vail_kagami | SPN Big Bang: All the Streets Are Empty (and the Cars on Fire)

See masterpost for story information and art.

They left early the next day. Bobby saw them off, as did some of the people from the town. Castiel recognized their faces but did not know their names nor did he care to ask. Some of the people were glad to see them go, frightened by Sam and his powers. A few others asked him to stay.

Bobby said nothing except, “You okay? I mean – you know.”

“You mean, I drank blood and it will come to bite me in the ass?” Sam shrugged. “The withdrawal shouldn’t be so bad. I didn’t drink much.”

“And you don’t…” Bobby trailed off and didn’t continue, probably ashamed of doubting Sam’s willingness to continue his abstinence now he had had a taste. Castiel found himself thinking that they would meet more demons along the way and had no weapon to kill them but said nothing.

They walked for a bit, checking every car they found for gas and functionality. The first gassed car they came across, five hours later, had rolled off the road and was hidden by the bushes down a slope. The driver was still inside, half-decayed, beside an equally dead woman in the passenger seat. The bullet hole in his temple and the missing back of her head told their story.

The car looked intact, but there was no way of getting it up onto the street. While Sam used a hose to syphon the remaining gas (barely two gallons, they wouldn’t have made it much further anyway) into a can he’d found in the trunk, Castiel picked up the gun that had slipped from the woman’s fingers. They carried enough weapons with them, but could always use the extra ammunition.

The canister was heavy and Sam wasn’t feeling well, so Castiel carried it. They were travelling light, but there was still a lot to carry, from spare clothes and blankets to food and weapons. Sam had insisted on bringing a toothbrush, hating the sensation of unclean teeth. He was peculiar in ways Castiel was only now beginning to learn.

They found a working car with some leftover gas and added theirs just before Sam’s withdrawal symptoms became so bad he could no longer walk.

They holed up in an empty house two towns over where everyone seemed to have left, and waited for Sam’s body to rid itself of the poison. Castiel ate the canned tuna he’d found in the kitchen while he waited and thought about all the spells he knew to summon an archangel.

Sam screamed his way through the pain and hallucinations and later through whatever Lucifer was doing to him in his dreams. Castiel had learned to distinguish between a normal nightmare and Lucifer. If Lucifer was involved, Sam would scream the word ‘No’ over and over again. In his nightmares, the word he screamed loudest was ‘Dean’.

No one was around to hear him. If anyone or anything had been there, the screams would have attracted their attention and probably called them close, but no one came.

Eventually, Castiel realised that he had stopped waiting for Sam to give in. Maybe the world would not, in fact, end any -day. He wasn’t sure what to do now.

They found more gas and made it to Iowa where trees fallen across the roads forced them to finally abandon their car. There was a town nearby, some small place with less than ten thousand buildings. A good half of the town was burned down, the rest looked intact. Again, there was no sign of life as they walked down the streets, their guns ready and all their senses alert. Castiel could not sense anything, but not because there was nothing there. He felt naked and useless and the shotgun he held was no compensation for what he had lost.

The word CROATOAN was smeared in blood across a shop window. Sam and Castiel kept alert for danger until they found another car to take them as far as the road would allow, but everyone else had already left.

Half an hour later, with the needle marking the gas level close to reserve and the car squeaking with every bump in the road it hit, Castiel asked, “What happened when Dean met Michael?”

“He said yes.” Sam was driving. He didn’t look away from the road.

“What were his conditions?” Castiel couldn’t imagine Dean just handing himself over without conditions. Maybe they could find something useful there. “He asked for your safety, I assume.”

“No.” Sam’s face was still blank, but his hands gripped the steering wheel tighter than before. “He didn’t.”

Oh, Castiel thought and didn’t know what else to say.

After eight minutes of silence, Sam said, “We’ll need a weapon against demons,” as if that was the only thing on his mind.

The car took them all the way to the next town, and there, finally, they found living people. Two men and a woman were watching from the window of a bakery as they slowly drove by, and the moment Castiel saw them, he realized that his grace wasn’t gone completely, not yet. At least one of the men was a demon, powerful and old. Castiel saw his true form beneath the mask he was wearing – not as clearly as he would have before, but without a chance of being mistaken. He was about to warn Sam, but Sam was already turning the car around and driving back the way they came.

They didn’t make it far. The car ran out of gas long before they made it out of the city and they’d had to walk. Castiel felt they were being followed, but there was no one to be seen when he turned around and his supernatural senses had been mostly lost and couldn’t grasp the feeling. Sam told him that it was probably his imagination.

“How would you know?”

“It’s pretty common to feel you’re being followed if you know there’s a threat nearby, or even if you’re just not feeling safe.”

“You mean humans feel like this all the time?”

“Yeah. But sometimes you really are being followed.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“You can’t.”

That didn’t help. Castiel’s fading grace didn’t help either, since he didn’t know if he was already suffering from the kind of paranoia apparently common to humans, or if he was really picking up on something that was there.

They took a few turns and made an effort to walk around the place where they had seen the demon. At some point, Sam said, “We should help those people.”

“What people?”

“The possessed people. Maybe we can still save them.”

Castiel shook his head. “We don’t have a weapon to use against them. And that demon was very strong. We’ll do best to avoid it.”

“The others were weak.”

Castiel had not even been able to tell that the other two people were possessed as well. That Sam was had to be a lingering effect of the demon blood Sam had only just expelled from his system. “We shouldn’t seek confrontations where we don’t have to. We’re vulnerable like this and no help to Dean or anyone else if we’re dead.”

“How are we a help to anyone if we won’t help anyone?” Sam asked bitterly. “These are the people we’re trying to save.”

“We’re trying to save your species.” Irritation crept into Castiel’s voice when it didn’t seem like Sam would see reason, but Sam just shifted the weight of his backpack and took a turn that would bring him back to the main street.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

There was no doubt that the demons knew who Sam was, but Sam and Castiel could at least pretend not to know that they were demons. They approached them cautiously, claiming that they turned around earlier because the three strangers hadn’t looked very welcoming and they didn’t want any trouble, but then their car had broken down and they’d ended up back there anyway.

The demons acted suspicious, but only for a short time. Eventually, they welcomed them and offered shelter for the night, and when the woman tried to take Sam along to her room, he let himself be talked into it after only a short act of hesitation.

It took Castiel a surprising amount of willpower not to go after them.

But Sam could handle himself. He returned after eight and a half minutes and Castiel could sense the power in him even though there was no trace of blood around his mouth or on his hands.

The other two demons, who’d been trying to inconspicuously manoeuvre Castiel into a corner, were clueless. Sam managed to draw one of them out before they really understood what was going on and held the other still and trapped inside its host while he sliced open the creature’s arm and caught the blood inside an empty plastic bottle. Only then did he force the demon out of the man it was possessing.

The man collapsed face first at Castiel’s feet, like a puppet with cut strings. He was dead, and so was the other one. “The woman?” Castiel asked.

“Shaken, but mostly okay. I told her to stay calm until we come get her.”

They did, in the end, save no one that day. Back in the bedroom they found only the corpse of the young woman Sam had left there, the blood from the cut Sam had inflicted on her arm already dried, the blood flowing from her neck not yet stilled. Whether it was the horror of what the demon had done in her body, the violation the possession had inflicted on her or the hopelessness she found in the ruined world outside the window that had made her slice her own throat they would never know.

Sam and Castiel buried all three under a pile of rubble outside when they couldn’t find a spot of earth large enough for a grave. It was a waste of time, but Sam insisted on it.

They met one more living person before they left the city behind. It was an elderly man who came storming out of a house as they walked down the street. He was thin, his dirty clothes hanging off his body in a way that made clear he’d lost a lot of weight lately, and he looked pale and haunted. He was also wielding a shotgun and yelling at them not to come any closer. When they didn’t turn around immediately, he shot at them. Fortunately, his aim wasn’t very good.

They left him behind and found a way around his street. When it got dark, they found shelter in a three-storey apartment building. In two rooms they found corpses – one man, two children, all having died of causes not immediately apparent – but most places were simply empty. Even Castiel had no idea where the majority of the people in this place had gone.

Perhaps some radio transmission had promised shelter somewhere else. Sam found a radio with working batteries in the apartment under the roof, but a scan of the frequencies produced only static.

A quick search had them find a few cans of food which they packed in their half-empty back-packs, and a lot of meat and vegetables rotting in dead refrigerators. They found an empty bedroom on the third floor, ate from the cans, and found restless sleep in a king-sized bed with the neatly folded sheets.

As usual, Sam didn’t get much rest. Instead of Lucifer or nightmares it was nausea that woke him this time, not long after midnight. Castiel knew it was the withdrawal setting in again and that there was little he could do to help, but he stayed awake anyway while Sam’s body was wracked by cramps and shivers. He dabbed the sweat off his friend’s skin before he could catch a cold on top of everything else.

Around two in the morning, he fetched the bottle with the demon blood from Sam’s backpack, screwed it open and offered it to Sam. “Drink.”

Sam eyed the bottle with a mix of horror and painful need. “Take that away.”

“Drink it, Sam. We have enough, and there’s no point in you going through this.”

“No.” Sam’s voice was strained. “I won’t, unless I absolutely have to.”

He would do it because he needed to, but never because he wanted to. Castiel knew this, but he had trouble actually understanding the reasoning, and right now Sam didn’t seem to be in any condition to explain.

So Castiel tied to make Sam understand something he appeared to be missing: “We can’t stay here much longer and your withdrawal is going to take you out of commission for too long. It’s unnecessary, which makes it a waste of time. Drink.” Then he added, because he was suddenly certain that it factored in Sam’s refusal, “Dean doesn’t care.”

But Sam continued to refuse. By dawn, he was hallucinating. By the time the day had gotten as bright as it would with layers of dust from the attack weeks ago still filling the sky, he was throwing furniture around with his mind and forcing Castiel to hide in another room.

When Sam fell quiet for a while and Castiel went back to him with a damp cloth and the bottle of blood, determined to make him drink, Sam awaited him half-propped against the wall, his eyes unnaturally bright, but clear.

“The knife,” he said.

Castiel didn’t understand. “The knife?”

“The one you’re carrying. Use it.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“I’ll come back all better. You’re right, this is a waste of t-time.” Sam’s voice was shaking, his hands twitching. Castiel drew the knife from his belt, but he still hesitated.

“Hurry up,” Sam gasped. “I can’t… Ah.” His back arched and something fell off a far wall.

The outbursts of Sam’s powers would call attention to them eventually. Sam was right: things would be easier this way. It would also spare him unnecessary suffering.

It still felt wrong when Castiel plunged the blade into Sam’s heart.

While Sam was gone, Castiel collected their bags and went to check the building’s garage for a working car. He was lucky: there were only two cars down there, and while one was nearly empty, the tank of the large SUV was more than half full.

By the time he got back, Sam was alive again and giving him a shaky smile in greeting. Castiel led him down to the garage, half-supporting his weight and not liking his unsteadiness. In the garage, Sam made Castiel use their can to get the gas from the SUV to the smaller car, explaining that it would need less and get them further. While Castiel was busy, Sam went to look for a way to get the garage door open and collapsed right beside it.

The electronics were dead, but there was a way to manually open the gate. Castiel didn’t do that instead he carried Sam back to the room they had stayed in, no longer able to ignore that his death had done little to help him get over the detox. In the end it was another day before Sam was calm enough to be on the road again, and even then Castiel only left because he thought it unsafe to linger any longer.

He drove into the dusky twilight at noon with Sam moaning softly in the back, wondering if the future would seem any less hopeless if the sun were shining.

The next city they found had been large, but it was mostly gone now. There was not even a crater left like in Sioux Falls; the buildings had simply been levelled.

Castiel found a way around it, sometimes having to drive over grass and sand where the road was blocked or damaged. Eventually the destruction ended and they found intact streets and houses in the outer parts of the city that trailed towards the next town. Castiel avoided them, too, expecting survivors and not trusting them not to steal their car.

The gas was more than half gone when he found a farmhouse that looked like it had been abandoned long ago and got Sam inside to rest for the night. Sam was only half-conscious and so weak that Castiel had to carry him again. It hadn’t been a problem before, even though Sam was bigger than Castiel’s vessel. It was just as easy this time, despite Castiel’s own exhaustion and slow physical decline. Until now Castiel had not paid attention to how little Sam was eating and how quickly he was losing weight. Something had to be done about that.

The next day, Sam was better but still shaky and weak and feeling too sick to eat. When Castiel brought up the topic of more nutritional intake, even though it was in an ‘In General’ rather than a ‘Right Now’ sense, Sam actually shook his head and told him in all seriousness that too much food would be wasted on him. “I can’t die.”

“You can. You did. You come back but you can still starve.”

“And then I‘d come back.”

“Just to die again because being dead doesn’t feed you.”

“We don’t know that. Lucifer removes whatever killed me when he brings me back, so it might actually work.”

“You have a fever, Sam. You are usually too intelligent to make a suggestion like this.”

Sam did have a fever, but he was also painfully pragmatic, to the point where he might honestly come up with ideas like this. So Castiel tried to appeal to his pragmatism when he added, “Starvation takes time and you’d be weak and useless long before. We do have a mission, or had you forgotten?” For the first time he feared that Sam might have given up in the face of the hopelessness of all their options. But Sam hadn’t. He went on to explain to Castiel how he didn’t actually intend to starve to death, but their supplies were limited and hunger would make them weak and sluggish and prone to illness and more easily killed, and therefore Sam would leave most of the food for Castiel because Castiel needed it now, and other than Sam he would stay dead if he died. It made a twisted sort of sense, and yet Castiel felt the need to somehow make Sam stop talking because it was ridiculous. Fortunately, Sam eventually fell asleep, and when he woke up, he was too shaken by his nightmares to continue their discussion. When Castiel gave him food, he ate.

But after one very small can of tuna, Sam claimed that he was stuffed and refused to eat any more.

Wind had come up, just strong enough to cause the dirt, bone-dry from weeks without rain, to whirl up and make it hard to see very far. They drove slowly, the road covered in dust and hard to make out. The light was rapidly fading as the dust that filled the sky got even thicker. Castiel knew for a fact that it was only afternoon.

“How long until we can see the sky again?” Sam wondered. He was driving, because even suffering the after-effects of his detox he was better at it than Castiel.

“I don’t know. It might be months. Maybe years.”

Sam said nothing in return, focusing on the road. They were aiming for a town about a mile away, because Sam wanted to check for survivors and they needed more gas. After a while, Castiel said, “You will need your strength soon. Try to get it back. Eat more.”

Without looking away from the road, Sam rolled his eyes. “What for?”

“I have finally been able to recall a spell that will summon the archangel Michael.”

Sam stilled for a moment, but he didn’t stop driving and didn’t turn to look at his friend. Castiel was glad; he feared that the lie would be too visible on his face: he hadn’t just recalled the spell; he had known it all along. He’d just not seen the point of using it.

He wasn’t sure there was a point now.

“That’s… good,” Sam finally replied, carefully. “Do you also know a spell to drive him out of his vessel?”

“No,” Castiel admitted. “The only hope is that you can reach Dean somehow, to make him reject Michael. It might work.” It probably wouldn’t.

“I can’t reach Dean,” Sam said as if to deliberately shatter Castiel’s hope. “Michael is keeping him too far under to see anything that’s happening around him.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. It’s got something to do with Dean’s conditions for saying yes.”

“Did he ask for it?” Castiel felt disappointment, but no surprise.

“No, he’s…” Sam shook his head. “Look, Dean made Michael promise something and Michael didn’t keep that promise. If he’d let Dean see, Dean would know Michael lied to him. I just don’t think Michael would allow that.”

So maybe Dean had asked Michael to go after Lucifer but spare the world. It would have made sense for Castiel’s friend to want that, maybe so much that he would have sacrificed himself to make it happen. Castiel knew Dean had somehow felt responsible for the apocalypse, and considering his increasing desperation perhaps he had reached the point where saying yes on this condition had seemed like a good idea.

It would mean that he had not simply given up, had not, in fact, betrayed them and everything Castiel had fallen for. Castiel’s heartbeat picked up inexplicably at the thought and he tried to ignore the fact that Dean wasn’t naïve enough to believe Michael would actually keep a promise like that.

“You might be able to reach him anyway. It’s not certain, though, and it depends on Dean. He’d have to be willing to be reached.” And even that might not have been enough. Their chances were more than slim, but if Dean had indeed been betrayed by Michael… “It’s up to you if you want to try.”

“I see.” Sam carefully steered the car around a deep crack in the road. “What would we need?”

“Holy oil,” Castiel replied. They did have a flask of that – Bobby had insisted they take it. “Blood of a demon and a human. Silver, lead and brimstone. Utah.”

“Why Utah?”

“It is the right size.”

“I guess in that case, it kind of depends on whether or not we find enough gas to get us there,” Sam noted dryly.

“So you want to do it?”

“Let’s look for gas first,” Sam said vaguely. “Then we’ll see.”

It was a good enough answer. Castiel wasn’t sure he wanted to try it either.

He never asked exactly what price it was that Dean had demanded for his consent.

They didn’t find gas in the town; what had been left had long since been used up by the survivors they found instead. This time, there was no demon amongst them, but the people – barely a hundred in number – had seen other things they couldn’t explain, and more than one said they’d seen a stranger change shape before their eyes in the days after the power went out and the first towns were blasted off the map. They were very suspicious of Sam and Castiel and Castiel didn’t want to stop and deal with them, but Sam ignored the risk after hearing their stories and decided to stay the night so he could teach them the most important things about demons and other monsters and how to fight them or keep them away. “I wish we had pamphlets to hand out,” he muttered at some point, so quiet only Castiel could hear, and the angel had to agree. The knowledge was important, but telling it to all these people took time.

At least Sam was too polite to turn down the meal they were offered and actually ate his fair share. He managed to win the people’s cautious trust, though Castiel could not tell how. Even so, someone around them was always carrying a gun.

The reason became clear the next morning. Castiel had slept some but Sam stayed awake all night, not trusting the strangers enough to let his guard down completely, but also because he didn’t want to disturb them with his nightmares. He would sleep in the car when only Castiel was around.

The suspicion of the others had been strengthened by his refusal to sleep, though, and eventually Sam found out that everyone who’d seen that stranger change shape before them had witnessed the change only after the man had fallen asleep.

A few questions finally brought clarity: the small community was hunted by a werewolf. After everything that had happened, it hardly seemed to matter.

At least that was what Castiel thought. Sam thought it was a good idea to promise he’d take the monster down.

“We can’t just leave these people to their fate,” he defended his decision later, after they had left for the hunt. “They said it had taken three of them last month, and two already this month.”

It was just their luck that they’d ended up there on a full moon. The werewolf would be susceptible to it for another night, and Castiel sighed when Sam wouldn’t be deterred from his decision to take it out, even when the traces they found led away from the town into the forest nearby. Chances were the wolf was moving on and bothering these people no longer, but that didn’t stop Sam. “It’s just going to go after someone else.”

And he was right. That didn’t mean this wasn’t a secondary problem. Being safe from werewolves was meaningless if they weren’t safe from the apocalypse, Castiel told Sam. Being safe from the apocalypse was meaningless if they were eaten by werewolves, Sam replied. He didn’t stop, so Castiel had no chance but to follow.

It had gotten dark, but Castiel’s night vision was still excellent and after Sam told him what to look out for, he easily followed the werewolf’s trail. It was from the previous night when he had been in his wolf-shape. Apparently the fact that all actual moonlight was blocked by the dust in the atmosphere had no effect on the transformation.

Between the two of them, Castiel and Sam had only one gun loaded with silver bullets and Sam gave it to Castiel, since he would probably not transform if bitten and would come back if killed. It shouldn’t have mattered, since they had no intention of splitting up, but when they heard a shrill scream ringing through the night, Sam had started sprinting towards it and Castiel had had a hard time keeping up, not used to moving a human body through branches and trunks at such speed.

They ended up at a cabin in a small clearing, one window lit by a candle and shapes moving behind the glass. Castiel arrived just seconds after Sam, but the moment his friend kicked in the door something slammed into Castiel from the side and knocked him off his feet.

The thing, heavy and panting, had landed on his back, keeping him from getting upright, and a low, aggressive growl rang in his ear. Castiel wanted to call for Sam, but already he could hear the sounds of fighting from inside the cabin, Sam’s slightly hoarse voice mingling with a shrill, female one and the growls of a werewolf – and Castiel knew that there could be no help coming from that side. If anything, his call would distract Sam at a crucial moment and get him killed.

And in the end he didn’t even need help. After the initial surprise, he was able to identify the weight on him, by sound and smell, as a large but entirely normal dog. A dog that was aggressive, that considered him a threat and would have been a serious danger to any normal human, but Castiel, with his inhuman reflexes and strength, could easily wrestle it down while keeping its jaws from closing around his throat.

Just a minute after Castiel was attacked, the dog was lying motionless beneath them – either knocked out or dead, Castiel couldn’t tell. The important point was that it no longer trying to kill him.

Castiel didn’t waste any more time on the animal. He picked up the gun he had dropped and ran towards the cabin, but when he got there, everything was already almost over.

Sam was standing in the middle of the room, between the entrance and a small kitchen. His hand was raised, his eyes narrowed in concentration and effort. Behind him, a girl – long hair, dark skin, no older than twelve – was covering her eyes, dark and wide in an ashen face. Opposite him, an unusually large werewolf was pinned to the wall, kept there by Sam’s psychic powers.

“Cas,” Sam forced out between gritted teeth. “Shoot him!”

Of course. Sam’s powers could disable the werewolf, but they couldn’t replace silver bullets, which short of complete mutilation were the only thing that could kill these creatures. Castiel aimed carefully, still not used to the firearms of mortals, and fired a single shot, right into the monster’s heart.

Sam let go the moment the werewolf went limp. The monster slumped to the floor, already dead. It lay in a heap, the shape of a human; a man with torn clothes and a bearded face.

Castiel found himself staring. He had known that werewolves retuned to their human form in death, but watching it happen, seeing all traces of the monster disappear to leave only the human behind, was a strangely eerie experience.

Beside him, Sam looked at the man with an unreadable expression on his face. He stood still for a long time before he turned to the girl and asked her if she was okay.

The girl was shaken and not particularly helpful, but eventually stopped trying to crawl into Sam’s chest and calmed down some. Sam spend a few minutes talking to her while Castiel checked on the dog to make sure they would not be attacked again and then waited impatiently for the others so they could return to the town and drop off the girl.

As it turned out, though, the girl wasn’t from the town but from the one they had passed before, the one Castiel had avoided while Sam was suffering the consequences of drinking demon blood. The same consequences he was facing again now, after barely a break, because he had drunk blood to fight the werewolf – and for what? They were no closer to getting Dean back or fighting Lucifer than before.

In the light of that, it was understandable, Castiel thought, that he was a little frustrated and irritated when they made their way back to the car with the girl and the dog that wasn’t dead and apparently belonged to her, only for Sam to promise that of course they would take her back to her hometown to see if her mother or her grandparents were still around.

“This is pointless,” Castiel hissed sixteen minutes into the drive. “We have more important things to do than babysitting this child.” He kept his voice down because the child had fallen asleep on the backseat, her arms wrapped around her dog, and he didn’t want her to wake up and interrupt their conversation.

“Like what?” Sam asked, challenge in his voice. “What’s the point of saving the planet if there’s no one living on it?”

“It might have escaped your notice, but you cannot save every single person from every single danger.”

“But we can save the ones we can.”

“It’s a waste of time. If we stop Lucifer and Michael, we wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of their apocalypse. It would save people far more effectively.”

“I’d generally agree with you, but as it happens we don’t exactly have a plan, or much of a chance to do anything at all. All we have is an idea that will probably get us killed.”

“Get me killed,” Castiel corrected. “You will come back. Though Michael might make use of the opportunity and hand you over to his brother, or take it on himself to torture you into giving consent.”

Sam was silent for a beat, then he said, “You kind of support my point here.” He licked his dry lips. “If we try to summon Michael, it will end with you dead and me saying yes to Lucifer. How is that helping?”

“It is still worth the try. And if we fail… No, not the right word. We will likely fail, but even then things will simply be the way they are meant to be. You will say yes, eventually, and I will cease to exist – I’m not even meant to be alive. It is better to try and fail than struggle to postpone the inevitable.”

Sam snorted, a soft and bitter sound. “You sound a lot like Dean right now.”

“Maybe Dean had the right idea.” Castiel hated saying that, and his anger and disappointment had not lessened, but he had begun to understand how much it must have worn on Dean to fight a fight that was hopeless.

“You think we have no chance and that I’m eventually going to damn everyone,” Sam summed up. “You could just go and try to save yourself, then. If there’s no point in fighting, there’s no reason for you to stay with me. In fact, it’s the best way to get yourself killed. And yet you dragged me along even when I was detoxing and useless and just slowing you down and eating your food.”

“You did not eat my food. We’ve had an argument about that.”

“Not my point. You could have left me behind and there’s no good reason why you didn‘t.”

It wasn’t true, of course, and Sam ought to know that. Sam was useful, and crucial, and needed, and Castiel didn’t want him to come to harm, as he had found much to his own surprise. Leaving him behind had never been an option.

Beside that, Castiel knew him. He did not know any of these other people, and neither did Sam, so as they drove through the dim light of early morning – the sky just beginning to show first traces of its now familiar orangey-brown- – Castiel didn’t understand why he was the one who had to explain his viewpoints.

“You’re Sam,” he therefore only said. It was the shortest way he could express his thoughts.

“And that girl is Lorna,” Sam replied, as if Castiel should care. “She’s eleven and was in that cabin with her dad when everything went to hell. He had made a trip to the city that day and didn’t come back. Since then she lived off the food they had stored and things she found in the forest, hoping someone would come to get her.”

Castile shifted uncomfortably, glancing into the rear-view mirror and at the sleeping child. “Why are you telling me that?”

“Let’s go to Utah. It’s probably gonna end in disaster, but we can’t not try.”

“Sam.” Castiel grinded his teeth. “Why did you tell me about that girl?”

Sam sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I hope you’ll figure it out eventually.”

Castiel was not interested. He stared out of the window sullenly, thinking about the gas they would need, the food, the fact that he didn’t know what he would do if he should still be alive after Sam had said yes.

It was a very long time – month and years and many failed plans away – before he understood why the girl’s story was important, and why Sam wanted him to know.

September 12, 2012

MASTERPOST