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Dean’s hands are still shaking.
He takes a few breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth in the pattern that that Dad had taught him. It doesn’t calm him down very much, but he doesn’t think they’re shaking enough for someone else to notice, so he stops trying altogether.
“She’s asleep.”
Sam re-emerges from Dean’s hotel room, buttoning up his shirt to cover the rusty bloodstains from Claire clutching at his shirt as he’d carried her into the hotel. Dean looks for a telltale tremor in his brother’s hand and isn’t surprised to spot one.
“Good.”
God knows she needs it. Dean remembers what it’s like to have something foreign racing through your veins, trying to rip your humanity away. And, judging by the haunted look clinging to Sam’s eyes, he remembers, too.
“Have you called Cas?”
Dean really doesn’t want to do that. Cas still hasn’t texted him since he ran off looking for leads on Kelly yet again. He’s taken his phone out and stared at the last message (an emoji of a chick cracking out of an egg) more times than he would ever admit to Sam over the last few weeks. He does not want his opening line after a few weeks of radio silence to be ‘so, we almost killed Claire.’
“I—” He’s going to say that he wasn’t planning on it, that he was going to leave the heavy lifting for Claire, but at Sam’s arched eyebrow, he caves. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Besides, it’ll be good to hear his voice. Or at least, that’s what Dean tells himself as he picks up the phone and hesitantly dials Cas’s number. He resolutely ignores that he knows it by heart, despite the fact that he could have just searched for Cas’s name in his contacts list.
It rings three times. Then, “Hello?”
Had it been anyone else, Dean would have assumed that they’d just woken up; the static of the receiver makes Cas’s already gravelly voice a few shades deeper.
“Is everything all right?”
When Dean doesn’t answer immediately, something rustles on the other end of the line as Cas presumably gets up and starts making for the nearest exit.
“We’re fine. Everybody’s fine.”
Is it weird that he can practically hear Cas’s raised eyebrow from probably several hundred miles away?
“Everybody?”
It’s too late to backtrack and ask what the weather is like in wherever the hell Cas is now. “Um, yeah. There was an incident.”
The sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line tells him that Cas is about to launch into a speech. Dean winces. He sounds like Sam when he’s trying to write up a plausible sounding police report, so he quickly changes tack.
“Like I said, we’re fine. Nothing to worry about.”
“What kind of incident?” Cas demands.
“We ran into Claire on a hunt. Werewolves. Werewolf, actually. The Men of Letters apparently got the othe—”
“Where are you?”
Cas’s voice is loud enough coming through the receiver to catch Sam’s attention. He looks up questioningly, mouthing something that Dean is too distracted to properly make out.
“Listen, Cas, it’s all right.”
On the other side, a door slams. Whether it’s the door of a motel that Cas had hunkered down in for the night or the door of that awful pickup truck that Cas has been sporting lately, Dean can’t really tell.
“No, you listen,” Cas spits, like each of the words is fiery hot to the touch and blistering his tongue. “Claire is a child. She shouldn’t be hunting, and I can’t believe you would enable her!”
Dean is suddenly very glad that Cas can’t see him, because his eye roll would have earned him a glare of biblical proportions.
“She’s not a child, Cas. I was younger than her when I started.”
Not that he’d wish that on anyone, but Claire chose the hunting life. She’d gotten the opportunity to be normal and hadn’t taken it. That’s not their fault. All they can do now is help her where they can. Like she’d said; it’s her life, and she gets all the votes.
“And of course you’d be the first to say your childhood was first rate,” Cas deadpans.
He really doesn’t want to bring the John Winchester School of Hunting into this, so Dean steers the conversation in another direction.
“You don’t have to come down here. Really. Besides, you’ve got the whole Kelly thing to worry about.”
Silence. For a moment, Dean thinks that maybe their cell connection has died.
Cas’s voice is bitterly cold. “So I should just stay on the job, then. Let you take care of my—of Claire.”
“She’s not your daughter, Cas.”
It comes out a little sharper than he’d intended, because he’s thinking of a little boy in Indiana who’d thought that Dean was the king standing on top of the world, not Atlas sweating beneath it.
“She’s not yours, either.”
Dean opens his mouth to speak, but gets cut off by the click of being disconnected.
Claire’s eyes blink lazily open to the sight of someone standing at the foot of her bed. Energy surges through her limbs as she forces herself upright, tangling herself in her bedsheets.
“It’s all right.”
For one aching, hopeful moment, she thinks she hears her father. Then she notices the deeper pitch, the rougher tone.
“They called you?”
An emotion flutters across his face, too quickly for Claire’s sleep-addled brain to register. She thinks it might be anger, but for the life of her, she can’t figure out why he’d be angry.
“Of course they did. I’m your—”
And he stops.
Claire can’t blame him. She’s been searching for a word to fill in that blank for a long time.
“Guardian angel,” she supplies with a sleepy grin that she’ll deny later.
Castiel doesn’t smile, but his features soften. If she hadn’t been so familiar with the lines of his face, Claire doubts she would have noticed at all.
“Dean told me where you were staying. I got this.”
He pulls Grumpy Cat out of his trench coat and places him in the crook of Claire’s arm. Any other time she might have protested, but she’s still so tired.
“Go back to sleep.”
Hesitatingly, he reaches out and smooths back her sweaty hair. Claire drifts off to sleep clutching Grumpy Cat to her chest.