Kiss the Cook

"Cas, I told you not to call me unless -"

" – unless it was an emergency," the familiar husky voice interrupts from the other line, his words rushed and blending together. "And it is. The giant machine is angry with me, Dean. It's screaming and spitting out fire, and I don't know what to do. I even offered it a sacrifice to soothe its rage, but it's no use."

It takes me a minute to think of something to say to that. "Uh," is the best I can do.

"It's an emergency, Dean," he repeats, as if I might not have heard him the first time. His panicked voice is nearly drowned out by a loud beeping that begins echoing through the hotel room Sam and I had left him in, and something clangs to the floor seconds after he finishes speaking. "I have fought more wars in Heaven than I can count, but I was not prepared for this."

A dull ache slowly creeps its way into the space between my eyebrows, and I pinch the bridge of my nose against the tell tale sign of the start of a migraine. "This is kind of important, Cas. Can't you handle it yourself?"

Sam gives me a confused look, pausing his scanning of the moldy wood room out of concern for our resident insane Angel.

Cas should really have called Sam, not me. I never was the patient one in the family…

"What's up?" he asks quietly, flicking the small device off as it suddenly starts lighting up again. Just about every other step Sam has taken since we walked into this broken down shack has been directly into some sort of ghost wavelength. Whatever is taking up shop in this piece of shit house has left its ghostly mark all over the place. The constant whirring of the EMF tracker hasn't exactly been helping the headache situation, but I'm guessing that a quick beer or two when we're done here will be enough to drown it out.

But we'll never get back to the hotel if Cas keeps calling us every five minutes with some sort of 'emergency'.

"Cas is freaking out over something on TV, I think," I inform him, pressing the phone against my jacket to muffle the connection. "Keeps insisting he's about to die, that it's an emergency and I need to get over there."

Sam shrugs. "Maybe there is something?" he offers unconvincingly. Ever since Cas lost his marbles, he's been all over the place. When he showed up on our doorstep again out of the blue last week, I thought that maybe he had finally pulled himself together. But he still 'follows the bees', as he calls it.

I don't even bother giving Sam a response, because we both know that the most likely scenario is that Cas found the nature channel all by himself, and is now having an orgasm because of a documentary on water buffalo migration patterns. It wouldn't be the first time.

"Besides, it's not like I can't handle this myself – standard vengeful spirit case, Dean. Nothing I haven't dealt with before."

I take in the dry-rotted wood floors and walls of the small room before me, and all I can think about is a vengeful spirit and broken down old house we faced so long ago. My first case with Sammy after I picked him up at Stanford – a crazy lady who drowned her kids, and a woman in white to boot.

Back in the days when the worst thing I had to fear was my brother going back to college instead of traveling with me like we used to. When my biggest problem was abandonment issues and Sam's was the classic youngest child syndrome. Simpler times, to say the least.

Looking at my beaten down brother, I would hardly recognize him as the hopeful kid he was when we worked that case. He's harder now, older – much older than just what time had done. Hell aged him far more than any normal person would even be able to notice without really looking. But I can see it all, clear as day; every second he spent in the Pit is etched into his skin, reflected in his eyes. My baby brother, the old man.

I snap the phone shut, slipping it back into my pocket. "Let Cas deal with it himself. Right now, I'm on a case with my brother – just like old times. No Dick Roman, no Leviathans, no Angels. Just you, me, and some pissed off old dead broad."

Sam cracks a grin, one of those rare moments when he can lighten up enough to feel even a scrap of happiness, and I try to return it as best I can. What a screwed up pair.

I'm about to make some snide comment about Sam getting his ass back to work, when suddenly I'm not looking at Sam – for a fraction of a second, I'm not looking at anything. My eyes involuntarily blur over, and I can't focus on anything around me. When my eyes catch up and refocus, I don't see Sam anywhere. In fact, I don't even see the mildew covered old room anymore.

All I can see is a smog-filled room with a disgustingly pattered red and blue couch, a thick boxy television, and tan carpets that have seen better days. It looks vaguely familiar, but my mind is still a second behind. And then the situation quickly comes to light with the sound of the last voice on Earth I want to hear right now.

"Great, you're here," Cas calls from the kitchen of our newest hotel room, a metallic clash following his voice. "No need to be alarmed – I already put out the fire."

I try to reorder my thoughts, making a serious effort to remain calm. "What the hell, Cas?" I demand, choking on the lungful of air I attempt to breathe in. The thick smoke hangs heavily around me, burning my chest and stinging my eyes.

I already put out the fire, he said.

I pinch the bridge of my nose as the migraine intensifies, whether from the smoke or the nutcase Angel, I'm not sure. We leave him alone for an hour, and he manages to practically burn the hotel to the ground.

"Why is the room filled with smoke, Cas?" I try again, my voice steady but sharp. I'm trying really hard not to get pissed off, because I know that these days he's more like a toddler than an Angel who's witnessed the creation of man. But damn it, he isn't making it easy on me.

There's a long moment of heavy silence from the kitchen, and my anger is growing with every second. Just when my short fuse is just about to run out, I hear his shuffling footsteps making their way from the kitchen towards me. When he walks into the small, makeshift living room, I am once again struck speechless.

His trench coat is even dirtier than usual, almost completely covered in white powder – in fact, just about all of him is covered in the stuff, even his dark hair dusted with white flakes. He looks sticky, too; there's some sort red and yellowish goo spattered on his shoes, his sleeves, and in his eyebrows. He looks incredibly sheepish, like a child caught doing something he knows he isn't supposed to be doing. None of it makes sense until I look a little closer at his apparel, and notice a new addition to his ever-constant wardrobe.

"Kiss the cook?" I ask dubiously, reading the bright red letters off the slime-covered apron that at one point appears to have been white, as opposed to the reddish-brown color is currently boasts.

He looks down at the apron, then shrugs, unashamed. "It was the only one that I could find," he explains. "And, frankly, it made me smile." A grin breaks across his face as he speaks, demonstrating for me how the apron made him feel. He looks so innocent, standing there beaming up at me in his food-covered apron, drenched from head to toe in various cooking ingredients. My stomach twists guiltily as I think about how I was just going to leave him here alone…

"Why did you have to zap me here?" I ask firmly, still upset about that. No matter how childish he looks, my bowels will not be thanking him. "I was going to drive over; save you the hassle, and save my digestive system a little trouble..."

He scrunches his nose up like he always does when he's confused. "You weren't answering me on the phone. I was calling your name, but you weren't there anymore." I wait for a real reason, but for Cas, that's explanation enough.

I heave a sigh, resigning just to go along with him for the time being. "Alright, Cas. So I'm here now, what's the emergency."

"The emergency was the angry metal box that was spitting fire at me like the dragons of the medieval times, but don't worry. I managed to appease it."

My head is reeling, trying to keep up. "You… beat a dragon?"

"I beat a metal box."

I click my tongue impatiently, but give him a wan smile. "Good for you."

He can tell that I'm getting angry again, and his shamefaced expression returns. I backtrack quickly, trying to keep my cool.

"So, uh, you beat the metal box of doom. What did you do to make it angry?" Baby steps, Dean. You'll get answers eventually, you just have to go a little slower than you're used to, Sam advises me in my head, ever the voice of reason.

He shrugs, looking at his flour and sugar covered dress shoes. "You and Sam were on a hunt."

I grit my teeth to keep back any sharp retorts. "Yes."

"And you had been having a bad day."

"I'm having a bad decade, Cas."

"And I just thought that… You know…"

I can hear Sam's nagging voice in my mind again, coaching me through this. Be patient. He's practically just a little kid. Remember how you talked to me when my melon was fried. "You just thought what?"

He finally raises his big blue eyes from the ground to look at me. "I thought, since you're having a bad day… I would try to make you a pie. To cheer you up."

I'm dumbstruck. I feel my face go blank in surprise at this perfectly innocent attempt at brightening my day – something that no one really has the time to do anymore. Sam and I used to do stupid little things for each other all the time; he'd get the Impala waxed, I'd buy him a season of that stupid show about the woman lawyer that he likes, and not judge him for watching it. Out loud, anyways.

I can't even remember when we last had a minute to just stop and do something fun for the hell of it. We've been so caught up in the whole Leviathan mess – and the Apocalypse before that, and finding Dad before that, and so on… We never have time to do dumb little things like we used to do growing up, and back before we got tangled up in every mess that the universe created; back when we were just Sam and Dean Winchester, your average hunters from Kansas.

But here's Cas, trying to teach himself how to cook so he can make me a pie.

Cas, who doesn't understand eating, attempted to cook for me. And a pie, no less – something that isn't exactly where most people start their cooking careers. I mean, the guy has never even used a toaster before, but he still wanted to try and make me a pie – from scratch, I'd assume, based on the state of him.

I give him a much more genuine smile, and he shuffles his feet bashfully.

"We're going to need to find another apron, Cas."

He screws up his nose again, tilting his head to the side and giving him an even more candid appearance. "Why?"

"Because now I need me some pie."