.fic: Freedom hangs like Heaven (Dean/Castiel) PG13/R | 42,000 (complete)

[aesc]

Freedom hangs like Heaven (Dean/Castiel) PG13/R | ~42,000
A really, really, really overdue Sweet Charity fic for verstehen, who wanted a Dean-centric post-Apocalypse fic with Sam having given into his inner demons. Because it's so late, I tried to add on a couple thousand words for each month this should have been done, kind of like interest. Actually, the story totally got away from me.

The fic has substantial spoilers up through 5.14ish, but goes significantly AU after that. Title from Iron and Wine's brilliant song.

Freedom hangs like Heaven

01: Road

The sky in Vermont was congested – the mountains and never-ending trees hemmed it in, and the clouds choked it where they lay heavily on the hilltops. Even when the state road broke reluctantly out onto a scenic turnoff, or slithered high along a mountain's green flank, the sky never really opened up, never ran off into its blue infinity. The clouds hung low on the mountains, and spilled down their sides into the valleys and the driving – already slow on the winding, narrow roads and stuck behind the world's most defensive, law-abiding drivers – made him almost crazy with the boredom.

That night, Dean found himself on a ridgeline, still twenty miles from the nearest motel, fumbling his way out of the Impala, bent-backed and clumsy with how his body thrummed after a day's driving. And, looking up – now the sky was open, so abruptly different he stood there with one hand on the Impala's warm hood for balance. A storm had chased the clouds off, and the sky arched up endless and black, dimensions and dimensions beyond the stars that crowded close.

Isolate, Dean studied the seam of the Milky Way for a moment, unwillingly remembered Sam’s eighth-grade astronomy class and a homemade telescope, then climbed back into the Impala and drove on. Not a minute later, the road pitched steeply downward into a valley, and the trees swallowed him, and the stars vanished. He cut the high beams on, and the long tunnel of darkness lit up in the soft yellow of the Impala's illumination, the cathedral of oaks and pines, and nothing but the night behind them.

On the seat next to him, the Brattleboro Reformer, acquired for the weather report and the sports that remained unread, predicted the peak of the Perseid meteor shower would come that night, and, with no moon in the sky, the viewing would be excellent. Above the ridge he'd just abandoned, meteors, as though flung from heaven, streaked silver across the sky's face and disappeared.

In the back seat, another fallen thing slept under Dean's extra coat and an army-surplus blanket.

* * *

"Goddammit!"

"Jesus, Sammy!"

Sam's pistoning elbow nailed him right in the gut, rode up hard against his ribcage. Breath left him and so did balance, and Sam, busy punching the demon (vicious hail of blows, Dean saw: hook to the head, chest, solar plexus, gut) didn't even falter. He had to pick himself up and hitch himself out of the way and just watch, like he'd let something out of its cage and had to wait until it stopped running and destroying to do anything about it.

The demon laughed, a wet, gurgling sound, the blood and salt mixing together and pulping its throat. Dean tried not to think of Alastair. "Heh," the demon wheezed, and Dean could have sworn it was looking right at him, blood-glossed black eyes still glittering and knowing despite the pain and the knowledge it was going to die.

"You fucking did this to me," Sam hissed, and the knife was out, shaking because Sam was gripping it that hard. The demon's gaze slid to the knife like oil, and its bloody grin widened, "Well, I didn't personally, buuuut…. I might have helped out some people who did."

The knife came down, and more blood joined the smears already decorating Sam's wrists and forearms, the splashes on his face and the spatter on the weatherworn wall behind him. Dean watched, not really noticing the brief flare and dying of the demon inside its host, and didn't even spare a thought for the poor bastard who was finally out of his misery.

Sam collapsed back, liquid and loose, staring at the dead body. The knife fell, soft clatter on the floor, when Sam had to open his hand to brace himself. He stared at the demon – the body, the body of some poor guy who probably hadn't deserved any of this – and Dean stared at Sam and watched as sanity slowly came crawling back.

"Dean, did you hear him?" Sam asked. His voice sounded small, confused, so much the little kid brother again that Dean didn't know whether to crawl close to help or get the hell out of there. "Dean, that was one of the demons who worked with Lilith. It's one of the ones from when Victor died."

"I know, Sammy."

"It deserved it," Sam said, vicious again, and desperate, and Dean had heard that tone before, of Sam trying to convince himself back into righteousness again. He wanted to say I know, Sammy, because the demon had – they all did – and Dean couldn’t fault Sam at all for wanting the thing dead and gone, but watching how he’d done it, that unleashing of rage and then all the red heat of that anger boiling down to coolness as the demon died locked up his words. There wasn’t much else to do except watch and know he was scared, and know that he’d been scared, not of the demon because he’d gotten used to the things, but of Sam, and to wonder if they weren’t just circling back to last year, to Sam angry and silent and wanting fights they couldn’t afford to have. Wanting death, and the slow, poisonous conviction that this Sam, the one with blood on him, with blood fucking in him like a virus, wasn’t the real Sam after all. Like being drunk, and in vino veritas, when the alcohol loosens the things you keep tied down for good reason.

At least Sam wasn’t going for the blood on his hands, thank God for small mercies. Dean pulled himself to his feet and made himself stretch to test the pain. It sparked and tugged at his ribs, and low and mean just beneath them. His breath shook on a curse to vent how much it fucking hurt. Sam didn’t even look at him.

"Come on, Sam," he muttered, "we need to clear out."

"Yeah," Sam said, not really paying attention. Dean prodded his shoulder, felt the unyielding muscle of it, like poking at something inhuman. Finally Sam shuddered and picked himself up with a grunt, and left Dean to pick up the knife. Sam looked at it with distant confusion when Dean offered it to him, and then said in a small voice that Dean could keep it.

"I'm so touched," Dean said. The sarcasm went over like a lead balloon, rolled right off Sam's Teflon shoulders and left awkwardness behind. "Let's go, Sam," he said, and led the way outside. Sam trailed silently behind, stopping only to collect their gear from the other room and pick up an empty beer bottle.

"It needed to die," Sam said, and it was, Dean knew, meant to convince himself as much as it was meant to convince Dean.

You don't need to tell me, he thought, and turned away from the image of Sam's eyes wild and glittering in the thin, naked light. Just, not like that Sam. Not like the way things have been going.

The night had that weird, uncertain cold, warming slowly into spring but humid and with a chill underneath. Sam dumped their duffel in the trunk, grunted in response to Dean's suggestion to get some sleep while he found them a place to stay that wasn't an old meth lab. Like everything else tonight, Sam didn't have much to say to that, but grabbed a towel from its corner in the trunk and obediently climbed into the passenger seat.

"No blood on the upholstery," he said weakly when Dean slid in beside him.

"Rule Number One," Dean agreed, and didn't bother trying to smile.

* * *

"Hey, hey, we're here."

Even though Dean was doing his best to whisper, his voice sounded way too loud in the deserted parking lot. The lights that picked out the motel's name, and the light from the lobby, only made the darkness more complete, and the silence out in the woods pressed in closer. With a quick glance at the lobby and its single, bored receptionist, Dean tried again.

"C'mon," he hissed, "wake up," but that didn't work either.

The Impala's dome light washed out Castiel's face to bloodlessness, and painted yellow shadows under his eyes. When he closed his palm around the unresponsive flesh under the blanket, only the slow warmth of Castiel's body told him life hid anywhere in that battered form. And under the blanket… Dean didn't want to think about that, only ran a finger down the side of Castiel's neck to check his pulse, the entirely human thump-thump of it that he couldn't bring himself to find reassuring.

"Guess I'll just check us in, then," he told Castiel's silent self, and went to do that.

Like most of the motels around here, the Black Bear Motor Inn traded on one of the major features of the area, black bearskin rug and black bear paintings, black bear sculpture on the front desk, carved black bear looming in the corner, black bear everything except the receptionist, who was human and bored. She checked Dean in without even a flicker of smile, not that Dean offered her one of his own, and dropped the plastic bear-paw keychain into his waiting hand.

"You get into something?" she asked with a jerk of her chin.

Dean squinted at her from behind the swelling over his left eye. "Bad side of a door."

"Okay," the woman said suspiciously. "Just keep it down, we got kids staying over." She paused. "Ice machine's at the end of the building."

"Right. Thanks." Dean jingled the keychain at her and went out. He felt her watching him, distrust layered on fear, and heard the electronic beep-beep of a cell phone's buttons being pressed.

"You think bears are big around here?" he asked Castiel as he idled the Impala down the row to their room. "Probably," Dean answered himself, "they are."

And then: "Fucking hell, this is lame."

Castiel didn't wake up until Dean shook him hard, and the wakefulness he came to faded in and out – there enough for him to sit up so Dean to get an arm under his shoulder and help him up, sliding away when he stood. Pressed close he smelled like earth and salt, his breath coppery. Dirt had worked into one cheek, the fold behind his ear, his elbow, and some had caked with the blood on his knuckles, before the nurses had cleaned it off and bandaged it.

"You're one heavy son of a bitch," he muttered as he hauled Castiel's body more firmly upright. Sorry, Cas sighed, head rolling loosely to its resting place on Dean's shoulder. "Let's go."

In the blurry edge of his vision he saw the receptionist watching him from the safety of her well-lit office, cell phone in her hand. "Rough week," he hollered at her, voice catching when Cas moaned. The receptionist vanished back into her office, and some of the light disappeared when she slammed the door behind her. Cas stirred briefly and settled again, heavier than before.

"Goddammit," Dean hissed. Managing Cas, the keys, and the door was impossible, and if he'd been thinking he would have opened up the room and turned on the damn light before fetching Cas's useless carcass. Three steps behind, Winchester, he thought, and that was where his mind seemed to be these days, pulled back by some dragging weight he didn't let himself think about too closely.

At least Cas was good for a distraction, something to look after – something, Dean thought, ungrateful and with a mean right hook – and he was used to doing that. He'd done it God only knew how many times in the years with Sam and Dad, or just Dad, or just Sam, shouldering his way through another motel door, helping the other person through, getting them set in bed and cleaned up before seeing to himself. Routine, and Cas fit into it pretty neatly, feet trailing clumsily and catching on the threshold, collapsing onto the old, musty mattress the second Dean let him go. The army surplus blanket had fallen in the parking lot, sad and crumpled under the sidewalk lights, but if Cas missed the warmth he didn't show it.

Traveling for one, traveling post-End Times, hadn't changed much from Before, just his duffels with clothes and weapons, one flask of holy water and one of whiskey. The latter needed refilling, but the other Dean kept more out of habit than anything, the way things had been going the past month.

Unceremoniously he dropped his stuff next to Cas and inspected the room. "They really like bears here," he said. The wallpaper was black bears, and a water-stained print of some engraving – of a black bear – hung over the bedside table. Even the rug was fake black bear skin, with plastic eyes and tongue gaping. "Really like."

"It's called the Black Bear Motel," Castiel muttered. "Maybe that has something to do with it."

"Jesus, Cas." Dean dropped the channel listing card. "What the hell?"

Cas stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment before those blue eyes wandered over to Dean. They were hazy, cloudy, human, and slow to focus, but Dean felt that split second of awareness when they did. And as they did, Cas seemed to regain some of his old composure, drawing himself up to sit with his back against the headboard. The chain around his neck chimed softly, and the amulet it held swung gently back and forth until it settled against Castiel's chest.

"Where are we?" Castiel asked, and he frowned when Dean told him. "I fell here?"

"Right inside a state park, twenty miles up the road." Dean sat down on his own bed. "You weren't exactly subtle."

"That is…" Cas's mouth twisted. "Disturbing." He lifted one wrist, the one that still had the plastic bracelet from the local hospital listed. "I don't remember this."

"You've been pretty out of it; it happens." It felt like a nail in the coffin, or one more nail in whatever it was that tied Cas to this body. "There are some things your mind can't remember, not really."

Castiel gave him a look, way too knowing and too angel-like to be comfortable. And yeah, Cas probably knew exactly what he was thinking, because Dean's mind had something wrong with it that let it remember forty years of hellfire. Either way, it stood to reason that Cas's mind wasn't going to let him remember falling, like Dean had had happen to him a couple times in the hospital: one minute he'd been doing his thing, and then time had passed, some shapeless, indeterminate amount that might have been an hour or a month, and then he'd come to in a hospital bed, breathing in antiseptic.

Gravely, silently, Cas studied his hands, the hospital bracelet, the moose t-shirt Dean had acquired for him from the hospital gift shop, the hospital scrubs. His expression wasn't so much confused as it was cataloguing, working out assets and weapons and strategy, and Dean wondered if Cas was ever going to take a break.

"What do we do now?" Castiel asked calmly. His hands settled on the black bear patterned bedspread.

"You could apologize for clocking me," Dean suggested. He gestured to his eye, which hurt, and Cas looked at him. "When I found you in that forest, I shook you to wake you up and you suckerpunched me." It had been a good thing Cas hadn't been locked and loaded, angel-wise, otherwise Dean's eye and part of his skull would have been on the other side of that clearing.

"You must have startled me," Cas said, which meant Dean wasn't going to get an apology any time soon, or ever, and that was gratitude for you. "Where's Sam?"

"He's…." Dean swallowed. "Couldn't get him back, Cas."

"Oh." Mercifully, Castiel looked away. In the dirty yellow light he was a washed-out gold, skin made paler by the dark stubble on his cheeks and jaw. "But Lucifer…"

"That's the hell of it, I don't know." And Jesus Christ, was that going to be his life? "Just that we got to Detroit, and shit hit the cosmic fan, and he wouldn't tell me where Sam was, and none of your fucking worthless brothers could tell me anything, either."

"They couldn't know, not with my sigils marking him," Castiel said, strangely bitter and proud. "And Lucifer wouldn't have killed him." He paused. "At any rate, not permanently."

"Yeah, he could have done a fuck of a lot worse." The deep quiet of the night suddenly became fragile, hovering on the edge of breaking, or of violence. Dean reminded himself there were kids staying here, even though the building seemed otherwise empty, and it felt like just him and Cas in their small, lit space. "He could have stashed Sam somewhere – in Hell or goddamn Limbo or Dubuque, Iowa for all I know."

"I've never been to Dubuque," Castiel said, "and Limbo, contrary to some doctrine, doesn't actually exist." He gestured to the hotel room and the darkness beyond it. "For trapped, unabsolved spirits, this world is Limbo."

"Anyone ever tell you that you really seriously suck at consoling people?"

"Once or twice," Cas said, with an unexpected twist to his mouth. "But I wasn't made for consolation to begin with."

That was true, in fucking spades. Cas didn't play harps or guide or provide a gentle, supporting wing to lean on; instead, he pushed and bullied and snapped, and the one time he'd shown Dean his wings had been to terrify him more than anything. The tired-looking figure on the bed, in its borrowed clothes and with its bare feet, didn't seem any less imposing, despite Cas's sudden, soft sigh and his eye sliding shut.

"We'll look for him tomorrow," Castiel said. "We'll find him."

"That's the thing, Cas," Dean said. Somehow his throat had gone tight and the edges of his vision blurry and hot, and he wasn't fucking going to cry, not when he'd spent the past thirty-two years shedding more than enough tears and blood for the goddamn world. "I don't know if I can."

* * *

He stood in one of the gigantic parking lots of a car factory, one long-abandoned with grass and weeds pushing the cement apart. The empty carcass of the car factory, its windows blinded by plywood, loomed behind him, covered – so Cas had said – with devil’s traps and charms to ward away angels. So far as Dean knew, Cas was still lurking on the periphery somewhere, trying to work his way in, and trying to close off Lucifer's escape.

"Thank you for keeping your word," Lucifer said. He wore old flannel and jeans and a soft smile, and skin slowly burning away around him.

"Yeah, that's me, Mr. Righteous Man. Didn't bring anyone with me." A terrible pressure weighed on his back, say yes say yes say yes. He imagined Cas out there, holding the lines, fuck only knew what else was hiding, and Cas was fucked either way if it was demonic or angelic. "You planning on holding up your end of the deal?"

"I'm an angel, Dean." Lucifer's smile became reproving. "You of all people should know that angels are bound to their word, once they give it."

"Fine, great. So, what the fucking hell did you do to him?"

"Nothing he didn't do to himself," Lucifer said calmly. He sighed, a long, tired breath with millennia of grief behind it. "Dean, just as it's possible to earn grace, it's possible to earn damnation."

"I never earned grace, or forgiveness, or whatever." His stomach clenched and the weight increased. It wasn't Cas, that presence, nothing half so familiar, but completely alien. You can kiss my ass, you winged bastard. "All I wanted, all my brother wanted, was for us to be left alone."

"Are you sure that's all Sam wanted?" Lucifer asked. His borrowed mouth settled into something entirely too knowing. "He didn't want your life. He didn't want you, Dean."

"What, like you didn't want your brother?" Dean took a step closer, and fate moved with him, and there was no backing out now. "You've got one more chance, Lucy: where the hell is Sam?"

Something on the edge of Dean's awareness gave, and he heard Cas, heard him, and Zachariah, the other angels, and the one angel he'd never met in his own time and could never escape. Dean, Cas said, voice as clear as though he were standing right by Dean's shoulder, and that made it better, not being alone at the end, Dean, it's now or never.

"Sorry," Lucifer said, all regret and loss, "you know I can't tell you that, but you can kill me if you'd like to live the rest of eternity not knowing."

"You know," Dean said, mind clear, hand steady, "I think I can live with that."

A stream of fire hit Lucifer square in the back, liquid flame burning up a container of holy oil – bona-fide genuine Winchester homemade flame thrower and angel-flambée maker. Like he'd summoned it, the long, cold blade – Cas's sword – fell down his sleeve and into Dean's hand.

Lucifer's eyes went wide. A light came – from the fire, from Lucifer, from all around – and killed the shadows of early morning.

Our covenant, Lucifer said, and didn't say, the words a fierce pressure inside Dean's skull. The glass behind the plywood blew out with a distant splintering sound.

"I didn't bring any angels with me," Dean heard himself say through the roaring and chaos. The sword was hot in his hand, hotter than the fire, not hotter than the fury in his blood. "Like I promised."

* * *

Dean woke up to daylight and utter silence. The gray light through the window said early morning, and Dean's body said to go back to sleep.

On the bed next to him Cas slept on, utterly still, and Dean had to watch closely to see the slow rise and fall of his silhouette. Cas had drawn up his shoulders and looked small and miserable and cold, a lot smaller without the coat and the immensity of his waking presence. And there was no easy way around that thought, no easy way at all.

Any sleep after that was the weird half-waking sleep, with the roar and whoosh of the cars on the highway weaving itself into the pattern of the past three months and memories, and the not-memory of standing on that overlook from last night, leaning out over the guardrail, and crash-landing in the forest with the shadows of his wings pressed into roots and dirt and grass.

He'd seen that, but hadn't done it himself. The rescue team had thought it was a small plane, two conspiracy theorists had thought it was an extraterrestrial and wanted to get there before the government could hush it up, and crazily, they'd turned out to be right, almost. It had been a hell of a time keeping up with them and then sneaking past them, trying to remember the trajectory and make his way through the darkness, skidding downhill and falling over rocks, roots, and finally, almost, Castiel.

Cas hadn't been wearing anything (and that had been hell to explain to the paramedics), and he'd been curled around a tiny sapling, unconscious, warm, naked as the day he was born because, and Dean knew it now, that had been the day he was born, stumbling and falling into the world. Dean had grabbed him, too overcome with relief and shock, and then Cas had reared up, wild-eyed in the darkness, and punched him in the face.

Slowly the room brightened, and Dean's dream stumbled its way through the hallucination of the trip to the hospital, insisting on staying with Cas and pretending to be a paramedic to do it. He'd done that so many times it had come effortlessly even as his body dragged with exhaustion, and by the time he worked his way through to dropping Cas in bed and pulling off his socks and shoes, Dean wanted another night of sleep.

Even as he thought that and turned over to hide from the sunlight, Cas stirred, pushing himself upright, eyes going from sleep-soft to alert more slowly than Dean wanted.

"Sleep well?" Dean croaked. His mouth, he realized, tasted awful, like hospital and whiskey, and a bit of industrial detergent from the pillow.

"I've slept before," Cas said curtly. He stretched, spine and shoulders popping, and as he rolled his neck – more popping, and Dean winced – looked around the room. "What are we doing today?"

"I don't know, man." Possibilities suggested themselves: finding a hunt, finding a bar, sleeping for another year, even if he did have to stay at the Black Bear Motor Inn to do it. Only none of them sounded good, all of them different mountains to climb

"Sam," Cas said, with unexpected and un-Caslike delicacy. Dean cracked on eye open and frowned at him. "What about Sam?" he asked, and Cas looked at him, all sleep vanished now. "We could look for him," and Cas's patience had an edge of sarcasm to it.

"We could." Dean swung out of bed and stomped to the bathroom, slammed the door right in Cas's questioning face. "We could also go fucking look for unicorns, if we wanted to waste our goddamn time." He didn't want your life. He didn't want you, Dean. "He's dead, or he's gone, or both, Cas," he said over the rushing hiss of the water. "And I can't… I can't chase after him anymore."

"There aren't any unicorns in North America," Cas said from the other side of the door. "But…" His voice trailed away and silence replaced it, long and permanent enough that Dean got worried and yanked the door open.

"We could go somewhere," Cas said, right up in Dean's face. "Do something."

"You got a bucket list?" Dean asked after he took a careful step back. Cas smelled like antiseptic and a bit of dirt that the nurses had missed. "For that matter, you got a toothbrush?"

Castiel's forehead wrinkled, a brief dip into confusion before he pulled himself out of it. "No, I don't," Cas said eventually, "but I'm not used to doing nothing."

That was one lesson they'd never got around to, not that there'd been time for it in the first place, how to do nothing.

* * *

Three months to go before the Big Show, although they didn't know it yet. Dean mechanically cleaned the guns and checked the salt, the industrial-sized jug of holy water with the rosary wrapped around the mouth. Cas made a cross, impatient sound behind him, "I may not be what I once was, but I can still bless the damn water," and "touchy-touchy," Dean said and recapped the container.

"Hey, Princess, you going to eat that?" he asked, to ask something, when Cas retreated into silence and Sam seemed content to stare like an idiot at his dinner. He poked Sam's knee and fiddled with the fork speared through the lettuce and hard-boiled egg on Sam's plate. "Eyes bigger than your stomach?"

"Bite me," Sam muttered, pushing Dean's hand away. "Not really hungry tonight." The look he gave Dean said like you have room to talk.

"Need to keep our strength up, Sammy," he said, and heard himself back at twelve years old saying that to a recalcitrant little brother tired of macaroni and cheese. Sam heard the same thing, shoulders tensing, muscle going hard under his shirt and Dean's hand.

"You ever think things are getting worse?" Sam asked in a small voice.

"I don't think," Dean said, and tried not to remember the latest round of bad news from the day. "I know."

* * *

They headed west later that day, chasing down the sun with Cas riding shotgun and staring out the window. "That's where I found you," Dean said, tilting his chin toward the anonymous trailhead where he'd parked that night, and where the ambulance had hauled him and Cas's unconscious self to the hospital. A few cars, unremarkable, peppered the turnoff. Cas turned to look as they whisked by.

"You were fortunate to find me," he said, and then, more slowly, "I was fortunate."

"Yeah," Dean said, and stared fixedly at the road.

They hit the state line at New York at twilight, a patch of countryside with its fields burnt away, and ravaged, skeletonized trees clinging to the hills. Cas peered more closely at them, "Something happened here," and the stress in his voice said something supernatural.

"There aren't many places something didn't happen," Dean grunted. The road curved along the side of one rolling hill and took them down into a town. It lay half in ruins, too, but it was just age, the town taking a long time dying and most of its people having left long before; the other half was new, or mostly new, fresh repairs and paint, and people looking purposeful. Old buildings and open, unstocked stores flashed by and the road propelled them back into the open country again.

"Dean," Cas said, quick and authoritative, "stop the car. Now."

Obediently, because there wasn't much else to do when Cas got bossy and impatient, Dean pulled over to the narrow, barely-there shoulder. A tractor-trailer howled by them and set the Impala to rocking. A truck came next, wheezing diesel and the driver's curses.

Cas was out of the Impala almost before it stopped, stumbling and slipping down the verge. Barely remembering to check the rearview, Dean got out himself, circling around the Impala's hood before the asshole in the sports car could run him over too. By the time he skidded down through the grass and almost sprained his ankles, Cas was kneeling by the fence line, bent close to a worn and abraded post. On the other side of the wire, a cow blinked at them sleepily; one carcass, its ribs vaulted and empty, rotted quietly behind it.

"Dude, told you to go at the last gas station." The sun felt unreal, prickling and hot despite the hazy cloud cover, and the air was still.

"Go where? Never mind," Cas snapped. "Look."

Reluctant and stiff with five hours of driving, Dean knelt obediently and looked where Cas was pointing. He hadn't cut off the hospital bracelet yet. "What am I looking at?" he asked, and Cas exhaled an exasperated breath.

"Those are protective sigils."

Dean looked closer, the random scratchings in the wood resolving themselves into patterns. Right under 'J+R 4eva' there was – "That's Enochian," Dean said. It felt Enochian, with the strange resonance those symbols had for him ever since that day. He wondered if he still had his ribs scrimshawed and touched his chest reflexively, no way to read the letters through layers of muscle and skin.

"Yes." Castiel nodded shortly. "It's meant to indicate that angels must stay clear of a certain place in the course of their…" He paused delicately, mouth twisted with something much less graceful. "Missions. It's a sign of mercy, that the inhabitants of a place should be spared. There's probably a companion symbol scratched somewhere on the other sides of the town as well. They'll match the four points of the compass."

"You mean angels took time out of their busy schedule trying to end the world to save a ghost town?" Dean frowned. "Hate to say it, Cas, but that doesn't sound like the MO of most of the ones I know."

"It could have been any one of a dozen reasons." Cas stood up, shoulders falling into their habitual military correctness, odd under the t-shirt and jeans. They'd had to scrounge in a thrift store for them, not much that people weren't holding onto these days, just in case. "There might have been a prophet living there, or something of strategic value kept there. Something I didn't know about." Frustration touched his voice.

It weirded Dean out, that the vacant-eyed Cas who'd been in his passenger seat for half the day had actually been keeping track of things. Cas looked at him appraisingly, not much human in those very human eyes, and Dean wondered how much Cas was fallen, if he was, with that amulet around his neck, tucked safely under his shirt. Absently, Cas brushed at the dirt on his palm.

"You want to stay and check it out?"

Cas hesitated. "We should keep moving."

They got back on the road, and didn't stop until Cleveland and daybreak.

* * *

"I loved my brother." The words were tired, the voice belonged to a middle-aged man who'd seen too much and the eyes reminded him of Cas, ancient and sad and not quite understanding why Dean tolerated such pain. "The strength of your love for Sam? Imagine if you'd had an eternity to feel that, and then to have it ripped away."

"No one told me the end of the world was going to be fucking group therapy," Dean said crossly. He shifted his grip on the useless gun and prayed – to Cas, the only person he could pray to these days, without God in the picture – that Cas would stay away. "What the hell do you want?"

"I want it to be over, Dean," Lucifer said. "Just like you do." He looked around the motel room, Dean's dream-replica of the Crossroads Moto-Tel in a no-name Appalachian byway. He'd lost his way once he'd gone off into the warren of back roads, the tucks and hollows of the mountains. "What's the use in prolonging any of this? Any of my pain, my brothers'… yours?"

Dean made himself ignore that. Lucifer smiled at him, gently knowing, and turned away to inspect his reflection in the mirror. Dean tried to look, but the mirror burned with fierce, unrelenting brightness, and he had to look away. "It's so curious, that you've never been able to see any of us in our true forms, not even poor Castiel… Perhaps you could see my brother." He smiled again, and it was almost wistful. "It would be… good to see him again."

"Get Cas's name right," Dean snapped, "and believe me, I'd be happy to see your ass back down in Hell, right after you tell me where you stashed Sam."

"What makes you think I have him?" Lucifer asked, wheeling back to face Dean again. The terrible light in the mirror peered at him from out of those eyes, that grizzled face. "It's true, I do have my ways… And you know your brother, what he's capable of."

The words pressed him hard with their implication – no, what they said, the images clear as the worst possible day: Sam with blood smeared across his mouth, Sam howling in the panic room, Sam running off with Ruby, high as a kite on power and demon mojo and whatever other unholiness Ruby'd managed to sink into him. He'd worked past that, Dean told himself, closing his eyes against the knowledge in Lucifer's eyes, and Lucifer laughed and said, "Are you sure about that, Dean? Are you truly sure?"

"No way he said yes to you," Dean ground out, "otherwise you wouldn't be in that second-rate meatsuit."

"Nick gave himself to me willingly." The light was worse now, and Dean was looking away to save his sight even as he laughed, You mean you lied to him? he heard his voice, small and mortal, say and Lucifer laughed as well. "If it's a lie to tell people God doesn't care what they suffer… maybe that should be the new truth."

* * *

The undine who lived in Lake Erie had become a lifeguard at a Cleveland city pool, a limber, graceful girl with brown hair and eyes as blue as the water she came from. "Maybe I'll find a husband one of these days, finally," she said, scanning the bar, suddenly shy when she saw Cas. "Ever since your covenant, Dean Winchester, things have gotten better for some of us."

She bounced to her feet and kissed him on the mouth. "My sisters and I thank you," she said with a quick, girlish smile – it reminded him of Cas, that weird flickering between old-young-old – and she vanished into the crowd.

For his part, Cas watched her go without saying anything.

"I didn't include any undines in my deal," Dean whispered to him, "although maybe I should have." Her lips had been cool, moist, a shockingly clear memory of him and Sam playing in a lake near Bobby's house. "Damn."

"Your deal was to bar angels from…. 'screwing around with people down here,'" Cas said. He took a sip of his beer and set it aside, shoulders a little looser from the alcohol and Dean ordering him to relax. The chain of the necklace was just visible under the collar of his shirt. "The world has possibilities again."

"Doesn't feel like it," Dean muttered, and finished off his whiskey.

* * *

"No, no, no, Dean, that's not how this is done." Another motel, another night, Cas out fighting the impossible battle while Dean tried to get some sleep. Lucifer hauled him up out of bed and had him somewhere else entirely, an empty street that didn't belong in Charleston, West Virginia.

"How's what done?" Even in a dream he had morning mouth, made worse by the beer, which had been bad and cheap, and by the tickle of headache. "Can't you fucking let me sleep? This is just playing dirty."

Lucifer gestured impatiently and shook his head; a piece of skin at his temple dissolved in a brief flaring of light.

"You have your… angel," Lucifer said the word like a curse, "out looking for me. Really, Dean?"

Fear gripped him, cold claws around his stomach sharp enough to take the hangover and exhaustion away. Cas.

"I can understand why my brothers stay in heaven – they're all brainwashed, most of them, but I can understand them not wanting to tempt our non-existent father's wrath." And he did sound understanding, which was the hell of it, understanding like the one judge who'd dropped Dean in juvie for a week for shoplifting, never mind it had been a pack of Ramen and that it had been for Sam. "But Castiel… Cas," and Lucifer laughed a little, rich, rough, amused, "I could count on one hand the number of angels who have wanted to be human. He's the only one I can think of who's wanted to serve them."

"Not everyone's perfect." Especially not Cas, who was ninety-nine kinds of stupid to hang around with him, and way too determined. "Figured you'd know about that and all."

"Give him to me," Lucifer said. In the twilight he was brilliant light and shadows both at once, the light in his eyes and the darkness in his smile, or suddenly reversed. "He's almost spent anyway… Give him to me, and I'll tell you where Sam is."

"I want Sam back alive, you son of a bitch."

"Oh, Dean." Lucifer smiled, terrifying and fond. "We're so much alike, both of us… I don't have a mother either."

* * *

The state highway traced a loose parallel to the interstate further south, angling along the lakeshore for a few miles before tilting away from it. Cas rode shotgun, head resting on the window and the glass bouncing his reflection back at him. For his part, Dean tried to ignore the countryside scrolling by on either side of the road, or the detours they had to take onto gravel when the road disintegrated. The land was a checkerboard of destruction and salvation, long stretches of burned-black fields and then new growth, late summer corn standing tall and close up against the road. With his window down, the air was a mix of sweet grass and smoke.

There'd been something huge and rotting on the lakeshore when they had detoured north around some catastrophe. "Leviathan," Cas had said, glancing at it dismissively. "One of my brothers destroyed it," and my brothers had so little inflection in it that it hurt.

No way could Dean bring that up, the huge white elephant in the backseat with "Why the hell is Cas down here?" painted on its side. Cas wasn't volunteering, keeping his secrets as close as he'd ever kept them, no matter that he ate and slept and pissed like any mortal. It was hard not watching as Cas dressed and undressed without any pretense of modesty, and something about the glint of dirty sunlight across Cas's shoulders made Dean feel scared and alive, trapped in too-tight skin.

"It's fourteen towns now, Dean," Cas said when they stopped for lunch at a town so small Dean missed the sign driving in. He'd lost track of the distances and the number of havens, as Cas had taken to calling them.

"None have populations of over two thousand." Cas swung himself easily out of the car and stretched, skim of bare, tan skin where his shirt rode up. It was heartbreakingly human, effortless. "They're small, out of the way."

"And the symbols are all the same?" Dean moved around to Cas's side of the Impala, voice carefully low. A lot of people these days knew something had happened, even if few of them understood. Dean wasn't entirely sure he understood, and he'd seen it, all of it, had lived through the End Times and got spat out on the other side.

"Yes. They're… elementary. Hasty." With a considering look, Cas peered back down the road they'd taken in.

Despite himself, Dean found himself warming to what he definitely was not about to call a case. "So what, an angel just happened to love small-town life that much that he went around and warded all these places?"

"We should get something to eat," Castiel said, brushing by Dean like Dean's agreement was a foregone conclusion. Which it was, but dammit, Cas's angelic presumption still grated. He tried to shrug it off, and it wasn't like he didn't need to eat.

Castiel watched closely as he ordered, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and even more closely as Dean ate. "Have I got something?" Dean asked, and Cas wanted to know what, and looked confused, so Dean scrubbed at his face with his napkin. "You can lay off the staring," Dean told him. "It doesn't get any less creepy."

"We should go to Bobby's," Castiel said after a moment, in which he'd devoted a second to studying his french fries before refocusing his attention on Dean again. "You need rest."

"I can rest when I'm dead," Dean said. Only now that he knew what Heaven was, how much rest he was going to get there, he had no idea. Would they let him forget that? Would he want to forget that? He stared at Cas, who looked right back, and Cas's expression was as angelic as it ever was.

"You've been doing what you've always done." It sounded, almost, like accusation, and Dean bristled. "Maybe… it's time for a change."

In the silence afterward, the waitress came and refilled Dean's coffee and Cas's water, and made an observation about Cas's eating like a bird.

"Excuse me," Cas said, and even the politeness sounded weird, "have you had any…" He took a breath and seemed to struggle, and Dean realized this was Cas trying to be tactful. "Have you had any odd occurrences in town this past year?"

"Quiet as Sunday since January." The waitress deposited a fresh lemon slice in Cas's water glass. "Not like what happened over at Huron. All those people – the ones that made it anyway – are here now." She slid the check under Dean's plate. "We got someone watching out for us, for sure."

"Thank you," Cas said, and the waitress beamed at him, face all grandmotherly creases, and shuffled off.

"You're on a mission," Dean hissed once the waitress was out of earshot. "Is this why you're down here, Cas?"

"No." Cas bit into a fry, dipped the bitten end into the ketchup and ate the rest of it in one go.

"What," Dean paused for breath and a chance to moderate his voice before people started looking, "I drive around like I've got no direction for three months, almost nothing supernatural in sight, and you show up, and a weird-ass case drops in my lap?"

"That's coincidental," Cas said dismissively, and actually had the nerve to frown at Dean's soft, disbelieving exhale of a curse. Nothing was coincidental when it came to him, and definitely not when it came to angels, even ex-angels, and especially Cas. "I came down here for different reasons."

"And those reasons just happened to materialize three months after you zapped out of here," Dean snorted. "What the hell were you doing up there, anyway?" And because he couldn't help it, because the thought had chased him since he'd stepped out of that chain-link fence with Lucifer's wings charcoaled to the cement behind him, and Cas hadn't answered his call. "I fucking… Cas, I thought you were dead."

"No, but it was three months – of your time – before I could complete my preparations for coming down here." Cas looked angry now, in his quiet, intense Cas way, mostly in the eyes, the tightness and fierce light in them. He stood up, shoving his plate across the table, abrupt so that the waitress glanced up from her post at the counter, and bent close, warm breath on the side of Dean’s face, lips close enough to touch almost. "You forgot one thing when you made your covenant: no angels at all."

* * *

He'd sworn to himself a lot time ago: no more deals with anyone, ever, and especially no more deals with anything supernatural. Or, as Zachariah called them, covenants. They sounded worse somehow, never mind that apparently God had been really into making them himself at one point.

"You're losing," he said to Zachariah, and that made it a bit better, watching those beady, glittering eyes narrow in annoyance. "You've got Lucifer and the demons down here, and those angels who think Lucifer's right up there, and no way in Hell you're going to be able to fight them both."

"We'll deal with our own problems," Zachariah said, irritation fading into that smooth smile that begged to have Dean wipe it off Zachariah's face.

"Yeah? Like Michael and Lucifer dealt with theirs? Fantastic work there, keeping it in the family; gold star for you." The warehouse was drafty, the air charged, uncertain, despite the wards Castiel had put up around it. "Only Zachariah can come," Castiel had said, finger-painting away, pressing the knife to his forearm again. "He's the one you'll want to make the covenant with." There wasn't, Cas said, any chaining Michael.

"I know the incantation to call him." Thick, wet, slopping sound of blood that had made Dean swallow. "But we would also be dead, and that would be less than desirable."

Zachariah scowled. "You're wasting time, boy, unless you've come to say yes. And I can promise you, you aren't getting anything… Or do you want the world to go up in flames? That way no one gets it."

"I help you," Dean said, ignoring the trail of destruction that had been the past year, had been everything in his life since crawling out of that grave, "I help you put away Lucifer, and you – all of you – leave me alone. And leave humans and the earth the fuck alone." The words hurt, he'd wanted to say them so badly. "When I'm done saving your asses, you leave and take your fate and your prophecy and all that shit with you. For good."

"I could take you right now," Zachariah said brightly, a wave of his hand in the direction of the great beyond, of Heaven.

"You could try," Dean agreed, "but Cas has the gate shut behind you; no way you're getting out until you agree."

Zachariah's face contorted in fury, and that, that was really beautiful, so beautiful that Dean couldn't help grinning and that only stoked Zachariah's anger higher. Two flickering pulses, Zach trying to flap off, and anger slid off his face, replaced by shock. He glared around the warehouse, empty except for the two of them, as though he could make Cas appear, and his voice rolled, sudden and high and terrible, Castiel!, pressing hard on Dean's eardrums, but Cas didn't come.

"He's done following your orders," Dean said, "and I'm done with you unless you say yes. I'll leave you here for Lucifer to find; I bet he'll have all kinds of fun with you."

"Fine," Zachariah ground out. "As I would swear it in Heaven, I swear it on Earth. You help us, we leave when it's all said and done."

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" Dean asked, and Zachariah quivered. "We're, uh, not going to have to kiss or anything, are we?"

"No," Zachariah said, face twisting, and that was sweet, sweet victory right there, for once and the first time in a long time. "Now let me go."

Dean pressed the speed-dial, got Cas on the first ring and a curt "very well" in his ear. In the next second, Zachariah vanished, a whirl of displaced air and fury. Not even a heartbeat later Cas appeared by his side, and Dean couldn't keep back his grin, a grin that only got wider at Cas's habitual calmness.

"He's agreed to it, Cas," Dean said, and swallowed to make his breath not shake. "Talk about poking the bear."

"Good," said Cas, utterly without inflection. "We should go before he returns," and Dean felt a hand on his shoulder, and then they were gone.

* * *

Sam, when he'd been in a sulk, usually flounced to the library or to a frou-frou coffee shop, or somewhere where it was clear he didn't want Dean butting in. Back in the days when he could fly, Castiel got off to places Dean couldn't even begin to imagine, a deserted planet or the bottom of the sea, or who the hell knew, Kansas City.

Now, wings clipped, Cas stood leaning against the Impala, wrapped in brittle silence and an anger that frightened Dean a little, enough that he didn't say something about Cas not getting a butt-print on the hood or wrecking the suspension. Getting Cas to acknowledge him was, like always, a hunt for eye contact, and once he had it, to hook Cas's attention in and pull it to him – and finally, there, burning and ferocious and barely contained, real in the weird hallucination that had been Dean's existence for the past few months.

"You need to stop being stupid," Cas grumbled. He managed to look away, down at where his hand was pressed against the sun-warm metal of the Impala's hood. "This was the only way I could talk to you."

This felt like a conversation that needed to be had in private, if they had to have it, which Dean didn't want at all. Before Cas could decide to continue the awkwardness in public, Dean fled around to the driver's side and climbed in, and through the safety of the windshield watched Cas straighten up, vertebra by vertebra, disheveled and still a little stiff from all the sitting, trailing fingers along the Impala's side. If that was because Cas hadn't gotten used to the touching and feeling things, or if he was being careless, or purposely wanting to irritate Dean, Dean had no idea.

With a heavy sigh, Cas dropped into his seat. Dean echoed it for him, exaggerated and put-upon enough that Cas scowled.

"I didn't ask for you to come back, you know," Dean told him. He reversed and pulled out without looking, fast enough to do damage, and too late checked the rearview. No one there except for a guy crossing the street, surprise giving way to indignation. Dean ducked his head guiltily and drove off. Cas's mouth was disapproving and sly both at once. "Fuck off," Dean muttered.

"Do you know how much work it took to get down here? What it cost me?" Dean's gaze slithered guiltily to Cas's chest. He had a guess, and the possibility – the fucking reality of it – crushed him, suddenly, a brick out of left field. "Even at the worst, I was angel enough to get banished back to Heaven once Lucifer died. And I was in prison, Dean." A flicker of a pause so Dean could remember what angel prison meant. "My disobedience didn't get a… a pass because you won."

"Cas… Shit." He swallowed and bit back the rest of the words so he could drive without crashing them into something. Silence, pulled tight on knowledge and Cas's pain, filled the car, not enough space inside her for everything, not the past few days, not the past several years.

He got them out of town, into a long-abandoned rest stop, parked near the blown-out shelter and the twisted carcasses of the vending machines. An out-of-order sign flapped in the wind, on the edge of being blown out into the fields, in the direction of a gutted farmhouse.

Cas extracted himself from the car, took a few steps, his head tilted up to the sun. Dean climbed out too and watched from across the Impala's roof, Cas squinting into the light and small and lost, shoulders still square like he'd never stopped being the soldier he'd been for the millennia before he'd run afoul of Dean Winchester. Maybe, for all Dean knew, he hadn't. Angels didn't change their wings, and Cas – even without his wings and that stupid trench coat – hadn't changed out of his uniform.

"I'm not your mission anymore, Cas," he said. The wind and open space caught his words and tossed them off into the distance, so they came out small and helpless.

"I know that," Cas said peevishly. "Stop saying stupid things." He turned around, frustrated and human in jeans and t-shirt, and Dean found himself skipping back and forth between angel and one of us, and he wondered if Cas felt the same way sometimes. "If I escaped as an angel, it was only a matter of time before they found me and dragged me back," he said, each syllable slow and hard-driven, made to pound through Dean's skull, "because if I got out I couldn't come down here."

He was looking at Dean, in the way that said Cas had things he was saying that couldn't be said using human language, or not the kind of language Dean understood.

"You… wanted back down here, specifically." Dean pointed to the crumbled concrete to emphasize this place, right here, somewhere north of Toledo, Ohio. When there was a whole cosmos to hide in, Cas wanted Vermont and a drive across the Northeast. He wanted – "You wanted to go on the lam with me?" It dawned on him, sudden, hard, terrible. "With me."

"Yes," Cas said, but with a look on his face that said that wasn't entirely what he meant.

"You are a fucking glutton for punishment," Dean informed him, and Cas's dry smile said he knew. "I mean, what the hell is the matter with you?"

"Nothing," Cas said calmly. He scuffed at the tarmac, turned to watch a car race by, humming down the road to the middle of nowhere. "I don't understand," a bit of frustration now, "why you think spending time with you is worse than being in prison."

"Maybe because the last time we hung out you did get hauled off to prison? You died? I have no fucking idea."

An eighteen-wheeler, one of the few Dean had seen since three months and forever, roared by. From the other side of the verge he felt the hot wind blown off it, and the wind caught in Cas's hair and tugged it, his t-shirt. Cas squinted into it thoughtfully.

"You should have more faith, Dean," Cas said at last.

"Where the hell have I heard that before?" Dean asked.

* * *

"Come on, man, we need to get on the road." Dean poked at Sam's massive, unmoving shoulder. "Sam, burning daylight here."

Sam grunted and rolled over onto his stomach, propped himself up on his elbows to squint up at Dean. "Yeah, sorry," sleep-rough voice and puffy eyes, pillow crease across his cheek and Sam looked flushed, sweaty. Dean almost teased him about needing more time to solve some issues, but that was nightmare sweat, and pupils glazed with exhaustion. "Just give me a minute."

"Take your time," Dean muttered. "I'll pack the car, Princess."

Cas was nowhere to be found that morning, not lurking around outside and he had his cell phone off. Anxiety prickled, starting low and mean in Dean's gut and crawling up his spine as he stashed the guns and shoved a t-shirt into a corner of his duffle bag. Going out to the car made it worse, a cycle of nausea and the slow swell of uncertainty. Ear bent close to the door on his way back in let him know Sam was still there, and up and moving around, to judge by the heavy thump of something being dropped, and an answering curse.

Sam didn't look any better when Dean walked back in, face damp from a hasty wash and clothes still scattered around his unmade bed. "I told you to take your time, Sammy," Dean said, and Sam shrugged, said "I can sleep in the car" in a tone that said he wouldn't be getting much sleep there either.

"Sam…" Dean hovered in the doorway, not entirely sure he wanted to get into hugging range, or what Sam would think of Dean's concern. "C'mon, man, what's up?"

"Just really shitty dreams last night." Sam pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes, wincing under the pressure. "I dreamed you were back down in Hell."

"Believe me, that's not going to be happening again any time soon," Dean told him. He offered a tentative grin, which Sam returned with one of its own. "No Winchester's ever making a deal, ever again."

"Yeah," Sam said. He shook his head and huffed a breath that might have been exhaustion or resignation. "I mean," Dean said, seeing that, and the flex of pain on Sam's mouth, "we're not right?" And "No, definitely not," was Sam's reply, and that seemed stronger at least.

"Just tired of being jerked around, you know?" With more force than necessary, Sam crammed his shaving kit into his bag and stuffed a pair of dirty jeans on top. They needed, Dean thought, to do laundry. The air was stale, old pizza and old blood piled on each other; housekeeping was going to bitch.

"I hear ya." Sam had forgotten his cell phone charger again; Dean unplugged it, "You forgot this," and Sam accepted it with a soft noise that might have been thanks, or maybe indifference.

"Are we getting this show on the road?" he asked, when Sam looked perfectly happy to stand there all day. "Or are we gonna contemplate the mysteries of your stank-ass duffel until the Apocalypse is over with."

Sam snorted. "That doesn't sound half-bad. Seriously, Dean," and he looked up, and shit, those were Sam's serious eyes, the ones that meant business and painful confessions, "you ever think we should maybe, I don't know, stop fighting?"

"What? And say yes?" The stale air went still, and no no no, that's what he heard through the low hum of the heater and the white noise of the road. "Sammy."

"No," Sam said quickly, shaking his head. "God, no, Dean, I just meant – " And Dean opened his mouth to say No way, Sam, no way in Hell or Heaven, but Sam beat him to the punch, breathless and upset, "I meant maybe we should just hide. Focus on saving people, not trying to stop things. Let them fight each other to death."

His heart hurt, Jesus, like every cheeseburger in the world suddenly catching up, like one of those demons down in the pit, who'd reached into him with his bare fingers and held.

"You want that," and Sam's voice sounded way too much like Lucifer's: soft, a galaxy of hurt, pleading for Dean to understand him, the inevitability of him. I win, so… I win, and his own broken, future self under Lucifer's foot, and the kindness, the pity, on Lucifer's face. Only Sam's soft eyes looked back at him, and he'd know, right? He'd know if Sam agreed to it.

"Hell yeah, I want that," he said, suddenly angry – angry, tired, he didn't know what the hell he was anymore, other than a guy with an angel riding him. "It's number one on my fucking bucket list." Things to do before he died: go fishing and not have to worry about the road the next day, spend three months without having to change the Impala's oil, find a doctor to stitch him up instead of doing it with a bottle of whiskey and one hand. "But Sammy, we stop fighting and a lot more people are going to die – a lot more people than either of us, or all the hunters, can save."

"Yeah." Sam snorted and yanked at the zipper on his bag. The world started again, and Dean's breath came back. "Wishful thinking, I guess."

"Be careful what you wish for." Don't wish at all, he reminded himself. It only leads to all sorts of shit.

* * *

They skipped around the Indiana-Michigan border, one hint of Indiana: cornfields, villages, a ruined sign for the RV Museum that made Cas look briefly interested in something other than keeping count of the saved towns and cities, and the ones gone to ruin. A half-hour later saw them in Michigan, everything the same except signs for fireworks. Night, and Dean's newfound exhaustion, found them south of Chicago, and Cas staring at the black vacancy of the Sears Tower.

Chicago had come through okay, but there'd been something going on around the tower, and all the offices there had been empty since.

"Why'd your angel friend skip the big cities?" Dean asked. He nudged Cas's shoulder, and Cas reluctantly looked away from the window.

"Those sigils are stronger the closer they are together," Cas said. "More distance between them…" Dean nodded to show he understood. "And they can be easily destroyed, something more likely to happen with more people around."

"Would have been nice to meet the guy." Dean paced around the room, a room exactly like the hundreds and thousands of others he'd seen in his life, vomit-green wallpaper with flocking, bedspread something out of a bad hallucination. Only, Cas being there made it different, alchemized it into something weird, which Cas seemed to do pretty easily.

Cas grunted, and that was probably all Dean was going to get out of him. He flopped down on his bed, spine cracking, watched as Cas inspected the list of TV channels and then the list of local restaurants. There were heavy black lines through the ones that were closed, which meant all but three were down for the count.

"You hungry?" he asked. "Can't remember who's buying this week, but order what you want."

"No." Cas stripped off his jacket, a quick, economic movement, and Dean found his eyes – as they usually were – helplessly, inevitably, drawn to the small bump of the amulet under Cas's shirt. And this time Cas caught him looking.

"If you have a question," Cas said with some of his old impatience, "you should ask it."

"That," Dean pointed unnecessarily, "is that your – ?" And the look on Cas's face, sad and confused and reverent, said it was. "How?"

"There are many ways to fall." Cas spoke calmly, voice its usual steady roughness. "Gabriel didn't fall so much as leave," and there was a sharp twist, of pain and anger, "Anna needed to be sure she would not be hunted for abandoning her post."

"And you didn't want to experience human life from Day One?"

"No," Cas said again, and far from being impatient, the word held so much, so much Dean couldn't identify.

"Anna said when she did it, it hurt."

"Very much," Cas said quietly. He had the clasp unhooked now and the amulet resting in his palm, eyes fixed on it with an expression Dean, in the evening shadows, couldn't quite make out. "It felt like… I don't know."

Cas confessing ignorance had always freaked Dean out, or irritated him, because Cas was supposed to know everything, and if he didn't that was usually bad news. Now, though, he had to say, "Sometimes you can't remember stuff like that. Your mind blocks it out," and it was what human brains did, because there was only so much pain they were built to take. Dean's cutoff was somewhere around thirty years – and he remembered those as some timeless stretch of pain, punctuated with the flash of razor, screams, the taste of blood.

A softly impatient noise and Dean realized Cas was holding out the amulet. He took it automatically, and it was warm, from the part of Cas contained inside it, or from resting against his chest all day, Dean had no idea. Light slid uncertainly around the edges, where the metal was dull and smooth, as though many fingers had stroked it or rubbed it over centuries. The symbols glowed with their own light, keen under Dean's thumb and unexpectedly sharp on his palm.

* * *

"We killed the Devil." Jimmy Novak's voice shook, so much lighter than Cas's, absent the weight of millennia. He had one hand buried under his coat, pressed to the shirt beneath it, Dean knew, against the pain of the sigils Cas had carved into him to hide him from Lucifer's sight. "He's… that was him."

He heard the sword, Cas's sword, clatter to the ground, metal on concrete, shrill and scraping and discordant. Spring-cold air he couldn't breathe because of the smoke, the breeze pushing it up and away in swirls and feathers of grey-black away from the body. No bones left, Dean saw, like Lucifer had already burnt away flesh and bone and all the rest of that poor bastard he'd possessed.

Delicately, cautiously, Jimmy stepped around the burning mess, foot smudging one of the long, sweeping wings like charcoal. The gun, a home-made Winchester special, dangled loosely in his hand as though he were on the verge of forgetting it, and the discordance of that hit Dean viciously, square in the stomach. Not Cas's easy, stalking gait, not Cas's fingers curled competently around the hilt of his sword.

It reminded him; he knelt and picked the sword up, and the hilt was still warm, the tiniest bit slick from his sweat, although that was mostly gone. No blood on the blade, not even the smallest drop. Jesus, Cas.

"You okay?" Not that Jimmy looked okay, pale as his shirt and with blood seeping slowly through the fabric. "Don't answer that," Jimmy said after a beat, with a wry look equal parts dying humor and pain.

"We'll get you patched up." Sam should be there. The space behind his shoulder felt hopelessly empty. Jimmy made a dismissive noise, "Just a flesh wound," with a wince to give it away. "Never thought I'd see the day when I'd want an angel riding around inside me again," he said, with a laugh as hollow as the sky, that kind of empty.

"Did he say anything?" Jesus, it was hard looking at Jimmy, the reminder of a person Dean had never actually seen.

"He told me what to do," Jimmy said hoarsely, "and then he told me not to be afraid."

"He have anything to tell me?"

"No," Jimmy said, and looked apologetic. It would figure, though, Dean told himself; Cas never liked words or explanations, not when there were a lot more important things that needed to be done. Jimmy's mouth worked slightly for a moment as though he were searching for words, maybe words that Castiel would have said to Dean, but oddly, Dean thought, Jimmy had a lot less experience of Cas than Dean did, in some ways.

Jimmy was pointedly not looking at the husk and the ash on the ground, and breathing through his mouth. Dean had no idea what to say, or to do, beyond reach into his pocket for his keys, their familiar song loud in the silence.

"Come on," Dean said, "we should get you cleaned up, get you back home."

"Home," Jimmy whispered, like he couldn't believe it, and Dean couldn't either.

* * *

The protection marks stopped when they hit the border with Iowa. Then again, they drove past four undestroyed towns, full of rattled citizens but no death out of the ordinary. Not many of them wanted to talk to Dean, and the two of them got looks Dean had been able to shrug off for a long time – the long, slow, distrustful silence as he fueled the Impala, the silence that followed him when he went into the gas station-slash-café to collect Cas and dinner.

He found Cas, tense and on the knife-edge of a colossally bad idea, by the counter. Bills, crumpled from Cas's pocket, and some change littered the floor and ground metallic under Cas's boot. Four men, necks lasered red by the sun and eyes dark with suspicion – almost demon-dark, shit, and Dean sidled up to Cas as quick as he could – stood ranged around Cas, belligerence in jeans and flannel, and one of them in a John Deere baseball cap. The baseball-capped one hung back, cradling his wrist and looking torn between pain and fury.

"C'mon, Cas," he said as lightly as he could, "we're burnin' daylight."

"It'd be best for you if you moved on, boys," a guy with the face of Farmer Brown, and a gigantic tire iron in his hand, advised him. Dean backed up, grin on his face to show he would definitely take Farmer Brown's advice. Next to him, Cas stiffened and Dean wished like hell that Cas still had his telepathy, because doing anything right now except getting the hell out of Decorah, Iowa would not end well for them at all.

Cas breathed something that sounded Enochian and filthy but, when Dean touched his wrist, he subsided. Thank God. Dean didn't dare bend down to collect the money, even though that was ten bucks and dinner right there; just back out slowly, Winchester, slowly, think calming thoughts at Cas, who's a bomb about to go off, tick-tock, tick-tock, and then they were out the door and maybe safe, the good ole boys on the other side of the wall.

By the time they had Decorah safely in the Impala's rearview, Dean's heart stopped pounding. It wasn't the good kind of adrenaline, the kind that left him buzzed and charged and wanting sex or a fight. Instead, it settled down sick and heavy in his stomach, and then tiredness leached in, and he hoped to God there was a normal town somewhere around here, where the people weren't psychotic and paranoid.

"What'd you do?" he asked, once his voice felt like it wouldn't crack under stress. "I sent you in to get food, Cas, not stir the turd."

"I didn't stir anything," Cas said, sounding deeply offended. "I reached into my pocket to get the money you'd given me, and one of them said 'We don't want your filthy Babylon money here,'" and the way Cas said it made Dean laugh, the sound just barely not hysterical, "and when he tried to stop me, I… took exception."

Dean thought of the guy with the cap. "You mean you broke his wrist." Back in the day, Cas could have taken the guy's hand off and used it for an ashtray.

"I thought it best that we be clear about things," Cas said.

"Yeah, I'm sure you made things plenty clear to them." Dean glanced out the window. Route Nine was a desert, farms dark against the late afternoon, and a fleeting glimpse of a sign told him the next town was miles up the road. "You're not an angel anymore, Cas."

It hurt to say, but it had to be said, even though Cas went straight-backed and quietly angry. "I know that Dean," he said, in the tone reserved for when Cas thought Dean was being too stupid to live. "Believe me, every day I know this."

"I know," Dean sighed. "Sorry."

"At any rate," Cas said after a moment, a silence that Led Zep couldn't quite fill, "I did get dinner."

"What?" Dean made himself look away from the endless ribbon of highway. Cas was fishing in his coat pocket, a rustling, crinkling sound before he produced a frozen burrito and one of those fake blueberry pies that came in a package, and looked so pleased Dean had to laugh.

* * *

They hit bad hunting outside of Boston, the kind of really old, really pissed off ghosts that made Amityville look like Casper. And speaking of Casper, Cas had vanished on reconnaissance or something, and that meant Dean was being hurled around the dead little girl's bedroom like a stuffed animal. Even heavier, more substantial thumping came from the master bedroom down the hall, and a sound that Dean hoped wasn't bone breaking.

"Sammy, some help here!" The words rose in pitch towards the end, and the little girl, her claw-hands held out to keep Dean pinned in place, grinned up at him. "Look, can the temper tantrum, kid," he said, and, ow, fuck, the girl introduced his face to the opposing wall.

"Dean!" Heavier thumping, closer, closer and the door banged open, wood splintering around the lock, rebounding off the wall. With his face plastered to the wall and his nose just about to snap, Dean couldn't see anything, but he could hear the blessed, wonderful sound of a gun going off, deafening in his right ear, and then he got dropped right on his ankle. It gave out from under him and it was ass-spine-head the rest of the way.

"What a fucking brat." He made himself roll to his knees, which didn't hurt much less than the rest of him. Sam was right there, hand shaking on his shoulder like he was the one who'd been tossed around the room by a psycho five-year-old.

"You okay?" Sam's voice came out high and edgy with nerves. "Shit, Dean."

"I'm fine." It was the I'm-not-coughing-blood kind of fine, which meant he could move. "The hell is up with this place?"

"Cas," Sam said, pulling Dean to his feet. "I'll explain later, but we gotta get out of here now."

"Not arguin' about that," Dean wheezed. He had to make himself move, even with Sam hauling him along. They almost tripped down the stairs, Sam practically galloping down them with Dean shuffling uselessly along beside him, and they hit the landing hard enough to make Dean groan. Sorry, sorry, Sam breathed, wincing for him, wide-eyed and terrified like Dean hadn't seen him in a long time.

Down the hall, down, down, through to the foyer, and Sam heaved with his other shoulder and forced the door open. Dean coughed, inhaled and coughed again when he tasted smoke, and shit, what the hell? He even asked that, "What the hell, Sammy?" as Sam bumped them down the porch stairs and onto the lawn.

In the shadows, half-lit by flame, stood Castiel, chanting. Dean recognized the syllables as Enochian, but the meanings, as they always did, slipped and slid away from him. Sam hauled him across the grass, the air shocking and fresh on Dean's face even as he smelled the smoke behind them. Not even breaking his chant, Cas looked him up and down, assessing, all combatants accounted for, and kept going.

"Thanks for the save," Dean mumbled. He looked around, up the silent street and then in the other direction, and no one stirred. Angel mojo, he figured, the equivalent of the cop saying "Nothing to see here, move along," although he couldn't quite square that deep, dark quiet with the creep of fire up the house, the flames licking the windows, the roof.

"He couldn't get in," Sam breathed, as though he were afraid Cas could overhear – which, judging by the sidelong look he got, Cas could – "and he tried to call you, but you weren't answering."

Because the pint-sized sociopathic spirit had been flinging him around the room, and probably his phone was still up there, being melted down to slag. Right. Dean eased himself off the support of Sam's shoulder and, after testing his weight on the iffy ankle, managed to stand unassisted. "So what's the deal?"

"Lucifer," Cas said. He'd stopped chanting and was staring fixedly at the flames. "This was Death's work."

"Death told them it wouldn't release them until they did what he wanted," Sam told him. "Otherwise this would have been the salt and burn it was supposed to be."

"Death can reach across the veil," Cas said as he knelt to gather the lighter he'd dropped, a knife. His movements were quick, economical. "Spirits that want rest will do anything they can to have it." The fire was really going now, a core of white at its center, stoked by Cas's words and maybe some of his pyrotechnic angel skills. "You should leave."

"Good idea," Dean said. The back of his mouth tasted like an ashtray, and his face had gone tight with heat that felt as though it could singe his clothes. "Cas, you riding with us?"

"I'll meet you at the motel," Castiel said, attention back on the burning house. "I need to finish here."

It was too much to ask Cas to save their asses and be the clean-up crew, but Dean's body had gone ten rounds with plaster and drywall and his head had the swollen, too-full feeling of a blooming headache. Sam, at least, thank God Sam looked okay, a bit bruised but mostly freaked and unsettled.

He didn't settle until they got back to the motel, and even then, the Stay-Inn-Comfort's admonishment to "Rest up awhile!" went unheeded. "You need ibuprofen? Pizza? Hot pack?" Sam's semi-automatic mouth fired off the options, a full round before Dean could process the ibuprofen and the pizza.

"Chill, Sammy… It's no worse than usual." He thought, anyway; something still didn't feel right in his ankle, and there was something up with his ribs. "You know me, a shower, fistful of painkillers, I'll be fine in the morning." Sam looked doubtful, and Dean picked himself up off the bed and stretched to demonstrate how fine he was. "D'you want me to do jumping jacks? Go a round with you?"

"Bite me," Sam said, but without heat.

"If you order food, I'll feel a lot better," Dean suggested, and tried not to limp on his way into the bathroom.

When he got out of the shower a greasy bag was sitting on the table, waiting, with a glass of water and four pills to keep it company. Sam bolted into the bathroom when Dean's back was turned, and it was so normal and everyday, despite the shittiness of the hunt, despite Lucifer, that Dean had to laugh.

* * *

His half of the burrito and pie tasted like victory, microwaved victory, to Dean, just the slightest bit grainy, and the burrito was still cool in the middle even though the tortilla was hot enough to singe his fingers. Cas had inhaled his own burrito half and had his share of the pie saved for later, and was stretched out on his bed, ankles crossed and hands clasped across his belly.

"So your mystery angel had a beef with Iowa? Or did he ward the entire state?"

"Decorah says otherwise." Cas was ignoring him in favor of staring up at the knotted-pine ceiling of the I-O-Way Motel in Blue Earth. Blessedly unaffected Blue Earth, which was willing to share its microwaves and even give motel rooms to strangers, and it was that second thing that had brought Dean up short. "It's just good to see someone from the outside," the proprietor had said, waving off Dean's – or, really, Kirk Ulrich's – credit card. "You'll just have to come down to Sid's and give us some news. We haven't had many people up this way lately."

"It's like Stepford-cheerful here, Cas," Dean said now, and tried to be inconspicuous about looking out the window. "I don't like it." At least the people in Decorah had been honest about wanting Dean and Cas plastered messily to the cement, but here, Dean couldn't help but think of the village people from years ago, the ones who liked to fatten their unsuspecting victims before serving them up to the local fertility god.

He and Sam had been apart then, too. Redirect, think about being some kid's Happy Meal. "We're not going to end up on someone's menu, are we?"

Cas rolled his head back and forth on the pillow and stretched out the kinks in his back, and Dean tried not to stare. "The people in Decorah were probably cursed," Cas said once he'd resettled. "Or else they made a deal to keep their town safe."

"What, there was a marathon kissing festival with a demon?"

Despite lying down, Cas managed to shrug. Dean thought about it and decided, yeah, if he'd been terrified his town was going to be blown off the map, he might have made a deal too. At least, back in the days when he'd been making deals. "You think the good people of Blue Earth did the same thing?"

"They could just be good people," Cas said, but even he sounded uncertain.

"I don't want to go to Sid's," Dean said. "Did you see it when we were driving in? They have the best barbecue in the county."

A knock sounded on the door, like it had been summoned. When Dean reluctantly opened it, sawed-off tucked safe and invisible behind his thigh, it was Ernie the proprietor, grinning and waving encouragingly.

"You boys ought to come down to Sid's," Ernie said, face wrinkling into a smile. His eyes were small and bright and kind, the sort of kindness Dean imagined mutating into greed and bloodlust. Ernie added, "I know everyone'll be real glad to see you," and his smile broadened.

"I bet," Dean said, and smiled thinly. "We'll be right down."

And the hell of it was, they were good people, Dean found out, after he and Cas scoped the place. No scary ritual-looking devices, no gigantic human-sized cauldron and no cleavers, only Sid, who'd turned out to be Sid herself, fortyish and quick with the beers, rounding up what looked like half the town and telling them to be quiet and give these boys a chance to drink. She had her hair back in a bandanna, but a few dark strands escaped and fell in her dark eyes.

"We haven't really had any news in here for a while," Ernie said. "It comes in with the truckers, when they come by, but the cable people ain't fixed the lines coming into town. And some days the phones work, some days they don't."

"Shut your face now, Ernest, and let these two eat," Sid said, materializing with two full plates, and on each a burger the size of Dean's face, practically, and Dean realized he was starving.

The burger tasted good, sweet tomato and onion, sharp edge of beer to wash it down. Next to him, Cas plowed his way through his meal, and man, the guy was still superhuman when it came to packing in the food. It was hard, suddenly, remembering all his mistrust, and dammit, he'd been ridiculous, thinking these people were cannibals when all they wanted was to be hospitable.

"You honor us with your presence," Ernie said, strangely formal with his baseball cap and plate of cheese fries. Sid, who'd reappeared next to him with two more beers, nodded approvingly.

And Cas, firmly distracted from his steak, set down his fork and knife and peered closely at Sid and Ernie. Dean braced himself for the cleavers and hacksaws, but Cas only bowed, as much as he could sitting down, and said, also formally, "You honor us."

"Eat, drink, and be merry, boys," Sid said, and plunked the beers down so a bit of foam slopped over the rims. "Although I don't think you'll die tomorrow," she added, with a quick, speaking look. Wiping her hands on her apron, she walked away, all rolling hips and sass, and told two of the hovering Blue Earthers to leave the guests alone while they ate.

"That was weird," Dean breathed out of the corner of his mouth.

"Expected," Cas corrected him, and returned to his steak. Across the table, Ernie ate a cheese fry and beamed.

* * *

It had been weeks, and no change, only the slow slip into despair.

Food tasted like ashes, bitter. He called the hunters he knew, and the ones who would speak to him told him they had no idea where Sam was.

"Maybe he killed himself," Lewis O'Connor suggested. "God-fucking-damn I hope so."

"You better hope I don't find you, Lewis," Dean ground out, and slammed the phone shut and threw it at the wall.

"I'm sorry, Dean," Cas said from behind him. "I haven't been able to locate him, either, not him or his dreams."

"What the hell good are you, then?" Dean asked. A whirl of wind was his answer, stale and unwashed air of the motel room, and he was alone again.

* * *

Sid and Ernie kept them at the bar until way too late even for Dean's night-owl body. A lot of it was talking, Dean filling them in on the little he'd seen on his trip up the seaboard and then across the Midwest, and Cas seemed to be absorbing some of that too, the three months he'd been gone.

"But a lot was saved," Sid had said, when Dean had talked about how so much had been destroyed – not only buildings, but people's lives, the space that existed between the real world and the supernatural, and there was no going back to that old world now. "And you saved us, Dean Winchester."

"Shut up," he'd muttered, and stared at his plate. Dessert and not just pie, but cake and ice cream, and it was like he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

"It's the least we can do," Ernie said, and the townspeople, who'd started to hover again, all nodded in agreement. "When Sid said you were here, we looked at each other and decided, well, we haven't had a good do in ages. Perfect chance!" And the townspeople had cheered and toasted each other, and someone drunkenly called for another round.

"What do you mean, when Sid said we were here?" Dean had asked, and that's when it had all come out, the reason why Blue Earth was so quiet, why Dean and Cas got a free night in the I-O-Way and now more food than Dean had seen outside of a Las Vegas buffet.

Back in the motel, after Sid and Ernie had finally released them, Dean still couldn't believe it, a life that had seen all sorts of bizarre and still kept seeing even more of it. Cas looked at him quizzically. "What's so bizarre about it?"

"Babylonian goddess of beer, hospitality, and shelter," Dean repeated, and wondered if it was possible to explain this sort of thing to someone who'd spent the past seven thousand years of his life being a bona-fide supernatural entity. He shook his head, wanted to laugh. "You've got to be freaking kidding me."

"I'm not kidding you." Cas was stretched out in bed again, this time on his belly. Dean stared, way too much beer talking now, and his reflexes were stupid and discretion had gone out the window, but Cas didn't seem to mind. "It makes sense… Not everyone saw the world being half-destroyed as a good thing."

So the pagans had chipped in, Dean said to himself, and for Sid – Siduri, Cas had said, a Babylonian goddess – that had meant keeping Blue Earth safe. And Cas, almost echoing Dean's thoughts, said, "She is covered with a veil," and it sounded like poetry and Dean remembered Sid's bandanna. "Other gods and spirits have a stake in this world," Cas said, "they've never liked the premise of Heaven."

"I can't imagine why," Dean snorted. For a wonder, Cas laughed at that and smiled, really honest-to-god smiled, and Dean's heart went all weird. Cas's smile was laugh lines and teeth, and it even got to his eyes, and he was all lit up, and something in Dean's chest let go, just a little bit.

"Sid seemed to like you," he said, out of nowhere. That was seared into his brain, too, Sid coming back with their dessert plates and coffee, and after she'd deposited them, she'd kissed Cas on the cheek and said something Dean hadn't understood, something that felt old. Enochian-old. Cas had replied in what Dean guessed was the same language, and had, in a very un-Caslike way, gone a bit pink. "What'd she say to you, or is it not for delicate human ears?"

"She said she was grateful at least one of us had found something worth saving," Cas said, but he said it in a way that suggested it hadn't been the world Sid had been talking about, and to save himself Dean got up to go brush his teeth.

* * *

Dean wandered out of the bathroom, mouth minty-fresh and face freshly shaved.

"What have I told you about staying up late on school nights, kid?" No way to keep his surprisingly good mood to himself, and no point; he filched an orange from Sam's fresh-fruit stash and began to peel it. Sam scrubbed one hand over his face and kept reading.

"Is the secret to stopping the Apocalypse up in there somewhere?" Dean flicked the folder with a juice-damp finger.

"What?" Sam blinked. "No. It's just the case." There went the fingers again, pressing at his temples, pressing the bridge of his nose.

It was work to tear Sam away from the research, "Seriously, dude, you're rank, and when I think you're rank, you're fucking rank," but he got Sam into the shower, and got a chance to study the folder a bit. It didn't tell him much, at least, nothing he already knew, but to humor Sam and keep him out of his funk, Dean asked for the pre-show recap.

Back on the road up to Massachusetts, some bedroom community with a couple bedrooms being haunted by angry ghosts. "Only weird deaths I could find were this family – mom, dad, little girl," Sam said, rubbing his eyes as he studied his gigantic folder of print-outs and photocopies. "Died of carbon monoxide poisoning ten years ago."

"Are you kidding me?" The last few miles of New York countryside spun out beneath the Impala's wheels, the day a bright, high spring day, with flowers blooming and the birds and the bees doing their thing, like the end of the world wasn't happening all over. "So what, do they wait for helpless air conditioning repair guys to come by or what?"

"No clue," Sam said absently. "It's weird that they're acting up now."

"End of the world and all that," Dean suggested. "Maybe it's screwing everything up."

"Maybe," Sam muttered, face crinkling. He sighed and shoved the papers back in the folder. "It's definitely doing a good job screwing with other things. Like us."

"Hell, maybe all we need is just a routine salt-and-burn," Dean suggested. He reached across the front seat and clapped Sam on the thigh. "Sometimes you gotta take a break from not ending the world, you know?"

"Don't know if that's allowed, Dean." Sam laughed, his small, frustrated, I'm-humoring-you laugh. "But we should still check it out."

"That's the spirit," Dean said, even though it really wasn't.

* * *

"Hey, Bobby."

"Hey, yourself." Bobby wheeled himself up the ramp to the porch without another word, head bowed as he pushed the wheelchair up and up. Dean didn't even think about trying to help him. When Bobby reached the top, he did a neat wheelie, a 180-turn to look at Dean and Cas again. "Why'd you come by?"

"Cas here suggested it," Dean said, "and they still haven't re-opened Disney World."

"Oh, Cas suggested it. Well, then." Bobby fixed Cas with a look, which Cas returned unblinkingly. Sighing, Bobby shook his head and even allowed himself a smile—small, but there, and Dean relaxed. So it wasn't going to be the shotgun, or the threats. "It's good to see you again, Dean," Bobby said, to confirm it, and Dean heard even without Sam somewhere in the back of the words.

Dean sighed, breathed in, tasted old rusting cars and oil, the cooler air of South Dakota edging its slow way towards fall. Some of those cars had been there for years, gradually settling into the ground, a small handful of newer ones clustered by the house, silent reminders that Bobby's scrapyard had been faltering even before he'd gotten hurt, and now…

"We don't want to put you out, Bobby," he said, but Bobby waved him off impatiently. "You can scrap some of those cars if you want," he said, "so I can enter 'em into the inventory. I got suppliers and recyclers coming by a lot now, can't keep up and no one's been answering my help-wanted ads."

"Can't imagine why," Dean muttered, which got him a look and a snort. "But thanks, Bobby."

"Don't mention it." Bobby's attention swiveled to Cas, who'd been hanging out in the corner of the conversation.

"You know you've always got a room here, boy," Bobby grunted, and Cas twitched as though surprised to be addressed. Bobby looked up at Cas from under the brim of his cap and, solemn, still, Cas looked right back. "Hell, you've come back from the dead and you've sacrificed yourself over and over again like a fool, so I suppose that gets you honorary Winchester status."

"Thank you," Cas said. Bobby grunted again and slapped Cas's thigh, "You'll do, kid, you'll do," and heaved himself over the threshold and into the house. Dean, stuck with carrying the duffels – his and Cas's, Cas had one of his own now – trailed Bobby and Cas inside.

Everything was the same, he saw, books and papers, the familiar chaos, only most of it lower down. He listened to Cas's light step on the floorboards, and the long, low roll of Bobby's wheels, two earthbound creatures, one of them offering the other a beer.

* * *

He woke up the next morning, the painkillers blunting the edge of pain, and he was a bit hazy with them. "Weird," he coughed, and his mouth tasted like something rotting in a toilet. Breathing a curse, he carefully shifted over onto his back and tried to remember what the hell it was that he'd done to get hit by that damn train.

Oh yeah: psycho teacup ghost. Death getting involved, again. Sam hauling him downstairs and to safety, and Cas torching the house. Cautious and waiting for the pain to hit, Dean breathed in, relief when his ribs didn't bitch at him. Sam must have given him the good stuff then, not just the ibuprofen, and it would explain the dreams, confusing, broken voices, an argument, and he'd been in the middle – again – Sam and someone else fighting, no no no, he'd begged, not again, and Sam had said something, the other voice had said something else, and then nothing.

"Dad." Some of the last words he could remember Dad and Sam speaking had been fighting words, and fucking hell he did not have time to think about Dad right now.

"Sammy?" he asked the silence on the other side of the room. The silence answered back. "Sammy?"


02: Time and materials

"Maybe you boys should get out, go for a drive or something," Bobby suggested. "It's a nice day."

It was a nice day, Dean agreed, only he didn't feel it, the weather sliding off some weird coating of resignation and disinterest. Bobby, sensing it and not in the mood to indulge Dean, snorted and muttered about how no one should jump up all at once, and turned and wheeled himself over to the closed library door to yell at Cas. Preoccupied silence, the kind belonging to someone stuck on hold for an eternity, answered him back.

"You could spend longer waiting in Purgatory," Bobby hollered at him, but Cas didn't say anything in reply and Bobby grumbled, "Suit yourself." He rolled back toward the kitchen, a little extra heave-ho to get the wheelchair over a place where the floorboards had warped. At a loss for anything else to do except stare at the dead black eye of the TV, Dean got up and followed him.

"Honestly," Bobby grunted, "you boys need to get a life. I'm old, I got an excuse to hang around here and do nothing all day."

"Bobby, I'm older than you are." And he was, wasn't he? He had seventy-plus years of memories, and more than half of them in Hell. His skin didn't want to contain all that time, still; it spilled out at moments, in memories, in shivers up his spine and waiting for the razor, when he got a look at his shoulder and the handprint that never healed. Back then, it had been easier keeping all that shit under control, tamped down tight in a place where he couldn't get to it, and that meant surviving, seeing one day through and then the next.

Then, contents under pressure, it all started coming back out, a trickle some days, a few drops on others, ever since he'd dropped Jimmy off at his place.

Bobby was rummaging for food, leftover baked beans and hot dogs from a town Labor Day party. With a meaningful look, he shoved the paper plates at Dean, and Dean transferred them to the microwave.

"What the hell's he doing in there?" Dean asked, to ask anything.

"What, boyfriend isn't talking to you?" Bobby snickered as he pulled three beers from the fridge. "Thought you two were in each other's pockets."

"Since when does Cas say anything?" Dean deliberately did not think about Cas spilling his guts on that roadside, the confessions at odd moments. What he did to get down here, why he wanted to get down here, and he definitely wasn't thinking about that.

"If you're going to be like that…" Bobby's expression said he was indulging Dean now, and was going to give him hell for it later. "He's been calling around about some research. Books, reports from hunters on the apocalypse. Maybe he's writing a goddamned research report. He could be writing his memoirs. Hell if I know."

The beans in the microwave started to explode. Dean turned it off and transferred everything to the table. Some of the beans smoked, and one of the hot dogs had gone all wrinkled.

"Soup's on, Cas!" Dean shouted.

With a heavy sound, the library door slid back and Cas strode through.

And right past the table, with God's own food on it, and out onto the porch. The screen door banged behind him, and his boots hit the wood hard and fast, one-two-three as he took three steps and jumped the stairs, dusty thump when he landed. Dean glanced back at Bobby, a what the hell was that? look, and when he turned back to the door, Cas had vanished.

"Go talk to your boyfriend, Dean," Bobby told him, unexpectedly gentle. "I'll keep this stuff warm," he added when Dean hesitated, and Dean couldn't quite figure out how to snap back that Cas wasn't his damn boyfriend, not when Cas had been trailing frustration and disappointment behind him, and Bobby actually sounded concerned.

Talking covered a lot of sins in his book, Dean figured; he'd track down Cas and stay there while Cas vented, or didn't vent, or they could stare at each other like they used to do. He didn't bother with his jacket, the sun still clinging to the last of summer, and wandered out into the dust-dry air, squinting.

"Cas?" Dean wound his way through the maze of cars, a maze that never seemed to get smaller no matter how much work they did, There was a sort of courtyard, formed by metal carcasses stacked three high, buttressed with tires, where Dean usually worked and Cas stayed with him, helping him catalogue parts, and it was there that Dean headed after a moment's consideration.

He heard Cas before he saw him, which wasn't something that happened a lot. Or ever, really, but Cas was giving the junked-out Nova a hell of a beating, enough hell that Dean felt sorry for it. Cas was a furious blur of motion, the tire iron moving too fast to catch the light except in long, rhythmic streaks as Cas reared back and struck, reared back and struck, and Dean, yeah, he remembered doing that too.

"Last time I did that," he said, when Cas was paused at the top of his swing, torso twisted and arms raised, a terrible light in his eye, "Last time I did that, I beat the shit out of my car… but if you did that now, I'd have to kill you."

Cas dropped the tire iron. It clattered off his boot and rang metallic on the concrete as it skidded in Dean's direction. It stopped near the boundary of sunlight and shade, under the small shed where Dean stood. The air was heavy with old oil and rust, and Cas's vibrating, just-leashed anger.

"They not have your size?" Dean asked, and Cas turned to look at him, face wild and blank, like something trapped or pushed past its endurance. Or both. Energy crackled off him, angel or not, and with his hair disheveled, sweat streaking his temple, the worn t-shirt, he didn't look like Dean's Cas so much as that future Cas he'd met one time.

"I…" Cas said hoarsely. He coughed and licked his lips. "I don't know why I just did that."

"You're pissed off," Dean said, and, inappropriate to the end, wanted to laugh at the confusion on Cas's face. Only then the uncertainty collapsed into desolation, edged with anger, and in a heartbeat it wasn't so funny anymore.

"What's up?" he asked, and braced himself for something awkward and terrible. Cas stayed silent, glaring at and through the trunk of the Nova. His hands, usually still at his sides, worked, the fingers clenching and unclenching. "Cas? Earth to Cas?"

"I thought it would be better," Cas said, his voice stretched tight, "once we were here."

"What would be better? The food?" Careful, like Cas was an animal about to spook, and Dean shifted closer. "Come on, Cas. Help me out here."

Cas shook his head. "I don't know."

He wasn't looking at Dean, those dark eyes of his fixed straight forward and frowning into the middle distance, that expression he got when he thought if he could just not look at Dean, Dean might not exist. Or, Dean supposed, that was Cas trying to wrestle his emotions into submission, a guy used to being all-powerful confused and overwhelmed by something he couldn't smite into tiny pieces. Either way, the answer was to bob and weave and fake Cas into looking at him, and it took work still, but there, he had him, hooking Cas's reluctant blue eyes and drawing his gaze back to Dean and the real world.

"Cas, c'mon, man."

"I thought," Cas said, with the utter slowness of a person barely under control, "once we got here, things would be better."

"What the hell do you mean?" Dean tried, he honestly did, not to let his exasperation show, but the wrinkling of Cas's forehead, and the rebellious look away, said otherwise. "Cas, I'm usually the last guy to say this, but you gotta give me something here."

"I don't know." Cas shook his head, looked around the small square of sand and dust, the dead cars rusting their way through oblivion. He scuffed at the dirt, and Dean was on the edge of giving up – he did not have the patience for this, not with Sammy and not with Cas – when Cas came out with, "I thought being here would fix things," and the look he gave Dean said what, exactly, Cas thought being here would fix.

Dean sighed and let himself slump back against the Nova. Its battered body was warm beneath him, and the suspension, long since shot, gave heavily under his weight. His hands rested on his thighs, and they looked battered, old, two fingers broken that had never set properly, and he'd only had this body for three years, barely. Not even that.

"Cas," he said, and felt more than saw Cas's attention swinging back to him, as absolute as it ever was, "there's some things that're past fixing. I'm probably one of them."

That got him a quietly furious look, and before he could apologize, because it was the truth but a shit thing to say, Cas straightened up and stalked past him, back to the house. "Lunch," Cas half-snarled, and shook Dean's hand off when Dean tried to grab him and pull him back.

"Cas," Dean said, and knew it was useless, had to settle for trailing Cas into the house and enduring Bobby's meaningful glare. Cas couldn't, or wouldn't, talk about it anymore. Bobby bitched at him about letting their lunch grow cold, and Cas took it stoically.

"I'm going to be in the library," he said after they'd finished, and abandoned his plate and bottle to Dean. The library door slammed shut behind him. Dean, who was absolutely not eavesdropping, heard Cas's rough voice say into the phone, Is this the information center for – and then something incomprehensible.

"You boys," Bobby sighed. "Come on and help me with this, then we gotta get started on the inventory."

Some philosophical asshole once said there was no great loss without some small gain, and that small gain was Bobby's business. It was also the loss of any chance to laze around, him and Cas taking apart the wrecks dragged in off the highways and Bobby adding them to the inventory, then dealers and mechanics coming to pick up the goods. It had meant, for a while, the distraction of teaching Cas about cars, and Cas bent close and warm and attentive.

Not so much, now. Dean crammed the paper plates into the trash.

"He's just tryin' to help, Dean," Bobby said. The wheelchair creaked over the linoleum and out onto the wood floor of the hallway.

"Yeah, well, he can mind his own damn business," Dean told him, and raised his voice in case Cas was listening.

"You are his damn business," Bobby said from the hallway.

* * *

He left ten messages on Sam's phone in three hours, and called the cell phone company about the GPS. His next call was to Cas, who manifested himself two feet away from Dean's face.

"Sam's gone," Dean said, and didn't even bother to keep his voice from breaking.

Cas looked him over, cataloguing and as anxious as Dean had ever seen him. "If Lucifer had taken him…" He trailed off, and Dean said into the sudden silence, "I wish he had," and couldn't bring himself to feel bad when Cas shuddered with quick anger. Dean turned away, hand tight on his cell phone, careful not to look at Sam's empty, rumpled bed and the absence.

"He took his stuff," Dean said. "That's something right? Don't think you guys usually worry about shaving and having clean underwear."

"No, not particularly." He could hear Cas's coat rustling, his soft breaths.

"Sam's in Delaware," Dean said. "Can you take me there, Cas?"

"Yes, but it would be…"

"Just take me there, Cas."

Cas did, two cool fingers on Dean's forehead like always, and he caught himself before crashing into the Welcome to Historic Smyrna sign. This never got easier, and Dean had no idea why, not when Cas seemed to come out of it in stride and not when Dean felt like his brain wanted to scatter in ten directions at once.

"First things…" It was a long shot, but it was all he had.

He found what might have been the only phone book in Historic Fucking Smyrna, hidden behind the shuttered town commerce building, found the first motel in the yellow pages, Abe's Motor Court, with free HBO and pool, and come stay for the night… or a bit longer! With the phone book crammed up against the booth, he entered the number into his contacts.

"Can you take me there, Cas?" he asked, and pointed to the listing for Abe's Motor Court. A silence, as though Cas were memorizing the address or entering it into his angel GPS, and then Cas's rough "Okay," and one stumble out of freefall later they stood in the parking lot of a grimy, battered motel. Abe-Abe-Abe blinked at them from the neon sign on the fritz.

"This could be a trap," Cas said tensely, and "Yeah, it could be, but I don’t fucking care," was all Dean had to stay to that. Cas made a resigned noise and surveyed the deserted parking lot, the dim rectangle of light from the window, and the proprietor shuffling around inside the lobby. The evening had something terrible in it, that got Dean's heart thumping and had him briefly clumsy with his cell phone.

"Listen for the ring," he told Cas, and Cas nodded to show he understood. Dean hoped he did, anyway. He hit speed dial on the cell and listened to the ring – one, two, and "Over there," Cas said, nodding at a corner room. Dean let the rings play out to the end and Sam's message, Hey, this is Sam. Leave me a message, and "Fuck you for doing this, Sam," Dean hissed before jamming down the disconnect button and stuffing the phone back in his pocket.

"It's room fourteen," Cas said quietly.

"Let's go say hi to Jim Rockford, then," Dean said, and would have gone barging in if not for Cas's hand hard and sudden on his shoulder, caution and the threat of a broken collar bone at the same time. Cas eeled around him in a swish of trench coat, the hand on Dean's shoulder turning into a gesture to stay back, and for fuck's sake, "I'm not a girl, Cas," Dean hissed, and Cas didn't bother saying anything to that.

"I can't sense anything, and there aren't wards," Cas said, almost sounding disappointed. Dean shot him a look as he maneuvered around Cas.

Knock on the door, and it echoed in the quiet. Leaning close, Dean listened for any sound in the room, but more quiet came back to him, the stillness of a place absolutely empty. Cas glanced sharply up, looking down the row of rooms to the lobby, but the desk slave didn't come out to see what was going on. Dean didn't even bother with trying the door, only threw his weight against it, the shivering impact and he thought for a moment that the door wouldn't give way. The bolt caught on the wood of the frame and the frame held it, and so Dean pushed, and the frame gave way, spilling Dean and splinters of door into the room.

"Sammy?" he asked, not really expecting an answer but hoping anyway. "Sam?"

"Dean." Cas, on the ball again, sidestepping the table and chairs and the end of the room's single bed. Sam's phone lay, almost invisible in the gloom, on the chaotic flower print of the bedspread. Now that he was looking, Dean saw the little light pinging, the one that meant all of Dean's desperate, pissed-off messages were sitting in the inbox.

* * *

It ain't that I don't love you, boy – and you too, Cas – but you being underfoot all the time, it's crampin' my style.

Trust Cas to find the tallest house in eastern South Dakota, and the one that needed the most work, and the one closest to Bobby's place. Trust him, for that matter, to find the owner in a bar near the waterfalls, and if Dean hadn't seen the faint, low glimmer of Cas's grace in that amulet, he would have said Cas was still part-angel, figuring this shit out. When he asked Cas about it, and what exactly he had in mind, Cas shrugged and proceeded to ignore him.

"Okay, how'd you find out who he is?"

"I asked Bobby who he was, and then I asked Jenny where he hung out." Normal human speech didn't quite work for Cas still, and Dean could tell, Cas's mouth fitting awkwardly around the concept of hanging out. "She was helpful."

"Jenny the waitress, huh?" Dean offered Cas his best you sly dog look, and it slid off Cas like snot off Teflon. "Yeah, I bet she was helpful," and leaning on the helpful got him the same blank look, and impatient observation that Wayland Quentin was waiting.

"You're Bobby Singer's…" Quentin trailed off, and Dean supposed there wasn't really a good way to say what they were. "Friends," Quentin said at last, and leaned forward to shake their hands. He did this without trying to push himself up, or standing, but rather by bending at the waist to reach across the table, and Dean saw the reason, the wheelchair folded up and leaning against the side of the booth.

Quentin saw him looking. "Got hamstrung ages back. Damn useless gams haven't worked since." Dean muttered something that, if it had words, would have been an apology, but Quentin waved it off anyway, "It was a fuck of a long time ago, and hey, I got the bastard in the end," which made Dean's eyebrows bounce up. Cas didn't look terribly surprised, and in fact seemed understanding. Quentin smirked at him. "Living well's the best revenge, boy," he said, "and don't let anyone tell you different."

"Duly noted," Dean said.

"Enough philosophy!" Quentin barked, and waved for the waitress. "You're here about the house," he added, and banged a decisive hand on the table, like they were now, officially, there about the house if they hadn't been before. Cas nodded. "Well, I'm not lookin' to sell right now, but I am wanting someone to come in and fix it up. I'll buy materials, and you can stay there – rent-free. I'll toss in the beer, too."

"I…" Dean had no idea what to say.

"Think about it for a bit," Quentin said. "Why don't you have a beer, in the meantime? Help things along."

* * *

"He's gone, Cas."

Cas had Sam's phone tucked in his pocket, out of sight. He stood, silent, arms loose at his sides like always, and Dean sat on the bed and looked around the room. It had the weird, unlived-in feeling of a room days empty, even though Sam couldn't have been but one day gone. In the bathroom, the towels – cheap, white, pilled almost threadbare – hung undisturbed, hand towels and washcloths in their neat piles, the soap still wrapped. Sam hadn't even taken the complimentary shampoo and conditioner.

"We would know if he's said yes to Lucifer," Cas said, again, and that wasn't as much comfort as Cas probably meant it to be.

"Yeah, and he could be about to," Dean whispered, and tried not to think of all the reasons why. They weren't good reasons anymore, not with the kind of person Sam had been the past several months, but it was still too easy to hear Sam's fury, I'm angry all the time, and yeah, Sam had been angry for years, even after he'd escaped to college and his normal life. Then the coming back, and the hunting, and the fighting for the past two years, only Dean couldn't quite square that with Sam's despair, a lot clearer to him than his quiet, brittle rage.

With a rustle, Cas was moving again, scanning the walls, the bed, the carpet, with angel-vision. "If there was something supernatural here," and for 'supernatural' read Lucifer, or Hell, even Michael, and that made Dean's gut clench like no one's business, "If there was something," Cas said again, more insistent, enough for Dean to look up. Cas was looking down at him, face quiet and determined. "If there was something, it was so well concealed that I can't find any trace of what it might have been."

"Yeah, Cas, thanks. That's not very helpful." Cas bristled and turned away, but Dean couldn't make himself feel sorry.

"If he was taken," Cas said after a moment, "that phone wouldn't have been left for you to find. And if this was a trap," and Cas looked around like it might still be one, "Lucifer or Michael, or someone sent by them, would have been here by now."

Except Sam hadn't been there for a while, Dean could see that, long enough for the maid to be by, and they never let housekeeping in. Like reading Dean's mind, Cas said, "The last possibility is that he left of his own choice."

"Why the hell would he do something like that?" And he hated, hated how his voice caught on something sharp in his throat, and tore. He knew why, or should have known, and had ignored it, and Sam was gone again. "Cas, why the hell?" Like Cas had any answers.

And Cas knew it, and didn't say anything.

* * *

"I can't believe you talked me into this." Dean punctuated his disbelief with a sneeze and wiped at his streaming eyes. Sawdust slipped under his eyelids, and then plaster dust mixed with sweat, and it was like painting his eye in stinging agony. "Fuck," he breathed, and fumbled blindly for his water bottle.

"You didn't need much convincing," Cas said from the darkness off to his left. Dean heard a soft scuffling sound, and then the plastic bottle, damp with condensation, slid into his hand.

Sweet, blessed relief. The water ran cool over his hot skin, and took the worst of the irritation away. He opened his eyes, blinked the water off, and Cas resolved from a blur back into Cas again, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up. "I was drunk and didn't know what I was saying," Dean told him. "You should have realized that."

"You were very sober when you signed the contract," Cas said tranquilly.

"What, you mean that guy's drink napkin?" It had pretty much been that, anyway, fixing up this empty house for a guy who'd moved to town and hadn't been able to find a buyer for it. "Cas, I was loaded."

As he usually did with truths he thought were unimportant, Cas ignored that. Instead, he hitched himself forward to rummage in the cooler (paint-splattered, scuffed at the corners, like the house) and produced two bottles of something not Bud Lite. Dean breathed a soft, thankful breath, you're awesome, Cas and twisted the cap off, and the beer was cold on his tongue and tasted like paradise.

* * *

Cas teleported them back to the hotel, and they landed hard, rush of displaced air and Dean almost hit the bed. His mind, left back in Smyrna, Delaware, arrived a couple minutes later.

" – start looking for Sam immediately," Cas was saying, like it was a done deal. Dean collapsed onto his bed, as much from exhaustion as the rough landing, and stared up at Cas, who was pacing around and looking like he was about to pull Dean to his feet and spirit them off again. That had to be nipped in the damn bud, and Dean held up a hand. "Whoa, hey, hold your horses," he said, and Cas stopped and looked down at him.

"Cas, I gotta… Let me process this, okay?" Process was a Sam-word, like coping, which was good, and repressing, which Sam, the giant hypocrite, said was bad and did anyway.

He let himself fall backwards into the mattress, the cheap panels of the ceiling blurring and the room going hot, and shit, he was not fucking crying, and Cas wasn't watching him. The breath he managed burned in his throat, ragged, and he had to swallow it down.

"I can't do it, Cas," he whispered. He had to swallow again. "How the hell am I supposed to do it."

Cas came to rest on the bed next to Dean's, a soft sigh as the mattress sank beneath him. It was strangely human, unexpected, that Cas had weight. In the corner of his eye Dean could see him, a blur of tan and white and the thin stripe of his tie. He had his hands folded, long fingers and slender wrists, and he seemed immovable.

"Cas, I can't." He had to shut his eyes, so if his eyes were closed maybe the words would be less real. "I can't fight Lucifer and Heaven and find Sam. I just fucking can't do it, man."

"You won't have to," Cas told him. "I'll look for Sam. You should rest."

Yeah, he should rest, but there wasn't time, there wasn't enough energy in him to kick off his boots and fall asleep, there wasn't anything left except Cas's cool, strong fingers on his forehead, and the drop.

* * *

Two weeks on in their house – or, the house they were living in while they fixed it – saw them down at the bar, watching as Quentin rolled around the room, talking to people. His wheelchair was an odd pastiche of wheels and gears and parts that, to Dean's eye had no obvious function, and an insulated cup holder.

"I hope you didn't touch my stuff," he barked at Cas, who'd been studying the beer selection.

"No," Cas said, "we haven't," and he said this with an odd sort of respect. That had been the one condition: the crazy metal sculptures had to stay where they were, and no messing with the forge and Quentin's metalworking tools.

"Good." Quentin nodded approvingly and rolled over to another local.

"So, Dean, how's the house coming?" Julia asked, sounding the slightest bit impatient, and Dean realized it was because she'd asked the question twice.

"It's, you know, coming." He looked her up and down, careful about it, but she caught him and welcomed the attention anyway, trim in her skirt and heels and cute top with some kind of beady design on it. And it occurred to him, as it usually did, to invite her back to see the house for herself, and the question hovered on the tip of his tongue, ready to ask, before he caught it and swallowed it back.

"I'd love to see it sometime," Julia said, and smiled so her lips curled perfectly around the suggestion.

"We're going to have a party when we get it finished." Dean gulped down a mouthful of beer, the cold shocking and welcome.

Julia's index finger traced idle patterns on the top of the bar, trails and curlicues through the condensation. "Can't wait… Maybe I could get a sneak peek?" Her smile lengthened, her eyes smoky and dark in the questionable light.

Time was, Dean wouldn't have cared if Sam got sexiled to the Impala or a coffee shop, not with a beautiful girl leaning close and smiling the smile that meant good times and nakedness in the not-too-distant future. But tonight he could feel it, the interest shutting down as the hormone factory went offline. It left him frustrated and warm, reaching for more heat and the usual anticipatory fantasies even as his body cooled down around him, and her bright smile, her legs, her very nice breasts seemed dull and distant, or like they belonged to his aunt. If he had one. He finished his beer.

"Gotta drive my roommate home, before he gets loaded," he said, faint apologetic smile to tell her it's not you, it's me, and he gestured at Cas, who'd settled in with his beer and was talking to Quentin about something. "Speaking of which," Dean said, hoping it was loud enough to catch Cas's attention, "we should probably get going."

Naturally, of course, Cas didn't hear him. Quentin was saying something and Dean caught only the tail end, "… can get down to Kansas, if you survive Nebraska. They were desp – Dean!" Quentin's voice boomed supersonically. "What are you doing?"

"Just collecting Cas, here," Dean said, and indicated the Cas in question. "We need to get going."

"I just got my drink," Cas protested, sounding unexpectedly petulant for a seven-thousand-year-old being. Then he looked up, and whatever he saw on Dean's face had him offering his glass to Quentin, who took it without even trying to encourage Cas to stay. "Very well then."

It wasn't that he was keeping score – or, rather, the complete lack of score – but this was the sixth time he'd turned someone down for sex. Dean tried hard not to think about that as he got them into the Impala and navigated them through the quiet, Friday-night streets of outer Sioux Falls. Like every other fucking thing these days, it seemed like work, like back in the worst days when Famine had hollowed out that hole in his soul a little more, and told him nothing in the world could fill it.

Cas rode quietly next to him, like he always did, and color him crazy (ten kinds of crazy, at least), Dean let the silence ride and fill the Impala's old, familiar space. It was good, really good, Cas watching out the window, small contemplative smile touching his lips, his hands easy in his lap and his shoulders a few degrees off their military straightness.

Yeah, Dean thought, and couldn't help a smile of his own, suddenly. Really good.

* * *

Suburbia, Dean reminded himself, was fucking dangerous.

He found himself back-to-back with Cas, and something bloody and ugly scrawled on the doors that meant Cas couldn't bounce them out of here. And in here with them were two angels, both with drawn swords. One of them a woman and the other a man, both in severe black suits and ties, her hair and makeup immaculate, his tie knotted and precise. Dean said something about the two musketeers, and could feel Cas shift behind him.

"Brother," the man said, mouth settling into a satisfied smile as he circled, eyes on Dean, "you've had a pretty good run of luck so far." Dean eased to the side to keep him in his line of sight, and as he did, he felt something cold and sharp slide against his palm.

A moment later came the slight ooze of blood, and shit, whatever-it-was was so sharp he hadn't felt the sting of it. He wanted very much to look down and see what the hell was up, but Cas shifted again, significantly, and Dean kept his eyes on the angel in front of him and tried not to see what the goddamn hell Cas was doing.

"Nuriel, Ambriel," Cas said, and under the calm Dean heard the strain, "I don't suppose there's any use in trying to convince you not to do this."

"Not really," the other angel said, and lunged.

The thing, Dean realized in that instant, was a sword – Cas's sword – and his hand closed reflexively around the hilt. It burned cold-hot against his palm, searing, chilling, and powerful, and he brought it up more out of hope and determination than thinking he could actually kill the angel gunning for him, and aimed for the heart.

It was enough. The angel saw the blade at the last second and tried to dodge, its own sword rising to parry. And that was time, that was what he needed; Dean managed to slide around it, away from the protection of Cas's back, his boots scuffing on the tiles and his movement hemmed in by the refrigerator and the nice counters. The angel came again, like lightning and shit these things could move when they wanted, and the longer this went on the more likely Dean was to die. He flinched away from the angel's counterstrike, felt the blade slide easily along his coat, and even better felt his own blade strike flesh, sinking into the space between two ribs.

When he opened his eyes, ears still ringing from the angel's scream, he saw Cas standing over the other angel, the woman. Her hair and wings spread themselves across the floor, both black arcs and ripples and perfect. Cas stared down at her, her sword resting easily in his hand, as though Cas were unaware of it. Her eyes gazed up at him, empty of human life and angel alike.

"Cas?" Dean asked. Cas didn't reply, and Dean didn't try again, only knelt to clean the blood off the sword with the handkerchief in the angel's coat pocket. Silk, and Dean wondered if angels only liked people in suits, or if Zachariah made them change, or what. He thought briefly about asking Cas, but the terrible stillness of Cas's shoulders and the silence told him that would probably be a bad idea.

It occurred to him, and why now he had no idea, that Cas was staring down at one of his sisters, and her blood was on the sword he'd somehow taken from her. In what he could see of Cas's face – the shadows confused things, and the blurriness of coming down from adrenaline – Dean couldn't see any particular grief, or anger, or anything, but that was Cas for you, silent and cards close to his chest. After a moment, Cas straightened and looked up, and looked at Dean, and his eyes were clear and caught the thin light coming through the bay windows.

"Cas," Dean said hoarsely. "Cas, man…"

"Don't worry about it, Dean." Cas pulled a cloth from his pocket and cleaned the blade before making it vanish inside his coat. "It's not important."

Family is important, Dean thought, only with two of Cas's siblings lying on the floor, and whatever painful history there was in Cas's millennia-long past, he had no idea, and kept his mouth shut. Still, he remembered, uncomfortably, Cas in that hospital room, on fire and furious, I killed two angels this week, two of his fucking brothers, and I did it, all of it, for you.

"We should get out of here," he said instead, and kept his relief to himself when Cas nodded shortly and waited for Dean to scratch the blood off the walls enough for him to leave.

* * *

He hated the rasp of sandpaper over wood, god did he hate it, and the sound wore on his very last nerve, dragging it out as he slowly buffed away a hundred years of warp and stain and imperfection. "Finally," he sighed, and the sigh blew wood dust off the panel, and when he ran a hand down it, the old oak was like silk to touch.

Across the room Cas stretched to clean the grime and accumulated crap out of the plaster molding, shirt riding high and jeans a bit low, not like teenager low, but working on it, catching on Cas's boxers (and Cas was a boxer guy, who would have thought it) and his hips. Dean thought about asking if he needed help, but Cas was prickly about that sort of thing still, and looked like he had things under control, so Dean turned back to the cabinet.

This was, according to Quentin, the dining room. Once upon a time someone had kept china in here, the frilly and expensive kind with gold on the edges and little flowers decorating it. There would have been dinner parties in fancy dress, and afterwards maybe a walk on the immaculate lawn Dean could see through the gaping, empty socket of the window. Well, not immaculate now, Dean supposed, populated as it was by ragged grass, weeds, and Quentin's weird-ass iron and steel sculptures.

"Gotta turn swords into plowshares," Quentin had said when he'd walked them through the first time. He'd whacked a sculpture with one of his braces, and it had rung oddly, metallic and resonant, but sweet. Or really fucked-up weird shit, Dean had added, wondering how the hell it was the sculpture was humming in perfect middle C.

Whatever they'd turned into, Quentin had forbidden Dean and Cas to move them, or his forge in the ramshackle garage. That was fine by Dean, with enough to do in here and no clue how to do some of it. There were do-it-yourself books in the kitchen, and printouts from Bobby's, stacked crazily on the kitchen table and the few places on the counter not occupied by paint cans and random crap.

Dean made himself stop looking at Cas and turned back to his work, rolled his neck and shoulders to work the worst of the stiffness out. The cabinet had the dull yellow-gray quality of old wood, stripped of what had been five coats of paint and varnish by endless iterations of paint remover and sandpaper. Once again Dean let his fingers drift down the smooth grain of a door panel, like silk, like the Impala's fine-ground curves, and thought that he'd done this himself – not made the thing, obviously, but stripped off all the damage and got it to the edge of being brought back to life.

Impulsively he looked over his shoulder again, in time to see Cas carefully picking his way down the ladder. Cas caught him looking and frowned, but didn't say anything, and let the silence ride, Cas-like to the bitter end as he knelt to consult his book with all the focus he might have given something from a not-too-long-ago apocalypse. That was okay with Dean, because it wasn't real silence, not with Led Zep playing in the kitchen, singing about how he ain't had no lovin' Lord, since you know when.

* * *

He was in Little Rock, sound asleep – it had been a day, or two days, driving from Virginia – when the world came down around him. It came down with a crash and a terrible grinding of metal, and a choking cloud of dust, a roof joist that barely missed his head.

For a moment – the first clear moment after waking up – he thought Lucifer had found him and this was it. This was fucking it, and if Dean Winchester was going to die, he was going to go down swinging. His knife came into his hand, he kicked aside what debris he could (insulation, roof shingles, wires, dust, drywall) and coughed out a curse. And looked around for Lucifer, or whoever he'd sent to do his dirty work, and there was – there was nothing.

Nothing except the night staring down through the hole in the roof, and the shattered, sparking television, and Cas lying stretched across a small raft of tiles and ceiling.

"Cas?" Dean half-fell off the bed, had to shove crap out of the way with his feet to stumble to the end of the bed, to Cas's limp body and bloody face. He didn't think about tetanus, didn't think about anything except kneeling next to Cas to check his pulse, fingers wading through the blood smeared across his neck.

It was there, thin and faint, but beating back to strength with every flicker. Cas stirred and moaned, eyelids fluttering, and "No, hey, Cas, stay still," Dean whispered, glancing up at the door. It was only a matter of time before the night receptionist worked up the courage to see what the hell happened, and then even less time before the cops and paramedics lit things up. Despite that he kept Cas from sitting up, "hey, hey, take it easy, just give it a second," until Cas managed to open his eyes and focus, and glare his way into making Dean let him sit up.

"Can you move?"

"Of course I can move," Cas said, but weakly. He coughed, and blood slopped at his lips; impatiently, Cas spit out some more, licked, and spat again. "I got careless."

"Jesus Christ, Cas." Dean hauled Cas up, even though Cas shook him off with an irritable growl about how he could do it himself – and Dean's hand was back on him, steadying him when Cas overbalanced. "What the hell were you doing?"

"Trying to avoid angels and demons, mostly." Cas wiped his mouth and frowned at the blood on his sleeve. "We should get out of here."

Dean had his duffel in two seconds flat, a bit dusty but otherwise unscathed. The TV hissed angrily at him, and jumped to life. "They tracked me," Cas said tensely, and pulled himself together, pulled his sword. The faint, dust-smeared light slid along the edges, shifting as Cas moved through the piles of roof to Dean's side, not even bothering to ask, and as Dean listened for the rustle and murmur of approaching angelic voices, he didn't have a problem with Cas placing two fingers on his forehead and magicking them away.

They hit the ground running – or driving, the Impala racing down a still dark and open road, the keys not in the ignition. It took everything in him not to grasp at the wheel for balance, to keep his hands steady and breathe through the disorientation, and not to jerk when the Impala started to drift to the right and he had to get his hands back on the wheel.

Next to him Cas sat slumped, head resting against the passenger window, his breath fogging the glass. He didn't move when Dean called his name, Cas, Cas, and moaned when Dean shook his shoulder, even gently. "Shit," Dean breathed, and tried to brake; the Impala slowed cooperatively, and rolled to a halt onto the shoulder. In the shadows an overpass loomed up ahead, a bridge spanning the darkness.

"Cas?" Another check of Cas's pulse and it was there, along with a thin sheen of sweat and blood where Cas had smeared it. Cas's sword rested loosely in his hands, the point digging into the floor. Dean left it alone, tried one more time to wake Cas up.

He got an explosion of startled angel, a convulsive tightening on the hilt and the next thing he knew he was seeing stars – back of his head knocked against the driver's side window – and no breath in his chest and none coming, with a powerful arm pressed against his throat, the sword back in his right hand, steady, the point absolutely still. The Impala lurched, rocked hard onto its left wheels and then came back down, and Dean's teeth slammed together.

"Dean," Cas said hoarsely, face all over blood and eyes wild and distant.

"Cas," Dean croaked. "Cas, it's me."

"I can see that." Cas eased backwards, coiling into his seat again. "I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted." He had to cough a couple times, once for the unsteady gulp of air he needed, and once for the fear. Cas nodded once, and Dean shook his head. "How the hell you did that, Cas…"

"The same way I always did." Cas looked around hazily.

"You didn't transport us to, like, Scotland or something, did you?"

"No," Cas said briefly. His head fell back again and he closed his eyes, and Dean waited for a beat in the hope that Cas would say where they were, but he only got a slow, deep breath for answer. He glanced over at Cas, and yeah, Cas was out, curled into his trench coat, and there wasn't much to be done for the blood, or any of it until Dean figured out where the hell they were.

Hell turned out to be Ocala, Florida, the sun breaking lazily over orange groves and a big racing farm. Dean drove past endless billboards for Disney World – "Cas, when this shit is over, guess where you and I are going? That's right," and Cas's utter, concentrated stillness for answer – and farm stands, more billboards for crazy shit like the Clown Museum, oh, Sammy, something called a "Christmas Village." The road looped around lazily, past silent gas stations and liquor stores, and finally, at last, to the Lucky Orange Motel, which really didn't look very lucky, but Dean would take what he could get.

"You got a room at the end?" Dean asked. "I got a kid… cries a lot."

"You're the only person here, honey," the lady behind the desk twanged at him as she counted out the cash Dean had given her, "but whatever." She handed him the key, attached to a massive orange disk keychain. "Room Twelve, down at the end there."

"I'm not a child," Cas said groggily, when Dean got back to the car and had to help him out. "Sure," Dean said as kindly as he could, helping something divine and powerful shuffle through the door.

He gave Cas first turn in the bathroom and some privacy, listened to the water run as he fell back in the bed and shut his eyes. His body didn't want to settle, buzzed and fidgeted with a fugitive energy under his skin. Instinct told him to ward the room, especially now that Cas had slipped up and was exhausted, and that was the only reason they'd almost caught him, Dean told himself, Cas was too tired to be his usual ninja self.

"You gotta give yourself a break," Dean told him, once Cas was back out in the bedroom and looking almost human. Almost human, nowhere near angelic. "Come on, Cas, you gotta sleep for a while. We can keep looking later."

It was like convincing Sam to settle and sleep, to put the research away: slow, coaxing, pleading, and finally threats Dean knew he couldn't make promises, I swear I'll pluck every one of your damn feathers, so lie the fuck down, Cas, come on, and Cas looked at him steadily for a moment before that calm face collapsed into uncertainty and Cas had to look away with the soft admission he'd never really slept before.

"Yeah, you have," Dean told him, remembering that terrible trip back in time, Cas coughing up blood, and tearing himself to pieces to get them back there when he could have gone himself. He wondered what it meant, that Cas didn't remember that, or where Cas's mind had been in the car just now, if that was sleep or something angelic Dean couldn't understand. Either way, Cas was dead on his feet and worn to the bone, another tally on the list of things Dean owed Cas and couldn't ever hope to pay back.

"Cas, please," he said, and hooked Cas's attention to him again. "You gotta sleep, man. Just for a while."

Reluctantly, Cas lowered himself onto the other bed. Dean made himself sit up and cross to Cas to pull off his shoes and tug him out of his coat and jacket.

"We gotta get you some real clothes," he told the angel, but Cas was already gone.

* * *

Cas had the counters mostly taken apart, the veneer peeled back to reveal the crap festering underneath, mildew and shit Dean wasn't even going to think about, especially not right now. Pointedly not looking at the counters, or the disaster of the rest of the kitchen, he collected his plate of pizza and his bottle of beer, and shuffled out onto the porch.

"Good day's work," he said to Cas, one of the few things he'd said all day. Cas agreed in his usual quiet way, a glance up in acknowledgment, and Dean settled himself down beside Cas on the porch steps. Cas obligingly shifted to give him room, easy and natural, and close enough still for Dean to catch the edge of his warmth in the slow cooling of the day. With a sigh, Dean shifted and got comfortable, brushing up against Cas before settling back, and Cas didn't seem to mind much.

Cas's hands, and Dean's, were flecked with paint that wouldn't come off, and Dean was pretty sure there a splinter had embedded itself under his thumbnail. A rip curved neatly across the knee of Cas's jeans, hint of bare, tanned knee through the fabric. He smelled like human sweat and paint and acetone, kind of rank and heady actually, and Dean probably didn't smell too hot himself, all over sawdust and varnish on his forearm.

The lawn faced to the west, to the sun working its lazy way down to the horizon. The sun stretched the shadows of Quentin's weird sculptures out across the lawn, darkening grass and bare earth, the edges of one brushing the rear bumper of the Impala, where she rested in the driveway. They made strange patterns, bars and crosses and a few odd, flat curves that seemed as though they'd been ground down by hand, and by a human's imperfect eye. And it was probably a statement about the multiple kinds of crazy Dean had witnessed in his life, because a guy with bad recycled-steel sculptures in his front yard barely even blipped on Dean's weird-o-meter.

"Think we'll be done before winter?" he asks.

They're working on early September and it's still warm, not even a breath of fall yet. Cas says he thinks so, that perhaps they should consider re-checking the exterior and painting it. "I dunno, I sort of like it," Dean said, and leaned against the porch railing, the splintering paint and weather-beaten wood peering through underneath it. He'd spent a lot of time in houses like these, most in worse shape, and remembered having to keep an eye on Sam, to make sure he didn't eat the paint chips.

Next to him, Cas meditatively chews his pizza, plate resting on the table of his thighs. How the hell someone can look so focused eating pizza, Dean has no idea, even if this really is pretty great pizza. He wonders if Cas has ever actually been relaxing, outside of showers – which he seems to enjoy – and sleep, which Dean knows for a fact Cas is terrible at. Thinking back over it, the only time he'd seen Cas in a recreational setting had been that brothel, and Cas had been way too worked up and anxious to be anywhere near relaxing and having fun. And at the bar, but Cas never looked relaxed even there, busy looking around and trying to be normal.

"Let's take a day off tomorrow," he said, and had to grin at Cas's soft, surprised noise.

"Why?" Cas asked, and Dean could hear an entire sentence, plain as day: We've got work to do.

"All work and no play makes Dean a dull boy," Dean informed him. He took another bite of pizza, chased it with beer, and this… this was the life, body sore with a day's work not involving blood and death, the weirdest friend in the world next to him. "We'll give Bobby a call, see what the hell there is to do around here."

* * *

Whenever Cas landed these days it was hard, invisible wings kicking up air and dust, whatever wasn’t nailed down. He needed a moment, afterwards, to gather himself and catch his breath before reporting more of the same. More disasters, more people dying. Lucifer had been hunting along eastern Illinois, the angels had been fighting demons in Oregon. In South Dakota there'd been something seen in the Badlands, something like a shadow with teeth, and twenty tourists and a ranger had gone missing.

What Cas thought of all this, he never said. That night, once Dean finally got out of Florida and up to a roadhouse in the Lowcountry, he sat on the opposite side of the room's single bed and said, "I must rest, Dean."

"Sure, Cas. Plenty of room for us and the Holy Ghost." In the faint light, Dean could clearly make out Cas's puzzlement, and headed it off with a, "Just lie down already, I won't bite unless you want me to."

"I don't," Cas said, but stretched out cooperatively. He was warm, warmer than the stifling air the rickety air conditioner couldn't cool, but Dean liked it. It was something else, someone else, and not just him in the darkness. As Cas settled himself he listened, and realized the sounds were familiar, the rustle of clothes, of Cas's soft sigh, the building silence afterward.

"Dean, I won't be able to keep traveling much longer," Cas said into the stillness. "It's… wearing."

"Don't worry, Cas," Dean told him, "just get some sleep."

* * *

The Impala rumbled into the dawn for five minutes and then turned north, and it felt good, Dean thought, to stretch a little. "Don't want you getting out of shape," he told the car, and laughed at Cas's puzzled silence. He pushed a tape in, whatever had been the last thing they'd listened to, and oh yeah, it was Metallica, unplugged, "Comin' Home" played to the empty fields and the huge, huge sky.

It was an hour and a half to Lake Kampeska, but Dean, accustomed to multi-state drives, barely felt the time. And Cas, used to centuries between eyeblinks, didn't seem to mind riding shotgun. On the way, Dean tried – and failed, he was pretty sure – not to stare at Cas's bare legs, which were somehow extraordinary for reasons Dean couldn't define precisely. Maybe because he'd almost never seen Cas in anything except those stupid suit pants or his jeans, and the only time he'd ever seen Cas naked had been that night when he'd fallen. It seemed ages ago now, fifteen hundred miles away, a house, a place to live and the year ready to turn the corner into fall.

The summer hung on, though, and it told in the busy parking lot once they arrived. Sunday had brought the crowds, families and laughing children, people splashing fearlessly in the water. Cas looked vaguely astonished and definitely uneasy, peering around at the chaos. Dean herded him through it, and rolled his shoulders to get more of the heat and the sun on his back. "You gotta relax Cas," he said, and tilted his face up to the warmth, and sensed Cas watching him and trying to do the same thing.

"There was this place," he said, "up in New York, this tiny park… We were there one summer when I was thirteen, Dad was working a case, and I took Sam there." He could see it, the little strip of parking lot, a couple of shelters, two small, roundish ponds with sand that was warm and rough under his bare feet. "School was out and I wasn't old enough to go on hunts with Dad – Sammy and all – and we spent a lot of time there."

He kept back the part about crashing a couple of birthday parties, stolen cake and hot dogs, learning how to play Chicken with Amanda Becker's sleek legs clutching his neck, watching Sam build sand castles, firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Even without saying it he had the feeling Cas caught his meaning anyway, because Cas nodded and looked wistful and confused. Wherever Cas fell in his family's fucked-up hierarchy, Dean was pretty sure younger brothers didn't get trips to lakes, or amusement parks, or anything.

Sadness skidded over him as he led Cas through the rituals of staking out space on the sand, old towels and cooler of soda and sandwiches and water, Dean's duffel with sunblock and a couple other things instead of his guns and spare cartridges set out on the perimeter. Cas looked around assessingly, thoughtful, as the breeze tugged his hair and the hem of his t-shirt, and he looked battered and a bit scruffy – so, the same as always, except Dean could see the tension in his shoulders unwinding a bit.

"Let's swim," he said, and pulled his shirt off, acutely aware of Cas watching and focusing. "C'mon, Cas, get half-naked."

Cas skinned out of his shirt and dropped it on the towel, the light sudden on his skin – faint tan, darker on his arms from the sun – and on the amulet, and obediently walked to the water's edge, so the subtle waves lapped at his toes. He regarded the water with deep suspicion for a moment, and Dean wondered if it wasn’t' some weird birdlike thing, a flying creature hating to get wet, but then Cas seemed to steel himself, and marched in. shiver worked up his spine, elegant shudder of muscle and bone, and Dean's mouth dried a little.

"It's cold," Cas said, and his teeth chattered but he kept moving, ankle to calf to the sensitive skin at the back of his knees, a pause to breathe through it. Dean followed close behind, had to give into the devil and cup a palmful of water in his hand, toss it playfully at the sunwarm expanse of Cas's back. Cas yelped.

"That – that…" Cas fixed him with a look, the look that promised smitings and unpleasantness, and Dean wanted to laugh, despite the fact it was as intimidating coming from a shirtless, damp Castiel as a fully-clothed one. Before he could try to slosh out of harm's way, Cas's hand skimmed over the top of the water, a pure and perfect arc of spray that caught Dean in the chest, and some of which got up his nose.

"Oh, it's on," Dean told him.

When Cas finally let him up, Dean had water up his nose and burning down his throat, and was freezing under the layer of chilly water and the end-of-summer breeze, trying to laugh and choke at the same time. And Cas even allowed himself a slight smile, victorious and smug, and Dean ached to pull Cas to him and taste what that victory might be like, and it might be cool but warm underneath, like the day.

Instead, he told Cas to stay in and enjoy himself while he got something to eat, and headed back to their small patch of sand, negotiating little kids along the way. He dropped onto his towel, sighing as he stretched and the sun started to dry and warm away the cold, and this… this, the light filtering red through his eyelids and the slow relaxation, this was the life. He idled his way through half-sleep, the splashes and happy shrieks and the crying birds distant, living noises, and it occurred to him that this, this was what he'd helped to save.

A while later he heard Cas pad up and settle by him, and opened one eye just a bit to see Cas folded over, arms resting on his knees, hair plastered to his head and water rolling lazily down his shoulders and spine. And he wasn't watchful, just watching, and off guard, his skin the slightest bit flushed from the sun, and Dean thought maybe one mission was accomplished.

* * *

They met at a park, abandoned. Weeds grew up through the sand around the charred skeleton of the playset, and the chains of the swings swung in a breeze Dean didn't feel. Above him, the sky was a paradoxical and flawless blue, and in front of him Lucifer was smiling his soft smile, and fraying at the edges with power.

"So… Detroit," Lucifer said.

"Yeah," Dean said, "there's an old Ford plant," and he gave the address. Lucifer nodded.

"You remember the deal," Lucifer said, and it wasn't really a question. "Of course I remember the fucking deal," Dean told him, and was glad Lucifer didn't ask the other question, which was what if Dean felt like breaking it.

* * *

He hunched close and tried not to breathe too deeply, head-lightening scent of polyurethane and wood dust. The brush under his fingers ran smooth down the door panel, no streaks left behind, and it glowed soft and mahogany in the naked light.

"Aw man, look at that." Dean shoved Cas's shoulder, still a bit surprised when Cas shifted against the pressure. "Look at that!"

"I am, Dean," Cas said, and sounded indulgent.

That was the cabinet, finished finally, right along with Cas's re-laminating the counters in the kitchen. "We are Norm fucking Abrams," Dean told Cas, and Cas nodded seriously, knowing who Norm Abrams was by now, "and we should celebrate," Dean added. Cas agreed to this, with more eagerness than Dean was used to hearing when it came to drinking, or celebration in general.

"Do you want to go out?" Cas asked.

Dean studied him, band-aids on his fingers, battered and stained, working off the last of his sunburn as his skin alchemized it into a tan. "You want to go out?" he said at last, and realized even as he said it he kind of wanted to stay in, and keep Cas and the quiet for himself.

"Yeah," Cas said decisively.

So it was hot dogs and corn on the cob they'd scavenged from Bobby's the other day, and more beer. When Dean walked past the door to Cas's study, he had to work to turn his thoughts away from the photos and Cas's mysterious notes, the case in the back of his mind. Not your world, he told himself, and it was easier to say when he watched Cas lick melted butter off his fingers, graceless and sloppy.

Later, when Cas vanished into his study to answer his phone, Dean bitched at him for leaving him with the dishes, ignored – or tried to – Cas's voice saying, low and obviously trying not to be overheard, Yes, Bobby, I'll be down tomorrow to pick them up. And since he heard it anyway he didn't bother sugarcoating when Cas came out, "What's the big secret, Cas?" and Cas shrugged.

"Bobby has some spare paint brushes," he said, so elaborately casual Dean knew it was a lie.

* * *

"This is your old home." Lucifer turned slowly around the kitchen, inspecting the scrubbed-clean counters, the potholders on their hooks. "Well, your only home."

"Yeah, and you can get the hell out of it," Dean said. "Any time now."

Lucifer smiled kindly. "Oh, don't worry – after all, you have to wake up sometime. Maybe."

"Look, I have two cheerleaders and that girl from Transformers to get back to, so you mind?" Lucifer's face flexed into disappointment, which, really… the Devil being disappointed in him? "No, not disappointed," Lucifer said, and right, it's the mind-reading, "just… endlessly surprised that the righteous man isn't more like the angels he serves."

Dean snorted. "You got the wrong righteous man," he said, and Lucifer did. "You mind getting to the point here, Lucy?"

The linoleum creaked under Lucifer's boots. The vessel's boots. As Dean watched, the skin on the vessel's forehead seemed to pull tighter and tighter as a bubble opened up beneath it, and finally broke in a flare and a death of light. Lucifer didn't seem to notice it, too busy running his hands over the smooth wood of the table (its corners worn where elbows had rubbed against it, where Dean had sat for the first years of his life) , the chair – Dean's chair – and everything else.

"Keep your hands off my damn dream," Dean said, to say anything.

"I came to ask you if you know where your brother is?" Lucifer's smile lengthened.

Cold gripped his stomach, froze him deep, deep down even as rage pumped heat up into his face and made his voice break. "You… no way you took him."

Lucifer tsked. "I wouldn't bet against me, Dean," he said quietly, and Dean remembered his brother's, Lucifer's face, distantly regretful, and his voice – Sam's voice – whenever Sam was explaining an unfortunate truth. I win. "And if I were you, I'd listen to what I have to say."

"No," Dean whispered. He was past this. Sammy, I thought I was done making deals for you. Not today, and "Not ever," Lucifer said, laughing. "I know how you think, Dean Winchester."

"Then you know I'm thinking how great it's going to be to see you dead," Dean said tightly. He tried to move and couldn't, and far from being scared, the fury welled up higher, and he was almost blind with it.


"Why end it quickly?" Dean hoped the question was rhetorical. It was; Lucifer kept going, that soft smile still there, "Not that I've grown attached, but there's something… satisfying, watching this planet's death agonies drawn out a bit." Lucifer turned on his heel, the movement effortless, natural, a man wandering aimlessly through his own house. "So my proposition is this, Dean… You can look for your brother all you want. But kill me, and you'll never find him."

* * *

He woke up sudden, hard, blankets shoved down to his ankles and the air cold on his skin. Adrenaline, the worst kind – unexplained, just there to fill the silence with his pounding heart – buzzed in him and he stared up into the blind dark. Slowly the world resolved itself into the quiet thing it had been for the past month and a half: the new whitewash of his bedroom ceiling, the second-hand furniture still crowded into the corners, the window and the stars peering through it.

"Shit." The clock on his bedside table told him the blue hour, three-twenty in the morning, and the light seemed wrong. "Shit," Dean said again, and fumbled for the lamp. It came on, one blinding wash of light, and he winced against it, and the headache that bloomed behind his eyes.

"Just fucking beautiful."

His body hummed, on edge with waking up and half-wanting to go back to bed but knowing he'd have to hunt down sleep for hours until it was time to get up again. Nothing for it, then; he slid out of bed, goosebumps crawling across bare skin. He found his t-shirt and a pair of clean jeans still in the laundry basket; the nights had cooled down hard, this close to fall, and he could taste the chill in the still air. Definitely time to get the heat going, he thought, and he wondered if Cas was cold.

Sometimes there wasn't much point in trying to be quiet on ancient wood floors, their boards a warped and creaky symphony no matter how hard Dean worked at keeping the noise down. He made a passing attempt, in case Cas really was asleep, even though Cas seemed to be up at the craziest hours sometimes, normal sleep schedule for a couple weeks and then Dean would get up to get a drink of water and he'd find Cas, wide-awake and intent, working away at something in the small hours.

That wasn't the case tonight; the house lay somnolent, no light and not even Cas's unobtrusive sounds to wake it up. Dean padded his way down the dark hallway, hand on the wall to guide his way. Quentin's house, like Bobby's – like every ramshackle house Dean had ever seen, for that matter – had a long, narrow hall, the walls pressed close and crowding up on Dean's shoulders. Four bedrooms and a bath, the master bedroom still a chaos of paint and plastic sheeting, another one Dean can't even contemplate. For two weeks he and Cas had slept together in the one room they'd cleaned out, and moving into his own room when they'd finished it had felt wrong.

Cas hadn't said a word about it, but that was par for the course with him. He hadn't said anything almost all night tonight, come to think of it, and it was that memory that had Dean stopping at Cas's door, grateful to find it open, and looking in.

The bandage on Cas's knuckles was a blur in the darkness. Dean sighed; there'd been something about it, Dean pulling Cas to stand by the sink and thrusting his hand under the stream of cool water, that had made Cas go fragile and silent, holding something in and still that thing had trickled out with the slow ooze of blood where the two-by-four had scraped off a layer of skin.

Those boards can be real bastards, Dean had said, giving Cas a quick, consoling look, because that shit – the random, surprising "fuck, that hurt" shit – happened to everyone. It hadn't seemed to soothe Cas, who'd suffered Dean to spread antiseptic on the wound and then wrap it and tape the bandage down, before returning to work.

Cas's breath came slow and soft, and Dean could see the rise and fall of his chest, his belly limned in the faint starlight, and he had to look away, because seeing Cas like this was seeing way too much of him, and more than Cas would want. Sighing, he turned and resumed course for the downstairs and the kitchen, and for something else, he had no idea what.

Water, it ended up being, and one of the how-to magazines that had started piling up around the house. Probably, Dean thought, as he stared blurrily at an article on installing light switches, they'd end up having to support the downstairs ceiling with a stack of the things, the way they were going sometimes.

"What do we look like?" he asked the magazine. "Fucking This Old House?"

"We look like we should be in bed," Cas said, having materialized in the doorway like he'd ghosted himself downstairs or flapped in from wherever. Dean was too tired, to stirred-up, to react with more than a grunt. Anyway, what Cas said was true enough. Behind him, in the kitchen window, the sky seemed darker against the kitchen light, and whoever'd said that thing, about the darkest hour being just before the dawn, like in the Dylan tune, had sort of been right. There weren't even shadows, just the wall of black, and the stars had gone.

Cas went to rummage in the refrigerator. It closed a moment later, and then Cas deposited the jug of orange juice on the counter. A glass joined it after a few seconds' rummaging for a clean glass.

"I have to go over to Bobby's tomorrow," Cas said.

"You go over to Bobby's every day. Do we need to get you a library card?" Bookcases had been the first furniture Cas had persuaded out of Quentin, and part of Bobby's collection was stored neatly in them, by some classification system Cas had devised.

"No," Cas said. "I need to ask Bobby some questions."

"What, like, 'will you marry me?'" Dean tried to laugh, but the laughter tasted like morning mouth and turned into a frown. "I'm starting to feel unloved here, man."

"You shouldn't feel that way," Cas said, so utterly serious and Cas, and meaning every awkward word that had just come out of his mouth that Dean had no idea what in the hell to do. Cas let him squirm for a moment, generous like that. Dean glanced at him, sleep-rumpled with his foggy blue eyes, and had to look away.

"I thought you had, like, eons and eons of knowledge in that skull of yours."

"I do." Cas swallowed half his juice in one go. "I did."

Dean felt the fear jump under his skin. "Cas?"

"I still have it," Cas said hoarsely, fingers tightening on his glass. "I'd know if I'd forgotten about it. But I find it… difficult," and he said this as though the word were being dragged from him, "to remember some things, on occasion."

How long this had been going on, Dean had no fucking idea. Apparently Bobby did, and the old bastard hadn't told him a damn thing. And he knew what Bobby would say if he asked him why the hell he wasn't telling him what the hell was up with Cas: If Cas wanted you to know, then he would've told you.

"You ever planning on telling me about it?" Dean tried not to emphasize me, or sound petulant, but he had the feeling he'd failed when Cas glanced sharply up at him.

"Forgetting is a human thing, I understand," Cas said dryly. Dean heard the despair under it anyway. "I accepted it, Dean. My choice, remember?"

"You've gotten stuck with some shitty choices," Dean mumbled, staring at his hands. Looking anywhere other than Cas was easier, despite the fact that Cas kept drawing his eyes back, like a magnet. "And you've made them for – "

"Don't." Whatever else he'd lost, Cas still had his authority, and he was glaring at Dean now. "Don't say it."

"I never said thank you," he muttered. "But I am… And Jesus, Cas, I'm so fucking glad you're here."

And that was a lot of truth for Dean Winchester at four in the morning, and now that it was out there, articulated, with Cas sitting there in silence and absorbing it, he could admit it to himself. I can't do this without you, he thought, and decided he couldn't say that, not now and maybe not ever. Still, the sideways look Cas gave him – knowing, but kinder than usual – said he might know anyway, and was letting Dean off easy by letting him keep those words to himself.

"Just, just tell me, okay? If things aren't working," Dean said, and damn it was work, to make the request come, honest as it was. "You don't have to take care of me all the time."

"I'll try," Cas promised, and Dean figured that was all he could ask.

* * *

Sam leaving didn’t stop the Apocalypse, and Sam leaving didn’t end it either. It kept going, a little bit worse every day, even with Cas there. And right now it was going a lot worse.

The back of Dean’s head throbbed with a deep, splintering pain that might actually be slivers of skull poking into his brain. That same pain coruscated red and yellow at the edge of his vision, and blackness started to close off the rest. In the narrowing space of sight Castiel whirled and dodged, and the sharp clang-and-scrape of his sword and the demon's knife shivered along Dean's eardrums. He wanted to cheer, Go Cas, but his mouth wouldn't let out anything except groans and a bit of blood where he'd bitten his lip, and probably Cas didn't want the distraction anyway.

The demon said something in Demonese and Castiel shuddered, fell back as though the demon had managed to strike him. With a laugh, the demon – the demon wearing a fourth-grade history teacher – lunged, and its knife skidded along the outside of Cas's arm as the angel twisted away. With distant admiration, Dean watched hazily as Cas sidestepped and used the demon's momentum against it, and where the demon had expected Cas's vulnerable body to catch it and its descending, slashing knife, there was only air to fall into, and Cas pivoting behind the demon and his sword riding hard up into the demon's ribs.

With a flare of light, its own death too swift for it to scream, the demon went limp at the end of Cas's sword, and when Cas pulled back, it fell to the tile.

Dean didn't remember much more than that, beyond Cas standing there, contemplating the demon, hand clenched around the hilt of his sword. That hand was shaking, and Dean would remember that clearly: Cas's hand flexing, the dark blood and the glittering metal. Pain took most of the rest, and he'd slipped off somewhere between Cas standing there and waking up again in their motel room in Nashville.

Cas was sitting there, watchful and motionless, when Dean woke up like a shot. For one of the few times in his life, Dean saw actual worry, and a second later, with Cas still leaning over him he learned why: "I couldn't wake you," Cas said, and sounded even more anxious than his face suggested.

"Concussion'll do that to you sometimes." The words were foul-tasting grit. He almost fell on the glass of water Cas offered him, and on the pharmacy Cas had deposited on the bed next to him. "I didn't know what you need," he said, gruff and apologetic, awkward – and dissonant as hell, next to Dean's last memory of him, that elegant shift and the concentration.

"We need to get you some first aid lessons." Dean has to squint to read, so blurry vision… not good at all. "Get a wet cloth, okay? Uh, cold." Cas nods and vanishes into the bathroom, leaving Dean to swallow a fistful of ibuprofen and take stock of his agony in peace.

A minute later Cas reappeared, wet cloth and all, dripping on the carpet. "Wring it out a bit," Dean said, and Cas obeyed. His shoulder didn't want to work so he had to tell Cas where to place the cloth, and he shivered a bit when the cloth, and Cas's fingers, settled on the back of his skull.

"You need to wake me up every now and then, okay?" His eyes didn't really want to focus, and nausea started to churn in his stomach, timed to the slow rolling of the rest of the room. "And you might… you might need to take me to the hospital."

"I will, Dean," Cas told him. "You should rest."

"Why'd he leave?" he asked. While he'd been trying to get his body under control, his voice had divorced itself from his brain, spilling emotion all over himself and Cas curled up next to him. "Cas, he just fuckin' left."

"I'll find him, Dean," Cas said, utterly inexorable. Dean wanted to say Like you found God? but couldn't bring himself to be that mean, delirious as he was. The words slid around his mouth, clumsy, slurred, "I just want it over with, Cas," he said, and damn if he was going to cry into Cas's trench coat, but maybe he was anyway.

"You know what that means," Cas said, "and you should stop talking now."

"Just want it over," Dean said, and some already-broken thing in him shivered to pieces, and everything else crumbled and crashed down around him, except for Cas, and there was nothing.

* * *

Quentin had temporarily abandoned his wheelchair in favor of a pair of crutches, and was swinging his way around the kitchen, making approving noises. "And you haven't touched my stuff," he kept saying, and Cas, with slowly eroding patience, reassured him that they hadn't.

Dean heard the latest go-round from the library. They called it the library but it was really Cas's, books and more books, papers, a battered laptop Cas still regarded with mistrust and almost never used. Dean hated looking at it, its scruffy silver casing, drowsing most of the time under a pile of folders. Cas tended to get touchy about those, but he was occupied now, showing off the garbage disposal Dean had installed, and Quentin was grumbling about new-fangled devices in a way that sounded as though he was actually pleased.

Thirty folders or so, Dean saw, all of them labeled – shit, labeled in goddamn Enochian. He glowered at Cas, who was invisible and oblivious on the other side of the wall, and flipped the top folder open.

Photos and small scraps of paper. The writing on the backs of the photos was Enochian, thank you, Cas, and so were the symbols carved into the worn wooden fence post in one picture, and engraved into a large boulder in another. Two more pictures, both of fence posts, and the same familiar symbols.

He set that folder down and picked up another, and a third, a fourth, and they were all of pillars, posts, boulders, railroad ties, trees, and all with those symbols. All had notes in Cas's incomprehensible language, but some – the sixth, the tenth, the fifteenth – had notes written in English, one by someone who worked for the Wabash Historical Society and was answering Mr. Singer's very odd request because I admit, I was curious as to why we were spared, when other towns were not, and I've seen things. One wasn't signed. The third, belonging to Folder Fifteen, was from some place called Flat River, Colorado, and was signed by a hunter Dean had known.

I've never seen these before in my life, Bobby, and how the hell you knew they were there I got no idea. But yeah, whoever carved these did good by us. There's good people who've made their homes here, so we're grateful.

* * *

It got worse when he got out of the hospital.

They'd made him stay two days for observation, because there could have been bleeding in his brain, or a gasket about to blow, and he could have dropped dead, or just gone in his sleep. If he didn't know the angels could just drag him back and toss him in his broken body again, he would have welcomed it, and where the hell was free will if you couldn't choose to stay dead?

He asked Cas this, but Cas, busy deciphering the instructions on the pill bottles, didn't answer.

"Cas," he said, and coughed around the dryness in his throat. His head pounded viciously. "Cas, seriously man."

"The angels want to take it from you," Cas said at last. In the motel room lights he was faded yellow and gold, and tired shadows sloping under his trench coat. "And drive you to the point where you'll want to say yes to them." Something in his tone implied Dean would be really, really sorry if he made that choice. Cas looked up, and his eyes were dark, also tired, but still determined, and when Dean wondered how he did it, Cas admitted he didn't know.

"Too dumb and too stubborn," Dean said. God, the light was bright, never mind Cas had it turned almost all the way down. He heard Cas laugh, his odd, soft huff, and caught the edge of a smile. "It takes one to know one," Cas said, dry as dust, and despite how it hurt one side of his face, Dean had to laugh about that, too."

"He asked me for you, one time." Dean interrupted himself to swallow, and to try not to imagine if he didn't have Sam or Cas. "Said if I let him have you, he'd give me Sam."

Cas's fingers were powerful, careful, on Dean's neck, and Dean could feel the unfamiliarity in Cas's touch, something wild, not-human settling against flesh for the first time. "The devil's very good at temptation, Dean," Cas said, and even though it wasn't a judgment, it still sounded like one. Or forgiveness. Dean had no idea, way too messed up to handle the guilt and the uncertainty, and Cas's cautious hands. Cas kept massaging, coaxing out the knots made of exhaustion and pain, and relaxation crept slowly down Dean's spine.

It was impossible, but Dean said it anyway. "You should stop looking for him."

"He hasn't caught me yet," Cas said, and Dean grinned, knowing Cas could see the side of it from where he sat. And that was true, and Dean had no idea how the hell Cas had managed to do any of it, snaking him out of Zachariah's clutches twice, getting them away from Raphael and then from Lucifer. "I was trained for this sort of work," Cas said, and right, mind-reader, and far from being angry and surprised at having his mind waltzed into, Dean was mostly surprised about how it didn't feel as strange, now.

Dimly, he felt Cas shift away and slide off the bed. "From the moment Lucifer fell, we started training for this." "What," Dean asked, unable to see Cas and wondering what the hell he was doing, "neck massages?" A soft snort answered him and Cas came back into view, bottle of sports drink and a candy bar with him. Dean grasped at it, but Cas made him take the drink first. "Doing what was necessary," Cas said at last.

"You haven't gotten less weird and mysterious, you know that?" Despite the ache and the harrowing, marrow-deep exhaustion, he felt better with just the promise of sugar. He gulped the drink, ignoring Cas's warnings about what the doctor said. "We can't keep going on like this Cas."

"It's getting harder," Cas said, where a normal person would say we need to buck up, stay strong, we'll get through this.

"We should get it over with." The sugar rush faded and reality stumbled back in. Cas sat on the bed again, shuffling Dean's feet aside. "Cas, I'm just… I'm so tired. I want – "

"You're not saying 'yes,'" Cas said firmly, and Dean, not really in the mood for Cas's bossiness, asked "What about free will?" And Cas turned to him, eyes suddenly alight and angelic, and a lot more like the Cas from the old days. "There will be none, if you give in."

Cas looked more tense and angry than Dean had seen him in a long time, and Dean never wanted to see – or feel – him like that again. He collapsed back, and hoped Cas would make it quick, if he was going to pound the living daylights out of him, but Cas only looked down at him, shadows and angles, somewhere between the tired, confused guy Dean had come to know and the warrior and immortal-supernatural-weirdo angel Dean knew he was under the coat and the sadness.

"I've been tracking Lucifer," Cas said at last, "and the last time I found him, he was near Cleveland."

"Okay," Dean whispered. "When I can see straight again, we'll head there."

* * *

Usually Dean was all for confrontation, especially when if it involved people – hey, like Cas, for example – keeping stuff from him. Especially Cas, who'd made it a habit early on of not telling Dean anything about what was happening, and getting that information out of him had been like pulling teeth, like pulling teeth from the jaw of a Tyrannosaurus rex, one that was still alive and really hungry. And it hadn't gotten much easier, because Cas was one uncommunicative sonofabitch even when he'd decided to place his bet with the longshots, and Dean suspected some of that was because Cas was honestly puzzled whenever he realized humans didn't have access to the angelic knowledge bank. The rest was probably pure Castiel, stubborn close-mouthedness for the sake of it, and Dean didn't hold out much hope that that would change, even with Cas's grace trapped in that amulet.

Still, he had to ask because he couldn't not, and that was the hell of it, either keep living with the burn of not-knowing or just come out and ask, and either way, the peace he'd been building along with this house felt like it was about to come down around his ears.

He waited until they'd finished the project for the day, repainting the dining room, knowing that Cas knew something was up – and knowing that Cas had no idea what to do, either. How he felt about that, Dean couldn't say, somewhere between satisfied (let the angel sweat for a bit) and regretful, because things had been good. Really good, the kind of good Dean couldn't even begin to describe, it was that different from his usual definition.

At last Cas tossed his roller brush into the tray, soft splot of paint that flecked Cas's jeans and boots, and got on Dean a little. The wall gleamed dully, and Dean stared at it and tried to get the breath and courage together while Cas stood and let the silence build.

"So, you going to tell me what the hell's up with the photo gallery?" Dean asked, and Cas looked up quickly, winced at what had to have been a pretty uncomfortable pull on sore muscles. "Yeah, I saw what you've got going on in the study," Dean continued, and didn't bother keeping the hostility out of his voice. "So: what the hell's up with the photo gallery?"

With a shrug, Cas eeled past Dean, and was out in the kitchen before Dean could quite process that Cas could move that fast. Irritation spiked hot up his spine, and he hated it – the irritation, the fucking case that wasn't even supposed to be a case to begin with, that Cas was slithering around his questions again. Three long steps had him in the kitchen, watching Cas's shoulders as he rummaged in the random drawer of crap by the refrigerator.

"Cas, come on. What the hell?" Dean asked, and got silence, unsurprisingly. What he also got was Cas looking up at him, a wordless plea for Dean just to give him a second. It wasn't a second Dean felt like giving, but this was Castiel and there was no dragging anything out of him before he was ready.

'Ready' for Cas meant waiting a couple minutes for a heating pad to warm up in the microwave, and a gruff invitation for Dean to get a couple of beers. Dean did, more out of a desire to do something than to do what Cas told him, and sat down at the table, his one rickety chair across from Cas's.

"Well?" he asked, when Cas slowly sat down.

"I was curious," Cas said defensively, "and since I can't fly, I asked Bobby for help."

"Jesus, Cas. I thought you'd dropped this." And the look Cas gave him said Dean was twenty kinds of stupid for assuming that. Dean had to agree; he was twenty kinds of stupid (at least twenty), thinking Cas was going to let something angelic go like that. "Why the hell didn't you say anything?"

Cas dropped his head again, moved the hot pad so it rested along the back of his neck. "You've been happy," he said, hesitating over happy as though unsure that was the word he wanted. "You've been at peace," Cas added, leaning into the pressure of his own hand and sighing, and it wasn't a contented sigh, but something resigned.

Peace, that word again, and it hit Dean square in the solar plexus. What Cas had wanted for him back when Zachariah had persuaded him to return to the fold, what all the other angels had seemed to want even as they'd gone about getting it in the worst possible way. Peace, and Dean had never really known that outside of a few scattered moments, and even the happiest times, when he'd been in the Impala with the windows down and music soaring, it had been a weird, transient peace, because going somewhere had been his normal.

Normal had never been signing a contract on a drink napkin to live in and rebuild a ramshackle house, and it hadn't been the same skyline, the same space day after day. It had never been someone who wasn't family, leaving out Bobby's remarks about Cas's honorary Winchester status, it hadn't ever been a supernatural being, never anyone other than Dad or Sam. Cassie and Lisa, Jamie, all ports in a storm, needed, necessary, and they'd given him a hell of a lot – more than he could ever offer back – but their space had never been his. He'd never, he realized distantly, had his own space, at least not one that hadn't been upholstered and didn't have a tape deck, and creeping in along with the splinters and cuts and headaches from the chemicals, the learning the tools and the using-up of time and materials, he'd somehow started thinking of this house as his.

His and Cas's.

Distractedly, he listened to Cas get up, the chair scraping across the naked floor boards a small and unimportant sound. A month, a month they'd been at this – two, counting their stay with Bobby – and he'd never been so still for so long, or gone days at a time without thinking of the next town down the road, the next hunt, the next terrible thing the world or God or whoever was going to ask of him. The Impala cooled her heels in the driveway most days, or carried groceries and other crap back and forth. Or brought a sunburned, sun-sleepy Cas back home after a day at the lake, for Dean to haul upstairs and put to bed with two aspirin and a bottle of aloe.

That had been a day, something filed in with his growing-up when Sam had been young and worshipful, when his mom had been alive, and it had slid right in there along with varnish and fighting with drywall. Two months of a different kind of mission, and he'd never even thought about what they'd do after – and they, that was different, too, and frightening, how easy it was to tie his name to someone else's. It was never just Dean, but Dean and Dad, Dean and Sam, Dean and Cas.

"There's no tracking these anyway," Cas said, and shrugged. "At least, not yet. I have some more things I'm waiting on." He set the folder back down.

"Yeah? Things like what?"

"Things." Cas rolled his eyes. "I'm cultivating a hobby, Dean. I thought you'd be pleased."

"God, you're weird," Dean said, and when he looked up at Cas, Cas had his I am not telling you anything more look on, impenetrable as a brick wall, and he had to let it go.

* * *

They needed two days to get to Pontiac, and another day to learn that Amelia and Claire had moved to a small house near Peoria. Dean pointed out that they only needed one day, really, but Jimmy had looked at him and said, "You're about to fall over, and I don't think you want me driving your car."

Then Dean had looked at himself, smoke and blood and torn clothes, his entire front half feeling singed and right at the edge of seared. Yeah, Jimmy was probably right; Dean's autopilot needed an autopilot, his mind shot to hell and gone, and Jimmy looked like he'd… well, like he'd just spent the past year chained to a comet, pale and wild-haired, still shocky. They both smelled like smoke and burning things Dean wasn't going to think about, and shit, Lucifer was dead, and Sam… Sam was gone.

He kept that to himself that night. Jimmy, with quiet competence and thirty bucks he found in his coat pocket, got them a room at some motel, somewhere, and looking back at it, Dean would never remember what the place was called or where it was, only Jimmy looking at him with eyes that were all wrong and too human and saying, "C'mon, Dean," and guiding him inside.

And he'd remember deciding the next step in life would be to get Jimmy home, and he did that. The next morning they got up and Dean persuaded coffee out of the yellowing coffee maker, and told Jimmy they were on their way to Pontiac. Jimmy's face went soft with surprise and longing.

The next day they drove the last few hours to Spring Bay, along a stretch of glittering blue water, the windows down. Wind raked through Jimmy's hair and tugged at his collar, and he had his head back to catch the sun and the air, and Dean couldn't look, and couldn't keep himself from looking at that kind of naked happiness on the face of a person he'd always, always think of as Cas. Two years Jimmy had locked himself up inside Castiel, and what had happened near the end, with Cas's grace dying around him, Dean had no idea and didn't want to know. And now he was free, and on his way home, and no way Dean could parse out what was going on in his own head about that: happiness, anger, jealousy, loss – yeah, no unknotting those.

Dean turned the Impala onto the last street, a row of old, small houses. Some families were out and about, moms and dads and kids, a group congregating in the park where a sign and balloons advertised a birthday. Like every day, like nothing had happened, the grass green and growing and the clean air.

"Cas did this," Jimmy said, "he told me they would be safe, no matter what," and there wasn't much Dean could say to that, except, "Cas kept his promises," because he did. "Yeah, I know," Jimmy said, without any of the bitterness Dean had been expecting, only gratitude and a tightness that said Jimmy was trying not to cry.

Jimmy had the address written down on a scrap of paper, and he had it crushed in his hand as he leaned forward, as though urging the car along. Dean kept himself to five over, had to smile – happy, angry, jealous, lost – at Jimmy's face, lit up and transfigured, and "Hey, hey!" he had to slam on the brakes because Jimmy was sliding out of his seat belt and opening the door, a house too early.

"Amelia!" Jimmy shouted, jogging down the sidewalk, coat flapping behind him. "Claire!"

The front door of a small blue-and-white ranch banged open, and a blonde whirlwind shot out, screaming "Daddy! Daddy!" at the top of its lungs. It launched itself at Jimmy, and he caught it, and it resolved into Claire, a bit taller now, coltish legs flailing, arms wrapped around Jimmy's neck. Dean parked the car and got out, and when he looked up again Amelia was there, rushing down the steps, and it was the three of them, Jimmy trying to hug and kiss them both at once.

"How?" Dean thought it was Amelia, her deep voice deeper with tears and disbelief.

"It's over," Jimmy said, his voice muffled by her hair. Amelia's shoulders shook. "It's really over, Ams, I swear."

"Okay," Amelia said. She pulled back a bit, her face blotchy and red, a wrinkle in it from where she'd pressed it to Jimmy's coat. "Okay." The second okay came out on a laugh.

Dean very carefully didn't look at Jimmy's face, the brilliant smile and the wrinkles around his eyes, and tried to make himself invisible, edging back towards the Impala and the possibility of getting out of here. People were watching, and the skin across his shoulders crawled uncomfortably.

You used to live for this sort of thing, he reminded himself, and his heart twisted, slow and cruel, just a bit.

He'd started to sidle around the Impala's front end, almost to the safety of the driver's seat and then escape, when Claire peeled herself off Jimmy and looked right at him.

"Mr. Winchester," she said, and Dean almost looked over his shoulder for his father.

"I gotta get going," he said, hating the desperate gratitude in their eyes, because none of this should have happened. Castiel shouldn't have convinced Jimmy into abandoning them for some great battle that hadn't even been the battle Cas had ended up fighting – only, without Jimmy maybe Dean wouldn't have met Cas, or become friends with him. Maybe. He had no fucking idea. He was faltering, falling apart, and he knew it, raised a hand to say so long. "See you, Amelia. Claire. You guys take care."

"Please," Amelia said earnestly. She scrubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan and smiled, shaky but sincere. "Please come in, just for a bit."

"Can't," Dean said, "thanks, though," and before she could say another word, he dove for the refuge of the Impala and started her up, peeled out in a way totally unconsonant with a graceful exit.

In the rearview he saw Jimmy watching after him, almost angelically still, until he waved good-bye, and Dean turned the corner.

* * *

He tried to let it go, he really did. Some days made it easy, when the work needed all his concentration, or when he could lose himself in Cas's steady focus as they cut and measured their way around reflooring the bedrooms. And he couldn't help it, and wondered if Cas knew, when they drifted close and Dean touched him when he really didn't need to touch him, and stayed close to see Cas shiver a little before losing and then picking up the train of his thought. Those were the days when they got shit done, and the days when it was Dean-and-Cas, and he thought of the house – dangerous thinking, Winchester, and he didn't bother to stop it – as his.

Then there were the days when it was one disaster after another and nothing worked, and Dean could have sworn the house had a poltergeist in it, things were that fucked up. Days like today, when they had shit to do and instead they were in the walk-in – or, really, limp-in – clinic because Cas had done something to his ankle when he'd slipped on a drop-cloth and skidded halfway down the stairs.

"Well," the doctor said, "it just looks like a bad sprain. I'll wrap it up, write you a prescription, the usual."

When she turned away to get the splint and bandages, Cas leaned into Dean's space, warm and sudden. Dean's breath caught, and he was so busy wondering what the hell that he almost missed Cas's soft question, "What's 'the usual?'"

"Gonna have to stay off that foot, Cas," Dean told him, and the doctor agreed with a cheerful smile as she resettled herself and began to fit the brace. Cas hissed and Dean winced, too, the ankle puffed up and red, starting to fade into purple as the bruising began. "I'd say give it a few days on crutches," the doctor said, oblivious to Cas's furious silence. "After that, you can walk on it a little – but use the crutches if it hurts."

Cas thanked her with the least amount of grace Dean had ever seen, and, when finally released, snatched his crutches and awkwardly swung himself out of the room. The doctor watched him go, mouth twisted with sympathy, and she even patted Dean on the arm.

"Hey, hey," Dean said as he escaped out into the waiting room in time to see Cas trying to push his way through the door. "Lighten up, Cas, seriously." He held the door and refrained from bowing and saying After you, ma'am; Cas had probably already worked out that crutches were effective weapons. With a grunt, Cas hobbled by him, and suffered Dean to open the door to the Impala and hold his crutches as he crawled in.

"There are better ways of getting out of work, Cas," Dean told him. Cas snorted. "I'm serious, man… Get a thermometer and hold it to a light bulb to fake a temperature, fake food poisoning – hey, after that Chinese last night, you might not have to." He laughed, to encourage, and Cas summoned up a half-hearted huff that might, on some planet, be laughter. "It'll be okay, Cas. There's stuff I can work on by myself."

"I suppose," Cas said. He sighed and studied the bottle of pills. "What do these do?"

"Bring down the swelling a bit," Dean said. "When we get back we'll get you set up on the couch with some ice."

Then it hit him: Cas's folders, the stupid fucking case-that-Dean-wasn't-calling-a-case. Dean had never actually seen Cas with permanent stillness forced on him, always going, going, going when he wasn't asleep. And now that he had to be still, with pretty much everything house-related on hold for the next week or so, the only thing standing between Cas and going crazy from boredom was that stack of folders, and whatever the hell Cas was looking for in them.

So there was no way to avoid it without Cas working beside him and the distraction of his presence. Things were different, abruptly, unpleasantly, snapped back to the days when he and Sammy had been kids and in some temporary haven – Bobby's, that town in New York, a couple other places – where they'd stayed for a while so Dad could work, or they could go to the same school for more than a few weeks. Early on he'd loved them, happy mostly for Sam being able to stay in one place and for the chance to eat more than Spaghetti-Os and three-times-warmed pizza. But then he'd grown attached, and grown not to mind waking up in the same bed day after day, and then the second he'd thought I like it here, Dad had announced it was time to move on.

Always a case, always something over the horizon, something one town over. When Dean had been old enough, he'd learned it was the thing that killed Mom, always just over there, don't settle, keep driving, keep searching.

Feeling unmoored, like he needed his duffel and his jacket again, he helped Cas negotiate the porch steps and told him to go crash on the couch while he rounded up ice and water for the painkillers. Cas made a resigned noise, but looked at Dean with honest gratitude – "Hey, I gotta take care of you sometimes, Cas," Dean said, a bit gruffly, and looked away – and obediently hobbled down the hall to the living room. Dean watched him go, the hesitant working of his shoulders and the splinted foot carefully held up.

Keys went on the front table, like everything else in the house something scrounged from a thrift shop. Dean glanced at the library door, open, which was unusual, and jumped when he heard the buzzing of Cas's cell.

Probably Bobby. Dean glanced up the hallway to make sure Cas was safely out of sight and ducked into the library. Immediately, the musty book-smell closed around him, stacks and stacks of books arranged in some order apparent only to Cas, the folders a bit off-kilter, an odd note of disorganization in Cas's military precision. The phone was resting on top of another folder, buzzing away.

The caller ID wasn't Bobby, it was someone named MM. Dean looked up again, not like he couldn't hear Cas coming a mile away with those crutches, and said the hell with it, picked it up, and flipped it open.

"Cas's phone," he said.

"Dean?" A voice, rich, warm, and definitely surprised, and he'd only heard it for a few days of his life, but it had been enough to make an impression.

"Missouri?"

03: All our past times

Bobby was a different kind of past. Bobby was family, and he'd been family back before Dean really knew about hunting, or knew anything beyond You gotta look out for Sammy, Dean. Make sure he's okay and the sacredness of that mission. And Bobby's place was one of those havens, a place to return to, and sometimes their lives had circled around it, two-week hunts in over in Minnesota or down in Kansas before going back again.

Missouri, though, she'd been at the start of everything that had gone wrong with Dean's life in the past five years, her kind voice explaining about their mother, their father, the freaky-ass shit going on in Sam's head. And she'd been there at the house, where Mom had died and Azazel had… had done what he did.

"Dean, boy, you still there?"

"Yeah, yeah." He'd sat down in Cas's desk chair, soft fabric and battered, springs digging into his ass. "Missouri…"

"Well, I was hoping to talk to Castiel," Missouri said dryly. "I see the years haven't taught you manners, picking up someone else's phone."

"He's hurt," Dean said automatically, and on Missouri's sharp, indrawn breath, added, "Not bad, just a sprain… Fell down some stairs." And then, because it was way too much like two old friends catching up and Missouri hadn't called him, said, "Why – how the – how'd you get Cas's number?"

"He got mine, Dean Winchester," Missouri snapped, "and watch your tone."

"Sorry," Dean mumbled. "Why, though?"

"I figure that's Castiel's business," Missouri said tartly. "I've been helping him with some things. You mind putting him on the line."

"No," Dean said, because there wasn’t anything else to say, and because Cas apparently could manage stealth with his crutches and busted foot, seeing as he was standing there on the other side of the desk, face its usual impersonal blank that nonetheless had a lot of anger burning just beneath the surface. "Here he is."

"Missouri," Cas said, tone cool as he took the phone from Dean and held it to his ear. "I'm sorry." Missouri said something, a low blur Dean couldn't quite make out, and Cas hitched himself over to the spare reading chair and sat down heavily. "Did you have a chance to – " He sat up a little, sinuous and alert. "You did. Where?" He nodded. "I… Thank you, Missouri."

Cas flipped the phone shut. "We need to go to Arrow Rock, Missouri."

Dean felt his hackles go up. "Oh, we do, do we?" he asked, and Cas gave him a look that said he was being absolutely serious, and had no time for Dean's sarcasm. "Why?"

"She has a lead for – " Cas paused. "For us. But Arrow Rock still doesn't have telephone service, or a working cell phone tower. She heard this from a hunter who went through there and stopped at her house on his way to somewhere else."

"Heard what, which one of your brothers did the scratchings around the town?" Something cold and hard settled in the pit of Dean's stomach. "Cas, if you need me to take you, I'm not going until you tell me what the hell's up."

"I want to find out," Cas burst out, "I want to find out because I want to know if we had allies back then. And maybe I'm not alone down here." He closed up sudden, hard, and Jesus, that hurt. "Cas, you're not," he tried to say, you're not alone, we're together, right? because that had been where the breaking had started between him and Sam, the two of them in the same space but utterly separate. "I told you, man, I'm here."

"I know," Cas conceded. "I shouldn't have said that."

"We'll do this," Dean told him. "I mean, you clearly need me to drive, no way are you getting behind the wheel like that… But I want to." He found he was managing to convince himself with the words, he wanted this, didn't want that sad, distant look on Cas's face, that distance. "You know how far this place is?"

"About seven hours," Cas said, and "Hey, that's nothing – I can do that in my sleep," Dean said, which made Cas nod and smile and look away.

* * *

Quentin, who always managed to show up at the worst times – when Dean was covered in paint, usually, or something was busted and beyond even Cas's patience – wasn't happy when Dean told him they had to leave for a while. "Define 'a while,'" he ordered, and when Dean couldn't, and could only snap back I don't know, a while, Cas stepped in and said "Something important's come up," and stared calmly and angelically at Quentin until Quentin nodded grudgingly.

"I don't like people backing out on agreements," he said, and sounded almost apologetic. "Tends to get my dander up."

At any rate, he let them go and ten minutes later they were in the Impala and pushing south along the infinite stretch of prairie. The Impala rumbled along, dependable, and Dean patted the wheel, the old girl happy to be in motion again. Cas sat quietly and listened to the music, hands curled around a folder that Dean assumed was pictures from Arrow Rock, wherever that was.

Wherever that was ended up being a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, and a historic town of brick and neatly painted wood and those stupid historic site signs, and filled with people, way past what Dean assumed was the normal population for a national park. They had to abandon the Impala in a parking lot outside the town limits – no room, the attendant said, but was at least polite about it. "We got no room at all," he said, and glanced regretfully at Cas's splinted foot, "but you can ride my motorbike in, if you want."

Decent kid, Dean thought, as he and Cas completely destroyed the motorbike's suspension getting into the thing. Cas clung, warm and close, to Dean's back, his crutches balanced across the handlebars. There were looks, quite a few of them, and the motorbike could only crawl along at a few miles an hour with two grown men on it, so by the time they reached the tourist information center – "You gotta go there, check in," the kid had said – they'd attracted a couple of dogs and a few kids, and one smart-ass with a video camera.

If he was bothered by the indignity, Cas didn't show it, but hopped off the motorbike and retrieved his crutches as though this was a thing he did every day. Even on crutches he was fast, swinging and pushing his way through the curious crowd and nudging the door open, almost through it by the time Dean got the bike settled.

"Are you Jill Walsh?" he was asking as Dean shouldered his way in. The tourist information center was dark and his eyes needed a moment to adjust; when they did, he saw that all the usual informational boxes and glass-case displays had been stripped away, and in their place were bare tables, the cheap formica kind. He drew a breath, and that was gun oil and rock salt, and the smell sent his heart racing.

Behind the desk was a wiry middle-aged woman, so like Ellen Dean's heart twisted and her name was almost out of his mouth before he saw it wasn't her. But the face was the same, lined and serious, eyes that could drive nails. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore flannel and jeans, and a shoulder holster.

"I am." Jill Walsh stood up and maneuvered around the desk, "and that you know my name means you've been talking to someone."

"Do you know Missouri Moseley?" Cas asked, and warily, Jill Walsh nodded. "I do, up by Lawrence," she admitted, and Cas said, "She told us we should speak with you, about the sigils."

"Right." Jill sighed the word. "I don't suppose you'd mind introducing yourselves first; we don't really like strangers around here."

"My name is Cas," Cas said, and drew a breath to add, "Cas Novak. And this is – "

"Jim," Dean leaped in. "Jim Plant."

Suspicion crossed Jill's face, but she didn't say anything, and thank God Cas kept his mouth shut. No telling what hunters around here – and Jill was a hunter, plain as day – would think of Dean Winchester and his demon brother, you know, the guys who started the end of the world, and Dean had never bothered to find out if anyone had known he'd been the one to save the damn thing after all. And suspicion or not, Jill shook Cas's hand and then shook his and invited them to come with her. The crowd, gathered outside the door like a bunch of eavesdroppers, made way for her like water parting.

"We've got people from four different towns in here," she said, and that explained all the people clogging the streets. She moved slowly, as much for the number of people as for Cas, who didn’t seem too worried about pushing people aside with his crutches. "There were some farming towns, a couple of villages, that got blown to hell. Used to be a hell of a lot more people here, but then we got some people to set themselves up in one of the safe towns downriver."

"Safe towns?" Dean had to maneuver around a clutch of little kids, their mother with canvas totes of groceries. He stole a look: bread, a few vegetables, a lot of canned soup. Up ahead, he could see some people lined up outside a grocery store.

"I'll let you talk to Miriam about that," Jill said. “I’ve just been working on keeping our asses safe; she’s the one who’s been making sure other people stay safe, too."

"Talk to me about what?"

Another woman materialized outside of a brick house, one that had belonged to some guy named Dr. Sappington. Unlike Jill, she was young, and dark where Jill was blondish, and moved like a civilian. Behind her glasses her eyes were also dark, but warm with eagerness and welcome. Also unlike Jill, she held out her hand to shake and smiled a welcome at them.

"These guys want to know about the safe towns," Jill explained. Miriam blinked as though in surprise, and Jill continued on: "They're some friends of Missouri's, or so they say."

"Old friends," Dean added helpfully.

"Okay," Miriam said, looking between him and Cas and Jill uncertainly. "I'm not sure what there is to tell, exactly. We'd been attacked by locusts – an actual plague of locusts – and all the farmers had moved to one of the nearby towns. My husband and I ended up here. It was either here or Frontage, and that… We learned a week later that had been destroyed in a tornado, and we figured we'd be next."

"It was hell, keeping everything calm here," Jill interrupted. And yeah, Dean could see that, he knew it, because he'd either walked through it and seen the tracks of Armageddon, or he'd left them behind him, because destruction walked hand-in-hand with him in those days. Jill continued, about people who ventured outside the town limits disappearing, and Miriam chipped in with, "And Jill took over. She told us… She told us what was out there."

"You didn't know of the sigils by this point," Cas said.

Miriam shook her head, but instead of answering further shot a guilty look at Cas's crutches. "You should come in and sit down," she said, and before Dean could blink her hand was tucked under Cas's arm, urging him inside. She waved with her free hand, to include Dean in the invitation.

'Sitting down' meant ducking inside Dr. Sappington's house, its lintels way too low for Dean and the hallways tiny, from the days when people were short and didn't mind taking up too little space. Then it meant squeezing into a dilapidated loveseat with Cas, and trying to lean forward even as the loveseat tried to swallow him up. Miriam tucked herself into a small chair on the other side of a scrap of carpet, and waited until Cas had his crutches situated.


"Like I said, we didn't know about the signs at first," Miriam said, "the hunter who told us came by in April some time. I saw this guy messing around with one of the fences… I thought he was trying to steal cattle. I almost shot him."

"Lucky for him," Dean muttered. Cas nudged Dean's foot with his good one and breathed an order to shut up.

"What he told me sounded crazy," Miriam admitted. She tucked a long black strand of hair behind her ear, "and he showed me how to carve them myself, even though I didn't believe him. Not until the tornado, anyway."

"It went right around us," Jill said. She'd positioned herself by the door that led to some room Dean couldn't see clearly, but that looked crowded with sleeping bags and clothes. "It should have pulled that fence line up – hell, it should have wiped us off the map – but it didn't."

Cas was leaning forward too, despite having to put some weight on his foot to do it. And this was the Cas that Dean remembered from the war days, intent and focused, and that brain of his click-click-clicking along at a million miles an hour. He listened, they both did, as Jill told them about the people from neighboring towns trickling in one by one, a few families with mothers and fathers and kids still alive, but most of them having someone lost. Then it had been finding space and food, and Jill explaining to people that, yeah, it was probably the end of the world for real, so learn how to use rock salt and deal with it.

"Then I got Jill to drive me to the next town," Miriam said. She tugged her hair behind her ear again. Someone sighed, and Dean realized they had an audience, ten people or so crowded close, and more beyond the open door. "I put the sigils up – I'd drawn them on paper – and… they worked. Moon Creek's still standing. We have more people there now. So, Jill told someone, and they went… I guess these are all over the place by now."

The sigh this time came from Cas, who actually looked frustrated as he leaned back to rest his head against the back of the couch. Dean barely kept himself from biting off something smart, what, you wanted the entire damn state to be leveled?, and realized whatever or whoever Cas was tracking just made it that much harder for him to find them.

"This guy have a name?" Dean asked.

"I don't know… Jeff? Jay? Something J— Manns," Miriam said. "I don't know if that name was real, though." Cas leaned forward again and, ignoring Miriam's apologetic shrug, asked – well, ordered, really – "Describe him."

Dean's heart turned over once, hard, no way, no way, and only Cas's hand on his arm kept him from lurching forward – to do what, to go where he had no idea, except maybe to start looking, to drive. Some kind of movement, that was all he wanted, but Cas had him anchored, with the hand on his arm and a commanding, speaking look. And he heard Miriam saying, as if from a great distance, Well, I couldn't see his face well – it was almost full night – but he was really tall. He had a baseball cap. Mostly, he was tall. But he was kind.

"Did he say where he was going, after he left?"

"No… he went west, though," Miriam said. Her dark, kind eyes turned on Dean. "Are you okay?"

He wasn't – or he was, he had no idea, so far from anything he could recognize. Only it was like something had broken open in him, hope, maybe, he couldn't put a name to it, and it was like life. Not that the past few months hadn't been living, but this, Sam, Sam, Sam. It was watching Sam's graduation, despite the pain and Dad boycotting it, keeping an eye on him from afar, knowing he was in Stanford and okay. It was the adrenaline after a hunt, when they'd barely managed to escape being eviscerated or blown up or whatever, and they'd looked at each other, and Sam's usually somber eyes were all lit up with wonder and excitement. That, it was that look.

Cas was saying something, more questions, shifting forward a bit as if to press his point. He asked for a pencil and paper, and a kid ran and got it like lightning – that, Dean thought, was Cas for you. And Cas, Jesus Christ, he'd done this. Those folders, the phone calls, the patient waiting for the sound of something even vaguely Sam-like. Sneaky, magnificent bastard, and Dean wanted to kiss him, or punch him, not necessarily in that order.

"When I get back into range, I'll call her," Cas said, touch of finality to his tone. "Thank you, Miriam, you've been helpful."

Miriam bounced to her feet, dark hair flying. "It's late now," she said, glancing out the window. He'd lost track of the time, the space, everything; when he turned to see what she was looking at, night peered at him through the window. That's right, they'd started late, not until almost eleven, between Cas's trip to the clinic and getting things squared away with Quentin. They hadn't eaten except for something Cas had grabbed at a gas station, and while Dean knew he should be starving and ready to eat someone's leg by this point, he'd never felt less hungry in his life.

"You should stay the night," Miriam told them, and Jill echoed her, although she made it sound more like a command. "Plenty of time to find your mystery man tomorrow," Jill said with some dryness. "We've got food here, though – provisions have been easier to come by, with people clearing out – and there's some spare mattresses and sleeping bags, if you don't mind sleeping on the floor." Her face said that if they minded sleeping on the floor it was tough shit, because it was the floor or nothing.

"Dean," Cas said quietly, manifesting himself in Dean's personal space like old days. "Don't."

He knew what the don't was for, but he asked anyway: "What, get my hopes up?" And Cas nodded, and Dean wished he could explain, that it felt great and it hurt so fucking much, like the happiness he'd been building with their house got stripped away and he was all-over pain, a layer of skin yanked right off him. Raw, exposed – those were the words, and he hated it, but Sam. Cas got it, of course he did, and his eyes went soft, the way they did when Cas really was sorry and was maybe hurting a bit himself.

"You should go get our stuff," Cas said, and it wasn't precisely a request, or an order, but the pointing-out of something to do.

In a daze, he took the motorbike out to the parking lot to retrieve the duffels, the night wind cold on his face and the stars wide and wild overhead. Cas's low, cautious voice rode bitch seat, don't get your hopes up, it could still end bad. It could end in a grave, or Sam just being gone – and they had no idea where he went, other than west. It was something, after so fucking long, and him not looking.

He owed Cas, and he told Cas as much when he got back to Miriam's place (one near-wipeout in a pothole later, and you try balancing two duffels on a crotchrocket, Cas). Miriam was shepherding them to dinner, and the small house was noisy with the ten people who lived in it besides Miriam and her husband, Nick: Quinn, who was red-haired and shy, the twins Pearl and Parker, Andy and his girlfriend Laya who kept making stupid faces at each other, and Dean started to glaze over there, distracted and wanting to just leave. The names trailed off and he nodded and tried to be polite, and Cas tried to look normal. It seemed to be getting easier.

"I owe you," he said again, later, when they were in their room, something that had probably been the servants' quarters and barely large enough for the two of them. Cas was curled on the air mattress under a blanket, still wincing with the pain in his ankle. "You okay, man?"

"Fine," Cas said tightly. "The drugs just need to work."

Dean let the silence sit. It wasn't real silence, not the quiet of the house settling and the prairie huge and sleeping around it. He could hear footfalls downstairs, voices trying to be quiet, Andy and Laya probably getting it on in the next room over. Cas sighed and shuffled around, pulled off his shirt – he hated sleeping in the things, apparently, a crazy human quirk Dean would never have expected of him – and went still again.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Dean asked.

"If I told you what I was doing, and it turned out to be a false lead, or a dead end, what purpose would that have served?" Cas shook his head. "This may still be a dead end, Dean. What will you do if we can't find him?"

He hadn't even considered that, and no way he was going to consider it. "Remember when I told you about how I knew my dad was still alive, when I was looking for him? Like, I hadn't heard from him in weeks, but I knew he was still around?" Cas nodded, mercifully refrained from pointing out he'd known his own father had been alive and had been too much of a deadbeat to help his kid out. "I know that about Sam," he continued. In the distant outside, a screen door wham-banged shut. "He's somewhere, we just gotta find him. And we will."

"I know, Dean," Cas said calmly, and it was the old certainty. It was enough to calm some of the adrenaline and push it back, and questions came crowding forward. Or the one question, the one not even God could answer to Dean's satisfaction.

"Why'd this have to happen anyway?" Dean asked. In the moonlight and darkness, Cas's face was somber and sad, eyes liquid shadows, and Dean could barely make out the soft flex of his mouth as he looked for an answer. "I mean, why?" And that was a question Cas had heard so many times, and a lot of those from Dean.

"Maybe it was – " and Dean broke in, Don't you fucking say 'destiny', but Cas rode over him anyway, " – required that to save the world, you had to give up the one thing you always refused to."

Sam. "Greater love hath no man than this," Cas said, and Dean wasn't that much of a heathen that he didn't know the rest of the verse, that a man lay down his life for his friends, and he'd done that, hadn't he? He'd gone to Hell, and died God only knew how many times, and still that hadn't been enough. Because in the balance of things, Dean's life didn't matter, and he was okay with that – maybe – it was only the taking-away that counted, when the most important thing in the world wasn't your own life, but someone else's.

Cas said, "I hate that it was done to you."

"And what, you were trying to make it up to me?" Dean asked, not even meaning it, but Cas made a soft, aggrieved sound anyway. "Cas, I was kidding. I… Shit, there's no way – " Cas opened his mouth to say something, but it was Dean's turn to keep going, " – I can't ever pay you back, man. I'll try, but hell if I ever can. Hell if I know why you did this." And this was helping him through the end of the world, falling, helping him again, and it stunned him, thinking of it, and the thousand small moments where he'd noticed Cas, like he'd been something blurry that suddenly jumped into focus.

"You're bad at noticing what's right in front of you," Cas said, the mind-reader, and the disdain was so naked, Cas not even bothering to be polite, that Dean had to push at him. Cas yielded only a bit, and shoved right back, and Dean grabbed his wrist and tugged. Cas went still.

"Dean?"

Dean tugged one more time, and Cas came, easy and on a quiet, yielding breath that Dean could taste the moment before his mouth closed over Cas's. He wanted, and it was a real, sharp thing – that focus again, all the details of Cas jumping out at him: his rough jaw, the careful stroke of his tongue against Dean's, trying the kiss on for size. Cas's new confidence telling in his fingers sliding down Dean's shoulder, familiar and unapologetic. The warm slide of Cas's body under his blanket, and that was easy, real easy, to push aside, palming the subdued curve of Cas's hip and the run of his thigh. He felt clumsy, greedy, grasping, and Cas's answer was the same, and not just giving, but taking too, with Cas's usual impatience.

"Here," Cas grunted, and shifted over with a squeaking sound of nylon and nylon. Dean shivered. "Come on."

That Cas and his pragmatics for you, and it wasn't like they'd never shared before – just nothing this small, a mattress barely larger than a twin. They ended up on their sides, an awkward shifting of arms and legs, and Cas's brace felt weird and synthetic against Dean's bare ankle. But then Cas settled, and twined around him again, graceful twist of muscle Dean could read under that warm, warm skin. He wanted to laugh, or hell cry, his heart was that fucking full, but settled for tracing the length of Cas's chest, his neck and the human throb of his pulse, his cheeks, kissing him one more time.

"Dean," Cas whispered, wrecked and confused, eyes hazy. What the hell he got up to in his bedroom, Dean had no idea, and he'd never seen Cas even slink out of the bar for a quickie, much less go home with anyone. Because he was waiting for you to get your goddamn act together, with a lot more restraint than Cas usually showed when it came to Dean not seeing the forest for the trees. "Dean," Cas said again, edge of a whine, and "Here, here, I got you," Dean told him, palming him through his boxers, and Cas cried out, sharp and sudden, thigh shaking against Dean's and spine curling – Dean could feel the long, hard shiver of the muscles in Cas's lower back – and he came, abrupt, shocky, graceless, and when he fought for breath Dean had to, had to, kiss that open, dazed mouth.

* * *

They said goodbye to everyone the next morning. Jill shook their hands and Miriam hugged them both. Everyone else glared at Andy and Laya, both of whom seemed to wilt, and Dean snickered to himself.

"It's really safe out there now?" Reilly, the kid with the motorbike, asked as Dean parked it and toed the kickstand down.

"Yeah," Dean said, and Reilly beamed, wide and crooked-toothed, before remembering he was supposed to be a surly teenager. "Maybe I'll fucking get off parking lot duty, finally," he muttered, and Dean told him to fight the good fight. He helped Cas into the Impala and they drove, and Led Zep and the highway wind sounded better than hymns.

Missouri met them back in Lawrence. The years hadn't been kind, to her and everyone, and they told in the wrinkles around her eyes, the slightly heavier step. But she still had a smile for Dean, and her eyes still snapped with fire and humor, when she stepped down the driveway to greet him. Her arms closed around him, warm and strong, oh, honey, you've been through it, haven't you?

"You okay?" he asked, ducking the question. The look she gave him told him he might as well have answered – psychic, remember? – but she settled for saying, "I'm as well as can be expected. You could say I'm feeling pretty blessed right now," and shared a smile between him and Cas, and asked them both inside.

"And you've been through the wars too, haven't you?" she said to Cas, who blinked and said, "Which ones?" She laughed her warm, rich laugh, and didn't seem at all weirded out by the fact that she was touching a former angel – and not really touching, but tugging through her small foyer and into the living room.

"Well, it's been a time!" she said brightly. She pushed Dean over to the couch, which had been recovered, a different afghan thrown over the back, and guided Cas to sit next to him. "But it sure is good to see you again, Dean."

The unspoken Sam hovered, and Dean shot a glance at Cas. Missouri caught it, of course, and said, "I heard from Bobby what happened with Sam, Dean. I'm sorry."

"That's why we're here," Dean said, anticipation making his voice stretched out and hesitant, and Cas's cautions came back full force, dead end dead end, we don't know yet, but this was – Missouri was it. "I don't know if you can help," and god he hoped she could, it was that or going on another hunt for God, "but could you try?"

"Of course I can," Missouri said, and sounded almost insulted. "If I can't help you find Sam, I'll try and dig up someone who can," and Dean jumped a little, right, psychic, and he was probably broadcasting like crazy. The sad, understanding look Missouri gave him told him that he was.

Cas leaned down to rummage in his duffel, and produced a small lump, wrapped in a spare t-shirt. Missouri took it from him when he held it out, with unexpected delicacy, and unwrapped it. The block of wood, worn, half-chewed out by termites, lay in the cradle of fabric and Missouri's palm, and facing upwards was the northern sigil. The anchor, Cas had said, because of Polaris, the fixed star that pointed the way northward.

"You know about Cas's project," Dean said, and Missouri nodded. "I've been helping him with it, since Bobby told me. I just thought this was something else for the files, though, when Jill came up."

"It's not – well," and shit, he was saying it, and the possibility welled up, huge, terrible, blinding, "it could be him, Missouri. I just, I gotta know."

"Oh, sweetie." Missouri cupped her other palm over the sigil and looked straight at him. And that was the thing about her – and Bobby, and Cas, Ellen, Jo: she wouldn't spare him if it was bad. Might as well not sugarcoat, rip the bandage off and never mind that, now that he was invested again, alive and on the hunt (and this is what you do, Winchester, you spend your life looking for people), if she said no, or if she said Sam's dead, that would be it for him.

"I need you boys to get me some things from the trunk in the next room," she murmured, eyes shut now. "Yarrow, sandalwood, the bag of crushed quarts, some chalk and the board, a match."

Cas got up and vanished, and left Dean to watch as Missouri sat and murmured to herself. In a few minutes the altar was set, and Cas drew the circle himself. Missouri set the sigil in the center, and chanted softly as Cas arranged the herbs on top of the wood, and when Missouri said now he lit the match and dropped it.

The herbs sparked and flared, the sandalwood warm, a sharp smell from the quartz and the woodsmoke. Dean leaned forward, aching, body on pause as Missouri bent over and inhaled the smoke.

* * *

La Cygne was a couple hours of state highways and back roads, and a long, arcing stretch of river. Cas drove because Dean would have killed them both, and he drove with unexpected competence, unfazed by Dean's jittering. Steady, and man did Dean need that, and every now and then he'd glance over at Dean and say something reassuring that Dean didn't hear. They had the music off, not because Cas didn't like it, but the silence fit somehow, the roar of the wind a match to the chaos going on in Dean's head.

He didn't really see the landscape, the unrolling of farms and small towns, or La Cygne itself. It was a blur, and meant nothing, other than a moment of clarity when Cas stopped at a red light, and unself-consciously leaned out to ask directions of someone walking by. Then the town resolved into brick and wood, engines rumbling by and some asshole honking for Cas to get a move on. His heart jittered in his chest, and it was like a mile left, less, Cas navigating expertly through the streets, late afternoon light tossing shadows and pulling them out across a wide-open expanse of park where kids ran and played. A lake glittered near the edge of it, and the river wound on by at its edges.

There would be sigils around this place, sigils like the marks Dean could see etched into mailboxes and the lintels of doorways, now that they were going slow enough for him to tell, and the world was taking on that unreal sharpness again. "Cas, look," Dean said, and Cas slowed down even more, so the Impala crawled along, and he could interpret. Sigils for protection, and turning aside the evil eye, turning aside sickness, a ward for peace carved into a doorpost next to an American flag. One house had a prayer flag, and Dean couldn't read it, but Cas took a quick look and said it was for long life and prosperity.

Judging from what he saw, it had worked. They'd all worked, this small town wrapped up in safety, like the towns he and Cas had driven through on their way to Bobby's, like Arrow Rock, the dozens and dozens in Cas's folders back home. Places all over the country, and Sam had done that. Dean's heart did something painful and complicated, thinking of that, Sam running from town to town, stopping when he found a likely place.

"Missouri said this was as close as she could get." Delicately, Cas eased the Impala into an open space at the curb. "We'll have to look around on foot."

Dean was out of the car almost before Cas stopped, and definitely before Cas got the ignition off. "Dean!" Cas hollered – as close as Cas got to hollering – and Dean couldn't wait, he just couldn't, and he felt like shit, but couldn't help it. He heard Cas fighting with his crutches, and wanted to shout, Sam, Sam, Sam, the stupid-ass refrain, the chorus of his life.

He was so busy looking, so desperate, on fire and everything so clear he had no idea where to look first, no idea what he was seeing. Then Cas was there, grabbing Dean by the arm and yanking, hard, pointing – Cas was pointing at something, get it together Winchester, "Dean, look," and obediently, Dean looked.

Mann, neat black letters on gold foil background, and the post the mailbox perched on was carved with signs that kept away demons and everything in the world except humans, and ex-angel humans tenacious enough to look for them. And, Dean thought, lucky enough to find them.

"Cas," he said hoarsely, and Cas was there, hobbling along by his side. "What if – " and Cas shook his head, "He'll be glad to see you, Dean," and that was what was frightening. Worrying, whatever, the fear that stretched out the last ten yards to the sidewalk that led to a modest ranch house and the depressingly sensible car in the driveway. It had been the fear back in Stanford, asking Sam for help even though he'd needed it, because Sam had a life, he'd been happy, and maybe that was the case here.

I swear to god I won't ask you for anything, Sam, just as long as I can see you, make sure you're okay, and that'll be it. I'll be gone.

He wondered if he should knock, or break in, was so distracted by it he almost missed Cas poking at his ankle with his crutch. Back there, Cas whispered, and Dean heard it, a rummaging sound, something heavy being pushed or dragged across concrete. His heart thumped once, heavy and sick, and he had to make himself move, one foot in front of the other, around the side of the house. The lawn was neat, trimmed, and that would be pretty Sam-like, anal-retentive down to the fucking soil.

Then he came around the corner, and there, there.

"Sam?"

That broad back froze, and he'd know that gigantic body anywhere, any time.

"Dean." Sam stood up, straightening vertebra by vertebra. Still gigantic, although he seemed smaller, diminished. And that was Sam, huge sad eyes and face slack with disbelief. "Dean?"

"Hey, Sammy." He wanted to run to Sam, run away, walk, stop, he had no fucking idea.

"Hey," Sam said.

"Been a while, Sammy." Not their longest streak, not by a long shot, but the past few months had been, looking back on it – even the good times --, like the twisted, stretched-out time in Hell, a few days as a month, and a month as a decade. "You look good."

"Yeah." Sam looked down at his hands, a folded-up and worn paper clenched in them. He shoved the paper in a pocket. "I didn't think you'd…"

Then he broke, because Jesus Christ his brother was dumb. And Sam's hand was on his arm, touching like he couldn't quite believe it, and good one, Sammy, because Dean couldn't quite believe it either. Sam, whole and okay and un-possessed, with grease on his hands and on his shirt, and fuck being girly, he pulled Sam against him and hung on, and Sam's bearlike arms came around him and held on too.

* * *

Cas had greeted Sam in his usual quiet way and gone inside to rest and take more painkillers, and they'd walked across the street to the park. Most of the kids were inside now, school night and all, and the evening cooling off with the first touch of fall this far south. The pond had darkened, silver highlighting it here and there, and the river ran silver, too. Sam shuffled his feet and bent to pick up rocks, and started to toss them into the pond, trying to skip some and failing for the most part, his hands too unsteady.

"Why'd you leave?" Dean asked after a while.

It hurt like hell to ask, but he had to know and had the right to, and by the look on his face, Sam knew it. Still, Sam let the silence spin out for a few minutes as they stood there, the seconds sometimes punctuated by the plunking of a stone drowning.

"What you always said we have to do… saving people." Sam tossed a rock into the pond, ker-splash and it went to the bottom. "You know, family business."

Another rock, the shivery sound of a skip and then the plunk as the rock fell through the water. "I was so angry all the time." Another rock, but Sam only held onto it, turning it over and over. "I was just, well, you know…" And yeah, Dean knew. He'd seen it, the entire spectrum from the tense, concentrated-steam quiet in the Impala to Sam's wild eyes and arcs of blood to the moments after that anger had been slaked, when Sam had been cold again, and superior, and it had been like looking at Lucifer in the future.

In the darkness now, though, Sam was miles away from being any of that. "Eventually I realized I was going to say yes." Small, regretful, Dean's stupid little brother again. "If I kept fighting," Sam said quietly, "I was going to keep being angry, and sooner or later I was just… I was going to cross some line and I was gonna say yes, because I'd be angry enough to do it."

That was the way it was, really, and Dean could see it all laid out: those weeks of slow-burning fury, erupting now and then like a volcano, and then the turn, when Sam had gone quiet. It hadn't been the quiet of steam compressing, waiting to blow, but the absence of something. At the time he'd just thought it had been exhaustion, or Sam moping his way through the Sam-equivalent of PMS. You're bad at noticing what's right in front of you, Cas had said, and okay, fine, a point to the angel for that, because what he'd missed was Sam coming to realize he couldn't go on, and coming to a resolution.

"So, I left," Sam said, like every other time he'd left – running away, finding new friends, going to school – only there was pain here. "I had some hex bags stashed, managed to find a shaman who helped me ward my dreams," and that would explain the dream-catcher Dean had seen in the bedroom, "and I'd been watching Cas, so I had some tricks up my sleeve," he paused and added uncomfortably, "for saving people."

"Cas was tracking you," Dean muttered. "I can't fucking believe it."

"Not just me," Sam said. "In some places – well, where I could get people to listen to me – I showed them how to do these, and asked them to go around to other places, set up the wards the same way." He shrugged. "You saved the world Dean, I just…"

"There were more people to save, 'cause of you," Dean said. "Don't go all modest, Sammy." His heart loosened a little, and the tension unwound and spun free and took some of the weight with it. "Just, if you do it again, I'm going to find you and kill you."

"I knew Cas would look after you," Sam said, oblivious to impending danger. The smile he offered Dean was only the slightest bit teasing. "He did, right?"

"Yeah, Sammy," Dean said, and thought about more than motel rooms and a last desperate gamble, all chips in – a New England forest, a road, a house. "Yeah, he did."

* * *

"Honestly, you boys are going to be the death of me." Bobby's scolding faded out as she stepped into the kitchen, but returned full force once more as he wheeled himself back into the living room. "You," he growled, pointing a finger at Sam, "running off without your brother, and you…" Whatever it was Dean had done was apparently too much for Bobby, because he shook his head in exasperation.

Only Cas seemed to escape, and got a cup of coffee and a smile that, for Bobby, counted as fond, the kind Dean imagined grandmothers would give to their grandchildren right before pinching their cheeks. His brain stuttered around accommodating millennia-year-old Cas and being someone's grandkid in the same space, and by the look on Sam's face he was having the same problem. Dean wondered if it was Cas and the weird youthfulness – fresh-faced, almost, dewy-eyed despite being scruffy and a bit disheveled – or if it was just that he, Sam, Bobby, Ellen, Jo, Missouri, saw Cas as something less supernatural and something more every-day.

"I'm sorry, Bobby," Sam said meekly.

Bobby glowered. "Not sorry enough, believe me, so why don't we pretend it never happened?"

There really was no way of pretending, was the thing, and Dean knew he wasn't ever going to shake what it had been like, those weeks without Sam and with Cas desperately trying to keep him together, and then those months of wandering and no direction. Then Cas, and like Bobby said, there wasn't any way he could possibly repay Cas even though he tried, writing incoherent gratitude across Cas's skin at night, until Cas got impatient and pointed out he'd already dragged Dean from Hell, and "there's no way you could possibly repay that to begin with," which was so typically Cas-like Dean had to laugh and shove him over onto his back and drive him crazy.

Thought you were doing that under orders, he'd said to the quivering slope of Cas's neck, and Cas had grunted impatiently, That's an entirely different story, and one I don't want to tell right now and then had ordered Dean to make him come.

Not that Dean was thinking about that or anything, not with Sam grinning stupidly at him and Bobby shoving a mug of coffee into his hands with an annoyed sound.

"I hope," Bobby said, "I'm not gonna get all three of you crashing here. There's only so much Winchester a man can take in his life," this said with a speaking look at Cas, who was too busy guzzling his coffee to notice. "Cas here's the only being in the world who can put up with you two – other than me – and I figure it's his turn for the next twenty years."

"I dunno," Dean said lazily. The mug was warm in his hands, and Bobby's house had its familiar musty smell, books, gun oil, chili, and Sam was sitting there. He couldn't stop looking, Sam and Cas there together, and Bobby too, and that was his world. There'd been a time when he'd told Cas what was worth fighting for, and that was family, people, and he had his people. "Hey, Cas, you think you can put up with us that long?"

"I don't know," Cas said calmly, but the smile tugging his lips – soft, barely there, and Dean knew exactly what that smile felt like by now – gave him away. "I can try."

"Do or do not," Sam said, "there is no try."

"That’s good advice."

It figured, coming from Cas.

"You guys need to talk to Quentin," Bobby told him, businesslike enough for Dean to have to pay attention to him. "Maybe, now that you've got someone with almost a college degree, you might be able to work out some sort of rent agreement with him. Hell, you can come back here and work for me – you know, sort-of honest work."

Honest work. A house. Dean didn't quite know what to make of the onslaught of normal. Sam seemed puzzled too, and needed explanations that Cas gave in ten words or less: Wayland Quentin, his sculptures and his house, renovations, and how they were now behind by several days due to Sam. Sam listened, incredulous glances bouncing back and forth between Cas and Dean, "You mean you actually got him to stand there in a hardware store and pick out paint colors?" he asked, and, perfectly serious, Cas said that he did. Dean invited Cas to bite him, which won an unexpectedly coy look (Cas being coy, maybe the Apocalypse was now), and Sam laughing.

"Wish I had a picture of that," Sam said, and wiped away a fake tear. He sobered after a moment, even though he smiled, the quick, quivering smiles of someone struggling not to laugh and then, finally, mastering their hilarity. "I…" Sam coughed, rubbed the last of the laughter off his face, "I'd like that, if it's cool with you guys."

"Sammy, I can't fucking believe you sometimes," Dean said, "of course it's cool."

And, yeah, there was nothing Sam's pre-law and art history could say to that, except a quiet thanks before Bobby made a comment about the estrogen level in the room.

* * *

That night he had Cas tucked up against him in bed, the both of them rolled slightly to the center because the mattress was old and the springs were going. The room smelled faintly of paint, and the dropcloths were like ghosts, draped over the ladders and pooling on the floor. Where he had his body pressed against Cas's, and his arm around Cas's shoulders, he was warm, and everywhere else slightly cool from the air through the open window.

Cas stirred and muttered, squirmed a bit and sighed as he dropped back down into another layer of sleep. His brace rubbed against Dean's calf. One bedroom down, in Cas's smaller, now-former bed, Sam snored away, deafening volume softened by the intervening walls.

Dean let himself drift, listened to the house settle and Cas breathing, and his brother being there, and watched the night turn imperceptibly toward dawn.



-end-

Comments

[hermitsoul]

*claps hands in glee* Oh, so very, very awesome! *bookmarks* Thanks so much for sharing this with us!