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Sometimes Meg wishes she had made better life choices, and sometimes she looks around her and decides that, hey, she’s not doing so bad. Working at the hospital is somehow a constant combination of both. For one thing, it’s boring, and for another, Cas isn’t always a good source of conversation. Still. She’s glad she has him.
He talks to her in a way that no one else has before. Every once in a while, the memory of him kissing her springs to her mind without her permission, and she tries not to think about it too much.
“Did you know,” he says to her one day, “that the first gender affirming surgeries were pioneered in 1920’s Germany? It’s fascinating, really-” (and he continues to go on about this and that, things that happened after her time that fill her with resent and anger, the idea that she could have been happy, could have avoided so much pain if she’d just been born a few centuries later) and when she tunes back in, Cas has circled back around to the subject of his body.
He talks about his body often. Meg doesn’t think she could ever talk about her body (or her vessel, or her relationship to her body, her vessel, her previous vessels, her original body-) in such an earnest, honest way without- without something. She’s not sure.
“It’s a matter of perspective,” Cas says. “I am my true form, but that doesn’t negate the way I’ve existed in this vessel- it’s a shift in perspective.”
She feels uncomfortable. “That’s sweet, Clarence. How about shifting your perspective over to my vessel?” she says, raising an eyebrow suggestively.
He looks at her in contemplation, and says, “The woman who previously inhabited your vessel is long gone. You’re alone in there, as far as I can tell, and you’ve come to view the vessel as your own, but you still feel like something’s not quite right.”
“Sure,” she says. There’s not much else to say.
Cas tilts his head. “Perhaps you would benefit from a haircut.”
Meg lights a cigarette. The rest of the hospital staff tends to avoid Cas. His presence makes them doubt their own sanity, and if she was responsible at all she would tell him to tone it down. She isn’t, of course, and it’s amusing to see them try to make sense of Cas’s little magic tricks.
Some days it’s quiet. Meg sits there and smokes. Cas looks out the window as if he’s seeing something nobody else can. He probably is. The lights flicker now and again, and she wonders what he’s thinking.
Meg isn’t weak. But she’s lonely. She’s glad she has him, of course, but there’s always that hope for something more. Cas sleeps now: he didn’t used to, he explains to her one day, but he wanted to see what it was like to dream. The situation is inherently absurd, but there’s something almost beautiful about it: a demon watching over an angel as he sleeps, curled up peacefully beneath the covers. She wishes he could join him. The first time it happens, she’s overtaken by something so fond, so human , that she gives him a kiss on the forehead. She’d never let anyone know.
He talks about Dean often. It makes her hate him, filled with a sort of jealousy that she doesn’t understand, but it also makes her think that she could probably sort out their differences pretty easily if they all just hopped into bed together.
As soon as Dean shows up, she files the idea away for later. She doubts anything’s gonna happen, but there’s nothing wrong with hoping.
One day, in that stupid goddamn cabin, Cas plants a kiss right smack on Dean’s mouth. Meg laughs, and laughs, and laughs, as Dean looks a bit shell shocked and says, “Cas, buddy- normal- uh- guy friends don’t. Do that.”
Cas frowns. “I don’t understand why you insist on these social conventions.”
“Yeah, you do,” Dean says quietly. Sadly. As if he wishes it could be different. “And- you know. It’s not just-”
Cas nods, and says nothing, and Meg breaks the silence by saying, “Well, are we all gonna sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, or can we do something?”
The thing is- the thing is. She can’t stop thinking- what a waste. It’s almost a need to be human again. God knows it was easier to find a cause and serve it. Life was easier, especially for those ten precious years after the deal. She’d spent her days with theater troupes, before that, partly as a way to dress how she’d wanted, and partly because she had what some might describe as a flair for dramatics.
And then she’d met a man at a crossroads, and it was over. One quick kiss, and ten years in a body that she could call home, a body and a chance to live life as herself. And then it was over, in what felt like a blink of an eye, and that body transformed once more- from a home into a trap that she couldn’t escape, a vessel for pain and torture. Centuries in hell, and then the chance to rise again, with only vague memories of her past life, having forgotten even her own name. What a waste. And still, Meg Masters, she thinks, is as good of a name as any.
Her vessel is her body now. There is no shift in perspective like Cas was talking about. It belonged to someone else, and now it belongs to her. No guilt needed. The world is a shit place. Someone takes what’s yours, and it becomes theirs.
Being human meant that a cause to hold onto was always right around the corner: now, things are a lot more complicated. She figures the closest thing she has to a cause at the moment is Cas, so she might as well hold onto him- she tacks on the innuendo in more ways than one, wishing someone else was around so they could watch her smugly chuckle at her own joke.
Of course, clinging to a cause- a person, a cause, a purpose, there’s not really a difference- is infinitely more difficult when said cause insists on clinging to another person. “Do you think he loves you?” she asks him one day.
“Does it matter?” Cas says. And then: “The average human heart beats about a hundred thousand times a day. I held his, once.”
“Oh, Clarence,” she says hopelessly. She wraps her arms around him, and feels something almost (but not quite) like love.