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“Hey. Catch.”
Castiel looks up quickly to see the object, about the size of a baseball, soaring in a wide arc towards him; he catches it deftly with one hand, earning a low, appreciative whistle from Dean. He smiles to himself and looks at what he’s caught, rolling it carefully from palm to palm.
“It’s a pearl,” he says, tone changing from pleased with himself to befuddled. “What’s this for?”
Dean shrugs and comes to sit beside him at the table in the library, swinging himself into his seat with ease. He rests his elbows on the table as Castiel continues to probe the pearl with his fingers. “It’s huge, though, right? That’s big for a pearl?”
“More than,” Castiel concedes, still rolling its cool white shape in his hands. “Where did you find it?”
“Downstairs.” Dean jabs his finger at the computer in front of Castiel. He was using it for …well, nothing, really. He’s becoming more and more accustomed to the idea of ‘doing nothing’. When Dean interrupted him, he was googling things. Dean leaned over to look at the screen. “Were you looking at shoes?”
“Yes.” Castiel stares him down obstinately. “I need new ones.”
“Okay. Sure,” Dean’s mouth twists into the expression which Castiel has learnt means ‘what you’re doing is funny for reasons you don’t understand’, so he ignores him. “Anyway, you think we could put it on eBay? We could pull in a lot of cash on this, right? Buy you all the boots you want.”
Castiel fixes him with a withering glare and holds the pearl up to the light in the library. “I’m not sure. You found it downstairs?”
Dean nods.
“It could be magical,” Castiel says carefully. “Maybe we should find out where it’s from.”
Dean rolls his eyes. “Fine. But if it’s not magic, we can sell it, right?”
“I don’t see why not.”
The pearl exists pretty much nowhere on the internet – or if it does, they can’t find it with the search terms ‘big ass pearl’ – but after asking Sam they find out that the Men Of Letters kept extensive records of everything they held in the bunker, the pearl included. After about half an hour of useless flicking through leather-bound notebooks faded with age, trying to decipher the handwriting of men who, in Castiel’s humble opinion, could have benefited greatly from some tutoring in penmanship, they find the entry.
The pearl has no name; in fact, to Dean’s incredibly evident joy, the pearl is nothing special; it’s just huge, and worth a lot of money. It was found coincidentally, whilst the Men Of Letters investigated, of all things, a Sea Monster up in Maine.
Dean practically bounces in his seat when he finds out the case was left unresolved. “A fucking sea monster. Like, Cthulu, sea monster? B-movie stuff?”
Sam shrugs and peers closer at the logbook. Castiel, sitting between them, looks from one brother to the other. “Says here people were going missing in towns along the coast,” he shrugs. “Couple of people thought they saw something, but nothing concrete.”
“Something tentacle-y?”
“Maybe.”
“Cool,” Dean snatches the pearl from Castiel – he’d been throwing it from hand to hand, and Dean caught it mid-throw. He looks up, mildly irritated; Dean just grins and throws it in the air. “So they never caught the guy. Think we’ve got a net big enough for Nessie?”
Sam snorts. “Hold on,” he taps away at the keyboard for a second. Dean makes as if to hand Castiel the pearl, then holds it away, grinning – Castiel slaps the underside of his hand, dislodging it, and takes it back. He holds it smugly in one hand – Dean rolls his eyes. “Quit flirting,” Sam mutters, interrupting Dean from trying to grab the pearl from Castiel’s hand (he isn’t having much success). “Says here people are still going missing from the coast every now and then. Not many – maybe eight, nine this year. People put them down to usual missing person stuff, but there’s a couple of articles here with people talking about sea monsters.”
“That enough to go on?”
Sam looks at him, brow arched. “You really want to do this, huh?”
Dean balks slightly. “Y’know, it’s just – sea monsters. Cool.”
Sam grins slowly and elbows Cas. “Dean’s been watching the bad kind of Japanese porn.”
Castiel looks from Sam to Dean’s flushed face. “There’s a bad kind?”
Dean steals the pearl out of Castiel’s hands while he’s distracted. “Shut up, Sam.”
Sam figures there’s no particular rush about the sea monster thing – if it’s even there. They decide to set off in a couple of days, and Dean takes it upon himself to give Castiel a Hunter Crash Course.
It’s ridiculous.
First he decides to get Castiel ‘geared up’, which is basically an excuse to drape him in weaponry until it gets so heavy that he almost falls over. Dean compares it to ‘buckaroo’ – Castiel, tired of his references for that day, elbows him hard in the stomach. Dean still laughs. Then they do the standard knowledge check – salt lines, devil’s traps – things Castiel is well aware of (especially considering he knows more wards than Dean does). The only thing Castiel even slightly enjoys is target practise, and that’s for reasons closer to waist-level than his brain.
“So – like this?” he stands in front of the targets, gun a weight in his hands. He deliberately lists out of the standard Weaver stance, angling his shoulders wrong – grins to himself when Dean’s hands land on his shoulders.
“No, no, you gotta-” Dean pushes gently at his shoulders, righting them. Castiel moves his hips out of alignment. Dean laughs. “Are you doing this on purpose?”
“Doing what?” He hasn’t quite managed nonchalance yet. Dean puts his hands on his hips, and pushes them in-line again, Castiel malleable beneath his hands.
“You dick. You know exactly what you’re doing,” Dean sounds pleasantly shocked by the whole thing. “Sneaky bastard.” His voice is right next to Castiel’s ear.
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Whatever,” he says, laughing. Castiel grunts in disappointment when Dean moves away from his back again. “Let’s see you shoot.”
Castiel readjusts his ear-protectors, fires, and misses. He fires again, hits the target’s shoulder; fires again, and hits nothing. He turns to look at Dean. “Perhaps you should show me again how this is supposed to be done.”
Dean chuckles darkly and fits himself to Castiel’s back again. “Dick,” he murmurs, breath warm against Castiel’s earlobe, even beneath the cumbersome plastic headgear. “Okay.” He shifts Castiel’s body again so his stance is correct. Murmurs, next to his ear, little instructions; ‘like – yeah. Like that.’ It makes Castiel’s body warm; he’s not quite able to explain why it affects him so much; that capable voice in his ear.
Dean adjusts his hands; Castiel fires. Bulls-eye, of course, because he has no excuse to ruin it on purpose with Dean fitted against his back. Dean’s hands drift against his hips.
“Knew you could do it. A-plus.”
Castiel laughs. “I could do it again, if you like.”
“No, I’ll take your word for it. Put the gun down – safety on.”
Castiel rolls his eyes, though Dean can’t see him. He puts the safety on and puts the gun down. Turns out of Dean’s hands and goes to lean against the bench in front of the firing range. “What’s next on the itinerary? Will you be teaching me how to drive?”
Dean scoffs. “Yeah, keep hoping,” he walks closer; Castiel lets him, smiling lightly. He pulls the ear-guards from his head.
“So nothing else?” he asks, as casually as he can. Dean stands between his knees.
“Nothing else. Asshole. I was doing this for your benefit, you know.”
“Mm, it definitely seemed like it.”
Dean laughs and Castiel reaches out, gripping Dean by the waist. This is still such a novelty – being able to just reach out and touch. To have Dean respond, as he does now; lifting his hands to fit them against Castiel’s neck. Castiel tangles their feet together; Dean stumbles slightly as he leans down to kiss him, and as he snorts another soft laugh Castiel closes the distance between them.
It is lovely, and it is like nothing else, and Castiel makes a pointed noise when Dean pulls away too quickly.
Dean looks at him, considering; his thumbs graze Castiel’s cheeks. “You’re gonna be okay, though, right?”
Castiel eyes him carefully. “Dean, I’ve been hunting with you before.”
“Yeah, but not – I don’t know. You’re still figuring out how not to burn toast.”
“You burn toast all the time.”
“That’s not the point,” but he laughs. “I’m just checking. You gonna be okay? With the whole… with everything?”
“Yes.” Castiel says assuredly, but dean still looks dubious.
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Dean hums lightly, and kisses him again. “You wanna go upstairs?”
Castiel grins. “Yes, please.”
There’s something really interesting to him about being on the road. He knows Dean and Sam feel a certain kinship with it, Dean more than Sam. Both of them get an ache in their bones when they haven’t been travelling in a while, and Castiel puts most of it down to their upbringing, but figures some of it might just have been born into them; or at least bred.
Dean leans his arm out the window as he drives. It’s not really a nice enough day to do so – the weather is thick with cloud, humid and rainy – but he does it anyway, driving with one hand. Occasionally he looks over his shoulder into the backseat, where Castiel has his window open, too.
“Alright back there?”
Castiel nods, but doesn’t answer. He’s fixated by the spin of the scenery; the sweet curve of treetops, the hesitant smell of rain. How rain prickles at his skin when it hits him through the open window, how wind tugs at him when he leans his forehead out.
He dangles his fingers in the slipstream, and tries not to remember what it was like to have wings.
Sam reaches for the radio, tunes it to something Castiel has never heard before. Usually, Dean doesn’t allow this, but today he’s in a good mood; his method of waking Castiel that morning was with a pleasant – if sloppy – blowjob, and he grinned and kissed him after. Dean is moving with ease, glad to be out again, and he doesn’t just allow Sam to pick the music, he drums his fingers along with it. Sam shoots Castiel an incredulous glance, proving to Castiel that Dean’s behaviour is just as unusual as he assumed.
They roll on, and though the world outside changes, it is only by degrees. It’s a long drive up to Maine, and Castiel finds himself lulled by the soft rain falling on the roof, by the slowly shifting colours of the towns and cities, fields and forests, that they pass.
So strange, to be in this box – tiny metal capsule, nothing on a global scale – and yet pass the world as if it were only pictures on a reel, endlessly turning.
Dean asked him that morning, again, if he was ‘going to be okay’. He muttered it into Castiel’s hair; Castiel muttered his yes as curtly as possible.
He lets his eyes slip closed and falls asleep to the noise of the strange music on the radio, the calm whisper of rain; to Dean’s soft, amused huff when he looks in the rearview mirror.