Siphoning gas, breaking into motels, collapsing in exhaustion and staying up all night when you think you can hear the monsters closing in. Yeah. It's not like Cas is some pedestrian who doesn't know what's what, but he is more scared than usual and is not very good at hiding it.
Cas doesn't know how much his mortal body can take, doesn't know how far it can go, how much pain is normal, how much blood he can lose before needs to take care of it. Cas doesn't know how much loneliness is normal, maybe, because he wouldn't shut up about his family when he was doped up on morphine, and Dean thought of dead scholars who say things like hell is the absence of god and hell is other people and wonders which one Cas would relate to. Hell is zombies and vampires wanting to eat you alive. Maybe it's that.
Dean knows a mortal body can do a hell of a lot, and the first order of business is to teach Cas how. "Look," Dean says, and points with his knife at the croat they just killed. "If you stab someone here, here, here, or here, they're dead. You cut them here, or here, it makes it easier for you to make them dead. Got it?"
Castiel nods.
Dean makes him stab the corpse a few times, for practice.
This is a gun. This is the safety, this is the trigger. Here is how you put in a clip. This is how you take a gun apart, this is how you put it back together. Dean and Cas sit in the peace of abandoned buildings and go through different exorcism rituals, because now that Cas can't exorcise demons with just a touch, he's gonna have to rely on good old-fashioned Latin.
Cas furrows his brow in concentration as he cleans his Glock, and it dawns on Dean: it's like being thirteen all over again, teaching Sam about guns and salt and holy water. It's like being eleven and telling Sammy about monsters, but don't worry, we can kill them, we always do. When Dean was fifteen, Sam almost got mauled to death by a ghoul, and Dean ripped his own shirt apart to make a bandage and held him and talked nonsense at him until Dad showed up: it's like that.
Cas cleans his gun with the same meticulous care Sam does, and it makes Dean's heart ache.
He wonders sometimes, about these second chances that keep falling into his lap. Dean dies, and his father pulls him back out. He dies again, and it's Castiel this time. He sees his parents again, but in a past he cannot change. He sees the future, and he changes it. Now here he is, with another second chance that came back wrong.
"Dean?"
"Huh?"
Cas cants his head to the left.
"I'm fine," Dean says.
Cas looks skeptical, but also concerned, and Dean knows that expression. It's the expression that means the next thing coming out of Cas's mouth is going to make Dean feel incapable and volatile, despite the good intentions. So he falls back on the time-tested Winchester method of dealing.
2/2, because being overexcited about croatverse is my baseline
Cas doesn't know how much his mortal body can take, doesn't know how far it can go, how much pain is normal, how much blood he can lose before needs to take care of it. Cas doesn't know how much loneliness is normal, maybe, because he wouldn't shut up about his family when he was doped up on morphine, and Dean thought of dead scholars who say things like hell is the absence of god and hell is other people and wonders which one Cas would relate to. Hell is zombies and vampires wanting to eat you alive. Maybe it's that.
Dean knows a mortal body can do a hell of a lot, and the first order of business is to teach Cas how. "Look," Dean says, and points with his knife at the croat they just killed. "If you stab someone here, here, here, or here, they're dead. You cut them here, or here, it makes it easier for you to make them dead. Got it?"
Castiel nods.
Dean makes him stab the corpse a few times, for practice.
This is a gun. This is the safety, this is the trigger. Here is how you put in a clip. This is how you take a gun apart, this is how you put it back together. Dean and Cas sit in the peace of abandoned buildings and go through different exorcism rituals, because now that Cas can't exorcise demons with just a touch, he's gonna have to rely on good old-fashioned Latin.
Cas furrows his brow in concentration as he cleans his Glock, and it dawns on Dean: it's like being thirteen all over again, teaching Sam about guns and salt and holy water. It's like being eleven and telling Sammy about monsters, but don't worry, we can kill them, we always do. When Dean was fifteen, Sam almost got mauled to death by a ghoul, and Dean ripped his own shirt apart to make a bandage and held him and talked nonsense at him until Dad showed up: it's like that.
Cas cleans his gun with the same meticulous care Sam does, and it makes Dean's heart ache.
He wonders sometimes, about these second chances that keep falling into his lap. Dean dies, and his father pulls him back out. He dies again, and it's Castiel this time. He sees his parents again, but in a past he cannot change. He sees the future, and he changes it. Now here he is, with another second chance that came back wrong.
"Dean?"
"Huh?"
Cas cants his head to the left.
"I'm fine," Dean says.
Cas looks skeptical, but also concerned, and Dean knows that expression. It's the expression that means the next thing coming out of Cas's mouth is going to make Dean feel incapable and volatile, despite the good intentions. So he falls back on the time-tested Winchester method of dealing.
Dean asks, "You wanna shoot some things?"