It's only by the grace of whiskey that Dean sleeps at all, and he wakes up with a dry, gummy mouth and a headache that threatens to turn his stomach. He glances around the room, gray morning light filtering through the curtains, and finds it empty, which leaves him free to grab the half-empty bottle by his bed and take another drink, something to dull the ache. He fishes a couple aspirin out of his bag and washes them down. He brushes his teeth, cause he's not stupid and Sam has a working nose, and spends a long time afterwards washing his face with cold water, wondering if the sink is deep enough to drown himself in.
When he thinks he could pass for human, he goes to the next room over, rapping on the door before he uses the spare keycard to open it. Sam is inside, just zipping up his bag, already dressed and showered, his hair still wet and curling behind his ears. He signs, "quiet", and nods toward the bed on the far side of the room. Rowena is still sleeping, deeply ensconced in the many pillows bracketing her small body. Sam follows him out into the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar behind them.
"She passed out pretty early," he says. "I figure we let her sleep while we get some food, then hit the road."
"So you trust Sleeping Beauty not to make a break for it?"
Sam purses his lips. "I don't think it's an act." He can tell Dean's about to protest, because he adds, "But I'm gonna stay up here. You bring breakfast back. Is that enough of a compromise for you?"
Dean scrubs a hand over his face, stubble prickling at his palm. "Yeah, all right."
"Is Jack up?"
"I thought he might be with you, but I guess he went downstairs already."
"Cas?"
Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, shrugs. "I dunno, haven't seen her." Sam looks at him oddly. Dean fidgets. "Okay, I'll be back with the nonfat yogurts for Her Highness and her handmaiden."
That makes Sam roll his eyes, which is much more comfortable territory for Dean. He escapes down the hall, riding the elevator to the main floor, where the smell of syrup and coffee is thick. It's still early, so there's only a few people milling around the counters laden with breakfast fare, and he sees Jack and Cas at their table immediately. Jack has a plate entirely filled with one fat, golden-brown waffle in front of him, stacked high with cream and fruit. On another day, Dean might have joined him, but right now, the thought turns his stomach. Castiel's back is turned to him. He wonders if he can slip by, grab an armful of food, and disappear again before either of them notice.
He loads up a tray with whatever's quickest. None of it looks that good to him at the moment, honestly, but he can't have Sam giving him any more Concerned Sam™ looks. Yogurt cups, a few dinged-up bananas and oranges, a single-serving box of Apple Jacks, a muffin, and two coffees. He can probably choke at least one of those things down.
Jack calls his name a couple of times. Dean keeps adding to his tray.
"Dean?" A finger taps his shoulder. Jack waves to him when he turns.
"Oh, hey, morning. Didn't hear you," he lies. "Sleep okay?"
Jack has a little line between his eyebrows. If he can tell Dean's full of shit, he doesn't say anything.
"Yes. I woke up at four, but you slept through the television show about the rotisserie oven."
"Oh, damn," Dean says. "Sorry I missed that."
"Don't be," says Jack. "There wasn't much of a story. They just kept repeating the same things over and over. It did sort of make me hungry, though?"
"That's how they get you. I'm taking these up to Sam and Rowena, tell Cas we're gonna get packed up in about a half hour, okay?"
Jack smiles and returns to their table. Dean tries to hoof it before his eyes follow Jack all the way, but Cas sees him before he rounds the corner, her face square and still. Dean's heart feels lodged in his throat. The car ride is going to suck.
Dean is a little weirded out to see that Rowena's enfeebled act really might not be an act. It takes a while to stir her after he and Sam eat, Dean choking down the little box of cereal dry and chasing it with black coffee. He tosses the rest of the food into the cooler and saves it for the road. Sam ends up asking the concierge for a wheelchair, and he carts Rowena downstairs to the car, where she sits in the back between him and Cas, dozing intermittently against Sam's shoulder for the first hour.
When she finally wakes, it's just to tell Dean to put on something a little less grating. He grumbles for a minute before switching out Back in Black for Rumours. Stevie Nicks is probably a witch, so Rowena's bound to like her. Sam peels her an orange, and she eats it slice by slice, smiling a little when "Second Hand News" transitions into "Dreams." Nailed it.
Cas just gazes out the window, watching Missouri scrolling by. Dean trains his eyes back on the road, knuckles white against the steering wheel.
"Like a heartbeat drives you mad," Stevie croons, "in the stillness of remembering what you had, and what you lost."
"Shut up," Dean mutters.
"What?" Jack looks at him from the passenger's seat.
"Nothing. Uh, that guy's bumper sticker," he says, and points ahead on the road. It's as good an excuse as any. Jack squints to read it.
"My child is an honor student at Lake Bridge Junior High."
"Important lesson, Jack," says Dean. "Grades are meaningless. Honor students are just kids who know how to game their test scores. In the real world, none of that shit matters."
"You're just saying that cause you never did well on tests," Sam says.
"Yeah, so? When do I need to know how to solve for x out here in the field? I don't. Cause what matters is I know how to do my job, and I do it well. Doesn't matter how much useless shit you memorize."
"Like the useless shit we're always tearing through the library for?"
"That's not useless shit," Dean grumbles. "Anyway, you're just mad because we never stayed in one school long enough for you to make honor roll."
Sam scoffs. "Yeah, like dad ever would've let me put one of those bumper stickers on the car."
"Oh, absolutely goddamn not. He would've disowned you."
"Yeah, well, he did that anyway," Sam says. Dean's teeth clench, and he breathes out hard through his nose.
"Good for me I'm a fuckin' moron, then."
"No you aren't," Cas snaps. Dean, startled, looks back to see her reflected in the mirror. She still won't look at him, but her cheeks are splotchy red, her lips thin and pale.
Dean lets it drop, even though he would have thought Cas would be the first person to call him a fucking moron. She's done it often enough before. He doesn't know what the hell she's thinking right now. He doesn't have the first goddamn clue.
"When the rain washes you clean you'll know," sings Stevie.
Shut up, Dean thinks, and turns the music up a notch anyway.
They've just crossed over the state line into Kansas when Rowena perks up enough to start asking Castiel questions.
"So, Big Bird," she chirps. She's taking little pinches of the muffin Dean hadn't touched and popping them into her mouth daintily between sentences. "What made you decide to make the switch?"
"I'm sorry?" Castiel had been leaning up against the door, her chin in her hand, until Rowena leaned in and playfully smacked her arm.
"Your transformation! I have to say, I'm very happy for you. You must know how I've always felt a kinship with other powerful women."
"It wasn't really a choice," Cas says. Dean tries to keep his eyes on the road, but he can hear the frown in her voice.
"Oh, yes, I've heard that said," Rowena says. "I know of a few witches who started on the path because their desire to transfigure themselves was really more of an imperative."
Castiel hesitates before speaking again. "You misunderstand. I didn't choose to become this way. When I was… returned to life, it was by an entity that seemed enraged by my very existence. And it knew me. It knew my life, my thoughts, my—" There's a pause where Castiel seems to be remembering. She'd been vague on the details, but the Empty sounded like a pretty shitty way to spend eternity. "It wanted to be rid of me, but it also seemed to take satisfaction in tormenting me. I believe that choosing this… visage for me was its idea of a great cosmic joke."
Dean can hear the bitterness in her voice. His hands flex against the steering wheel. He leans on the gas a little harder. It's still a few hours to Lebanon, but he wants out of this car as soon as possible.
"Oh dear," Rowena says. "Well, then, I am sorry." She sits still in the tense silence for a while before she adds, "But, you know, if you ever wanted to fix that little problem…"
"That's not necessary," Castiel says.
"If you say so. And of course I'm in no state to carry out such complex magicks at the mo. I'm just saying, you have options. You needn't limit yourself!" Rowena reaches over to pat Castiel on the knee. "Consider it, dear."
Dean looks back to see Castiel's face, but she's tucked it back into her hand, and she spends the rest of the drive quietly staring out the window.
It's a relief when they finally pull into the garage at the bunker, to be stretching his legs and looking forward to the prospect of a dark, quiet bedroom to nurse his headache in. It's also a relief to put some space between him and Cas, because being constantly aware of her at his back was starting to make him feel kind of insane. Apparently, Cas feels the same way, because she's gone before Dean's done unloading the car. He and Jack carry the bags inside while Sam helps Rowena get to her feet.
Dean's down in the library when Sam and Rowena make it to the staircase. He hears her say, "Samuel, be a dear," followed by Sam's little noise of acquiescence, and then Dean's obviously having a stroke, because there's no way his little brother is carrying that woman down the stairs. She has an arm slung over his shoulder and the other holding her cane in her lap, and when they reach the foot of the steps, he sets her down gently on her feet.
Rowena gives Dean a sharp smirk as they pass. Sam, trailing behind her, looks at Dean like he would gladly murder him with his bare hands right there if Dean so much as blinked at him the wrong way. Dean decides not to test that hypothesis.
He spends the rest of the afternoon tending to Baby, getting under her hood to make sure everything's tip-top and giving her a good wash and rinse when he's through. Maintaining a car is practically a meditative state for Dean, down to the mechanical simplicity of the fact that all the parts in front of him make sense, that all problems are ultimately solvable. When he's done, he offers to pick up takeout from the Chinese place a town over just for an excuse to be alone a while longer, and when he brings back two heavy paper bags full of food, he grabs the carton of beef lo mein and takes it back to his room without a second thought.
The thing is, he knows he's being a coward, and he still can't stop himself. It's a gut reaction, as intrinsic to him now as sleeping with his gun under his pillow, or doing a sweep of a room every time he walks in, checking for potential exits or ambush points. It's instinct, written into his code somewhere so deep he can't really pick out one particular instance to say, There, this is the reason. This is where it started. He can't actually remember the first time his dad put a gun in his hand, held his arm up the right way, taught him how to keep his finger near the trigger but never on it until he was ready to shoot, ready to kill. But he can remember the repetition of it, the constancy of it, the drill of it, every single day until eventually he could do it in his sleep.
In the same way, he can't really remember the first time he thought that maybe there was something wrong with him. Something that people could sense but he couldn't control. He can't remember the moment he realized he would have to work at it to make sure no one noticed, to make sure he passed without a second glance, to make sure nobody asked him any questions he wasn't prepared to answer. The knowledge is just ingrained in him now, as sure as the fact that he's Dean Winchester, that he's John and Mary Winchester's firstborn. There are things men don't do without attracting the wrong kind of attention, and there are things men don't do period. No amount of evidence to the contrary has yet been able to overwrite that programming.
Moments stick out in his mind. Times when he was forced to consciously think, I'm going to be in trouble if anyone finds out.
The man who propositioned Dean outside his and Sam's motel room when Dean was fifteen and Dad hadn't been back all weekend. He remembers the fear that Sam might have overheard, the irrational feeling that the guy wasn't just some sick creep who would have said that to any boy, but that he could look at Dean and tell there was something different about him.
His seventeenth birthday, when Dad sent him out to a haunted chapel with a bag of rock salt and a can of lighter fluid, and the spirits of the women who'd chosen to die rather than be punished for loving one another writhed in their last embrace, begging God's mercy as they burned. He'd returned with ash in his hair, steel-jawed and puffing his chest out while his insides wailed, wondering if Dad could tell just by looking why he was reluctant to talk about the job.
The time a girl with a Bettie Page haircut took him home and told him he was pretty, but he'd look even prettier in her clothes. When he'd finally agreed to wear them, he'd said, "I'm not a queer."
She'd kissed his lips, leaving her lipstick behind, and said, "Obviously," and stroked him through the satin until he came with her seated on his face. She had a floor-length mirror in her bedroom, and lying there on his back with her slick still on his mouth, he saw himself and liked the way he looked, soft and spent and oddly delicate, and he'd thought, She's wrong.
The first time he and his old friend Lee snuck away from his dad to go out drinking after a hunt. Lee had thrown his arm around Dean's back, a solid line of heat all along his side, and Dean, stumbling, had slapped a splayed hand against his thick chest and thought, I could kiss him right now, but didn't. Dad liked Lee, respected him. He said he liked hunting with him, that he had a good head on his shoulders and a mean right hook, even though it pissed him the hell off when Lee, who was older than Dean and should've had his dumb early-twenties bullshit far behind him, brought him back half-senseless smelling like cigarette smoke and stale beer.
That was one of the reasons that Dean kept his damn mouth shut after the fifth or sixth time. Lee planted a wet, bristling kiss under his ear and helped him jerk the both of them off behind the building. He'd staggered back to the motel well into the early hours of the morning to find his dad asleep, but when he'd come out of the shower to climb into bed, he heard Dad's voice on the other side of the room, saying, "Don't want to see you coming home like that ever again, boy. You hear me?"
Dean had frozen, one knee on the mattress, afraid to look, though it was too dark to see his face. "Yes, sir."
"You can't afford that kind of distraction."
"No, sir."
"I don't give a shit Lee's a hunter. If I catch you after sneaking around in some shithole with him again, I'll black his eye. You come home by midnight. You stay home. That's part of the job."
"Yes, sir."
Dean had lain awake, not sure how much his dad knew, whether he just thought Dean was drunk and useless, or if it was worse than that, if he had figured out what had really gone on and knew he had to put an end to it. If he hits Lee, what's he gonna do to me? Dean had wondered, and watched the ceiling, afraid to do so much as breathe too loud until the sun rose. But Dad never said, and Dean never brought Lee up again after the last time they did a job together, and that was that for the remainder of John Winchester's life.
Castiel had said something before about gender being irrelevant, a human hangup not worth bothering with or caring about. Where did that leave Dean, then? If Castiel could just throw it in the trash, what had Dean been spinning himself in circles for all these years? What had he been working so hard to hide it for? Dean definitely didn't care what God thought, and he told himself he didn't care what his dad thought anymore, either. So why should he still be so fucking afraid?
Alcohol dulls it for a while, but it always just comes right back again. And here he is, hiding in his room from his best friend, his very recently revived best friend, who he had thought he might never see again. He'd gone and fucked that up, too. So what did it matter? What did any of it matter? Cas is one of the few people in Dean's life that keeps coming back. Someone he'd die for, someone he'd kill for. Someone who, despite that, he still can't bring himself to touch where people might see. And unfortunately it's real easy to hate himself for that and then just keep on doing it.
Castiel seems just as set on avoiding him as he is on avoiding her, which works out, even though it also leaves him feeling like shit scraped off a boot. He eats breakfast with Jack and Sam, and Rowena glides in at noon every day acting like she ought to be waited on hand and foot while Sam makes a faint attempt at acting like he's not going to do exactly that, and he hardly catches a glimpse of Cas through it all, unless Dean happens to pass through while she's spending time with Jack. She's kept her hair in its braid, and his fingers itch at his sides when he sees it.
He tries to distract himself by cleaning. He hauls all the bottles and cans out of his room in two great big trash bags, and doesn't ask permission from Cas to steal her stolen truck to take them to the dump. He changes the sheets. Hell, he even dusts the furniture. But then he gets to his mom's room in his chaotic fervor to return the whole dusty bunker to some kind of external order, and he's faced with a dilemma.
Neither of them have opened this door since the day they brought Jack home. He's not sure if he should now. Maybe Rowena will heal up quick and they'll find a way to save her. All of her things will be just how she left them, and it could be a rare moment of perfect normalcy in her otherwise utterly abnormal life. Or maybe she'd want him to make sure her things are clean and fresh when she gets back. He argues with himself for a minute before he says screw it, and opens the door.
Honestly, he's not sure what he expected. The room hardly looks lived in. Mom had been gone more often than she was around, and the only evidence anyone lived here at all is a bottle of Tylenol on the side table, a half-empty water glass, and Mary's still-packed duffel bag by the door. Sam had put that there himself; they couldn't just leave it in the Impala, but she wasn't around to need it.
She'd treated the bunker like a hostel, coming and going and hardly leaving a trace she was ever there.
Dean grabs the bottle of pills and takes the glass away to wash it out.
What would Mom think of all this, if she were here? Would she even care, or would she just treat it like another bad dream she could get away from if she just took one more job?
There's an idea. Dean inherited all his parents' worst traits, so why not just lean into it?
He's still doing the dishes when Sam walks in. He opens the fridge, hovering with the door ajar for a long enough time that Dean suspects he's not actually looking at anything. Dean keeps his nose down, rinsing out bowls and setting them on the drying rack one after the other.
"Hey," Sam says after a while, Mr. Smooth.
"Sammy," Dean says, and starts wiping things down with a dishtowel. Sam closes the door, empty-handed, and slicks his hair back.
"Look, I know you're pretty mad about Rowena," Sam says, and Dean's so genuinely caught off guard that he laughs for the first time in days, a little snort and a huff. Honestly, he'd been so distracted by everything else, he forgot to be mad about that.
"I don't care about Rowena," Dean says. Sam looks like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. "You were right about one thing, she might be the only person who can help us figure out how to get to Mom. So, you know. Whatever. You and I can handle it."
"Oh." Sam shuffles in place, thrown off-balance. "Well, uh… Good, then. That's good."
"Yep." Dean finishes drying the dishes, and starts putting them away in their places. Sam helps, and a small part of Dean thinks it's just so he can lord those few extra inches of height over him reaching the highest shelves.
"I really thought you were pissed at me. You've been, uh, kinda keeping to yourself."
"What, a guy can't value his 'me time'?"
"I don't know. It's just a little quiet, I guess. Cas has been gone, and all Jack and Rowena have been doing is binge-watching Great British Bake Off, which is… fine and all, but—"
"What do you mean, Cas is gone?" That's news to Dean, who admittedly hasn't seen her in a few days, but he'd thought that was by his choice.
"He took off a couple days ago. He didn't tell you?" Sam frowns, pulling his phone out of his pocket, scrolling through. "He texted this morning. Didn't really explain what he was doing, but you know how Cas can be."
"Well, that's just fucking great," Dean says, slamming a cabinet shut. Sam flinches, then slips his phone back in his pocket.
"Is everything… you know—"
"It's fine. Whatever, like I'm his keeper?" Dean scrubs a hand over his chin. He forgot to shave again, and his scruff is nearing beard territory. "Yeah," he growls, "I just fucking died, but sure, I'll run off alone to do who knows what without saying anything."
"Did you guys have another fight?" Sam's using the same voice he uses to talk to scared animals and little kids, which is about the limit of what Dean can handle from this conversation. Dean pulls out his phone, tries to ignore that his most recent recieved text is that photo of Jack grinning and Cas making that dumb little frowny face, and starts typing something to Cas before he can think better of it.
Where are you??
"Dean?" Dean looks up from his phone, then shoves it back in his pocket, cheeks hot.
"Idiot. I can't believe her. Screw this."
"Dean, what is going on?" Dean just blusters past him, heading for the garage. "Where are you going?"
"Out." Dean needs to just drive until he stops fuming, and then maybe drive some more.
"Right, go throw a tantrum about it if that's what you need to do, then!" Sam calls out after him, but Dean's already halfway to the garage.
He drives straight down the highway until he's got to flip over the cassette in the deck, but when side B of Physical Graffiti plays the opening notes of "In the Light" he just ejects it again, pulling off onto the shoulder and sitting in the idling car in silence. He pulls his phone out for the first time since he started driving. To his surprise, he's got a missed message from Cas.
It takes a second to load when he opens it. It's a picture of a deer, its nose pointed up into a blackberry bush. The light is golden and just starting to fade, casting the rest of the image in blues. Dean looks outside, squinting against the early evening sun. So they're in the same time zone, at least. He fires off a response.
You skipped town to go on a nature hike without saying anything?
Dean furiously watches the little "..." of Cas responding blink like staring at it will make Cas appear in front of him, like old times.
I'm sorry. I didn't think you wanted to see me.
Dean sighs, letting his head tilt forward until it collides with the steering wheel, pressing a hard line into his forehead. He has no idea what the fuck to say to that, because Cas is right— he had been purposefully avoiding her. That doesn't mean he wants to her fuck off and vanish on him. His phone blips before he can figure out an answer.
How is Jack?
Dean reflexively starts to type a reply about watching too much Netflix, then stops, gritting his teeth, deleting everything, and replacing it with:
Ask him yourself
He stares at the screen for a long while, tapping the screen every time it dims, but Cas doesn't text him again. He throws the phone into the passenger's seat and steps off the brake, pulling a U-turn and heading for the closest pocket of civilization.
A night spent being alone around other people might do him right. If he gets too drunk, he'll just pick someone up and let her take him home. He's found a place to sleep that way more than once. So what if it's been at least ten years since he had to worry about things like that? It's like so many other things in his life, at this point. Instinct.