Lord it's a hard life God makes you live.

[decadency]

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. As far as he can tell, Lucifer sent him exactly three years into the past—an alternative past. What the value of "alternative" is remains to be discovered. Due to various circumstances, none of them relevant now, it took him six weeks to travel from the Sanitarium that housed Lucifer's garden and Dean's final resting place in 2014 to Bobby's house in Sioux Falls in 2011. Six weeks or negative one hundred and fifty weeks.

The destruction of the house, and within two weeks, the discovery of the Impala, proved to Cas that Dean and Bobby are no more alive in this world than they were in his own. He doesn't know what happened to Sam. The world hasn't ended; he has no reason now to search for Sam Winchester.

Whatever demise the Winchesters met, and Bobby by extension, it didn't happen here. Through his careful exploration of the first floor of the house—his drive for self-destruction takes the form of ingesting as many chemicals as possible to provide relief or stimulation, not breaking his leg on navigating derelict stairs—he found a few books that survived the fire, as well as a few pieces of furniture he could appropriate for his own use: a kitchen chair, a table he could repair, a bed frame. But no bodies. No bones. He tried not to decide if that was a cause for relief (foolish hope) or despair (funeral rites are human practices, and he's not, he's not).

One of the books contained photographs. His employee discount at Target purchased a collection of picture frames. He tried not to crumble the charred edges when he tucked the photos safely behind glass.

They litter the surfaces of his room now: Sam and Dean as children or as young men; Bobby and other hunters Cas made the acquaintance of before they died. He likes the photographs, pieces of memory frozen eternally, even if they aren't his memories. He likes them almost as much as he likes the books. Very little of Bobby's library survived, but he saved what he could and then added his own in the last few months. Short-story fiction and philosophy are his favourites, but he buys whatever hooks his attention, or whatever seems popular with the shoppers at Target.

Humans craft stories to explain the world to themselves. He always wanted to understand them, resolved himself to live among them, even if now he lives miles and miles from another living person and contents himself with a room full of paper-thin images and distant knowledge. Living here isn't much different to being an angel. In a way, he's gone home.

For all that it may be lonely, he likes the home he's made for himself here. It may not involve waking up in sheets that smell like Dean and sex, or coming into a kitchen to be greeted with the smell of bacon frying and Dean smiling. But Cas has known those desires were only fantasy for years. Here, a generator runs two lamps, a space heater, and a hot plate when he needs it to eat up cans of soup. The bathroom down the hall miraculously still has running water, even with one of the walls missing. It's cold, and he worries as winter sets its teeth into South Dakota that the pipes will freeze, but it's better than no water. All in all, the commodities are no different than what they had at the camp, but with the addition of no one trying to kill them, no Croatoan virus, no torture, no traumatized refugees.

No Dean.

His shift ended tonight at eight, but they sent him home at seven due to lack of customers. Early on the floor manager decided it was better for him to focus on stocking and cleaning rather than interacting with people, but no customers means nothing to stock. He had spent the last hour leaning on the handle of his mop in the children's section, reading Harry Potter. Now, two hours later and dinner already prepared and consumed, he wishes he had bought Chamber of Secrets when they told him to go home. He has National Public Radio playing on the radio in the Impala outside, but listening to it means keeping the door open, and the evening February chill is no match for his space heater. He lies on the box spring he pulled out of what he thinks is the living room, curled under the pink and green floral comforter he bought as a set from Target's clearance aisle, despite having no pillows to put the pillow cases on, and tries to let the soft voices debating abortion lull him to sleep. Questions of mortality no longer interest him, but the news will be on in another hour, the nightly debrief for any signs or clues what happened in this world to keep it from becoming his own. Until then, he has a bottle of whiskey to keep him occupied, as well Bobby's stash of pain killers and sedatives in the table drawer.

Perhaps tomorrow he'll drive back to Target to buy Harry Potter. His day off can involve learning what becomes of Harry.

Comments

[whatrhymeswith]

He didn't tell Sam where he's going.

There wasn't any reason to. They're between cases; Sam's busy digging up dirt on Dick Roman—Dick; Dean can't even think of the guy without clenching his fists tighter around the steering wheel, without gritting his teeth and working his jaw—and Dean . . . well. Dean tried to help, but sitting in a motel room brooding over a collection of newspaper clippings and print-outs, spending his days staring at the face of the man he wants dead, wants to see hurt and broken and bleeding and dying because he took away the one thing in Dean's life that was whole still . . . it didn't really work out. Earlier tonight, after Dean had once again snapped at Sam for admittedly no reason whatsoever, Sam told him to get out, go get another room, catch some sleep, shoot holes into the fireplace, whatever would make him chill out. So Dean grabbed the car keys and left. Shooting holes into the fireplace isn't his style; he prefers going for a drive. This red '72 Mustang isn't the right car, though.

He didn't really intend to head to Sioux Falls, but nonetheless found himself going west on I-90 within less than an hour of leaving Clear Lake, the small town where Sam and he crashed for their Dick Roman research marathon. He resigned to his subconscious choice of destination when he passed Worthington, and now thinks that maybe this isn't even such a terrible idea. Even if seeing Bobby's old place won't help--which, if he's honest with himself, he's fairly certain it won't--he can check on the Impala, make sure she's fine, maybe take her out for a spin to make sure the battery won't go flat. Go for a short drive in the right car. That actually might help.

He takes the exit off 29, and after a few turns the Mustang is bouncing up the dirt road to the scrapyard's entrance. Dean's eyebrows are pinched together in a frown; the suspension on this car is terrible. But then, the suspension of all cars they've been driving the past few months was terrible. He pulls up in a free space between half a Camaro and the remains of a totaled Toronado, then kills the engine. Sits there and listens to the dead quiet of a South Dakota winter night. No birds, no crickets. No sounds from the house that used to stand at the end of the driveway, and which is now no more than a couple of charred walls and a lot of black, crumbled wood. No sounds at all.

Except that's not quite right. His frown deepens as he cracks the Mustang's door open, listens intently. He can hear the chatter of a radio from nearby. The monotone voices are hard to mistake for anything else. He gets out of the car, his right hand going to rest on the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans as he uses his left to quietly push the car door closed. Quiet as he can, he walks further up the driveway, and isn't surprised when he spots a light glinting out between the ruins of the least damaged part of the house. Someone's squatting in there, in the hallway leading up to the backdoor, which the fire miraculously didn't touch.

Awesome. He works his jaw, narrows his eyes. The anger's irrational. He's squatted enough himself to know that most of the time, squatters are more careful with the property than the owners themselves. In this case, there isn't even an owner anymore. Hasn't been for a few weeks. He doesn't want to think about that. Instead, he pulls his gun out, starts moving around the house, careful to walk on the grass to avoid his boots crunching on the gravel. Turns the corner of the house.

The anger he feels at the sight that presents itself now is less irrational. It's Bobby's backyard, an open gravel field leading up to the backdoor. The yard itself is filled with old car bodies, stacked three to four cars high with a broad gravel alley down the middle. The car that's parked closer to the house—or what used to be the house and is now a burned-out wreck save for the small cabin someone assembled out of the remains of the hallway—is not an old, empty shell, though. Black, sleek lines with chrome detailing, headlights on and aimed at the half-open door, Dean would recognize this car anywhere. Because she's his. And that's not where he left her.

He doesn't quicken his pace; if anything, his movements become even quieter, even more careful. He slides along the side of the car towards the door, grits his teeth even harder when a brief glance at the dashboard reveals a clump of exposed wires. Whoever's squatting here, he has half a mind to just put a bullet in them and be done with it. The Impala is his. You don't get to touch her, to take her and hotwire her and use her and then move into Bobby's house as if it didn't use to be someone's home. As if it never meant anything to anyone. Actions like that invoke consequences.

He steps into the light of the headlights at the last possible moment, pushes the door open all the way and points his gun at the ramshackle excuse for a bed that's sitting against a wall in the hallway cabin. "Don't move."

He's standing right in front of the headlights in the hope of disorienting the squatter enough to not be able to take proper aim, in case they're armed. He also doesn't really care, though. One false move, and all he has to do is pull the trigger. He's a very good shot.