle in a pair of Pay-Less stilettos in a fight with a vengeful ghost with the worst sense of timing in history, she'd said, 'Fuck this, Mary Ann Turner and her low introductory APR are buying my ass some shoes that won't get me killed.' The ugly-ass things cost eighty bucks on clearance and they came from Naturalizer in the Cherry Hill, New Jersey mall and afterward Sam gave her crap for so long that even Deanna started saying, 'Where's my grandma shoes?' when it was time to suit up for official-type appearances.
She laughs quietly when she thinks of Sam buying her a 'Sheriff Grandma' badge at a haunted gift shop in Georgia and a 'Granny's Ride' license plate holder from a Virginia truck stop mysteriously appearing on the Impala. Then she thinks of pulling Sam's giant puppy-eyed ass out of a thousand and one fires and his giant moosey hands pulling her out of a thousand and one more and how that's never going to happen again because Sammy's down there in that cage and there's not a thing in creation that has both the power and the willingness to get him out of there, and the Arriving Flights screen goes blurry.
"They wouldn't let me take my wine on the plane," says the squat elderly woman in a visor and a Statue of Liberty t-shirt who's walked up next to her. "I never like to check any bags, ever since they lost my granddaughter's suitcase. We never did see it again. And I said to her, I said Janie, I'll bet you money somebody just picked up the durn thing and walked off with it."
"Uh-huh," Deanna says, blinking the sting out of her eyes, tunes out the actual grandma and her suitcase story that just gets longer and longer and watches bags start to creak their way down the belt. The first red bag that comes down has the right last name on it and she rolls it away with the old lady still talking and limps her way to the inconspicuous rental car that's waiting for her in short-term because airports have cameras fucking everywhere. The Impala's questionably safe probably somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania by now and the beige Camry with the creepily silent pushbutton ignition will only trace back to Christine Taylor's MasterCard and a nondescript businesswoman on some grainy cameras with her hair hiding most of her face. And if they see her throwing her shoes into the trunk along with the suitcase, it doesn't really matter.
*
There's nothing Deanna hates more these days than an empty motel room. Maybe empty passenger seats, empty other sides of diner tables. Empty spaces that ought to have Sams in them and she doesn't think she'll ever get used to it. She didn't even get used to it in the Stanford years, and Sam's a lot farther away now than California. It's the worst when she's alone in a motel room that doesn't have anybody bitching and researching, and, hell, right now she'd even take him strung out on demon blood and creeping her right the fuck out because at least he'd be there. She broke the apple-pie half of her promise to him months ago because she was too screwed up and was making Lisa miserable and she's nobody's damn stepmother, no matter how much she wants to want that, and no matter how much Lisa might have wanted to try, there was also some part of her that wanted Ben to have a dad. Deanna would break the other half of the promise if she could, the half where she swore to Sam she'd leave him down there for an eternity of fuck-knows-what that Alistair couldn't come up with in his wildest hellfirey dreams, and damned if she didn't try to go back on her word, but she couldn't, can't. So Sam's still in the cage, and she's got empty rooms and cars and tables.
She's also got Cas, who fills a space but not the space. He fills his own space, not the Sam-space, does awesome with the researching and sometimes hilariously (and sometimes heartbreakingly) okay with the bitching, fills seats and rooms and has her back, but it's not the same. At least he knows it and at least he understands that she's never going to be not screwed-up, because he's screwed-up too. He's also currently two states away, maybe a little less, or should be by now, so there being a second bed without an owner makes the room even emptier. Just Deanna and a hex-box and some beer, a 12-pack because she's not kidding herself. The suitcase is probably on its way back to the airport, slipped in among the luggage leaving on the last shuttle and with any luck leaving the blame for the missing Very Expensive and Very Cursed Thing on the shoulders of the TSA because the internet is really helpful if you need to mock up one of those 'your bag has been inspected' notices. She stayed here specifically to use the airport shuttle for getting rid of the bag, and places with airport shuttles don't tend to have Magic Fingers, so Deanna's stuck with rubbing the burn out of her own feet after she peels off the hose straight into the wastebasket.
Three beers down she's still staring at the same section of (Sam's) laptop screen with the scan Cas emailed from Maine, an old book's details on the amulet. It's just a legend about the witch who made it and its supposed powers, nothing about how to destroy it, and before she started glazing over it was reading like a gruesome fairy tale. Wronged woman, evil scary gift jewelry to asshole ex, revenge blah blah, cheaters dying messy blah blah. Deanna and Cas had split up because someone needed to gank the witch (still hanging around the same town two hundred years later, go figure) and someone needed to chase the amulet before anyone else got their hands on it. She hasn't heard from Cas since a text saying he was alive and the witch wasn't and he was on his way to Maryland, but she knows how he drives and that he'll be later than he thinks because he won't time it assuming he'll need sleep. He doesn't always, but whatever mojo he's got left has been slowly but steadily draining away. Deanna ignores it a little less than Cas does, but they both know it's happening. There's probably some pretty bad shit going down in Heaven but Cas can't get back there to find out, hasn't been able to ever since he winged down into Lisa's back yard while Deanna was raking leaves. She'd be lying if she said leaving Lisa didn't have something to do with Cas being suddenly there and so lost and so frustrated, so she does her best not to say anything about it at all. Like about how he's getting less charmingly inept with technology, for example, like he knows he's going to need it.
"I should be there in three hours," Cas says when she finally gives up not calling because she's out of things to say to Bobby and there's nothing on TV and it's too goddamn quiet.
Deanna can hear road noise, a semi's horn sounding, and that sound will never not send a chill up her spine. "Tell me you're not driving right now."
"You do it all the time, Dee," Cas grumbles absently, and Deanna flinches and feels a knot in her throat because only Sam ever used to call her that. Cas usually remembers not to, and he does now after the fact. "I'm sorry," he says, and she can hear the strain and fatigue in his voice.
"Yeah, well, you can multitask behind the wheel when you've been driving for sixteen years too." It feels thick in her mouth and hollow in her head and doesn't come out jokey-bitchy like she meant it to, but Cas doesn't call her on it.
"I thought I shouldn't lose any more time by stopping again. I was forced to rest for a few hours." He admits that like someone else might say they've wet their pants.
"It's okay. Get here when you get here. I'd rather have you in one piece."
"I'll see you in three hours." Cas hangs up without a goodbye because he still hasn't quite gotten the hang of that.
Deanna exchanges the rest of the Fed costume for a long hot shower and then for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans that damn, are going to need washing pretty soon. She orders a pizza, mostly so that it can be left in the mini-fridge in case Cas is hungry and doesn't want to admit it, but she eats a couple of slices out of habit even though she doesn't really feel like it. She tries to look at the amulet stuff again so Cas won't give her that disapproving-teacher look for admitting she hasn't read it, but she ends up looking at the pictures on Sam's hard drive, mostly college stuff with Sam far away and happy, and falls asleep after a few moments of closing her eyes against a welling sting in them.
When she wakes up, it's with a start, and there's Cas standing over her gripping her wrist against the knife she's got pointed at him. She lets her hand go slack and feels a smile creeping onto her face. "Hey." She doesn't ask how he got in here, whether he picked the lock or mojo'd the door or told the desk she was his wife. "So you're in one piece, how's my baby?"
"Unscathed," Cas says. She lets him take the knife from her and put it back under the pillow.
"I got pizza if you want any."
Cas is still close, smells like the Impala's leather, like home. He shakes his head. "I don't need it."
Deanna rolls onto her back and pokes him in the shoulder. "I said want, asshole, which you better because I got green peppers on half and you know those give me the shits." This is how it is, getting Cas to eat. She's not sure how often he needs to, but she's half afraid he'll just keel over from malnutrition or get rickets or scurvy or something if he's not try this, it's awesome'd into chewing and swallowing.
"Not right now," Cas says, and sits down on edge of her bed to unlace his boots. She nearly laughed at him the first time he got a blister running around in the holy tax accountant shoes, but she didn't because as far as Cas was concerned it might as well have been cancer. They're a still-new pair that match Deanna's floppy weathered worn-in ones, only in a bigger size, and she did laugh when she suggested Cas get cowboy boots like Dr. Sexy and he glared at her and, after some apparent deliberation, gave her the finger. If Cas were Sam, she'd tell him right now that his feet fucking stink, but there is no Sam and stinking feet equals humanity equals things Cas wants to ignore, so she just asks him about the witch and he kicks his (seriously noxious) feet up onto the bed next to her and answers her questions until one or the other of them trails off talking into sleep.
*
Even with the amulet burning a hole in the trunk, they can't get straight back to Bobby's because once they hit Ohio, the Plain Dealer on the racks in every convenience store has nasty headlines about deaths in Elyria and they have to stop. There's a man who died from having every bone in his body broken in a twenty-foot drop down a sidewalk vent, half a dozen assaults in dark alleys, a teacher driven to a psychotic break by her third-graders taunting her. It's not until they find out about the woman whose brain was eaten by spiders that crawled into her ears while she was sleeping and the man whose dick literally fell off that they finally piece together that whatever's doing it is preying on people's worst fears. A businessman gets swarmed to death by killer bees while they're in a restaurant and Deanna's telling Cas she can't believe he's never tried pierogies and pushing a plate toward him. If Sam were here, he'd be looking over his shoulder for clowns. Or maybe the devil.
"It already happened," Deanna says when Cas asks what her biggest fear is, because it is, was, losing Sam, and Cas leans forward and does that half-smile that's actually a frown but stops short of touching her hand and picks up the salt shaker at the last second. "But now, I guess... I don't know." It could be Cas getting sucked back up into heaven, or it could be living a life that doesn't mean jack shit, playing picket fences and pretending there's nothing to fear in the dark until there's grandchildren discussing whether to pull the plug. It's not Hell; it never was, but it could be the parts of her that Hell changed. It could be any of a thousand nightmares, but she can't narrow it down to one. "Maybe that'll make me immune or something." She shrugs and doesn't really believe it. She doesn't ask Cas the question in return because she's pretty sure he might already be living it out in things like hunger and sleep and the fact that he's starting to need a haircut and is stuck down here with her.
The waitress flirts with Cas, which Cas doesn't notice. She's hot enough, a college girl whose nametag says Hailey, and once she hears they're FBI she's full of questions, because she's afraid she'll be next. "My Nana says the town's cursed," she says with wide eyes and a trembling lip. Deanna has to kick Cas under the table when he starts asking what kind of curse and where they can find Hailey's grandma.
"Don't you worry about a thing, hon," Deanna says with her winningest smile, because all they fucking need would be for Hailey to be flipping out enough about bad juju to actually bring more of it into being. "We're gonna figure this out and stop it."
"Why did you kick me?" Cas asks when Hailey's nodded all watery-eyed and given them their check. "If this Nana knows something--"
"Yeah, Granny's worth checking out, but you can't just spout off about rituals in the middle of a lunch rush." Cas has gotten a lot better at not doing things like announcing the existence of demons to small-town sheriffs, better at playing a part when he needs to, but sometimes he's still just a little too angel-literal.
"I apologize," Cas says, more the kind of sorry you say for 'I started the apocalypse' than for 'oops, almost blew our cover,' and Deanna feels like kind of an asshole. Cas seems to have more feelings to hurt than he used to.
"It's okay. You just gotta be more careful. Blondie-bear didn't know anything except she's freaked about what's going down around here and wants to get in your pants."
Cas blinks and licks some sour cream off the side of his hand. "I don't think I want her in my pants." Beat. "That was a joke."
That pulls something loose in Deanna's guts and she can't stop laughing all the way to the parking lot, where Hailey's sitting in her car smoking a cigarette and she smiles at them as they walk by, too much faith and trust behind cheap lipstick.
*
Cas paints extra sigils on the inside of the Impala's trunk to protect the hex-box, symbols he just knows without thinking like he knows a million languages and has a demon encyclopedia in his head. It's kind of awesome how he just looks at her like 'what?' when she's still kind of in awe and trying to catch up with the motions of his hand.
Hailey's grandma doesn't know anything, not really. She's half Erie and thinks the 'curse' is the wrath of her dead relatives for building the Midway Mall on ancestral land, but it wasn't a burial ground or anything and the mall was built in the '60s and the land is only ancestral in the sense that some ancestors used to live there a few centuries ago. She likes Cas a lot, even before he pulls a bunch of Erie history and a couple of phrases out of the angelic wikipedia in his giant brain. Deanna she just glares at, like she can see right through, with brown eyes so dark they look nearly black and it's unnerving. She gives Cas a dreamcatcher when they leave, not one of the crappy mass-produced truck-stop ones but a real one that Deanna can look at and name off all the functions of the crystals and stones caught in the red spiderweb. She knows Cas can too, and he keeps staring at it in his lap with that microscope gaze all the way through Deanna's swearing and multiple U-turns that it takes to get to the mall because the 'Elyria Next 3 Exits' sign off 58 is not only a direction but a description because the place is nothing but exits and whoever built the town doesn't seem to think anyone should actually need to go anywhere in it. She's never asked what Cas dreams about when he sleeps.
The mall is one of those creepy deserted ones with the department stores closed and dark and cleared out, nothing left but a few sad-looking shops selling stuff like Nordic Tracks and sunglasses and wicker furniture, three empty spaces apart from their nearest neighbors. Besides the employees, no one's there but Deanna and Cas, some kids smoking cigarettes around the dry fountain outside the main entrance, and a handful of old people in workout gear using the place as an air-conditioned indoor track.
"Weird place, huh?" Deanna says to the maybe-college-maybe-high-school kid working at the Auntie Anne's, which is the only thing left in the food court besides a dubious-looking Sbarro.
The kid shrugs, runs a hand through his hair and that's probably against health codes, but whatever. "Boring as hell, but I get paid eight bucks an hour to sit around and do my homework." So college kid, probably. Deanna gets the pretzels for free because the guy hasn't even bothered to open the cash register for the day. "They're probably going to taste like ass anyway," the guy says. "I don't even remember the last time we had to order dough."
The pretzels do taste pretty freezer-burnt, but they're okay dipped in the little pots of sauces. Deanna makes Cas try all of them, and he likes the chocolate. "Was that boy flirting with you?" he asks, thankfully without physical air quotes, though Deanna can hear them there anyway.
Deanna shrugs. "Maybe kinda," she says around a mouthful of pretzel and honey mustard. And yeah, she's been known to go for barely-legal, and the kid had the kind of face she wouldn't kick out of bed, but it actually hadn't even occurred to her. "Probably just happy to see somebody who's not old enough to be his grandmother." Cas has a drip of chocolate sauce just below his bottom lip and she reaches out without thinking to brush it away. Cas stares. "You had some, uh." She wipes her finger on a napkin.
She was pretty sure this mall would be a bust, but it's all they've got right now. The EMF has nothing to say for itself until they climb the turned-off escalator and find themselves in front of one of those incense-reeking headshops with tie-dye wall hangings and bongs in the window. The bloodshot-eyed owner introduces himself as 'Bear' and ends up stoned-ranting about being about to get evicted due to not having paid rent on the shop in six months, because of 'the fucking Man, man.'
Bear ends up knocked out and there's a creepy altar in the back room that's nicely flammable. Cas recites something over the flames and slices his palm open while Deanna stands by with a fire extinguisher and waits for his nod. They walk out an emergency exit to the tune of deafening alarms and a rain of sprinklers.
"My worst fear," Cas says back at the motel, his eyes on the cut on his hand that hasn't magically sewn itself back together as Deanna cleans and bandages it, and they both know it's not still there because they haven't broken the spell.
"I know," Deanna says in a near-whisper, and it's only because she's thinking of her mother and skinned knees seven thousand lifetimes ago that she presses her lips to the gauze and tape and accidentally catches a little bit of sweat-salted skin. She imagines running her tongue along the cut itself, seaming it closed.
Cas looks at her with too much feeling for someone who didn't used to show a damn bit of anything, so Deanna tapes off the bandage and lays his hand down and strips off her pantyhose and powerbitch jacket and pulls her itchy Victoria's Secret push-up special out through the arms of her white starched blouse, scratches at the stubble growing up on her legs. She never used to shave until some barbie doll in 8th or 9th grade gave her shit for it and called her a dyke. She'd still rather not, even all these years later, but it's part of blending in for the job, being unremarkable. Nobody remembers too much about a hot lady Fed except that she's a hot lady Fed, as long as she looks the part, and months of leg hair smashed under hose isn't part of the part. She lets her pits do what they want unless they have to look the part too, the rare but nonetheless disturbing times when she has to go out in tight things and flash more than a couple buttons' worth of cleavage to get information. Most guys don't seem to mind, and a guy in Wherever, Nebraska thought it was hot and licked the sweat out of the dark downy hairs. Lisa never minded, stroked manicured-to-look-not-manicured fingers through the should-have-been-bikini-waxed hair on Deanna's upper thighs. Lisa accepted a lot of her, almost all of her, but in the end not quite enough of her. Not the part that can't forget what's out there. Out here.
She knows that Cas knows every cell and follicle. Knows all of her, even the really shitty parts, and he's still here, and that's why she lets go of his hand and gets as far across the room as she can, even though he's staring at his hand like it's betrayed him. Cas doesn't like platitudes any more than she does, and that's all she's got right now, the it'll be okays and the don't worry about its that she knows are empty bullshit. So she just changes back into her kinda-rank jeans and steps into her boots without bothering with socks and goes and gets some subs from the Mr. Hero down the street. Cas picks the peppers and salami out of his Italian like it's an archaeological dig and the lettuce and tomato shouldn't be disturbed.
He catches her rubbing her feet again, because she really needs new Fed shoes, and lays hands on them that don't do anything but transmit a little extra warmth and a slight tickle. She can see him realize the mojo hasn't worked, see the sigh in his shoulders that he doesn't voice. "One time, we lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania-- which is basically either Philly or Jersey depending which way you go-- for about two months while Dad was trying to take down this complete bitch of a witch," Deanna says, breaking off part of what's left of Cas's sandwich. "I had this Metallica shirt from their first big tour ever, and I lost a bet with this guy because I couldn't eat six of those radioactive-pink pickled eggs, which by the way taste like a demon's asshole. Not that I'd know, but I'm pretty sure they do. So I owed him the shirt and two whiz wits, which I'm ordering but don't actually have any money to pay for, but Sammy's brought the jar of eggs along with him and he's eaten like, ten, and just when I'm about to have to figure out how to pay the sandwich cart guy, Sammy projectile-vomits pink eggs all over bet-dude's shoes. And you've seen his grown-up puppy eyes, but imagine them at twelve when he's all short and awkward. Bet-dude just gets disgusted and walks off but the sandwich guy turns out to have little kids at home so he goes all motherly on Sammy and gives us free food. Well, I got free food. Sammy got free ginger ale."
"What happened to the shirt?" Cas asks, and his thumbs are digging into the arch of Deanna's right foot.
"Eventually got disintegrated by some noxious slime," she says with her eyes closing. This would be better if Sam were here to contradict her on the finer points of the story. It would also be better if the touches to her feet weren't going straight to her groin. It's not the first time she's wondered if that's something that can be detected by angelic spidey-senses, pheromones or whatever, but half the time Cas can't even tell when he's being flirted with, so maybe not. She's sure as hell not going to ask right now. What she does ask is where Cas learned to do this, and hopes he doesn't say a porno. Cas starts in about human physiology and names off muscles and Deanna keeps her eyes closed and feels a smile creep onto her face.
Next: Part 2