It's the Stars That Lie: October 12
Seven years bad luck.
—Day 70—
Though sitting up on the edge of the bed is exhausting, Dean’s way too happy to care. Today, he got to sit up with a tray in front of him, and there was broth (with almost-meat!), wet bread, and vegetable something but definitely not mush, on a plate. Sure, it wiped him out, but whatever, he sat up and ate actual food, or at least something like food was fed to him because using utensils is still a work in progress, but the point is, he did it.
Giving the IV a long look, he decides that today—right now—he doesn’t care about it, because he’s looking right at the bathroom and in a moment—when he’s less dizzy—he’s gonna be using it as God intended.
“Dean—”
“Shut up.” Dean reaches for the IV line and loops it over his wrist, then looks at Cas until he reluctantly walks over to the pole and kicks off the brake. Dean pulls it closer by its tubing—making Cas twitch and move it the rest of the way, which was the entire goal—before looking up at Cas expectantly. “Okay, operation piss in an actual toilet is a go. Ready?”
“No,” Cas says, frowning down at him. “Not at all.”
“Whatever.” He extends his hand for Cas to help him up, shutting his eyes against the brief vertigo and letting Cas take his weight until his vision clears again and he can focus on the suddenly monumental task of walking a whole ten steps to the bathroom door. From the bed, it seemed a lot shorter.
“Okay,” he tells himself as Cas places his now-constantly-tingling right arm over his shoulder, adding a deep breath for good measure before taking a step and gritting his teeth against another wave of vertigo. Jesus. This is gonna take longer than he thinks his current situation is gonna wait.
“Just a moment,” Cas says, the arm around Dean’s waist tightening, and the fact that he can still feel the floor under his feet is the only way he knows he’s even standing up; it’s like floating, except well, it’s not. Tilting his head to look at Cas, currently maneuvering the IV away from Dean and taking it himself, careful of the tubing, he smiles his approval of preternatural strength, and not just because it’s being used for a greater (Dean’s) good.
The last couple of weeks have confirmed something Dean’s suspected for a while; Cas has really been holding back on what he could do, and it wasn’t just about seeing him fight. Cas said he never lived with anyone before, and Dean’s pretty sure now that wasn’t just the result of Cas’s highly developed misanthropic tendencies, though that probably helped.
There are things you just can’t hide when you live with someone for long, but to give Cas credit, he managed to do it so well it never actually occurred to Dean that what he saw on a daily basis was less important than what he didn’t.
Either the result of necessity in the face of extended illness or sheer, constant exposure, Cas is slipping, and in the most ridiculously mundane ways possible: fumbled glasses never hit the floor (Cas never seems to fumble anything, ever, but he and Vera aren’t blessed with reflexes that may or not possibly break the sound barrier if required), trays of food are never overturned by anyone’s sudden movement (it happens, he’s tired, hospital corners, did he mention tired as fuck?), IV lines are never pulled out by accident or tripped over to and from the bathroom, and Dean’s steadied before he even notices his loss of balance sitting up or standing. More than once, he’s seen Cas move things out of Vera’s way when she’s distracted before she can trip, catch any number of items falling from the bedside table before even gravity has time to notice, and retrieve pens, books, the clipboard, and Vera’s stethoscope before Vera can accidentally sit on them or Dean roll over on them.
That Vera doesn’t notice doesn’t surprise him; Cas is very good at it, probably from years of practice when being around people was obligatory. What surprises him is that he does, and on a guess, he’s supposed to. He’s just on the verge of asking for a deck of cards and seeing how much Cas knows about using all that for evil and profit, or at least some awesome practical jokes because Dean’s exactly that bored and why not?
Maneuver accomplished, Cas shifts Dean’s weight back to the floor before stopping, feet just touching the wood. “Are you going to insist you simply require balance just to prove a point to no one who will actually care?”
Dean scowls at him; he can damn well walk to the bathroom. “Dude—”
“Is the goal to attempt to travel the entire distance into the bathroom—which will inevitably fail, but you may try—or use the bathroom for one of its intended purposes? You’ll only accomplish one of those things. Decide now so Vera can—”
“Don’t say it.” Frowning into the open door, the cool tile beckons temptingly with its lack of invasive instruments and utter horror, he admits Cas may have a point. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do this.”
“Thank you.” The sarcasm is half-hearted at best, Cas’s concentration focused on assessing Dean’s strength—non-existent, as usual—before the IV pole is placed just to the side of the door, tubing carefully maneuvered to easily slide beneath it—he can’t swear to this, but he doesn’t remember the bottom of the door having that much of gap—and he’s carefully left to lean back against the sink by the toilet in semi-casual triumph.
“I will be right outside,” Cas says after a few seconds of Dean staring at him significantly. Some moments aren’t meant to be shared (or even exist, but he’s accepted he’s going to have a lot of moments like that in his immediate future). “Very well, please attempt to avoid falling and concussing yourself before I can stop you.”
Dean smiles brightly. “Get out, Cas.”
With a dubious look at the toilet, Cas turns to the door, closing it deliberately behind him. Dean squints; yeah, that’s definitely a new gap. Dismissing it, he savors his moment of triumph for a moment, then gets down to business, in charity with his scrubs. Hideous teal or not, they definitely make this a lot easier.
Dean’s been hospitalized—wow, a lot—but the advantage of a hospital is that everyone is, for the most part, in the same goddamn position of achieving wellness with the assistance of zero privacy and constant personal humiliation. A cabin in Chitaqua is not a hospital and Vera and Cas are not vaguely medical shaped persons of indeterminate identity who he’ll never see again.
On the other hand, Vera is a medical professional and she knows how to turn on the faceless thing well enough that he can deal, given an hour to get over the horror of someone that hot having seen pretty much every inch of his body in the shittiest circumstances possible. Cas, while not a medical professional and—from Dean’s observation—intimately interested in and acquainted with human bodies in almost surreally complicated maneuvers in the interests of orgasms, still lacks even the most rudimentary understanding of self-consciousness; embarrassment doesn’t even register.
More importantly, unless it’s brought to his attention via a lot of explanation, he doesn’t even notice it in other people. It can be comforting—oblivious to Dean’s discomfort when Vera’s examining him—or utterly beyond horrifying—carrying on a one-sided conversation with Dean from the doorway (and dear God it took a long time to get him that far away) as Vera does a catheter removal interspersed with questions to her about the process that will haunt Dean’s nightmares—-but it’s the kind of rock-solid consistency that he really thinks he needs more of in his life.
Cas sees no reason why he shouldn’t be in the bathroom for Dean’s historic moment, but once Dean explained—using way more words than he should’ve needed—he agreed to it with the same faint bewilderment at the weirdness of humanity that Dean remembers from a certain newly-vesseled angel. Some things never change.
Slowly, taking his time to savor the moment (and not fall the fuck over), Dean turns to the sink, reaching for the faucet to wash his hands. Glancing up at the mirror, time seems to stop, and something in Dean’s mind snaps with an audible crack, like a twig breaking in a quiet forest, or maybe, just maybe, the world really ended after all.
“…Dean,” Cas is saying urgently, and he stares up at the wide blue eyes—worry, he thinks distantly, terror, what?—but when Cas touches his face, trying to get his attention, Dean flinches hard enough to knock his head against the wall with an audible thump like a splitting watermelon. Cas freezes. “Dean?”
Blinking, he stares over Cas’s shoulder at the mirror, now innocently reflecting the ceiling and the far wall, and tries to figure out how to put this. He really should have asked—that fever, it was high, right, so maybe he—this is Cas, and he said he can’t resurrect him again, but what if he tried and— “Am I dead?”
“What?” Cas’s gaze follows his to the mirror in bewilderment before returning, color draining from his face. Before he can get away—he’s flat against a fucking wall, where he’s going to go?—Cas rests a hand on Deans’ forehead that he can feel is shaking. “Is the fever—”
“I saw—” Dean swallows—everything’s in slow motion and weird and right now, he…doesn’t know. Looking down, he shoves up the sleeve the long sleeve t-shirt he wears under the scrub top and stares at his own arm under the bright, harsh bathroom lights, noticing for the first time how thin it is, bones pushing insistently beneath papery yellow skin broken in peeled patches of dead white like they’ll break through at any moment—how did he miss that? He thought the scrubs were just stupidly huge, but maybe he’s just—he stares at the bandage covering his forearm and looping over his wrist and palm, peeling skin around the edges in curls of pus-white, and it doesn’t hurt, it should hurt why doesn’t it hurt? “What happened to me?”
“Dean,” Cas says softly, fingers pushing Dean’s head up, blue eyes searching his face intently. “What’s wrong?”
“I—in the mirror—” Reaching up, he touches his forehead, sliding up to feel the stubble—his hair, what happened, when did that happen—drawing his fingers down clammy skin, trying to find what he saw in the mirror. Sunken cheeks, skin stretched too tightly over bare bone, hollowed out eyes ringed in thick circles of rotting black, patches of peeling yellow and white skin broken with shocks of angry red, smears of green and dots of purple, fleshless lips stretched to splitting over teeth—it had taken a full minute to realize he was looking at himself. It looked dead—it looked dead, days dead, just starting to rot but not bright enough to know it was supposed to stop walking, stop breathing, stop living. “Cas, did you—the fever, did you do something when—did I really recover or—”
“Did I resurrect you as a zombie?” Cas interrupts, so transparently incredulous that Dean snaps back into the room with an almost physical jolt, like he sat down hard enough to jar him to his bones. Which, he realizes abruptly, he probably did; he’s sitting on the floor, right. He doesn’t remember how that happened. “I—no,” he seems to decide. “I lacked the necessary components, such as knowledge, and unfortunately I still possessed sanity, such as it is. Being subject to the constraints of reality was also a problem.”
Dean nods, licking his lips and winces, flashing on that fleshless mouth grinning at him from the mirror. He doesn’t even realize he’s staring at the mirror again until Cas turns to look at it, studying it for a few long minutes.
“Oh,” he says, sitting back on his heels abruptly. “Your appearance surprised you?”
There’s not a word in the English language that could be less appropriate than ‘surprised’. “Yeah, a little.”
Cas glances at the mirror again with an expression Dean can’t interpret, then shifts off his knees, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Vera attempted many different treatments before we found one that worked,” he says, watching Dean intently. “There were side effects from those as well as the fever. Vera said that you would find it much less disturbing to not wake up to seeing your hair begin to fall out, and in any case, I assumed even if it was not total, you would find the patches—” he pauses, obviously searching for the right word, “—annoying and wish to shave it yourself for—aesthetic purposes until it began to grow again. I dealt with the problem so it wouldn’t be a source of stress.”
“Right.” He actually doesn’t know how he would have reacted to seeing that. Survey says: really fucking badly. “Okay, and—”
“You’ve lost almost fifty pounds since the fever began,” Cas continues, watching him. “Your current diet hasn’t been sufficient to do much more than keep your weight static, and you’re still dangerously underweight. Currently, your skin is also recovering from the side effects of the combination of medications and the fever itself, and in case you aren’t aware of this, you haven’t been exposed to direct sunlight since you arrived here. It is temporary, though I can see how you might find it disconcerting.” He pauses, blue eyes widening. “Your body did something unexpected and it upset you because you didn’t know what it was doing or why it was doing it.”
And he looks dead, but Cas’s sudden comprehension reminds him that once upon a time, Cas’s body wasn’t just new to him but new to him. When it started acting human and he—still wasn’t. When he had to figure out what to do with it.
“I apologize,” Cas says, looking away with a frown. “I should have realized what you would experience when you saw yourself.”
“S’okay,” he answers. “Well, you not noticing I look like a corpse—”
“You don’t,” Cas interrupts, looking at him in surprise. “In addition to weight, muscle tone was also lost and your current low level of activity contributes to its slow return. Dean, as the one who is primarily responsible for your daily care, I can assure you, the changes are both temporary and largely cosmetic.”
He nods slowly; even knowing that, knowing it was probably shock, the image of the thing in the mirror won’t get out of his head. “It doesn’t—bother you,” he tries, not sure what he’s asking. He’s been out of it enough to ignore what couldn’t be helped—sponge baths, his mind offers in belated horror—but he didn’t have any idea what it was Cas and Vera were looking at, touching, dealing with day in and day out. Honest to God, he’s never been that fucking hung up on how he looks, not like this.
“You look—” Cas pauses. “You look as if you survived a fever that almost killed you. You look like you woke up and knew who you were and where you were. You knew who I was and who Vera was and then you fell asleep. You look like you woke up again and you still knew those things. Every day, you do these things, and when you have a fever, it goes away, and when you fall asleep, you keep waking up.” Cas’s voice cracks. “You couldn’t look any better than you do right now.”
Dean wonders if near-fatal illness is the new drunken confession time.
“Yeah, okay.” After a second, he says, not looking at Cas, “Uh, you know, I—haven’t said—told you, I mean.” Rolling his eyes at himself, he forces out the words. “I get how much this—doing all this—you shouldn’t have to. That wasn’t part of—” Their agreement, which is looking a lot worse from Cas’s side these days. Like, even worse than it did before.
“I have no idea what you—” Cas sighs, looking annoyed, but at least that lost look vanishes. “I understand human discomfort with forcible intimacy due to medical necessity, as Vera explained it to me very thoroughly.” Oh God, he’s glad he missed that conversation. “If you were in a hospital, it would be—” He obviously has no context for it, so he gestures vaguely to convey what Dean assumes is ‘however you feel that is strange to me’, “—different. But to remind you, I formed your body from its DNA and that was crumbling bones and some mortifying flesh.”
Dean stares at him. “Jesus.”
“As I was saying,” he continues, eyes narrowing, “I know it very well. In a sense, other than yourself, of course, I’m best qualified to care for it, and I—” He pauses again, obviously trying very hard to be sensitive or something, which is kind of disturbing. “Other than yourself, of course, I have the most right to be chosen to do so. Why you would think otherwise is—” His expression conveys how weird humans are about shit like this and that he’s getting tired of it, so stop already. “I suppose your illness makes it difficult to understand.”
“Yeah, that would be the reason. Don’t know what I was thinking.” The sarcasm’s totally wasted; Cas just nods, pleased, like Dean’s said something unexpectedly reasonable. He’d put this up to Cas trying—-very weirdly—to make him feel better, but exposure apparently does wonders for his Cas to English. In a way, he kind of gets how Cas sees it; he supposes if he was having this hideously embarrassing conversation with Sam—with Sam feeling like Dean does right now—he’d be pretty much trying to say something like this, and he probably wouldn’t be doing much better. Without, admittedly, any reference to being resurrected from his DNA or his goddamn bones and mortifying flesh, Christ.
“I’m saying thanks,” he decides. “Now can we—”
“Get out of here? Yes, please.” Cas liquidly shifts to a crouch—what does he do with his bones when he does that, anyway?—then hesitates, glancing at him warily, and yeah, that flinch. Making a monumental effort, he hooks one nearly boneless arm over Cas’s shoulder and waits for Cas to ease them both to their feet, content to let him handle the logistics. What’s the use of having an ex-angel with residual superpowers if not to use them for personal gain, like moving?
“Jesus, what the hell happened,” he wonders, forcing his eyes away from the gleam of the mirror on their way to the door. “Bathroom, just wanted to piss in a goddamn toilet.”
Cas doesn’t comment, helping Dean back into bed, fussily arranging his IV—no heart monitor or other things to worry about these days, Dean realizes with a flicker of remembered pleasure—and waiting for him to finish his glass of water and take his medicine, and it’s almost like it didn’t happen at all. Dean’s drifting a little as Cas excuses himself, and sleep is just on the horizon when he comes bolt upright, startled awake by the sound of something shattering.
Dean stares at the bathroom door, utterly floored, as Cas comes back out, checking himself when he sees Dean staring at him incredulously and belatedly trying to hide his bleeding hand. “Dean. I thought—”
“What the—” Okay, fuck that. “Come here. Wait, get the first aid kit and then come here. Now.”
Cas sighs, going back into the bathroom before emerging again with the kit. When he reaches the bed, Dean has all the energy he needs to jerk Cas down on the bed.
“Dean—” Cas says in alarm, righting himself in a disorienting blur of speed ending with soft landing in the middle of the bed, barely even bouncing the mattress as he settles to give Dean a scowl, and Dean takes a moment to appreciate watching Cas do that; it’s just cool. Then he leaves it for later, because Cas is trying to hide his hand.
“Did you just—Cas, I saw your hand, stop it. Let me see it.” Looking even more annoyed, Cas extends his hand, and Dean jerks it closer in malice aforethought to get a better look. Taking in the split skin over the first and second knuckles, the rest reddening with the promise of serious bruising in the near future, Dean checks carefully for slivers of glass before, satisfied, he glares at Cas. “What the hell was that about? Did you break the goddamn mirror?”
“I never liked mirrors,” Cas starts.
“Except to shave and you know, not cut your throat,” he says incredulously, pulling the kit closer and unpacking it on the bed between them. “What the hell—”
“Every time you go in there, you would’ve either avoided looking in the mirror or forced yourself to look at it and remembered this,” Cas says. “Now you won’t have to.”
Every once in a while, Cas does shit like this, startling him so badly he can’t even get around to working out a way to deny it.
“Seven years bad luck.” Cas rolls his eyes; yeah, right, look at his life to date. Doing a quick clean and bandage, Dean almost decides they’ve hit their limit on how many times Cas misses the concept of ‘awkward’ in conversations for the day, but the way he said that…. “You don’t like mirrors.”
“No.”
“What do you see?”
Cas meets his eyes. “Exactly what’s there.”
Swallowing, he thinks of a tiny barn in the middle of nowhere, shadows of something incomprehensibly huge stretching across the walls, contained by a being who defined the impossible. He wonders, really wonders, how often over the years Cas stood there and stared into that goddamn mirror, penance or punishment or masochism or hell, all three, looking at what was missing, and honestly, he’s glad he gave Cas a reason to get rid of the fucking thing.
“So how’s it going with the camp and everything?” he asks quickly, belatedly letting Cas take his hand back. “Anything new to report?”
Cas raises an eyebrow, a hint of incredulity wiping the blank expression away. “You mean among those that survived after I drew a blood circle to resurrect you as a zombie and used their lives as the sacrifice to whatever god was still available, of which there are none?”
That’s his fucked-up angel; there’s always time for sarcasm. “Get me some water and we’ll start there.”
Dean’s found exploiting Cas’s level of comfort a distinct advantage post-fever; he won’t mention Dean looks tired as long as he’s comfortable, and that chair is a fuckload less comfortable than getting half a mattress to lounge on.
“Joseph’s team returned earlier today,” Cas says, leaning an elbow on his knee, pillow conveniently in reach to pull out for lounging purposes at any moment; Dean now makes sure of it. “He turned in his preliminary report before he went to bed, but he’s supposed to report tomorrow after he and his team have slept.”
“In a hurry to get back, huh?” Dean asks, finishing his water in quiet triumph. “Sounds good.”
“We had more than Joseph expected in the accounts, and he was also able to use all of what we offered in trade, so apparently we saved money we can use for later bribery purposes.”
Dean snorts. “I like to think of it as embracing the spirit of giving.”
“Then I suppose the use of blackmail at the eastern checkpoint should be considered embracing silence in the spirit of kindness?” Cas asks curiously.
He reaches for his glass of water and takes a drink. “Do I want to know?”
“It’s one of the few sexual acts I’ve never been remotely tempted to try or even know existed. Fortunately, Joseph didn’t feel the need to tell me how we found out.”
“That would be no.” Cas nods in relief. “So what did we use and what did we get?”
“Twenty M16A2 rifles, thirty M-24, and fifteen M-4 carbines from the military supplies we acquired. Ammunition, of course, and several boxes of grenades, as well as a small amount of the C4, though Ana insists we keep the rest of it for our own use, which I assume means we have a use for it.”
“You said she was an explosives expert in the Marines, right?” Cas nods. “Ours is not to question why. Ours is to keep the woman who likes to blow things up happy.”
“That was my feeling as well.”
Dean frowns. “We kept some for ourselves, right?”
“Yes, of course,” Cas answers with a snort. “Two teams were assigned to continue inventory of the military outposts and move their supplies here, but as yet, we have yet to complete those in Kansas City alone. Two of the cabins were repaired enough to act as storage, but we’ll need another one soon at this rate of acquisition.”
“Cas, you ask yourself why the border guards—who are pretty well armed from what I understand—need weapons?”
“They trade them on the black market as well as to those in the infected zones for exorbitant prices; it’s very lucrative from what I understand, and some of what we acquired isn’t available anywhere else. If you’re worried whether it will be traced to us here, don’t be; the border is under military rule, and any border guard discovered dealing any supplies to those within an infected state for any reason, especially arms, is shot on sight.”
Dean swallows, not sure if he wishes that were a surprise. “And they still think it’s worth the risk.”
“They make the people in infected zones pay exorbitant prices for seeds to grow food, gasoline to run their vehicles and generators, antibiotics to heal infections and illnesses, and water purification supplies when their water supply is limited to rivers and lakes,” Cas answers evenly. “Love of money is the root of many evils, as I’m sure you know, not least what people will choose to become in their pursuit of it. They’ve become experts in concealing their activities when utilizing the black market to their personal benefit, provided we make it worth their while, and we do.”
Yeah, still not surprised. “What about contacting Dean’s old dealers?”
“Nothing has resulted from our initial inquiries, but Joseph didn’t expect any answer for at least a few months due to the number of channels being utilized,” Cas answers, voice losing that chilling edge; only Cas, Dean reflects, can convey so much condemnation in so few words. “We were able to get the current passcodes for all the border checkpoints currently in the United States and on both the Mexican and Canadian borders, as well as all the border patrol routes. They are subject to random change as well every time the border guards are reassigned, but we are guaranteed accurate updates for the next four months, which is when the next change of personnel is scheduled.”
“Holy shit.” He only asked for the Kansas ones. “Tell Joe nice job.”
“The border guards, I assume, have never heard that there are some things money, or sufficient carbines, can’t buy,” Cas says with the ghost of a smile. “As you requested, we now have an updated list of the infected zones in the United States, both the fictional public version and the actual list, and the current commonly used routes between the infected and non-infected states used by those companies with authorization to deliver goods. The worldwide data on the spread of Croatoan is pending, since international information is difficult to obtain, which I assume means they’ll tell us what they want in return for that information at the next scheduled meeting. The other information you requested is also available, but Joseph’s preliminary report was only a summary for me to give to you. When we meet with him tomorrow, you can ask him for the specifics.”
Dean opens his mouth and forgets the question when he catches the pronoun. “We?”
“Yes, he’s coming tomorrow afternoon to give his report to you in person, though I’ll be in attendance of course,” Cas says casually. “Vera said the risk is very low provided the meeting is short in deference to your strength and Joseph takes the appropriate precautions. I explained them to him before he went to bed, and Vera will examine him before he’s allowed in the room.”
Dean thinks of the mirror again with a start of horror. “I don’t think—”
“He needs to see you,” Cas interrupts, something flickering across his face that Dean doesn’t quite catch. “He needs to see you alive and breathing and hear you speak to him and know you’re getting better. They all do, but Joseph’s visit will reassure them—”
“Who?” he asks blankly.
“The camp,” Cas answers, like he’s wondering about Dean’s sanity. “Your soldiers. Those who lived on the porch for two weeks and only with an effort could Vera and I assure them you were well enough that they could leave. There was praying and singing, I’m sure I told you about that. Your entire fever had a soundtrack of morbid hymns, depressing a capella secular music in the key of tone deaf as well as rhythm absent and volume excessive, and terrible drinking songs during frequent periods of mass inebriation, listening to which I’m certain deserves its own circle of Hell.”
“You were serious about that.” Dean tries and fails to think of something to say to that other than apologize for humanity not being up to the standards of an angelic choir. “Did Joe really threaten to kidnap a doctor?”
“Oh yes,” Cas answers easily, starting to look amused. “Once I had to threaten to chain him to his own kitchen sink and tell him his grandmother would be terribly disappointed in his behavior.”
Right. “Were he and Dean—”
“No,” Cas interrupts, amusement fading into seriousness. “They weren’t.”
Oh. “He wants to see me.”
“Almost as much as I did and still do waiting for you to wake up,” Cas tells him. “Anything else or will you attempt to hide beneath the covers when he arrives?”
“I could order him not to come.” Cas rolls his eyes, and he wonders why he’s even trying. “Fine, whatever. When’s the next meeting with the border?”
Cas’s expression tells him he didn’t miss the change of subject. “In a month.” He hesitates, looking—Dean’s not sure what that look means. “I thought it might be advisable to stay in closer contact to more quickly receive information on recent events, so Joseph will continue meeting with them regularly once a month.”
So this is what it looks like when Cas decides to try something new. “Good so far. Anything else?”
“We’re both also still one and two on the current FBI Most Wanted List and the militia is still listed on the terrorist watch list, though as of two weeks ago we’re located in Georgia. So we still can’t board any flight on the continental United States, assuming air travel wasn’t currently banned throughout most of the world.”
“Tell me I’m number one.”
Cas’s mouth twitches. “You are, but only because Dean was actually seen trafficking weapons on the Texas border while I had the sense to stay hidden.” Looking satisfied, he adds, “Half of the currently occupied cabins are now up to standard for electricity and plumbing, the generators in the garage repaired and in use, and three quarters of Chitaqua has been mowed, so the fire hazard is all but eliminated.”
Dean nods and carefully avoids thinking that one, Cas is probably being literal, and Chitaqua has a lot of fucking lawn. “Awesome.”
Cas hesitates for a long moment. “Amanda wished to talk to me in private today.”
Dean reminds himself firmly this is his camp and being sick, this is the only way to get to know his people. “Anything new?”
“She thinks she knows who is spending their nights with Kyle. She’s narrowed it down to three people, and she has a theory on why one of them is the most likely.”
Dean leans forward. “Who?”
“You’re aware Kyle is very argumentative on patrol assignments since Cynthia was injured and I replaced her with James? He thinks he should have been consulted on the composition of his team and that I’m overstepping my authority, or so he tells anyone who will listen to him expound on the subject, at length. Excluding me, of course.”
“Of course.” Dean files that away for future thought. “Keep going.”
“You told me the first time you arrived here, you were the subject of an altercation with Risa regarding—”
“Jane, yeah, I—wait. No way.” Dean stares at him. “You’re fucking with me.”
Cas closes his eyes. “They’re apparently finding consolation for our cruelty to them with each other.”
“Oh God,” Dean says, appalled, before forcing himself to get back to the subject. “So what’s going on with Andy and Kat?”