It's the Stars That Lie: October 28
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—Day 86—
You thought I was being paranoid,” Vera says over her shoulder as Dean squeezes the tennis ball to an internal beat of triumph and watches the IV finally—finally—roll out of the room for good, to be taken to the infirmary by Joe and Kamal and used by actually sick people and not just really goddamn tired ones who may have the occasional fever or three.
He’s been off the IV for over a week while Vera carefully tracked his progress, and her notes show that he’s finally starting to gain weight, which sadly enough, can be directly attributed to his current personal chef.
(Cas may have a shitty relationship with food, but at least when he cooks, it’s edible; the mess seems to have some kind of sadomasochistic relationship with it even when Zack’s not in charge, and the food inevitably loses.)
“You get that a month ago, you were trying to exorcise me? With my own knife?” she asks from the doorway, crossing her arms, eyes fixed on the ball. Feeling stupidly optimistic—must be a day ending in ‘y’—he tosses it and is almost as surprised as Vera when he catches it, fingers closing loosely over the rough surface.
Squeezing it—still not his best work, but he’s getting there—he grins at her. “You really gotta get over that.”
Through means that Dean assumes are using camp resources for personal gain—or Dean’s gain—he not only has several sizes of balls of various types and levels of firmness, he also has clothes that actually almost fit. Chuck brought them by this afternoon, spoils (he assumes) of the Kansas suburbs (he’s gotta find the “Supply Dean with clothes” supply run report), freshly washed and after looking them over, Dean piled them up on the foot of the bed for Cas to deal with when he gets home, mostly because he’s still not sure where to put them, the closet being an armory and everything.
While he’s glad to have jeans that (nearly) fit again and therefore freedom from sweatpants for daily wear (not looking at the size helps, because sometimes, you just don’t wanna confirm how much of your body mass is missing), he’s kinda gotten used to being offered one of Cas’s eclectic collection of t-shirts, the ones that Dean didn’t even know existed until Cas pulled out one of the many boxes from the weapons closet last week.
“They were mine,” Cas told him so casually at Dean’s question that he immediately added that to his mental list of Things About Cas Before Chitaqua. “Dean advised that I alter my wardrobe to more easily blend into the population when I went on jobs.”
Taking each painstakingly folded shirt, Cas shook it out with an abstracted air at odds with the careful way he laid them on the bed, and Dean watched, fascinated, at the emergence of a collection unlike anything he would have expected.
Rammstein, so much not a surprise: Alice in Chains, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails, he could have called that one sight unseen (probably his preferred soundtrack when shooting up; God knows a few hours of that and Dean would be doing it from self-defense): Queen, Radiohead, and Dave Matthews Band, really, Cas?: Grateful Dead, of course: Metallica, hell, yes: ‘N Sync, holy shit, didn’t see that coming. Several movies also made the cut, along with a couple of State Fairs, half a dozen theme parks, a Star Trek convention (Spock, of course), and no less than two separate Sea Worlds, Atlanta and San Antonio.
Picking idly at the hem of his current daywear (Breaking Benjamin), he wonders idly if one of those boxes has the music to back some of those shirts; on a guess, he’s going with yes. Eclectic, yes (this is Cas) but random it’s not, packed up in a box—out of sight, out of mind—and barely worn more than a few times. Cas currently wanders around in three to pack former Wal-Mart specials in black and grey, army surplus, and sixties-era guru wear in all the wrong sizes: faded, tears neatly stitched when needed, with old bloodstains and bleach marks, scrupulously clean, but obviously used at random.
It’s almost like a before and after, maybe an exploration and interest brought to a sudden halt. Because no one sane—even Cas—would think a grown man in a ‘N Sync t-shirt blends with anything, anywhere, ever.
“Well,” Vera says as she comes back, interrupting his thoughts, and checking the room with a discerning eye for stray medical paraphernalia, “I think we can safely say that if you’re not stupid, you’re past the danger of relapse and might even survive a hangnail. Congratulations.”
“And the fevers?”
She grimaces. “Yeah, I don’t know. The frequency’s dropped, and you’re recovering from them faster each time, so—immune system, who knows. If I were guessing—and I am—it might be chronic.”
“You mean the rest of my life I’m gonna be getting these?” He really doesn’t want to think about that, but considering the prognosis at one point was ‘will die in the next five seconds’, he’s really gotta think positive here.
“Maybe?” She shakes her head at his expression. “Look, brownie infections are weird anyway. Yours is pretty much the worst possible iteration without being dead, and it was a close thing. From here out, this is learn as we go.” Before he can respond, she adds, “Your bloodwork is still sketchy, so I’m putting you on a steroid and antibiotic for the next month to avoid unexpected pneumonia, though your lungs seem fine, so don’t worry about it.”
“Right,” Dean answers blankly. “Pneumonia?”
“It’s mostly precautionary, since your immune system is still getting over the brownie infection and it’s still—but other than that…give it a couple of months and no one would know you spent two weeks doing your damndest to die.” She abruptly drops onto the foot of the bed, spilling the pile of clothes onto the floor and staring down with an unsettlingly blank expression. “Like it didn’t even happen.”
“Vera?”
“A month ago, we were—” Her voice cuts off, shoulders hunching defensively. “I haven’t practiced medicine regularly in over three years, and the only people who knew I used to were Cas and Jeremy. I had to remember things I didn’t even know I’d learned, and it wasn’t enough.” Her head snaps up, eyes dark. “I’m not sure you understand this; you didn’t just almost die, Dean. You started almost dying from the get-go and kept it up for two weeks. I did my time in the ER and intensive care on forty hour shifts, and that was nothing compared to this. I’m not a real doctor, and he thought I could—” She shuts her eyes, hands starting to shake. “Nothing I tried even slowed it down. Your heart stopped twice, and the second time….I never—I couldn’t even—even figure out what the hell was happening to you!”
“Vera—”
“Brain damage was a given, okay, and I couldn’t even be sure you’d wake up again long enough to know you’d lost half your cognitive functions or stay a goddamn vegetable, but you know what?” She opens her eyes, and to his horror, he thinks she’s about to cry. “You woke up like you hadn’t spent two fucking weeks frying your own goddamn brain. Which, whatever, your brain had no idea either. I ran you through all the tests I knew that didn’t require an MRI and—well, maybe you’re crazy, but not like we’d know the difference.”
“It wasn’t you, Vera.”
“Yeah, you’re damn right it wasn’t me—I have no fucking clue how you—”
“It wasn’t your fault, Christ!” Where the fuck is Cas? He needs reinforcements five minutes ago. “Vera, you saved my life.” She opens her mouth, but he just manages to get in first. “Sorry I made it hard for you.”
“You’re sorry—”
“I mean, not like anyone saw death by fucking brownie coming,” he continues doggedly. “It’s not usually that dramatic, I get that.”
She stares at him for a long moment, hostility slowly draining away.
“No,” she says finally. “You’re special like that.”
“You have no idea.” After a second, he adds, “Really, thanks. For someone who hasn’t practiced for a few years—”
“I kept my hand in.” Dean can’t figure out what she’s thinking right now. “You know—well, you don’t, probably. Cas wouldn’t go to the camp doctor after what happened when he broke his foot.”
He straightens so fast he sees spots from the head rush. “What?”
“Darryl—he really didn’t take the not-quite-human thing well.” She shrugs, not looking at him. “He—”
“He wouldn’t treat him.” Jesus Christ, he hopes to God that this Dean was just a shitty leader who didn’t know what was going on in his own goddamn camp. The alternative is so much worse. “You took care of it?”
“Setting the bones? No sweat, I could do it in my sleep. Didn’t even have to worry about infection, just made sure he stayed down until they were healed.” She hesitates, chewing her lip uncomfortably before adding, “Cas didn’t want you to know. Darryl was the only doctor we had, and he didn’t think—”
“Yeah, I get it.” If he wouldn’t tell this Dean about his lieutenants trying to kill him, a little medical prejudice wouldn’t even make the fucking radar.
She nods before looking up, expression wary. “I told him I wouldn’t tell you if he promised to tell me every time he was injured and let me treat him. First time he didn’t—or I even thought he didn’t—I went to you and told you everything. With the records to prove it.”
“That worked?”
She meets his eyes with a flicker of humor. “Let’s put it this way; he never risked testing me on that.”
Dean hears the second reason loud and clear: so that’s why Vera was around for Cas’s experiments in better living through chemistry. Talk about the gold standard for blackmail for a good cause, and documented, even: he needs to see those goddamn records.
“So I really owe you here.” She blinks in surprise. “Why would Darryl—okay, this is ridiculous, Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with people?”
Vera’s eyes widen. “What the hell happened to you in Kansas City?”
He stares back at her; there’s no way anyone sane would make the leap, but he suddenly, viscerally gets what Cas was afraid of, why he wouldn’t even risk anyone being here during the fever who might see the physical difference. They might not—probably couldn’t—come to the right conclusion, but there are a lot of dangerously wrong ones they could think of, too.
“Sorry, I—” She sits back, staring at her hands as if she’s never seen them before. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry, that’s really not my business.”
“It’s okay.” Dean dials down from outright panic, trying to think what would happen if everyone found out—then stops and revises it into what would happen if she found out. The risk she wouldn’t believe him, that she would, that she’d let it slip to someone, anyone, even by accident, in this camp. A camp where paranoia is reflexive, a fucking doctor refused to treat Cas, and there were (are?) people who called Cas Lucifer’s brother and at least one tried to put a bullet in his head because of it.
She trusts Cas, and he knows Cas trusts her, but this isn’t about trust, it’s about this fucking world and what they risk every time they go outside of Chitaqua’s wards. In the back of his mind, he thinks of Chuck: Leave with you if he had to? Kill us to do it? Yeah, he would. He wouldn’t like it, but it wouldn’t slow him down. It’s not like he didn’t believe it in theory, but that assumes Cas would want to survive having to do it, or even be able to. When he was an angel, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered or even been applicable, he could do it and never count the cost, but now….
“You don’t have any reason to trust me,” he says finally. “Or like me, I get that. You still saved my life. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that.”
“I have reasons to hate your guts,” Vera says flatly, and no, it wasn’t just about Debra. It was about the kind of man who ran a camp where Croat wasn’t the only way to get a death sentence by bullet, and what he knows is probably only the tip of the iceberg in what he doesn’t.
“I know, and I’m not trying to—”
“Bullshit, you’re trying your damnedest,” she says acidly. “Talk about not being subtle, you could take prize in it.”
“Look—”
“Why, who the hell knows; the ways of Dean Winchester are ineffable,” she continues brittlely. “The thing is, when you’re not trying, it’s the same. I can’t even tell the difference anymore.”
Dean swallows. “People change.”
“It seems to be a theme with you these days,” she answers. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“It could be the entire saving my life thing,” he tries warily. “You know, once you save a life, whatever.”
She’s quiet for a long moment before looking up, brown eyes thoughtful. “It could be,” she admits. “I hope not, though. I’m okay with not hating you anymore.”
He wonders if he’s supposed to respond to that.
“I came here to fight, any way I could,” she says. “I didn’t think we could win, but I had to try, you know? World ending, no way to stop it, but it—it was—”
“Worth fighting for.”
“Yeah.” She searches his face. “Do you think we can win?”
“I know we haven’t lost yet.”
Vera nods, eyebrows drawing together like she’s trying to stare directly into his mind. “Okay.” He’s still wondering what the hell is going on when she nods as if to herself, abruptly getting to her feet. “Thought I’d get that out of the way. So, where were we?”
“You don’t hate me anymore?” It’s pretty much all he’s got.
“Yeah, and you’re clear of the infection,” she agrees, crossing her arms with a smile that this time reaches her eyes. “You’re out of danger. Now comes the hard part.”
Dean tries and fails to follow. “What?”
“Recovery.” Her smile widens in cheerful malice. “Let’s talk about how we’re getting you back to normal.”
“…and daily walks, supervised,” Dean finishes in outrage, waiting for Cas to fake a little sympathy as he finishes with the dinner dishes. It hasn’t happened yet, but hope springs eternal or something. “Did you see the size of the pills in the new and improved treatment regime?”
“I’m not that masochistic,” Cas answers, smart enough to hide his smile with a closing cabinet door before turning around. “Apparently, while under normal circumstances I’m a terrible cook, my abilities right now suit your current diet, since blandness and tastelessness are desirable qualities where you’re concerned.”
He’s gotta admit it; it may not be even diner quality, but he can keep it down easily. It helps, oddly enough, that he’s also sitting at the table to eat off a plate and not poking himself with his own fork while the bed springs whine a nerve-jangling soundtrack to his failure. He’s gotta admit, as motivation to teach your left hand to do things, repeatedly stabbing yourself in the gums does the job just fine. “It’s like your own personal superpower or something.”
Cas just smiles at him and wipes his hands meticulously on a dishtowel—they own those now, who saw that coming?—before his eyes flicker to the front doorway for a deliberate moment and dart back to Dean. It’s so transparently an elaborate performance of how to act suspiciously that he’s gotta be doing it deliberately. It’s also impressive as hell; he’s even got the ‘not meeting his eyes’ and cryptic amusement down pat while dithering over which order to stack two identical plates in the cabinet.
“Perhaps you should rest in the living room,” he says casually after finally being satisfied that his arrangement is the best possible.
Finishing his water, Dean tries to decide if he wants to play: why not? “I’m a little tired, fever and all. Maybe tomorrow?”
“I can make coffee,” Cas offers, not missing a beat and already turning toward the pantry. “If you have no objections.”
“Maybe a cup,” Dean concedes after a long pause, getting to his feet with his best yawn—he even adds a protracted stretch just for the fuck of it—and pretends not to see Cas roll his eyes.
Wandering to the couch, Dean notes the sudden absence of the box of reports (one of two, he recently discovered, to his horror) and sighs deeply, not entirely for Cas’s benefit. Getting better has some drawbacks, as it turns out; the more he gets to do, the more he notices what he still can’t, and getting his evenings awake, upright, and talking to Cas in here or on the porch back comes with missing when he could do all that over a beer or two, which is now very special occasion and probably will be for a while.
Still though, he doesn’t miss it that much; just being able to spend an hour or two (these days, forty-five minutes, but he’s getting there) hanging out with Cas again and talking about something other than his goddamn health makes up for it. Before the fever, it was the best part of his day, and not just because it was the only time he wasn’t pretending to be someone else. In some ways, now it’s even better; Cas is on a learning curve as much as he was and still is, and this is territory neither of them knows and are learning while doing. Dean’s journal isn’t much of a help when it comes to running the camp, and now he’s starting to understand why Cas didn’t like how much time he used to spend studying it.
Glancing into the kitchen, where Cas is measuring out coffee with the kind of precision you’d use for explosives and sketchy ritual magic with very undesirable side effects when you get it wrong (much like explosives, come to think), he considers that distinct probability he’s not the only one who looks forward to this.
Vera’s talk with him last week got him thinking, and not just about how to bring up the subject with Cas (still pending the thinking part; he can’t even imagine how to start). Granted, he’s been distracted since the fever by the surviving and getting better thing, but he doesn’t have that excuse for before, and it doesn’t say anything good about him if the entire goddamn camp came to this particular conclusion because there was actual evidence of just that (thanks for breaking it down, Vera; apparently, Cas isn’t the only one who needs things spelled out sometimes).
That’s only the start, though. Reading reports, talking over what happened each day with Cas, the problems that need an immediate solution and those that don’t but will eventually, their shared bewilderment that they’ve managed—against all odds—to avoid a camp-wide revolution overthrowing them for sheer incompetence (though Nate’s three days in the mess were pretty tense before he and Cas worked out the new rotation), it hit him while examining Cas’s list for their two new potential teams that every name now came with attached face and even a tentative personality and vague knowledge of their skills, and it only took him almost three months to pull that off.
Wait, no; it took him less than three days once he started seeing regular visitors and saying hi to anyone who walked by the cabin (who he now knows were hoping he would do just that) and spending a few minutes talking to them. Interesting, that: so what the hell was he doing the almost-three months before that again?
Yeah, a whole new world, he needed time to get used to it, fine, but he’s gotta wonder how much time he really needed to spend brooding about the unfairness of it all while reading this Dean’s journal and feeling inadequate. Sure, learning shit took a lot of his attention, but for the life of him, he can’t remember if even once he ever thought of this as anything but another job—a much more difficult one granted, but still just a job—and learning it just enough to make people believe he knew it before walking away once he was done, ready for the next one.
Dean’s journal: yeah, let’s think about that. It makes a pretty good historical record of missions past and obsession getting a book deal, hell yes, but you’d never know without very close reading and a considerable leap of intuition that Dean was running a camp and the people on the missions were his own soldiers, not random hunters he happened to be working with at the time. The latter would make a hell of a lot more sense, since there’s a real lack of names in more than passing unless you’re lucky enough to be a casualty, and on a glance, there’s no indication they were even people he knew.
Like Chitaqua and the soldiers he recruited, trained, hung out with, regularly fucked in serial monogamous bliss, were a job—a much more difficult one, granted, but still just a job—that he learned very, very well and he would walk away from once he was done, ready for the next one.
That job, by the way, was killing Lucifer; the rest was, apparently, just details.
He didn’t run this camp, that was details; his team leaders did, and a bang up job they made of it, by the way, and he’s not even just holding what happened to Cas against them. Reviewing at his post-fever leisure what Chuck first told him about Cas and the team leaders, at the time he remembers thinking vaguely Chuck wasn’t one of their biggest fans. Really, he should have followed up on that a lot better considering it already bit him in the ass once with Luke, but hey, he finally got around to it by sheer accident.
Three days—three days—of shooting the shit with every person who walked by his door, he’s come away with a lot more than just the identities of his own soldiers and an impressively eclectic list of hobbies you can maintain in a militia camp that isn’t sex, drugs, heavy drinking, and contemplating the end of the world (the last of which assuring the existence of the other three).
(Among them: one book club, Amanda and Christina officiating, with very few books they read very slowly; one D&D run by Rob as Dungeonmaster in which Joe, Kim, and James are very active members; a weekly poker night (almost everyone from what he can tell); a camp-wide betting pool that encompasses everything in the world you could possibly bet on; a semi-regular lottery of premium goods like shoelaces, socks, toothpaste, and God help them, underwear; and memorably, Vera’s occasional sewing classes, which he suspects she told him all about in a test of the theme of change is good or possibly desperation on how close the camp was to ‘optional nudity on random days’ except maybe not optional. This led to a revelation (and belated explanation of Chuck’s paper obsession during that supply run), an immediate emergency meeting with Cas about what exactly was considered a priority in days gone by, and a dramatic revision of said priority list, starting with ‘everything not fucking weapons, salt, and mystical herbs; for fuck’s sake, they’re auctioning off briefs!’ He also learns Cas learned to sew from Bobby, and he and Vera have opinions on how to do it. He didn’t know mending torn clothes involved opinions, but he does know it involves supplies, and the supply list now has those and more.)
Three days of chatting, all that, and the added impression a few of them were possibly as afraid of their own (dead) leaders as they were of the Fallen angel in their midst. What he doesn’t have—yet—is the reason why.
When Cas told him the journal wasn’t an instruction manual on becoming what he’s not, that might have been said in the desperate hope that wasn’t exactly where Dean was going with it. He can’t even blame Cas; evidence suggests that’s exactly what he was doing.
He’s still brooding on that—but in a self-actualized way, Sam, not an exercise in irony—when the sound of beads jerks his attention to the doorway to see Joe walk in, wet brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and freshly shaved. “Hey, am I—”
“Your punctuality is exemplary,” Cas says easily from the kitchen doorway, and that is one fuck of a smug smile. “I forgot to mention that Joseph returned from his meeting with a few of the communities before I went off-duty and wishes to give his verbal report to you tonight.”
“Welcome back,” Dean says blankly, counting backward twice and still coming up with five days since he left. They’d assumed he’d need at least a week just to find someone who wouldn’t a.) assume they were there for extortion/blackmail/fuck knows what horror and ask them to leave, b.) that and at the point of a gun, c.) skip all that and shoot on sight, which isn’t common but not nearly as rare as it should be, which would be ‘never’. “So, uh—”
“I’ll get everyone coffee,” Cas says brightly, wandering back to his domestic chores with something that may actually be a spring in his step as Joe grabs the armchair from beside the couch and pulls it to the other side of the coffee table, the better to face him with a wide grin. Dean takes a moment to remind himself to stop moving the chair; no one seems to like it there, and it’s not like there’s a view out that window other than ‘depressing’. “Joseph, please begin without me; I can listen from here.”
Dean looks at Joe curiously. “So, how did it—”
“Glad you asked,” Joe tells him with no effort at being casual. “I might have some prospects.”
Oh thank God. “Good, so—”
“—yeah, it’s great,” Joe says. “Didn’t even have to look for them. They found us.”
Dean sits back, not sure what that’s supposed to mean. “What?”
“I checked your original list of prospective towns who showed a positive response to our initial visit and gave it to Joseph as a starting point,” Cas tells him, materializing to set two cups down between him and Joe. “Your notes indicated Harlin seemed to—”
“Yeah, Mel’s team made contact with them,” Dean interrupts, pulling up the memory after a panicked delay. “She said something—they weren’t nervous, not like some of the others were.” That would be the ones that shot at them when they were in range, and Sarah’s jeep has the repairs to the body to tell them the exact caliber of the bullets. “They were also doing pretty good. Even had electricity in the part of the town they were living in, and they had a regular patrol that seemed to know their jobs. Seemed friendly, too. No one took their kids and ran inside when they saw us, anyway.” Which again, not like some of the others, who literally did just that, sometimes while firing at them. “They were looking for us?”
“Or their patrol extended their range considerably and just happened to be in just the right place at the right time to almost pull off surprise when they saw our jeep and decided on the fly to hail us down and say hi,” Joe answers, cocking his head. “Which sure, could happen.”
“They’re located just south of the northern perimeter of District 4,” Cas says, returning with his own cup of coffee and seating himself on the right side of the couch, tucking one leg underneath him before achieving his favorite comfortable slump into the corner. District 4: southern Kansas border to forty miles north of Wichita, two alternate routes, three to five days to complete, got it. “The patrol teams continue to follow your order to greet anyone they see, explain their purpose if they seem friendly, and be amiable, casual, and non-threatening for the length of the interaction, and leave immediately should anyone seem uneasy to emphasize our good intentions. So far, there’s been no opportunity for them to practice their people skills, as they’ve seen no one, so I remind them regularly.”
“He quotes you,” Joe offers to Dean’s horror. “Every time they leave the camp for their route. We can all recite it by now. Want me to—”
“No. So you used the patrol’s regular route?” Dean asks a little desperately. Grin widening, Joe nods. “How far were you off the time a team would normally come by?”
“I wasn’t,” Joe answers, glancing at Cas for confirmation. “They usually hit there afternoon on day one, but they took an alternate route this time in case anyone was watching and got nervous seeing two jeeps.”
“Good call; looks like someone was doing just that.”
“Gets better. The only access road they could have used was ten miles south and light green, meaning shitty as fuck,” Joe says, taking a quick drink of coffee. “Shitty because, and could be wrong, not like Mel’s worked road crew—”
“It was fucked up deliberately,” Dean finishes for him. “She mentioned something about that.”
“Mel reported the destruction of the asphalt was very conveniently located,” Cas says. “It became medium to dark green—very passable to excellent, if haphazardly patched—after less than two miles, when it was no longer visible from the main road.”
“She was right,” Joe says. “On a guess, some repurposed fireworks and a working knowledge of homemade explosives for the initial destruction, which wouldn’t be as rare as you think for anyone who grew up on the family farm or took a shop class or two in high school.”
“My shop classes taught me how to make a box and a really shitty cabinet,” Dean says, offended. “What the hell, there was an optional explosives lecture I didn’t know about?”
Cas gives him a searching look. “You know perfectly well how to manufacture explosives from anything that can be found in a standard kitchen.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” he answers, still annoyed as he turns his attention back to Joe, whose indulgent expression as he looks between them tells Dean that he thinks he’s watching domestic partners having the cutest argument ever. Also, what the hell does Cas have in their kitchen these days anyway? “So they were definitely watching for us. Keep going.”
“Right.” Joe composes his expression to something like professional if you ignore the twitching. “So they waved us down—it was very casual, they even had someone very obviously checking what was a perfectly fine tire and holding a tire iron—and we stopped, did the greet, and then I told them why I was there.”
Dean leans forward hopefully. “Tell me you said, ‘take me to your leader’.”
Joe grins. “They even pretended it was funny.”
“And so you followed them back to Harlin?”
Joe’s expression changes, brown eyes flickering to Cas, who just stares back expressionlessly. “Not exactly.”
“They—brought their leader to you, no, of course not.” Dean fights down a spurt of belated fear, but he can’t quite keep his voice equally calm. “You went back with them. Alone.”
“And I disarmed in front of them and asked them to check me before I got in their jeep,” Joe answers calmly, and Dean just manages not to drop his coffee cup. “Ana, too. Leah and Mike stayed with our jeep and two of their patrol, Felipe and Christopher, volunteered to wait with them. They offered to disarm as well, and I said no.”
“You learn that in negotiation or hostage school?” Dean snaps.
“I learned it in a militia camp where they know we can find and kill all of them with an arsenal equal to the American military,” Joe answers soberly. “And my commander told me—”
“I didn’t tell you to go in there practically naked!”
“—that the only thing they know for sure about us is what we do when they meet us. They saw one of your lieutenants willing to do exactly what we were going to ask of them: believe in their good intentions. Dean, sometimes you just gotta spread our bread upon the water—”
“It comes back.” It always comes back.
“Dean?” Cas says finally, and he realizes he said that out loud. Taking a deep breath, he makes himself nod, focusing on Joe again.
“Right, what’s done is done. What happened then?”
Joe relaxes slightly, taking a hasty drink that empties his cup. “They took me and Ana to town, where serendipitously, the mayor was hanging around one of their admin buildings—at least, that’s what it looked like once we got inside, Mel didn’t go farther than the edge of town—and he invited me and Ana in for refreshments and you know, chatting.”
“Casually.”
“Very,” Joe assures him, sitting his empty cup down and looking amused. “I don’t think they thought I’d buy it, but they appreciated I played along. So there we are, in a room that might be mistaken for where you have meetings with a snack tray of cookies—”
“Cookies?” Dean straightens; so that’s what hunger feels like. He almost forgot. “They gave you cookies?”
“Cookies, coffee, a vegetable tray, and tiny sandwiches,” Joe says gloatingly. Dean doesn’t want to think Joe is maybe getting back at him for the totally justified anger earlier, but yeah, that’s exactly what he’s doing. “Dinner was amazing—wait, jumping ahead, sorry.”
“I hate you.”
Joe smiles in satisfaction. “Anyway, we talked with the mayor—Daniel but call him Danny, mid-forties, married with two kids and one on the way, former lawyer, I’m guessing corporate or real estate from his conversation—and his deputy, Sandra, late thirties, former high school principal and designated shark, and two of what I think were their equivalent of patrol leads; friendly, but spoke only when spoken to and not much, though God knows I tried. Not a bad choice, actually,” he says thoughtfully. “She has experience making recalcitrant teenagers confess their sins. I was this close to admitting I cheated on my tenth grade algebra exam.”
“You pay for your sins,” Cas intones solemnly as he gets to his feet, pausing to get Joe’s empty cup on his way to the kitchen. “Great and small, you pay for them all.”
Dean bites back a smile at Joe’s expression. “So they seemed interested?”
“We shared heartwarming stories of fighting evil, the ridiculous prices charged by the border guard, and the challenges of successful animal husbandry,” Joe says thoughtfully. “They assured me nothing they offered contained pork, which was nice, and we had a good laugh about keeping kosher when faced with squirrel pie, and no one mentioned how on earth they knew I was Jewish, including me.”
“Guessed?” Joe smirks, cocking his head. “Border guard.”
“Yeah, and pretty detailed if I’m right. They barely caught themselves before they got to the ‘rabbi’ part if Sandra’s extremely timely change of subject is any indication when I was trying to find out,” Joe answers. “It’s not like the border won’t happily take money for pretty much anything.”
“So they’re smarter than we are,” Dean says. “Wish we’d thought to do that; add that to our next meeting. So how long did they keep up the small talk?”
“Until the mayors of the other four towns showed up.”
Dean blinks, wondering if he heard that right. “Four other towns?”
“Andale, Noak, Mount Hope, and Ichabod.”
“Cas, where—” A map is dropped in front of him as Cas passes Joe his coffee cup, which on a guess was hidden somewhere in the room in preparation earlier today. “Thanks.” District Four: he marks off the three of the towns and doesn’t even find a glimpse of the other two. “Okay, I give up: Noak and Ichabod? Seriously?”
“That’s what they said,” Joe says, sipping his coffee.
“Ichabod. As in ‘Crane’?” Seriously?
“As in, I didn’t argue the point but accepted their expertise on the subject of their hometowns,” Joe answers virtuously. “Anyway, four extra mayors, their four deputies, and eight people who introduced themselves and didn’t hide their weapons before taking a seat in line of sight to me and Ana, and we all got down to talking about what Chitaqua wanted and why.” From somewhere, he pulls out a legal pad, putting it on the table between them. “My notes and the terms, but I can summarize until I can write Cas a report.”
Picking it up, Dean looks for the first blank page and doesn’t find it, but does find a lot of what may or may not be writing. It’s definitely not Hebrew but he can’t prove it’s English on a glance, either.
“Cas,” he says, staring at the first page and fighting the urge to turn it sideways to check readability on the horizontal plane. Joe’s handwriting is much better in his reports. “Make more coffee. This is gonna take a while.”
“So we all had dinner with Danny and his family and friends as a kind of going away party last night—roast beef and roasted potatoes, by the way—”
Dean groans. “Seriously, fuck you. You could have brought home the leftovers at least.”
“—and he told us that after speaking to the other mayors that afternoon, they’d like us to return in a week, give them time to discuss it amongst themselves and consult their respective councils,” Joe finishes, stealing the last cracker from the bowl and munching it contentedly.
Dean lets out a slow breath. That was pretty much the best case scenario; anything other than a flat refusal (bullet optional) or terrified instant acceptance is a win as far as he’s concerned. Anytime a well-armed, terrifyingly competent militia starts making requests, it’s hard not to see the guns and wonder if request is another word for order.
“We left noon today and came straight back here,” Joe continues as he picks up his half-empty coffee cup. “Mike and Leah mostly spent time with the towns’ patrol after they arrived the first day, but I told them to get some sleep and write up their reports tomorrow, since you’d have enough to read tonight.”
“Thanks.” Flipping the page, Dean skims the tentative terms again: guns and ammo, of course, and some tentative suggestions on helping with planting and harvesting or livestock or repairing buildings and houses for occupation, but Joe underlined the ‘training’ thing three times to emphasize that went over really, really well with a tiny note that he thinks is ‘Alison actually looked less than bored for a second there’, because Joe’s observations are kind of hilarious when readable. “Nice job, by the way. In case that wasn’t really fucking obvious.”
Joe grins lazily. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Dean snorts, skimming the next page. “Tell me more about their trade agreement with each other.”
“You know the drill: trade food and labor, mutual defense, not work against each other, the usual,” Joe answers. “No surprises, just a question of finding out what they each wanted separately and what was mutual between them all. Danny told me the first night that they thought it would be best for us all to meet at once, which made sense if they wanted to make sure that the offer applied equally to all and we weren’t….”
“Trying to divide and conquer,” Dean finishes for him, and pauses to study his expression. “It wasn’t just that, though.”
Joe makes a face. “They definitely compared notes from the teams they met and what they were told during the second survey, which again, makes sense. No one wants to be the one who gets less than the others, and trade deals have a way of breaking down fast if everyone’s not careful. It was going great, actually; lots of overlap between the towns on what they wanted from us, respected each other to back down on one thing to get another if it meant they could all get it, arguments were professional—Dean, meetings in IT finalizing design documents got hotter than this in five minutes, but they managed to keep their tempers for four entire days and by the end have a unanimous agreement in place to take back their towns.”
Dean looks at Cas, whose eyebrows are lost beneath his bangs but are probably pretty goddamn high now. “I’m impressed with your almost superhuman negotiation skills.”
“Like I said, that’s what I was thinking,” Joe agrees. “If anything that happened in that room was because of me, that is.”
“This was going too well, I knew it,” Dean mutters into his cup, then realizes Joe looks amused. “What?”
“Yesterday morning, I was going over my notes and realized I’d been played but good,” Joe answers wryly. “Worse, I got played and still got exactly what I wanted. I didn’t know that could even happen.”
“Anytime you want to explain, I’m here.”
“Until then, it was just a lot of little things, nothing I could point to, until I went back to that first day.” He sits back. “Before I left….what you said about the people here and what they’d think, I knew that already, but it didn’t hit me what that meant until I saw it live and in action in a room where me and Ana were the only ones who weren’t armed.”
Dean grits his teeth against the reminder. “They were jumpy?”
“Oh yeah. I don’t blame them, not when I think about how many kids I saw running around outside, what they were risking just talking to us and how we’d react to a ‘no’.” Looking at Dean, he shrugs uncomfortably. “They tried to hide it, but they watched us every second, and that first day, me or Ana moved suddenly or got up too fast, everyone jumped and sometimes literally. One of them, though, and to give her credit, she’s got some titanium nerves on her, never twitched; even if she wasn’t worried about me and Ana like everyone else, she should have been getting edgy just from contact.”
“How long did that last?”
“Day two, they’d all settled down, even their ten person security force. Dean, no one comes down that fast from that level of alert after a few hours of talk over celery sticks and mixed nuts followed by a good night’s sleep where you get time and leisure to think worst case scenario with added insomnia,” Joe answers soberly. “I should have had to double down that morning on being non-threatening, but on my way to the meeting, I got introduced to Danny’s kids on their way to daycare and caught an escaping three year old without anyone drawing on me on principle.”
“That’s unusual,” Cas remarks, looking at Joe thoughtfully. “You think it was related to the woman who seemed calm the first day?”
Joe hesitates. “Not at first. Most of day two and three were spelling out the potential terms and Q&A, I let them decide how they wanted to do this. They all asked questions—good ones, bad ones, and weird ones, I made a top ten list for all categories—but one of them—she asked good questions, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t hard ones. Nothing I had to think about too hard, and nothing that made my top tens, either.”
“I’m guessing same woman?” Joe nods. “So she didn’t want too much attention.”
“Nope, but that made sense; she was typing on a goddamn laptop the entire time, taking verbatim notes, I assumed, though now I’d kill to have found a way to get Ana over there to get a glimpse of her screen and see what was actually on there.” Cas tilts his head, blue eyes narrowing. “Most of the time, she looked bored while typing a hundred and twenty words a minute, drank a couple of carafes worth of coffee, and made me feel inferior with a pen and two legal pads. Also made me wish I had a secretary because my hand was killing me by the beginning of the third day.”
To Dean’s surprise, Cas starts to smile. “Was that when you—”
“Had my moment of revelation? Yeah, which says a few things about me I’d rather not know,” Joe says ruefully as Dean looks between them in bewilderment. “Let me give you the demographics: five mayors, two were women; five deputies, three were women; but our personal security force of ten, all men. They sat at the back of the room, didn’t say a thing, but on a glance, it looked like a lot of men with a few women and—”
“—a secretary who was taking notes,” Dean finishes for him. “Perfect distraction.”
“Even wearing glasses and looking harassed every so often when I was talking, like I was going too fast for her to keep up.” Joe slumps lower in his chair. “I’m pretty sure now she was either just smashing the keyboard for the fuck of it or making fun of us, and from the way her deputy Claudia looked when she glanced at the screen a couple of times, I’m leaning toward outright mockery.”
“Let me guess—Alison of Ichabod, may or may not be of ‘Crane’ fame, who got her own carafe of coffee.”
Joe closes her eyes. “Pencil behind her ear she never used showed up the second day. She had to be fucking with me at that point just to see if I was paying attention.” Cocking his head, he begins to grin. “You see a bored woman in a mostly male meeting who’s the only one typing and acting annoyed to be doing it, you don’t think ‘leader’, you think ‘secretary’. I do, actually, know better than that.”
“You just didn’t think they did.” Dean grins at Joe’s rueful expression. “So she was controlling the meeting? The other mayors let her?”
“A little background from Mike and Leah: for obvious reasons, they weren’t too eager to break down their social and political structure just to satisfy our curiosity,” Joe says, looking startled when Cas sets a full coffee cup on the coffee table in front of him before coiling himself neatly in his corner of the couch with the most innocent expression in the world. Dean hides his smile behind his own cup: using preternatural speed for evil, check. “Thanks, Cas.”
“You’re welcome,” Cas answers tranquilly. “You said they were mayors; is this a lifetime position or one related to the actual meaning of the word?”
“These are small towns, with populations between probably three and nine hundred each; at that level, it’s either a Platonian wet dream of communal democracy or small-scale despot, and none of them gave the impression of ruling with an iron fist over a cowering population,” Joe answers. “Leah and Mike confirmed Harlin is closer to the former and nowhere near the latter, and I told them exactly what to look for. Could be wrong about the other four,” he admits, “but I don’t think so. Even a casual trade agreement needs some basic rules to work from, and I got to know Danny pretty well. He’s not just a good guy, he’s a lawyer; he’s not stupid enough to deal with the devil and think he’s gonna come out ahead unless he’s the devil in this scenario, and he’s not.”
Dean starts to wonder if Joe is ever going to the point when he realizes he just did. “Joe, who were you actually meeting with the last few days?”
“Seems obvious now, doesn’t it?” Joe asks, shaking his head. “I wasn’t meeting with five towns with a good trade relationship, but a single established trade alliance made up of five towns with a single agenda and a single leader who knew exactly what she was doing. An alliance, by the way, that worked together to play me like a goddamn piano. God knows they’ve had the time to learn to trust each other, since that alliance is nearly two years old.”
Son of a bitch, he’s impressed. “And Alison…”
“If she’s not one of the founders, I’m gonna be really surprised,” Joe answers glumly. “I’m pretty sure they don’t know I figured out what was going on, but I’m not actually willing to bet on it. That woman was good.”
“You liked her,” Dean says with a smirk.
“Her and her deputy Claudia make one hell of a two-woman act. Claudia, in case this needs mentioning, was quiet, careful, and pulled off the best impression of being vaguely intimidated by being in the meeting I’ve ever seen, which I didn’t buy for a second, thank God.” Joe sighs. “On a guess, the next week is pretty much everyone offering up their impressions of us so Alison can give her recommendation to the rest. Which is a diplomatic way of saying she’s the one making the decision, and God help us if she’s just buying them a week of time before giving us a no. It’s all or nothing here; we don’t get any of them if we don’t get her.”
Dean nods slowly. “How much do we want them specifically?”
Joe frowns, fingers tapping restlessly against the arm of the chair, and Dean can see him thinking about it, carefully evaluating them as purely trade partners. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Harlin’s doing better than any town we’ve seen up close yet, and guessing, the other four are doing just as good. And I liked what I saw and what Mike and Leah told me about. More importantly, getting them will go a long way toward potentially settling with any other towns who don’t know if what we say we want is what we mean to get.” He pauses, looking more thoughtful. “Everyone had something to bring to the table, which I think helped a lot, especially since I don’t think they expected what we were offering.”
Dean flips to the page with the terms and nods. “Escort service outside their safety window; they can expand their trade.”
“Exactly, and add in training them—they really didn’t expect that—shows we won’t hold that over them later.” Joe sits back. “It sure as hell isn’t beneath my paygrade to help them bring in the harvest and get their products around the state, and them getting some extra fit adults out in the fields or moving goods to help out isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. They got a lot of kids and a lot of jobs to get done just surviving, not to mention I’m pretty sure it would be reassuring to feel they’re guaranteed our attention once the attacks start again.”
“So you think there’s a good chance they’ll take our deal?”
“Keeping in mind I only got a little over a day knowing who was making the decision?” Joe grimaces. “Honestly, if it was a no, we wouldn’t have been there all four days. I’m pretty sure Alison was the reason they were calmed down by day two and started the actual talking, and she wouldn’t have done that if it was gonna be no. Leah and Mike noticed their access to the town got upgraded by day three, and very casual social dinners with a few of the town residents who were prepped beforehand on where to take conversation. That’s a lot of work and effort for an inevitable no, so—let’s go with better than average on the ‘yes’, but no guarantees.”
“I already ordered the patrol to continue to use the alternate route until Joseph’s concluded his negotiations and we’ve received their answer,” Cas offers into the thoughtful silence that follows, adding at Dean’s surprised attention, “You were correct about their apprehensions regarding us. Even if they are aware of our patrol schedule, seeing a team before they’re ready to speak to us might appear—questionable.”
Dean smiles at him. “Yeah, let’s avoid even the appearance of dickery.”
“That was my feeling as well,” Cas says in satisfaction. “Joseph, were you able to get an impression of how many people there are among the towns and the farms dependent on them?”
“I was very careful not to ask and they were equally careful not to tell,” Joe starts, which Dean gets. Even if he has no idea what the hell he or anyone else here could do with the information, whatever they’re imagining is probably kind of terrifying, and the point here is less of that, not more. “Three to eight thousand people between them all, with an upper limit of ten thousand.”
Dean whistles. “That’s a big margin of error.”
“Ichabod and Noak aren’t on the maps, so I’m guessing based on the towns within two hours by SUV on a medium green road or better from any of the other four towns,” Joe answers. “They’re a trade alliance, that means goods that they have to move by road, and this is an infected zone, which means distance equals risk. Original populations of those were between two hundred and ten thousand. People think they don’t need people up until they realize they do, and this is one of those times that numbers are almost always better.” Joe focuses on Cas. “Cas, from what I got from the border, you work out a timeline yet?”
Dean looks between Joe and Cas. “What?”
“It’s probable that the borders were closed long before the official announcement of Kansas being zoned as infected,” Cas tells him. “It’s always been guesswork on the amount of time between when a state is zoned and when it’s officially announced. Usually it began with isolation of the cities and slowly expanded to encompass the state, with California as the most dramatic example of when that didn’t work and they were forced to announce prematurely due to massive civilian casualties on the border of Nevada that weren’t quite enough to avoid those escaping to spread the word throughout the country. Including where else they saw checkpoints while fleeing across state lines.”
Dean winces. “You remember the population of Kansas before everything?”
“Roughly two point eight million,” Cas says immediately. “Kansas was nearly decimated before Croatoan was successfully contained; I’d estimate between those who successfully left the state before the border was closed, the spread of Croatoan, and attrition the number is now between one quarter to half of a million people, though there’s no way to estimate the current birth rate. The smaller towns and rural farms had the protection of semi-isolation after the border closed, and if they were warned—”
“They’d shoot on sight any stranger showing up by policy.”
Cas and Joe nod in unison.
“So it paid to stay small, avoid attention, and shoot the fuck out of strangers.” That matches the patrol reports and makes this group of towns a lot more interesting. Croatoan doesn’t work in isolation; there’s a short window before it manifests and sane thought becomes the first casualty; that would explain why they were watching the patrols so carefully, note the schedule they’re on. “Survival odds: what if you lived outside the travel time window for Croat from the major cities and airports? Small towns, off the major highways, the military and us keeping Croat in the cities and outside the state borders, got though the first year—”
“All you have to do is worry about everything else, and that’s not counting food, water, and shelter,” Joe says with a sigh, then glances out the window in surprise. “I should let you two get some sleep,” he adds, getting to his feet and looking at his coffee cup regretfully before being interrupted by a yawn. “I’ll tell Leah and Mike—”
“Two days from now is early enough,” Cas says unexpectedly, glancing at Dean queryingly.
“That’s fine. You’re all off-duty until then. By the way—good job.” Joe grins, saluting lazily on his way to the door, beads tinkling merrily behind him. Leaning over, Dean picks up the legal pad again, flipping through the pages before giving Cas a frown. “Don’t say it.”
“Vera declared you free of infection today,” Cas answers meditatively. “I suppose staying up past your bedtime could be considered a reward for good behavior.”
Dean groans. “You still suspect the entire fever thing was just to fuck with you, don’t you?”
“There’s no proof either way,” Cas admits after extended contemplation of his coffee cup. “I suppose I must rely on faith that it’s not true, which as you know, is not my forte.”
Dean jerks his gaze back to the legal pad so Cas won’t see him grin, flipping through until he gets to the mayoral meet and greet, complete with names and looking for the Ichabod contingent: Alison and Claudia, Manuel and Hans, their probable patrol leaders-slash-security. “Think we’ll get some last names if they think we’re trustworthy enough?”
“If they still use them,” Cas answers idly. Dean looks at him, startled. “We don’t use them here.”
“Some of us are using aliases because of our multiple federal warrants or hiding our last names because of the same,” Dean answers, thinking fondly about how impressively wanted his militia is, and under way more names than he thinks anyone should have to keep straight, which, come to think…. “It’s not just that.”
“The military are the only ones who offered surnames, and for the reasons you mentioned, we tended not to,” Cas answers meditatively. “However, even with our limited contact with other residents of the state before now, I don’t remember surnames being offered to patrol, and at least for them, there was no reason to conceal them. Here—I suppose it’s unnecessary, as we all know each other.”
“There’s that.”
Cas shrugs. “Surnames in their various forms were historically used for the purpose of tracing lineage, claiming membership in a clan, tribe, or extended family group, identifying their origin, or in some cases, as a more specific form of identification in very large groups,” he says, warming to the subject. “They also acted as a means of separating individuals into identifiable groups. In smaller populations, however, it’s not common for them to be used for reasons other than ceremonial.”
“How would you introduce yourself to someone these days?” Dean asks curiously. “Just Castiel?”
“As ‘of the Lord’ could be considered on the order of a sick joke, as well as highly inaccurate, yes,” he answers, looking amused. “I suppose in formal situations—if one occurred—’of Chitaqua’ would be relatively accurate.”
“Cas….” Dean tries to think how to put this. “When you started hunting, did Dean—I mean, you were here full time and everything. He ever—you know, get you a name?”
“I had many aliases—”
“Not for jobs, just—I don’t know.” He doesn’t, and it’s weird enough he’s not even sure why it bothers him. He used aliases all the time without even thinking about it for the job—for that matter, he was pretty dead under his real name for a while, which seems to have changed here—but that’s different. “Forget it.”
“Dean suggested I use James Novak to procure a driver’s license, as that is the body I was using, and he would take me to acquire his birth certificate, but between jobs and other things….”
“Didn’t happen.” From Cas’s expression, he’s not entirely unhappy about that, either, and Dean agrees, though he can’t quite put his fingers on why.
“A few weeks later, however, while Dean was otherwise occupied, Bobby told me to accompany him to the DMV and gave me an envelope before explaining I was not allowed to leave until I could do so in a Class Three vehicle and he’d wait.” Cas hesitates for a moment, then stands up. “Wait here.”
Startled, Dean nods, watching Cas go into the bedroom. It’s only a few minutes—long enough, Dean thinks, to open one of those boxes—before he returns with a brown envelope that looks startlingly new, the creases fresh and sharp, as if it’s barely been used. Still looking uncertain, he sits down on the couch again, looking down at it, then hands it to Dean. “This is what he gave me.”
Putting down the legal pad, Dean takes it, looking at the carefully taped flap before sliding a nail along the edge to get it open without messing up the paper. Opening it, he considers the contents before carefully pulling out a birth certificate, uncreased and brand new, like it just came from Vital Statistics, throat tightening as he makes sense of what he’s reading.
“Bobby had asked me earlier that week to choose a day and month that I felt was significant,” Cas says quickly. “I didn’t know what he wanted it for or why, so I gave him the day and month that—”
“That we first met.” Dean swallows. Castiel Gabriel Singer, right there in official government print; Dean knows a forgery when he sees one and this isn’t it. How the hell Bobby pulled it off, he doesn’t know, but it matches the social security card, still crisply new, and a goddamn driver’s license with Bobby’s address on it, so shiny it looks like it’s never even been used. “Your first?”
“Dean procured me several identities before….” Cas trails off, eyes flickering to the envelope. “When I came out, Bobby told me to drive us back to his home because the DMV would give a license to a monkey and he wanted to be sure I could actually do it, then told me to put this away for safekeeping and never to use it on a job. I asked him what it was for, and he said it was for me. He said everyone got one of their own first, and we did it all backwards, which wasn’t a surprise since we were idiots.”
“Yeah, that’s Bobby.” There’s other documents—another license for Kansas, a library card, a piece of mail, just a circular—but the name on them is the same. “Castiel Singer: I like it.”
“I—” Cas breaks off. “Until you mentioned it, I forgot I still had it. I suppose if someone asked me for my full name, that’s what I would tell them. If that’s what you meant when you asked.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.” Carefully, Dean slides everything back inside, running a thumb over the tape and resolving to raid Chuck’s office supply collection if they’re out of tape from Cas’s last mapmaking adventure. They need a change of topic, and look at that, two empty cups right there. “Want more coffee? Porch: we’re gonna have a wild celebration of coffee and sitting outdoors, if you’re up for it.
“Yes, thank you,” Cas replies immediately, then looks at the envelope uncertainly. “I should—”
“I got it,” Dean answers, snagging the cups with his free hand; this isn’t going into the bottom of Cas’s not-thinking box again, but a different kind of box would be fine. He’s just grateful it didn’t meet the same fate as the Impala, since on a guess, that’s where this Dean’s went if he ever even had it “Top of the closet with my wallet okay?” Where he keeps an outdated Dean Winchester Kansas driver’s license stuffed in the lining, bent to hell and back, the last he ever legally got under his own name, but still his own.
“Yes,” Cas says after a minute. “Thank you.”
“Did you know about the weekly poker games?” Dean asks, sipping from his cup and thinking of maybe getting some kind of cool lockbox or something, add that to the next supply run for things like this. Maybe get Cas to start opening up those goddamn boxes where apparently, Cas may or may not have been storing a life before Chitaqua.
Beside him, Cas pauses, lowering his cup to look at him curiously. “No. I’m a terrible poker player.”
Taking another sip, he considers that. “Did Dean?”
To his surprise, Cas’s mouth twitches. “Your rant on the lack of sufficient needles and thread and boxers compared to briefs was extremely energetic; I wondered about that.”
“They bet underwear,” Dean argues, scowling at him. “If you don’t see something wrong with that, I don’t even know what to say.”
“Chafing does discourage going without,” Cas muses, like he tested this extensively at some point, which is even less of a surprise than Cas being a shitty poker player.
Gambling is very personal and what you play says a lot. Stacking the deck and counting cards, manipulating your opponents to think a bad hand is good and a good hand is shit: Cas has all the skill sets (deadpan like a lifestyle choice, manipulation raised to a fine art, and not even including what he demonstrated he can do with a deck of cards and his speed for Dean’s post-fever amusement), but his personality doesn’t quite match the game. Roulette is fatalism by definition, and he can see how that might appeal to Cas once he Fell and lived his mortal life in the joy and delight that’s a militia camp with the occasional rationing on soap, but that’s just a side effect; it’s not who he is.
Cas, angel or mortal, isn’t a fatalist; he’s a risk-taker of the first order, willing to pit himself against impossible odds without hesitation (or sanity, when it comes to facing multiple archangels armed with nothing but righteousness or Michael with a goddamn Molotov cocktail). Craps, single roll, winner take all: he’d never hesitate to pick up the dice and make the call. No matter what anyone says about method and strategy, at the end of the day, it’s being willing and able to risk everything on a single throw of the dice that’s the difference between someone that plays to win and someone who knows that sometimes, the only way to win is to play.
“I don’t know if he knew,” Cas says, startling him from his thoughts. “He didn’t attend the games, if that’s what you’re asking. It might have been to avoid too much familiarity—”
“—with his soldiers, among whom are those who were intimately familiar with his bodily fluids and sleeping patterns,” Dean finishes, taking a drink at the bitterness in his voice. “Never mind.”
It’s not fair to do this to Cas, and it’s embarrassing how long it took him to get that. It’s not just because Cas isn’t responsible for this Dean’s decisions, though that’d almost be better if that was his reason for doing it anyway. It’s easy—maybe too easy—to forget that to Cas, this Dean wasn’t just his leader but his friend, the guy he chose to Fall for, who did it even though he didn’t think they could win, and Cas is still feeling that loss.
(He tries not to, but sometimes, when he’s too tired to stop himself, he thinks of the difference between being willing to die for someone and being willing to live for them and all the shit that comes with living. When he’s very, very tired, he also thinks, watching Cas sort laundry on the bedroom floor with a baffled expression or read reports at the stove while methodically stirring tonight’s dinner, of the kind of choice you make so that, no matter how high the price, even if it’s everything, you’re the only one who has to pay it and do it willingly and without regret. No matter how tired he is, however, he never thinks, not once, what it would be like to know that someone thought you were worth that.)
Vera’s revelation about what the camp thought they were doing explained something that Dean wondered about, the rare days that Cas suddenly vanishes after Dean goes to bed and he doesn’t hear the surreptitious sound of climbing to the roof. In retrospect, he’s glad he assumed all this time that Cas was getting very laid somewhere else, or he might have been dick enough to follow him and on a guess, Cas wouldn’t have liked having his private grief interrupted, wherever it is that he buried this Dean’s ashes.
He’s also not entirely sure he would have taken finding out about that live and in person any better, and being saved having to potentially examine why that bothers him is another reason he’s grateful to Vera for telling him.
“Anyway, Amanda and Sean invited me to the game next week,” he says, “but I had to promise to teach them any cheats I used that they didn’t already know.”
“Amanda supplemented her credit card fraud income with semi-regular back room poker tournaments for very high stakes,” Cas offers in lazy amusement “She taught Sean everything she knows. They were playing you.”
“I figured.” Taking another drink, he adds casually, “You should come, too. No way to get better if you don’t practice. Maybe teach ‘em something new; infinite memory of poker throughout history would be useful for that. You could also help out Andy: Kat says he can’t keep a poker face worth a damn.”
Cas’s cup freezes halfway to his mouth.
“Sheila and Mike are moving in together, by the way,” he continues, watching the camp walls intently. “I told her to clear it with their roommates and you first—”
“She did,” Cas says quietly. “During what everyone now calls Home Improvement Week Two, we repaired the cabin that belonged to Stanley and Terrance, the former team leaders. It didn’t need very much, so I inspected it this week and told Sheila it was acceptable and helped her move some needed items that were too heavy for her alone.” He stops, blue eyes dark. “She asked for my assistance, because she wanted to finish before Mike got back from Harlin so it would be a surprise.”
“Tell me the ‘surprise’ is the finished moving part, not the moving in together part.”
“It’s the former; they became very good friends during training—I remember she used to cover for him when he would come to class with a hangover,” Cas says suddenly. “He had lost his wife and child only a few months before to Croatoan, and he drank heavily if given the opportunity. He had the good sense to appreciate her efforts to keep him from being thrown out of Chitaqua, and—how do humans put it?—pretended to care about living until it became true.”
“Fake it until you make it?”
“That would be the concept, yes.” Cas stares at his cup intently. “I suppose he’s succeeded, then.”
“Grief works on its own schedule,” Dean says as carefully as possible; Cas’s last disappearing act was three nights ago, the same day Sheila stopped by for a chat and bursting with anticipation, and it’s not like he needs anyone to draw him a diagram this time. Cas said he didn’t pay attention to what went on in the camp all this time, but Dean’s come to suspect Cas lies to himself almost as well as he does to him. “So—”
“Sheila also reminded me to add birth control to the list for the border,” Cas says out of nowhere. “I assume Erica was responsible for telling Joseph when it was needed and adding it to the regular list. And condoms, of course.”
Dean thinks about his very sexually active camp and Joe’s mention of Danny’s currently-percolating bundle of potential joy with a start of alarm. “Uh—”
“We have at least four months before it becomes an issue. Alicia happened to need to ask me a question after Sheila’s visit and gave me a very detailed list she also happened to have on hand.”
“Thank God,” Dean breathes, finishing off his coffee in a gulp; it’s not that he doesn’t like babies, but adding in a daycare rotation is gonna put Nate back on kitchen duty and oh God, no. And also, babies in a militia camp fighting the Apocalypse, of course: bad idea, no time for any of that. Like there’s going to be a world left for the kids already here to grow up in. Like they’ll have time to grow up.
Like that’s ever stopped anyone, ever. “Make sure—get Vera to do it—that everyone knows if—you know, failure rate happens, that kind of thing, we can work with that. No one’s gonna have to leave.” He stares at his empty cup, wondering frantically how that would work anyway, though make it up seems to be working for them so far. “Whatever they want to do is fine, I mean.”
He’s not sure what to make of Cas’s silence; it’s not like Cas is unfamiliar with reproduction or the ways to keep it from happening that don’t include being creepy and weird about other people’s sex lives and telling them how to have them. He could be thinking Dean doesn’t entirely understand what a militia camp does, or what an Apocalypse is.
“If you think they need to know that,” he adds uncomfortably. “Anyway—”
“They do need to know, and under the circumstances, as you’re still recovering—and I assume would immediately develop a fever if necessary to avoid it—I’ll make the announcement,” Cas interrupts calmly, like they’re talking about pretty much anything camp related that’s not this. “I’ll confirm it’s by your order, and that should be enough.”
Dean’s so relieved it takes him an entire minute to understand what Cas isn’t saying, which is the reason Vera can’t pass this on with her magical gossip powers. It’s gotta be official, especially if (when) a completely opposite order already existed.
He really, really regrets the lack of beer right now. “Did anything happen before that might make them—worried about that actually happening?”
“…no,” Cas answers slowly. “If it had, that would have been a very popular topic in the camp. Dean, at some point, you won’t be able to avoid thinking about what you’ve been doing since you were awake long enough to start telling me what changes you want implemented in the camp.”
Fuck beer: this is a whiskey night, unlimited shots. “It’s not just a job.”
Cas turns on the step, blue eyes very dark, and yeah, that’s what Dean calls ‘weaponized attention’. Because Cas would learn to do that.
“Living here isn’t a job,” he answers. “There’s a difference between a job being your life and treating your life like just another job, and neither one’s great, but the first is still better than the second.” He almost grins at Cas’s nod. “Not gonna pretend you don’t understand?”
“Of course not.” Looping an arm around one bent leg, Cas rests his chin on his knee. “Tell me more.”
“My job,” he says deliberately, “isn’t to pretend to be someone else. It’s to lead this camp, which I do by letting everyone think I’m him—well, and by making you do most of it for me, granted, but fever and everything—that actually helped, now that I think about it.”
Cas raises an eyebrow. “Now I’m going to tell you that I don’t understand, and it’s completely genuine.”
“Life isn’t a job; it’s life,” he says, searching for the right words. “Living here isn’t a job; I’m not going to be walking away when it’s done—I mean literally, even if tomorrow we won the Apocalypse, I’d still be here, just with less to do. He treated this like a job, because that’s all it was to him; that’s why he went to Kansas City, why he took his team leaders and you; his life was the job, and you were just how he was going to get it done. Five extra guns, and once they ran out of bullets, they were—” He bites down on his tongue, but it’s way too late.
“Useless,” Cas says coolly.
Dean closes his eyes; he really, really needs to practice the ‘not being a dick about Dean’ thing. “Cas—”
“You aren’t wrong,” Cas continues. “That’s what I was supposed to be.”
“That’s what you were to him,” Dean says quietly, not looking at Cas. “What he wanted you to be, all of you. That doesn’t make it true, though, and that’s why he had to work at it. He didn’t know about the poker games, and if he did, he never would have gone to play, even if he was banging one of the ones going. You even told me why: sex is just physical, it doesn’t mean shit. He didn’t have to tell you that; he showed you every day of your mortal life in this goddamn camp when he’d fuck his soldiers but left running the camp to his team leaders so he wouldn’t have to deal with any part of their lives but what they did on his missions. They deserve better than that.” He stares at the porch steps intently. “You deserve better than that.”
“And you don’t?”
Dean thinks about it. “I want to fix the porch so next time everyone camps out on it, we don’t lose people to epic splinters when that right side finally collapses. You got most of Bobby’s books boxed up in the closet, right? The ones that won’t fit in the old utility closet?” He looks up at Cas’s startled nod. “I’m going to learn how to drywall from Nate, build you a library already. If we get the agreement, we—yeah, you, too, even misanthropy needs a break once in a while—are gonna go meet Danny and his wife and kids, hang out with the other mayors, let Alison make fun of us to our faces, do some time in the fields. Learn how a potato becomes French fries. Do you know, ‘cause I don’t.”
“Poker night?”
“Beat the shit out of everyone here,” Dean answers, starting to smile. “Figure out what the fuck Zoe’s doing with that incense, and am I the only one who wonders about the ‘Thursday’ thing? She was a groupie, right? Didn’t you used to be called the angel of—?”
“Don’t say it, Amanda suspected that as well, and she’s investigating,” Cas says quickly, looking haunted. “Groupie?”
“Uh, nothing.” Tell Cas he accidentally gave up the joys of mass casual sex for monogamy and domestic harmony with his leader, and also, Phil is a fucking would-be-if-he-could-be homewrecker, wait, not that part. He better get on that sometime soon. “Learn how to be a good leader, fight evil, save people, teach you how to really play poker, get Joe to teach me how to hunt for food…I don’t know. What do you think?”
Cas thinks about it, head tilting. “Anything else?”
He’s got a list, actually, and it’s still growing. “World’s not over yet. Looks like I got some time, so might as well start doing something with it. You in?”
“It’s very late,” Cas says abruptly, taking both their cups as he gets to his feet. “Tomorrow will be your first day without constant watchers, though they’ll still be checking on you several times a day. I think you’ll find even this limited return to your normal activities tiring.”
Dean nods and takes Cas’s extended hand, fighting down his own disappointment; Cas didn’t say no, that’s the important part. If he’s gonna ask a craps player to risk everything on a single throw, he’s gotta be patient enough to wait for when he wants to call.
Bracing an arm over Cas’ shoulders is almost reflexive, as much as his frown at the beads that currently don’t even pretend to be a door and adds that to the top of the list: get them a fucking door already.
Cas pauses just short of the doorway, regarding the beaded curtain thing like he just noticed it’s there, then looks at Dean. “You do realize I know perfectly well you dislike them. It just amuses me to see how long it will take you to articulate your displeasure.”
It’s not that he doesn’t know Cas is a dick; it’s just that it’s hard to tell when it’s the result of the fact Cas has a fucked-up sense of humor or when it’s a deliberate effort. He reluctantly admits that this time, it’s probably just something Cas thinks is funny, but right now, he doesn’t get points for that.
“Dean, if you want a door, we can get a door,” Cas adds, not even bothering to hide the smile in his voice as they make their way across the darkened living room. “However, installing it is beyond my abilities. The cabin came this way.”
“And you just—went with it?” As they reach the bedroom door, he remembers that Cas probably had a pretty good reason not to get on door-related home improvement. Claustrophobia from shit he doesn’t even remember: there had to be a way Falling didn’t fuck him, but Dean’s still unclear on what that is.
“It didn’t seem terribly important at the time,” Cas admits, which he kind of figured. “Privacy isn’t a concept I had developed when we came here, and even now, the—finer points, you might say, still elude me.”
“I can probably do it,” he offers as he drops gratefully onto the edge of the bed, not sure of that at all, but Cas mentioning it makes him want to try anyway; it’s not like this needs advanced construction skills. It’s a goddamn door. “Use your leader power for personal gain and send everyone on a mission for a door. But make them measure it first or something.”
“You have no idea how to install a door.” Crouching, Cas looks at him in amusement as he efficiently strips off Dean’s socks, automatically balling them together in preparation for tossing them toward the small wooden crate that appeared at some point since the fever to hold laundry. Like maybe Cas is getting the entire basic organization of your living space thing, though it could also be with him and Vera keeping him alive, tripping over dirty laundry had become a hazard for Vera and she put her foot down. “You want to do it anyway. How typical.”
“Look who’s talking. You’re going help me plan a war I have no idea how to even fight,” Dean mocks him. “You think I can win it anyway.”
Cas goes still, dropping the balled socks to roll a lopsided few inches under the bed, staring up at Dean blankly.
“Cas?” he prompts, but Cas doesn’t move, and by now, Cas’s baseline mockery should have kicked in. “Uh, you don’t think—Cas, come on, you can’t think I can win this.”
Cas reaches out, plucking the sock ball off the floor and unnecessarily taking the time to stand up and carry it to the crate to dutifully drop it inside before surveying the piles of clothing around it that result from his usual blind general-direction throw. Dean watches incredulously as Cas begins to actually straighten up, which historically has required both Dean and Vera to point out at least five times before he actually notices. And yeah, Dean does know he’s channeling Sam these days, but this is Cas and if Dean’s gotta take the nuclear option when it comes to living conditions, he’ll do it and like it.
“Cas, look at me.”
Frowning Cas puts the last shirt into the crate and turns around, expression flat. “We fight, we lose, everyone dies anyway, I know. However, I don’t see why, if we’re going to fight anyway, we shouldn’t believe we’re going to win. The only thing we risk is that we might experience a profound sense of disappointment if we survive long enough to realize that we’ve lost.”
Cas is looking at him with that expression again, the one that’s only shown up since the fever, but this time, he gets what he’s looking at. Cas said that he didn’t Fall because he thought they’d win, it wasn’t the point, and Dean gets that, and God knows by the time he had, no one had told him any different. It was the Colt or it was the end of everything, and even Dean fucking Winchester hadn’t believed it could end any other way, saying with the indifference of resignation to accept Michael with his team dying less than a mile away and the Colt in his hand; we’re not gonna win, so why even try. It won’t work.
“Craps, I knew it,” Dean breathes, light-headed: he called that one, and how. “Come here.”
He waits for Cas to cross the room, watching him drop into an easy crouch, blue eyes meeting Dean’s without hesitation, and what’s in them— “You really think we can win?”
“Yes,” he answers. “I know we can. The question is, are you in?”
Dean wonders if this is what it’s like when someone gets their faith back. When they want it back, because it’s worth fighting for, too. “Fuck disappointment. I’m in.”
Cas smiles up at him, and it’s almost enough to stop him breathing. “I was thinking that as well.”
“We don’t have a plan…”
“A plan would be advisable, but we do have a course of action.”
Dean squints up at him as Cas gets to his feet, going to the drawer where dwells Vera’s latest punishment for him making it hard for her to keep him alive. “We really don’t.”
“Save the world,” Cas answers, taking out two bottles and placing them on the bedside table. “We’re starting now, one small Kansas town at a time.”
“Joe said—”
“Joe underestimates himself by habit; he’s very good at what he does. His observations are always accurate, and they indicate a very positive response to our offer. If it was ‘no’, he would have known it and told us.”
Uh huh. Dean braces a hand on the mattress behind him. “Five towns in the middle of Kansas isn’t much.”
“It’s an excellent start,” Cas says, glancing over his shoulder. “I feel ambitious.”
Yeah, he’s getting that impression. “Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me what you got.”
“You should take your medication,” he says in an abrupt switch of topic, picking up a prescription bottle from the bedside table and scanning the label before shaking out a pill and retrieving the second one to get another one and leaving them on the bedside table. Turning around, he meets Dean’s incredulity with suspicious sincerity on his way to the door. “I’ll get you some water.”
Resigned to Cas being himself, Dean starts to reach for the pills when it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually remember when a bedside table showed up in here, though on a guess it was during the fever. Glancing around the room, that’s not the only thing that’s new, and without the distraction of medical shit, it’s kind of obvious. He must have really been out of it if he didn’t realize he’s been taking all this individually instead of as part of what appears to be a greater theme.
He’d suspected for a while that Cas, being the only occupant of the cabin, took the most minimal approach possible to arranging his living space. When Cas gave him the room for his use, the only change was that after a lifetime of motels, Dean failed at remembering to make the bed in the morning and had to teach Cas how to warn a guy before leaving the bathroom after a shower wearing a towel (work in progress, sometimes he forgets to remind Cas, no reason. He’s very sick. His memory is shitty).
In addition to the bedside table (holds more prescription bottles than Cas’s entire drug cache) with added lamp (definitely added during the fever), there’s the crate (which if he squints, he can read used to hold ammunition for a AK-47, so point for recycling) and the worn armchair (he assumes is for both reading hippo porn to Dean purposes as well as the most comfortable option for Cas to not so subtly fall asleep in while observing Dean continuing to breathe), both of which are fixtures that he barely noticed. However, now there’s also the following: a table and chair in the far corner, stacked with reports, maps, a box of pens and pencils, and various camp related paraphernalia for Dean’s reading pleasure, and a battered chest of drawers with a duct-taped leg slumping gratefully into another corner that he thinks that he vaguely remembers showing up a day or two ago. Like maybe Cas realized that clothes should be put into places that aren’t on the floor, which is kind of a huge leap of personal growth, since he thinks closets are for arsenals.
Shifting to sit back against the pillows—now that he thinks about it, they’re all suspiciously lacking in flatness and the number is four times greater than two—he takes another look around. There’s a definite sense this is now someplace someone lives, not just staying. Add a couple of posters and a lava lamp, and this could almost pass for what Dean’s hazy memories of must-see TV would call a normal bedroom. Even with Lisa, sharing a bed and a house and something like a normal life, it sometimes felt like he was never more than a visitor; when he left, it was easy, maybe for both of them, because the only real change was the lack of his presence.
He’s still thinking about the potential for lava lamps and if the generator could handle one—fuck it, he’s kind of always wanted one, so why the hell not—when Cas returns with both the water and another prescription bottle that’s probably Vera’s latest additions to Dean’s schedule of medications. Scooting over so Cas can sit down, Dean assumes from their size that she’s really enjoying using her medical knowledge for revenge; he’s only surprised she’s not administering them herself so she can watch.
Cas waits for him to manfully get everything down before saying, “Dean—”
“I think we can win,” he says, knowing Cas needs to hear it, and maybe he needs to say it. He can’t figure out why the fuck he made this so goddamn hard, like false hope is somehow worse than no hope at all. Like he actually thinks it’s false fucking hope; this can be, will be, is the real thing. Fake it until you make it: he can do that. “We just gotta figure out how.”
“What—” Cas stops, staring at the empty glass like it’ll suddenly confer wisdom or an unexpected and needed amount of Eldritch Horror. “You want to recruit so we can expand our numbers.”
“For a start, yeah. Not just that—everyone’s fighting this, and they don’t have to be part of a militia to do it. Doing it together might help.”
“Though more people joining us would also help.”
“An army would help,” Dean admits, then revises that. “I have an army. It’s just a small army.”
“You’d like a bigger one.”
“Wouldn’t hurt.” Dean cocks his head at Cas’s intent expression. “What, you got one around and forgot to tell me about it?”
“I didn’t forget,” Cas corrects him, standing up. While Dean’s still working out what that’s supposed to mean, he adds, “I think I may know where you can get one.”