He never knows if he dreams. Despite nearly four years of mortality and therefore the need for sleep, his dreams—if they exist—never stay with him as soon as his conscious mind registers reality. To wake up, for him, means to become aware of himself again. It happens in a single shift: off and then on. This morning is no different.

Dean's elbow digs into his ribs. Her weight shifts against the mattress, her body rolling into a better position from which to get up and make coffee.

He likes coffee. But he does not like Dean leaving. He also doesn't like the bounce of the mattress jarring him into consciousness.

A faint, unhappy growl keens through his nose and he tightens his arm around Dean's waist, pressing closer into her back. He wants to stay in bed a while longer. Dean doesn't need to be at work yet for a few hours. They have time. And Dean is warm and comfortable and smells like sweat and laundry soap when he slots between her neck and shoulder. Pressing his palm flat high on Dean's abdomen, he tries to hold Dean still in bed with him.

Next to the bed, Ae hangs in her tree, stretched along the lowest branch, her tail a swinging pendulum to brush over Farb below in his bed. Her round, golden eyes blink slowly with dissatisfaction for being woken, her head feathers fluffed out in defense.

"Novak! Visitor."

Novak. This is a name he hates. But then it could be worse. Just like everything. For four days a new man inhabited their four-person cell: white, short, skinny, hyperactive with long, stringy hair that when clean must have been similar in colour to Dean's hair. He made it his habit to invent as many ridiculous variants as possible on the name James: Jim, Jimmy Two Shoes, Jim-Jim-Jiminiy, and completing the catalog with current favourite, Slim Jim.

Slim is not an inaccurate description of this body, Cas will grant. His ribs protrude, dips between the bones that hollow into deep trenches when he stretches his arms above his head. Muscles stretch sickly across his shoulders, snaking into thin cords to make his biceps and triceps. In the four months since he awoke in Louisville, his body has collapsed into itself. His cheeks are sharp and his hip bones sharper, painful. All sorts of new, sore pressure points have erupted in the last few months. Human bodies apparently require fat and muscles. Without it, they become distinctly uncomfortable to inhabit.

Ae shows signs of the same deprivation, though in her the lack of regular food and sleep does not mean a decrease in body mass. Archeopteryxes, Cas assumes, or perhaps daemons in general, do not suffer starvation as a problem of mass. Rather her scales have dulled, and she has molted some of her feathers from her head, back and tail. At night, suppressed in the silence of their bunk, he massages circles into the bald spot on the side of her head, Ae croaking the soft, scratchy caw of sympathy on his chest.

Slim, then, is an acceptable nickname. Anything else pertaining to James Novak sends shudders through him. How unfortunate that the name listed on the left breast of his orange uniform reads Novak and that is all the guards can be moved to care about.

( Read more... )

Dawn approaches slowly. Faint light on the horizon reflects off the snow-covered fields surrounding Bobby's house and illuminates the cracks in the outer walls. Outside the blanket, the morning air bites with cold. It leaves Cas's ears and the tip of his nose numbed. But under the blanket, it's warm, shared body heat providing a furnace. Where their legs tangle, his knee slotted between Dean's and their calves pressed together, his skin sweats beneath his jeans. The small of Dean's back where Cas rests his palm likewise is sweaty beneath the sweatshirt.

Cas slides his hand across damp skin when Dean shifts in his sleep, rucking up the back of the sweatshirt. Foreheads touching, his nose nudges against Dean's as Dean stirs until Cas can join their mouths together in a soft kiss.

"Dean."

His fingers curl against Dean's spine, nails scraping gently against the skin. He relishes every point of contact of bare skin to bare skin: his toes flexed against Dean's ankle, his hand under the sweatshirt he loaned Dean. Even though Dean striped down to his boxers last night before they climbed into bed, he didn't. It didn't seem right. All this body has is scars.

He offers another whisper kiss and rolls his hips in a long, lazy stretch against Dean's thigh where it presses against his groin. The morning's quiet and still. He's been half-hard since the car last night. What seemed like an impossibility yesterday doesn't seem so ill-advised now. Not with time running out and the dawn approaching.

"Dean." Are you awake?

With the cessation of holiday hours at Target, Cas once again has the onerous task of filling free time. He avoided that problem for the last four months. The final weeks of September and the entirety of October he devoted to refitting a living space in Bobby's old house. Whatever happened to the house—a fire, he thinks, with neat illogic, because fire follows the Winchesters, the fires of childhood homes and the fires of Hell, until they burn, burn, burn—much of it remains uninhabitable. The wind of a strong storm would likely topple two of the exterior walls; most the interior is nothing but char. But there are some salvageable things—always, always something to save.

When the weather turned cold and the winter wind bites through the newspaper on the walls, that thought makes Cas grin, as hard and brittle as the wind. It's a joke Dean wouldn't appreciate, but would have understood nonetheless. Wherever Dean's soul is now.

( He arrived in Sioux Falls in mid-September. )

The killer turned out to be a shapeshifter, not a spirit. But beyond that mistaken assumption, the hunt had gone well. By the time they reconvene and locate a motel room for the night, it's only late afternoon and their injuries are small and few.

( Blood stains the cuff of Cas's jacket, tacky and drying slowly. )