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When the road blurred once and then twice within the span of seven seconds, Dean hit the blinker and pulled off sharply to the right lane. There was a rest stop just ahead that he crawled to, exhausted and ready to close his eyes for an hour. It had been a taxing day.
“What are we doing?” Emmanuel asked, pinching his eyebrows together in an oh-so-Cas expression.
“I’m going to drive us into a ditch if I don’t pull off, man,” Dean said, rubbing his eyes. “Another hour or two isn’t going to kill Sammy.”
He hoped.
“There are no motels nearby,” Emmanuel told him, bunching his fists in his khakis, then releasing. Over and over.
Dean made a sound that might almost be a laugh. Got out and threw himself into the backseat. Every bone in his body hurt— the ache when you've been hollowed out but you're forced to keep going. He fished Bobby's flask out of his jacket and tipped it back into his mouth until the burn in his throat distracted him. Emmanuel watched him with a pissy look on his face, twisted around to look in the back seat. His gaze flicked up and down Dean's body. The expression was so familiar, Dean could hardly stand to look at him.
“Just rest your eyes, healer. I know you can't sleep,” Dean told him, pushing his jacket into a vaguely pillow shaped form. Emmanuel startled, then pressed his mouth into a thin line and turned around. They listened to the rain on the roof in silence. The car wasn’t as comfortable to sleep in as baby. Dean couldn’t find a position that wasn’t driving some lump into his back. He cleared his throat. Thought about the trench coat in the trunk.
“So what I said earlier,” He started. Stopped, cleared his through and tried to press on. “You sure you don’t mind not knowing who you are?”
“I feel I know who I am currently,” Emmanuel said. He was leaning against the door, looking out into the wet night. Dean watched the back of his head, the side of his ear outlined in orange sodium light.
“So you, uh, Methodist? Baptist? What?” Dean asked, scratching his stomach under his shirt, just to have something to do with his hands. The outfit Daphne had dressed him in screamed Church-Going.
“Nondenominational,” Emmanuel told him. “Well. Daphne’s Methodist.”
“Great,” Dean dropped his shirt and rubbed his hands over his face. “You, uh, don’t wonder if you left behind a wife or kids or a— boyfriend. Husband. From your life before?”
He felt brave, alone here in the car with a Cas who didn't know him from a random guy on the street. It made him want to prod, poke at soft spots he knew Cas had. Dean could see the line of Emmanuel’s shoulders move when he said boyfriend. Dean’s heart climbed up his throat.
Fuck, he was still so mad. He wanted Cas to pay for— everything he’d done. Tipping the world towards destruction, again, and then exiting-stage-left to leave Dean to clean up the mess. For breaking Sam— Cas, of all people, knew how important Sam was to him. What Cas had done to Dean's little brother was near-unforgivable. Maybe totally unforgivable.
But he couldn’t help himself.
“I’m a married man,” Emmanuel said stiffly. “I have to assume I don’t have a secret wife and family missing me. Or— one of those. I don't have… one of those."
“Right,” Dean said, sitting up and gripping the back of Emmanuel’s seat, getting close. “Sure. You are right now— married or something.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” He said bluntly. Now he was refusing to look at Dean. "I am confident if I had someone important to me in my previous life, that surely I would— wouldn't they come looking for me?"
Ouch. Apparently Dean couldn't escape recrimination even in this. Dean pushed the heel of his hand against his forehead, the pressure relieving the ache in his head. He dropped his hand and his finger tips brushed over the back of Emmanuel's shirt collar.
“You don’t know for sure though. What if you’re a murderer?” Dean pressed. He was leaning far enough in that he could smell Emmanuel’s hair gel. “What if you —,”
“It would be quite the departure from my current life to find out that I was a murderous homosexual,” Emmanuel snapped, finally turning to face Dean. Their noses were very close together.
Dean laughed, fell back onto the seat. “Well. You never know what the world has in store for you.”
When Emmanuel had introduced Daphne as his wife, Dean had a dizzying, selfish moment where he wished he hadn’t saved her. Then impulsively thought, well what does that make me? The ex? The jealous ex? That was insane— he and Cas hadn’t even— still, Cas just went off and got attached to another human? Oh, this one didn't work out, better try my luck with a soccer mom?
The moment of looking up from the slain demon straight into Cas’ face had him convinced he’d finally snapped— grief-mad from the loss of Cas, then Bobby, then Sam. He hadn’t felt this alone in years. A moment of confusion, then elation, immediately muddied and obscured by how they’d parted. Cas begging for forgiveness. All the literal and metaphorical blood on his hands.
He’d looked away, eyes on the ceiling when Emmanuel kissed Daphne goodbye. It hadn't looked very passionate, from what he'd seen. That, at least, had been a small comfort. At least no one here was happy.
“Why’d you get married?” Dean asked out loud. “You only knew her for a few months.”
“She takes care of me,” Emmanuel said, still with a hard edge to his voice.
Dean laughed, trying not to be mean, but—
“Sure. Why not. What I’m hearing is that you had to be married before you could knock boots?” Dean teased, voice missing the levity he tried to inject into his tone. He'd been wondering that since he stood in the neat, clean living room, cream carpets and beige furniture— had Cas had sex with this woman?
“I’m not comfortable discussing my marital relations,” Emmanuel shifted around in the front seat, getting comfy. “Besides, didn’t you pull us off the road so you could sleep?”
Dean rolled to face the back of the seat, where he wouldn’t have to look at the outline of his— friend? Enemy?— in the front. Dean knew he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. He’d been in the suburbs for a year, practically married. And he’d really loved Lisa, in his own way. And he and Cas hadn’t ever addressed the— thing. But it didn’t stop him from getting uncomfortably jealous.
Emmanuel spoke up again, a few minutes later. “You don’t approve of what Daphne did?”
“Fuck,” Dean opened his eyes again, looked at the roof of the car. There was a single cigarette burn above him. “I don’t care. It was your life.”
“Was?” Emmanuel asked sharply, the seat creaking as he turned to look back at Dean. They met each other’s gaze, and Dean was the first to break away.
“Is. Was. Whatever.”
Emmanuel hummed, nodded. “I take it I’m not going to be able to go back to that life.”
He said it like a statement. Dean let it sit for a moment while he tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t freak him out.
“Does that make you upset?” He asked eventually, when the answer was clear by his silence.
Emmanuel didn’t answer. The seat creaked as he shifted again and got comfortable.
Dean began drifting to sleep, orange light filtering through his half closed eyes.
“Should I be upset?” Emmanuel asked quietly.
“That I’m kidnapping you? Taking you away from your wife? Yeah,” Dean murmured, yawned. “Yeah, I think any other man would be.”
“And you trust that I’m not going to get out and run when you fall asleep?” He asked, incredulously.
Dean did. God help him, he did. He couldn’t say that though.
“I’d find you,” Dean told him.
“Tell me about your friend. The one who betrayed you,” Emmanuel requested, leaning his chin on the seat to watch Dean.
“Thought you told me to go to sleep?” Dean peeked at him without fully opening his eyes. “So you could try to escape.”
Even now, when Cas didn’t know him— they were still playing. The give and take, the back and forth they had fallen into. He had missed it painfully, the months Cas had been dead and the months where he’d been pretending to be God before that.
The sudden remembering twisted his stomach like there was a knife in it. He was sitting in a car with an amnesiac psychopath who had killed thousands of people just within the last year. One who featured heavily in Dean’s dreams and fantasies, even still.
“He was crazy,” Dean said. Closed his eyes fully. He didn't need to see Cas' face for this. “Went crazy, at least. Did a bunch of bad shit. Killed a bunch of people. Then when he realized that it was going to end badly for him, he tried to pull it all back and asked me to forgive him.”
“Oh.”
“Then he died. Well. I thought he died.”
“Did you? Forgive him?”
Dean opened his eyes to look at Emmanuel, staring down at him. Face mostly covered in shadow.
“I don’t know,” Dean said truthfully. “I would have. Eventually. I think. Whatever he did, he believed he was doing the right thing.”
“The power of conviction is often misplaced,” Emmanuel mused.
Dean sat up, reached over and curled his fingers around the side of Emmanuel’s head like he was cupping his ear. Emmanuel’s eyes widened but he didn’t pull back. The sound of the rain seemed distant, Dean could only concentrate on his own breathing, how dark Emmanuel’s eyes looked. Rubbed a circle into his cheek with his thumb.
“Do you miss him?” Emmanuel asked, voice strained.
Dean pressed his mouth against Emmanuel’s, closed and dry. Just to feel it.
“Dean,” Emmanuel said, strangled and muted against his skin. Dean pulled back. “I’m— I’m sorry, I’m a married—,”
The spell was broken.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dean said heavily, flopping back against the seat. Aching, emotionally. Physically. “Night.”
Emmanuel listened to the deep, even breathing of the strange man in the backseat. The occasional snore. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the head rest, wishing again that sleep would visit him. It seemed to easy for those around him— Daphne dropped into sleep always within minutes of laying down, Dean chugged his flask and passed out, even babies seemed to be able to sleep when they chose. He, on the other hand, lay in bed tossing and turning, eyes pinched shut, waiting for it to take him. He lied to Daphne, to save her from fear, but he'd never slept.
And Dean— he knew. He said he knew that Emmanuel couldn't sleep. Maybe it was coincidence, 'I know you can't sleep in the discomfort of this car,' but it solidified the errant thought in his mind that Dean knew him. From before. He'd had the suspicion from the beginning when Dean showed up on his doorstep— seeing his sturdy figure, eerily familiar hands gripping the knife— he hadn't been afraid. He'd felt… not safe, but seen. Like he was finally coming home. He barely spared Daphne a second thought as he followed this strange man out of the house into the beater car parked on the street.
He wanted to ask. But he got the feeling that Dean kept truth close to his chest and wouldn't tell him.
Now he wished he hadn't come. Dean's prodding about the before times… a murderer? Boyfriends? This was not a realm that Emmanuel was comfortable navigating. And then Dean had kissed him. Barely. And Emmanuel had wanted to explode, burn the entire world down so that everything stopped and he wouldn't have to deal with what came next. But he thought of Daphne and— well, it didn't matter. Dean had pulled away fast and fallen asleep. All Emmanuel could do now was watch his sleeping figure in the rearview mirror, trying to memorize this man for the inevitable moment that they would part.