Hannah's nose instinctively wrinkled as her nostrils were assaulted by a consortium of noxious odors upon entering the human tavern. Or bar, she supposed late night oases of this ilk were called now. To her eyes, they all had the same hallmarks as a den of iniquity, full of drunkenness and indolence, rife with the stale odors of beer and human sweat. And sex, to an admittedly less pronounced degree. Distaste weighed against her resolve, even as her eyes trailed from one group of mingling humans to the next. Combined with the growing knot of anxiety in her gut, the fleeting thought that maybe he wasn't here became unreasonably appealing—but she had seen the car outside, and specifically watched the location to raise her chances of finding him alone. The King of Hell had left unaccompanied only a few moments ago, which strongly implied. . .
She recognized Dean Winchester at the bar just in time for a small batch of new patrons to jostle into the bar around her amid an absent grumble of insincere apologies, and jarring her feet to move more abruptly from the entryway than she would have done otherwise. Her hands fluttered over her midsection, inanely fussing with straightening the layers of her clothes. She found the palms of her vessel to be oddly damp. Her eyes, she kept trained on the back of Dean Winchester's shoulders, watching him bend back to point the bottom of a beer bottle at the ceiling as he drained out the last drops, and trying not to linger on the edges of the Mark on his arm that showed where his shirt sleeve was pushed up.
He didn't turn to look at her right away when she took the stool next to him, though she saw his eyes slide to her reflection in the mirror on the other side of the bar. The corner of his mouth twisted up for a moment, in a manner that Castiel had once described as self-assured when issuing a report on Michael's vessel before the aborted apocalypse, when his accounts to Zachariah had been regular and filled with obsessive detail. Looking at it herself, she tried to separate it from what she knew of the man giving it. She knew that there was suppose to be something in it that could be considered disarming, but she could only see the human who had arguably ruined Heaven.
She wondered if Dean Winchester would recognize her, but then she saw the cocky half smile abruptly vanish, as if he were able to read her thoughts. The beer he was still casually holding in one hand was set down, and his eyes lost that look that was meant to be inviting.
Hannah deliberately curved her vessel's lips into a small smile.
"Dean Winchester."
"You're Cas's friend, right?"
"I certainly hope he thinks of me as such." Hannah didn't miss the way Dean Winchester's line of sight simply bypassed her when he turned around in his stool, darting out to search the room around them in that casually dismissive way of his that made Castiel's affinity for this human so impossible to understand. She settled her hands with their palms on her denim-clad knees and straightened her spine. "Castiel is not here."
The bored scowl she watched come onto Dean Winchester's face did nothing to ease her discomfort, but she masked it under an expression she carefully schooled to be on the softer side of neutral. She reminded herself that she wasn't here for her own benefit, as she offered the words, "My name is Hannah, in case you have forgotten. I know we only met once—"
"Rumor is you homebody angels are suppose to be out hunting all your little friends who don't want to re-join the team. How'd you shake the buddy system?"
"That isn't important, and not why I'm here. I," Hannah raised her chin, but only by a measured, minute amount, "am here to talk."
Dean Winchester's scowl didn't go away.
"It doesn't have to be unpleasant," Hannah added quickly, and inwardly noted the way her voice changed tone without her consent. She swallowed, gestured toward the bottled liquor on the other side of the bar. "Castiel has explain the custom to me. I will buy you a drink."
"So, Cas sent you?"
"No. He doesn't know I'm here."
"And that makes this what? Bonding time?" Dean Winchester snorted. He started to raise the beer on the counter to his lips again, turning away from her with a dismissive air that had Hannah's teeth pressing themselves together.
"I have something to say. Not about Heaven, not about angels, and I'm trying to do this the right way, Dean Winchester."
An eyebrow quirked when Dean Winchester heard her use his full name, and she issued a glare before she could caution herself against it.
What she got in response was a snicker directed at the bottle he had evidently forgotten was empty.
"Okay, fine. Let it out."
"What are you drinking?"
Hannah had the distinct sensation of a chill running up her spine when Dean Winchester's green eyes finally settled on her face for the first time since she walked in. She had read every report Heaven had to offer on him before coming here, records leading back to the day the cupid department filed Mary Campbell and John Winchester away as successfully paired, to Zachariah's overblown accounts of their negations on Michael's behalf during the apocalypse, to a flowery, meandering imaging of how Dean Winchester might have inherited the Mark of Cain that Metatron had scratched into his jail cell wall, seemingly from pure boredom. She tried not to dwell on the Mark as she watched Dean Winchester gesture to the human tending the bar with his empty bottle, or the remarkable, self-destructive stupidity Castiel showed in holding its wearer in such high regard. It was too important that she kept her composure in this. . .thing. . .she had made up her mind to do.
This entire venture was new territory for her. Angels in general weren't like Castiel, with his affinity for humanity that prompted him to somehow go native. With any other human, this would have been an awkward enough, completely unheard of errand. Angels were meant to be incapable of personal wants, above the petty trappings of desires and misery that made humans run out their inane lives in such a huff. The story of Castiel succumbing to humanity's charms was. . .a rare occurrence, though not one that had never been noted before in Heaven. As she pressed her palms more firmly against her jeans and deliberately tried not to think about the indescribable bout of sentimentality that had her siting beside the human who had seen more angels die than any creature outside their own species since before Lucifer's first caging, she was unable to avoid wondering if human weakness of contagious. If it was something they could pick up just from being in their vessels for too long, and slowly lose sight of their higher purpose in Heaven. Castiel had certainly been in his vessel longer than most of their siblings. Metatron's aptitude for pride after his time in hiding among humans could certainly be skewed to support it, and with her own vessel. . .
She shook her head.
Either way, it didn't matter. She was already here.
"I am here to talk about Castiel."
"What about him?"
"I would like to ask about the paradigm of your relationship with him."
"Come again?"
Hannah licked her lips. When the bar tender placed a new beer in front of Dean Winchester, she found herself snatching it up before he could make a move toward it, taking a long pull from the bottle in a spike of anxiety. The boredom Dean Winchester wore so unabashedly shifted ever so slightly when she put the bottle down, motioning to the lingering bar tender to bring out another. A side of his mouth was turning up.
"Let me start again," she said. "What are your feelings toward Castiel?"
Dean Winchester cocked his head. "What, Heaven's wondering if I appreciate Cas?"
"I told you, this isn't about Heaven," Hannah said, thankfully with the composure to hold back the you ape that wanted to accompany it. "I'm here for Castiel."
Dean Winchester cocked an eyebrow at her again. The bar tender placed a new beverage in front of him. Hannah waited a few seconds to see if he would say anything, but he only picked the bottle up and drank.
"He's dying. I believe you know this."
She waited again, but he only moved his eyes to the mirror across from them. He appeared to hold the liquid in his mouth for a long time before swallowing.
"The grace that he borrowed is fading, and this time when it runs out he won't simply be left human. He'll be gone. And. . .I want to take you to him."
"Why would you want to do that?"
Hannah held Dean Winchester's eyes when they flicked toward her again. She kept her vessel's face in the same expression, not too harsh, not too open. Zachariah, Uriel, Naomi, Hester, all of their accounts hinted at taking a harsh approach with Dean Winchester before dying or disappearing. There were rumors that Balthazar had even come to odds with the Winchester brothers before mysteriously vanishing from Castiel's side during the first civil war in Heaven. She was determined to be as pleasant as she could manage. "Because he has gone through much in trying to serve us, and serve you. He won't accept any solution to his condition that might. . . compromise the wellbeing of other angels, so, I would see him happy before he dies. If he has to die."
Dean Winchester leaned an arm on the bar, without a care for what substances might be congealed there to give it its sticky sheen, looking Hannah over with that almost predatory gleam in his eye that echoed the way he had looked over her vessel when she first sat down. He gestured to her with the beer in his free hand. "Alright. And?"
"I'm sorry?"
"What exactly are you trying to say to me without saying?" A grin crested over Dean Winchester's face that merited a glare before Hannah could suppress it. "Do I make him happy?"
"I think you know."
"How happy are we talking?"
Dean Winchester looked at her with a cocky half formed smirk on his face, and like a wave crashing outside of her control, she was hit with the irrational thought that he knows, he knows, just an instant before she could quash it. She regained her composure in time to seize onto her vessel's instinct to flood her face with excess blood and dispel it.
She may have made a mistake in coming here herself. She stretched out the moment before she had to answer by way of turning her attention to the—frankly, distasteful—beverage she'd inadvertently gotten herself, aware he was still leering at her but striving not to show it.
The idea of sending a cupid to resolve the situation in the deceptively hands-clean manner that Heaven was accustomed to had occurred to her earlier, but she had no doubt that Castiel would resent that kind of interference in his affairs, even if he hadn't become so controversial in Heaven that approaching the department would have presented its own challenges. The cupids' mission on earth may have saved them from suffering the same number of causalities as other ranks during the Fall, but the mass number of vessels claimed in the aftermath had disrupted numerous plans the department had been working toward, and any information she shared could easily have been blown up in gossip broadcasted over angel radio from sheer spite. And she found herself unreasonably concerned with protecting her brother's privacy despite the considerably more strenuous nature of the alternative option she'd chosen.
It had only been a few days since she first entertained the thought of doing this, less than a week since the inciting incident with Castiel's prayers. She still felt an odd stab of embarrassment that Castiel's condition had become so harrowing that he seemed to forget how unchecked longing could still find its way to Heaven as a prayer if it was framed just so. She had only entered his dreams with the intention of enlightening him to what he was doing. It had seemed the right thing to do, and the fastest way of doing it, with her demolished wings, and his failing grace rendering his mind nearly as easy to access as a human's. . . She hadn't been prepared for the intensely personal nature of what she saw though. One might have thought a being as long lived as an angel of the Lord would have loftier imaginings put forth by his subconscious than the decidedly base, human things she had seen. Realization of just how significant of an oversight she had made by walking in on Castiel's unguarded, private thoughts dawned almost instantly, but. . .she had also stood staring for longer than she should have. There had been certain whispers after his initial fall, most of which she had assumed to be false, but the unbridled longing that she sensed there gave her pause.
She had collected herself in time to leave before any other aspect of the dream could become known to her, Castiel appearing to take no notice of her presence, for which she was acutely grateful. She wasn't sure what the human protocol was for assisting in these matters, but. . . In an offhand way, she could feel sympathy that her brother might find himself falling prey to some of the less reasonable urges of his vessel in his weakening state. Human courtship was somewhat out of her department in Heaven, but she could certainly put the two of them together in terms of proximity, if nothing else.
Although, sat alongside Dean Winchester himself as she currently was, Hannah was unable to comprehend what her brother could find so appearing in such an odious individual.
Hannah took a breath to try and clear the strings of any emotions that might lend her vessel's vocal cords more steel than she intended, and started again, "What I'm trying to say, Dean, is please. Castiel doesn't have much time left. His last wish is to help you—will you stop laughing?"
"First tell me if you're gonna to pass me a love note before you go. Check yes or no, make Cas's night? Or is Heaven just going to wrap me up like a thanks-for-your-service gold watch?"
"I told you, this is not about Heaven!" Hannah's disgust rose up in an unbridled burst that only seemed to register with the rest of her mind when her own beer bottle slammed down on the counter so hard that it shattered in her hand. But before that, she thundered on, "It's about Castiel wasting his final days worrying about you, while you sit here, reveling in every vice to cross your mind with the King of Hell! After he has given up everything for you, instead of trying to save him, he's the one wearing himself down helping your brother hunt you down—and yes, it might be about the fact that Heaven needs him, but he'd sooner answer your call than ours."
Dean Winchester, infernal human garbage that he is, only looked at Hannah as she sat there with her vessel's face burning in the wake of her outburst. He blinked slowly at her with that same arrogant grin on his face, and took another long drink from his beer. When the bottle was placed back down on the bar, he licked his lips and spoke to her in a tone that sounded far too pleased.
"You know what's really hilarious here? You. See, I do remember you. One of those sweet little angels—little Miss Law n' Order, in fact—who just loved hearing your name at role call in Cas's army." He tilted his head, continued smiling at her, while Hannah's vessel made a second attempt at sending unnecessary blood to her face, and he went on, "I bet it's really killing you to be here talking to me about this. Your commander all gone to bits over a filthy human? Has to taste bad."
"Alright, that is it!" Hannah surged to her feet. She laid her hand on Dean Winchester's forearm in a grip that she knew no human could resist. "Do you think Heaven hasn't picked up on your longing?"
Dean Winchester glanced down at her hand and then back up at her. His eyes narrowed.
"You know prayers don't need to be formal. They don't even need words. Any longing-fueled thought even vaguely directed at Heaven has a chance at coming through, and I have heard you Dean Winchester. You can scoff and make jests, but Castiel is not alone in the affections you insist on alluding to. I tried to be delicate, but I don't have time for your faux-homophobic, closeted attitude. And I'm going to take you to him."
She threw a handful of bills onto the counter with her free hand, then moved to pull Dean Winchester from his stool. But to her dismay, she found that he didn't budge. She could feel the features of her vessel contorting into what must have been an ugly scowl as she stared at her hand clenched around Dean Winchester's arm in an iron angelic grip and gave it a fierce tug.
Instead of Dean Winchester stumbling forward and that conceited grin falling off of his face, he gave his own arm a jerk that startled Hannah off her feet. She tumbled into his chest, where a second hand clamped down on her shoulder with a grip that was unsettling because it was stronger than a human's grip should be, strong enough to send a frantic tremor of alarm up Hannah's spine, as she found herself staring up into the human's face. When she first walked in and spotted Dean Winchester, she had absently glanced over his soul before focusing on his physical attributes to try and glean what cues she could from his demeanor in their conversation. From a distance, his soul had seemed normal. Perhaps slightly grayed by the Mark of Cain, but that, if anything, seemed a graciously small extent for something that had once blackened the light of an archangel. But now, with so little distance between her vessel's eyes and the soul in question, she could see the tiny disruptions in the soul's design. Dean Winchester's soul was like a fruit rotten just under the skin, holding its original shape until something touched it. Her vessel instinctively started to gag. It was only after she forced her eyes to re-center on Dean Winchester's physical form that she even noticed the black eyes that he stared down at her with, when he purred to her, "What's going to happen is, I'm going to give you a sporting two minutes to high tail it out of here. Just for Cas's sake. I catch you after that, well. . .let's just say that IS a blade in my pocket."
Hannah felt the shape that he was talking about only when she attempted to pull free of him before he let her hands go, the motion causing her to rock back against him.
"Hey, how about you let go of the lady?"
A hand came down on Dean Winchester's should from the other side of him, an unfamiliar man in business attire suddenly looming into their conversation in apparent concern. Hannah saw him in her peripheral vision, but couldn't take her eyes off the abomination in front her. For his own part, Dean Winchester didn't even bother with a verbal response. He threw Hannah a wink, and then turned around and seized the man by the knot of his tie, dropping his hold on Hannah so quickly that she hardly had a chance to reel back before he pulled the man into a sudden univited kiss.
"I dunno, I liked that a bit much for someone pretending to be a homophobe." A lecherous grin spilt Dean Winchester's face when he looked back at Hannah after allowing the kiss to be broken. The other man involved shouted obscenities at him, but Dean Winchester's fist effortlessly connected with the man's face and sent him reeling into the table behind him.
A curious reaction sprang up directly from the core of her vessel. Hannah was aware of her eyes staring in unadulterated shock as Dean Winchester turned away from her with two fingers raised over his head, calling back the words "Two minutes, angel cake." She was aware also, of the people seated around the over turned table were now swarming around the man who had tried to intervene on her behalf, and attempting to say things to her, but she was unable to comprehend what. Her shoulder ached where fingers had dug in. She stared at the space where the—the thing Castiel was so enamored with had previously stood, while her breath came out in slow, shaky gasps, and the second that a stray human hand happened to lightly graze her arm, she bolted for the exit. She fled out into the parking lot of the rundown road tavern in the middle of now where, USA, straight across the street so abruptly that cars honked at her form as she darted into the road and kept on going, going into the woods, straight to the clearing where the spell to access Heaven's doors was drawn into the dirt with another angel standing guard. She didn't even stop to return their greeting, she threw herself onto the sketched enochian symbols so fast. Not until she was safely in Heaven, did she stop to think about of how undignified her reaction was, how she was going to report the effect of the Mark without revealing too much about how she had learned it. Or how she would tell Castiel. . .
~ K ~
Castiel heard the sound of his phone vibrating as he stood buttoning his shirt over the bathroom sink. In the other room, Hannah's footsteps were also audible as she quietly meandered the small space that he, more or less, rented to wait out the final sputtering flashes of his fading grace. He was aware that it was not a particularly heartening setting by human standards, let alone to one who had just stepped out of Heaven on a mission. It was nowhere near as comfortable as the room in the bunker that Sam had offered him several weeks back, but comfort hadn't been as important to him at the time as shuttering away evidence of his decline. Now though, exhausted as he was just by the effort of dressing himself, he had to admit that he felt an element of relief at the thought of leaving this room.
He was experimenting with whether to fasten the final button at his throat, wondering how long it had been since he had lost his tie, when Hannah called to him, "It appears you have a message, Castiel."
He hardly gave it a thought when he called back, "Can you check who it's from?"
And then he remembered, and lunged for the door.
"Actually, don't—"
But it was too late. Hannah was standing on the opposite side of his sickbed, the cellular phone in her hand. She may not have even opened the message in question, but the preview image already showed exactly the image that he was afraid it would. A miniaturized photo message illuminated the screen with a display of the human male reproductive organ, fully primed for use. Castiel instantly fell silent, his mouth mutely opening and closing several times after meeting Hannah's eyes met over the rumbled expands of his recently vacated bed.
"It. . .appears to be from an unknown number."
"Yes. I, uh. . .usually only receive messages from Sam Winchester, but lately seem to be receiving a multitude of unsolicited messages from strange numbers."
"I see. . . .and is it normal that they. . . consist of. . .that?"
"Not when they come from Sam Winchester."
At that moment, the phone vibrated again with a second message illuminating the screen with a new preview. Hannah's arm immediately reached out with the device while her eyes redirected themselves toward the ceiling as if to avoid further exposure, though she needn't have bothered. The second message was almost always the kiss-blowing emoticon.
"Have you tried contacting. . .?"
"Sometimes, when the image has phone number attached to it, but the sender never seems to answer. I suspect he may be discarding the phones after use."
"Ah, I see." It may have been a trick of the dim lighting, but it almost seemed for a moment as if Hannah's vessel where blushing. Castiel was about to comment on it, when Hannah abruptly asked, "Why would humans send pictures of their anatomy like that?"
"Well, it isn't usually the custom to send pictures of one's genitalia over text message. From what I've been led to believe, it can sometimes constitute a crude form of courtship."
It was strange, but Hannah abruptly started coughing. The color Castiel noticed on her appearing to darken. He glanced up at that spot on the ceiling she was still staring at, but saw nothing in any way startling or upsetting.
"It's been several weeks though. Not many people have this number. I'm not sure who could be sending them. Are you alright, Hannah?"
"Fine! Absolutely fine."
Hannah waved a dismissing arm at him, at the same time that Castiel's phone went off with a rare third message, consisting of a winking emoticon next to one with a halo. Castiel frowned at it.
"You know, Castiel, I think I would prefer to wait outside. Please—just let me know when you're ready."
"Are you sure? I'm almost ready—" Castiel started to speak, eyes still fixed on his phone, but the sound of his front door slamming shut cut him off, leaving him to look after her and wonder if he had said something wrong.
~ K ~
A/N:
You know I'm really bad at dialogue scenes? I got the idea to write this while digging through some old 90s country songs about a week back, when I came across "The Fool" by Lee Anne Womack and had the thought that it would fit for a sappy conversation between Hannah and Dean. I took it in a slightly less mushy direction when putting to paper though, hee. Especially after realizing the only time Dean and Hannah could have had this conversation without Cas tagging along would have been before Sam de-demonized him, and then I had the thought of "What would Dean do if he found out his crush liked him too, but he was too evil to roll with it?" Answer: dick pics. From stolen phones. So Sammy can't find him.