Queen of Nothing [2/4]
Oct. 14th, 2012 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Part 1
Just outside South Bend, Indiana, Bobby calls with a ritual he thinks will kill the amulet. It's a pretty gnarly one, with lamb's blood and the bone of an adulterer. Deanna passes the phone off to Cas and watches him out of the corner of her eye as he takes notes. She notices for the first time that his hair's hanging down over his forehead where it used to stick up, and that maybe his perpetual five o'clock shadow is looking a little more like ten-thirty and it gives her a chilling flash of a Cas that will never exist if she has anything to say about it, one with glazed eyes and no hope. This Cas knows that, how he could have or still could end up (but damn well won't if Deanna has anything to say about it), and still chose this. Chose her, when you get right down to it. She's not sure whether it was to save her from herself or because they're as fucked-up as each other, no more than she's sure whether she would have had the balls to do the same.
The ritual has to be worked at the new moon, which is tomorrow night, and nobody wants them hanging onto the damn thing for another month, so they stop and spend the afternoon searching divorce records and murder trials for a dead cheater. "Just one damn time," Deanna says that night in the cemetery, stomping her foot down onto her shovel to unearth Lou Conley, 1937-1985, "I'd like to see a ritual that calls for candy canes and sunshine."
"Candy canes have no inherent metaphysical powers," Cas says from the other end of the grave. In the light of the Coleman lantern by the headstone, she can see he's sweating. She is too, and these jeans are definitely do-not-pass-go destined for the nearest washing machine. "That was a joke," Cas says, which she knew.
Once good old Lou's minus a few finger bones and Cas has helped pull Deanna back topside (yeah, she gets the symbolism) with soil catching gritty between their palms, he makes a sign in the air and mumbles something, maybe a re-consecration, maybe an apology. Then he blinks and the dirt's back in the grave, grass and all. Deanna's about to say something like 'damn, you couldn't have done the digging for us?' but when she looks over and opens her mouth, Cas is breathing hard and there's blood trickling out of his left nostril. So all she says is, "Hey," and pulls off the mostly-still-clean bandana she's had covering her hair and presses it to his nose. He shuts his eyes and sighs into it, a hot puff of air she can feel against her fingers through the cloth. She wraps an arm around his waist in case he needs to lean on her but won't say and she can feel his ribs through his shirt.
Cas is dead silent in the car, staring down at his hands, which have dirt under the nails and a cut that's only nearly healed. She'd been planning to suggest going out for a post-graverobbing beer but instead she takes them straight back to the Starlight Motel and digs the bottle of Jack out of the backseat floorboard. "Go shower," she tells Cas, shoving the bottle of non-crappy-motel-brand shower gel from her bag into his hands. "You'll feel better."
Cas has a few clothes besides his standard uniform, but other than the boots, he seems to sort of consider them costumes for jobs. Deanna doesn't think Jimmy's stuff is going to be visiting the heavenly laundry anytime soon, though, so she pulls out one of the pairs of thrift-store jeans and searches for a t-shirt that isn't one she bought him as a joke (there's one that says 'Jesus is My Homeboy' and one that says 'Riverdale Angels Basketball') before she got a grasp on what a slap in the face that actually was, and finally has to give up and find the biggest one of her own instead, a soft old one she's had forever and used to sleep in when she lived with Lisa, when she didn't sleep dressed to run out the door. It was her dad's, once upon a time. It used to come down below her knees.
She knocks on the bathroom door and Cas makes some kind of sound that doesn't seem like 'go away' so she sticks her head into the cloud of steam on the other side. "Just brought you some clean clothes," she says. Cas doesn't answer right away so she picks up the neatly folded pile off the counter, brushes away the grave dirt and sets down the clean stuff. "I'm gonna put a load of laundry in down the hall. Everything I own stinks." She thinks she might hear a 'thank you' once the door's shut behind her again, but she might not.
All she has that isn't in dire need of washing is an old hoodie and a pair of running shorts that got hastily stuffed in her bag instead of Sam's when they took off for Detroit months and months ago. Most of Sam's stuff, the stuff she doesn't need day-to-day, anyway, is at Bobby's sealed up in blue plastic bins, but these have stayed in the trunk of the Impala. They probably do need to be washed, but she won't, even though the hoodie doesn't smell like Sam anymore unless she sniffs hard at the back of the collar. It's maybe morbid and creepy, but she remembers Sam in it and the shorts are douchey and make her smile. She's gotten better at thinking about him without feeling like her insides are being sucked into a big stupid pit. Not great, but better. She can still only really talk about Sammy, the genius annoying kid who loved Star Wars and English class and his big sister and wasn't completely screwed up by all this yet.
The mildewy closet that passes itself off as the 'guest laundry' is too gross to be barefoot in and too sad to be swigging Jack straight from the bottle in, but Deanna does both anyway, squatted down with her back against the washer, listening to it knock and hum and trying to get her head around this Cas thing. She doesn't know what the stone-cold-crazy-bitch future version of herself did when the Cas of that world was losing his religion, because it didn't exactly come up in conversation, but she's got a pretty good guess that she told him to suck it up and deal.and tried to ignore all the broken things about him.
When she gets back to the room, Cas has put on the jeans but nothing else and is staring at himself in the mirror that's still dripping condensation, running his fingers over the more-beard-than-there-used-to-be. "I think you need a shave, man," she says. He doesn't turn around but his eyes are on her reflection for a moment before they drop down to look at neither of them. "Or you could rock the beard thing, I guess."
"I hate this," he says, and it echoes deep and rough off the tiles.
"I know."
"I made this choice knowing the likely outcome, but--"
"It still sucks."
She sees the corner of his mouth twitch. "Yes."
"Would they still take you back? Better to serve in heaven and all that crap?" Wait, that's backwards.
"Would you prefer I go? I know I'm not as useful as I once--"
"Shut up, Cas, of course not." She's not in so much denial that she can't admit to herself that she doesn't know what she'd do with herself if he did go. She'd manage, she always does, but she's not sure for how long. "But I don't want you down here hating life either, pining for the fjords and resenting my dumb ass for making it happen."
"I'm not a dead parrot." She'd be proud of him for getting the reference, but he says it so damn seriously. This is an ex-angel. It has ceased to be. Monty Python taken the wrong way can get really fucking existential. "I chose this. I made a shamed exit from the disorder I'd created. Angels aren't designed for free will and I couldn't rule them without-- I'm not equipped for that kind of power. Raphael's no more fit to lead them than I was, and someday it will come down on our heads."
"So if it does, we'll deal with it. That's what we do." She knows what he means. He's told her about Raphael wanting a plural-of-apocalypse rematch smackdown. One that's going to be her fault, again, because Cas (finally) came when she called. Somebody must still be fighting it up there, though, or it would have happened already. She's not sure why Cas thinks he wasn't fit to lead, and he won't say any more than that other than dark looks off to the side. She thinks he could have made a pretty badass head honcho upstairs, but she can't be sorry he's here. Their eyes meet in the mirror and all she can think is how tired Cas looks. His shoulder is still superhuman-hot when she touches it, like it could brand her palmprint on as a match for the one he left on her. She imagines wings between his shoulderblades, what it must feel like to lose them. "Come on," she says. "You need bad TV and whiskey."
They watch Chopped, which ironically has candy canes as one of the secret ingredients. Cooking shows bore the shit out of Deanna but Cas finds them fascinating, and she's okay with this one because of the idiotic reality drama and competition and nobody simpering about garden parties and fennel. She's pretty sure Rachael Ray is a demon and that Guy Fieri made a deal with one. Cas breathes out half a laugh down the neck of the whiskey bottle when she presents the theory and his hair makes a wet imprint on her sleeve when he falls asleep that's still damp when Deanna remembers the clothes in the dryer at three in the morning. She doesn't feel like folding them because it's three in the fucking morning, and the second bed is the best place to dump them. Cas gravitates toward her in his sleep when she lies back down next to him, drifts closer the same way he has with everything else since he came back. She stares at the water stains on the ceiling and feels a little guilty at the twinge of want that curls through her when Cas's hand settles against a bared patch of skin at her back. She wonders where they'd be now if she'd offered to fuck him the night they got kicked out of the brothel. It didn't even cross her mind at first because she was halfway pissed at him, but it did later, for a second, somewhere in the middle of suffocating from laughter and Cas all shocked with his tie askew. But it would've been weird, then. Maybe it'd be weird to him now. She doesn't really want to ask, because the thing about this, with him almost-snoring into her shoulder, it's kind of the least weird thing she's got going for her right now, where she doesn't feel like she's forgotten how to walk and talk and breathe, and Cas is kind of having to learn all that too in a way, so maybe he doesn't need more complications. One of the ceiling stains looks like Abe Lincoln and there are birds starting to make noise outside before she gets her eyes to stay shut.
The ritual has to be done not only on the new moon, but under it, which suits Deanna fine because she's had to sneak out of enough motel rooms in her time to avoid being charged extra for scorch marks. But there's a lot of time to kill before midnight, even with errands like taking suits to the cleaners and finding a butcher who even has any lamb's blood to be talked into selling, and a series of phone calls takes them far enough south that Deanna can't help but see Cicero on the map. She knows Cas sees her notice it but he doesn't say anything.
Deanna woke up this morning under covers she never got under, to the laundry folded and to Cas handing her a cup of coffee and looking like a disheveled grad student in his jeans and Jimmy's button-down. He's not awesome at stuff like combing his hair anyway, and even now it's still kind of weirdly lopsided from being slept on wet. He's been pretty quiet all day, but he's not staring into space and ordered both breakfast and lunch without her having to prod him. She knows better than to think that means he's going to be just fine from here on out, but it's a good sign for now.
"It would be more effective if the blood were fresh," Cas says as they leave the butcher's, who thinks they're making some kind of weird old-world soup.
"You wanna slaughter a cute baby lamb, be my guest, but that's all you. What the hell would you even do, break into a petting zoo?" She remembers an eight-year-old Sammy at some county fair wanting to free the ponies from the long spokes they were trussed up to for $1 kiddie rides. Looking back, Sam at eighteen saying he wanted to work for the ACLU shouldn't have been that big a surprise.
"Hopefully it won't come to that," Cas says, too serious, so she makes him eat a sundae at the mall food court and listen to her bitch her way through finding FBI-appropriate shoes that won't send her to an early (earlier) grave and manages to get him to sort-of-smile a couple of times. He looks like he wants to smite slightly creepy "Justin, Sales Associate, May I Help You?" in the Macy's shoe department and she kind of can't blame him.
"What do you think, honey?" she asks when Creepy Justin takes way too much time with too much touching checking the fit of the shoes. It doesn't make dude back off, but Cas's glare finally does and she walks out laughing her ass off.
Cas is Not Amused, though. "You should have requested a different salesperson."
"Look, I got no problem telling creepers where to stick it, but that guy was harmless. Skeevy, but harmless. He'll probably jerk off in his mom's basement thinking about my nasty-ass feet for the next month. Plus, I got a discount."
"You're worth more than that."
It never doesn't make her squirm when he just comes out with stuff like that, all grave and intense, so she just rolls her eyes as hard as she can and tries to make him pick out shirts. "I'm sick of feeling underdressed all the time, suit-boy," she says, which they both know is a lie to avoid mentioning the reality of no more self-cleaning clothes. He doesn't comment on that or the fact that she automatically starts going through a rack of plaid snap-front shirts looking for an extra-large. She gets to do her own smitey glare when some passing teenage mallrats decide to keep passing by repeatedly, giggling and making goo-goo eyes at Cas. Who is completely oblivious and asks if those 'children' are lost, and she laughs and sort of wants to hug him.
They stake out a spot to do the ritual, a nice clearing in a campground they have to pay to get into, but ten bucks beats the hell out of getting interrupted by some park ranger or cemetery caretaker or get-the-hell-outta-my-field dude with a shotgun. Deanna would never have thought of it, but as soon as Cas did it seemed kind of obvious. He says the bigger the fire the better, and nobody's going to think a big-ass fire is weird somewhere everyone else has one.
They don't want to hang around the woods for eight hours, so Deanna practices the incantation in a crappy bar over happy hour beers and nachos, and Cas looks for hunts. She was thinking they'd go to Bobby's once this is done, even though they don't need to get the amulet there now, maybe have a little downtime and let Cas catch up with himself, but he's talking about hauntings in Atlanta, so maybe he'd rather keep busy. Deanna does the driving math that would get them to Georgia by tomorrow night, but Cas says, "I meant Atlanta, Indiana."
Two towns over from Cicero. She only saw it ten times a week to drive Ben to and from the private school that he hated. "I don't think that's a great idea."
"I assumed you'd want to take the opportunity to visit Lisa." Cas is all shuttered with his eyes resolutely on the computer screen. From someone who usually takes eye contact to a new level of extreme, it's unnerving.
"That's the part that's not a great idea." Because want? Yeah, kind of. Should? Not so much. Deanna's been gone six months. She's called a few times but it's been perfunctory, awkward. They don't need her barging back in. 'You're not happy here,' Lisa told her, 'not really,' and Lisa wasn't either. If all she'd left was Sunday waffles and little league and chasing the apple pies and picket fences that Sam would never get to have, fucking bake sales and pre-scheduled 'date nights' and listening to a kid who was kind of becoming almost-hers mouth off about his math teacher and sing along to AC/DC, if that was all, maybe that would be one thing. But Ben caught shit at school when some kids figured out that 'my mom's girlfriend' didn't mean someone she went shopping and got pedicures with, and Lisa didn't know what to do that or with a few of the church ladies quitting her yoga classes, and Deanna wasn't any help other than 'if they don't like it, fuck 'em,' because she was holding on so hard to staying upright. And Cas doesn't know about all of that, no, but it's not fucking fair of him either to try to get her to deal with her shit when he won't deal with his own. "Let's just get the amulet done. If the ritual doesn't work, we'll need to get to Bobby's."
"We need to leave in an hour. You should stop drinking."
Deanna gives him the finger but orders a Coke instead of another round, suggests hustling the bikers in the corner at darts when she's finally managed to recite all of the ritual without Cas having to correct her (fucking Gaelic, what's the matter with Latin?) pronunciation. He doesn't like it, but he can't stop her either. It's easy, flash a little skin and let them go home with blue balls and a hundred bucks poorer. There's one of them she might have even taken up on his 'you wanna get outta here, darlin'?' a year ago, but she's got stuff to do and she hasn't actually wanted to go home with anyone since she left Cicero. Cas doesn't speak on the way to the campground and Deanna doesn't turn off the whiney college radio indie rock he settles the dial on.
Starting a fire when you've just soaked the ground in lamb's blood is kind of a bitch, but once they start chanting, the flames climb so high that she's afraid they might need to be more worried about the wrath of Smokey the Bear than about whatever ancient deity-types they're calling on. She looks at Cas across the flames and remembers him terrifying and otherworldly and crackling power in a broken barn, thundering wing shadows and right now he's not what he's been becoming, what he's been falling into being-- he's a force with lightning in the palms of his hands as he throws herbs and bones and the flames lick higher. Between the hot night and the fire, it's sweltering, but he looks like he could freeze the world with a thought. They say, "Bíodh amhlaidh," and it echoes loud through the clearing on sound waves that shouldn't be there and the clay dish full of blood and the amulet explodes when it touches the fire and Deanna's vision whites out.
She's not blind, but she's flat on her back in the dirt and feels like she's been punched in the face. The fire's back to its stuttering low ebb now and Cas is kneeling over her. "Did it work?" she asks.
"I believe so." He touches her cheek and she flinches at the wet sting of his thumb in what must be a cut. His hair is wild like he's been in a wind tunnel and his eyes are bright and sad in the firelight. She can feel a hot pressure underneath her skin, like something is trying. "You're bleeding," Cas says. "I'm sorry."
He's not sorry that she's bleeding, she knows; he's sorry that she's still bleeding, that his fingers do nothing but smear blood and grit over her face. "Must've been shrapnel from that clay pot thing blowing up. It's okay. I've had worse."
"I know," he says.
She lets Cas clean the cut out ('before I get mad cow disease or something,' she says, but the joke doesn't even raise half a smirk), all slow concentration like he's doing surgery. You'd think she'd just lost a limb. Technically, she has, but it's shaped like a giant moose of a brother who should be the one fixing her up, and there's not gauze enough in the world for it. Cas maybe knows that too, silently takes the traditional post-job beer she hands him from the cooler and they sit on the rocky ground with their shoulders just shy of touching and watch the fire die down and don't talk until Deanna forces herself to her feet and says, "Gotta see a man about a horse."
Cas makes a face. "I still don't understand why that's a euphemism for urination."
"Me neither. Google it or something." She picks up a shotgun and makes her way off into the trees-- there's porta-johns back the other way near the campground's cold spigot showers, but fuck that, she'd rather risk a little splatter on her boots than be locked in something coffin-shaped with other people's shit, plus Cas will be more likely to use them if he needs to if she's nowhere nearby because out of all the gross, weak things almost-humanity comes with, he seems to hate that the most. She kind of gets that, feeling like your body's betraying you, remembers a mortifying day in the sixth grade and having to walk around with a sweatshirt tied around her waist the rest of the day, burning her favorite jeans and shoplifting tampons, the time when she was nineteen and there was a werewolf at just the wrong time and the lecture she got from Dad for not thinking about it and nearly getting them both killed. It probably doesn't compare, but she kind of gets it.
Cas isn't there when she gets back and she spends a few minutes reminding herself not to panic before he emerges from the expected direction, looking defeated. She sees the furrow between his eyebrows relax when she doesn't say anything, just gets another couple of beers and pulls the scratchy old army surplus blanket out of the backseat floorboard. After a while of sitting on it looking up at the stars, Cas points at one and tells her about watching it come into being.
"It was beautiful and terrible," he says with a hitch in his throat. "They all were. But that one came about shortly after Balthazar disappeared, and I stood and watched gas and atoms collapse into a supernova for what would have been thousands of years in human perception."
"Who was Balthazar?" she asks. They're lying on their backs now, beers forgotten, and turning her face toward him makes her forehead touch a sweat-warm shoulder.
"A friend. A brother. Brother-in-arms might be the nearest thing in your understanding. Angels-- most angels-- don't compartmentalize love the way humans do, but there are different degrees of connection, affinity. We were close."
"I'm sorry," Deanna says, because she knows what it is to lose a brother, whatever else this Balthazar might have been. Her fingers find their way into his hair and stay there after they've both closed their eyes, and are still there when they wake wet with dew and squinting into the sunrise through the trees.
Next: Part 3
Part 1
Just outside South Bend, Indiana, Bobby calls with a ritual he thinks will kill the amulet. It's a pretty gnarly one, with lamb's blood and the bone of an adulterer. Deanna passes the phone off to Cas and watches him out of the corner of her eye as he takes notes. She notices for the first time that his hair's hanging down over his forehead where it used to stick up, and that maybe his perpetual five o'clock shadow is looking a little more like ten-thirty and it gives her a chilling flash of a Cas that will never exist if she has anything to say about it, one with glazed eyes and no hope. This Cas knows that, how he could have or still could end up (but damn well won't if Deanna has anything to say about it), and still chose this. Chose her, when you get right down to it. She's not sure whether it was to save her from herself or because they're as fucked-up as each other, no more than she's sure whether she would have had the balls to do the same.
The ritual has to be worked at the new moon, which is tomorrow night, and nobody wants them hanging onto the damn thing for another month, so they stop and spend the afternoon searching divorce records and murder trials for a dead cheater. "Just one damn time," Deanna says that night in the cemetery, stomping her foot down onto her shovel to unearth Lou Conley, 1937-1985, "I'd like to see a ritual that calls for candy canes and sunshine."
"Candy canes have no inherent metaphysical powers," Cas says from the other end of the grave. In the light of the Coleman lantern by the headstone, she can see he's sweating. She is too, and these jeans are definitely do-not-pass-go destined for the nearest washing machine. "That was a joke," Cas says, which she knew.
Once good old Lou's minus a few finger bones and Cas has helped pull Deanna back topside (yeah, she gets the symbolism) with soil catching gritty between their palms, he makes a sign in the air and mumbles something, maybe a re-consecration, maybe an apology. Then he blinks and the dirt's back in the grave, grass and all. Deanna's about to say something like 'damn, you couldn't have done the digging for us?' but when she looks over and opens her mouth, Cas is breathing hard and there's blood trickling out of his left nostril. So all she says is, "Hey," and pulls off the mostly-still-clean bandana she's had covering her hair and presses it to his nose. He shuts his eyes and sighs into it, a hot puff of air she can feel against her fingers through the cloth. She wraps an arm around his waist in case he needs to lean on her but won't say and she can feel his ribs through his shirt.
Cas is dead silent in the car, staring down at his hands, which have dirt under the nails and a cut that's only nearly healed. She'd been planning to suggest going out for a post-graverobbing beer but instead she takes them straight back to the Starlight Motel and digs the bottle of Jack out of the backseat floorboard. "Go shower," she tells Cas, shoving the bottle of non-crappy-motel-brand shower gel from her bag into his hands. "You'll feel better."
Cas has a few clothes besides his standard uniform, but other than the boots, he seems to sort of consider them costumes for jobs. Deanna doesn't think Jimmy's stuff is going to be visiting the heavenly laundry anytime soon, though, so she pulls out one of the pairs of thrift-store jeans and searches for a t-shirt that isn't one she bought him as a joke (there's one that says 'Jesus is My Homeboy' and one that says 'Riverdale Angels Basketball') before she got a grasp on what a slap in the face that actually was, and finally has to give up and find the biggest one of her own instead, a soft old one she's had forever and used to sleep in when she lived with Lisa, when she didn't sleep dressed to run out the door. It was her dad's, once upon a time. It used to come down below her knees.
She knocks on the bathroom door and Cas makes some kind of sound that doesn't seem like 'go away' so she sticks her head into the cloud of steam on the other side. "Just brought you some clean clothes," she says. Cas doesn't answer right away so she picks up the neatly folded pile off the counter, brushes away the grave dirt and sets down the clean stuff. "I'm gonna put a load of laundry in down the hall. Everything I own stinks." She thinks she might hear a 'thank you' once the door's shut behind her again, but she might not.
All she has that isn't in dire need of washing is an old hoodie and a pair of running shorts that got hastily stuffed in her bag instead of Sam's when they took off for Detroit months and months ago. Most of Sam's stuff, the stuff she doesn't need day-to-day, anyway, is at Bobby's sealed up in blue plastic bins, but these have stayed in the trunk of the Impala. They probably do need to be washed, but she won't, even though the hoodie doesn't smell like Sam anymore unless she sniffs hard at the back of the collar. It's maybe morbid and creepy, but she remembers Sam in it and the shorts are douchey and make her smile. She's gotten better at thinking about him without feeling like her insides are being sucked into a big stupid pit. Not great, but better. She can still only really talk about Sammy, the genius annoying kid who loved Star Wars and English class and his big sister and wasn't completely screwed up by all this yet.
The mildewy closet that passes itself off as the 'guest laundry' is too gross to be barefoot in and too sad to be swigging Jack straight from the bottle in, but Deanna does both anyway, squatted down with her back against the washer, listening to it knock and hum and trying to get her head around this Cas thing. She doesn't know what the stone-cold-crazy-bitch future version of herself did when the Cas of that world was losing his religion, because it didn't exactly come up in conversation, but she's got a pretty good guess that she told him to suck it up and deal.and tried to ignore all the broken things about him.
When she gets back to the room, Cas has put on the jeans but nothing else and is staring at himself in the mirror that's still dripping condensation, running his fingers over the more-beard-than-there-used-to-be. "I think you need a shave, man," she says. He doesn't turn around but his eyes are on her reflection for a moment before they drop down to look at neither of them. "Or you could rock the beard thing, I guess."
"I hate this," he says, and it echoes deep and rough off the tiles.
"I know."
"I made this choice knowing the likely outcome, but--"
"It still sucks."
She sees the corner of his mouth twitch. "Yes."
"Would they still take you back? Better to serve in heaven and all that crap?" Wait, that's backwards.
"Would you prefer I go? I know I'm not as useful as I once--"
"Shut up, Cas, of course not." She's not in so much denial that she can't admit to herself that she doesn't know what she'd do with herself if he did go. She'd manage, she always does, but she's not sure for how long. "But I don't want you down here hating life either, pining for the fjords and resenting my dumb ass for making it happen."
"I'm not a dead parrot." She'd be proud of him for getting the reference, but he says it so damn seriously. This is an ex-angel. It has ceased to be. Monty Python taken the wrong way can get really fucking existential. "I chose this. I made a shamed exit from the disorder I'd created. Angels aren't designed for free will and I couldn't rule them without-- I'm not equipped for that kind of power. Raphael's no more fit to lead them than I was, and someday it will come down on our heads."
"So if it does, we'll deal with it. That's what we do." She knows what he means. He's told her about Raphael wanting a plural-of-apocalypse rematch smackdown. One that's going to be her fault, again, because Cas (finally) came when she called. Somebody must still be fighting it up there, though, or it would have happened already. She's not sure why Cas thinks he wasn't fit to lead, and he won't say any more than that other than dark looks off to the side. She thinks he could have made a pretty badass head honcho upstairs, but she can't be sorry he's here. Their eyes meet in the mirror and all she can think is how tired Cas looks. His shoulder is still superhuman-hot when she touches it, like it could brand her palmprint on as a match for the one he left on her. She imagines wings between his shoulderblades, what it must feel like to lose them. "Come on," she says. "You need bad TV and whiskey."
They watch Chopped, which ironically has candy canes as one of the secret ingredients. Cooking shows bore the shit out of Deanna but Cas finds them fascinating, and she's okay with this one because of the idiotic reality drama and competition and nobody simpering about garden parties and fennel. She's pretty sure Rachael Ray is a demon and that Guy Fieri made a deal with one. Cas breathes out half a laugh down the neck of the whiskey bottle when she presents the theory and his hair makes a wet imprint on her sleeve when he falls asleep that's still damp when Deanna remembers the clothes in the dryer at three in the morning. She doesn't feel like folding them because it's three in the fucking morning, and the second bed is the best place to dump them. Cas gravitates toward her in his sleep when she lies back down next to him, drifts closer the same way he has with everything else since he came back. She stares at the water stains on the ceiling and feels a little guilty at the twinge of want that curls through her when Cas's hand settles against a bared patch of skin at her back. She wonders where they'd be now if she'd offered to fuck him the night they got kicked out of the brothel. It didn't even cross her mind at first because she was halfway pissed at him, but it did later, for a second, somewhere in the middle of suffocating from laughter and Cas all shocked with his tie askew. But it would've been weird, then. Maybe it'd be weird to him now. She doesn't really want to ask, because the thing about this, with him almost-snoring into her shoulder, it's kind of the least weird thing she's got going for her right now, where she doesn't feel like she's forgotten how to walk and talk and breathe, and Cas is kind of having to learn all that too in a way, so maybe he doesn't need more complications. One of the ceiling stains looks like Abe Lincoln and there are birds starting to make noise outside before she gets her eyes to stay shut.
*
The ritual has to be done not only on the new moon, but under it, which suits Deanna fine because she's had to sneak out of enough motel rooms in her time to avoid being charged extra for scorch marks. But there's a lot of time to kill before midnight, even with errands like taking suits to the cleaners and finding a butcher who even has any lamb's blood to be talked into selling, and a series of phone calls takes them far enough south that Deanna can't help but see Cicero on the map. She knows Cas sees her notice it but he doesn't say anything.
Deanna woke up this morning under covers she never got under, to the laundry folded and to Cas handing her a cup of coffee and looking like a disheveled grad student in his jeans and Jimmy's button-down. He's not awesome at stuff like combing his hair anyway, and even now it's still kind of weirdly lopsided from being slept on wet. He's been pretty quiet all day, but he's not staring into space and ordered both breakfast and lunch without her having to prod him. She knows better than to think that means he's going to be just fine from here on out, but it's a good sign for now.
"It would be more effective if the blood were fresh," Cas says as they leave the butcher's, who thinks they're making some kind of weird old-world soup.
"You wanna slaughter a cute baby lamb, be my guest, but that's all you. What the hell would you even do, break into a petting zoo?" She remembers an eight-year-old Sammy at some county fair wanting to free the ponies from the long spokes they were trussed up to for $1 kiddie rides. Looking back, Sam at eighteen saying he wanted to work for the ACLU shouldn't have been that big a surprise.
"Hopefully it won't come to that," Cas says, too serious, so she makes him eat a sundae at the mall food court and listen to her bitch her way through finding FBI-appropriate shoes that won't send her to an early (earlier) grave and manages to get him to sort-of-smile a couple of times. He looks like he wants to smite slightly creepy "Justin, Sales Associate, May I Help You?" in the Macy's shoe department and she kind of can't blame him.
"What do you think, honey?" she asks when Creepy Justin takes way too much time with too much touching checking the fit of the shoes. It doesn't make dude back off, but Cas's glare finally does and she walks out laughing her ass off.
Cas is Not Amused, though. "You should have requested a different salesperson."
"Look, I got no problem telling creepers where to stick it, but that guy was harmless. Skeevy, but harmless. He'll probably jerk off in his mom's basement thinking about my nasty-ass feet for the next month. Plus, I got a discount."
"You're worth more than that."
It never doesn't make her squirm when he just comes out with stuff like that, all grave and intense, so she just rolls her eyes as hard as she can and tries to make him pick out shirts. "I'm sick of feeling underdressed all the time, suit-boy," she says, which they both know is a lie to avoid mentioning the reality of no more self-cleaning clothes. He doesn't comment on that or the fact that she automatically starts going through a rack of plaid snap-front shirts looking for an extra-large. She gets to do her own smitey glare when some passing teenage mallrats decide to keep passing by repeatedly, giggling and making goo-goo eyes at Cas. Who is completely oblivious and asks if those 'children' are lost, and she laughs and sort of wants to hug him.
They stake out a spot to do the ritual, a nice clearing in a campground they have to pay to get into, but ten bucks beats the hell out of getting interrupted by some park ranger or cemetery caretaker or get-the-hell-outta-my-field dude with a shotgun. Deanna would never have thought of it, but as soon as Cas did it seemed kind of obvious. He says the bigger the fire the better, and nobody's going to think a big-ass fire is weird somewhere everyone else has one.
They don't want to hang around the woods for eight hours, so Deanna practices the incantation in a crappy bar over happy hour beers and nachos, and Cas looks for hunts. She was thinking they'd go to Bobby's once this is done, even though they don't need to get the amulet there now, maybe have a little downtime and let Cas catch up with himself, but he's talking about hauntings in Atlanta, so maybe he'd rather keep busy. Deanna does the driving math that would get them to Georgia by tomorrow night, but Cas says, "I meant Atlanta, Indiana."
Two towns over from Cicero. She only saw it ten times a week to drive Ben to and from the private school that he hated. "I don't think that's a great idea."
"I assumed you'd want to take the opportunity to visit Lisa." Cas is all shuttered with his eyes resolutely on the computer screen. From someone who usually takes eye contact to a new level of extreme, it's unnerving.
"That's the part that's not a great idea." Because want? Yeah, kind of. Should? Not so much. Deanna's been gone six months. She's called a few times but it's been perfunctory, awkward. They don't need her barging back in. 'You're not happy here,' Lisa told her, 'not really,' and Lisa wasn't either. If all she'd left was Sunday waffles and little league and chasing the apple pies and picket fences that Sam would never get to have, fucking bake sales and pre-scheduled 'date nights' and listening to a kid who was kind of becoming almost-hers mouth off about his math teacher and sing along to AC/DC, if that was all, maybe that would be one thing. But Ben caught shit at school when some kids figured out that 'my mom's girlfriend' didn't mean someone she went shopping and got pedicures with, and Lisa didn't know what to do that or with a few of the church ladies quitting her yoga classes, and Deanna wasn't any help other than 'if they don't like it, fuck 'em,' because she was holding on so hard to staying upright. And Cas doesn't know about all of that, no, but it's not fucking fair of him either to try to get her to deal with her shit when he won't deal with his own. "Let's just get the amulet done. If the ritual doesn't work, we'll need to get to Bobby's."
"We need to leave in an hour. You should stop drinking."
Deanna gives him the finger but orders a Coke instead of another round, suggests hustling the bikers in the corner at darts when she's finally managed to recite all of the ritual without Cas having to correct her (fucking Gaelic, what's the matter with Latin?) pronunciation. He doesn't like it, but he can't stop her either. It's easy, flash a little skin and let them go home with blue balls and a hundred bucks poorer. There's one of them she might have even taken up on his 'you wanna get outta here, darlin'?' a year ago, but she's got stuff to do and she hasn't actually wanted to go home with anyone since she left Cicero. Cas doesn't speak on the way to the campground and Deanna doesn't turn off the whiney college radio indie rock he settles the dial on.
Starting a fire when you've just soaked the ground in lamb's blood is kind of a bitch, but once they start chanting, the flames climb so high that she's afraid they might need to be more worried about the wrath of Smokey the Bear than about whatever ancient deity-types they're calling on. She looks at Cas across the flames and remembers him terrifying and otherworldly and crackling power in a broken barn, thundering wing shadows and right now he's not what he's been becoming, what he's been falling into being-- he's a force with lightning in the palms of his hands as he throws herbs and bones and the flames lick higher. Between the hot night and the fire, it's sweltering, but he looks like he could freeze the world with a thought. They say, "Bíodh amhlaidh," and it echoes loud through the clearing on sound waves that shouldn't be there and the clay dish full of blood and the amulet explodes when it touches the fire and Deanna's vision whites out.
She's not blind, but she's flat on her back in the dirt and feels like she's been punched in the face. The fire's back to its stuttering low ebb now and Cas is kneeling over her. "Did it work?" she asks.
"I believe so." He touches her cheek and she flinches at the wet sting of his thumb in what must be a cut. His hair is wild like he's been in a wind tunnel and his eyes are bright and sad in the firelight. She can feel a hot pressure underneath her skin, like something is trying. "You're bleeding," Cas says. "I'm sorry."
He's not sorry that she's bleeding, she knows; he's sorry that she's still bleeding, that his fingers do nothing but smear blood and grit over her face. "Must've been shrapnel from that clay pot thing blowing up. It's okay. I've had worse."
"I know," he says.
She lets Cas clean the cut out ('before I get mad cow disease or something,' she says, but the joke doesn't even raise half a smirk), all slow concentration like he's doing surgery. You'd think she'd just lost a limb. Technically, she has, but it's shaped like a giant moose of a brother who should be the one fixing her up, and there's not gauze enough in the world for it. Cas maybe knows that too, silently takes the traditional post-job beer she hands him from the cooler and they sit on the rocky ground with their shoulders just shy of touching and watch the fire die down and don't talk until Deanna forces herself to her feet and says, "Gotta see a man about a horse."
Cas makes a face. "I still don't understand why that's a euphemism for urination."
"Me neither. Google it or something." She picks up a shotgun and makes her way off into the trees-- there's porta-johns back the other way near the campground's cold spigot showers, but fuck that, she'd rather risk a little splatter on her boots than be locked in something coffin-shaped with other people's shit, plus Cas will be more likely to use them if he needs to if she's nowhere nearby because out of all the gross, weak things almost-humanity comes with, he seems to hate that the most. She kind of gets that, feeling like your body's betraying you, remembers a mortifying day in the sixth grade and having to walk around with a sweatshirt tied around her waist the rest of the day, burning her favorite jeans and shoplifting tampons, the time when she was nineteen and there was a werewolf at just the wrong time and the lecture she got from Dad for not thinking about it and nearly getting them both killed. It probably doesn't compare, but she kind of gets it.
Cas isn't there when she gets back and she spends a few minutes reminding herself not to panic before he emerges from the expected direction, looking defeated. She sees the furrow between his eyebrows relax when she doesn't say anything, just gets another couple of beers and pulls the scratchy old army surplus blanket out of the backseat floorboard. After a while of sitting on it looking up at the stars, Cas points at one and tells her about watching it come into being.
"It was beautiful and terrible," he says with a hitch in his throat. "They all were. But that one came about shortly after Balthazar disappeared, and I stood and watched gas and atoms collapse into a supernova for what would have been thousands of years in human perception."
"Who was Balthazar?" she asks. They're lying on their backs now, beers forgotten, and turning her face toward him makes her forehead touch a sweat-warm shoulder.
"A friend. A brother. Brother-in-arms might be the nearest thing in your understanding. Angels-- most angels-- don't compartmentalize love the way humans do, but there are different degrees of connection, affinity. We were close."
"I'm sorry," Deanna says, because she knows what it is to lose a brother, whatever else this Balthazar might have been. Her fingers find their way into his hair and stay there after they've both closed their eyes, and are still there when they wake wet with dew and squinting into the sunrise through the trees.
Next: Part 3
