Queen of Nothing [4/4]
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Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Downtime at Bobby's is more like killing time. Deanna has to impersonate an insurance agent because Bobby's gotten his leg fucked up by the hunt he was on with Rufus. He's fine except for a few pints of blood and a fuckload of stitches, but it makes 'couple days' stretch into 'couple-few days' territory.
Cas doesn't get a cold in the end, and Deanna gets better aside from some lingering phlegm. She shows him how to flush a radiator and makes him shoot cans off the fence. She should drill him like her dad did, disassembling and reassembling shotguns blindfolded, reloading with one hand tied, but she doesn't. She corrects his stance with hands on his hips and shoulders and arms, and honestly he's gotten to be a pretty good shot even without real lessons, just thrown into the fire. It's too easy to feel his bones through his too-new t-shirt and his elbows and wrists feel like they might cut through his skin.
Cas is better with a sawed-off than a pistol, as though he's built to withstand the recoil, and it's not just that a shell full of shot has a better chance of hitting something. With the cars, he likes all the fiddly little parts of putting on brake pads better than he likes changing oil; he looks comically disgusted when he tries to mount a tire, but he whips in an alternator on the first try nearly as fast as she can.
The days are nasty and hot with too few clouds and they come in with their clothes sweat-plastered to their skin and drink beer on the porch. That's the part she likes, with Cas wrung out and exhausted and sore and finally, finally still, like he's forgotten all the shit weighing him down. She knows he hasn't any more than she has-- even sweaty and greasy with sun-warm paint-chipping boards under her bare feet and a cold Grain Belt in her hand that she's trying to drink before it warms up enough to actually taste it, it's all still there gnawing at the back of her mind and Sam is still dead. But it feels more like she's allowed to tell all that to shut the hell up when they're leaning against the steps and watching the sun go down over car skeletons and all loose from working. Cas lets his knees splay apart in his secondhand jeans and lets Deanna dare him to crush a beer can against his forehead and she wants to laugh until she's sick.
Cas gets fascinated with a Criminal Minds marathon and Deanna thinks she liked it better when he was fixated on the Food Network, because she fucking hates procedural crime dramas. She has to admit the quirky hacker girl is pretty cool, though. She should probably like the ex-CIA badass chick better, but she seems pretty whiny for a secret agent. The overly-literal genius guy in ridiculous grandpa outfits kind of reminds her of Cas, the way he just spouts facts for any situation. Cas tells her that genius-guy was a child prodigy and that his mother is mentally ill and asks if Deanna knows how to play chess.
"Sammy tried to teach me a few times, but I suck at that kind of stuff. Couldn't keep all the squares and all the damn rules straight," she says with a shrug, followed by a series of rough coughs because of the crap that's settled into her lungs. She wonders if angels just sort of automatically get stuff like chess, the way they get seven million languages and eight zillion years of history and know how to map out the exits, but she doesn't ask. Instead she stretches a leg out across the sofa to poke him in the knee with her toe and tells him they should make enchiladas.
For all she spent years making sure Sam got the recommended daily whatever, Deanna still pretty much sucks at cooking. Hazard of the job. There were a couple of schools she went to that happened to be having bake sales during what she thought of back then as incarceration, and she always slunk away from the sign-up sheets and rolled her eyes at the fluffy cupcakes other girls brought in. Until that time Sam joined the Mathletes, when they weren't even staying somewhere with a damn oven, and he scorched two batches of microwave brownies and set off the fire alarm before Deanna eventually cussed him out and bought cookies at the grocery store, which Sammy insisted had to be put on a plate ("a real plate, Dee") as though nobody would notice they were from the Safeway bakery. But goddammit, even if it had to be Spaghettios with a side of Lucky Charms, she made sure every chance she got that Sam could eat enough to grow circus-freakishly tall. On a rare checkup with a pediatrician when she was ten or so, the guy told her she'd be six feet tall one day. She suspects that got stunted by coffee at twelve and cigarettes at fourteen. Sam, though, he'd probably have grown to be seven feet tall if she could have kept him in broccoli for the formative years.
She tells Cas this while she's mutilating tortillas and burning her fingers and both their tongues on the cheese that leaks out into the skillet and gets fried all oily and crunchy. He argues with her about what the recipe says versus what she's doing, and, well, she sucks at cooking and he's actually right, and she probably shouldn't really be surprised.
"You're totally studying some kind of pie recipe, stat," she tells him.
Cas smiles. She knows he's a little drunk, ignoring other shit the same way she is, but it's still a hell of a thing to see, one of those vacation-picture smiles with a laugh behind it. She knows Cas is a little drunk because she's ended up more than a little drunk herself, even after a pile of tortillas and beef and cheese and sauce.
She blames the enchiladas, later, when she wakes up from a nightmare about Sam in the pit, too vivid and too bloody and his voice too clear screaming her name, and she can't see anything but razors and fire and she can't breathe and she can't get to him or move or do anything, just hear him calling and calling to her. Cas shakes her awake, both hands on her shoulders and his eyes wide and wild.
"You were screaming," he says. It's not really a surprise. Her dream-brain, her subconscious, it knows at this point when she's somewhere it's safe to scream the damn walls down. "Then you stopped breathing." That's new. Cas probably imagined it, or she was snoring or something. He looks like some kind of mad scientist with his hair all crazy, grave eyes and a frown, and he hasn't let go of her shoulders so she can feel how fast his pulse is, or maybe that's hers.
"It's okay," she says, swallowing around a sour metallic taste in her mouth. "I'm okay." It's too hot to sleep under the weathered old quilt that's on this bed, but she wrestles the top sheet out from where it's tangled between her legs and pulls it over both of them and falls asleep thinking that Cas smells less like the ozone-lightning-seawater that used to fill the air when he appeared, and more like a man who's done his share of sweating for the day.
She's drooling on his collarbone when she wakes up, which would be kind of embarrassing if it were anyone else. They've both kicked the sheet off of them, so it's just her in underwear and a ratty disintegrating wife-beater and Cas in a pair of nearly-brand-new boxer shorts (the 'either sleep in your clothes or your underwear, but you have to wear something' conversation was a fun moment in Deanna's life), and she wonders if this apparently recent morning wood development is just humanity coming to call or has something to do with her, or some of both. It's not exactly cool to lie there staring at your bedmate's dick (no matter that it's covered) if there's not already an arrangement where you touch it, though, so she eases out and goes downstairs to make coffee.
Cas is freshly showered and fully dressed when he comes down, and his feet creak down the stairs about the same time as gravel crunches in the driveway and Bobby bangs through the door with a brand-new cane and a scowl.
"Hell, Bobby, if I knew you were coming I'd have put on pants."
"Don't do me any favors," Bobby grumbles, and throws himself into the chair across from her. She wonders if he's making any assumptions about her state of undress, but he's not throwing her any funny looks, just says, "Fuckin' Rufus. 's that bacon?"
It was bacon for two, so she gives Bobby half and Cas half and makes herself a piece of toast. At least Cas has quit denying it when he's hungry. It's more than a little weird to sit in Bobby's kitchen with no pants on and still thinking about Cas's junk (because there are guys you think about as guys, and then there are guys you think about as guys with cocks that do stuff, and the lines have been blurring here for a while, but there's thinking about it and then there's thinking about it) so she gets the hell upstairs and into a shower and clothes as soon as she can.
When she comes back down, Bobby and Cas are leaning together over a newspaper and Sam's laptop. Two teenagers in two weeks have gone missing from a roadside amusement park in Minnesota, and there's a pattern-- it's happened every ten years in the same place at the same time of year, back before the park even existed, as far back as the records go, but nobody's ever connected it, at least officially.
Deanna gets growled at by Bobby for asking if he needs her to stick around, and she's just as happy to get back on the road as she is not to have to watch him with the cane, because however temporary it might be, memories are memories.
*
Just south of Mille Lacs, Deanna's about ready to pull over and squat in a ditch before her bladder bursts, but there's a diner off the roadside so just-barely in time that she leaves the keys in the ignition and Cas in the passenger seat. She was afraid a place called Happy's might be clown-themed, but it isn't, and she comes out to find Cas sitting in a booth with the keys front of him, and remembers that it's not her or Cas who has a problem with clowns. The burgers aren't great but the onion rings are. A woman across the aisle from them asks if they know when the flea market a few miles back is going to open again. Deanna shakes her head and asks if the woman's ever been to Paul Bunyan Land. The woman laughs and says, "That's actually a thing?" and says she's not from around here.
The woman's husband or boyfriend or friend sits down with their ice cream sundaes and sounds theatrically Minnesota when he says, "Oh, yeah, they've got a mystery spot and everything," and rolls his eyes and laughs.
Deanna can barely choke down the bite of burger that's in her mouth and the rest of it feels like it's about to come back up. She has to remind herself that the last mystery spot didn't turn out to have anything to do with the case. She wonders if Cas knows about that, read it in her DNA somehow, or if Gabriel told him. She remembers the burnt imprint of wings on that hotel floor and it's not Gabriel she's picturing in the middle of it. She pulls Cas out the door and chugs half the bottle of pepto that's in the Impala's glove compartment. Cas asks if she's all right. She doesn't say anything until they're five miles down the road and her guts are churning a little less, and then she still gives Cas the story in as few words as possible.
"I regret Gabriel's death," Castiel says to the white line outside the passenger window.
"Yeah, well." Gabriel was a douchebag, but he helped in the end. That counts for more at some times than others.
*
They rent a cabin at the Twin Pines Resort, and Cas actually gets it when Deanna makes a Back to the Future crack. The guy behind the check-in desk isn't impressed. Deanna smiles pretty at him and says, "I bet that's only the five hundredth time you heard that, huh?" and he's more impressed, and a little too hopeful when he's asking if they want the cabin with one queen bed and a sleeper sofa or the one with two separate bedrooms. She figures there's no point spending the extra money, even if it isn't technically her money.
"I didn't like him," Cas says when they're out of earshot and rolling down the gravel road to what turns out to be a shoebox of a cabin, but it looks cleaner than a lot of places she's stayed.
"'Cause he was giving off kidnapper vibes or 'cause he was hitting on me?"
"I didn't sense any 'vibes.'"
"Air quotes, Cas." That he probably can't just tell anymore when someone's not human goes unspoken.
"Lindsey Buckingham?" he says when they're inside and Deanna's boots are off and she's handed him his newest FBI ID.
"Your punishment for actually liking Fleetwood Mac. Damned if I'm being Stevie Nicks, though. I hit the shower, you hit the internet?" She's almost got her hand out for paper-rock-scissors before she remembers that Cas will just go with it, other than asking who Stevie Nicks is.
The fact that the shower's a clear glass cubicle doesn't occur to her when she doesn't shut the bathroom door all the way, not until she keeps having to shout 'what?' at the information Cas is telling her about and he's suddenly about two feet from her on the other side of the glass and she slips and almost faceplants through it. "Dammit, Cas. One of these days I'm sitting your ass down and making you watch Psycho. Also, naked? Privacy?"
"My apologies. The children who disappeared last week each have one grandparent who investigated the 1980 disappearances."
"Hang on, so the cops investigate some missing kids, and then thirty years later their grandkids go missing the same way? What about the other ones?"
"We'll need to research it further."
"So, um, maybe do that?" She's done stuff less dignified in front of people in general and Cas in particular than wash her crotch, yeah, but, "I'm getting a little uncomfortable here."
"Sorry."
The grandparents are a dead end, literally, other than McKenzie Jefferson's distraught mother managing to cough up a hazy memory of hearing about a cousin whose body was never found. She calls Cas to check the records and pats Mrs. Jefferson's hand and gives her tissues and tries not to make empty promises about getting her kid back safe, because she knows it's not going to happen.
Deanna goes through the girl's bedroom, where there's no hex bags or spellbooks or anything hinky at all, and only realizes she's clutching white-knuckled onto a copy of My Brother Sam Is Dead when Mrs. Jefferson sniffles from the doorway, "It was one of her summer reading books. She was so excited about going to middle school," and snaps her out of it. Was means she's given up.
Jesse Lund's house has an old-as-dirt tintype of a bearded man in a sheriff's badge, and a father who says there's always been cops in the family. "Cops and Marines," he says.
"Semper Fi," Deanna says like a kick in the knee and takes the tintype as evidence.
*
There's take-out from the restaurant down the road where they proudly advertise they're now serving dinner, and nothing to drink except what was already in the car because it's fucking Sunday in fucking Minnesota and she really wishes she'd remembered that before they left South Dakota. Deanna's balancing on the lumpy sofa pasting all Cas's research up on the wall to try to make some kind of sense of it, but it just looks like a giant clusterfuck. Her head hurts and the new Fed shoes gave her a blister and her sandwich is soggy. They can go to the amusement park and the county records office tomorrow (or break in later tonight) but she has a feeling there's not going to be a grave to burn at the end of it. Jesse and MacKenzie didn't even know each other, and neither did their families beyond the grandfathers-- they were just in the park on the same day and both rode the haunted mine elevator.
If the mine elevator were actually haunted, that would be one thing, but it wasn't there when the oldest disappearances happened. The only thing connected in any of it is everyone who disappeared having some relative who worked another disappearance case. "This case blows," she says, letting her legs drop out from under her so she bounces down onto the sofa.
"It could be a vengeful spirit targeting members of law enforcement for failing to find a missing child," Cas says. He makes a face at a sip of his lukewarm beer and pushes it away.
"You found anything like that?"
"Not yet."
"You should change out of that stuff. I'm not ironing it."
Cas looks down at himself, loose tie and rolled-up shirt sleeves. "I wouldn't have thought you would," he says, which would look and sound polite and mild to most people, but it's actually that dry snark of his that makes his eyes crease at the corners, actually translates to 'as if you'd iron anything.'
"Asshole."
Cas unbuttons his shirt and his hand reaches up to where the tattoo is, but he stops short before she has to tell him not to scratch, and scowls at it instead. It's healing a little faster than a normal person's might, but not by much.
She can't decide if she should bitch about her headache and blisters or not.
She hears Sam calling to her in her sleep again and feels his corpse-cold hands grasping at her. They aren't Sam's; Cas is there when she opens her eyes, his hands cold from the cranked-up air conditioning. "Was I snoring again?" she tries, but her voice trembles. Cas just stares down at her and one of his thumbs is tracing a slow circle on the base of her neck. "Fuck this," she mutters, squirms out from under him and splashes water on her face in the bathroom and tries to keep herself from screaming or punching the mirror.
Cas is back on the bed when she comes out, just sitting on the edge with his hands folded.
"I'd know, wouldn't I?" she says, wondering if he can see her crazed bloodshot eyes in the dark like this. "I'd know if it was really him and not just some fucking dream? I always knew the difference when you did it."
"Sam's gone, Deanna."
"I'd go back down there for seven hundred more years if it'd get him out. I mean, fuck, what am I good for now that the destiny shtick's over if I can't save his ass?"
"Saving other asses. Mine."
"I think I more like doomed your ass." She sits down next to him, feels the wiry hairs on his legs brush against her skin and the scratch of the bedspread underneath her.
"If I chose again, I would make the same choice."
"Why?" Her voice is almost lost in the hum of the air conditioner kicking back on.
"Because you believe I'm worth saving," he says, and she almost laughs. She does smile, sort of, and so does he.
*
"Nice trenchcoat," says the giant animatronic Paul Bunyan statue. "Are you an international super-spy?"
"I'm an FBI agent," Cas says to it, holding up his badge as though the guy inside can see that far and Deanna winces as a few heads turn.
"Well, kids, it's my naptime," the statue says. "Don't worry if the ground starts shaking, 'cause it's just me snoring." A couple of little kids laugh and the creepily blinking eyelids go closed. Then a guy comes out of a door by the base of the statue's chair.
"I guess you know why we're here," Deanna says. "I'm Agent Ford, and this is Agent Buckingham."
"Jake Larsen. You mind if we talk in the dining hall? I only get a half hour lunch break."
Cas doesn't realize the maybe-all-of-sixteen-year-old girl behind the concession counter is practically swooning over him, even when she gives him a comically large souvenir cup (comically large seems to be a theme around here, even stuff that doesn't make sense, like shopping carts and pencils) and cotton candy for free, which he eats like a science experiment while Jake's telling them he's sure he saw the kids leave the park, but neither his boss nor the sheriff seem to believe him. "So I have a little drinking problem," Jake says with a shrug. "But I know what I saw."
"Did you see who they left with?"
"I figured it was their family, but when the parents came back looking later, it wasn't the same people. Some older guy in a hat and sunglasses, and a woman with a stroller."
Cas brings up a pile of faces from photocopied newspaper clippings, but Jake doesn't recognize anyone.
"So, off the record," Deanna says, "how many times a day do you get people flipping you off while you're up in the lumberjack head?"
Jake laughs. "Now and then. Mostly the kids who work here."
Cas stands up abruptly. "Excuse me," he says when he's already two feet away from the table.
"Did that guy watch too much Columbo or something?" Jake says with a grin. It's maybe supposed to be flirty or charming but it kind of just makes her teeth itch.
"That guy's saved a lot of people, Larsen," she snaps, and it's worth it to see him stumble to backpedal his way through an apology, and anyway, she meant it.
She leans against the wall outside the men's room until Cas comes out, and hey, at least he doesn't try not to look her in the eye. "My tongue is blue," he says with the same air of disgusted inconvenience he assigns to things like shaving and underwear shopping and she smiles and shakes her head and thinks about the last time she said don't ever change.
All she says is, "C'mon, Columbo. We got a tourist trap to search."
None of the attractions, haunted or otherwise, have anything suspicious, but they are fucking hilarious with Cas along to be baffled by them. "Why would anyone find this frightening?" he asks in the asylum. "The downward motion is obviously an illusion," he says in the haunted mine.
"It's for little kids, Cas," she says, but even she can't explain a random fake outhouse or the dinosaur statues, and she's kind of glad he's being all Professor Logic when his commentary gets her through the mystery spot without wanting to repeatedly put her sensible heel through its cheap partition walls. All the little buildings are hot and stuffy and attic-smelling, everything a little run-down, a graveyard of rusting old rides over the fence behind the inexplicable dinosaur statues.
There's another part to the park, out the back past the giant pumpkin and shopping cart sculptures, a 'pioneer village' that more than anything is like a whole bunch of antique stores where nothing's actually for sale. Some of them are set up like old-timey banks or drugstores or whatever, but some of them just look like somebody needs to call Hoarders. But it's not Deanna's problem why somebody wants to keep a collection of rusty tractors and gas pumps the size of a football field. One of the little houses with its windows papered over and a yellowing sign that says it's closed for renovation, though, that's Deanna's problem. So are the symbols drawn on the floor.
Cas squints at them, tilts his head one way and then the other. "These symbols, they're...." He shakes his head. She can see his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
"Bad mojo, huh?"
"They must be. But I don't know them."
Hell. "I guess we better get some pictures to Bobby."
"You don't understand. I should know them. I used to know them. I know I used to know them."
She might laugh at the constipated look on his face if she didn't have the feeling that this isn't like seeing some bit-part character on TV and going 'where do I know that guy from?' or not being able to remember that German word for laughing at other people's pain. A voice in her head that sounds like Sam supplies schadenfreude, because he's the one who taught it to her, but she's still not laughing.
"Cas, it's okay," she says.
"Of course it isn't," Cas says, and doesn't say another word until they're back at the cabin.
*
The disappearing kids are being sacrificed to a cult, one that worships a demon that must have gotten wiped out in the apocalypse, maybe even before, because it sure as hell isn't keeping up its end of the bargain anymore. Other than for fishing and camping and the occasional Coen Brothers fan coming to check out a fence, Brainerd's been on a steady decline for decades. Deanna calls the real Feds about the sheriff. Jake misuses the business card Deanna gave him to invite her to karaoke night at the VFW.
"Could be fun," she says to Cas, but he doesn't seem to think so. Hell, she doesn't even really think so, but Cas has been brooding since he couldn't read the sigils, and if it takes getting him shitfaced and sitting through three hours of Journey's greatest hits being vocally violated to snap him out of it, then fine. She's pissed enough, more for him than at him, but just fed the fuck up and tired enough, to shout at him to get the fuck over himself already, because it's not like he's the only one who's got issues.
That gets her a creaky screen door bouncing shut and the sound of Cas's boots disappearing into the distance. She kicks the bed a few times and swears herself half hoarse and possibly breaks her pinky toe in the process.
Two hours, some ice, some tape, and a drive to the nearest liquor store (which is not very near) later, Cas isn't back. Deanna takes the bottle of Jack with her and follows the path down to the lake. She could be badass and track where he's gone, but the truth is that she doesn't need to.
Cas is sitting at the end of a boat landing, leaning over and trailing his hand through the water. She'd been gearing up what to say when she left the cabin, but between the time to cool off and her toe throbbing against the side of her boot, she's sort of been losing hold on the fighting words, and Cas looks like a familiar dreamscape, so instead she says, "I feel like I should be sleep-fishing." The sun's setting but the lake isn't empty and calm-- there are some kids on jet skis, whooping in the distance, and there's a garishly painted sailboat named 'Uff Da' just a few feet away, but still.
Cas doesn't look away from the water when she settles next to him, but he takes the whiskey when she passes it. "I'm completely powerless."
She almost says 'welcome to the club.' "Hey, I never had superpowers and I still saved the world a few times."
"You had a destiny, Deanna."
"Yeah, well, if you're going with that argument, look where that got me. Way I see it, we're kinda in the same boat. I skirted being an angel condom and got a dead brother out of the deal. You kicked the End of Days in the ass and got booted out of the fraternity." She watches Cas's lips wrap around the mouth of the bottle.
"Heaven could be moments away from crashing down around our ears, and I can do nothing. Raphael could be--"
"It was going to shit up there my whole life and I had no idea. I thought you were okay with the choice thing." She takes the bottle back.
"With the choice itself. The consequences are unpleasant. Quite aside from the new... physical constraints, you must know that my inability to read those sigils was only the beginning. I'll lose more. Forget more. I'll be of very little use here once it's all gone."
"So write it down before you forget. And two, bullshit. You've gotten to be a hell of a shot and you can kick some serious ass. And save some serious ass. What happened to that? It's good enough for me but it's not good enough for you?"
Cas doesn't answer, but he stops staring so far out over the lake, and follows suit when Deanna pulls off her boots and socks and rolls up her jeans to dangle her feet in the water. His hand covers hers on the neck of the whiskey bottle, but she doesn't give it back and he doesn't try to take it. A teenager turns his jet ski over and comes up laughing and the sun slips the rest of the way down. The walk back is cold damp feet and Cas's hand warm in hers.
The sofa bed stays folded up when they get back and eat instant mac'n'cheese and don't actually drink much more while someone on TV has to cook with goat brains. Deanna thinks this is one of those things that should probably get talked about, but instead she looks at Cas across the pillows and listens to his breathing speed up when their toes brush together under the covers and they don't talk about it at all, other than for her to say, "Cas?"
And for him to say, "Yes," and for them to reach for each other. She thinks she'll have to go slowly, gently, show him what to do, but that one yes is all it takes to have him kissing her and stripping her and grasping at her like he's been starving for it.
"Hey, hey, slow down," she tells him, and learns that her fingernails on his back make him shiver and sigh, wonders if she's touching a memory of wings or just skin. "We got all night," she says, lips scraping wet against the stubble on his jaw. He kisses the mark on her shoulder, traces the indents of scar tissue with his tongue. She's always thought it might fade with time, but it never has, not even now that he's close enough to human for his skin just to be a normal kind of sweat-hot, for her to know that the strength of his hands gripping her ass is thoughtless and not him pulling punches, that he can neither snap her bones nor heal them.
"Dee--" he says, and she kisses the last syllable and whatever else out of his mouth, and he comes too soon, sudden and wet against the join of her thigh and hip, biting down on a gasp that sucks the air from her throat and it's stupidly, insanely hot, especially when there's none of that half-shamed half-betrayed 'fuck this humanity shit' look on his face where he glares like he's hoping to smite something. Just soft eyelashes and his mouth kissed red and his fingers caught in a snarl in her hair.
"Don't think you're getting off that easy," Deanna says, and then laughs at herself. "No pun intended."
Cas smiles, loose and easy, and pulls her on top of him. "You're occasionally very ridiculous," he says, and his fingers draw a meandering spiral over her breast, through the few little dark hairs that like to crop up from time to time, and she watches him watch his hand circle and close and tease.
"Part of my charm," she says, and bites her lip as the beginning of a trigger callus on his right hand catches rough against her nipple, spreads her knees down wider so she can feel him against her.
She knows he loves her. He tells her anyway. In return she doesn't tell him not to say it or accuse him of having some kind of fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome or mention the very real possibility that this will all end in tears. Most things do. And this doesn't really change anything about them; it was probably inevitable, and maybe he's been not-thinking about it as much as she has. If that didn't occur to her now, it would have occurred to her in the morning, after her dreams have been silent and she wakes up knowing exactly where she is and who she's with and why.
*
They go back to the park as paying guests on their way out of town because Cas has never ridden a tilt-a-whirl, and swears he never will again, but he likes the ferris wheel. She's trying to convince Cas to get his picture taken with Babe the Blue Ox when a call from Bobby kicks them back onto the road, toward Easter, Pennsylvania and something that sounds too much like biblical plagues.
Deanna will talk the whole way through Illinois about how much she hates driving through Illinois, and Cas won't suggest any detours in Indiana. They'll argue for most of Ohio about why Cas didn't think it was worth mentioning that a bunch of holy nukes have been missing this whole time, but Deanna will decide it's not worth it anymore around Youngstown, because she knows probably even going back in time wouldn't change anything. Near Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, Deanna will ask a motel clerk for a king, and laugh her ass off at signing in as J. & J. Cash, even though Cas doesn't get the joke. Heaven will still be hanging over them and Hell will still be growling under them and they'll keep driving in between.
End.
That's all, folks. Thank you for reading, and please don't forget to check out angrydumpling's awesome art if you haven't already! All comments are very welcome!
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Downtime at Bobby's is more like killing time. Deanna has to impersonate an insurance agent because Bobby's gotten his leg fucked up by the hunt he was on with Rufus. He's fine except for a few pints of blood and a fuckload of stitches, but it makes 'couple days' stretch into 'couple-few days' territory.
Cas doesn't get a cold in the end, and Deanna gets better aside from some lingering phlegm. She shows him how to flush a radiator and makes him shoot cans off the fence. She should drill him like her dad did, disassembling and reassembling shotguns blindfolded, reloading with one hand tied, but she doesn't. She corrects his stance with hands on his hips and shoulders and arms, and honestly he's gotten to be a pretty good shot even without real lessons, just thrown into the fire. It's too easy to feel his bones through his too-new t-shirt and his elbows and wrists feel like they might cut through his skin.
Cas is better with a sawed-off than a pistol, as though he's built to withstand the recoil, and it's not just that a shell full of shot has a better chance of hitting something. With the cars, he likes all the fiddly little parts of putting on brake pads better than he likes changing oil; he looks comically disgusted when he tries to mount a tire, but he whips in an alternator on the first try nearly as fast as she can.
The days are nasty and hot with too few clouds and they come in with their clothes sweat-plastered to their skin and drink beer on the porch. That's the part she likes, with Cas wrung out and exhausted and sore and finally, finally still, like he's forgotten all the shit weighing him down. She knows he hasn't any more than she has-- even sweaty and greasy with sun-warm paint-chipping boards under her bare feet and a cold Grain Belt in her hand that she's trying to drink before it warms up enough to actually taste it, it's all still there gnawing at the back of her mind and Sam is still dead. But it feels more like she's allowed to tell all that to shut the hell up when they're leaning against the steps and watching the sun go down over car skeletons and all loose from working. Cas lets his knees splay apart in his secondhand jeans and lets Deanna dare him to crush a beer can against his forehead and she wants to laugh until she's sick.
Cas gets fascinated with a Criminal Minds marathon and Deanna thinks she liked it better when he was fixated on the Food Network, because she fucking hates procedural crime dramas. She has to admit the quirky hacker girl is pretty cool, though. She should probably like the ex-CIA badass chick better, but she seems pretty whiny for a secret agent. The overly-literal genius guy in ridiculous grandpa outfits kind of reminds her of Cas, the way he just spouts facts for any situation. Cas tells her that genius-guy was a child prodigy and that his mother is mentally ill and asks if Deanna knows how to play chess.
"Sammy tried to teach me a few times, but I suck at that kind of stuff. Couldn't keep all the squares and all the damn rules straight," she says with a shrug, followed by a series of rough coughs because of the crap that's settled into her lungs. She wonders if angels just sort of automatically get stuff like chess, the way they get seven million languages and eight zillion years of history and know how to map out the exits, but she doesn't ask. Instead she stretches a leg out across the sofa to poke him in the knee with her toe and tells him they should make enchiladas.
For all she spent years making sure Sam got the recommended daily whatever, Deanna still pretty much sucks at cooking. Hazard of the job. There were a couple of schools she went to that happened to be having bake sales during what she thought of back then as incarceration, and she always slunk away from the sign-up sheets and rolled her eyes at the fluffy cupcakes other girls brought in. Until that time Sam joined the Mathletes, when they weren't even staying somewhere with a damn oven, and he scorched two batches of microwave brownies and set off the fire alarm before Deanna eventually cussed him out and bought cookies at the grocery store, which Sammy insisted had to be put on a plate ("a real plate, Dee") as though nobody would notice they were from the Safeway bakery. But goddammit, even if it had to be Spaghettios with a side of Lucky Charms, she made sure every chance she got that Sam could eat enough to grow circus-freakishly tall. On a rare checkup with a pediatrician when she was ten or so, the guy told her she'd be six feet tall one day. She suspects that got stunted by coffee at twelve and cigarettes at fourteen. Sam, though, he'd probably have grown to be seven feet tall if she could have kept him in broccoli for the formative years.
She tells Cas this while she's mutilating tortillas and burning her fingers and both their tongues on the cheese that leaks out into the skillet and gets fried all oily and crunchy. He argues with her about what the recipe says versus what she's doing, and, well, she sucks at cooking and he's actually right, and she probably shouldn't really be surprised.
"You're totally studying some kind of pie recipe, stat," she tells him.
Cas smiles. She knows he's a little drunk, ignoring other shit the same way she is, but it's still a hell of a thing to see, one of those vacation-picture smiles with a laugh behind it. She knows Cas is a little drunk because she's ended up more than a little drunk herself, even after a pile of tortillas and beef and cheese and sauce.
She blames the enchiladas, later, when she wakes up from a nightmare about Sam in the pit, too vivid and too bloody and his voice too clear screaming her name, and she can't see anything but razors and fire and she can't breathe and she can't get to him or move or do anything, just hear him calling and calling to her. Cas shakes her awake, both hands on her shoulders and his eyes wide and wild.
"You were screaming," he says. It's not really a surprise. Her dream-brain, her subconscious, it knows at this point when she's somewhere it's safe to scream the damn walls down. "Then you stopped breathing." That's new. Cas probably imagined it, or she was snoring or something. He looks like some kind of mad scientist with his hair all crazy, grave eyes and a frown, and he hasn't let go of her shoulders so she can feel how fast his pulse is, or maybe that's hers.
"It's okay," she says, swallowing around a sour metallic taste in her mouth. "I'm okay." It's too hot to sleep under the weathered old quilt that's on this bed, but she wrestles the top sheet out from where it's tangled between her legs and pulls it over both of them and falls asleep thinking that Cas smells less like the ozone-lightning-seawater that used to fill the air when he appeared, and more like a man who's done his share of sweating for the day.
She's drooling on his collarbone when she wakes up, which would be kind of embarrassing if it were anyone else. They've both kicked the sheet off of them, so it's just her in underwear and a ratty disintegrating wife-beater and Cas in a pair of nearly-brand-new boxer shorts (the 'either sleep in your clothes or your underwear, but you have to wear something' conversation was a fun moment in Deanna's life), and she wonders if this apparently recent morning wood development is just humanity coming to call or has something to do with her, or some of both. It's not exactly cool to lie there staring at your bedmate's dick (no matter that it's covered) if there's not already an arrangement where you touch it, though, so she eases out and goes downstairs to make coffee.
Cas is freshly showered and fully dressed when he comes down, and his feet creak down the stairs about the same time as gravel crunches in the driveway and Bobby bangs through the door with a brand-new cane and a scowl.
"Hell, Bobby, if I knew you were coming I'd have put on pants."
"Don't do me any favors," Bobby grumbles, and throws himself into the chair across from her. She wonders if he's making any assumptions about her state of undress, but he's not throwing her any funny looks, just says, "Fuckin' Rufus. 's that bacon?"
It was bacon for two, so she gives Bobby half and Cas half and makes herself a piece of toast. At least Cas has quit denying it when he's hungry. It's more than a little weird to sit in Bobby's kitchen with no pants on and still thinking about Cas's junk (because there are guys you think about as guys, and then there are guys you think about as guys with cocks that do stuff, and the lines have been blurring here for a while, but there's thinking about it and then there's thinking about it) so she gets the hell upstairs and into a shower and clothes as soon as she can.
When she comes back down, Bobby and Cas are leaning together over a newspaper and Sam's laptop. Two teenagers in two weeks have gone missing from a roadside amusement park in Minnesota, and there's a pattern-- it's happened every ten years in the same place at the same time of year, back before the park even existed, as far back as the records go, but nobody's ever connected it, at least officially.
Deanna gets growled at by Bobby for asking if he needs her to stick around, and she's just as happy to get back on the road as she is not to have to watch him with the cane, because however temporary it might be, memories are memories.
*
Just south of Mille Lacs, Deanna's about ready to pull over and squat in a ditch before her bladder bursts, but there's a diner off the roadside so just-barely in time that she leaves the keys in the ignition and Cas in the passenger seat. She was afraid a place called Happy's might be clown-themed, but it isn't, and she comes out to find Cas sitting in a booth with the keys front of him, and remembers that it's not her or Cas who has a problem with clowns. The burgers aren't great but the onion rings are. A woman across the aisle from them asks if they know when the flea market a few miles back is going to open again. Deanna shakes her head and asks if the woman's ever been to Paul Bunyan Land. The woman laughs and says, "That's actually a thing?" and says she's not from around here.
The woman's husband or boyfriend or friend sits down with their ice cream sundaes and sounds theatrically Minnesota when he says, "Oh, yeah, they've got a mystery spot and everything," and rolls his eyes and laughs.
Deanna can barely choke down the bite of burger that's in her mouth and the rest of it feels like it's about to come back up. She has to remind herself that the last mystery spot didn't turn out to have anything to do with the case. She wonders if Cas knows about that, read it in her DNA somehow, or if Gabriel told him. She remembers the burnt imprint of wings on that hotel floor and it's not Gabriel she's picturing in the middle of it. She pulls Cas out the door and chugs half the bottle of pepto that's in the Impala's glove compartment. Cas asks if she's all right. She doesn't say anything until they're five miles down the road and her guts are churning a little less, and then she still gives Cas the story in as few words as possible.
"I regret Gabriel's death," Castiel says to the white line outside the passenger window.
"Yeah, well." Gabriel was a douchebag, but he helped in the end. That counts for more at some times than others.
*
They rent a cabin at the Twin Pines Resort, and Cas actually gets it when Deanna makes a Back to the Future crack. The guy behind the check-in desk isn't impressed. Deanna smiles pretty at him and says, "I bet that's only the five hundredth time you heard that, huh?" and he's more impressed, and a little too hopeful when he's asking if they want the cabin with one queen bed and a sleeper sofa or the one with two separate bedrooms. She figures there's no point spending the extra money, even if it isn't technically her money.
"I didn't like him," Cas says when they're out of earshot and rolling down the gravel road to what turns out to be a shoebox of a cabin, but it looks cleaner than a lot of places she's stayed.
"'Cause he was giving off kidnapper vibes or 'cause he was hitting on me?"
"I didn't sense any 'vibes.'"
"Air quotes, Cas." That he probably can't just tell anymore when someone's not human goes unspoken.
"Lindsey Buckingham?" he says when they're inside and Deanna's boots are off and she's handed him his newest FBI ID.
"Your punishment for actually liking Fleetwood Mac. Damned if I'm being Stevie Nicks, though. I hit the shower, you hit the internet?" She's almost got her hand out for paper-rock-scissors before she remembers that Cas will just go with it, other than asking who Stevie Nicks is.
The fact that the shower's a clear glass cubicle doesn't occur to her when she doesn't shut the bathroom door all the way, not until she keeps having to shout 'what?' at the information Cas is telling her about and he's suddenly about two feet from her on the other side of the glass and she slips and almost faceplants through it. "Dammit, Cas. One of these days I'm sitting your ass down and making you watch Psycho. Also, naked? Privacy?"
"My apologies. The children who disappeared last week each have one grandparent who investigated the 1980 disappearances."
"Hang on, so the cops investigate some missing kids, and then thirty years later their grandkids go missing the same way? What about the other ones?"
"We'll need to research it further."
"So, um, maybe do that?" She's done stuff less dignified in front of people in general and Cas in particular than wash her crotch, yeah, but, "I'm getting a little uncomfortable here."
"Sorry."
The grandparents are a dead end, literally, other than McKenzie Jefferson's distraught mother managing to cough up a hazy memory of hearing about a cousin whose body was never found. She calls Cas to check the records and pats Mrs. Jefferson's hand and gives her tissues and tries not to make empty promises about getting her kid back safe, because she knows it's not going to happen.
Deanna goes through the girl's bedroom, where there's no hex bags or spellbooks or anything hinky at all, and only realizes she's clutching white-knuckled onto a copy of My Brother Sam Is Dead when Mrs. Jefferson sniffles from the doorway, "It was one of her summer reading books. She was so excited about going to middle school," and snaps her out of it. Was means she's given up.
Jesse Lund's house has an old-as-dirt tintype of a bearded man in a sheriff's badge, and a father who says there's always been cops in the family. "Cops and Marines," he says.
"Semper Fi," Deanna says like a kick in the knee and takes the tintype as evidence.
*
There's take-out from the restaurant down the road where they proudly advertise they're now serving dinner, and nothing to drink except what was already in the car because it's fucking Sunday in fucking Minnesota and she really wishes she'd remembered that before they left South Dakota. Deanna's balancing on the lumpy sofa pasting all Cas's research up on the wall to try to make some kind of sense of it, but it just looks like a giant clusterfuck. Her head hurts and the new Fed shoes gave her a blister and her sandwich is soggy. They can go to the amusement park and the county records office tomorrow (or break in later tonight) but she has a feeling there's not going to be a grave to burn at the end of it. Jesse and MacKenzie didn't even know each other, and neither did their families beyond the grandfathers-- they were just in the park on the same day and both rode the haunted mine elevator.
If the mine elevator were actually haunted, that would be one thing, but it wasn't there when the oldest disappearances happened. The only thing connected in any of it is everyone who disappeared having some relative who worked another disappearance case. "This case blows," she says, letting her legs drop out from under her so she bounces down onto the sofa.
"It could be a vengeful spirit targeting members of law enforcement for failing to find a missing child," Cas says. He makes a face at a sip of his lukewarm beer and pushes it away.
"You found anything like that?"
"Not yet."
"You should change out of that stuff. I'm not ironing it."
Cas looks down at himself, loose tie and rolled-up shirt sleeves. "I wouldn't have thought you would," he says, which would look and sound polite and mild to most people, but it's actually that dry snark of his that makes his eyes crease at the corners, actually translates to 'as if you'd iron anything.'
"Asshole."
Cas unbuttons his shirt and his hand reaches up to where the tattoo is, but he stops short before she has to tell him not to scratch, and scowls at it instead. It's healing a little faster than a normal person's might, but not by much.
She can't decide if she should bitch about her headache and blisters or not.
She hears Sam calling to her in her sleep again and feels his corpse-cold hands grasping at her. They aren't Sam's; Cas is there when she opens her eyes, his hands cold from the cranked-up air conditioning. "Was I snoring again?" she tries, but her voice trembles. Cas just stares down at her and one of his thumbs is tracing a slow circle on the base of her neck. "Fuck this," she mutters, squirms out from under him and splashes water on her face in the bathroom and tries to keep herself from screaming or punching the mirror.
Cas is back on the bed when she comes out, just sitting on the edge with his hands folded.
"I'd know, wouldn't I?" she says, wondering if he can see her crazed bloodshot eyes in the dark like this. "I'd know if it was really him and not just some fucking dream? I always knew the difference when you did it."
"Sam's gone, Deanna."
"I'd go back down there for seven hundred more years if it'd get him out. I mean, fuck, what am I good for now that the destiny shtick's over if I can't save his ass?"
"Saving other asses. Mine."
"I think I more like doomed your ass." She sits down next to him, feels the wiry hairs on his legs brush against her skin and the scratch of the bedspread underneath her.
"If I chose again, I would make the same choice."
"Why?" Her voice is almost lost in the hum of the air conditioner kicking back on.
"Because you believe I'm worth saving," he says, and she almost laughs. She does smile, sort of, and so does he.
*
"Nice trenchcoat," says the giant animatronic Paul Bunyan statue. "Are you an international super-spy?"
"I'm an FBI agent," Cas says to it, holding up his badge as though the guy inside can see that far and Deanna winces as a few heads turn.
"Well, kids, it's my naptime," the statue says. "Don't worry if the ground starts shaking, 'cause it's just me snoring." A couple of little kids laugh and the creepily blinking eyelids go closed. Then a guy comes out of a door by the base of the statue's chair.
"I guess you know why we're here," Deanna says. "I'm Agent Ford, and this is Agent Buckingham."
"Jake Larsen. You mind if we talk in the dining hall? I only get a half hour lunch break."
Cas doesn't realize the maybe-all-of-sixteen-year-old girl behind the concession counter is practically swooning over him, even when she gives him a comically large souvenir cup (comically large seems to be a theme around here, even stuff that doesn't make sense, like shopping carts and pencils) and cotton candy for free, which he eats like a science experiment while Jake's telling them he's sure he saw the kids leave the park, but neither his boss nor the sheriff seem to believe him. "So I have a little drinking problem," Jake says with a shrug. "But I know what I saw."
"Did you see who they left with?"
"I figured it was their family, but when the parents came back looking later, it wasn't the same people. Some older guy in a hat and sunglasses, and a woman with a stroller."
Cas brings up a pile of faces from photocopied newspaper clippings, but Jake doesn't recognize anyone.
"So, off the record," Deanna says, "how many times a day do you get people flipping you off while you're up in the lumberjack head?"
Jake laughs. "Now and then. Mostly the kids who work here."
Cas stands up abruptly. "Excuse me," he says when he's already two feet away from the table.
"Did that guy watch too much Columbo or something?" Jake says with a grin. It's maybe supposed to be flirty or charming but it kind of just makes her teeth itch.
"That guy's saved a lot of people, Larsen," she snaps, and it's worth it to see him stumble to backpedal his way through an apology, and anyway, she meant it.
She leans against the wall outside the men's room until Cas comes out, and hey, at least he doesn't try not to look her in the eye. "My tongue is blue," he says with the same air of disgusted inconvenience he assigns to things like shaving and underwear shopping and she smiles and shakes her head and thinks about the last time she said don't ever change.
All she says is, "C'mon, Columbo. We got a tourist trap to search."
None of the attractions, haunted or otherwise, have anything suspicious, but they are fucking hilarious with Cas along to be baffled by them. "Why would anyone find this frightening?" he asks in the asylum. "The downward motion is obviously an illusion," he says in the haunted mine.
"It's for little kids, Cas," she says, but even she can't explain a random fake outhouse or the dinosaur statues, and she's kind of glad he's being all Professor Logic when his commentary gets her through the mystery spot without wanting to repeatedly put her sensible heel through its cheap partition walls. All the little buildings are hot and stuffy and attic-smelling, everything a little run-down, a graveyard of rusting old rides over the fence behind the inexplicable dinosaur statues.
There's another part to the park, out the back past the giant pumpkin and shopping cart sculptures, a 'pioneer village' that more than anything is like a whole bunch of antique stores where nothing's actually for sale. Some of them are set up like old-timey banks or drugstores or whatever, but some of them just look like somebody needs to call Hoarders. But it's not Deanna's problem why somebody wants to keep a collection of rusty tractors and gas pumps the size of a football field. One of the little houses with its windows papered over and a yellowing sign that says it's closed for renovation, though, that's Deanna's problem. So are the symbols drawn on the floor.
Cas squints at them, tilts his head one way and then the other. "These symbols, they're...." He shakes his head. She can see his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
"Bad mojo, huh?"
"They must be. But I don't know them."
Hell. "I guess we better get some pictures to Bobby."
"You don't understand. I should know them. I used to know them. I know I used to know them."
She might laugh at the constipated look on his face if she didn't have the feeling that this isn't like seeing some bit-part character on TV and going 'where do I know that guy from?' or not being able to remember that German word for laughing at other people's pain. A voice in her head that sounds like Sam supplies schadenfreude, because he's the one who taught it to her, but she's still not laughing.
"Cas, it's okay," she says.
"Of course it isn't," Cas says, and doesn't say another word until they're back at the cabin.
*
The disappearing kids are being sacrificed to a cult, one that worships a demon that must have gotten wiped out in the apocalypse, maybe even before, because it sure as hell isn't keeping up its end of the bargain anymore. Other than for fishing and camping and the occasional Coen Brothers fan coming to check out a fence, Brainerd's been on a steady decline for decades. Deanna calls the real Feds about the sheriff. Jake misuses the business card Deanna gave him to invite her to karaoke night at the VFW.
"Could be fun," she says to Cas, but he doesn't seem to think so. Hell, she doesn't even really think so, but Cas has been brooding since he couldn't read the sigils, and if it takes getting him shitfaced and sitting through three hours of Journey's greatest hits being vocally violated to snap him out of it, then fine. She's pissed enough, more for him than at him, but just fed the fuck up and tired enough, to shout at him to get the fuck over himself already, because it's not like he's the only one who's got issues.
That gets her a creaky screen door bouncing shut and the sound of Cas's boots disappearing into the distance. She kicks the bed a few times and swears herself half hoarse and possibly breaks her pinky toe in the process.
Two hours, some ice, some tape, and a drive to the nearest liquor store (which is not very near) later, Cas isn't back. Deanna takes the bottle of Jack with her and follows the path down to the lake. She could be badass and track where he's gone, but the truth is that she doesn't need to.
Cas is sitting at the end of a boat landing, leaning over and trailing his hand through the water. She'd been gearing up what to say when she left the cabin, but between the time to cool off and her toe throbbing against the side of her boot, she's sort of been losing hold on the fighting words, and Cas looks like a familiar dreamscape, so instead she says, "I feel like I should be sleep-fishing." The sun's setting but the lake isn't empty and calm-- there are some kids on jet skis, whooping in the distance, and there's a garishly painted sailboat named 'Uff Da' just a few feet away, but still.
Cas doesn't look away from the water when she settles next to him, but he takes the whiskey when she passes it. "I'm completely powerless."
She almost says 'welcome to the club.' "Hey, I never had superpowers and I still saved the world a few times."
"You had a destiny, Deanna."
"Yeah, well, if you're going with that argument, look where that got me. Way I see it, we're kinda in the same boat. I skirted being an angel condom and got a dead brother out of the deal. You kicked the End of Days in the ass and got booted out of the fraternity." She watches Cas's lips wrap around the mouth of the bottle.
"Heaven could be moments away from crashing down around our ears, and I can do nothing. Raphael could be--"
"It was going to shit up there my whole life and I had no idea. I thought you were okay with the choice thing." She takes the bottle back.
"With the choice itself. The consequences are unpleasant. Quite aside from the new... physical constraints, you must know that my inability to read those sigils was only the beginning. I'll lose more. Forget more. I'll be of very little use here once it's all gone."
"So write it down before you forget. And two, bullshit. You've gotten to be a hell of a shot and you can kick some serious ass. And save some serious ass. What happened to that? It's good enough for me but it's not good enough for you?"
Cas doesn't answer, but he stops staring so far out over the lake, and follows suit when Deanna pulls off her boots and socks and rolls up her jeans to dangle her feet in the water. His hand covers hers on the neck of the whiskey bottle, but she doesn't give it back and he doesn't try to take it. A teenager turns his jet ski over and comes up laughing and the sun slips the rest of the way down. The walk back is cold damp feet and Cas's hand warm in hers.
The sofa bed stays folded up when they get back and eat instant mac'n'cheese and don't actually drink much more while someone on TV has to cook with goat brains. Deanna thinks this is one of those things that should probably get talked about, but instead she looks at Cas across the pillows and listens to his breathing speed up when their toes brush together under the covers and they don't talk about it at all, other than for her to say, "Cas?"
And for him to say, "Yes," and for them to reach for each other. She thinks she'll have to go slowly, gently, show him what to do, but that one yes is all it takes to have him kissing her and stripping her and grasping at her like he's been starving for it.
"Hey, hey, slow down," she tells him, and learns that her fingernails on his back make him shiver and sigh, wonders if she's touching a memory of wings or just skin. "We got all night," she says, lips scraping wet against the stubble on his jaw. He kisses the mark on her shoulder, traces the indents of scar tissue with his tongue. She's always thought it might fade with time, but it never has, not even now that he's close enough to human for his skin just to be a normal kind of sweat-hot, for her to know that the strength of his hands gripping her ass is thoughtless and not him pulling punches, that he can neither snap her bones nor heal them.
"Dee--" he says, and she kisses the last syllable and whatever else out of his mouth, and he comes too soon, sudden and wet against the join of her thigh and hip, biting down on a gasp that sucks the air from her throat and it's stupidly, insanely hot, especially when there's none of that half-shamed half-betrayed 'fuck this humanity shit' look on his face where he glares like he's hoping to smite something. Just soft eyelashes and his mouth kissed red and his fingers caught in a snarl in her hair.
"Don't think you're getting off that easy," Deanna says, and then laughs at herself. "No pun intended."
Cas smiles, loose and easy, and pulls her on top of him. "You're occasionally very ridiculous," he says, and his fingers draw a meandering spiral over her breast, through the few little dark hairs that like to crop up from time to time, and she watches him watch his hand circle and close and tease.
"Part of my charm," she says, and bites her lip as the beginning of a trigger callus on his right hand catches rough against her nipple, spreads her knees down wider so she can feel him against her.
She knows he loves her. He tells her anyway. In return she doesn't tell him not to say it or accuse him of having some kind of fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome or mention the very real possibility that this will all end in tears. Most things do. And this doesn't really change anything about them; it was probably inevitable, and maybe he's been not-thinking about it as much as she has. If that didn't occur to her now, it would have occurred to her in the morning, after her dreams have been silent and she wakes up knowing exactly where she is and who she's with and why.
*
They go back to the park as paying guests on their way out of town because Cas has never ridden a tilt-a-whirl, and swears he never will again, but he likes the ferris wheel. She's trying to convince Cas to get his picture taken with Babe the Blue Ox when a call from Bobby kicks them back onto the road, toward Easter, Pennsylvania and something that sounds too much like biblical plagues.
Deanna will talk the whole way through Illinois about how much she hates driving through Illinois, and Cas won't suggest any detours in Indiana. They'll argue for most of Ohio about why Cas didn't think it was worth mentioning that a bunch of holy nukes have been missing this whole time, but Deanna will decide it's not worth it anymore around Youngstown, because she knows probably even going back in time wouldn't change anything. Near Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, Deanna will ask a motel clerk for a king, and laugh her ass off at signing in as J. & J. Cash, even though Cas doesn't get the joke. Heaven will still be hanging over them and Hell will still be growling under them and they'll keep driving in between.
End.
That's all, folks. Thank you for reading, and please don't forget to check out angrydumpling's awesome art if you haven't already! All comments are very welcome!