Cas spends fifty minutes staring at the new cell phone Dean gives him. It's not fifty minutes all at once. It's broken up across the whole day, in the far too frequent times when he's alone. He hasn't used a phone in years, and in the meanwhile the technology has grown even more complicated.
This phone is flat, smooth, lacks buttons and folding parts. Cas makes sure of this, investigating with gentle fingers, when he gets back early to the empty Impala. He finds himself looking around, watching men and women move across the city block, more than looking down at the phone. He almost wants to ask one of them for help, but he worries the one he picks won't know what to do with this phone either. They'll all have to learn together, separately.
Cas doesn't know what it is when it rings the first time. He recognizes the steady, whining beat as an alarm because it resembles the police sirens and emergency bells he hears as he spends more and more time in the city streets. It sounds nothing like the old phone he had in the days leading up the end of the world. Then again, he was usually incorporeal when it rang. He figures it out later, when Dean is griping at him about picking up, next time.
It's just Sam and Cas later, leaving the flea market central to the case of the week. They walk until they see a vacancy sign, and Cas says he'll go in and rent the rooms. Sam is a little surprised, a little unsure, but he's tired and he's willing to fall back, to go into the convenience store across the street and pick up a road tripper's dinner.
The motel office is small and the walls are bare. There's one person behind the counter appearing to be equal parts disinterested and expectant of Cas to say and do the right thing in the most expedient manner. He pulls the credit card Sam gave him from his pants' pocket and slides it over the counter, making a three with two fingers and a thumb, shaking his head when the clerk asks and for how long?
Cas leaves the door open, waits outside crouched beneath the window and staring at his phone. Sam finds him later—finds because Cas hasn't called with the room number—and offers to show him how to dial out or at least send a text message. "No, I've got it," Cas tells him, and his tone is a tad too firm. Sam backs off and quietly calls Dean and tells them where they're staying.
They eat together, sort of. They discuss the case when Dean gets in. At lights out, Cas heads to the other side of the lot to a single bed room. He only sleeps for a few hours. It's less than four, which is what he understands a human to need because Dean told him so, but he doesn't want to shut his eyes again after that dream. So, in the middle of the night, the only illumination in the room is the light of his phone. He slides one fingertip gingerly across the screen.
Cross-posted from AO3, May 16, 2013
