—Day 97—
Dean does not, it must be said, take further confinement well.
“God, I miss shitty diner food,” drifts from the kitchen in the despairing voice of one surveying a nuclear holocaust in progress. The sound of the pantry door closing—gently, Dean’s pain is too deep for violence—is followed by the slow, dragging footsteps of a miscreant whose journey ends with a hangman’s noose, or in this case, a miserable slump in the far corner of the couch in a blue t-shirt and mismatched socks, which Castiel has to work very hard to ignore.
(Alicia explained on the last laundry day that the disappearance of individual socks is something of a common hazard of dryers (“My mom told me dryer elves,” she said wisely from her seat on the dryer, heels banging cheerfully against the metal. “Is that possible?” “I have no idea,” he told her, looking suspiciously at the quickly rotating laundry). It seems her theory bears investigation; he knows all the socks had their appropriate mates when he put them in the dryer yesterday.)
Dean sighs—a full-body effort requiring the use of at least three more lungs than he actually has—and says, “There’s nothing to eat.”
“There is one five pound bag of brown rice and three of white, one ten pound bag of sugar, two one pound boxes of pasta—spaghetti—eight cans of carrots, six of chicken, two of collard greens, five of corn—two white and three yellow—two of green beans, nine of green peas, and five of spinach in the pantry,” he replies without looking up. “In addition, we have two loaves of bread, one—”
“Shut up.”
Castiel never claimed he was taking Dean’s confinement any better.
Sighing again—that is incredibly annoying—Dean reaches for one of the latest patrol reports with a despondency more suited to reading a casualty list or, perhaps, the terrifying day Castiel thought he was out of single-malt whiskey (he was very high) before remembering in relief there was more under the couch (three bottles, in fact). He could use some now, he reflects grimly as Dean reaches for his cup, starting to take a drink before noticing it’s empty. “Out of coffee,” he breathes in the hopeless tones of a martyr between the third and fourth turn of the rack. “Of course we are.”
“I made a fresh pot ten minutes ago,” Castiel answers composedly, consulting Hippofucker’s Guide to the Sex Swamp (Dean™️) and making a correction in his translation before looking at him with weaponized sympathy. “Would you like me to get you some?”
Dean’s fingers tighten around the body of the mug, knuckles briefly going white; in his mind, it’s probably already airborne, flying toward Castiel’s head. “I’m fine.”
Setting down the cup—with force this time, Castiel notes—Dean returns to the report, shoulders slumping further as he re-reads the number of times they had to stop and push the jeep out of the mud and a detailed description of each individual event. As it turns out, patrolling in a rainstorm the likes of which haven’t been seen since one Noah (of Ark fame), is even more boring than usual when visibility reaches six inches or less.
“You know,” Dean says suddenly, “we should have sent them to the south, not east.”
Pausing in his translation, Castiel searches for context (none) and makes a (wild) guess. “Vera and Jeremy?”
“Yeah,” Dean answers slowly, dragging out the single syllable until he runs out of breath (Whatever their actual number, Dean’s lungs seem remarkably healthy, and Castiel tries very hard to remember that Dean contracting pneumonia would be terrible indeed), as if Castiel’s lack of telepathy is a grievance he has yet to entirely forgive. “South’s a military passthrough, and it’s not like the military’s using it these days. Less traffic.”
He tries and fails to connect the concept of ‘traffic’ to I-70 hosting a maximum of three legally credentialed vehicles per week.
“The military directly supervises the border guards on the military passthroughs,” he answers, viciously adding a slight lilt to indicate his personal satisfaction with the world and all that’s in it, not limited to his current activities, the rain falling outside, and Dean’s tragic level of boredom after two days of contemptuously rejecting every suggestion of constructive activity Castiel could devise. “Their scheduled inspections of those stations are frequent and the unscheduled ones even more so, and the logs are validated daily. Joseph acquired the border patrol routes as well as the duty roster for all ten states they will potentially need to cross; using the east checkpoint assures—”
“—minimal exposure to the military, I know.” Dean flips the page of the report, scanning it as if it’s undergone a radical change since his last read or has anything at all to do with the subject at hand. “So instead, ten day minimum travel time in at least two uninfected states, probably on the best farm roads the country has to offer.”
“Vera’s been doing this for two years and knows better than either of us the safest and most efficient method of travel,” Castiel says absently, frowning at the page uncertainly. Potential bestiality expressed in hieroglyphs is only moments away from being confirmed or—he would say denied, but that symbol doesn’t translate to ‘hug’ no matter how much he wants it to. Some things would benefit when lost to translation, he reflects; a pity this isn’t one of them. “Before we declare her journey an unqualified failure, perhaps we should wait until that actually happens.”
Dean’s glare suggests rationality is not welcome here, which is as unsurprising as the inevitable horror of how this epic journey down the Nile will come to an end. “You just got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he answers distractedly, forcing himself to accept that word indeed, does not mean hug. “Why?”
The silence that follows that statement would be ominous if he could bring himself to care, but if that is indeed not a hug, he has some serious reservations about the logistics of this obscene act against nature. Height alone….
“What if they get caught in a blizzard on the way back?” Dean says challengingly. “Got an answer for that?”
“It’s forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.” Though the wind chill and presence of water probably reduces that to something closer to thirty-nine, he supposes, reading his notes carefully to assure he didn’t—by some very welcome chance—make a mistake. It’s possible. “And raining.”
In his peripheral vision, he sees Dean turn to survey the rain-soaked evening as if the weather itself only adds to the unbearable burden that is his life. “Okay, I give up; what the hell is up with the weather?”
Perhaps the author thought that word meant ‘hug’: he was not, it must be said, a shining example of intellectual profundity. Feeling optimistic, he continues to the next sentence. “What about it?” Though the logistics of hugging a hippo are—
“Where’s the snow?”
He squints at the page, frowning; the author’s grasp of size seems questionable. Adult hippos are much larger than—
“Cas?”
What if that’s not an adult hippo?
“Cas!”
He jerks his gaze from the page only a moment before he passes the outer boundary of plausible deniability. Closing his eyes, he breathes a sigh of relief before smiling in the face of Dean’s hateful glare. “What?”
Dean’s expression dissolves into confusion, eyes darting to the open book curiously. “What were you—”
“The formation of snow crystals requires an atmospheric temperature at or below zero degrees Celsius,” he says, closing the book discreetly. “At this moment, there’s no method available for me to verify the current temperature in the atmosphere anywhere in the world, much less search it for crystalized water, so while probability suggests snow is at this moment somewhere on earth, the only answer possible as to its current location that can be considered entirely true is ‘not here now’.”
Dean blinks slowly.
“Did that answer your question?” he asks politely, surreptitiously shifting his notes to the couch beside him along with the book and covering them with a convenient pillow. “Why are you asking about snow?”
“Because I’m gonna teach you how to make a snow angel,” Dean answers, murderously sincere. “Gotta wait until the snow’s nice and deep though, so when I push you off the roof to make it, you just might survive.”
“You realize,” he says evenly, bracing a foot on the coffee table, “the weather is not my fault. Nor Alicia restricting you to the camp out of concern for your potential lung function.”
“I don’t care,” Dean retorts. “I’ve been here since August and this is the first time it’s been other than ‘cloudy’ and now ‘really wet’. What’s with that?”
“Global warming.”
Dean stares at him. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Not when you continue to give me such obvious opportunities.” Bracing both feet on the coffee table, he sighs and dislikes himself for it. “I was being somewhat truthful, however. Do you want the long version or the short?”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Short.”
“Cataclysmic environmental change.”
“Long.”
“Weather is complicated, and I could spend the next five hundred years explaining how nature maintains a very delicate balance that assures that the entire planet is only rarely plunged into an ice age—”
“Shorter than that.”
He reminds himself that he likes Dean, at least most of the time. “It’s a side effect of living in an Apocalypse.”
“It breaks the weather?” Dean asks, as if it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.
He likes Dean, he reminds himself again. “In your world, do you remember the increase of natural disasters as well as supernatural activity before you defeated Lucifer?” Grudgingly, Dean nods. “Normally, everything in the ecosystem is relatively balanced and can deal with the occasional disaster. Some, if not most of them, might be considered more along the lines of features, not bugs.”
Dean sighs. “Forest fires?”
“As an example, an excellent one,” he says approvingly, which only succeeds in inexplicably making Dean scowl. “Nature changes and adapts to it; that’s its entire function. Change, adapt, exist: the first two are mandatory to carry out the third. However, at this moment, it’s reacting to a series of natural disasters that are—for lack of a better word—not of natural origin and its attention—so to speak—is rather lacking.”
“Even Creation’s falling down on the job,” is Dean’s verdict, looking pensively out the window again with a sigh. “I really wanted to have a snowman contest.”
“A tragedy for the ages.” Dean doesn’t answer that with anything but the ghost of a glare. “Console yourself that when snow does come, it will doubtless be in the form of a blizzard to make up for its tardiness. Possibly a very extended winter will follow.”
“So a new ice age isn’t off the table,” Dean says with gloomy triumph. “Saw that coming a mile away.”
He blinks. “I didn’t say—”
“We lose to Lucifer, we all die immediately; we defeat him, we all die slowly and really fucking cold,” Dean continues as he slumps into the cushions again with a disconsolate expression. “Fighting with sticks and rocks against buffalo or mammoths or whatever as a reward for winning the Apocalypse.”
“Dean,” he tries again. “I don’t think—”
“Live in caves, sleep with one eye open for demons and mammoths,” Dean says, warming to the topic. “Telling our grandkids about the internet and electricity—not that they’ll believe us—”
“Please stop talking,” Castiel interrupts desperately, starting to reach for his translation again (even that may be an improvement on this), and then pauses, considering a world without electricity or running water, which are the only things that makes the human excretory system less than utterly horrifying.
Before his mind’s eye stretches a vast, frozen wasteland dotted with buffalo and mammoths (possibly ridden by demons?), tiny humans running despairingly away with their small spears and rocks and not a single adequate firearm to protect them, huddled around substandard fires in poorly ventilated caves in questionable sanitary conditions, sharing an oral history of skyscrapers and the internet and prime time TV and possibly—and why this didn’t this occur to him before—books.
Who will have time to write them between their desperate fight to survive and running from megafauna? In growing horror, he wonders if their tiny fires are being fed by the collected works of Shakespeare and Catullus and Stephen King. Children may be born, he realizes, who won’t read Harry Potter.
“Better figure out how to kill a mammoth with a rock,” Dean advises him in cheerful despair, head dropping onto the back of the couch and staring up at the ceiling as he heaves yet another sigh. Before he even realizes what he’s doing, Castiel echoes it. “Look on the bright side. Maybe the entire global warming thing ends this in a worldwide desert.”
“Even oversized sandworms excreting recreational substances couldn’t make me high enough to deal with that.” Dean turns his head to give him a vaguely curious look. “Dune, Frank Herbert. They consumed the waste of the native sandworms to achieve—”
“So, we could be eating sandworm shit instead of freezing to death. Thanks, Cas.”
Castiel closes his eyes, but that just means he has no distraction from the image that brings to mind.
“Where are the dice?”
After a protracted search through the kitchen, Dean returns to tumble a worn pair of dice onto the coffee table, giving him an odd look. “You want to play craps?”
“Not really, but it’s preferable to listening to a narrative of our deaths by hypothermia or megafauna.” Castiel pushes the coffee table back enough to place a pillow on the floor and seat himself. Extending the other pillow, he smiles hopefully. “Do you know how to play?”
“Can you?” Dean asks doubtfully as he takes the pillow.
He shrugs. “I know the principles of every form of gambling ever created. It’s not as if it’s particularly complicated.”
“So speaks someone who’s never been to Vegas.” Dean rolls his eyes as he drops the pillow on the floor and sits down. “So, we gonna make this interesting?”
“You mean bet?” he asks, plucking the dice from the coffee table. Dean sighs noisily. “If you wish. What are you willing to lose?”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “You can’t play poker, but you think you can beat me at craps? Really?”
“Do you know what they used to call craps?” Castiel asks, rolling the dice over his palm with a clink of ivory. “’Game of God’.”
“Gambling’s a sin,” Dean intones solemnly. “What kind of angel gambles, Cas?”
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” he quotes, which almost coaxes out a smile before Dean ruthlessly represses the impulse. “It could be applied to all those who condemn pleasure.”
“’Evil to he who evil thinks’?” Dean shrugs, but the smile hovers closer. “Personal motto?”
“Six hundred and sixty-six years of knights pledged to the Order of the Garter can’t be wrong.” He pauses for Dean’s mouth to twitch. “Does that satisfy the definition of irony, I wonder?”
“I’m in.” Dean smirks at him. “You take morning patrol reports, incoming and outgoing, and I get to sleep in.”
“Done,” he agrees. “Pie.”
“What?”
“I want to try pie.” He begins to regret the impulse at Dean’s sudden attention. “Pie has sugar, and it seems to be a very common preference among dessert items, though well below ice cream, from what I understand. However, the lack of available cows is a problem.”
“We could do ice cream.” Dean’s face goes through a series of inexplicable contortions before settling on surprised. “I got a militia and a real lack of standards on how I use them for personal gain. Dude, I can find a cow.”
Considering who he’s talking to, that’s very possible. “You like pie better.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s a feature of your conversation when food is the topic, which you seem to find endlessly fascinating to explore.” He should have just told him ice cream. “I’m curious.”
“Curious.” Dean leans an elbow on the coffee table, far too interested for Castiel’s peace of mind. “Dean never got you any pie?”
“I’ve had pie,” he answers determinedly and Dean’s eyebrows jump. “Just not at a time—you said you wanted me to try and find food I like. Why are you arguing about my choice of stakes?”
“Because pie isn’t a stake; it’s a necessity,” Dean argues, staring at him intently, and he wonders when pie became such a dangerous topic. “Dude, you’re not betting access to pie. You want pie, we’ll get you some fucking pie, no dice required, got it?”
He nods warily. “All right.”
“Good.” Relaxing again, Dean cocks his head. “So stakes?”
“I can’t think of anything else.” Nothing he thinks is appropriate for a casual game of dice between friends who don’t have sex, at least. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“Jesus, okay. Let’s make this interesting.” Dean crosses his arms challengingly. “One time offer, and pay attention, Cas, because no one gets this. One favor—one—of your choice, call it in at any time. How’s that?”
“You’re joking.”
Dean flashes a grin. “I’m really not.”
“You’re serious.” Dean nods. “Anything I want?”
“Anything,” Dean confirms, grin widening. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it. Street rules, single roll, playing for the pass line, shooter on the come out,” he recites, rolling the dice expertly and watching in satisfaction as Dean’s grin fades. “Point is hard six.”
Dean watches him pick up the dice before looking at him. “You’re literally a craps player.”
“What else would I be?” he asks curiously, rolling the dice and watching as they settle on a matched set of three. “As you know, I’m terrible at poker.”
“…pass line and the shooter makes seven on the come out.” Scooping up the four and three, Castiel passes the dice to Dean, who takes them with a blank look. “That’s three favors.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, looking at the dice suspiciously. “It is.”
“Come out is snake eyes on the don’t pass,” Cas says, surveying the dice affectionately before looking at Dean, who scoops up the dice for his second examination. “Six favors.”
Rolling them in his hand, Dean examines them with an expertise not unmixed with desperation before giving him a glare.
Castiel smiles slowly. “Your roll.”
“What. The. Fuck?”
“That’s ten favors,” Castiel confirms, scooping up the five and six from the coffee table. “Do you want to try for eleven?”
“Give me the dice,” Dean demands, almost snatching them from him and rolling them in his hand suspiciously before letting them drop to the table and observing how they fall. “This is bullshit.”
“You’ve checked them three times,” Castiel tells him in amusement, leaning back against the couch. “There’s nothing wrong with the dice.”
“There’s something wrong,” Dean answers hotly, letting them fall again before looking at him accusingly. “You’re cheating.”
“So are you,” he answers, ignoring Dean’s unconvincing show of innocence. “Who do you think taught me to play?” That was a mistake; the green eyes narrow dangerously, and he files away another example of the times that Dean doesn’t want to hear what he learned from his counterpart. Eventually, he hopes to be able to work out for himself which ones are safe to mention and which should be spoken of only under threat of death. Picking up the dice, he says, “Let’s try something else. Tell me what to roll for point.”
Crossing his arms, Dean sits back, looking mutinous. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
He rattles the dice enticingly; gamblers often find it difficult to leave the table, he’s noticed. Especially poker players. “Are you in or not?”
Dean glares at him, but after a second, he nods shortly. “Snake eyes.” Castiel rolls the dice, not bothering to watch how they land in favor of enjoying Dean’s expression darken. “Boxcars.” Another roll, six and six. “Yo.” Five and six, easy. “Give me the goddamn dice.”
“I don’t cheat,” he tells the top of Dean’s head as he examines the dice again. “I don’t need to.”
Dean’s head snaps up.
“Five.” Taking back the dice, he closes his eyes and throws. They tumble in a cheerful clink of ivory across the wood surface before coming to a reluctant stop, the silence broken by Dean’s sharply indrawn breath. Opening his eyes, he meets Dean’s. “Game of God.”
“You’re doing it.” Dean straightens in dawning interest. “Angel thing?”
“Apocalypse thing,” he corrects him. “Though yes, that, too.”
“Okay, so what are you doing? Something to the dice, the table, the—Grace somewhere?” Dean squints at the table as if suspecting it of housing surreptitious Grace for gambling purposes.
“Probability.” Dean blinks, looking confused. “I’m manipulating probability.”
Dean looks between Castiel and the dice in his hand, then the coffee table, before sitting back, a thoughtful look on his face.
“You know,” he says slowly. “I never asked you and I really should have, since you’d know: is luck real?”
“Yes,” he answers positively, extending his hand for the dice. “Hard eight.”
They both watch as the dice rattle lazily across the surface of the coffee table before coming up with two fours. A smile begins to stretch across Dean’s face before he shakes his head and sits back, looking at Castiel.
“Tell me.”
“Gambling is the art of chance, which is—among very limited minds—an explicit denial of the will of God,” he explains to an unexpectedly rapt audience of one. “To call upon luck was thought to be a form of idolatry; to privilege chaos over order, or evil over good, to put it in the simplest and least accurate terms.”
“The more you know,” Dean answers in mock-wonder. “Keep going.”
“Luck is chaos, in a sense; its function is to disrupt order and facilitate change. You might also simply call it random chance. What is living must change or it’s not living; in very broad terms, luck is a part of that. Otherwise humanity would still lack sentience and fear the presence of fire.”
“No pie,” Dean agrees. “So everything’s luck?”
“Everything is subject to chance,” he corrects. “Luck is a part of that, yes, but alone, its effect is generally very small; it’s spread very thin, you might say, which renders it effectively neutral in the short term and simply a part of the progression of Creation in the long term.”
Dean thinks about that. “The more complex something is, the less luck has any effect on it?” Pleased, he nods. “This wouldn’t work on poker, would it? Too much shit going on for luck to work with.”
“Blackjack, perhaps,” he answers, surprised by Dean’s insight. “The simpler the game, the fewer the factors involved, the better it works.”
“Factors. You mean other players, right?” Dean shrugs at Castiel’s start. “Luck influences everything, you said, but you can’t manipulate the luck of everything, right? Or anyone. That’s why I won a few times when we were playing earlier.”
“Or I could have been trying to throw you off.”
“You want to throw me off, don’t do a six play run,” Dean tells him smugly. “It’s just your luck you’re manipulating? Tell me I’m right, I’m on a roll here.”
“You are.” Dean grins widely. “How did you guess?”
“If you could manipulate the luck of the dice—do dice have luck? Never mind, that’s too weird—then you could do it to cards, too, so poker should be easy,” Dean answers. “But you said simple games and mentioned Blackjack. Card game, complicated, but also a game that you can play with only one other person, the dealer. So it’s other people that are the problem. Why?”
Castiel tilts his head. “You tell me.”
“You can win at craps, but you can’t make anyone play against you. Ace-deuce,” Dean answers, meeting his eyes, rolling the dice and almost immediately covering them with his hand. “You can increase the probability of getting what you want when you roll, but you can’t fuck with what I get.” Lifting his hand, he shows Castiel the dice: one and two. “Or how I cheat.”
He thought Dean would understand. “Exactly.”
“Game of God,” Dean agrees in satisfaction. “You said it was an Apocalypse thing and an angel thing; what’d you mean by that? Angels are lucky?”
“Angels have Grace and can effectively manipulate all the forces of Creation,” he answers. “They could manipulate probability easily, but remaking the fabric of reality would be equally easy. Which as you know, they’re not above doing.”
“Stupid question, yeah.” Dean grins ruefully. “Why destroy a mountain by hitting it with a hammer when you’ve got a bomb?”
“I can think of several reasons,” he answers, and Dean’s grin fades into thoughtfulness. “A chisel isn’t nearly as noticeable and could get the job done eventually—immortality and the ability to manipulate time does help with long term projects—but subtlety isn’t a characteristic of angels.”
“Suddenly,” Dean says slowly, “I don’t think all this was just to stop me talking about the weather.”
“It wasn’t. Seven.” Picking up the dice, Castiel rolls them, watching Dean’s expression. “Manipulation of probability. All things being equal—in a scrubbed universe in which the surface of the table, the wear on the dice, and the airflow were constants—the results would still be random because a human threw the dice. All things living embody change, and change requires chaos to exist. Hard eight.” Dean doesn’t bother looking at the dice, green eyes fixed on him. “Angels are chaos incarnate, but we don’t change. Strictly speaking, we may not count as living.”
“Now you’re just fucking with me.”
“I didn’t make the rules, I only enforced them.” Dean rolls his eyes. “Think of it as another form of balance. My Father’s absence unsettled that balance in Heaven, and so it was on Earth, and so it was in Hell. The Apocalypse is the dramatic and impossible to miss—it lacks subtlety. Soft ten.”
“How long,” Dean says, glancing at the dice briefly, “can you keep that up?”
“More importantly, why am I doing it at all? It was useful, but only if I was careful, if I was subtle, because any legitimate casino would have blacklisted us immediately if I wasn’t, drawing attention neither Dean nor I could afford. Street craps is often played with filed dice, so I had to be careful to confine my activities to reputable floating craps games in some truly questionable basements and backrooms. However, when I had Grace, neither of those were applicable. When I had Grace, why did Dean teach me craps so I could manipulate the games well enough to keep us in ammunition, execrable diner food, and remodel Bobby’s kitchen?”
Dean opens his mouth, then hesitates. “You were using a hammer on a mountain. The Host would notice you using Grace, but not luck; it’s too small.”
“Exactly. Boxcars,” he says, watching the dice turn up two sixes. “It’s almost monotonous, isn’t it? Almost as if there’s no random element at all, which is impossible, because angels do in fact count as living. We don’t change because of divine obedience, not because we can’t. I should fail to roll the number I specify, because this game—more than any other—is the application of luck. It’s nothing but chaos. Hard ten.”
Dean stares at the dice: two fives. “Not so small anymore.”
“Very small,” he corrects Dean. “But very dramatic.”
Dean reaches for the dice before he freezes, gazing at Castiel incredulously. “Hold on. Are you predicting how the Apocalypse is fucking with the world with craps?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.” Castiel grins, plucking the dice from under his hand. “Luck is very small, but as it goes, so goes all things.”
“Craps.”
“Weather and natural disasters are all well and good,” he continues, enjoying Dean’s shock. “But you may have noticed we lack a reliable way to track world events with any kind of accuracy. My Grace is in the wards, so I have no access to the whole of Creation itself to do a diagnostic. Manipulation of Creation is inherent to my being, however, and unlike remaking reality or time travel, luck doesn’t require power; it requires I exist.”
“Because angels are lucky, and seriously, you’re predicting the Apocalypse with craps?”
“I thought about using solitaire instead,” he muses. “But it’s very boring.”
“You.…” Dean shakes his head, sitting back again. “Okay, but if angels are lucky, then how can you tell if you’re more lucky?” He makes a face. “Tell me that made sense.”
“Angels are lucky,” he counters. “Mortals are different. Dean—and I understand if the irony kills you, I’m in danger of apoplexy on a daily basis—there’s a reason humans weren’t given access to the forces of Creation in their entirety to exercise your own ability to create. What you would do with it isn’t the question; it’s more what you wouldn’t, and I’m proving that right now. Technicalities on what I am aside, right now luck is being consciously, deliberately manipulated by a mortal on this plane, something that gets the undivided attention from the forces of Creation under normal circumstances, and trust me, I’m not being subtle about it. And yet.”
Dean starts to look alarmed. “What would happen if it noticed? Smite you or something?”
“Nothing so dire. It simply stops letting me do it. When it notices, that is. Soft eight, again, three and five.” He rolls the dice, unsurprised to watch it come up with a three and five. “It will, eventually, cut me off. It just depends on how long it takes it to notice with all the other demands on its time to try and maintain balance.”
“Remember where you used to at least pretend Creation wasn’t alive and had a personality?”
“Remember when craps was a game of chance and not a monotonous exercise in deciding which of eleven numbers I would like to see next?” he asks Dean’s glare. “If it’s any consolation, even I didn’t realize what it meant that I could still do this after I Fell. The first time, I thought I was just very stoned.”
“How’d you find out?” Dean asks, widening his eyes in mock-sincerity. “Strip craps?”
“Who would top. I like to win.” Dean bursts out laughing. “It shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did: everything I retained was random and either so specialized it was of limited practical use or utterly useless even as a clever party trick. And sometimes caused migraines.”
“Or nearly killed you,” Dean points out with grim satisfaction, just in case Castiel might have forgotten. “So let me guess; the longer you can go, the worse it’s getting out there?”
“Short version: yes.”
Dean licks his lips, looking away uncomfortably before meeting Castiel’s eyes. “Even if we stopped it now—right now—the balance thing, that would still be a problem.”
“Creation would balance itself eventually, and you would adapt,” he answers carefully, but the grim resignation in Dean’s eyes hurts to witness. “You’ve watched far too many terrible science fiction movies. You aren’t doomed to rocks and megafauna for another ten thousand years before you reinvent the wheel. Humanity passes points in their development that they can’t easily fall behind, not without a concerted effort. Trust me when I say, humanity has tested this extensively and noticeably failed to do much damage to their long-term development as a species. At very worst, you may have to rediscover Enlightenment and the Romantic period, which yes, does seem cruel, but you might be fortunate enough to get another Mary Shelley, and I’d suffer any number of terribly underthought philosophical concepts for Frankenstein.”
“Gave me nightmares,” Dean says absently, still looking troubled. “Weirdly enough, though, that would be better than some of the alternatives.” He shakes his head, grimness folded away if not forgotten. “So your favor: you want it now or saving it for a rainy day?” He smirks. “Metaphorically speaking.”
Castiel makes himself match Dean’s light tone; it’s the least he can do for him. “I’m not holding you to the stakes, Dean. And it was more than one favor, if I remember correctly.”
“You place your bets, you take your chances,” Dean counters. “I knew something was going on, but I kept playing to figure out how you were doing it. Eleven favors: now or later?”
Castiel opens his mouth to argue, but instead what comes out is, “One favor, and I can tell you now.”
“That’s what I thought.” Dean makes a show of bracing himself. “What is it?”
“I understand this may take time,” he answers carefully. “Since I don’t know all that is required, and you probably do, I’ll accept it being available to me at a later date. There’s no time limit, since I know you’re good for it.”
“Got it; you can wait,” Dean says, nodding with barely leashed impatience. “Now what—”
“—especially since we don’t have any milk, or available cows from which to acquire it.”
“Ice cream.”
“No,” he disagrees. “I want a milkshake.”
“Why—” Dean stops, blinking. “That’s your ‘Winning the Apocalypse’ snack.”
“You remember that?”
“It was a depressing conversation,” Dean answers. “So don’t want to risk not getting it after all?”
“More I want to take advantage of all the aspects of an open favor while I can,” he replies. “This way, I can have you make it. Chocolate, with sprinkles on top.”
Dean stares at him for a long moment, and slowly, one corner of his mouth begins to curve upward. “You got it.”
“I can wait for us to find a convenient cow,” he says, smiling back. “I understand it may be some time, however.”
“Oh ye of little faith. You want a milkshake?” Dean nods firmly. “You get a milkshake. We’ll find a goddamn cow—”
A series of rapid knocks on the doorframe outside interrupts them, and Castiel blinks in surprise when Joseph’s wet head pokes between the shade and the doorway. “Hey. Got a minute”
“Back already?” Dean says in surprise, getting to his feet. They only left three days ago to get the answer from the communities, and Joseph’s sober expression isn’t encouraging. Reaching for the cord to roll up the shade, Dean smiles at them, but Castiel doesn’t miss the look on Dean’s face before he composes it for Joseph’s benefit. “Get in here.”
Disappointment seems like such a small risk until it happens, Castiel reflects as the team comes inside, dripping water all over the immaculately clean floor but thankfully avoiding the rug, which is already becoming dusty due to the rain. It’s not as if he’s not used to it, and so is Dean, but once—just once—he wants not to be.
Please, he thinks to no one at all in the eternity between Dean lowering the shade and turning to face Joseph, it’s not so much to ask. Just this one thing.
“So how’d it go?” Dean asks, gaze flickering over the wet faces of each member of the team before coming back to Joseph.
“Not too bad,” he answers, pushing his wet hair back. “So how’s it going? We miss anything?”
“Joe,” Dean starts in annoyance before he stills, searching Joseph’s face again, and Castiel’s unaware he’s standing up as Dean’s shoulders straighten, eyes narrowing. “You son of a bitch.”
“You owe me this one,” Joseph answers, carefully maintained façade breaking as he gestures to Ana, who drops a thick stack of paper on the coffee table. “All terms were accepted in full, signed by all the mayors and cosigned by the leader of the trade alliance herself, and by the way, Alison of Ichabod sends her regards and looks forward to meeting you.” Joseph’s grin widens at Dean’s expression. “We got ‘em.”
Dean stares at the stack for a minute, then jerks his attention back to Joseph. “Do they have any cows?”
“Herds of them.” Joseph’s voice is almost gloating. “Ask me how many hamburgers we’re getting. Ask.”
“I love hamburgers,” Dean agrees, turning to look at Castiel, green eyes filled with all the light in the world. “But I’m really looking forward to the milk. What about you, Cas?”
Castiel nods blankly.
“Game of God,” he adds smugly before returning his attention to Joseph and Ana. “Okay, details: lose the coats and sit down already. Cas, grab something to write with. Who wants coffee?”