Chapter Text
“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . .”
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please—tame me!” he said.
— The Little Prince
“Hey,” Dean calls back to the angel guy once he’s pocketed all the good snacks in this dump, “any chance you can do that teleporting trick again?”
“It’s hardly a ‘trick,’” Cas replies, frowning, and, damn, who knew that angels were be so damn pretentious? “And I recall telling you not to expect any more guidance.”
Dean scoffs and stomps his way out of the gas station, closing the door in Cas’s face without looking back. “Right, right. Is that what you call this? Guidance?” He gestures with one hand at the empty desert stretching out around them and at the road that ends somewhere beyond the blazing horizon, wondering amusedly if it really will lead him to Rome. “I have no idea where I’m going, man.”
It’s a half-truth. Dean spent years in Hell navigating these same roads by memory in the very back of his head, his soul having retreated to the farthest crevices, wishing to be here, in the middle of nowhere, anywhere but with that knife in his flesh, or, worse, in his own two hands—
“My assignment was not to serve as a compass,” Cas remarks drily, although, in his voice, it sounds almost like a growl. Dean wonders if it strains his throat, all that gravel.
“Yeah, about that,” Dean wonders aloud, ditching the gas station in favor of marching along the shoulder of the road, trusting that the angel will follow, “what’s up with all this ‘divine mission’ crap? Why wake me from my nap just to trail after me?”
Nap. If he was anyone else, any wiser, Dean would be showing the gratitude that Cas has seemed to expect from hour one. But he’s not anyone else, and Dean’s not nearly naïve enough to take unasked-for favors at face value. Certainly not favors like this.
Cas takes up that same position just behind Dean and to his left as they walk. It itches at Dean’s shoulder blades, the proximity; remnants of Alastair’s sadism, he tells himself, and certainly not some weird knee-jerk fear of whatever Cas will do when Dean’s not looking.
“It’s God’s will,” comes the angel’s low reply, predictable as ever.
“Seems awfully like a wild goose chase.”
A pause. “The Lord works in—”
“If you say ‘mysterious ways,’” Dean snaps, “I swear I’ll put myself back in my own damn grave.”
Cas’s footsteps stutter behind him. Dean, one ear focused on them anyway, turns his head a fraction. He feels like prey with a predator lurking behind him, and curses himself internally for it. “I would only dig you out again,” Cas states flatly, the frown audible in his voice.
Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the sweat beading on the back of Dean’s neck. Maybe it’s the damn sound of Cas’s footsteps behind him, sending unpleasant prickles down his spine. Maybe it’s Cas’s words, his disregard for Dean’s will, his—what was it that Dean called it earlier? Pretentiousness? But in any case, Dean can’t take any of it any longer, not like this.
He halts and whirls. “Dude, if you’re gonna follow me for however long it takes to get to Bobby’s, at least walk beside me.”
Cas tilts his head and squints—a favorite gesture of his, Dean remembers from the grave site. It makes Dean instantly defensive, the assessing nature of it. “It spooks you,” Cas says after a moment, more like an announcement than anything else, and Dean muses bitterly, hole in one.
“No,” he lies without an ounce of hesitation. “It’s—it’s just annoying, talking to you while you’re—” He huffs. “Walk beside me or ahead, I don’t care. Just not behind.”
A deeper squint. “Okay,” Cas agrees at last, and moves past Dean to walk a step ahead of him.
Dean scowls more about his own outburst than anything else, and follows Cas.
“You’ll have to explain your plan to me,” Cas says to the horizon, never once turning in Dean’s direction. “Who is ‘Bobby’?”
Dean just barely refrains from biting his own tongue. “Well, I don’t see any phones around, so I can’t call S—I can’t call my brother, and there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to find him without talkin’ to ’im first. But Bobby?” He exhales softly and hopes the angel can’t hear the fondness in it. “I’d bet my soul that he’s exactly where I left him.”
“No more betting souls,” Cas announces, and Dean shoots him a glare he isn’t sure Cas even notices.
“But first,” Dean says, hurrying his pace, “I’ve got to take a detour.”
Cas actually looks back at that, and Dean struggles to keep the smugness off his face. Serves him right for refusing to just walk next to Dean, the superior bastard. Though it appears Dean’s going to have more pressing issues than just managing to find the place he’s looking for. “What detour?”
Suspicion. Huh. That’s a new expression on Cas’s face. Dean kind of hates it, for some reason.
“I’ve gotta find some things of mine,” Dean answers vaguely.
Cas’s gaze sharpens. He slows a fraction, positioning himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Dean on the shoulder of the road, and Dean, despite the sore lack of signs he can read in Cas’s posture, recognizes a threat when he sees it. “Such as?” Cas demands.
Dean grits his teeth and swivels his head to look at the road—anywhere but at Cas. “Weapons, man.” His knuckles whiten as he tenses in anger. “In case you’ve forgotten, we met a few hours ago. Not to mention that you’re—you’re whatever you are, and I’m Alastair’s favorite chew toy.” He wants to punch something, anything. “We’re not exactly friends.”
“No,” Cas agrees, “but I was assigned—”
“I don’t give a shit about your orders, or who you got ’em from,” Dean snaps. “They don’t entitle you to shit from me. Actually, I think I’ve been too nice so far.”
Predictably, Cas takes offense. “Need I remind you,” he nearly snarls, “that though my orders were to bring you back, they were also to bring you in line?”
Dean tenses defensively. “The fuck does that mean?”
“It means I can send you back to Hell,” Cas threatens. “Yes, we need you, but we don’t need you now. I could send you back, and—surely you understand the difference in time between this plane and the demons’? Minutes here are days you could spend as the ‘chew toy’ of that torturer of yours.”
Dean, against his every raging instinct, against everything he’s ever known and done and been told to do, shuts his damn mouth and, to show that his absolute compliance is not so easily earned by some measly—terrifying—threats, stomps past Cas, shouldering him on the way.
Cas isn’t affected in the least. Dean’s whole arm aches.
And just like that, they’re back where they started. Dean, the back of his neck prickling, and Cas, walking behind him with what Dean is sure, should he turn and check, is an angry look on his face.
But the situation doesn’t last for long. Because, unlike before, after a minute or two, Cas steps past Dean to walk just ahead of him.
Dean squints at his back and refuses to show any sign of his relief, nor does Cas reveal why in all Hell he would do Dean a favor after just threatening him with the worst damn thing Dean can imagine.
It’s puzzling. It’s frightening. It’s—it’s new, too, all of this angel business. Cas is certainly an asshole, but—but maybe not to the extent of a demon. No, certainly not to that extent. He’s considerate, in his own way. Despite his anger.
Dean’s never seen anything like it.
Though maybe that says more about the company Dean keeps than it says about Cas.
Dean has a stash of weapons just south of Sioux Falls, nestled deep within an abandoned storage unit by a sleepy town Dean once hunted a poltergeist in. Among those weapons are various flasks of holy water. Dean ‘accidentally’ spills one on Cas, with minimal results. Though Cas does not seem to be especially convinced of Dean’s clumsiness and remorse, he doesn’t say a word of it but to suggest that he ditch the bag of salt Dean formerly intended to carry on his shoulders like a sack of flour. Dean, miffed by Cas’s suggestion, acquiesces anyway, mostly because his shoulder still burns from the resurrection.
With Dean sufficiently armed, they set off for Bobby’s place. Cas doesn’t seem pressed to assist Dean in any way but with food and water, so Dean’s taken up hitchhiking. It’s much harder with two men than one, but Cas is determined not to leave his side, like some kind of guard dog.
If Dean’s honest to himself, it’s sort of reassuring to have an angel’s constant protection. But good things never come free, and Dean knows that Cas’s snark and occasional frustration with him are far too low a price to pay.
There’s a second shoe looming over their heads, and Dean is determined not to be caught off guard when it finally falls.
“Hey,” Dean calls to Cas, just ahead, once they finally arrive at Bobby’s front door. “Just—hang back a moment, will you?”
Cas tilts his head and halts, allowing Dean to catch up. His eyes—and, damn, is there some trace of angelic grace in there making them so blue, or is that just the way Cas is?—dart to the door and then back to Dean thoughtfully. “Why?”
His tone’s not suspicious, really, nor is it confrontational. Dean’s found that sometimes, when Cas uses a word or a phrase in a context in which it’s otherwise rude or offensive, he doesn’t mean it so; he’s just—sincerely confused. Genuinely asking.
Cas employs that contemplative squint Dean’s gotten awfully familiar with over the past few hundred miles, and Dean wonders, not for the first time, if he’s even capable of being ingenuine.
“He’s gonna freak anyway,” Dean replies frankly. “No need to throw an angel in his face along with his dead—” He pauses, grits his teeth, wonders what am I to Bobby, really? And, understanding that the term son might just confuse Cas and unsure if Bobby would even be okay with it, despite him not being here—Dean chooses the next best thing. “His dead friend.”
Cas doesn’t say a word. He just gives Dean that assessing look and then retreats a step, angling himself out of immediate view of the doorway. Dean, who’d hoped Cas would finally take a hint and actually leave, merely sighs softly and walks up to the door.
He hesitates before knocking. When he does, there’s no code in it. He’s not sure if he’ll remember them right if he tried.
He remembers what Cas had said, about the difference between time on Earth and in Hell. There’s no way it’s been as long for Bobby as it’s been for Dean. But what if—what if a wrinkly ninety-year-old opens the door? Or, worse, what if it’s not Bobby at all? What if it’s some family who bought this shithole after his—after—
But Dean doesn’t have to worry for long. In moments, the door swings open, and Dean is staring Bobby in the eye.
He looks the same as he did when Dean last saw him, some half a century ago.
For a moment, Dean’s a block of ice, a pillar of salt—Lot’s wife in that damn evil plain, staring down at the wreck of her past life. And then Dean smiles and steps forward.
To meet the muzzle of a gun pressed to his abdomen.
It’s through sheer force of will that he keeps himself still. His smile doesn’t slip off his face, but his shoulders tense—a duality that seems to unsettle Bobby. But Dean can’t help it, because he’s really here. Staring down a barrel at a ghost. A ghost he’d die for, a ghost he loves.
Bobby must be thinking the same thing, he figures, only the ghost part’s probably a lot more literal for him.
Bobby reaches into his pocket for some holy water, Dean’s sure, and he puts his hands up, expecting a splash—but that’s not what happens.
Instead, Cas flashes forward in half a second, seizing Bobby’s wrist and throwing the gun out of his other hand.
Dean’s smile drops as his hands do. He steps past the gun in the doorway, putting all his force into the shove he gives Cas, but it’s Sisyphean—Cas doesn’t shift an inch.
Bobby uses his free hand, bereft of the gun, to unsheathe a blade at his hip and try to stab Cas. Cas, for his part, grasps Bobby’s arm in what Dean knows to be a grip stronger than iron and twists it, not enough to break bone but enough to hurt like a bitch, and shoves Bobby further into the house, past a table and into a wall.
Dean considers them lucky that he didn’t push Bobby through it.
He hurries after Cas and, after a moment, puts a calming hand on his arm, like some damsel. He’ll hate himself for it later. “Easy, Cas,” he says. “He’s my friend. C’mon, man,” he insists when Cas doesn’t give an inch, “we’re hunters. It’s just precaution.”
“He could have killed you,” Cas hisses. Bobby leans back into the wall, reaching with his twisted arm toward a nearby gun, but before Cas can do anything stupid like give Bobby a concussion, Dean shoves himself in between them. Cas allows him, for some reason Dean can’t parse, dropping his grip on Bobby.
“It’s fine,” Dean argues. He looks Cas in the eye for a time, and Cas, apparently unwilling to threaten Dean with Hell or bodily harm today, drops his gaze and his guard and allows Dean to push him back. “I told you to wait outside.”
“And God told me to keep you alive,” Cas snarks. “Who do you think I ought’ve listened to?”
Dean scoffs and turns to check on Bobby.
He’s met with a shockingly cold splatter of holy water to the face. He blinks and wrinkles his nose.
Bobby stares at him for a moment, the empty flask in his hand. “Dean?” he acknowledges at last, voice hushed. Dean wipes his face with his sleeve as Bobby banishes the flask to the dark underside of a table, likely never to be seen again. “You’re—is it really—?”
“No more tests needed, Bobby,” Dean half-pleads. “It’s me.”
He searches Bobby’s eyes and finds an additional wrinkle at the corner of them. It’s bittersweet, the effect the passage of time has had on both of them—that is, infinitely minimal, if any at all.
It’s been forty years, he wants to tell Bobby. I’m older than you now, did you know? Can you sense the years I’ve lived—the many, many years? Can you sense that the last time I saw you was forever and a million gruesome tortures ago?
But Bobby only gasps “Dean” again, like his name is some sort of prayer, and then surges forward to embrace him.
Dean half-expects a knife to the gut and is pleasantly surprised by the arms wrapped around him.
No, he decides, Bobby doesn’t know. And I hope he never does.
Wordlessly, Dean hugs Bobby back, and thinks, by the way he said his name just now, that Bobby wouldn’t especially mind if Dean called himself his son—not when Bobby holds him so close and so much like his father should have, all those years and atrocities and apocalypses and flaming houses and dead mothers ago.