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Dean can’t seem to keep his hands from shaking, so he grips the steering wheel tighter, sets his jaw, and tries to keep his gaze from flicking over to Sam every few seconds. Even with all the miraculous healings Dean has seen over the years, he still can’t quite convince himself that the same Sam that had been convulsing in the snow, unable to so much as count to three, is sitting beside him, unharmed.
He’d let Jack zap back to Mom, just in case Nick had a spell that would resurrect him sewn into his back or something—it’s not like they haven’t seen that before—but not without strict orders to stay there and wait. He doesn’t want the kid using more of his powers than he has to. Not until they figure this out.
Of course, he knows a thing or two about rebellious teenagers, so that’s probably a lost cause. Dean pushes down on the gas pedal.
“He shouldn’t have had to heal me.”
Dean’s foot nearly slips off the pedal. “What, and let you hemorrhage while some backwater ambulance took its sweet-ass time? Come on, Sam.”
It’s not like Sam to start these kinds of conversations when other people are around. He glances up in the rearview mirror at Donatello in the back seat. Sure enough, he’s asleep. One of these days, Dean is gonna have to grill this guy on how he deals with trauma. It’s like everything just slips right off him.
Sam shakes his head, almost imperceptibly, out of the corner of Dean’s eye. “Nick isn’t exactly a trained warrior.”
“Wasn’t,” Dean corrects, automatic.
And thank God for the past tense on that one. It’s about time Nick and all the Lucifer-related crap he kept digging up was behind them. Behind Sam.
Sam makes the face that he usually makes when Dean’s translation of a sentence out of one of the lore books doesn’t quite match the rest of a passage. Because of course he does, because he thinks there’s an epilogue. To be fair, there usually is.
Well, not this time. Not if Dean can help it.
“He sounded—” Sam pauses, clears his throat. It doesn’t help much. “Nick sounded just like him.”
Dean isn’t exactly an expert on Lucifer’s speech. He’s only heard the guy a few times, after all, and it wasn’t like he was paying a whole lot of attention to the patterns. He’d always been a tad bit more concerned with the are we gonna die? part. To him, Nick sounds just like the rest of the psychos that you meet on this job. Like someone who just watched a documentary on Ted Bundy.
“Sam.”
Usually, that’s enough to snap Sam out of it. But he’s miles away, his gaze drifting somewhere out the window.
“He let me fight back, sometimes.”
The few cheese curls he’d eaten before today had gone directly in the toilet churn in Dean’s stomach. Maybe it’s a good thing he never got his hands on the meat lovers’ pizza.
“Never for long.” Sam shakes his head, mouth twisted. “Never for long.”
Dean wishes to God that he couldn’t imagine the scene with frightening clarity. A blink and a miniscule shake of his head aren’t enough to wipe it away.
“I had him,” Sam continues. “And I hesitated.”
Dean shakes his head again. “I should have let you at him.”
It’s never easy for Dean to admit that he’s wrong. A childhood where a misstep had meant CPS knocking at the door or a Shtriga knocking it down instilled the need to be right. The consequences were too high for anything else.
“Yeah, maybe.”
In the rearview mirror, Donatello’s eyes flicker open.
“Did I fall asleep?”
“Is it true?”
Anael holds a diamond necklace up to her throat. They’re fake diamonds, Castiel can see, because the molecules aren’t lined up correctly. Cas sets down the stuffed squirrel he’s been examining—this is God they’re talking about, after all, so nothing is too weird—and picks up an old cuckoo clock.
“Is what true?”
He’s forgotten these last few years just how cryptic angels can be sometimes. They make Sam and Dean look like the straightest talkers in the world.
Anael’s grin is almost flirtatious. Or teasing, maybe. It’s strange. “Your thing with the older one.”
Cas chokes, and it has nothing to do with the plume of dust that comes off of the stack of old knitted sweaters he’s just pulled off of the shelf. He holds them up one by one, not deigning to answer.
“I mean, no judgement from me,” Anael continues, breezey.
She’s sitting on one of the antique chairs now. Cas thinks that she hasn’t looked seriously at the last ten objects she examined, which means he needs to comb back through them.
“He’s a hot mess—I mean, I don’t want Michael’s leftovers—but you can really put an emphasis on hot.”
Now she’s just trying to get a rise out of him. Cas wonders absently if this is what it would be like to have siblings like Sam and Dean are siblings, not siblings in the angelic sense. Based on Dean’s movie night picks, it seems like all they do is rib each other like this.
“Are you going to help or not?”
Anael puts her hands in the air. “Just trying to get some of the gossip. Being cut off from angel radio has been—”
“Lonely?” Cas suggests.
“New.”
Anael straightens her hair in a gold-framed mirror before she lifts a birdhouse to eye height to peer in the little hole.
“It wasn’t all business. You remember, don’t you?”
He hasn’t thought about those days in a long time. Even though the last ten years—has it really only been that long?—are only a tiny blip in his long, long life, it’s hard to imagine the way it was before.
“I remember.”
His garrison had been like a family, once. A large, somewhat distant family, but a family nonetheless. Angel radio hadn’t been quite unlike the dinner conversation between the Winchesters.
Anael puts down the birdhouse, unsatisfied, and moves on to a pile of umbrellas with strangely shaped handles. One is a snake, another a flamingo.
“For old times’ sake, then. Indulge me. I’m bored.”
Cas sighs. “You used to endlessly push a button.”
Anael’s eyes flash at the reminder. “I didn’t like that much, either.”
She flops down in the chair again, one leg crossed over the other and arms placed delicately on the spindly armrests. Cas suspects that she’s not going to be much help for a while.
“It’s not a thing,” he says at last.
She leans forward, resting her chin on her palm and her elbow on her knee. “Thing-adjacent?”
He’s not even sure they’re talking about the same thing anymore.
“Dean Winchester is my best friend,” Cas tries.
He tries in vain to ignore the way the words stick in his throat.
Anael almost doubles over in laughter at that. “What are you, a middle schooler?”
Cas picks up the flamingo umbrella and turns it over in his hands, trying to ignore the snork-filled laugh going on behind him. "You're the one playing truth or dare."
“Castiel,” she says, wiping her eyes, “you are the strangest angel I’ve ever met.”
“He is,” Cas insists.
She shakes her head and gets up. “Fine. Don’t tell me.”
As she resumes picking through a pile of bracelets that Cas would bet were fifty percent cursed, he wonders to himself just how much she heard over angel radio.