Work Text:
It’s been raining for hours, the relentless pounding on the tin roof of the cabin occasionally interrupted by the thunk of hail. The river god Unhcegila woke up cranky. Sam and Castiel have a bronze bowl filled with herbs and the bones of a particularly unfortunate saint on the table between them, ready to hit the river god’s snooze button for another thousand years, but it’s useless until Dean arrives with the final ingredient.
Even trapped inside the permanent sensory deprivation tank of a human body, Castiel can hear Dean shouting against the roar of the storm on Sam’s phone. The Impala is stuck in the mud, and Dean is trying to make his way to the cabin on foot.
“The goddamn ‘animal sacrifice’ got loose and made a run for it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch a chicken on a mountain in a hail storm?”
Sam smirks. “Not really.” There’s a hand-sized spider on the wall behind Sam’s head. Sam almost leans back into it, but it scuttles into a gap between the planks.
“Listen, the two of you just sit tight until I can . . .”
The line crackles and goes dead. Sam and Castiel are left sitting in what passes for silence. Castiel winces when the sky flashes pink with lightning. More than a year after Metatron slashed his throat he still hates the constant surprises that come with being human: never knowing what’s around a corner or behind a door, the startling string of noises and lights that he can’t predict or control. He wants to get up and pace but he settles for drumming his finger against the table. Taptaptaptaptap. Something is rustling under the floorboards. Rats, most likely, seeking shelter from the storm.
“I used to be able to talk to them,” he says. Sam looks bewildered. “The rats. The ones swarming under your feet.” Sam glances beneath the table and then crosses his legs. “I wish I could do it right now.”
“Yeah, well, sorry I’m not as exciting a conversationalist as a rat.” Sam subtly scans the floor.
“You’re about the same, really.” This is where Dean would tell him to fuck off, but Sam doesn’t say anything. He just furrows his brow in that quick little hurt look he gives whenever Castiel says something unkind to him. Sometimes Castiel really hates living with the Winchesters and their hurt faces.
“All rats ever say is ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘I’m horny,’ and ‘I’m scared.’ But that’s all humans ever say, too, once you take out conversations about the weather and sports. You just use more words.”
Castiel would never have believed how little difference there is between one mammal and another until he was one. His body is ceaselessly demanding, blotting out thought with cravings for food, sex, rest, and warmth. And behind it all there’s the constant hum of anxiety, threatening to rise unpredictably to a deafening screech. It’s amazing that humans ever manage to do more than fuck, feed, and cower in dark places.
Castiel swings his feet up to rest on the table. The rats don’t bother him, but he needs to move and it keeps him from jumping up. His heel taps in rhythm with his finger.
“We use more words. You’re one of us now,” Sam says wearily. After Castiel showed up on the Winchesters’ doorstep without his grace Sam made it his project to help him adjust. He’d offered so much affable, nonjudgmental help that Castiel began to suspect it was pity and actively resisted it. Over the months that followed Sam’s attitude had shifted from enthusiastic, to determined, to quietly desperate as he gradually realized that there was never going to be a morning when Castiel woke up and embraced the wonders of the human condition. Now Sam mostly settles for correcting Castiel’s pronouns.
The lightning flashes again and Castiel jumps. “How much speed did you take, anyway?” Sam says.
“What makes you think I’ve taken amphetamines?”
Sam huffs, earnest and disapproving. “You’re sitting down and you’re still bouncing off the walls. Plus, you’re grinding your teeth.”
“I found where Dean hid them. They’re a wonderful invention.” The Winchesters have a rainbow of pills in their medicine bag, but Castiel likes the amphetamines best. He’s never really gotten a handle on sleeping, and the crystal clear hyper-reality and confidence remind him of how it felt to be an angel.
“Damn it. I told him to throw them out, not hide them.” Castiel already knew that. He’d been listening last week when they’d talked about it.
“He put them with the emergency whiskey he thinks we don’t know about,” Castiel says. “And you can stop looking so self-righteous. I found your stash yesterday.”
Sam swallowed and looked away. “I don’t have a stash.”
“Sock drawer, left side. You’ve got a bottle of Xanax inside a roll of socks.” Sam started to protest. “I won’t tell Dean.”
“I swear to Christ, between you and Dean I never get any privacy. And anyway, it was legitimately prescribed.”
Castiel is inclined to believe him, but Sam’s outrage is too entertaining to let pass. “To whom?”
“Me!” It doesn’t seem to cross Sam’s mind that Castiel could be anything less than entirely serious. “They gave it to me when I left that psychiatric hospital.” Oh. Castiel supposes that’s what he gets for poking at Sam. He wishes Dean would hurry up and get here so he can borrow a bottle of whiskey.
Sam seems oblivious to the landmine that Castiel just wandered onto. He’s only interested in defending his Xanax. “I’ve had the same bottle for years. It’s just so I know it’s there. I only take one if I really need it.”
Castiel would rather not be having this conversation anymore, but without the possibility of escape the only alternative is to curl up into a sullen ball of silence, and he’s too jittery to pull it off.
Instead he leans toward Sam and squints at him until he squirms. “Are you high right now?” It’s not an entirely flippant question. Sam is bizarrely calm and forgiving in the face of the horrible things that have happened to him. Castiel has never understood it, and he finds it unnerving now that he knows first-hand how painful it is to be human. A steady diet of downers would explain a lot about Sam.
“No!” Sam says. He sounds scandalized.
Castiel shrugs and fishes a joint out of his shirt pocket. “Well, there’s your first problem.”
“Put that away. We’re hunting.”
“We’re waiting for a chicken. And it’ll balance out the amphetamines.” He lights the joint defiantly. Dean would probably lean across the table and grab it out of his hand. The two of them have always been like that, push and pull, forever elbowing their way into each other’s personal space. Sam’s more reserved. Cautious. With reason, perhaps, but even before Castiel hurt him he’d kept his distance, always a shade more polite and considerate than a friend should be. Castiel has never had the patience to work out what’s happening beneath the surface. Not even back when he had centuries to spare.
“Where did you even get that?” Sam says when his disapproving gaze doesn’t make the joint disappear. “I know it wasn’t from Dean.”
“One of the people I had sex with last night gave it to me. Lovely young man. Theology major.” Dean had taken him to a brothel again not long after he fell. He couldn’t have been less interested, but Dean had been so hopeful and excited that he hadn’t had the heart to say no. He’d enjoyed it more than he expected. Sex rarely lasts as long as a chemical high, but it’s remarkably effective at blocking out pain. He understands now why Dean likes it.
Castiel feels a little better after a couple of hits. He barely even jumps at the next lightning flash. He offers the joint without thinking, because that’s what the people he’s smoked with have taught him to do. When Sam actually takes it Castiel half expects him to stub it out.
“What?” Sam says in answer to Castiel’s incredulous look. “I’m tired of being the designated family buzzkill. Besides, you’re giving me a contact high anyway.” He inhales like he knows exactly what he’s doing, and immediately collapses into a half minute coughing fit. Castiel laughs.
“Shut up,” Sam wheezes out when he can talk. “I haven’t done this since college.” When he gets the joint again he takes only a tiny breath and doesn’t look like he’s in imminent danger of choking. As he passes it back his fingers brush Castiel’s.
Sam leans in confidentially. “You know why Dean hates this stuff?”
“Because hippies smoke it?” Castiel doesn’t understand Dean’s dislike of the people he calls hippies. In his own experience they’re quite generous with both sex and drugs.
“Yeah, no. I mean, that’s what he says, but really it makes him super paranoid. When we were in high school one time he got convinced that the cops knew what we were doing and he hid in the bathroom.” Sam starts giggling. “Like, literally behind the shower curtain. I tried to talk him out of there but I was . . .” Sam breaks off to take a breath and get his laughter under control, “. . . laughing too hard. Like now. God, this is always what happens.”
Castiel isn’t sure he’s ever seen Sam laugh like this. Dean, yes—not nearly often enough, but a few times. Probably about as many as he’s seen Dean cry. Sam only lets his emotions vary over a tightly controlled range.
Sam puts out the joint against the edge of the table. “You think Dean’s caught that chicken yet?” Sam’s voice breaks into laughter a bit on the word “chicken.”
“I don’t know. We may need to find an alternative. The scroll didn’t specify a chicken, after all, just an ‘animal.’”
“Sure, but where are we going to get another animal in a hail storm when the car’s stuck?”
“I heard a deer hunter outside the cabin this morning. He had his dogs with him.”
Sam looks at him like he’s suggested throwing a baby into a fire. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
“All right then, we’ll wait for Dean. It seems you’re stuck with me for a while.”
Sam pats Castiel’s hand. “I’m okay with that.” Apparently Sam gets handsy when he’s stoned. Castiel finds it unsettling. Ever since his body started inflicting sexual feelings on him he’s done his best to keep them separate from the Winchesters. He resists the urge to touch them when he wants it too much, and doesn’t let his eyes linger where they shouldn’t. He doesn’t want to upset them; he’s already imposed on them unjustifiably since he’s fallen. Besides, in his experience sex is generally a small and selfish thing, and he cares for them both too much for that.
But now Sam’s smiling at him, bright with dimples, and his hand has settled a fraction of an inch away from Castiel’s. His fingers are long and powerful.
The spider chooses that moment to crawl out of its hiding place and settle on the wall a couple of inches to the right of Sam’s head. Castiel leans across the table. When Sam kisses him it’s so far from anything he expects that he freezes for several seconds before he pulls the knife from his belt and slams it down next to Sam’s head.
Sam gasps and breaks away. “The hell?”
Castiel holds up the knife with the spider impaled on it, then scrapes it off into the bowl and flicks the lighter. The spider curls in on itself as it burns.
“Animal sacrifice,” Castiel says.
Silence settles between them, and it takes Castiel a moment to recognize that it’s absolute. No rain and hail rattling against the tin roof, no thunder and lightning.
Sam looks at the bowl and then out the window. “It stopped raining,” he says. A beam of sunlight falls across the floor of the cabin.
They catch each other’s eyes and Sam glances away. He looks like he wants to crawl into a dark place and hide. A number of things about him make more sense to Castiel now.
Castiel gets up. “I should find Dean and tell him he can stop chasing that bird.” He makes sure to set down the lighter next to the joint. Sam’s a long way from his sock drawer.
“I’ll wait here in case he makes it up.” Sam’s already packing away his emotions. He just looks tired and a little embarrassed.
Castiel hesitates at the door. “You shouldn’t feel--”
Sam waves his hand dismissively. “I’m fine. Really. Forget about it. Go find Dean. I’ll be okay here.” Sam snorts. “I’m sure me and the rats will find plenty to talk about.”
Castiel considers that on his way down the mountain. He doesn’t know whether Sam would find anything to talk about with the rats or not, but for himself he rather misses how much easier it was than talking to people.