"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.

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