Fic: The Real Thing
Title: The Real Thing
Author: yellow_pomelo
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Always-a-girl!Dean/Castiel
Spoilers: Up to end of S5, just in case.
Warnings: Some cussing. I'm not even sure what months S5 is set in, but let's pretend it includes October.
Word Count: ~6, 600
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural or any of it's characters.
Summary: Set sometime during S5; It's almost Halloween and so there is work to be done, but more importantly there is diner food and costume shopping and good times all around.
Notes: So I've been MIA for a while, but I don't dine and dash! I said I'd write a mostly angst-less always-a-girl!Dean/Cas fic for insight2 , and after all her support for my other fic, this is my gift/prompt-fill for her! I was actually writing another always-a-girl!Dean/Cas fic, but then it was so not light and not going well, so maybe I'll release it at a later date. And yeah, it's no-where near Halloween yet, but just roll with it.
“Sam is a hypocrite,” Deanna says, plucking a fry from the small mountain to her right and dipping it in ketchup, “A terrible, terrible hypocrite.”
Castiel turns away from the smudged window of Susan’s Diner to look at Deanna, distracted from his task of staring a new hole into the ozone layer.
“I have yet to meet a mortal man who has not at some point fallen to hypocrisy.”
“Yeah, but Sam is the worst. I mean look at this. Look at this,” Deanna smacks one greasy fist onto the foot-thick stack of papers she’s reading, her other hand waving in the direction of the motel where a small metropolis of papers sits waiting on the dresser. “He’s always going on and on about being environmentally friendly and littering and recycling and blah blah blah blah. ‘Dee, if you’re not going to reduce your carbon footprint, at least separate the paper and plastic’.”
Deanna drops the falsetto, continuing in her normal pitch and throwing her arms up in exasperation, “Half the places we go to don’t even have recycling bins. Forget different kinds of bins for different kinds of crap!” The fry between her fingers slips away to land quietly somewhere over her shoulder.
Castiel looks at her. He’s not doing anything but sitting stiffly opposite to her in the booth, but somehow he implies that the hands which rest in his lap are now tented over the sticky table top, his face tilted over them so he can peer over his glasses at her in reproach.
She doesn’t know how he does that. Castiel doesn’t even wear glasses.
“The two of you protect human life. It isn’t illogical for Sam to extend his care to the earth you walk upon.”
Deanna acknowledges this with a hum, shuffling the papers around, “Well he’s got no right to bitch at me about being green when he goes to the library and comes back with a million rectangles of dead trees.”
She does not mention why Sam had to print out so many pages of material to lug back to the motel, and Castiel wisely does not mention the frozen screen of the laptop resting on the motel’s bedside table.
It was not her fault. Anyways, knowing the lonely road they travel, Sam should have installed better anti-virus software. A girl has needs.
Because he is an angel, Castiel doesn’t say anything about any of that. Instead he says, “I can help with the reading, if you’d like.”
“Uh,” Deanna looks down at the printouts in her lap, page after page taken from a dozen different forums, all full of shocking text and sprinkled with very, very inappropriate GIFs frozen in very inappropriate black and white stills. This is why Deanna is ninety percent sure the virus wasn’t her fault. This time.
“No, I don’t think so,” says Deanna, because Castiel is an angel. “There’s a lot of, uh, stuff you wouldn’t get. Slang and... stuff.”
It’s probable that Castiel is a big voyeur who has spied upon humanity for millennia, but Deanna doesn’t care. If there is anything out there that can make an angel weep, it is this, and not for the first time Deanna is glad Castiel can barely operate a phone, never mind a computer.
Deanna herself can hardly handle this and she’s seen a lot of mind-scarring things while hunting. The Internet is enough on its own, but now she and her brother have been forced to scour the underbelly of the web, rooting through all sorts of unpleasant threads, trying to crack freaking riddles and codes in the posts so they might find some sort of physical remnant that can be destroyed. All this because of some stupid ghost who decided to haunt an internet message board.
Sam’s thinking they’ll be salting and burning a keyboard full of shed skin cells or maybe an office chair stained with sweat. Deanna’s hoping for a good, solid corpse to desecrate, but all in due time.
For now, Deanna tries not to look too closely at a pixelated image in the corner of one page - God, what is that? A walrus, or-? - letting her eyes fly away to meet Castiel’s curious gaze with a forced grin, “Y’know what I always find distra- comforting? Food. Let’s get you something to eat.”
Deanna settles her stack of papers on the seat beside her, safe from innocent blue eyes. Then some kid rushes by on his way to the bathroom, leaving the edge of a page to flutter lightly in his wake.
Deanna slams her elbow down on the papers, resting her weight against them like she’s casually stretching out a crick in her back and not reaching out to strangle something.
She doesn’t know why she thought it would be okay to bring the papers out anymore.
Castiel squints suspiciously at her and for one horrifying moment it occurs to Deanna that he might have the ability to see through objects. “I require no nourishm-”
“Whatever. Just humour me, ‘kay? Eating by myself feels stupid.”
Castiel looks up from where Deanna’s elbow pins the papers in place to rest his eyes on Deanna’s half finished meal. The weight of his stare is like that of a condemned man who has seen what became of those thrown to the lions and knows it is finally his turn.
“Are burgers the only type of food they serve?”
Deanna recalls the red meat binge that made the angel so happy, only to end with the immense shame of uncontrollably gorging himself while not two feet away, the world was coming to an end.
Castiel doesn’t have a very good relationship with burgers anymore.
“I think they’ve got some soup or something,” Deanna says, subtly rearranging the fries on her plate to hide the remnants of her burger. No wonder Castiel had been staring at the sky and not at her. “I dunno, check the menu.”
In a show of extreme faith, Castiel picks up one of the placards standing at the end of the table, rotating the plastic encased square in cautious hands as he considers his options with a critical eye.
Deanna leaves him to it, discreetly snatching up the last of her burger and shoving it all in her mouth while he’s not looking. She chews thoughtfully as she flips a page on the seat next to her, wilfully ignoring all images and zeroing in on key text.
Distantly, Deanna hears the waitress come to take Castiel’s order, her simpering words and saccharine tone grating on the ears. Deanna restrains herself from throwing twenty pounds of paper at the woman and instead picks up her highlighter to circle and circle and circle a grouping of Greek letters. It bleeds through four pages, but that’s okay.
It takes a lot of concentration to avoid looking at anything that can drive her to madness and it’s only when she hears the clatter of ceramic on Formica that Deanna looks up again in time to see the waitress leer at Castiel, her bubble gum pink mouth stretched wide.
“Enjoy,” the waitress chirps brightly, her gaze lingering on Castiel as she leaves.
Something about her really bothers Deanna and the feeling is compounded when she looks down at the meal placed before them. Castiel turns equally mistrustful eyes towards the food though his wariness stems from elsewhere.
“That is...”
The large white bowl is filled with something red and bubbling. And lumpy.
“’Susan’s Saucy Soup’,” says Castiel. “It is special.”
Deanna looks at the placard entitled ‘Specials’ to check the description of the dish. ‘Tomato Soup,’ it claims.
A large bubble slowly oozes to the surface of the soup and pops with a low, menacing hiss.
Deana feels the vague urge to lash out and fling the bowl to the floor, but then she remembers she’s a hunter and carries flasks of holy water. However, before she can call Sam to recite Latin over the phone, Castiel dips his spoon in and brings the tiniest scoop of Mystery to his lips.
“Is it... is it tomato soup?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s not sure if Castiel doesn’t know because he’s never tasted plain tomatoes before or because the soup is made of Regan MacNeil.
“Maybe you should try ordering something else,” Deanna suggests, heart in her throat as she watches Castiel take another spoonful of malicious gloop, “If you don’t want burgers, then maybe a dessert? Pie?”
At the mention of pie, Castiel takes a larger swig of gore.
Deanna frowns. Castiel has no reason to dislike pie as much as he dislikes burgers. He’s never binged on pie; never even touched one. The most experience he’s had with pie is through Deanna. And sure, sometimes pie is the reason Deanna doesn’t pay as much attention to Castiel’s lectures as she should, but something that delicious just can’t be put down.
Castiel continues eating the remains of the Andes Flight Disaster.
“Or - oh, hey. They’ve got milkshakes,” Deanna points desperately to the beverage menu, “Haven’t had one of those in a while. Can’t go wrong with a milkshake. You should try one.”
Castiel pauses with his spoon suspended half-way to his mouth. Deanna can see little flakes of Soylent Green.
“Alright,” he agrees.
Deanna calls the devil-waitress to banish the soup and orders a chocolate milkshake for Castiel. She’s fairly certain Susan’s Saucy Soup is just a fluke since the other food Deanna has seen the diner patrons eating seems completely natural and thoroughly cooked. Her own burger was satisfying enough. Castiel’s just not a lucky angel, picking the one unholy item on the menu.
Deanna relaxes against the back of the booth seat, glad to see evil done away with yet again. Castiel looks similarly relieved but less than thrilled and it doesn’t take long for her to realize why.
“What you picked wasn’t bad, really. I mean, you couldn’t have known until you saw it. It was a ‘Special’ and had its own special name and everything. Normally that means good things when you’re eating out. Next time,” Deanna says, leaning forward to catch Castiel’s eye, “Next time we’ll go to the right kind of place and you can try some tomato rice soup.”
“Tomato rice soup?” Castiel’s voice is doubtful and flat, but Deanna sees curiosity and wan hope in his face, like a child being reassured that the tummy ache will pass and no watermelons will grow in his stomach.
“Yeah,” Deanna smiles, thinking of sun-warmed kitchens, the soft babble of a radio and the clang of spoons on pots, “The best kind of soup.”
Deanna is shaken from her thoughts by the arrival of Castiel’s chocolate milkshake served with a wink from the waitress. There will be no tips.
“Hold on, let me run some quality control.”
The milkshake certainly looks alright; maybe even better than alright, but after watching Castiel brave the soup, Deanna feels it’s her duty to ensure this experience turns out better.
Both the stainless steel cup and tall glass are clean, condensation already forming on the cool surface in a mist of tiny beads which lighten the creamy brown of the beverage. Deanna plucks a red and white straw from the can at the end of the table and spears it through the crown of whipped cream on the drink before lowering her lips to the plastic.
It’s good. Sweet and light and smooth. Everything a good milkshake should be with a delightful chocolate base. She’s even tempted to continue drinking, but refrains when she peers up through her lashes to see Castiel watching her, an unreadable look in his eyes.
“Deanna Approved,” she says with a slightly apologetic grin, sliding the drink back to Castiel as she brushes her long hair out of her face.
This time, Castiel doesn’t hesitate to take a sample. Hands come up from under the table to clamp down on the base of the glass. He forgoes the second straw Deanna’s about to hand him and fastens his mouth to the plastic tube already in the drink. Half the milkshake is gone before the next blink of her eye.
“Like it?” Deanna smirks, reaching out to pinch the straw between her fingers and slow the angel down. A good thing should be savoured.
Castiel seems to get the message because he releases the straw to reply, “Yes.”
His earnest response and the shy flick of his tongue over his lips tug Deanna’s mouth into a lazy grin. Having answered Deanna’s question, Castiel doesn’t waste another moment and returns his attention to his glass, slurping slowly but steadily away. Deanna can’t help but watch in amusement, her face cradled in her hands with elbows rested on the table top.
There aren’t many things that bring such simple pleasure, so Deanna waves the witch-ress over to order one of every flavour of milkshake.
* * *
“Y’know what’s weird?” Deanna asks later that week while browsing the town’s surprisingly large costume emporium. She rummages through a bin of assorted props and comes back up with a set of felt antlers.
Castiel peers at the sparkly unicorn horn in his hand like he’s worried it might be real. “What?”
“I’ve dressed up so many times for different cases, but I’ve never actually worn a costume for Halloween before.” Deanna chucks the antlers carelessly towards Castiel.
The antlers flex and bend, bouncing harmlessly off the side of his head like a leaf against a streetlamp. Castiel continues examining the plastic horn in his hand, turning it point-down and testing its weight. “There are many children in North America who don’t participate in Halloween.”
“I know, and obviously with all that’s happened, my family’s never really laughed about the things that go bump in the night,” Deanna picks up a pair of novelty glasses, shaking the frames and watching the pop-out eyes jiggle loosely on their springs, “But it’s just, you’d think that on Halloween - the busiest hunting day of the year - we’d have gotten a gig that required putting on a costume ages ago.”
“You have one now.”
“Yeah, I guess so. And I’m sure Sam dressed up for Halloween at Stanford, so it figures that my first time would be at the house party of some stupid kids who got their friend killed.”
Castiel makes a vague stabbing motion with the pink-tinted horn, “Is there a particular costume you’d like to wear?”
“Well, no. When I was little, I’d see my classmates come to school looking like little kittens or bunnies or princesses and I’d just be that weird girl who looked like a boy, like every other school day. I never really thought about costumes,” Deanna tosses the novelty glasses at Castiel. The plastic frames connect with the top of his skull before sliding down, one of the springs getting tangled in his hair and stopping its descent, “And I don’t have anything in mind now, but I really want to get Sam something.”
It’s only fair that since Sam gets to spend all day at the town hall looking up records - something he enjoys, especially with such a cute filing clerk - while she blinds herself looking at horrific printouts and running errands, she should get to decide what costume Sam wears. Unfortunately, that is not so.
“They’ve got a huge selection here. He could be the Hulk or a harem girl or a freaking mustard bottle - just something interesting - but no,” Deanna gripes, paddling her hands through the mounds of costumes and discarding gaudy material left and right. “He’s too manly and mature - but really, more like the Grinch who stole Halloween, except his heart’s already two sizes too big - so he’s just going to wear one of his plaid shirts and get the axe from the trunk to be a ‘lumberjack’. A lumberjack.”
Castiel tugs helplessly at the glasses caught on his hair.
“I told him to be a real sasquatch - or Chewbacca. Just stick some more body hair on and he’d be good to go - but nope.” Deanna pauses in her digging to hold up a sequined mesh skirt. The banana yellow ribbons criss-crossing the garment shimmer brightly under the fluorescent lights.
She tosses it back into the bin from whence it came.
“In a way it all makes sense now, why he’s so anal about the environment,” Deanna shakes her head, tossing her hair over one shoulder. “I think Sam secretly has a grudge against trees. Probably ‘cause their branches keep smacking him in the face.”
“He is very tall,” says Castiel in understanding.
Having failed to rid himself of the novelty glasses, Castiel turns to Deanna, two pairs of unblinking eyes beaming accusingly at her. Both sets are strangely matched in their ability to unnerve her though by all rights, the bobbing and rolling plastic googly eyes should look ridiculous protruding from his head.
Deanna steps over to Castiel and reaches up to wrestle the glasses none too gently from his scalp, making his unruly hair look more like the victim of a hurricane than anything else. “Maybe I should just get him a costume anyways and make him wear it. I’m his big sister. He has to listen.”
Except that logic stopped working when Sam was nine years old and realized he had a larger vocabulary than Deanna. Or maybe it was because their dad gave him that gun.
“Likely, he forbade you from purchasing a costume for him because he is familiar with your humour,” Castiel says squarely, even as the googly eyes are freed, taking a dozen little black hairs with them. He doesn’t seem to notice, only turning his gaze to something behind Deanna, “I can guess what you had in mind.”
Deanna doesn’t need to turn around to know what mannequin Castiel’s looking at. She grins toothily, “C’mon, you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be a little funny. Besides, it comes with the pitchfork.”
“It would be ironic, but unappreciated.”
Deanna makes a rude hand gesture.
Like the plastic unicorn horn, the googly-eyed glasses are discarded, Castiel’s hair left caught in the springs for the next shopper who has the misfortune to stumble upon them. Deanna returns to her browsing, moving on from the free-for-all bins in the center of the emporium to the racks along the walls. She assumes Castiel is doing his own shopping, but that myth is laid to rest when she takes a step backwards and promptly treads on the toes of black leather shoes.
Deanna leans back and tilts her head up to look at Castiel. It’s a poor view since she’s not exactly a dwarf, meaning her forehead fits just so against the underside of his jaw, the crown of her skull cradled in the hollow of his throat.
“I thought you were looking around for your own costume,” she says, bemused.
Castiel shifts his head to meet her eye. “I am already wearing a costume.”
The implications of that statement are serenely overlooked in favour of considering Castiel’s current fraying outfit.
“Okay. Well. I guess you could pass for a... noir detective or a cop. Or something,” human, “But if I’m going to dress up, you are too.”
Castiel cocks his head, his chin mussing Deanna’s bangs as he hums soundlessly, the vibrations barely registering against Deanna’s spine. It’s only then that she notices how the code of personal space has been breached, but she doesn’t say anything about it and neither does Castiel.
“Have you found a costume?”
“I think I’ll wear this,” Deanna smiles slyly up at Castiel, holding up the plastic wrapped square she’d picked off the shelf before them.
Castiel takes one look at the image on the packaging and frowns in surprise, “Why would you wear this?”
“Deanna, angel of the Lord,” Deanna intones solemnly, managing to hold a serious expression for a heartbeat before shrugging easily, the soft flannel of her shirt catching on Castiel’s lapels. Her lips quirk in amusement though she avoids his wide eyes; she laughs a little. “Can’t be a meatsuit this way, see? We’ll be the same, though Sam will still be a stupid lumberjack,” Deanna feints disappointment with a shake of her head, “Ruining God’s green earth with all his clear cutting. That bastard.”
“That is,” Castiel says. His mouth opens and closes soundlessly three times. “I am not particularly fond of lumberjacks,” he concedes.
Deanna smiles a little wider.
“What should I wear?”
“I dunno. Let’s just try a bunch of stuff on.”
With that plan of action, Deanna proceeds to gleefully lead Castiel around the store, picking up anything and everything that looks interesting and shoving it onto the angel before herding him to the shady change rooms in the back. Deanna pushes him into one of the narrow booths and he almost overbalances, weighed down as he is by the outfits heaped in his arms, but Deanna doesn’t pause, drawing the moth eaten curtain between them as if it could possibly protect anyone’s modesty.
Castiel’s head appears briefly around the barrier to direct an irritated squint at Deanna, but she just pushes him back, grinning from ear to ear, “C’mon, Cas! Don’t be shy!”
There’s a moment of silence behind the change room curtain that Deanna listens intently to, then the harsh rustle of fabric. Deanna leans forward in anticipation of seeing the glory of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or the mystique of a samurai, but instead she pitches forwards into the curtain at the sound of her name in her ear.
“Deanna,” Castiel says from behind her.
Deanna’s curses are muffled by the mouthful of dusty black fabric she inhales.
“Deanna,” Castiel repeats, “I don’t really...”
She picks herself up, pushing off from the change room wall to turn around and find Castiel sans trench coat, tie and suit jacket, his white shirt fully unbuttoned and hanging open. The angel’s shoulders are hunched and his face slightly pinched, giving him a hunted look like the bundle in his arms is the last of the Romanovs and not a wrinkled toga.
Castiel doesn’t finish his sentence, but he does lower his arms in annoyance, revealing a lightly muscled chest and thin red lines of scar tissue, a messy scrawl made all the brighter by the stark white of his pale flesh.
Deanna swallows thickly, all her earlier cheer floating away like dust in the wind. “Uh, problems... problems with the toga?”
“I rarely dress or undress,” Castiel says by way of explanation. “The process is unwieldy.”
And it would be for him, Deanna realizes. Maybe Castiel’s gotten used to it, but it’s probably none too comfortable. To him, the situation must be something like putting on a four-fingered glove over a five-fingered glove when you actually have more than six fingers.
Suddenly, playing dress up with a warrior of God doesn’t seem like such a nice idea, if ever it was.
“Oh,” Deanna buys herself some time to think by reaching out to do up the angel’s buttons, starting from the top. “Well, uh, this isn’t really a party you or Sam would be welcome at, unlike me, ‘cause I’m a girl and you two look like dudes. Also there’s the age thing where, again, ‘cause I’m a girl - a hot girl - it doesn’t matter, but for you guys it does. Sam’s actually growing a beard so no one will recognize that ‘reporter’ that was hanging around on campus. It kinda works for him ‘cause he’s a damn lumberjack, but you’re...”
Deanna finishes with the last button, her fingers lingering; almost tracing hidden shapes in the air over the fabric before she gets a hold of herself. “You kind of stick out wherever you go, so I thought maybe a disguise with more coverage would be good, but you could sit this part out if you want.”
Castiel immediately shakes his head in the negative, “I couldn’t help research. Perhaps I can’t fully grasp this case, but it feels... disturbing.” His lips thin, “I’m going to the house with you.”
“Um,” Deanna frowns uncertainly, finally looking up to meet the angel’s blue eyes, the rings of colour flashing like turbines whirling through the sky. “Alrighty. We’ll just get you a... mask. Should be easy enough to find something that goes with a suit.”
And it is that easy.
By the time Deanna has gathered Castiel’s trench coat and the rest of his discarded ensemble from the change room, the angel has chosen a mask from the far wall.
“Deanna,” Castiel says from behind her.
This time she’s expecting it and so she doesn’t leap away. What she doesn’t expect is Castiel’s chosen disguise.
“Will this suffice?” he asks, voice deadened by the mask that encases his whole head.
Deanna stares up at the horse head perched on Castiel’s shoulders. Though made of either rubber or plastic, the texture of brown hair on its face is disturbingly realistic and complete with the outline of veins, while the darker brown of its coarse mane seems to grow in patchy clumps over its crown and down its neck. The beast’s nostrils are flared, mouth agape with square teeth bright in a tar black mouth. Its eyes are the most catching feature, open wide and vacant; the whites visible all around dark irises like a creature in its death throes.
There are no words.
* * *
“Sam’s waiting,” Castiel says, and Deanna almost loses an eye. Today being Halloween it might’ve been alright to be a one-eyed woman, but since that wouldn’t work for the rest of the year Deanna is thankful that she’s never taken sudden angel appearances as badly as her brother. All that time spent with Castiel has almost made her impervious to heart failure, though that doesn’t change her belief that Castiel should wear bells.
Deanna grunts and returns the tip of the eyeliner to her skin, sketching in a slight upward curve to the corner of her eye, “Yeah, yeah. Just two more minutes.”
“That was what you said two minutes ago.” Deanna can almost hear his wings snap with impatience. As if to drive the point home, outside, Sam leans on the horn of the Impala.
“Well I’m saying it again.”
Castiel gives the impression that, were he anyone else, he’d be pacing back and forth behind the little bench seat Deanna sits on, wearing a trough through the motel foundations and working his way down to Hell so he can wash his hands of her. However, since he is himself, Castiel merely stands directly behind her, almost like a living seatback or a weeping sore on her shoulder.
“Is this necessary?” he grits out, “This... ‘make-up’?” Castiel pronounces the words carefully like they leave a bad taste in his mouth.
“For the good of the case, Cas,” Deanna answers distractedly, “People prefer talking to pretty girls.”
Castiel exhales. A sort of substitute to rubbing his temples, “Does it always take so long?”
“No. Normally I don’t put on half this stuff. It’s just, tonight - special occasion, I guess,” Deanna twitches one shoulder up in a shrug. “I know it’s not like some fashion show or my BFF’s wedding, but I just thought, why not?”
She’s really not even using too many cosmetics. A lot more eye make-up, sure, what with the glittery eye shadow and mascara. There’s the foundation to, which she used to cover up her freckles to give her more of a polished, porcelain look, but really, it’s not like she’s caked her face in the stuff.
“You don’t have anything to make up for, though.”
Because Castiel is standing, Deanna can’t see his face in the small mirror on the table. She’s not sure of what expression he wears, but his statement is exasperated and blunt as always. Open in the way only he can be.
“Um,” says Deanna. She tries to say something like, ‘That’s true,’ or ‘My face did launch a thousand ships,’ but manages neither. Instead she continues applying cosmetics with her eyes glued firmly to the mirror. She ignores the breath that ruffles the little flyaway hairs on the top of her head when Castiel leans over.
“You don’t need any of this,” Castiel says, a slight edge to his voice. And she’s not looking, but Deanna just knows that the angel is cocking his head in that way of his. The puzzled tilt that he has when he sees with crystal clarity and can’t understand how it escapes everyone else’s grasp.
Deanna clears her throat of imaginary phlegm, “Well, you know us puny mortals. Always doing stuff we don’t need to do.” She lowers the black pencil from her eye to look down at it, twirling the little stub between her fingers. “Besides, shouldn’t you be used to me wearing make-up? I put some on every day.”
“You don’t wear any during the days spent driving with your brother, nor when you are researching in your motel room.”
“’Cause I don’t need it when I’m not going to see anyone else,” Deanna says, dropping the eye liner and picking up a tube of deep red lipstick to draw across her lips. It’s not her usual colour, being too bright and flashy, too much like a movie star’s - like blood - but it’s part of a little cosmetics kit that she’d gotten as a thank you present after one of her cases, back when she’d been hunting solo.
Castiel doesn’t say anything and Deanna fumbles for a better explanation. “Think of it as, uh, war paint,” she tries, hoping to relate it to things an age old warrior - however non-human - might have more experience with, “Putting on make-up is like putting on my battle face.”
“You don’t look intimidating,” Castiel states, unimpressed.
“No, but I - I feel better, alright?” Deanna scowls, the angel’s frustration rubbing off on her. Her red lips look strangely pronounced in the mirror, “I know I’m not ugly. I’m fucking hot stuff, but this makes me feel like... like I can do... more.”
Her reasoning sounds weak and confused to her own ears and Deanna wishes she had a way with words. But she doesn’t, and so she flaps her hands about helplessly like that might make her more coherent somehow.
“No one taught me how to do any of this, but I knew it was kinda important to know, to not stick out like a sore thumb or to get info as a sexy, no-nonsense cop or whatever’s needed. All this stuff - the dressing up, the make-up - it’s like... turning into someone else.”
Castiel is curled over her shoulder, but he isn’t touching her. Despite this and the cool October air that wafts through the open window, the heat of him is like the shimmer over desert asphalt, silvery and elusive; something briefly seen but mostly felt.
It strikes Deanna that even though Castiel’s chin has finally made an appearance in her mirror the frame is too small to ever contain both her and the angel. No matter the angle that she turns her head, she can’t quite meet his eye in the reflection and something in her throat quivers.
“You see, the longer you play at it, the more you pretend, the closer you feel to whatever you’re trying to be,” she says, capping the tube of lipstick and placing it on the table. Her hair looks more blonde and less brown - almost golden - in the yellow light of the motel lamp, falling in gentle waves over her shoulders instead of the usual wind-tumbled mess. Her lashes seem longer, her eyes wider, kinder - less desperate and more hopeful - she looks like a cherished ideal; a precious memory.
“And sometimes... sometimes it’s nice. To be prettier. Nicer. More... more important and...” She looks good in white and the effect isn’t ruined by the cheap cotton of the costume. The cut of the dress isn’t the most creative and it hangs loose and airy on her slight frame, but it looks passably ethereal when paired with the feathered wings strapped to her back. Without them it looks like she’s wearing a white night gown.
Her reflection is unexpected when it shouldn’t be, and in the several seconds she spends staring at the mirror, Castiel reaches around her to grab the tube of lipstick from where it stands on the table.
“Cas...” Deanna drags out the name, surprised as she turns in her seat to look at the angel straightening up behind her. “What are you doing?”
Castiel doesn’t answer her. What he does do is stare straight ahead at the blank wall before him and pop the cap off the lipstick with precise fingers; careful like he’s defusing a bomb.
He then proceeds to smear lipstick across his mouth.
“I still think it unnecessary,” he says, hand moving mechanically in efficient strokes, looking for all the world like he’s well practiced at applying lipstick. The squiggly red line on his face says otherwise.
It’s a bit like watching a beloved pet’s toilet funeral.
When Castiel is done - if having a red doodle scrawled nearly from ear to ear is ‘done’ - he circles the bench in two awkward steps and sits down next to Deanna, shouldering her impatiently aside so he can observe his handiwork. “I see,” he says. “This is more difficult than I thought.”
Deanna’s not sure what to say. There’s the obvious ‘Yes’ and the ‘It might be easier if you actually look at what you’re doing’ and a ‘What the fuck, Cas?’ waiting on her tongue, but she says none of them, just laughs and laughs. And laughs.
When she’s done - as in, able to spare air for speech - she manages a choked response, hugging her split sides to keep her organs from popping out, “Fuck, don’t - don’t do that. I don’t look much like Batman right now, but that doesn’t - that doesn’t mean I’m okay with you being the damn Joker, Cas.”
Of course, her meaning is lost on Castiel and his annoyed squint makes everything wonderful. “I am trying to understand you better, Deanna,” he says, his red mouth looking like dancing gummy worms. “Sam suggested that shared experiences would help.”
Deanna loves her brother so very much.
“Oh?” she smiles widely, lips pressed tightly together to keep from braying like an ass, “That why you’ve been hanging around me this whole case?”
Castiel pouts or something. It’s hard to tell.
“It’s okay, Cas,” Deanna grins. She shakes her head and picks up a cotton pad from the table, moistening it with make-up remover before turning back to Castiel to dab at his wax covered cheeks, “Anyways, you know lipstick’s for girls, right?”
Castiel holds still, like a wilted cactus or a grumpy clown and oh - Deanna wishes Sam were in the room with them. “I’ve seen men wear lip colour.”
“Well you’re not a guy or a girl, so none for you,” she chuckles, grabbing the angel’s chin and turning his head so she can scrub away a stubborn smear at the corner of his mouth.
“I can do better,” Castiel says as the last trace of red is removed from his face. He glares at the unsuspecting tube of lipstick on the table as if willing it to apply itself to his face or risk being smote.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you really want to try putting on make-up. And with your hand-eye-face coordination we’ll take so long that Sam will probably mummify in the car.”
The angel lets out a harsh breath through his nose, grimacing like he’s being forced to swallow defeat. “You’re right. We have somewhere to be. If you’re done, let’s go.”
Castiel reaches out to pluck the horse head mask from the table and he makes a move to get up off the bench seat. His eyes blink furiously. His brows draw down to crease his forehead. His lips twist, his jaw tenses, the tendons jump in his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobs once, twice - and Deanna has seen him restless before, but never so animated.
Maybe it’s because they’re sitting so close - side by side, thigh to thigh - that she can see all these minute ticks, tiny tremors, and tell-tale twitches. These movements are the products of tension, and if this were any other, Deanna would dismiss them as such. However, this is Castiel and in all the time Deanna has known him, Castiel has never before moved because he could, but always because he should.
And maybe it’s because she sees this, or maybe it’s because Castiel just looks so at odds with the stutter in her chest - the flutter left by laughter and the gasping, floating dizziness of the oxygen deprived - that Deanna says what she says.
“There’s a way to get some make-up on. A quick way.”
Castiel has the mask raised above his head, ready to put on, but he freezes and turns his face towards her, intrigued. At this distance she can see every slivered shade in his eyes and it’s nothing human, but nothing inhuman, either.
“How?” he asks, and she sees cool blue but feels warm breath.
“Like this,” she answers, and kisses him.
It’s a simple press of lips to lips - little more than a clumsy peck - and lasts for barely a heartbeat, but when Deanna draws back, she doesn’t dare open her eyes.
It was nothing Earth shattering - what with Castiel not responding at all - and it’s possible Deanna’s shared better kisses with her pillow, but she is still fucking horrified. This was more impulsive and only a little less stupid than when she sold her soul, but she expects the consequences to be equally terrible.
She imagines opening her eyes to meet Castiel’s glare, disgusted or frigid or both. She imagines him mind whammying her until she’s regained her senses or smiting her on the spot. She imagines him looking at her with confusion. She imagines him flying away. Somehow it’s this last vision that frightens her most of all.
And then she feels some floppy thing land on her head and slide off her face.
She opens her eyes and looks at Castiel to find him looking back at her with an expression of... nothing.
His hands are still frozen in the air above them though the horse head mask now lies on the floor. He hasn’t moved on the bench, not closer nor farther and not even to turn a little to the side. The only thing about him that’s changed is his mouth - lips now just touched with red.
It’s only when their eyes meet that the world seems to start again. Castiel bends over quietly to retrieve the mask and Deanna points her face to the mirror, absently noticing that her hair is ruined and make-up smudged. She looks like some wind-blurred, wild thing; like a girl who took off running because she could so she did.
It doesn’t seem like a bad idea - to get up and just bolt out the door. Get in the Impala and tell Sam to step on it - but Castiel beats her to it, standing up in one swift motion. He turns on his heel and walks briskly to the door, pausing only when he has his hand on the knob.
Deanna finds it a little strange that Castiel didn’t just beam himself into the Impala, especially since she finally realizes that the loud wailing which she’d assumed was her own is actually Sam, honking and honking out in the parking lot.
Castiel turns the knob and opens the door, then pauses again, one foot on the threshold.
“Is there a... quick way to remove make-up?” he asks, the back of his neck flushed bright red.
Deanna grins.
Author: yellow_pomelo
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Always-a-girl!Dean/Castiel
Spoilers: Up to end of S5, just in case.
Warnings: Some cussing. I'm not even sure what months S5 is set in, but let's pretend it includes October.
Word Count: ~6, 600
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural or any of it's characters.
Summary: Set sometime during S5; It's almost Halloween and so there is work to be done, but more importantly there is diner food and costume shopping and good times all around.
Notes: So I've been MIA for a while, but I don't dine and dash! I said I'd write a mostly angst-less always-a-girl!Dean/Cas fic for insight2 , and after all her support for my other fic, this is my gift/prompt-fill for her! I was actually writing another always-a-girl!Dean/Cas fic, but then it was so not light and not going well, so maybe I'll release it at a later date. And yeah, it's no-where near Halloween yet, but just roll with it.
“Sam is a hypocrite,” Deanna says, plucking a fry from the small mountain to her right and dipping it in ketchup, “A terrible, terrible hypocrite.”
Castiel turns away from the smudged window of Susan’s Diner to look at Deanna, distracted from his task of staring a new hole into the ozone layer.
“I have yet to meet a mortal man who has not at some point fallen to hypocrisy.”
“Yeah, but Sam is the worst. I mean look at this. Look at this,” Deanna smacks one greasy fist onto the foot-thick stack of papers she’s reading, her other hand waving in the direction of the motel where a small metropolis of papers sits waiting on the dresser. “He’s always going on and on about being environmentally friendly and littering and recycling and blah blah blah blah. ‘Dee, if you’re not going to reduce your carbon footprint, at least separate the paper and plastic’.”
Deanna drops the falsetto, continuing in her normal pitch and throwing her arms up in exasperation, “Half the places we go to don’t even have recycling bins. Forget different kinds of bins for different kinds of crap!” The fry between her fingers slips away to land quietly somewhere over her shoulder.
Castiel looks at her. He’s not doing anything but sitting stiffly opposite to her in the booth, but somehow he implies that the hands which rest in his lap are now tented over the sticky table top, his face tilted over them so he can peer over his glasses at her in reproach.
She doesn’t know how he does that. Castiel doesn’t even wear glasses.
“The two of you protect human life. It isn’t illogical for Sam to extend his care to the earth you walk upon.”
Deanna acknowledges this with a hum, shuffling the papers around, “Well he’s got no right to bitch at me about being green when he goes to the library and comes back with a million rectangles of dead trees.”
She does not mention why Sam had to print out so many pages of material to lug back to the motel, and Castiel wisely does not mention the frozen screen of the laptop resting on the motel’s bedside table.
It was not her fault. Anyways, knowing the lonely road they travel, Sam should have installed better anti-virus software. A girl has needs.
Because he is an angel, Castiel doesn’t say anything about any of that. Instead he says, “I can help with the reading, if you’d like.”
“Uh,” Deanna looks down at the printouts in her lap, page after page taken from a dozen different forums, all full of shocking text and sprinkled with very, very inappropriate GIFs frozen in very inappropriate black and white stills. This is why Deanna is ninety percent sure the virus wasn’t her fault. This time.
“No, I don’t think so,” says Deanna, because Castiel is an angel. “There’s a lot of, uh, stuff you wouldn’t get. Slang and... stuff.”
It’s probable that Castiel is a big voyeur who has spied upon humanity for millennia, but Deanna doesn’t care. If there is anything out there that can make an angel weep, it is this, and not for the first time Deanna is glad Castiel can barely operate a phone, never mind a computer.
Deanna herself can hardly handle this and she’s seen a lot of mind-scarring things while hunting. The Internet is enough on its own, but now she and her brother have been forced to scour the underbelly of the web, rooting through all sorts of unpleasant threads, trying to crack freaking riddles and codes in the posts so they might find some sort of physical remnant that can be destroyed. All this because of some stupid ghost who decided to haunt an internet message board.
Sam’s thinking they’ll be salting and burning a keyboard full of shed skin cells or maybe an office chair stained with sweat. Deanna’s hoping for a good, solid corpse to desecrate, but all in due time.
For now, Deanna tries not to look too closely at a pixelated image in the corner of one page - God, what is that? A walrus, or-? - letting her eyes fly away to meet Castiel’s curious gaze with a forced grin, “Y’know what I always find distra- comforting? Food. Let’s get you something to eat.”
Deanna settles her stack of papers on the seat beside her, safe from innocent blue eyes. Then some kid rushes by on his way to the bathroom, leaving the edge of a page to flutter lightly in his wake.
Deanna slams her elbow down on the papers, resting her weight against them like she’s casually stretching out a crick in her back and not reaching out to strangle something.
She doesn’t know why she thought it would be okay to bring the papers out anymore.
Castiel squints suspiciously at her and for one horrifying moment it occurs to Deanna that he might have the ability to see through objects. “I require no nourishm-”
“Whatever. Just humour me, ‘kay? Eating by myself feels stupid.”
Castiel looks up from where Deanna’s elbow pins the papers in place to rest his eyes on Deanna’s half finished meal. The weight of his stare is like that of a condemned man who has seen what became of those thrown to the lions and knows it is finally his turn.
“Are burgers the only type of food they serve?”
Deanna recalls the red meat binge that made the angel so happy, only to end with the immense shame of uncontrollably gorging himself while not two feet away, the world was coming to an end.
Castiel doesn’t have a very good relationship with burgers anymore.
“I think they’ve got some soup or something,” Deanna says, subtly rearranging the fries on her plate to hide the remnants of her burger. No wonder Castiel had been staring at the sky and not at her. “I dunno, check the menu.”
In a show of extreme faith, Castiel picks up one of the placards standing at the end of the table, rotating the plastic encased square in cautious hands as he considers his options with a critical eye.
Deanna leaves him to it, discreetly snatching up the last of her burger and shoving it all in her mouth while he’s not looking. She chews thoughtfully as she flips a page on the seat next to her, wilfully ignoring all images and zeroing in on key text.
Distantly, Deanna hears the waitress come to take Castiel’s order, her simpering words and saccharine tone grating on the ears. Deanna restrains herself from throwing twenty pounds of paper at the woman and instead picks up her highlighter to circle and circle and circle a grouping of Greek letters. It bleeds through four pages, but that’s okay.
It takes a lot of concentration to avoid looking at anything that can drive her to madness and it’s only when she hears the clatter of ceramic on Formica that Deanna looks up again in time to see the waitress leer at Castiel, her bubble gum pink mouth stretched wide.
“Enjoy,” the waitress chirps brightly, her gaze lingering on Castiel as she leaves.
Something about her really bothers Deanna and the feeling is compounded when she looks down at the meal placed before them. Castiel turns equally mistrustful eyes towards the food though his wariness stems from elsewhere.
“That is...”
The large white bowl is filled with something red and bubbling. And lumpy.
“’Susan’s Saucy Soup’,” says Castiel. “It is special.”
Deanna looks at the placard entitled ‘Specials’ to check the description of the dish. ‘Tomato Soup,’ it claims.
A large bubble slowly oozes to the surface of the soup and pops with a low, menacing hiss.
Deana feels the vague urge to lash out and fling the bowl to the floor, but then she remembers she’s a hunter and carries flasks of holy water. However, before she can call Sam to recite Latin over the phone, Castiel dips his spoon in and brings the tiniest scoop of Mystery to his lips.
“Is it... is it tomato soup?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s not sure if Castiel doesn’t know because he’s never tasted plain tomatoes before or because the soup is made of Regan MacNeil.
“Maybe you should try ordering something else,” Deanna suggests, heart in her throat as she watches Castiel take another spoonful of malicious gloop, “If you don’t want burgers, then maybe a dessert? Pie?”
At the mention of pie, Castiel takes a larger swig of gore.
Deanna frowns. Castiel has no reason to dislike pie as much as he dislikes burgers. He’s never binged on pie; never even touched one. The most experience he’s had with pie is through Deanna. And sure, sometimes pie is the reason Deanna doesn’t pay as much attention to Castiel’s lectures as she should, but something that delicious just can’t be put down.
Castiel continues eating the remains of the Andes Flight Disaster.
“Or - oh, hey. They’ve got milkshakes,” Deanna points desperately to the beverage menu, “Haven’t had one of those in a while. Can’t go wrong with a milkshake. You should try one.”
Castiel pauses with his spoon suspended half-way to his mouth. Deanna can see little flakes of Soylent Green.
“Alright,” he agrees.
Deanna calls the devil-waitress to banish the soup and orders a chocolate milkshake for Castiel. She’s fairly certain Susan’s Saucy Soup is just a fluke since the other food Deanna has seen the diner patrons eating seems completely natural and thoroughly cooked. Her own burger was satisfying enough. Castiel’s just not a lucky angel, picking the one unholy item on the menu.
Deanna relaxes against the back of the booth seat, glad to see evil done away with yet again. Castiel looks similarly relieved but less than thrilled and it doesn’t take long for her to realize why.
“What you picked wasn’t bad, really. I mean, you couldn’t have known until you saw it. It was a ‘Special’ and had its own special name and everything. Normally that means good things when you’re eating out. Next time,” Deanna says, leaning forward to catch Castiel’s eye, “Next time we’ll go to the right kind of place and you can try some tomato rice soup.”
“Tomato rice soup?” Castiel’s voice is doubtful and flat, but Deanna sees curiosity and wan hope in his face, like a child being reassured that the tummy ache will pass and no watermelons will grow in his stomach.
“Yeah,” Deanna smiles, thinking of sun-warmed kitchens, the soft babble of a radio and the clang of spoons on pots, “The best kind of soup.”
Deanna is shaken from her thoughts by the arrival of Castiel’s chocolate milkshake served with a wink from the waitress. There will be no tips.
“Hold on, let me run some quality control.”
The milkshake certainly looks alright; maybe even better than alright, but after watching Castiel brave the soup, Deanna feels it’s her duty to ensure this experience turns out better.
Both the stainless steel cup and tall glass are clean, condensation already forming on the cool surface in a mist of tiny beads which lighten the creamy brown of the beverage. Deanna plucks a red and white straw from the can at the end of the table and spears it through the crown of whipped cream on the drink before lowering her lips to the plastic.
It’s good. Sweet and light and smooth. Everything a good milkshake should be with a delightful chocolate base. She’s even tempted to continue drinking, but refrains when she peers up through her lashes to see Castiel watching her, an unreadable look in his eyes.
“Deanna Approved,” she says with a slightly apologetic grin, sliding the drink back to Castiel as she brushes her long hair out of her face.
This time, Castiel doesn’t hesitate to take a sample. Hands come up from under the table to clamp down on the base of the glass. He forgoes the second straw Deanna’s about to hand him and fastens his mouth to the plastic tube already in the drink. Half the milkshake is gone before the next blink of her eye.
“Like it?” Deanna smirks, reaching out to pinch the straw between her fingers and slow the angel down. A good thing should be savoured.
Castiel seems to get the message because he releases the straw to reply, “Yes.”
His earnest response and the shy flick of his tongue over his lips tug Deanna’s mouth into a lazy grin. Having answered Deanna’s question, Castiel doesn’t waste another moment and returns his attention to his glass, slurping slowly but steadily away. Deanna can’t help but watch in amusement, her face cradled in her hands with elbows rested on the table top.
There aren’t many things that bring such simple pleasure, so Deanna waves the witch-ress over to order one of every flavour of milkshake.
* * *
“Y’know what’s weird?” Deanna asks later that week while browsing the town’s surprisingly large costume emporium. She rummages through a bin of assorted props and comes back up with a set of felt antlers.
Castiel peers at the sparkly unicorn horn in his hand like he’s worried it might be real. “What?”
“I’ve dressed up so many times for different cases, but I’ve never actually worn a costume for Halloween before.” Deanna chucks the antlers carelessly towards Castiel.
The antlers flex and bend, bouncing harmlessly off the side of his head like a leaf against a streetlamp. Castiel continues examining the plastic horn in his hand, turning it point-down and testing its weight. “There are many children in North America who don’t participate in Halloween.”
“I know, and obviously with all that’s happened, my family’s never really laughed about the things that go bump in the night,” Deanna picks up a pair of novelty glasses, shaking the frames and watching the pop-out eyes jiggle loosely on their springs, “But it’s just, you’d think that on Halloween - the busiest hunting day of the year - we’d have gotten a gig that required putting on a costume ages ago.”
“You have one now.”
“Yeah, I guess so. And I’m sure Sam dressed up for Halloween at Stanford, so it figures that my first time would be at the house party of some stupid kids who got their friend killed.”
Castiel makes a vague stabbing motion with the pink-tinted horn, “Is there a particular costume you’d like to wear?”
“Well, no. When I was little, I’d see my classmates come to school looking like little kittens or bunnies or princesses and I’d just be that weird girl who looked like a boy, like every other school day. I never really thought about costumes,” Deanna tosses the novelty glasses at Castiel. The plastic frames connect with the top of his skull before sliding down, one of the springs getting tangled in his hair and stopping its descent, “And I don’t have anything in mind now, but I really want to get Sam something.”
It’s only fair that since Sam gets to spend all day at the town hall looking up records - something he enjoys, especially with such a cute filing clerk - while she blinds herself looking at horrific printouts and running errands, she should get to decide what costume Sam wears. Unfortunately, that is not so.
“They’ve got a huge selection here. He could be the Hulk or a harem girl or a freaking mustard bottle - just something interesting - but no,” Deanna gripes, paddling her hands through the mounds of costumes and discarding gaudy material left and right. “He’s too manly and mature - but really, more like the Grinch who stole Halloween, except his heart’s already two sizes too big - so he’s just going to wear one of his plaid shirts and get the axe from the trunk to be a ‘lumberjack’. A lumberjack.”
Castiel tugs helplessly at the glasses caught on his hair.
“I told him to be a real sasquatch - or Chewbacca. Just stick some more body hair on and he’d be good to go - but nope.” Deanna pauses in her digging to hold up a sequined mesh skirt. The banana yellow ribbons criss-crossing the garment shimmer brightly under the fluorescent lights.
She tosses it back into the bin from whence it came.
“In a way it all makes sense now, why he’s so anal about the environment,” Deanna shakes her head, tossing her hair over one shoulder. “I think Sam secretly has a grudge against trees. Probably ‘cause their branches keep smacking him in the face.”
“He is very tall,” says Castiel in understanding.
Having failed to rid himself of the novelty glasses, Castiel turns to Deanna, two pairs of unblinking eyes beaming accusingly at her. Both sets are strangely matched in their ability to unnerve her though by all rights, the bobbing and rolling plastic googly eyes should look ridiculous protruding from his head.
Deanna steps over to Castiel and reaches up to wrestle the glasses none too gently from his scalp, making his unruly hair look more like the victim of a hurricane than anything else. “Maybe I should just get him a costume anyways and make him wear it. I’m his big sister. He has to listen.”
Except that logic stopped working when Sam was nine years old and realized he had a larger vocabulary than Deanna. Or maybe it was because their dad gave him that gun.
“Likely, he forbade you from purchasing a costume for him because he is familiar with your humour,” Castiel says squarely, even as the googly eyes are freed, taking a dozen little black hairs with them. He doesn’t seem to notice, only turning his gaze to something behind Deanna, “I can guess what you had in mind.”
Deanna doesn’t need to turn around to know what mannequin Castiel’s looking at. She grins toothily, “C’mon, you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be a little funny. Besides, it comes with the pitchfork.”
“It would be ironic, but unappreciated.”
Deanna makes a rude hand gesture.
Like the plastic unicorn horn, the googly-eyed glasses are discarded, Castiel’s hair left caught in the springs for the next shopper who has the misfortune to stumble upon them. Deanna returns to her browsing, moving on from the free-for-all bins in the center of the emporium to the racks along the walls. She assumes Castiel is doing his own shopping, but that myth is laid to rest when she takes a step backwards and promptly treads on the toes of black leather shoes.
Deanna leans back and tilts her head up to look at Castiel. It’s a poor view since she’s not exactly a dwarf, meaning her forehead fits just so against the underside of his jaw, the crown of her skull cradled in the hollow of his throat.
“I thought you were looking around for your own costume,” she says, bemused.
Castiel shifts his head to meet her eye. “I am already wearing a costume.”
The implications of that statement are serenely overlooked in favour of considering Castiel’s current fraying outfit.
“Okay. Well. I guess you could pass for a... noir detective or a cop. Or something,” human, “But if I’m going to dress up, you are too.”
Castiel cocks his head, his chin mussing Deanna’s bangs as he hums soundlessly, the vibrations barely registering against Deanna’s spine. It’s only then that she notices how the code of personal space has been breached, but she doesn’t say anything about it and neither does Castiel.
“Have you found a costume?”
“I think I’ll wear this,” Deanna smiles slyly up at Castiel, holding up the plastic wrapped square she’d picked off the shelf before them.
Castiel takes one look at the image on the packaging and frowns in surprise, “Why would you wear this?”
“Deanna, angel of the Lord,” Deanna intones solemnly, managing to hold a serious expression for a heartbeat before shrugging easily, the soft flannel of her shirt catching on Castiel’s lapels. Her lips quirk in amusement though she avoids his wide eyes; she laughs a little. “Can’t be a meatsuit this way, see? We’ll be the same, though Sam will still be a stupid lumberjack,” Deanna feints disappointment with a shake of her head, “Ruining God’s green earth with all his clear cutting. That bastard.”
“That is,” Castiel says. His mouth opens and closes soundlessly three times. “I am not particularly fond of lumberjacks,” he concedes.
Deanna smiles a little wider.
“What should I wear?”
“I dunno. Let’s just try a bunch of stuff on.”
With that plan of action, Deanna proceeds to gleefully lead Castiel around the store, picking up anything and everything that looks interesting and shoving it onto the angel before herding him to the shady change rooms in the back. Deanna pushes him into one of the narrow booths and he almost overbalances, weighed down as he is by the outfits heaped in his arms, but Deanna doesn’t pause, drawing the moth eaten curtain between them as if it could possibly protect anyone’s modesty.
Castiel’s head appears briefly around the barrier to direct an irritated squint at Deanna, but she just pushes him back, grinning from ear to ear, “C’mon, Cas! Don’t be shy!”
There’s a moment of silence behind the change room curtain that Deanna listens intently to, then the harsh rustle of fabric. Deanna leans forward in anticipation of seeing the glory of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or the mystique of a samurai, but instead she pitches forwards into the curtain at the sound of her name in her ear.
“Deanna,” Castiel says from behind her.
Deanna’s curses are muffled by the mouthful of dusty black fabric she inhales.
“Deanna,” Castiel repeats, “I don’t really...”
She picks herself up, pushing off from the change room wall to turn around and find Castiel sans trench coat, tie and suit jacket, his white shirt fully unbuttoned and hanging open. The angel’s shoulders are hunched and his face slightly pinched, giving him a hunted look like the bundle in his arms is the last of the Romanovs and not a wrinkled toga.
Castiel doesn’t finish his sentence, but he does lower his arms in annoyance, revealing a lightly muscled chest and thin red lines of scar tissue, a messy scrawl made all the brighter by the stark white of his pale flesh.
Deanna swallows thickly, all her earlier cheer floating away like dust in the wind. “Uh, problems... problems with the toga?”
“I rarely dress or undress,” Castiel says by way of explanation. “The process is unwieldy.”
And it would be for him, Deanna realizes. Maybe Castiel’s gotten used to it, but it’s probably none too comfortable. To him, the situation must be something like putting on a four-fingered glove over a five-fingered glove when you actually have more than six fingers.
Suddenly, playing dress up with a warrior of God doesn’t seem like such a nice idea, if ever it was.
“Oh,” Deanna buys herself some time to think by reaching out to do up the angel’s buttons, starting from the top. “Well, uh, this isn’t really a party you or Sam would be welcome at, unlike me, ‘cause I’m a girl and you two look like dudes. Also there’s the age thing where, again, ‘cause I’m a girl - a hot girl - it doesn’t matter, but for you guys it does. Sam’s actually growing a beard so no one will recognize that ‘reporter’ that was hanging around on campus. It kinda works for him ‘cause he’s a damn lumberjack, but you’re...”
Deanna finishes with the last button, her fingers lingering; almost tracing hidden shapes in the air over the fabric before she gets a hold of herself. “You kind of stick out wherever you go, so I thought maybe a disguise with more coverage would be good, but you could sit this part out if you want.”
Castiel immediately shakes his head in the negative, “I couldn’t help research. Perhaps I can’t fully grasp this case, but it feels... disturbing.” His lips thin, “I’m going to the house with you.”
“Um,” Deanna frowns uncertainly, finally looking up to meet the angel’s blue eyes, the rings of colour flashing like turbines whirling through the sky. “Alrighty. We’ll just get you a... mask. Should be easy enough to find something that goes with a suit.”
And it is that easy.
By the time Deanna has gathered Castiel’s trench coat and the rest of his discarded ensemble from the change room, the angel has chosen a mask from the far wall.
“Deanna,” Castiel says from behind her.
This time she’s expecting it and so she doesn’t leap away. What she doesn’t expect is Castiel’s chosen disguise.
“Will this suffice?” he asks, voice deadened by the mask that encases his whole head.
Deanna stares up at the horse head perched on Castiel’s shoulders. Though made of either rubber or plastic, the texture of brown hair on its face is disturbingly realistic and complete with the outline of veins, while the darker brown of its coarse mane seems to grow in patchy clumps over its crown and down its neck. The beast’s nostrils are flared, mouth agape with square teeth bright in a tar black mouth. Its eyes are the most catching feature, open wide and vacant; the whites visible all around dark irises like a creature in its death throes.
There are no words.
* * *
“Sam’s waiting,” Castiel says, and Deanna almost loses an eye. Today being Halloween it might’ve been alright to be a one-eyed woman, but since that wouldn’t work for the rest of the year Deanna is thankful that she’s never taken sudden angel appearances as badly as her brother. All that time spent with Castiel has almost made her impervious to heart failure, though that doesn’t change her belief that Castiel should wear bells.
Deanna grunts and returns the tip of the eyeliner to her skin, sketching in a slight upward curve to the corner of her eye, “Yeah, yeah. Just two more minutes.”
“That was what you said two minutes ago.” Deanna can almost hear his wings snap with impatience. As if to drive the point home, outside, Sam leans on the horn of the Impala.
“Well I’m saying it again.”
Castiel gives the impression that, were he anyone else, he’d be pacing back and forth behind the little bench seat Deanna sits on, wearing a trough through the motel foundations and working his way down to Hell so he can wash his hands of her. However, since he is himself, Castiel merely stands directly behind her, almost like a living seatback or a weeping sore on her shoulder.
“Is this necessary?” he grits out, “This... ‘make-up’?” Castiel pronounces the words carefully like they leave a bad taste in his mouth.
“For the good of the case, Cas,” Deanna answers distractedly, “People prefer talking to pretty girls.”
Castiel exhales. A sort of substitute to rubbing his temples, “Does it always take so long?”
“No. Normally I don’t put on half this stuff. It’s just, tonight - special occasion, I guess,” Deanna twitches one shoulder up in a shrug. “I know it’s not like some fashion show or my BFF’s wedding, but I just thought, why not?”
She’s really not even using too many cosmetics. A lot more eye make-up, sure, what with the glittery eye shadow and mascara. There’s the foundation to, which she used to cover up her freckles to give her more of a polished, porcelain look, but really, it’s not like she’s caked her face in the stuff.
“You don’t have anything to make up for, though.”
Because Castiel is standing, Deanna can’t see his face in the small mirror on the table. She’s not sure of what expression he wears, but his statement is exasperated and blunt as always. Open in the way only he can be.
“Um,” says Deanna. She tries to say something like, ‘That’s true,’ or ‘My face did launch a thousand ships,’ but manages neither. Instead she continues applying cosmetics with her eyes glued firmly to the mirror. She ignores the breath that ruffles the little flyaway hairs on the top of her head when Castiel leans over.
“You don’t need any of this,” Castiel says, a slight edge to his voice. And she’s not looking, but Deanna just knows that the angel is cocking his head in that way of his. The puzzled tilt that he has when he sees with crystal clarity and can’t understand how it escapes everyone else’s grasp.
Deanna clears her throat of imaginary phlegm, “Well, you know us puny mortals. Always doing stuff we don’t need to do.” She lowers the black pencil from her eye to look down at it, twirling the little stub between her fingers. “Besides, shouldn’t you be used to me wearing make-up? I put some on every day.”
“You don’t wear any during the days spent driving with your brother, nor when you are researching in your motel room.”
“’Cause I don’t need it when I’m not going to see anyone else,” Deanna says, dropping the eye liner and picking up a tube of deep red lipstick to draw across her lips. It’s not her usual colour, being too bright and flashy, too much like a movie star’s - like blood - but it’s part of a little cosmetics kit that she’d gotten as a thank you present after one of her cases, back when she’d been hunting solo.
Castiel doesn’t say anything and Deanna fumbles for a better explanation. “Think of it as, uh, war paint,” she tries, hoping to relate it to things an age old warrior - however non-human - might have more experience with, “Putting on make-up is like putting on my battle face.”
“You don’t look intimidating,” Castiel states, unimpressed.
“No, but I - I feel better, alright?” Deanna scowls, the angel’s frustration rubbing off on her. Her red lips look strangely pronounced in the mirror, “I know I’m not ugly. I’m fucking hot stuff, but this makes me feel like... like I can do... more.”
Her reasoning sounds weak and confused to her own ears and Deanna wishes she had a way with words. But she doesn’t, and so she flaps her hands about helplessly like that might make her more coherent somehow.
“No one taught me how to do any of this, but I knew it was kinda important to know, to not stick out like a sore thumb or to get info as a sexy, no-nonsense cop or whatever’s needed. All this stuff - the dressing up, the make-up - it’s like... turning into someone else.”
Castiel is curled over her shoulder, but he isn’t touching her. Despite this and the cool October air that wafts through the open window, the heat of him is like the shimmer over desert asphalt, silvery and elusive; something briefly seen but mostly felt.
It strikes Deanna that even though Castiel’s chin has finally made an appearance in her mirror the frame is too small to ever contain both her and the angel. No matter the angle that she turns her head, she can’t quite meet his eye in the reflection and something in her throat quivers.
“You see, the longer you play at it, the more you pretend, the closer you feel to whatever you’re trying to be,” she says, capping the tube of lipstick and placing it on the table. Her hair looks more blonde and less brown - almost golden - in the yellow light of the motel lamp, falling in gentle waves over her shoulders instead of the usual wind-tumbled mess. Her lashes seem longer, her eyes wider, kinder - less desperate and more hopeful - she looks like a cherished ideal; a precious memory.
“And sometimes... sometimes it’s nice. To be prettier. Nicer. More... more important and...” She looks good in white and the effect isn’t ruined by the cheap cotton of the costume. The cut of the dress isn’t the most creative and it hangs loose and airy on her slight frame, but it looks passably ethereal when paired with the feathered wings strapped to her back. Without them it looks like she’s wearing a white night gown.
Her reflection is unexpected when it shouldn’t be, and in the several seconds she spends staring at the mirror, Castiel reaches around her to grab the tube of lipstick from where it stands on the table.
“Cas...” Deanna drags out the name, surprised as she turns in her seat to look at the angel straightening up behind her. “What are you doing?”
Castiel doesn’t answer her. What he does do is stare straight ahead at the blank wall before him and pop the cap off the lipstick with precise fingers; careful like he’s defusing a bomb.
He then proceeds to smear lipstick across his mouth.
“I still think it unnecessary,” he says, hand moving mechanically in efficient strokes, looking for all the world like he’s well practiced at applying lipstick. The squiggly red line on his face says otherwise.
It’s a bit like watching a beloved pet’s toilet funeral.
When Castiel is done - if having a red doodle scrawled nearly from ear to ear is ‘done’ - he circles the bench in two awkward steps and sits down next to Deanna, shouldering her impatiently aside so he can observe his handiwork. “I see,” he says. “This is more difficult than I thought.”
Deanna’s not sure what to say. There’s the obvious ‘Yes’ and the ‘It might be easier if you actually look at what you’re doing’ and a ‘What the fuck, Cas?’ waiting on her tongue, but she says none of them, just laughs and laughs. And laughs.
When she’s done - as in, able to spare air for speech - she manages a choked response, hugging her split sides to keep her organs from popping out, “Fuck, don’t - don’t do that. I don’t look much like Batman right now, but that doesn’t - that doesn’t mean I’m okay with you being the damn Joker, Cas.”
Of course, her meaning is lost on Castiel and his annoyed squint makes everything wonderful. “I am trying to understand you better, Deanna,” he says, his red mouth looking like dancing gummy worms. “Sam suggested that shared experiences would help.”
Deanna loves her brother so very much.
“Oh?” she smiles widely, lips pressed tightly together to keep from braying like an ass, “That why you’ve been hanging around me this whole case?”
Castiel pouts or something. It’s hard to tell.
“It’s okay, Cas,” Deanna grins. She shakes her head and picks up a cotton pad from the table, moistening it with make-up remover before turning back to Castiel to dab at his wax covered cheeks, “Anyways, you know lipstick’s for girls, right?”
Castiel holds still, like a wilted cactus or a grumpy clown and oh - Deanna wishes Sam were in the room with them. “I’ve seen men wear lip colour.”
“Well you’re not a guy or a girl, so none for you,” she chuckles, grabbing the angel’s chin and turning his head so she can scrub away a stubborn smear at the corner of his mouth.
“I can do better,” Castiel says as the last trace of red is removed from his face. He glares at the unsuspecting tube of lipstick on the table as if willing it to apply itself to his face or risk being smote.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you really want to try putting on make-up. And with your hand-eye-face coordination we’ll take so long that Sam will probably mummify in the car.”
The angel lets out a harsh breath through his nose, grimacing like he’s being forced to swallow defeat. “You’re right. We have somewhere to be. If you’re done, let’s go.”
Castiel reaches out to pluck the horse head mask from the table and he makes a move to get up off the bench seat. His eyes blink furiously. His brows draw down to crease his forehead. His lips twist, his jaw tenses, the tendons jump in his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobs once, twice - and Deanna has seen him restless before, but never so animated.
Maybe it’s because they’re sitting so close - side by side, thigh to thigh - that she can see all these minute ticks, tiny tremors, and tell-tale twitches. These movements are the products of tension, and if this were any other, Deanna would dismiss them as such. However, this is Castiel and in all the time Deanna has known him, Castiel has never before moved because he could, but always because he should.
And maybe it’s because she sees this, or maybe it’s because Castiel just looks so at odds with the stutter in her chest - the flutter left by laughter and the gasping, floating dizziness of the oxygen deprived - that Deanna says what she says.
“There’s a way to get some make-up on. A quick way.”
Castiel has the mask raised above his head, ready to put on, but he freezes and turns his face towards her, intrigued. At this distance she can see every slivered shade in his eyes and it’s nothing human, but nothing inhuman, either.
“How?” he asks, and she sees cool blue but feels warm breath.
“Like this,” she answers, and kisses him.
It’s a simple press of lips to lips - little more than a clumsy peck - and lasts for barely a heartbeat, but when Deanna draws back, she doesn’t dare open her eyes.
It was nothing Earth shattering - what with Castiel not responding at all - and it’s possible Deanna’s shared better kisses with her pillow, but she is still fucking horrified. This was more impulsive and only a little less stupid than when she sold her soul, but she expects the consequences to be equally terrible.
She imagines opening her eyes to meet Castiel’s glare, disgusted or frigid or both. She imagines him mind whammying her until she’s regained her senses or smiting her on the spot. She imagines him looking at her with confusion. She imagines him flying away. Somehow it’s this last vision that frightens her most of all.
And then she feels some floppy thing land on her head and slide off her face.
She opens her eyes and looks at Castiel to find him looking back at her with an expression of... nothing.
His hands are still frozen in the air above them though the horse head mask now lies on the floor. He hasn’t moved on the bench, not closer nor farther and not even to turn a little to the side. The only thing about him that’s changed is his mouth - lips now just touched with red.
It’s only when their eyes meet that the world seems to start again. Castiel bends over quietly to retrieve the mask and Deanna points her face to the mirror, absently noticing that her hair is ruined and make-up smudged. She looks like some wind-blurred, wild thing; like a girl who took off running because she could so she did.
It doesn’t seem like a bad idea - to get up and just bolt out the door. Get in the Impala and tell Sam to step on it - but Castiel beats her to it, standing up in one swift motion. He turns on his heel and walks briskly to the door, pausing only when he has his hand on the knob.
Deanna finds it a little strange that Castiel didn’t just beam himself into the Impala, especially since she finally realizes that the loud wailing which she’d assumed was her own is actually Sam, honking and honking out in the parking lot.
Castiel turns the knob and opens the door, then pauses again, one foot on the threshold.
“Is there a... quick way to remove make-up?” he asks, the back of his neck flushed bright red.
Deanna grins.