AN: Written for a prompt at comment_fic on livejournal. Prompt: Supernatural, Cas from TheEnd!verse, Rainy Day Women

Slight AU for TheEnd!verse (the future that Dean visits): Like in "The End," Dean and Sam stay separated, but in this alternate timeline, "Abandon All Hope" didn't happen; otherwise it's the same verse as The End except Ellen and Jo are at the camp, and Sam takes longer to say yes.

The day Sam says yes is a bad day.

There's a storm that day. It's not a sign - the signs are less ... literal. And the storm is just weather.

But everyone knows what happened and everyone hears the thunder, and it's hard not to connect the two.

Cas looks for Dean, shouts his name in the rain and wind. They had to rethink their strategy, they had to talk about what happened, they had to consider the morale of the camp.

Cas yells this to wet, empty space and waits for a response. He has learned enough finally to know that Dean will not answer if he says "I think this is what it's like to feel your heart break and I don't know how any of you people survive it." And he wants to beg, to scream and beg and demand that Dean not abandon him at this moment, and worse yet, force Cas to abandon him, not after something like this. And he screams himself hoarse, slipping in the mud as everyone else hides in their tents, huddled and listening to the sound of the wind that echoes the earth's short future.

Jo notices him finally, and Cas is so weak now that he doesn't notice her approach, so weak that her yank on his shoulder actually moves him. She yells over the wind, "You have to come inside!"

"I have not found Dean!"

Jo hesitates, she looks at Cas like she understands. But she says, "Come inside," which means she doesn't. But she takes his hand and pulls him toward her cabin, and Cas can't refuse because he knows that Dean has chosen to be apart from him, from all of them; Dean has gotten too good at saying no. And as Jo pulls, Cas feels the heat of her hand, and he realizes that this means he is cold, he is cold enough so that this small soft hand provides him more warmth than do the remnants of his heavenly connection.

And suddenly it is hard to do anything, hard to walk, hard to breathe, hard to speak with his roughened throat, hard to do anything but lie down and imagine ways to fall apart. But there is that hand, that warmth, that tug toward shelter, and he follows it, even as he knows it's just a sensation, just an illusion of not being lost.

When they are inside, Jo releases him, lets go, and Cas feels it, the absence of the heat on his skin, and it feels like a wound.

Ellen is there also, and several other women of the camp. Some of them he doesn't know. But they smile sadly at one another, and try not to look devastated, like their world has not just been taken from them, and suddenly Cas wants to be like that, wants to be able to make his mouth form an empty, foolish smile. But then Ellen is dragging him into a private room, cussing up a storm that he's been wandering around the camp getting soaking wet. When he just stares at her, she gets to work yanking off the waterlogged coat and helps him shed his shirt and pants and socks and shoes until they are wet pile on the floor. And Cas looks down at the quivering motion of his naked human body and sees that he is shivering.

He is shivering.

Ellen hurries to cover him with a blanket, drying him and warming him all at once, and he feels the heat of her body, her arms reaching up to dry his hair, her chest brushing against him as she wraps the blanket tight around his shoulders as he just stands there, cold and shaking and useless. She guides him to a bed to lay down in and goes to find clothes for him, even though they both know clothes aren't exactly easy to come by, and she promises that she'll be right back and she'll send some hot food up for him. He doesn't tell her what it feels like when she moves away from him, that the distance between their bodies makes him feel as frozen as before, like he was a wasteland of a body and a being.

He fights it, almost like he remembers how to fight, and manages to say only two sentences: "Thank you," and "Send whiskey."

A woman comes up soon, knocks softly and enters with bread and soup and a tall glass of whiskey which she stares at, like she can't believe Ellen Harvelle set aside that much whiskey rations for one man. But Cas drinks it quickly and he can feel it, can feel the burn in the chest as it goes down and the fuzzy feeling in his head that makes him feel just a little bit less sharply. It makes him just a little less there and he stares at the empty glass, grateful.

He looks up, then, startled, as her hand reaches for his face.

A gentle touch.

He does not know this woman, can't see into her. She is new at the camp, and she came alone, which means she has lost what most people there have, and she doesn't seem to understand that Cas is different from her, from any of them. Maybe no one told her. Or maybe he just isn't that different any more.

Because he feels the warmth of her touch on his skin. And it is puny, a meeting of surfaces, and it should be nothing to Cas, but he turns his face into it, leans to it like it's something. Like he remembers what it's like to follow. And her arms come around him, and she whispers, she asks him to help her forget, she keeps saying that she needs him, that he can do this for her, that he can make her forget everything just for a moment, and her body is so warm against his cold body that he almost doesn't notice his own arms move to embrace her, to try and fall into her warmth and leave the cold empty space of his body.

And at the heat of her body, at its motions that surround him, Cas realizes that it is not so different, that this woman he does not know, whose soul he has never seen, can surround him with her warmth and it is almost the same as Ellen or Jo, it is almost the same as Dean or Sam; it is not a true connection, it is just a warmer way of being alone, but it is more than what he had, and for a second Cas thinks that this must be how humans do it, that they survive by replacing love and faith with heat and motion, they find more people, other people, almost interchangeable, to fill up the spaces left by the ones who abandoned them. Cas is astonished by this, this simple fact of physiology, that the body of a stranger feels as warm as any other, and for a second he wonders if this truth was sent to him to give him something to survive for.

And so Cas asks this woman to guide him, to show him how to lie to her, to let her pretend that he could save her from her pain, to let her pretend that he believed it too. And as Cas closes his eyes and learns, slowly, awkwardly, to move with her, he tries not to think of anything, to fall deep and hopeless into her words and her flesh and her warmth.