Chapter Text
They’ve been driving for an hour or two, uncounted silent miles of unremarkable country road passing beneath them where they go. It's a case Sam had happened upon in the papers - a spate of disappearances in a town half a day or so north of the bunker. Maybe nothing. But, then again, maybe something. Isn’t that always the way?
“I missed you,” says Cas, unprompted.
The sound of tires on asphalt is, abruptly, far too loud. “Yeah,” says Dean, “Well, uh. Yeah.” Notably, he does not tell Cas that he missed him too, but at this point Dean figures that his persistent baseline cowardice must be half the appeal, or Cas would surely have given up on him years back.
Cas fixes him with a waspish glare, eyebrows pinched together. “I wasn’t talking to you.” He pats the dashboard. “I meant Baby.”
God, he’s such a bitch sometimes. Dean laughs. “You missed my car ?”
“Yes. She’s a remarkable vehicle.”
Dean taps his fingers on the wheel, and grins. “She sure is.”
“When I first met you I found your affection for your car… confusing. It was, after all, only a method of transportation - and a slow, primitive one at that. Noisy. Inefficient.” He wrinkles his nose. “And the smell. Urgh.”
“You mean like the exhaust pipe, or Sam? Cos I tell you, I’ve never met a gassier kid. The guy can fight fucking ghosts and monsters and demons like nobody’s business, but half a cup of chilli and he’s-”
“I mean the exhaust, Dean. Besides, you’re one to talk.”
“What?”
“What?” says Cas, flatly. “Anyway. As I was saying. Like many things, your affection for your car confused me, at first. I thought that perhaps you were simply grateful for a means of getting around, but if that was the case you could easily have purchased or stolen many other cars which would do the job quicker, and cheaper, and more comfortably.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know that now, Dean. But it was a mystery to me at the time. So, after a while, I surmised that perhaps you felt a sentimental attachment to the car because it had belonged to your father, which made… some sense. He was-”
Here, Cas side-eyes him, and Dean shrugs. “You can say he was an asshole, Cas, it’s fine.”
“He really was,” says Cas, with feeling. “Still. He was your father, and that carries weight. Even then, I knew that much. But when I thought more about it, I realised that - given the amount of repairs and replacements made to the vehicle over the years - it was unlikely that this was really in any material capacity still the same car as the one he drove-”
“Hey, Baby’s still Baby,” says Dean, cutting Cas a glare and giving the wheel a consoling pat.
Cas rolls his eyes. “Yes, Theseus, your ship is still your ship. That’s the point I was getting to.”
“Hmmph,” says Dean, “Yeah, well, make sure you say it politely. She’s a lady.”
Cas leans back against the headrest and grins, closing his eyes. “Ah, there it is. And you’re right. For some inexplicable reason, she is. Which really, given some of the things she’s seen over the years, is quite remarkable.” He tilts his head back down, drifting his fingers thoughtfully over the dashboard. “By any literal metric she is only a car, and a car is only hunks of shaped and twisted bits of metal, and metal is only atoms that have happened upon a certain arrangement, and none of it adds up to anything other than an object. And yet, here she is. Far more than the sum of her parts.”
“She’s something special, huh?”
Cas turns to him. He has this expression that’s so… It’s more than Dean knows how to handle, really. Too bright to look at head-on. “You have such a talent, Dean Winchester, for making things more than what they are.”
Dean keeps his eyes on the road. He watches asphalt emerge from the darkness, and he watches the hood of the car swallow it up. A tiny patch of light in defiance of the moonless night. “Yeah, well,” he says, after a while. “I, uh… I bet Baby missed you too.”
***
They pass through Carson city on the way back from a hunt that ended up taking twice as long as it should have done because some asshole back in the ‘40s had buried a guy in the wrong fucking grave. Dean’s shoulders are not cut out for digging multiple graves in one night any more. Or his back. Or his arms. And none of his body enjoys being thrown around cemeteries.
“I’m getting too fucking old for this shit,” he grumbles, one hand on the steering wheel as he twists in his seat, digging a knuckle into a particularly tricky knot in his mid-back. “They should think about making graves out of softer stuff.”
“That’s unlikely to happen,” says Cas, eyes fixed in the rear-view mirror as the city lights drift away behind them. “Stone is a traditional and practical substance for grave markers.”
“Yeah, well. I’m sick of being chucked into rocks.” Dean glances up into the mirror. He catches Cas’ eye, half-veiled in shadow, and looks away. “You, uh, looking at Carson back there?”
Cas nods.
“You want to stop for something to eat? It’s not that far to the motel, but if you need to…”
Cas shakes his head. “No. I don't need to eat. I was just admiring the lights.”
Dean hums. “Funny, ain’t it. How different places look at night.”
“And from a distance,” says Cas. “Far enough away that you can’t make out the buildings. Like all the real parts of the city are gone, and all that’s left is the shape of the lights in all those windows. The, ah,” he throws up air quotes around the words, “the ‘Unreal City’, if you will.”
“Unreal… oh, like in ‘The Waste Land’?”
“Indeed.”
“Vienna, Paris, Athens, fuckin’... Carson, Nevada,” intones Dean, “Unreal.”
Cas snorts. “I’m not entirely certain that’s in the text.”
“Nah,” says Dean, “pretty sure it is.”
Cas shakes his head, but he’s grinning.
Dean hums. “So, you’ve been going through my books again, huh?”
Cas flips open the glove compartment, and brandishes a well-thumbed copy of selected poems. “Well, if you leave them in the library…”
Dean hums his assent. “Yeah, I suppose.” The road curves away ahead of him. “You liked it?”
“The Waste Land?”
“Yeah.”
Cas contemplates this for a moment. “Yes. I think so. Did you?”
“Well, I’m not really a poetry guy-”
Cas rolls his eyes. “Dean, I’ve seen your book collection.”
“They’re not mine. I leave them in the library.”
Cas gives him a Look.
Dean winks.
Cas sighs. “You are deeply, deeply annoying.”
“I try my best. And I- yeah. I suppose I did like it. I… the bit in ‘Burial of the Dead’, with the guy on the bridge. I feel like that about hunting, sometimes. About hunters. Like I-” he shakes his head. “Dunno. Guess all fights kind of end up being the same fight. Or. Something.”
Cas nods, slowly. “Yes. I see that. I like ‘What the Thunder Said’.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I…” he tilts his head, silently concentrating for a long, thoughtful moment. “I suppose I know what it is to thirst, now. I don’t think I would have understood it, before…” he half-glances at Dean, and shrugs. “To be lost in the desert, to need water, to long for rain - I don’t know. That sort of desire is so uniquely human.” He sounds wistful, but not exactly sad.
Dean feels like his mouth is full of sawdust. “Bet he was an asshole, though,” he says.
“Eliot?”
“Mmm.”
“Oh, probably. Most poets are.”
Cas flips the book open, and they lapse into a brittle sort-of-silence - the kind with no words, just the rumble of the road and the quiet turning of pages. The tap of fingers on the wheel. The rustle of a trench-coat being adjusted. Behind them, Carson fades into the night, and is gone.
“I think Macavity is my favorite, honestly,” says Cas, not looking up from the book.
Dean raises an eyebrow. “Of Eliot’s?”
“Of poems.”
“Why?”
Cas shrugs. “I like cats.”
Dean shakes his head. “Whatever you say, buddy. Just don’t go watching the film.”
“I’m not a complete idiot.”
Dean grins. “Coulda fooled me.”
***
Dean pulls the book from the glove compartment a few days later, meaning to return it to the Bunker’s library. It falls open in his hands to a page where a single passage is underlined in hesitant, spidery pencil.
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
He closes the book with a snap.