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It's a Wednesday during summer break when Emma wakes up to the sound of movement downstairs.
She lifts her head from her pillow long enough to squint at the clock on her night side table and confirm that yes, it is ten-twenty in the morning. Which is too late for it to be Cas or Claire downstairs, as Cas teaches classes during the summer and Claire has summer school ("that's not what it's called," she says long-sufferingly every time Emma sing-songs it); and too early for Dean to have come home from work for lunch, the way he sometimes does when they've had meatloaf the night before and he wants to eat the leftovers before anyone else can, the big pig.
So Emma rolls out of bed, sliding silently from under her covers and down the carpet in the hallway, down the stairs. Halfway down them she can't smell any scents that shouldn't belong in their house already: Dean and Cas and Claire and herself, and when she gets another few steps down, she sees the back of Cas's familiar, messy dark hair over the back of the couch.
She stops on the bottom step.
Cas is very still. He seems to be staring straight ahead at nothing. She can see his reflection in the dark TV screen. It's unnervingly foreign and even more unnervingly familiar at the same time, and after a long minute she realizes it's because the only other time she has seen Cas this motionless was when they found his past self in the basement, staring straight ahead with eyes that seemed to see nothing and everything at once.
Her fingers curl more tightly around the banister.
Eventually Cas stirs. He lets out a breath like something drawing life back into itself; he brings his hand up to his face, pushing it through his hair.
Emma moves then. "Cas?"
He doesn't start, exactly, but he does stiffen in a way that lets her know he hadn't known she was there. "Emma."
She takes a careful step closer. "Are you okay?"
"I have been…let go."
Emma blinks. "…oh."
Cas nods. Once.
Silence seeps in to sit between them.
"I'm sorry," Emma offers. "Was it…" It seems accusatory to ask if there was a reason for it, like it was his fault. "They shouldn't have done that."
"It wasn't their choice," Cas murmurs. "They had to dismiss someone in order to meet budget cuts, and I am the youngest and newest faculty member in the department."
"Well," Emma says. "They coulda just waited for one of the old ones to die."
Cas gives her a reproachful look. She realizes she's not helping at all, so she sidles out of the living room muttering something about making him some tea. Except it's summer and kind of fucking hot because Dean doesn't let them keep the AC on past 80 during the day when Emma's the only one at home ("go to the pool like normal seventeen-year-olds," he says when she complains about it). Which means tea's not really an option, or coffee, so she compromises by pouring some of that morning's leftover coffee from the carafe into a cup with a bunch of ice cubes and extra creamer to make him iced coffee.
She uses the time that the ice is chilling to text Claire. She doesn't really expect a response: Claire's probably in the middle of conjugating verbs, or whatever, but she's still disappointed when three, four, five minutes pass without her phone lighting up with a response.
She goes back into the living room with the glass of iced coffee. A few stubborn clods of creamer still float at the top, but Cas accepts the glass with a quiet "Thank you."
He doesn't drink from it, though, and Emma stands there awkwardly for a minute.
"You can go," Cas says after a moment, when he seems to realize she's still there. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb your rest. I know you like to sleep in."
Which makes Emma feel like a total tool. Here Cas is, visibly shell-shocked at having lost his job, and he's apologizing that she didn't get to sleep fourteen hours today.
"It'll be okay," she blurts out. "You'll find something new."
His smile is small and not very true. "Thank you, Emma." It feels like a pat on the head, like humoring a small child, and Emma slinks away.
- - -
Dean isn't answering his phone, and she doesn't think Cas will mind if she takes the car; he's still just sitting on the couch staring at nothing, so Emma drives his Honda the couple miles to the garage. Vincent sees her through the window and points her toward the back of the garage.
She finds him under a pick-up truck, Taylor Swift blaring from the boom box in the corner. "Hey." She kicks his leg where it sticks out from under the truck. "You need to go home."
Dean shoves out from under the truck on his creeper. He blinks up at her, grease streaked under his eye. "Em?"
"You need to go home," she repeats.
"What? Why?" But he's already standing up.
It doesn't feel right telling him Cas's news. "Cas needs you."
Her dad freezes. "Is he okay?"
"He needs you," she says again. "I'll do…whatever here."
"Rebuild a transmission?" Dean says skeptically. But he heads to the office, sticking his head in to shout something at Vincent and then bee-lining for the Impala.
Emma watches him go and checks her phone for texts from Claire, again.
- - -
Dean pushes the front door open gently. "Cas?"
Cas is sitting on the couch in his teaching clothes. There's a glass of some weird brown drink in front of him on the coffee table, surrounded by a pool of condensation, and Cas is staring at it with a sort of quiet despair. He looks up when Dean comes in, and the look on his face feels like a punch.
"Hey," he says when he can breathe again. Gently, hunkering down. "Baby, what's up?"
Cas straightens, away from the hand Dean puts on his knee. "Why aren't you at work?"
"Em said you needed me."
That flash of despair across Cas's face again. Then he squares his shoulders, and even though he's not wearing a trench coat, it reminds Dean of all the times he has been, like him facing against Raphael all those years ago. "I was fired this morning."
A punch to the gut again. "Aw, Cas."
Cas looking away, not meeting his eyes. His hands opening and closing restlessly. "They gave me two weeks' notice. But I felt--I wished to leave for the rest of the day."
"That's okay." Dean carefully puts his hand on Cas's knee again, curling his thumb underneath it gently. He doesn't pull away this time. "It was a big shock for you, huh?"
"I don't…" Cas seems to be trying to find something to do with his hands, looking down at them as though they're foreign to him. "I have never felt this way before."
Dean doesn't say anything. He just creaks up onto his feet and sits down next to Cas, sliding his arm around his back. Cas stays stiff for a minute, looking down at his open hands in his lap. Then he loosens, though, drawing his legs up to his chest and leaning into Dean.
"Things suck, don't they," Dean says into his hair.
"Yes." Cas's voice is muffled by Dean's shirt.
"They really fucking suck."
"They really do," Cas says, with a pissiness that sounds like his smite-y voice. The tone makes Dean's chest ease, lets his breathe again. He presses his mouth closer against Cas's head, the soft messy hair against his lips, and then he pulls them both back into the sofa cushions, toeing Cas's shoes off and trapping his feet beneath his own.
They lie there for a long, long time.
- - -
When Claire gets home, she's gotten the news from Emma. She comes home with Cas's favorite cheesecake from that place at the mall, and armed with several Redbox movies. There's a carefulness, a quietness, to her actions and Dean's and even Emma's own, that reminds Emma of nothing so much as the way they moved around when they had all first met, when Claire's jaw was wired shut, and they moved as if they were in a minefield, like one wrong move could blow them to pieces. She watches Cas from the corner of her eye, and so does Claire, and so does Dean, and they all know it, even Cas, who seems to get more upset the longer they do it, rejecting each offer of tea or cheesecake or a back rub with increasingly forced patience.
"All right," Dean says finally. He points at Emma. "Kitchen." He points at Cas. "Living room." He points at Claire. "Basement."
"Why?" Emma says at the same time Cas does.
"'Cause I said so," Dean says. "Cas, get Netflix up on the TV. Claire, get four boxes of mac 'n cheese from downstairs. Emma--with me."
"I don't wanna be with you," she protests, more for effect than anything else. The silence is too oppressive, otherwise; and Dean slings an arm over her shoulder and tugs her close as though in acknowledgement of the effort. "Get the milk out," he says.
They work in silence, Emma pouring four quarter-cups of milk as Dean gets water boiling in a pot on the stove. The rest of the house is silent, and Emma rubs her bare foot up the inside of her ankle, letting her hipbone dig into one of the cabinet handles as she watches Dean dial the timer to ten minutes.
"…Dad?"
Dean looks over at her.
"What's Cas gonna do?"
Dean looks back down at the pot of water on the stove. He rolls his lip between his teeth for a minute. Then: "Whatever he wants to do."
Emma considers this for a minute. "He doesn't…seem okay," she says finally.
"That's 'cause he's not." He looks over at her. "But he will be."
Emma sidles closer. Until her hipbone is digging into the handle of the stove door, instead, next to Dean's, and they watch bubbles drift slowly to the surface of the water in the pot until Claire comes back up with the boxes of Walmart-brand macaroni and cheese.
They don't have enough mixing bowls big enough to hold four boxes, and Dean insists they all get one box to themselves, so Claire volunteers to eat out of the gallon-sized measuring cup they use to make waffle batter. Emma pours them all glasses of milk, and Claire grabs a Lactaid before they troop into the living room. Cas is there on the couch, now in his pajama pants and a t-shirt and frowning vaguely at the paused opening credits of Parks and Rec.
"You started without us," Claire says, not quite accusing.
He looks up at her. She plops down next to him with her measuring cup of bright yellow macaroni in one arm and hands him his big stainless steel mixing bowl of the same with the other. Cas lets it be placed in his lap, looking down at it somewhat bemusedly. Dean settles on his other side with his own huge red bowl, and Emma parks herself on the floor next to Cas's legs, stretching her legs out under the coffee table. Her macaroni is drizzled liberally with barbecue sauce.
"You're gross," Claire informs her.
"I'm sophisticated."
"Clearly that word doesn't mean what you think it does."
"Shut it or take it downstairs," Dean says, and they both shut up. Emma leans into Cas's leg, though, as though staking a claim. Cas doesn't quite lean into it, but he shifts his leg so that his knee makes a pillow for her to lean her head against.
A few hours later, when the girls have conked out and Dean's used the remote to change from Parks and Rec to Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ("what? Jack Robinson is hot"), Cas stirs. "Dean."
Dean makes a humming sound. His hand is warm against Cas's back.
"What if we're not all right? With me--out of work?"
"Cas." Dean rubs his back. "We spent years with no jobs. I think we can handle having just one job for a while."
"That was before we had a mortgage."
"Cas. You're awesome. I'm awesome. If we can handle Satan, we can handle this."
Cas is quiet for a while. "This feels harder than Satan."
"That's because it's not gonna kill you," Dean says. "It's just a long stretching tunnel of misery. No noble end, or whatever."
"Dean," Cas says. His eyes somber and blue in the wash of light from the TV in the dark room "I'm sorry you ever felt like this."
"Would you stop worrying about my feelings when you're the one who's down?" Dean shifts on the couch to tuck Cas's head under his chin. "Let me baby you for once."
"I'm not a baby."
"That's true," Dean says. "You're my baby."
On the floor, one of the girls makes a gagging sound. Dean tugs a pillow from behind himself and tosses it at the sound. "Ow!"
Cas smiles slightly against his collarbone. He doesn't say anything, so Dean just pulls him closer and pulls the afghan down off the back of the couch and over both of them.