Now that Castiel is living with the three of them, the pressure is off Sam when it comes to Jack's grace education, though Sam's taken it upon himself to teach him about human things, too. The two of them are learning ASL together, which is actually a little terrifying to watch; Jack picks everything up with an ease that is literally supernatural while Sam's still mixing up the letters A and S. Whenever Dean walks in on them practicing, he can feel Sam daring him to ask about it, but he never does. After all, Dean made Sam promise never to speak of Lisa or Ben again, and he kept that promise. Dean understands when to let something rest.
He and Sam have been teaching Jack the fundamentals of hunting together, too, but there is one thing Dean feels solely responsible for, and that's Jack's cultural education. That's how Cas, Jack, Sam, and Dean all end up piled in the TV room, popcorn ready, watching A New Hope.
"Metatron," Castiel says, and the name comes out like a curse, "placed the knowledge of this series of films in my head, but I've never actually seen them."
"How did I forget to make you watch Star Wars?" Dean says in disgust.
"Oh, I think I know this one," Jack says. "Like Clone Wars! But that one didn't have real people in it. Is Ahsoka a real person in this?"
"The hell's an Ahsoka?" Dean scoffs, and sips his beer. "Wait, shh, you gotta read the opening scrawl."
Sam is a wet blanket who spends the movie flipping through some dusty old book, but Dean still feels proud of his choice, because it's clearly a hit with Jack, who is following all the emotional highs and lows of young Luke Skywalker with rapt attentiveness. On his other side, Castiel is leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, watching quietly, but she keeps getting distracted and blowing her hair out of her face. A few errant locks keep falling into her eyes, and the more she shoves them out of the way, the more her hair turns into a bird's nest. Castiel rarely had tidy hair when it was short. The added length has made that fact disastrous.
After the fiftieth time Cas blows a gust of air into her hairline, sending strands flying around her face, Dean swears under his breath and says, "Cas, you're killing me."
Castiel looks at him with a touch of guilt as Han shoots Greedo. "Sorry, Dean."
"You thought about tying it back? Hell, I can cut it off. I cut Sam's until he got too cool for it and decided he wanted to look like a damn hippie."
"Whatever, Abercrombie," Sam says without looking up from his book.
Castiel holds a lock of her hair, looking at it like it's an elusive foe. "I'm not sure." Dean rolls his eyes.
"Okay, well, just— Ugh. Stay there, I'll be right back."
When Dean returns, it's with a hairbrush in one hand and a hair tie around his wrist. Sam does look up at that, his little brother senses tuning him in to the crime that has been committed.
"Hey, that's my brush," he says indignantly.
"I'm just borrowing it," Dean mutters, and goes to stand behind where Castiel is sitting on the couch. "Gonna fix Cas's hair."
Sam gives him another look, which he pointedly ignores. Cas turns to look up at him with a question in her eyes, but Dean just gestures for her to turn back around, then gathers the snarls of her hair together in his hands, drawing it off her shoulders and over the back of the couch. He slides his fingers through it as best he can, separating it into sections, then starts from the bottom with the brush, working his way toward Castiel's scalp to detangle it.
Castiel's shoulders draw tight at the first catches of Dean's fingers in her hair, but as he reaches the last knots and coaxes them out, she relaxes, melting back into the cushions. It becomes oddly meditative, the familiar sounds of a movie Dean's seen a dozen times washing over him, an easily solvable task in front of him, and Cas pliantly allowing her head to be tilted this way and that as Dean works, until the brush runs through smoothly and without obstruction. He keeps brushing for a few minutes just for the simple satisfaction of it before he separates the hair into three sections, weaving them together the way he'd been taught once, years before.
When Dean reaches the end of Cas's hair, she's got about a foot long braid that starts out thick at the top and tapers down to a thin, curling lock that Dean ties off with the borrowed hair tie. He's a little disappointed that there's nothing left to do, honestly, and it's probably not the best braid anyone's ever done, but at least it keeps the bulk of it from tangling and getting into Cas's face.
"There, whatcha think?"
"Hmm?" Castiel's voice is a bleary hum, and she seems like she's rousing from a deep sleep, even though angels don't indulge in the practice, surprised to have been awoken.
"How'd you learn to braid hair?" Sam pipes up, looking at the two of them curiously.
"You just didn't get invited to the same slumber parties I did, Sammy." In the list of weird things Dean did to please a girl in his youth, braiding Kim Cox's hair while her friend Esther Park coached him ranks pretty low. What happened after that ranks a little higher.
Dean taps on Castiel's head to wake her up, setting the braid forward over her shoulder so she can see more of it. Cas touches it, strokes her thumb over it. When she finally looks up, her eyes are heavy-lidded and dark. She's lit in blue by the television, her lips parted, and she looks— well—
"Thank you, Dean," she rasps. Dean swallows hard.
"Yeah, no problem, pal," Dean says, and clears his throat, grabbing his beer from where he set it on the coffee table and taking a swig. It's gone warm. He finishes it anyway.
Jack cheers when Luke successfully uses the Force to save the day, and Dean promises him that The Empire Strikes Back is really gonna blow his mind. Castiel spends the rest of the evening absent-mindedly stroking her hair, and when they all go off to their bedrooms without her, Dean tries hard not to remember the shiver he felt when she said his name.
—
Dean is used to being the first one up in the morning. Jack doesn't sleep as much as a normal human would, but he tends to keep to himself while Dean's making coffee and sorting out breakfast, and Sam usually wanders in an hour or so later to turn his nose up at whatever delicious carbs and processed meats Dean offers him. He's still not quite used to Cas being around again, wandering the halls and not sleeping at all. That's one of the reasons he's a little surprised to hear Cas and Sam talking quietly in the kitchen when he comes out of his room at 6 AM.
"...more pressing things to be spending our resources on."
"Yeah, I know, but what could it hurt to just look? If there's a shot, don't you want to take it?"
"The amount of power required for this… With Jack being a target right now, we could be inviting more trouble than it's worth."
"Maybe. Just… think about it, okay? If it's really important—"
"Morning, guys," Dean says, deciding not to be a creeper and inviting himself into the conversation proper. Sam's face is a dead giveaway that it's not a conversation Dean is really welcome in.
"Oh, you're up," Sam says. He's making the same face he did when Dean caught him snooping around Bobby's Hustler collection when he was thirteen. Of course, they'd made a deal where Dean promised not to tell Bobby if he got to look, too, but he doesn't think that play's gonna work here.
"Good morning," Castiel says, and she doesn't look guilty in the slightest, just weary, which makes it even more of a mystery. Her hair is still braided back, just the way Dean left it. In the brighter light of the kitchen, he can see that it's a little bit sloppy, but Cas doesn't seem to mind. Dean sits between the two of them at the table, giving Sam a cheesy smile.
"What's happening?"
"Nothing. I made coffee. You want?" Sam stands abruptly, going to the cabinet to get a mug for Dean before he can even answer.
"Yeah, I want," Dean says, and rolls his eyes. He looks over to Cas to see if there really is anything he should be worried about, or if Sam is just being weird about something stupid, and finds that she's watching him again and running her fingers over the tail of her braid, just as she'd done the night before. Dean's throat feels tight. Sleep gunk or something. "Uh, how's the hair working out for you now?"
"It's… good," Cas says, and her hand stills on her hair, like she's only just realized what she was doing.
"Yeah? Good," Dean says, and accepts the mug of black coffee Sam offers him as an olive branch. "If you need me to, y'know, fix it or anything, let me know."
Sam looks like he might say something to that, but it's to both of their benefits that he catches the look Dean gives him and decides not to press his luck. Jack spares them both any further awkward silence when he comes in holding the laptop and grinning broadly.
"I think I found a case!"
"That's great, Jack," Sam says encouragingly.
"What kinda case?" Dean asks, giving up his chair and waving Jack over to sit down and set the laptop in front of the others. Jack's pulled up an article, the headline of which reads, "'IT'S A MIRACLE,' CLAIMS ST. ROSE STUDENT BODY AFTER SECOND UNEXPLAINED OCCURRENCE."
The article helpfully provides shaky video, captured by a student's cell phone, of a bush in front of the school engulfed in flame. Children in uniform crowd around, some shouting in alarm, and there's a collective gasp when the fire is extinguished completely just as suddenly as it reportedly started, seemingly without any intervention.
"Do you think it's an angel?" Sam asks of Castiel, who is frowning at the poor quality video.
"It's hard to tell, just from this," she replies. "I haven't heard anything over angel radio."
"A few weeks ago, there was another 'miracle'," Jack says, and clicks over to a new tab, where a second headline reads, "FEEDING THE MULTITUDE: MYSTERY DONOR GIFTS 5,000 FISHSTICKS TO ST. ROSE SCHOOL."
"Huh," Dean says.
"Kind of a stretch, to link the two things together, don't you think?" Sam says, puzzling at the article.
"The fishsticks appeared suddenly in the cafeteria one day," Jack explains. "There's no evidence that anyone actually entered the building in order to leave them there. That's why it was called a miracle."
"Does seem fishy," Dean says, and frowns when no one laughs.
"I don't believe the fishsticks to be divine," says Castiel. "But the burning bush warrants investigation."
Two days later, the four of them are in a motel just outside of Redbud, Indiana, putting the finishing touches on a fake education history for Jack. They've got him dressed just this side of preppy, and Dean's suited up like it's a fed job, though the cover is much more mundane this time around.
"All right, so… My name is Jack Fisher, and you are my parents… Gary and Carrie," Jack says. They spent the car ride over fabricating a backstory for the newest prospective enrollee of St. Rose Christian Academy.
"Are we really going with those names?" grouses Sam, who's typing away trying to get Jack's fake transcripts in order.
"I didn't hear you coming up with anything better," Dean says. He tosses Castiel the only prop she'll need, a fake wedding band that she holds up to the light curiously. "It goes on this one," Dean says, and points to the ring on his own hand.
Castiel's hand closes around the ring. "I know that," she says. Her hair is in a slightly tidier braid today, after Dean offered to help make her look more presentable. For the case, of course. They stayed at a place in Illinois the night before, and in the morning, while Sam and Jack were getting breakfast, Dean had 'borrowed' Sam's hair brush again, sat Cas down on the bed, and unraveled his earlier work to start fresh. He's a little bit prouder of the end result this time. It's more even, and there are fewer loose strands of hair framing Castiel's face. And if he's still riding high from the way she sighed when Dean gave her scalp a little scratch while separating her hair into sections, that's his business. "I've been married."
"Oh, crap, I forgot about that," Sam says quietly.
For half a second, Dean thinks she's talking about Jimmy Novak's wife, when he suddenly remembers exactly what—who—Cas is talking about. All the pleasant feelings he's been riding along with since that morning fade away as the memory settles heavily in his gut.
"Whatever happened to her? Dean, um, told me about it, afterwards, but…" Sam glances at Dean uneasily. Neither of them particularly like remembering that chapter of their lives. Castiel likely doesn't remember it too fondly, either, though he certainly seemed to be enjoying his faith healer phase well enough before Dean showed up and ruined it.
"Yes, I… wasn't in much of a state to check up on her, after… everything that happened," Castiel admits, studying the backs of her tightly closed hands. "I tracked Daphne down years later. She's a follower of Krishna, now, actually, and married to an acupuncturist. They have a child named Prairie."
Dean snorts before he can stop himself. "Uh, sorry," he says, clearing his throat. "How'd, uh, how'd you feel about all that? You miss her?"
"I'm glad for her," Castiel says. "I don't mourn the relationship, if that's what you mean. But Daphne was kind to me when I was alone in the world. She didn't have to be."
"Yeah, real kind," Dean huffs. If he's honest, he doesn't have all that high an opinion of the women Castiel has shacked up with. In Dean's defense, one of the two literally murdered Cas, so he feels entitled to hate her. He guesses that, in comparison, the other one deciding to common-law-marry a naked amnesiac she found wandering in the woods looks pretty good. Cas is his best friend, but she's got a bad tendency to trust anyone who's even a little bit nice to her. "Okay, so I guess you've got tons more practice at this married thing than I do. Take me to school, pookie."
"Of course," Castiel says, sliding the prop ring onto her finger, and her expression does not budge one inch when she adds, "Huggy Bear."
The school is small, a K-12 that only boasts a student population of about two hundred. The grounds surrounding the old brick buildings are immaculately manicured except for the charred shrubbery by the front doors. It's roped off, but the path surrounding it is littered with flowers, signs scrawled with praise and prayers, and burnt-out candles.
Dean wipes his sweaty palms off on his pants while the school's principal, a sturdy woman with wispy, curled white-blonde hair and a neck that sags like a pelican's, stares down her nose at them through her bifocals, a tremulous smile on her thin pink lips.
"Well, it's such a pleasure to meet you, Jack," she says, extending her hand to be shaken. Jack follows through admirably, just like they'd coached him to. "Introduce me to your family?"
Jack smiles broadly. "Principal Andrews, these are my fathers."
Dean smothers a choked noise and turns it into what he hopes is a charming laugh. "Yes! Ha, that's, uh, our little inside joke. You see, my wife's maiden name was actually 'Father,' if you can believe that," he says, and grabs Cas's hand, kissing her on the knuckles in what he hopes is a convincing display of lawful, god-fearing heterosexuality. "Gary Fisher. Pleased to meet you. This is my lovely wife, Carrie."
Principal Andrews doesn't laugh, but she seems to take the explanation calmly enough, her mouth quirking in a tight smile. Dean can feel the sweat making his shirt stick to his back. She turns to Cas, who is utterly still in her seat, her hand still clasped tightly in Dean's.
"Caroline," Cas says, and Dean's a little impressed that she managed to spin his lack of imagination into a real cover. "Good afternoon. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us."
"Mr. and Mrs. Fisher," the principal says sweetly. "Pardon me, but the two of you look so young, to have a son Jack's age!"
Dean paints on a smile. "Oh, that's real kind of you, ma'am. You know, we do our best to stay healthy. Just clean living and, uh, godliness."
"Are you and your son new to the community?"
"Yes, ma'am," Dean says. "My work takes me all over the country."
"I see," the principal says. Dean had a story all lined up, about being a traveling representative for a national pest control company, but instead of following that line of questioning, she has to go and blindside him by asking, "And how did the two of you meet?"
Dean blinks, floundering, when Cas speaks up. "I saved his life," she says. Dean looks over sharply, his eyes widening in alarm.
The principal's eyes grow a little rounder as well. "Really!"
"Yes," Castiel says. "He had fallen into the pit— a pit," she amends, and Dean's hand tightens on hers, steadying her. "I… pulled him out."
"Carrie's an EMT," Dean says by way of explanation. Cas doesn't sweat, but Dean's palms are sweating enough for the two of them.
"Goodness," Principal Andrews exclaims, and Dean's shoulders relax in increments, because holy shit, she's actually buying it.
Cas smiles the way she does sometimes, usually when she's about to go off and do something reckless for Dean's sake. Not a broad, brilliant smile; her whole face just goes soft, her mouth curves too gently to pinpoint, and her eyes crinkle around the corners, blues warm in the shadow of her long eyelashes.
"When I first found him, I thought, 'His soul is the most beautiful I've ever seen'," she says quietly. "I believed that God had chosen me for him."
The principal sighs, clearly touched. Their ruse is going off without a hitch. Dean would be happier about that if he could feel anything but his heart pounding in his ears. "What a blessing you've been given," she says. Dean forces a smile, unable to look at Cas, whose fingers are still woven between his.
"I'm a very lucky man," Dean says.
The rest of the interview is spent on Jack, how he was homeschooled his entire life (not untrue) and how they hope that spending time with other young people his age who share his values will benefit him (true about the young people, less true about the values), and it all goes as well as they could have hoped. The office is going over Jack's falsified records, Sam has sent through a very sizeable tuition fee which will almost certainly appear to be legitimate, hopefully for the length of time it takes for them to investigate the case, and they leave with the promise that Jack will be allowed to attend classes on a trial basis effective immediately, which is exactly the in they needed. They end the interview with a tour of the campus. If there's anything angelic happening, they would certainly notice, but when they reconvene at the end of the day, they're no wiser about the so-called miracles than they were going in.
"We don't have long before they get suspicious about the money," Sam says. "If we don't see anything that's, you know, in our wheelhouse in a couple days, I say we chalk this one up to a weird prank and move on."
"Jack will be allowed to interact with the students tomorrow at school," Castiel says, and smiles proudly at the boy. "Hopefully he can glean some information from one of them."
"If not, maybe me and Sam can get back to our roots, do a little B 'n E," Dean says. Jack tilts his head in a way that recalls Castiel so strongly it briefly makes Dean think he's got double vision. "Breaking and entering," he explains.
"Right!" Jack grins, just as pleased as punch. Yeah, they're doing a bang-up job raising the antichrist all right.
Dean excuses himself to get dinner for the group. Cas offers to come, but Dean declines. He needs some damn breathing room right now. He hops into Baby, rolls the window down, turns the tunes up, lets the familiar rumble of the engine in his arms and thighs soothe him like a lullaby.
What is he doing? That's the question he has to keep asking himself. He's gotten really good at shuffling around the filing cabinets rattling around in his head, shutting things away and locking the doors and barring them up tight, burying them deep. He'd gotten real good at doing that when it came to Cas. Losing her— losing him over and over and over again, in a hundred different ways. Learning not to expect anything better. Learning not to want more than he could have. Learning not to be surprised or disappointed when he went ahead and wanted things anyway and everything blew up in his face. Learning he still had the capacity to hope again, and always, inevitably, the capacity for his heart to break again. He keeps burying things and they keep on crawling out of their graves, over and over and over. When's he gonna learn?
It's not fair for Cas to come back like this and shake everything up. To give him an excuse to act the way he could never allow himself to. To touch and be touched. To do so openly, where anyone could see them.
Dean rakes a hand through his hair, groaning aloud, "God, this is so fuckin' gay." He could lie to himself and say it isn't. He's gotten really good at that, too. Instead, he punches the wheel with the base of his fist and turns the car around, going to bring back a bag of sandwiches and potato chips from the corner store like he promised he would. He throws in a Milky Way for Jack, and a fifth of Jim Beam for himself. He's gonna need it if he wants to sleep at all that night, and the two beers he had stashed in the cooler only did so much the night before.
He hides the liquor in the glovebox for later. No need to give Cas a reason to make sad dog eyes at him again.
The next day is just a lot of reading and waiting, which is Dean's least favorite part of any job. There's nothing all that interesting about the town's history or the land the school was built on, from what they've been able to find so far. Dean gets that Sam wants to encourage the kid, that Cas thinks he has some kind of destiny, but that shouldn't mean they just fuck off to Indiana every time Jack has a whim. If Dean wants to be restless in a one-stoplight town, he can do that back home.
He steps outside the motel room to grab the remainders of that fifth out of the glove box, just something to take the edge off, but he's surprised to find Cas is already out there, sitting in the backseat like she's waiting to be driven somewhere. Dean plays along, gets behind the wheel and adjusts the mirror a touch.
"Where to, ma'am?" he drawls. Castiel doesn't laugh. Dean chews the inside of his cheek, letting Cas's eyes bore into him in silence for a minute before he asks. "You okay, Cas?"
"I'm…" Castiel's mouth works silently, trying to form words and falling short. "Just trying to… adjust."
Dean breathes out hard through his nose. "Tell me about it," he mutters.
Cas takes the utterance literally, and Dean knows he's fucked, cause it makes his heart swell with fondness. "It's hard to explain. I don't know if I can."
Dean clicks his tongue. "I mean, if you want advice about coming back from the dead, you're pretty much talking to the expert, buddy."
"Dean," Castiel says, like Dean's said something terribly sad instead of something that's just the plain truth. But she doesn't elaborate, just looks down at her hands in her lap, unspeaking.
Dean wants to ask her: did you mean what you said? He thinks about crawling out of his own grave, about the handprint burned into his arm, long since healed by Castiel herself. He doesn't remember the moment Cas found him, after fighting her way through Hell and a host of demons. All of his memories from Hell are of pain both borne and inflicted. He doesn't remember an angel gripping his soul, judging it worthy, cradling it and placing it back in his body. He doesn't remember being pieced back together and breathed back to life.
But to know the truth might make him do something stupid, like hope, and that's one thing he know he can't afford, so he doesn't ask, and Cas doesn't say, and they sit there in the quiet pretending.