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Babysitting was a task ill suited to the two 27 year old children that were Castiel's most trusted employees. But due to a too recent death following a recent adoption, time and money didn't allow for Mary Poppins. Instead it was Seth and Danny at his disposal, occasionally Charles or Jolene when they were looking to skip real work, only to be reminded of the cruel reality that handling Alice was more work than handling a PCP rage or hostage negotiation. Battling her over bedtime this night was a little mixture of both, although by little after one in the morning, she had managed to remain silent in her room for more than half an hour. Neither were keen on risking the creak of the bedroom door to check in on her.
"Is it dumb to say I thought babysitting might involve more, like...sitting down?" Unlike Danny, still rigidly seated upright in the rocking chair despite having been in Castiel's house more often than his own apartment, Seth was sprawled out on the couch like he'd just gone ten rounds with a four-foot ninja. Which wasn't exactly wrong. "She acts like a little angel whenever Cas brings her into the station. What gives?"
"Separation anxiety?" Danny suggested.
"Anxiety my ass, you saw the grin on her face when she ripped my favorite T-shirt. Even Claire never caused this much trouble whenever my mom left me in charge."
"She was also a teenager."
"You weren't this rambunctious when you were Alice's age."
Danny scoffed, tipping his head back against the cushion of the chair with his eyelids dipping closed. His smile was infectious; Seth grinned back and peered over the arm of the sofa.
"What's so funny?"
"You definitely were."
"Was not."
"Were too."
"Was not times infinity times infinity times a thous-" The front door opened without warning. Both of them straightened up, Danny as much as he could in the position he was already in, and with every fiber of their being they prayed Alice wouldn't wake from the noise and make all their hard work look like nothing. At least Castiel had the sense to come home quietly when she was supposed to be in bed.
He usually had that sense. This time around, he let the door shut hard behind him and ditched his coat onto the floor, too literally wrapped up in his own arms to bother hanging it on the rack. For a man who kept his heart in the back of his sock drawer, he sure wore it on his sleeve now. Visibly distressed, he stumbled into the coffee table as though a thin layer of ice covered his skin and kept him from moving well, although under the light once he properly entered the living room, that didn't look too far off.
Danny said, dumbfounded, "You're soaked."
By now they knew him well enough to be prepared for a mild "Thank you, I hadn't noticed" in return. That was exactly what caught them unprepared when he said nothing at all beyond a simple nod, determined to get his shoes off before his socks froze themselves onto his feet. The task was just as hard as he made it look. Because his fingers were painful to move, he could only helplessly shuffle out of them and nearly hit his back against the wall in the process, thankfully steadied by Danny once he'd broken out of his astonished trance.
The save was sadly irrelevant. Whether they already made too much commotion or Alice simply sensed that her father was finally home, she was up and out of bed in seconds, dashing down the stairs calling "Daddy! Daddy!" like they wouldn't have heard her already. The moment Castiel lifted his gaze from his shoes, Seth already had his hands up in defense.
"We had her in bed. She's just a light sleeper," When Castiel still hadn't spoken a word, he added over his shoulder, "Go n' grab him something dry to wear. The hell happened to you?" Alice's yelling had stopped, but her excitement hadn't. She watched the two from behind Danny's leg until he left to find a a clean shirt, then stood herself in front of them with the presence of a first responder to an emergency.
"Did he get shot in his femoral artery?" Then, tugging on Seth's sleeve, "Hey, is my dad gonna die?"
"Good vocab for a six year old, amiright?"
Castiel switched out his dry sweatshirt from Danny graciously, mumbling a thank you that got lost between the hoarseness of his throat and stuffiness of his voice. "I missed my train. The car's in the shop, so I took one to work and I thought I could make it back by its last run but I'd completely forgotten to file my last report, and by the time I got to the station, it was down for the night. I couldn't call anyone because my cellphone battery was dead and I didn't have my charger on me, so I just walked home."
Uncertainly, Seth said, "Yeesh, take a breath."
"You walked all this way in the rain? Why didn't you at least go back to the office and get someone there to drive you?"
"I just..." Castiel sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "...I didn't feel like it. I just wanted to get home as soon as possible."
"Cover him with blankets! He'll get frostbite!" Alice ran out to grab the whopping two woolen throws her little arms could carry and brought them back with her eager expression quickly diminishing. He hadn't been shot, but the solemn weight that hung in the air was making her uncomfortable, enough to know it was time to be quiet. Cautiously, she wrapped the two blankets over Castiel's shoulders after Danny had led him over to the couch to sit, looking to her two sitters for guidance if not some kind of explanation she could understand.
It was too silent for anyone's comfort. When even Danny wanted to speak up just to banish the oppressive tension, something had to be sincerely wrong. But Castiel stayed quiet like he didn't even notice, and crushed under all his exhaustion probably didn't, until Alice took it upon herself to crawl into his lap. His frown cracked from an amused laugh as he stood her up by the shoulders, feet balancing on his thighs.
"Were you sleeping?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"You promise you were?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"That's my girl. You gotta go back to bed now, though."
Alice gave a sour look and sat herself down stubbornly onto his lap again, but she was no match. Castiel scooped her up and made the trip upstairs, thankfully without slipping over his soaked pant legs, and had disappeared up there for over twenty minutes before Seth and Danny had to wonder how long saying goodnight could take before it became counter-intuitive to actually sleeping.
He came back down in dry clothes soon enough, but with no one left to put a smile on for or make him smile, it was clear just how beaten down he felt. Whatever had him this tired, it couldn't be chalked up to this one bad night alone. When he took his seat on the couch again, at the very least hoping to stay put for a while, he thought he might have fallen asleep on the spot before Danny came in from the kitchen with a mug in his hand. "I shouldn't-"
"It's just tea," Danny assured him. "It'll warm you up."
The heat from the mug seeped into his palms with a warmth he wanted to sink into entirely, but he couldn't. His body was frigid and he didn't have the energy to thaw himself, or so much as move anymore. Seth gave an awkward laugh, saying to him, "You scared the shit outta us when you came in. I thought we were gonna have to ward off some kinda icicle monster."
Castiel whispered, "This would be so much easier if Maggie was still here..."
Silence loomed over them again. Where Danny stood motionless, parting his lips with nothing truly helpful to say, Seth recoiled from the shared pain but shook his head.
"Don't talk like that," he insisted, "You can't. It's not gonna do anybody any good." Whether Castiel believed him or not, he couldn't just not think it. She always knew what to do no matter how hard things got, and dear lord things had gotten hard. If he could talk to her just one more time, even that would be enough. But he couldn't. He couldn't talk to her, he couldn't warm up from this biting cold and he didn't know if he could keep going like this. "We're still here, right? And we're gonna get through all'a this together, ain't we?"
It took too long for Castiel to nod convincingly. Seth heaved a sigh and went to wrap another blanket over his shoulders, patting them a little too harsh. "It's not like you're doing a bad job, Cas. It's hard, but...that's what we're here for. Me n' Danny and just about everybody else, we're not about to let you freeze yourself to death in the rain or quit sleepin' cold turkey."
"Speaking of which, it's late," Danny mentioned. "You ought to at least try to sleep."
The very idea of it made Castiel skeptical- he wasn't able to sleep well before he had a kid- but if he was going to collapse into a pity party, he might as well do it lying down. Supported by Danny's arm around his back, he ditched the mess of shoes and mud in the living room and more or less fell onto his bed face-down, instinctively fighting sleep as it slowly crept over him. He turned to his side.
"Did she behave today?"
"She was an angel," Seth said. "Didn't give us any more trouble than she did last time."
"Last time you said you were going to sue her."
"Little less trouble than that today, sir."
Castiel smiled faintly, turning his face into the pillow. He was lost and scared without Maggie, but though she was gone, the rest of his world was sleeping safe and sound upstairs. "She ate all her dinner? Didn't hide her vegetables again?"
"Jesus fucking Christ, you're harder to put down than your own six-year-old. Go to sleep."
Seth didn't need to tell him twice. He'd already started to drift off before he'd finished talking, floating atop a sea of reassurances and doubts.
At least, as was his final thought, he was floating.