'Again and Again' - SPN - Castiel, Dean

[whynot]

roque_clasique was like, "Write some Dean h/c with cigarettes in!" and I was like, "Okay!" This also for the 'road trip' square of my mundane_bingo. Ah, croatverse, I have missed you.


Again and Again
Supernatural. Cas, Dean. PG13. Spoilers for 5x04.
Castiel and Dean try to find this Camp Chitaqua they've heard so much about. ~1200 words


After a while, the hunger becomes a solid thing, just sitting there in Castiel's stomach and taking up space. (How strange that is: his stomach, no longer his vessel's, whose soft murmurs disappeared the day the angels did. It's just his now, like his hunger, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his wild eyes when he looks at the rear-view -- all of it, like never before. They haven't eaten for a day now, and his stomach contracts and rumbles in protest.)

In the passenger seat, Dean is quiet and breathing shallowly, gritting his teeth, and Castiel is hoping he fixed that dislocated shoulder properly.

He wants to say something like we'll be there soon and you'll be okay, but he hasn't quite mastered lying and Castiel's mind is too scattered to formulate half-truths. He settles on repetition -- "We should be at the camp soon." -- and Dean croaks out, "Just drive."

+

Repetition, yes, as comforting to humans as it is to angels. Castiel counts ten fingers on himself over and over again like he can't believe it, a challenge to his faith rather than an affirmation of it. He would pause to study his inherited body on reflective surfaces, and Dean would make a joke about what, Castiel doesn't even know, but the smile softens the lines on Dean's face, so Castiel puts up with it. He puts up with Dean's jokes, and Dean puts up with how Castiel never laughs, and all in all, it works out fine.

No jokes now, though. Castiel drives for an hour before they find the boarded-up CVS, and he leaves Dean in the car with a gun in one hand and a knife on his lap. "Stay awake," Castiel barks, because Dean's eyelids are drooping, and his grip around the butt of his gun is weak-fingered and flimsy.

"Fuck you," Dean slurs. "Fuck everything."

Good, Castiel thinks. Good. If Dean can at least still curse the world, then he is fine. Things are good.

Castiel is in and out of the CVS in two minutes, and in the car Dean leans his head against the window with his eyes closed and his breaths shaky. "Dean!" Castiel snaps, which gets him one open eye, and Dean doesn't even protest when Castiel shoves him down and rips down the front of Dean's shirt. Dean just says, "Fuckin' right," and looks like he's trying to smirk, but Castiel is busy with needle and dental floss right now and he is trying to concentrate.

"You should just kill me," Dean says. "I'm probably infected now."

"You are not infected."

"I'll probably turn in fifteen minutes. You don't want a zombie riding shotgun, man. Who wants their brain eaten while they're driving--ow, fuck! Jesus, Cas!"

"Just because the rest of the world has taken a cavalier attitude towards death," Castiel says, stitching him close, "it doesn't mean you should too."

"You talk like a fortune cookie," Dean mutters, "but do you taste like one?"

"Watch for croats."

So presumably Dean tries his best to do so, and Castiel pulls the needle in and out, thinking about how this would be so easy if only he had his powers, if only he had never rebelled. If only he followed his family into the next reality. Everything that drew Castiel away from Heaven is bleeding out in the front seat of a '67 Chevy Impala, and with every second ticking, Castiel's hands are stained red with his blood.

+

Camp Chitaqua not only has electricity, but a food silo big enough to require two people keeping tabs on it. It has no running water, but it has clean water. It is well-defended and armed to the teeth, but is welcoming of strangers who prove themselves to be neither croat nor demon.

Camp Chitaqua has become a fairy tale in their minds, and on especially bad days, they find themselves spinning the old yarn just for the hell of it. Repetition is a powerful drug. Repeat something often enough and you get to call it ritual. Dean calls it addiction.

"Seriously?" Dean had asked the first time he saw Castiel light a cigarette with Jimmy's practiced moves.

"My vessel smoked," he explained, and Dean spent some time saying variations of "so what?" and "you're gonna be sorry when you get addicted and the world runs out of them". But the next time Castiel smoked a cigarette, he offered one to Dean and Dean accepted.

So here they are, taking the I-95 out of Maine, windows down and cigarettes in hand. Castiel is still hyperaware of every inhale of smoke that he takes into his lungs, sometimes holds it too long and so he coughs coughs coughs. He has memories of Jimmy's memories, and remembers looking through one of him sitting on his back porch sharing a cigarette with Amelia. Castiel can't connect the cigarette he's smoking to that image; human mundaneness as it manifests in him still throws him for a loop.

Dean is okay, if sagging passenger-side, the dislocated shoulder and nasty gash mostly taken care of, maybe. Dean took more than the recommended dosage of painkillers, and is now floating somewhere between thoughts of Sam and thoughts of death, if Castiel has to guess. Their hunger has been alleviated only slightly by half a pack of jerky and some potato chips, and as much as Castiel longs for their newly attained food stash in the back, rationing takes priority.

They haven't said anything for the past couple of hours, and the silence is not so much comfortable as it is familiar. Silence finds Castiel acutely aware of his burgeoning humanity (his jaw still hurts where a demon punched it, his shoulder is sunburned and stinging), and it finds Dean contemplating regret or strategy.

Dean is the first to speak. "When Sam was fourteen," he says, "I found him smoking a cigarette. I gave him hell. I called him all sorts of stupid."

"I didn't know he ever smoked," says Castiel. He glances over at Dean, who still looks pale and ragged, whose eyes are focused on some point beyond the horizon.

Dean tries to smile his self-satisfied smile. "He never smoked again."

In this way, Castiel has been learning the bits and pieces of Sam Winchester. Sam's favorite shirt, Sam's aversion to celery, and Sam's supposedly inexplicable soft spot for country music. ("I can understand a side of Johnny Cash. But Keith Urban?") A veritable smorgasbord of trivia relevant to no one but the two of them now who are cut off but somehow clinging.

"I hear," Dean says, "they have cigarettes in Chitaqua. Like, bunches of them. None of this menthol crap either."

"Menthol's not my favorite, but it's the only kind the CVS had any left of," Castiel says.

"I hear they got a garden where they grow fresh tomatoes and onions and shit," Dean continues. He shifts to a more comfortable position, and cringes when a twitch sends him clutching his shoulder. "A garden in Chitaqua. Sammy would have loved that. Did I ever tell you about the time we stayed in Long Island when we were kids, me and Sam helped pick grapes?"

Dean has told him this. Dean has told him this a dozen times, but Castiel settles to hear the story again, to hear all their stories from a time quickly becoming removed from history and reinstated in an abstract place above their heads. There is something to be said for repetition, or ritual, or addiction. Castiel wonders which one this is.