Queen of Nothing [3/4]
Oct. 14th, 2012 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Part 1 Part 2
The Atlanta haunting is a textbook salt-and-burn, no surprises. Deanna's buoyed high on things going well for once, and it's contagious, with Cas loose and talkative over a pitcher of beer and not having to be persuaded to try the onion rings, which he eats with an experimental delicacy that's almost scientific and makes Deanna feel warm. She drinks so much that she has to stagger back to the motel with Cas's arm around her, as sure and warm and solid as it ever was when he was all angel all the time. In the morning, she vaguely recalls trying to make him sing along to her drunk-botched version of 'Paradise City' and sort of succeeding, but not collapsing in a heap with him on one of the beds, still on top of the covers. It's happened enough times now that it's not that weird, but the morning wood pressing into her hip is new. She doesn't get much time to actually think about it because as soon as she's awake enough that she can think at all, she realizes she needs to puke.
Cas stays comatose when she extricates herself and runs for the bathroom and he mercifully stays that way until she's finished and cleaned up and showered. He's either got enough of his ridiculously high alcohol tolerance left or is just one of those assholes who doesn't get hangovers. "You're gonna have to drive," she admits reluctantly. "Think I'm still drunk."
It's the first time Cas has driven the Impala with Deanna actually in it when she wasn't teaching him or actively bleeding to death, and she's quaky and nervous at first, but Cas handles the car gently, with respect, and Deanna finds herself calmed watching the steering wheel slide through his hands.
"Dude," she says at the diner when she realizes Cas has just gone and ordered for her.
"The waitress asked you three times and you only said 'urgh.'"
And fair enough, Cas did fine, got her a big greasy plate of eggs and sausage and toast, though she doesn't end up being able to stomach much of it, sticks mostly to the coffee and to swiping Cas's orange juice until she feels somewhat human again. The irony of wanting that while sitting across from Cas, who'd like to feel any other way at all, is not lost on her. She remembers him lost in the future dry-swallowing speed, downing whole liquor stores when they got the secondhand Dear John from God, and wonders if maybe easing it up on the booze might be a good idea, for the sake of keeping him in one piece. But then again, she's the one with the raging hangover and he's the one looking a little bit amused when the waitress says there aren't free refills on orange juice.
They overstay their welcome in the diner by a good while, because Deanna knows that once they walk out the door she has to decide. Lisa's fifteen minutes down this road, and then there are all the other roads. "Why the hell are you so gung-ho about it, anyway?" she asks when Cas prods her again, winces when she slams the door of the Impala a little too hard. She doesn't put the key in the ignition.
"Because I think you're avoiding it out of fear."
"Hey, kettle, you sure are black. Fear of what, another grand tour of life don't work out that way? I know you'd flap back off to heaven if you could, but that's you, not me. It wasn't like that. Damn, you'd think you wanted me to go back."
"I do if you'd be happy there."
"Are you even hearing yourself? Yeah, no shit, I'm a miserable fucker. You think playing house and fakin' it till I make it's going to fix me? Make me have gone to hell any less, make my brother any less stuck in a cage with Satan or make the people we lost putting him there any less dead? Bullshit and you and I and everyone else know it. Even as bad as I want that to be all I want, it's not, and they're a hell of a lot safer without me than with. You know that too or else you'd be having Sunday dinners with the Novaks." The Novaks, that isn't fair and it isn't true but it's not damn fair what Cas is trying to drag out of her either. She should feel a perverse satisfaction in watching it hit home and sting, but it pretty much just feels like kicking a guy when he's down.
"The situations aren't similar," Cas says, quiet and severe, his face gone impassive to erase the little gutpunching flash of hurt. "I simply look like someone they once loved."
"Like I'm who Ben and Lisa loved? Same damn thing. They love some chick that looks like me who fixes the sink and makes pancakes. I can fake it pretty good, but I can't fake it that hard for that long."
"You left abruptly with matters unresolved. It could be they're willing to accept you as you are, if you'll allow it."
Deanna shuts her eyes and rests her head on the steering wheel and inhales the leather-gun-oil-her-and-Sam scent (the Sam part is fading, but she knows it's there, and there's a little bit of Cas there now too) that still smells like home. "So, what, I need closure? I already know how it ends. I wasn't the only one faking it there."
"Dee," Cas says, and she doesn't call him on it. She feels the heat of his hand hovering over the back of her neck and wants to say 'don't,' but she doesn't, so it comes down and brushes her hair aside and his fingertips ghost unsure against her skin. "You can change how it ends, if anyone can. If it can end well, you deserve it to."
Deanna draws in a breath that shakes in her throat. There's a little curl of something under her skin, like she felt when Cas tried to heal her, a pale imitation of the crackle of power that could once mend bones and bend time and touch away nightmares. Someday soon, she thinks, it'll just be a touch, just human to human. "You ever heard of a hunter with a family? One that's still all there, I mean. I can't have that, 'cause there's always that chance of work following me home wanting blood." She sits up and it makes her neck press back against Cas's palm, and he doesn't move his hand away. "I don't want Ben to be able to assemble a twelve-gauge with his eyes shut and name off how to kill two dozen kinds of monsters better than he knows his multiplication tables, I don't want Lisa checking the damn devil's traps every night. I want them eating pancakes and apple pie and not looking over their shoulders every minute, and the way they get to have that is without me."
"Isn't it their choice to make?"
"No. Even if they thought they knew what they were signing up for, no. You never get it until someone's dead, and I don't want them to get it." A reflexive move to scratch at the back of her neck reminds her that Cas's hand is still there, and her fingers catch between his. He's getting a callus between his left thumb and forefinger from aiming shotguns. "I dragged enough people down with me."
"I wasn't dragged," Cas says, hearing what she isn't saying. "I made a choice."
"Yeah, and look how awesome you feel now."
"I'll live," Cas says, with bitter twist to half a smile, and squeezes her hand.
Come around 5, Lisa's text says. Yeah, so what if Deanna was too chickenshit to call. They've killed time with laundry and cleaning guns and loading salt rounds, looking for any jobs that might need doing between Cicero and Sioux Falls because whatever Cas might think, Deanna knows she's not staying, not coming back unless it's life or death. Closure's a crappy Dr. Phil word for it, but that's really all she's expecting from this. The whiskey was mysteriously missing when she went looking for it, and it's Sunday in Indiana so she can't get any more. She settles for a couple of beers with lunch and eyeing Cas suspiciously.
He tries to say he'll stay in the motel room and read or look for cases, maybe go to a movie. Cas likes movies for some reason, same as he likes TV, maybe something between scientific curiosity and escapism, but Deanna hasn't asked. "We can go to the movies later," Deanna tells him. "I don't think this is gonna take long."
Cas nods. "Call me when you're ready."
Deanna leans back into the car window after she's gotten out, the house a looming presence at her back. "Hey, stick around for like ten minutes, okay? If it goes really shitty I don't want to be standing around."
Cas nods again and turns on NPR. Deanna smiles and shakes her head and lets that carry her up the porch steps to ring the doorbell. She still has a key but it's hanging from the ring in the Impala's ignition. There's one house in the world she can just walk into anymore, and Bobby being Bobby, even that's not always a great idea if you like not getting shot.
The azaleas out front that she and Lisa planted together are blooming and Deanna remembers that trip to Home Depot like a shock, them laughing about how their cart had a bad wheel that made a fart noise and looking like any other two people in the garden center picking out shrubs, picking up Ben from baseball practice right after and how he bitched about having to sit between the plants in the backseat. How alien all the normal felt, like she was playing a part in another archangel-engineered show. She was surprised every morning when she walked out the door to find the damn things still alive, that they hadn't just up and died because she touched them. There was a brief running joke about whose bush was doing better, another one of those quippy domestic things that didn't feel like reality as much as drinking and nightmares did. Now they're flowering huge and pink and a humid breeze brings over a whiff of honeysuckle from the neighbors' yard.
Then there's Lisa in the doorway and how many times have they looked at each other like this over one threshold or another? "Hey," Deanna says. Lisa hugs her, smells like foofy aromatherapy bath stuff and her hair's still wet and it's like a thousand other moments that didn't have the Impala idling in the background. Lisa feels strangely small in her arms, not fragile because she never was and never will be, but small, because lately Cas is the only person she's been this close to, even though Deanna's hands remember just where they fit best.
They don't kiss. Lisa smiles tight and sad and says, "It's good to see you."
"You too."
There's beer in the kitchen, a brand new six-pack of Deanna's favorite that she knows Lisa bought special, and a thick silence that's wider than the space of countertop between them. "Ben's spending the night at Steven's," Lisa says before Deanna can ask.
"You didn't tell him I was coming." Deanna has to try pretty hard to keep a note of accusation out of her voice, even though she gets it.
Lisa shakes her head. "He's just starting to get back to normal. We're just starting to get back to normal. It's not fair to him to have you show back up if you're not staying."
Normal's a good way of putting it. Normal's a thing that can't happen if she's around, not really, for a lot of reasons. There was never really a question of whether or not she was going to stay, for either of them. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Deanna says.
"I know."
She makes sure Lisa has Bobby's number, a shotgun, salt rounds, shows her how to bless holy water over the rain barrel out back. There's still a jar of it under what used to be Deanna's side of the bed. All the things she didn't want Lisa to have to think about, but she can't leave without doing it, either.
"You left the car running?" Lisa asks, looking out to the street.
"Yeah, I uh..." she scratches the back of her neck over the sweat-damp strands of hair coming loose from a hasty ponytail. "I asked Cas to wait a few minutes, in case you kicked me out right away." It's been more than ten now. Cas is either pulling his infinite patience routine or else has dozed off to All Things Considered.
"I wouldn't have. I never will, if you ever need to come back." There's no chill on the breeze but Lisa crosses her arms, rubs at them.
"That's--" Deanna swallows against her throat tightening. "Thanks." She knows she won't, but it means something that she could.
"If you're staying for dinner, it's pretty rude to leave him out there." Lisa's got on that crafty little half-smile she uses when a suggestion is really a demand. It's not quite all there the way Deanna remembers, but it's close.
"I wasn't, uh."
"Come on, you have to eat somewhere, right? You don't get to show up for half an hour and walk right back out. He does eat, doesn't he?"
"He's not a pet." Deanna says it a little harsher than she really means to, but it rubbed her the wrong way a little.
"Easy, tiger. Just a question. I don't know how the angel thing works."
"Yeah, he does. But look, do me a favor and don't mention the angel thing?"
"Okay," Lisa says on a slow, expectant note, but Deanna just goes out to the car, where Cas blinks out of a doze.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, we're invited to dinner."
Cas sucks at dinner small talk. Which Deanna sort of gets, because it's not like he has anything small to talk about and now that she thinks about it, he's pretty much never talked to any regular people outside of jobs. She's just gotten used to the random history lessons and bad almost-jokes, but Lisa hasn't. Lisa's not even sure Cas knows how to peel a potato and asks Deanna about it under her breath behind the fridge door when he asks if he can do anything to help.
"I dunno," Deanna says, not whispering, with a sense of vague insult she can't really put a finger on. "Hey, Cas, how are you at peeling potatoes?" She tosses one in his direction and he catches it, turns it over in his hand like he's trying to read its mind.
"There's no need to peel them," he says. She half expects some history of potatoes to go along with it but that's all he says.
"Well, yeah, you can eat the skins, but mashed potatoes are gross like that."
"I assume I can manage it," he says, more to Lisa than to Deanna, and he manages it fine.
The kitchen is quieter than she ever remembers it being. Ben should be here trying to steal bites of the cheese Lisa's grating and schizophrenically surfing through the radio or his iPod. Someone should laugh. The picture of the three of them isn't on the bulletin board by the back door anymore. She wonders if it's in a box somewhere, or just in the dump. For all of the thousands of things she can talk to Cas about and all of the thousands of things she can talk to Lisa about, Lisa and Cas don't seem to be able to talk to each other about anything. Lisa seems to be at a loss for the usual getting-to-know-you stuff, the where-are-you-from and what-do-you-do, since she knows but Deanna's told her not to mention it. The only thing they really have in common is Deanna, so the longest conversation that takes place just between the two of them involves Deanna rolling her eyes and grumbling protests while they discuss her Dr. Sexy habit, and that lasts all of two minutes. Deanna talking to one of them ends up with the other left out, because her 'polite' conversation topics are basically music and movies and cars, and neither of them like the same things as the other or care about engine specs or that Angus Young doesn't practice his stage antics. It goes quietest of all when Deanna asks how Ben's doing in school, and Lisa doesn't really answer.
Lisa's bought a pie from Deanna's favorite bakery. Apple. They eat it with ice cream and more silence on the back porch, on chairs that weren't here when Deanna last was.
"Happy?" Deanna asks Cas when they've thanked Lisa for dinner and gotten into the Impala with a banker's box that Lisa brought from upstairs of stuff that Deanna forgot and there's a lingering dampness on her cheek from a friendly brush of Lisa's lips, a warmth on her ear from a whispered 'take care of yourself.'
Cas frowns at her like the potato he was looking at earlier.
"Screw it," she says. "We still in time to get to that movie of yours?" She cranks up the air and the tape deck so they can't talk.
The movie Cas was thinking about seeing turns out to be an old silent film Deanna's never heard of, at a little arty theater all the way in Lafayette. It's called Intolerance and watches like an after-school special. People keep shushing them because Cas can't stop picking apart the historical inaccuracies, which is sort of stupid because it's not like there's anything to hear except music that sounds like moustache-twirling villains tying girls to train tracks. And hey, who knew the Tower of Babel was made of shit. The popcorn sucks but the perk of arty theaters, or this one anyway, is a full bar next to the concession stand. Five-dollar beers aren't really her style, but they don't suck to drink, and Cas sporting a foamstache and getting crankier by the minute about everything the movie's getting wrong makes up for the movie itself.
She hasn't been to a lot of movies in actual theaters-- a few on high school dates that she didn't exactly watch, and she made sure Sammy got to go to all three of the Star Wars re-releases (plus Episode One, which he bitched about for a solid month after). She and Lisa never went because they could never agree on anything, but they took Ben to one of the Harry Potters, which did not make Deanna hate witches any less, though she sort of felt for the whole destiny thing. And the first job that was just her and Sam happened in a place like this. They had to pull the fire alarm to get everybody out so they could burn whatever remains were lingering on the dress of a washed-up 40s starlet in a lobby display case.
Deanna pictures everyone in this audience running for the exits like those people did. It's not a full house and the emergency exits open straight up onto the back parking lot. They could all get out in thirty seconds, tops. She scratches at her leg where the knife strapped into her boot is getting itchy and sweaty against her skin. She saw Cas's eyes fall on each exit sign when they sat down, before the lights dimmed. She can't remember if that's something she told him to do or if he just knows. The soldiers on the movie screen make her think it didn't have anything to do with her.
She ends up sunk down low in her seat with her feet up on the empty one in front of her, though Cas is still sitting straight up like he's got a stick up his ass.
"That would be uncomfortable," he says, one corner of his mouth tugging upward, and she accidentally laughs too loud during a serious part. She jogs her knee against Cas's and he relaxes his back, but it's so artificial it's almost worse and she laughs more.
The first thing Deanna does when they get to Bobby's is come down with a cold. She's been feeling that little itch somewhere between her throat and the insides of her ears that makes her want to jam a knife in there to get at it (she settles for jabbing q-tips in way deeper than you're supposed to) for a couple of days now, but other than popping a couple of dayquil and ordering her own OJ instead of just stealing Cas's, she's been ignoring it.
She tries to blame her scratchy throat on the dust that pervades every corner of Bobby's house, clouds up when you open books, but by the end of the first afternoon there she's got a choice between blowing her nose till her brain comes out with it or swallowing throatfuls of snot, because apparently her brain tipped off her immune system that there was going to be some down time.
Being sick makes her pissy, always has. Used to be she could order Sam around, act pitiful and make him bring her soup and magazines, and he'd do the same to her when he inevitably caught it next (and inevitably one of them would say at some point, 'dammit, you run after ghosts sprained and bleeding but you're acting like some little cold's going to kill you'), but Bobby's not too inclined to take any crap from her and his one concession to doing a little nursemaiding is to grumble through cabinets and find her her own bottle of whiskey so she won't get her snot-germs on any of his.
And as for Cas, well, you'd think she had the fucking plague. He's sat by and watched her with worse, healed her from worse-- hell, done worse to her himself ('cause angels? not so much with the no-hitting-girls thing, especially when they think you're about to give the okay to be a rental tux for the apocalpyse prom) and not acted like whatever was physically wrong was any big deal. He's hovering around being stiff and quiet and keeping a safer-than-usual distance, and occasionally staring at her as though she might either explode or spontaneously be fine again, and it's damn distracting. She's just trying to lie there and be miserable and watch a Dr. Sexy rerun on Bobby's stolen cable, and he's just sitting there being shifty and doing a really shitty job of trying to look like he's actually paying attention to whatever he's doing on the laptop.
"Seriously, Cas. I'm not going to drop dead. If you're not gonna entertain me or make me soup or whatever, then go find Bobby and... I dunno, weld something. Check the panic room sigils. Get drunk and run naked through the scrapyard, I don't care, but right there with your nonverbal staring deal, you're driving me nuts."
The corners of Cas's mouth twitch down for a moment. "I'm sorry," he says in that grave too-sorry way that makes her feel (more) like crap. "Would you like me to make you soup?"
It's really a little hot for soup but damned if she's mentioning that now. Cas likes to be useful and maybe he's acting like a freak because he can't just wave a hand and cure the common cold anymore. She's not even sure he knows how to make soup, but it's not like it's hard and he did fine with Lisa's potatoes, so she tells him where the cans and can opener and the pots are and he disappears for twenty minutes and she gets to watch Dr. Sexy and wallow in peace.
Cas comes back with a bowl and spoon set on top of a plate. It's tomato rice and it's not exactly illness-related that Deanna has to swallow against her throat going tight because the memories of her mom and soup and Beatles lullabies are fresher in her mind than they used to be. Cas was miles away and passed out for that conversation, but either he somehow knew or that was just what was in the pantry. She wouldn't put it past Bobby to keep a couple of cans of it hanging around because Bobby does know. Deanna made it for Sam sometimes when he was little, but she never sang. "Thanks," she says, thick and sore.
He's quiet while she eats, still tense. She figures out why when he says, "I think my throat hurts."
Shit. It's maybe like that thing where somebody talks about fleas and you start itching, but maybe it's not. "You think it hurts, or it hurts?"
"It's a little hard to tell how things are supposed to feel," he snaps.
"Okay," she says, and gets interrupted by a sneezing fit, starts over not so defensive. "Okay, there's some orange juice in the fridge. Won't hurt to drink some." She breaks a couple of dayquil off the blister pack. "And take those. I dunno if they'll work on you but it's worth a shot." Because what the hell's the dosage for an almost-ex-angel whose entire-liquor-store hangover took an entire bottle of aspirin?
And suddenly she remembers all the shots she got as a kid, all the ones she told Sammy not to be a pussy about, all the suckers and cartoon band-aids and nurses in cheerful teddy-bear scrubs, and later Dad giving tetanus shots he got from fuck-knows-where. All the shots Cas has never had against all the stuff he might be able to catch now. Jimmy must have, but who the hell knows how well any of it's stuck. She's got her boots halfway on by the time Cas comes back out of the kitchen. "Cas?" she says at his bewildered head-tilt. "Just how exactly-like-Jimmy did your body come back after Lucifer blew you up?"
The waiting room at the free clinic is a special kind of hell, crying babies and people who sound sicker than Deanna, one very obvious hooker, some old folks who look like they're at death's door, and she thinks they might both catch something else just being here but now that she's realized this needs to happen, it seems too urgent to take the time to commit insurance fraud, like Cas is going to get the fucking mumps or something if he's not vaccinated six ways to Sunday in the next hour. Cas looks miserable and winces every time there's a cry or a cough and they just sit there not talking on hard chairs until their number is called.
The nurse is bored and young and doesn't give a damn why a grown man suddenly needs every shot in the book, even though Deanna was totally prepared with a story about Cas just having converted his way out of one of those religious groups who don't believe in medicine. The nurse's scrubs are plain hospital blue and the band-aids don't have any cartoons on them. They give him a little bag full of STD pamphlets and condoms, standard issue, which Deanna laughs at and Cas doesn't.
"You okay?" she asks in the parking lot.
He glares at her, which fair enough because it's kind of an exercise in indignity even when you're used to it, and spends the ride back to Bobby's staring out the window. He disappears among the labyrinth of cars as soon as they stop moving and she lets him go. She takes the hottest shower she can in the crappy-pressured hard water and for ten whole seconds she can breathe like a normal person, but then it all goes back to shitty when the steam clears.
She's hitting her special medicinal whiskey bottle and channel-surfing when Bobby comes in, eyes the pile of used tissues next to her and her wet stringy hair and says, "If you ain't the most pitiful thing I ever saw," not uncaringly.
"Shove it," she says, though it comes out more like 'shub id' because her nose has done a snot refill.
"Where'd angel-boy get off to?"
"I dunno. Went for a walk. Don't call him that where he can hear you."
"Gotta make a house call up by Watertown since your sorry ass'd probably just sneeze at the ghost. Think you can handle the phones?"
"Done it before. I guess they'll think I'm real dedicated, coming into work sick and all." She kind of actually hates it, because everyone who calls is either expecting Bobby or a man. Both hunters and local law enforcement often share the trait of generally being dicks and not thinking someone without a dick might know what the fuck she's talking about, and that actually she might should get back to being chained to the stove. But she can be a dick right back if she needs to. "You headed out now?"
"Yep. Couple days tops. Meeting up with Rufus-- sounds like a sonofabitch to kill but pretty standard. Try to keep the house standing."
"Do my best," she says with a grin that kind of hurts because her whole fucking face hurts. "Hey, Bobby? Be careful, okay?"
"When ain't I?"
"Usually."
"Idjit." He gives her a rough squeeze to the shoulder. "Take care of yourself, girl. World ain't gonna end if you get some sleep."
She does fall asleep, wakes up feeling raspy and feverish and a little drunk to the sound of the CDC phone ringing in the kitchen. She does her best to sound frigid-bitch and berates a medical examiner somewhere in the ass end of Georgia for calling her 'personal cell' at this time of night (it's dark and the kitchen clock says 3:37) and of course she sent Garth, whoever the hell Garth is.
Thing is, it's ass o'clock at night and no amount of checking upstairs or shouting to the basement or shoving her way into the panic room gets an answer from Cas. She's dizzy and maybe feverish and whether her heart's pounding like crazy because of worry or a meth-lab's-worth of decongestants goes unexamined as she finds shoes and a flashlight and staggers out into the salvage yard. It's dark and desert-chill foggy and all she can think about is the one set of needles Cas didn't get poked into his skin today, how whatever he technically is, he's all by himself in his body and if he can get the sniffles and need flu shots, then he probably doesn't have enough angel left now to keep out what the fuck ever feels like black-smoking its way in. She hadn't been too worried about it before, since Cas seemed to still have a little something, but something about today and the time of night and all the shit whirling around in her head has her closer to panic than she wants to be. She doubles back to dig a sharpie out of the chaos of the kitchen junk drawer (they're kind of all junk drawers, but some of them are heavier on the junk than the silverware) because he's not spending another minute without that symbol on him once she finds him, and a rosary and salt and holy water just in case.
Cas doesn't answer when she calls out-- just her voice echoing off metal and dirt and her heartbeat in her ears, and the flashlight beam muddles useless in the fog. She finds him, finally, by chance, sitting silent and motionless on what's left of the hood of a rusted-out Ford pickup.
"Cas?"
He looks at her like he doesn't see a half-damp rat's nest of hair and a nose gone red and raw all the way down to her upper lip. She heaves herself up on the hood next to him, metal and an old dead suspension creaking under her weight. "I was shouting my head off, man. Why didn't you answer?"
"I wasn't listening," Cas says, eyes focused far out into the fog. There's an open cut on his palm, probably from some car, and way to put the brand-new tetanus shot straight to work. No need to make a big scene of it, so she slips her hand against his. Nothing happens when her silver ring touches the cut, except that his fingers close around her hand and keep it there. "I prayed and no one answered."
"That's kinda par for the course." Except for when she'd pray to Cas, but she's not going to mention that. "Someone you wanted to see?" She wouldn't blame him for wanting back into the heaven club after today.
"Not in particular. I asked for guidance." He's gripping her hand so hard it hurts.
"They're not big up there on handing that out."
"No."
There are no stars to be seen through the fog but they look up at them anyway, silent with sweat prickling between their hands. Cas was always fever-hot, grace-hot, but now she wonders if it's just a fever. "Hey, Cas?" Deanna says after a long stretch of saying nothing, and he still doesn't say anything but his eyes shift off the sky to hers. "Don't run off and not answer, okay? You need your me-time or whatever, that's cool, and I know you could probably take anything that came after you, but--"
"I'm sorry to have worried you," he says, so she doesn't have to.
She remembers the sharpie in her pocket and Cas sits still for her to stretch the collar of his shirt down and draw the anti-possession sigil over his heart. He doesn't have scars like she does, even though she doesn't have as many as she used to, just smooth pale skin with a light dusting of dark hairs that she knows are thicker further down the center of his chest. It would be easier to concentrate without having to sniff against her nose dripping every three seconds, but she does a good enough job. "Just for now," she says, and has to clear her throat. "Bobby's got some amulets somewhere but a tattoo's the best idea."
Cas nods, solemn, and they stay where they are until the sun starts to come up and burn off the fog.
Cas sits stoically still for the tattoo artist, a woman named Elaine with long silver hair, a two-packs-a-day voice, and a faded orange phoenix crinkling like parchment in the tanned skin of one arm. Elaine's not big on small talk, which is fine with Deanna in general, but it's dead quiet except for the buzz of the machine and she feels pointless and twitchy, half woozy on too little sleep and too much cough syrup and leafing through the same weathered magazine because it's not like Cas needs his hand held.
In 2014, she saw a less artistic version of what's now taking shape on Cas's chest, when he changed his shirt before setting off on the suicide mission. She asked when he got it and there was a grim twist to his mouth when he said, 'You did it for me.' It got grimmer and joined a hollow laugh when she asked what she did it with, a box cutter and an inkpen? She tried to give herself one when she was fifteen, a skull and crossbones or something stupid like that, but it healed out to a vague blob on her ankle and eventually disappeared completely.
Cas breathes out a loud sigh when Elaine wipes off the ink and blood with an antiseptic-soaked towel, and Deanna sees that a fine sheen of sweat has broken out on his forehead. "See what you think," Elaine says, and points to a mirror.
"Damn, Cas, don't poke it," Deanna says. Cas drops his hand from where he was raising it to do just that, but his reflection shoots her a glare as Elaine tapes Saran wrap on him.
"Didn't hurt too bad?" she asks once they're on the way back to Bobby's.
"No," Cas says. There's a high flush on his cheeks and the antiseptic smell is mingling with the Impala's leather. Deanna spends a wait at a red light watching his right hand squeeze into a fist on his knee, then unclench and tap fingertips against denim. Cas used to be so frustratingly serenely still so much of the time, so controlled even when the sky was falling. Well, except when he wasn't. That's the thing, though-- he's twitchy like this now more often than he's not.
She talks him into lunch by way of a peace offering, which is enough like giving a treat to a dog who's had to go to the vet to make her lip curl up over her teeth if she thinks about it too long. Cas is more interested in his milkshake than his burger, and Deanna ends up eating the entire order of onion rings they're supposed to be splitting, even though she still can't taste much of anything.
There's a little kid at the table across from them, coloring outside the lines on the paper placemat while his mother ignores him in favor of her phone and spoons chili blindly into her mouth. She's around Deanna's age, probably a little younger, with highlights in her hair and a manicure on her nails. There was a time when Deanna would have computed face value to 'dumb bitch.' Sam once said it was internalized misogyny-- just the one time, since she threatened to punch him in the balls.
Cas has a newspaper in front of him, but the only weird thing going on in Sioux Falls is that the paper still runs Marmaduke. "I don't understand why a dog would need a flashlight," he says, and it's so much of a throwback to the confounded-by-humans 'this is a den of iniquity' angel he's been growing out of that she sort of wants to kiss him.
She doesn't, but she does laugh until she's doubled over with the coughing fit it's caused.
Next: Part 4
Part 1 Part 2
The Atlanta haunting is a textbook salt-and-burn, no surprises. Deanna's buoyed high on things going well for once, and it's contagious, with Cas loose and talkative over a pitcher of beer and not having to be persuaded to try the onion rings, which he eats with an experimental delicacy that's almost scientific and makes Deanna feel warm. She drinks so much that she has to stagger back to the motel with Cas's arm around her, as sure and warm and solid as it ever was when he was all angel all the time. In the morning, she vaguely recalls trying to make him sing along to her drunk-botched version of 'Paradise City' and sort of succeeding, but not collapsing in a heap with him on one of the beds, still on top of the covers. It's happened enough times now that it's not that weird, but the morning wood pressing into her hip is new. She doesn't get much time to actually think about it because as soon as she's awake enough that she can think at all, she realizes she needs to puke.
Cas stays comatose when she extricates herself and runs for the bathroom and he mercifully stays that way until she's finished and cleaned up and showered. He's either got enough of his ridiculously high alcohol tolerance left or is just one of those assholes who doesn't get hangovers. "You're gonna have to drive," she admits reluctantly. "Think I'm still drunk."
It's the first time Cas has driven the Impala with Deanna actually in it when she wasn't teaching him or actively bleeding to death, and she's quaky and nervous at first, but Cas handles the car gently, with respect, and Deanna finds herself calmed watching the steering wheel slide through his hands.
"Dude," she says at the diner when she realizes Cas has just gone and ordered for her.
"The waitress asked you three times and you only said 'urgh.'"
And fair enough, Cas did fine, got her a big greasy plate of eggs and sausage and toast, though she doesn't end up being able to stomach much of it, sticks mostly to the coffee and to swiping Cas's orange juice until she feels somewhat human again. The irony of wanting that while sitting across from Cas, who'd like to feel any other way at all, is not lost on her. She remembers him lost in the future dry-swallowing speed, downing whole liquor stores when they got the secondhand Dear John from God, and wonders if maybe easing it up on the booze might be a good idea, for the sake of keeping him in one piece. But then again, she's the one with the raging hangover and he's the one looking a little bit amused when the waitress says there aren't free refills on orange juice.
They overstay their welcome in the diner by a good while, because Deanna knows that once they walk out the door she has to decide. Lisa's fifteen minutes down this road, and then there are all the other roads. "Why the hell are you so gung-ho about it, anyway?" she asks when Cas prods her again, winces when she slams the door of the Impala a little too hard. She doesn't put the key in the ignition.
"Because I think you're avoiding it out of fear."
"Hey, kettle, you sure are black. Fear of what, another grand tour of life don't work out that way? I know you'd flap back off to heaven if you could, but that's you, not me. It wasn't like that. Damn, you'd think you wanted me to go back."
"I do if you'd be happy there."
"Are you even hearing yourself? Yeah, no shit, I'm a miserable fucker. You think playing house and fakin' it till I make it's going to fix me? Make me have gone to hell any less, make my brother any less stuck in a cage with Satan or make the people we lost putting him there any less dead? Bullshit and you and I and everyone else know it. Even as bad as I want that to be all I want, it's not, and they're a hell of a lot safer without me than with. You know that too or else you'd be having Sunday dinners with the Novaks." The Novaks, that isn't fair and it isn't true but it's not damn fair what Cas is trying to drag out of her either. She should feel a perverse satisfaction in watching it hit home and sting, but it pretty much just feels like kicking a guy when he's down.
"The situations aren't similar," Cas says, quiet and severe, his face gone impassive to erase the little gutpunching flash of hurt. "I simply look like someone they once loved."
"Like I'm who Ben and Lisa loved? Same damn thing. They love some chick that looks like me who fixes the sink and makes pancakes. I can fake it pretty good, but I can't fake it that hard for that long."
"You left abruptly with matters unresolved. It could be they're willing to accept you as you are, if you'll allow it."
Deanna shuts her eyes and rests her head on the steering wheel and inhales the leather-gun-oil-her-and-Sam scent (the Sam part is fading, but she knows it's there, and there's a little bit of Cas there now too) that still smells like home. "So, what, I need closure? I already know how it ends. I wasn't the only one faking it there."
"Dee," Cas says, and she doesn't call him on it. She feels the heat of his hand hovering over the back of her neck and wants to say 'don't,' but she doesn't, so it comes down and brushes her hair aside and his fingertips ghost unsure against her skin. "You can change how it ends, if anyone can. If it can end well, you deserve it to."
Deanna draws in a breath that shakes in her throat. There's a little curl of something under her skin, like she felt when Cas tried to heal her, a pale imitation of the crackle of power that could once mend bones and bend time and touch away nightmares. Someday soon, she thinks, it'll just be a touch, just human to human. "You ever heard of a hunter with a family? One that's still all there, I mean. I can't have that, 'cause there's always that chance of work following me home wanting blood." She sits up and it makes her neck press back against Cas's palm, and he doesn't move his hand away. "I don't want Ben to be able to assemble a twelve-gauge with his eyes shut and name off how to kill two dozen kinds of monsters better than he knows his multiplication tables, I don't want Lisa checking the damn devil's traps every night. I want them eating pancakes and apple pie and not looking over their shoulders every minute, and the way they get to have that is without me."
"Isn't it their choice to make?"
"No. Even if they thought they knew what they were signing up for, no. You never get it until someone's dead, and I don't want them to get it." A reflexive move to scratch at the back of her neck reminds her that Cas's hand is still there, and her fingers catch between his. He's getting a callus between his left thumb and forefinger from aiming shotguns. "I dragged enough people down with me."
"I wasn't dragged," Cas says, hearing what she isn't saying. "I made a choice."
"Yeah, and look how awesome you feel now."
"I'll live," Cas says, with bitter twist to half a smile, and squeezes her hand.
*
Come around 5, Lisa's text says. Yeah, so what if Deanna was too chickenshit to call. They've killed time with laundry and cleaning guns and loading salt rounds, looking for any jobs that might need doing between Cicero and Sioux Falls because whatever Cas might think, Deanna knows she's not staying, not coming back unless it's life or death. Closure's a crappy Dr. Phil word for it, but that's really all she's expecting from this. The whiskey was mysteriously missing when she went looking for it, and it's Sunday in Indiana so she can't get any more. She settles for a couple of beers with lunch and eyeing Cas suspiciously.
He tries to say he'll stay in the motel room and read or look for cases, maybe go to a movie. Cas likes movies for some reason, same as he likes TV, maybe something between scientific curiosity and escapism, but Deanna hasn't asked. "We can go to the movies later," Deanna tells him. "I don't think this is gonna take long."
Cas nods. "Call me when you're ready."
Deanna leans back into the car window after she's gotten out, the house a looming presence at her back. "Hey, stick around for like ten minutes, okay? If it goes really shitty I don't want to be standing around."
Cas nods again and turns on NPR. Deanna smiles and shakes her head and lets that carry her up the porch steps to ring the doorbell. She still has a key but it's hanging from the ring in the Impala's ignition. There's one house in the world she can just walk into anymore, and Bobby being Bobby, even that's not always a great idea if you like not getting shot.
The azaleas out front that she and Lisa planted together are blooming and Deanna remembers that trip to Home Depot like a shock, them laughing about how their cart had a bad wheel that made a fart noise and looking like any other two people in the garden center picking out shrubs, picking up Ben from baseball practice right after and how he bitched about having to sit between the plants in the backseat. How alien all the normal felt, like she was playing a part in another archangel-engineered show. She was surprised every morning when she walked out the door to find the damn things still alive, that they hadn't just up and died because she touched them. There was a brief running joke about whose bush was doing better, another one of those quippy domestic things that didn't feel like reality as much as drinking and nightmares did. Now they're flowering huge and pink and a humid breeze brings over a whiff of honeysuckle from the neighbors' yard.
Then there's Lisa in the doorway and how many times have they looked at each other like this over one threshold or another? "Hey," Deanna says. Lisa hugs her, smells like foofy aromatherapy bath stuff and her hair's still wet and it's like a thousand other moments that didn't have the Impala idling in the background. Lisa feels strangely small in her arms, not fragile because she never was and never will be, but small, because lately Cas is the only person she's been this close to, even though Deanna's hands remember just where they fit best.
They don't kiss. Lisa smiles tight and sad and says, "It's good to see you."
"You too."
There's beer in the kitchen, a brand new six-pack of Deanna's favorite that she knows Lisa bought special, and a thick silence that's wider than the space of countertop between them. "Ben's spending the night at Steven's," Lisa says before Deanna can ask.
"You didn't tell him I was coming." Deanna has to try pretty hard to keep a note of accusation out of her voice, even though she gets it.
Lisa shakes her head. "He's just starting to get back to normal. We're just starting to get back to normal. It's not fair to him to have you show back up if you're not staying."
Normal's a good way of putting it. Normal's a thing that can't happen if she's around, not really, for a lot of reasons. There was never really a question of whether or not she was going to stay, for either of them. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Deanna says.
"I know."
She makes sure Lisa has Bobby's number, a shotgun, salt rounds, shows her how to bless holy water over the rain barrel out back. There's still a jar of it under what used to be Deanna's side of the bed. All the things she didn't want Lisa to have to think about, but she can't leave without doing it, either.
"You left the car running?" Lisa asks, looking out to the street.
"Yeah, I uh..." she scratches the back of her neck over the sweat-damp strands of hair coming loose from a hasty ponytail. "I asked Cas to wait a few minutes, in case you kicked me out right away." It's been more than ten now. Cas is either pulling his infinite patience routine or else has dozed off to All Things Considered.
"I wouldn't have. I never will, if you ever need to come back." There's no chill on the breeze but Lisa crosses her arms, rubs at them.
"That's--" Deanna swallows against her throat tightening. "Thanks." She knows she won't, but it means something that she could.
"If you're staying for dinner, it's pretty rude to leave him out there." Lisa's got on that crafty little half-smile she uses when a suggestion is really a demand. It's not quite all there the way Deanna remembers, but it's close.
"I wasn't, uh."
"Come on, you have to eat somewhere, right? You don't get to show up for half an hour and walk right back out. He does eat, doesn't he?"
"He's not a pet." Deanna says it a little harsher than she really means to, but it rubbed her the wrong way a little.
"Easy, tiger. Just a question. I don't know how the angel thing works."
"Yeah, he does. But look, do me a favor and don't mention the angel thing?"
"Okay," Lisa says on a slow, expectant note, but Deanna just goes out to the car, where Cas blinks out of a doze.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, we're invited to dinner."
Cas sucks at dinner small talk. Which Deanna sort of gets, because it's not like he has anything small to talk about and now that she thinks about it, he's pretty much never talked to any regular people outside of jobs. She's just gotten used to the random history lessons and bad almost-jokes, but Lisa hasn't. Lisa's not even sure Cas knows how to peel a potato and asks Deanna about it under her breath behind the fridge door when he asks if he can do anything to help.
"I dunno," Deanna says, not whispering, with a sense of vague insult she can't really put a finger on. "Hey, Cas, how are you at peeling potatoes?" She tosses one in his direction and he catches it, turns it over in his hand like he's trying to read its mind.
"There's no need to peel them," he says. She half expects some history of potatoes to go along with it but that's all he says.
"Well, yeah, you can eat the skins, but mashed potatoes are gross like that."
"I assume I can manage it," he says, more to Lisa than to Deanna, and he manages it fine.
The kitchen is quieter than she ever remembers it being. Ben should be here trying to steal bites of the cheese Lisa's grating and schizophrenically surfing through the radio or his iPod. Someone should laugh. The picture of the three of them isn't on the bulletin board by the back door anymore. She wonders if it's in a box somewhere, or just in the dump. For all of the thousands of things she can talk to Cas about and all of the thousands of things she can talk to Lisa about, Lisa and Cas don't seem to be able to talk to each other about anything. Lisa seems to be at a loss for the usual getting-to-know-you stuff, the where-are-you-from and what-do-you-do, since she knows but Deanna's told her not to mention it. The only thing they really have in common is Deanna, so the longest conversation that takes place just between the two of them involves Deanna rolling her eyes and grumbling protests while they discuss her Dr. Sexy habit, and that lasts all of two minutes. Deanna talking to one of them ends up with the other left out, because her 'polite' conversation topics are basically music and movies and cars, and neither of them like the same things as the other or care about engine specs or that Angus Young doesn't practice his stage antics. It goes quietest of all when Deanna asks how Ben's doing in school, and Lisa doesn't really answer.
Lisa's bought a pie from Deanna's favorite bakery. Apple. They eat it with ice cream and more silence on the back porch, on chairs that weren't here when Deanna last was.
"Happy?" Deanna asks Cas when they've thanked Lisa for dinner and gotten into the Impala with a banker's box that Lisa brought from upstairs of stuff that Deanna forgot and there's a lingering dampness on her cheek from a friendly brush of Lisa's lips, a warmth on her ear from a whispered 'take care of yourself.'
Cas frowns at her like the potato he was looking at earlier.
"Screw it," she says. "We still in time to get to that movie of yours?" She cranks up the air and the tape deck so they can't talk.
*
The movie Cas was thinking about seeing turns out to be an old silent film Deanna's never heard of, at a little arty theater all the way in Lafayette. It's called Intolerance and watches like an after-school special. People keep shushing them because Cas can't stop picking apart the historical inaccuracies, which is sort of stupid because it's not like there's anything to hear except music that sounds like moustache-twirling villains tying girls to train tracks. And hey, who knew the Tower of Babel was made of shit. The popcorn sucks but the perk of arty theaters, or this one anyway, is a full bar next to the concession stand. Five-dollar beers aren't really her style, but they don't suck to drink, and Cas sporting a foamstache and getting crankier by the minute about everything the movie's getting wrong makes up for the movie itself.
She hasn't been to a lot of movies in actual theaters-- a few on high school dates that she didn't exactly watch, and she made sure Sammy got to go to all three of the Star Wars re-releases (plus Episode One, which he bitched about for a solid month after). She and Lisa never went because they could never agree on anything, but they took Ben to one of the Harry Potters, which did not make Deanna hate witches any less, though she sort of felt for the whole destiny thing. And the first job that was just her and Sam happened in a place like this. They had to pull the fire alarm to get everybody out so they could burn whatever remains were lingering on the dress of a washed-up 40s starlet in a lobby display case.
Deanna pictures everyone in this audience running for the exits like those people did. It's not a full house and the emergency exits open straight up onto the back parking lot. They could all get out in thirty seconds, tops. She scratches at her leg where the knife strapped into her boot is getting itchy and sweaty against her skin. She saw Cas's eyes fall on each exit sign when they sat down, before the lights dimmed. She can't remember if that's something she told him to do or if he just knows. The soldiers on the movie screen make her think it didn't have anything to do with her.
She ends up sunk down low in her seat with her feet up on the empty one in front of her, though Cas is still sitting straight up like he's got a stick up his ass.
"That would be uncomfortable," he says, one corner of his mouth tugging upward, and she accidentally laughs too loud during a serious part. She jogs her knee against Cas's and he relaxes his back, but it's so artificial it's almost worse and she laughs more.
*
The first thing Deanna does when they get to Bobby's is come down with a cold. She's been feeling that little itch somewhere between her throat and the insides of her ears that makes her want to jam a knife in there to get at it (she settles for jabbing q-tips in way deeper than you're supposed to) for a couple of days now, but other than popping a couple of dayquil and ordering her own OJ instead of just stealing Cas's, she's been ignoring it.
She tries to blame her scratchy throat on the dust that pervades every corner of Bobby's house, clouds up when you open books, but by the end of the first afternoon there she's got a choice between blowing her nose till her brain comes out with it or swallowing throatfuls of snot, because apparently her brain tipped off her immune system that there was going to be some down time.
Being sick makes her pissy, always has. Used to be she could order Sam around, act pitiful and make him bring her soup and magazines, and he'd do the same to her when he inevitably caught it next (and inevitably one of them would say at some point, 'dammit, you run after ghosts sprained and bleeding but you're acting like some little cold's going to kill you'), but Bobby's not too inclined to take any crap from her and his one concession to doing a little nursemaiding is to grumble through cabinets and find her her own bottle of whiskey so she won't get her snot-germs on any of his.
And as for Cas, well, you'd think she had the fucking plague. He's sat by and watched her with worse, healed her from worse-- hell, done worse to her himself ('cause angels? not so much with the no-hitting-girls thing, especially when they think you're about to give the okay to be a rental tux for the apocalpyse prom) and not acted like whatever was physically wrong was any big deal. He's hovering around being stiff and quiet and keeping a safer-than-usual distance, and occasionally staring at her as though she might either explode or spontaneously be fine again, and it's damn distracting. She's just trying to lie there and be miserable and watch a Dr. Sexy rerun on Bobby's stolen cable, and he's just sitting there being shifty and doing a really shitty job of trying to look like he's actually paying attention to whatever he's doing on the laptop.
"Seriously, Cas. I'm not going to drop dead. If you're not gonna entertain me or make me soup or whatever, then go find Bobby and... I dunno, weld something. Check the panic room sigils. Get drunk and run naked through the scrapyard, I don't care, but right there with your nonverbal staring deal, you're driving me nuts."
The corners of Cas's mouth twitch down for a moment. "I'm sorry," he says in that grave too-sorry way that makes her feel (more) like crap. "Would you like me to make you soup?"
It's really a little hot for soup but damned if she's mentioning that now. Cas likes to be useful and maybe he's acting like a freak because he can't just wave a hand and cure the common cold anymore. She's not even sure he knows how to make soup, but it's not like it's hard and he did fine with Lisa's potatoes, so she tells him where the cans and can opener and the pots are and he disappears for twenty minutes and she gets to watch Dr. Sexy and wallow in peace.
Cas comes back with a bowl and spoon set on top of a plate. It's tomato rice and it's not exactly illness-related that Deanna has to swallow against her throat going tight because the memories of her mom and soup and Beatles lullabies are fresher in her mind than they used to be. Cas was miles away and passed out for that conversation, but either he somehow knew or that was just what was in the pantry. She wouldn't put it past Bobby to keep a couple of cans of it hanging around because Bobby does know. Deanna made it for Sam sometimes when he was little, but she never sang. "Thanks," she says, thick and sore.
He's quiet while she eats, still tense. She figures out why when he says, "I think my throat hurts."
Shit. It's maybe like that thing where somebody talks about fleas and you start itching, but maybe it's not. "You think it hurts, or it hurts?"
"It's a little hard to tell how things are supposed to feel," he snaps.
"Okay," she says, and gets interrupted by a sneezing fit, starts over not so defensive. "Okay, there's some orange juice in the fridge. Won't hurt to drink some." She breaks a couple of dayquil off the blister pack. "And take those. I dunno if they'll work on you but it's worth a shot." Because what the hell's the dosage for an almost-ex-angel whose entire-liquor-store hangover took an entire bottle of aspirin?
And suddenly she remembers all the shots she got as a kid, all the ones she told Sammy not to be a pussy about, all the suckers and cartoon band-aids and nurses in cheerful teddy-bear scrubs, and later Dad giving tetanus shots he got from fuck-knows-where. All the shots Cas has never had against all the stuff he might be able to catch now. Jimmy must have, but who the hell knows how well any of it's stuck. She's got her boots halfway on by the time Cas comes back out of the kitchen. "Cas?" she says at his bewildered head-tilt. "Just how exactly-like-Jimmy did your body come back after Lucifer blew you up?"
The waiting room at the free clinic is a special kind of hell, crying babies and people who sound sicker than Deanna, one very obvious hooker, some old folks who look like they're at death's door, and she thinks they might both catch something else just being here but now that she's realized this needs to happen, it seems too urgent to take the time to commit insurance fraud, like Cas is going to get the fucking mumps or something if he's not vaccinated six ways to Sunday in the next hour. Cas looks miserable and winces every time there's a cry or a cough and they just sit there not talking on hard chairs until their number is called.
The nurse is bored and young and doesn't give a damn why a grown man suddenly needs every shot in the book, even though Deanna was totally prepared with a story about Cas just having converted his way out of one of those religious groups who don't believe in medicine. The nurse's scrubs are plain hospital blue and the band-aids don't have any cartoons on them. They give him a little bag full of STD pamphlets and condoms, standard issue, which Deanna laughs at and Cas doesn't.
"You okay?" she asks in the parking lot.
He glares at her, which fair enough because it's kind of an exercise in indignity even when you're used to it, and spends the ride back to Bobby's staring out the window. He disappears among the labyrinth of cars as soon as they stop moving and she lets him go. She takes the hottest shower she can in the crappy-pressured hard water and for ten whole seconds she can breathe like a normal person, but then it all goes back to shitty when the steam clears.
She's hitting her special medicinal whiskey bottle and channel-surfing when Bobby comes in, eyes the pile of used tissues next to her and her wet stringy hair and says, "If you ain't the most pitiful thing I ever saw," not uncaringly.
"Shove it," she says, though it comes out more like 'shub id' because her nose has done a snot refill.
"Where'd angel-boy get off to?"
"I dunno. Went for a walk. Don't call him that where he can hear you."
"Gotta make a house call up by Watertown since your sorry ass'd probably just sneeze at the ghost. Think you can handle the phones?"
"Done it before. I guess they'll think I'm real dedicated, coming into work sick and all." She kind of actually hates it, because everyone who calls is either expecting Bobby or a man. Both hunters and local law enforcement often share the trait of generally being dicks and not thinking someone without a dick might know what the fuck she's talking about, and that actually she might should get back to being chained to the stove. But she can be a dick right back if she needs to. "You headed out now?"
"Yep. Couple days tops. Meeting up with Rufus-- sounds like a sonofabitch to kill but pretty standard. Try to keep the house standing."
"Do my best," she says with a grin that kind of hurts because her whole fucking face hurts. "Hey, Bobby? Be careful, okay?"
"When ain't I?"
"Usually."
"Idjit." He gives her a rough squeeze to the shoulder. "Take care of yourself, girl. World ain't gonna end if you get some sleep."
She does fall asleep, wakes up feeling raspy and feverish and a little drunk to the sound of the CDC phone ringing in the kitchen. She does her best to sound frigid-bitch and berates a medical examiner somewhere in the ass end of Georgia for calling her 'personal cell' at this time of night (it's dark and the kitchen clock says 3:37) and of course she sent Garth, whoever the hell Garth is.
Thing is, it's ass o'clock at night and no amount of checking upstairs or shouting to the basement or shoving her way into the panic room gets an answer from Cas. She's dizzy and maybe feverish and whether her heart's pounding like crazy because of worry or a meth-lab's-worth of decongestants goes unexamined as she finds shoes and a flashlight and staggers out into the salvage yard. It's dark and desert-chill foggy and all she can think about is the one set of needles Cas didn't get poked into his skin today, how whatever he technically is, he's all by himself in his body and if he can get the sniffles and need flu shots, then he probably doesn't have enough angel left now to keep out what the fuck ever feels like black-smoking its way in. She hadn't been too worried about it before, since Cas seemed to still have a little something, but something about today and the time of night and all the shit whirling around in her head has her closer to panic than she wants to be. She doubles back to dig a sharpie out of the chaos of the kitchen junk drawer (they're kind of all junk drawers, but some of them are heavier on the junk than the silverware) because he's not spending another minute without that symbol on him once she finds him, and a rosary and salt and holy water just in case.
Cas doesn't answer when she calls out-- just her voice echoing off metal and dirt and her heartbeat in her ears, and the flashlight beam muddles useless in the fog. She finds him, finally, by chance, sitting silent and motionless on what's left of the hood of a rusted-out Ford pickup.
"Cas?"
He looks at her like he doesn't see a half-damp rat's nest of hair and a nose gone red and raw all the way down to her upper lip. She heaves herself up on the hood next to him, metal and an old dead suspension creaking under her weight. "I was shouting my head off, man. Why didn't you answer?"
"I wasn't listening," Cas says, eyes focused far out into the fog. There's an open cut on his palm, probably from some car, and way to put the brand-new tetanus shot straight to work. No need to make a big scene of it, so she slips her hand against his. Nothing happens when her silver ring touches the cut, except that his fingers close around her hand and keep it there. "I prayed and no one answered."
"That's kinda par for the course." Except for when she'd pray to Cas, but she's not going to mention that. "Someone you wanted to see?" She wouldn't blame him for wanting back into the heaven club after today.
"Not in particular. I asked for guidance." He's gripping her hand so hard it hurts.
"They're not big up there on handing that out."
"No."
There are no stars to be seen through the fog but they look up at them anyway, silent with sweat prickling between their hands. Cas was always fever-hot, grace-hot, but now she wonders if it's just a fever. "Hey, Cas?" Deanna says after a long stretch of saying nothing, and he still doesn't say anything but his eyes shift off the sky to hers. "Don't run off and not answer, okay? You need your me-time or whatever, that's cool, and I know you could probably take anything that came after you, but--"
"I'm sorry to have worried you," he says, so she doesn't have to.
She remembers the sharpie in her pocket and Cas sits still for her to stretch the collar of his shirt down and draw the anti-possession sigil over his heart. He doesn't have scars like she does, even though she doesn't have as many as she used to, just smooth pale skin with a light dusting of dark hairs that she knows are thicker further down the center of his chest. It would be easier to concentrate without having to sniff against her nose dripping every three seconds, but she does a good enough job. "Just for now," she says, and has to clear her throat. "Bobby's got some amulets somewhere but a tattoo's the best idea."
Cas nods, solemn, and they stay where they are until the sun starts to come up and burn off the fog.
*
Cas sits stoically still for the tattoo artist, a woman named Elaine with long silver hair, a two-packs-a-day voice, and a faded orange phoenix crinkling like parchment in the tanned skin of one arm. Elaine's not big on small talk, which is fine with Deanna in general, but it's dead quiet except for the buzz of the machine and she feels pointless and twitchy, half woozy on too little sleep and too much cough syrup and leafing through the same weathered magazine because it's not like Cas needs his hand held.
In 2014, she saw a less artistic version of what's now taking shape on Cas's chest, when he changed his shirt before setting off on the suicide mission. She asked when he got it and there was a grim twist to his mouth when he said, 'You did it for me.' It got grimmer and joined a hollow laugh when she asked what she did it with, a box cutter and an inkpen? She tried to give herself one when she was fifteen, a skull and crossbones or something stupid like that, but it healed out to a vague blob on her ankle and eventually disappeared completely.
Cas breathes out a loud sigh when Elaine wipes off the ink and blood with an antiseptic-soaked towel, and Deanna sees that a fine sheen of sweat has broken out on his forehead. "See what you think," Elaine says, and points to a mirror.
"Damn, Cas, don't poke it," Deanna says. Cas drops his hand from where he was raising it to do just that, but his reflection shoots her a glare as Elaine tapes Saran wrap on him.
"Didn't hurt too bad?" she asks once they're on the way back to Bobby's.
"No," Cas says. There's a high flush on his cheeks and the antiseptic smell is mingling with the Impala's leather. Deanna spends a wait at a red light watching his right hand squeeze into a fist on his knee, then unclench and tap fingertips against denim. Cas used to be so frustratingly serenely still so much of the time, so controlled even when the sky was falling. Well, except when he wasn't. That's the thing, though-- he's twitchy like this now more often than he's not.
She talks him into lunch by way of a peace offering, which is enough like giving a treat to a dog who's had to go to the vet to make her lip curl up over her teeth if she thinks about it too long. Cas is more interested in his milkshake than his burger, and Deanna ends up eating the entire order of onion rings they're supposed to be splitting, even though she still can't taste much of anything.
There's a little kid at the table across from them, coloring outside the lines on the paper placemat while his mother ignores him in favor of her phone and spoons chili blindly into her mouth. She's around Deanna's age, probably a little younger, with highlights in her hair and a manicure on her nails. There was a time when Deanna would have computed face value to 'dumb bitch.' Sam once said it was internalized misogyny-- just the one time, since she threatened to punch him in the balls.
Cas has a newspaper in front of him, but the only weird thing going on in Sioux Falls is that the paper still runs Marmaduke. "I don't understand why a dog would need a flashlight," he says, and it's so much of a throwback to the confounded-by-humans 'this is a den of iniquity' angel he's been growing out of that she sort of wants to kiss him.
She doesn't, but she does laugh until she's doubled over with the coughing fit it's caused.
Next: Part 4
