And the night you came
You won me all and all
And the better part of everything
Was born to run
-The Frames, "Sad Songs"
He doesn't look forward to Thursdays any more.
Thursdays used to be when he had shorter hours and and his daughter didn't have any extracurriculars. They'd spend the evening reading stories to each other—challenging ones because he knew she was smart and capable of doing so much—and they never meant to stop, only she got stuck on Paradise Lost and then he gave himself up to grace the night after.
He can still see her face, but her name is gone.
Now Thursday means one moment his eyes are seeing washes of blue, green—underwater again, he guesses—and the next he's hearing Dean's voice, the words vibrating too loud and too rich through the filter that is Castiel.
Always Castiel, never Cas.
Dean sounds more serious these days, the edges of his voice smudged by Castiel getting there first but the intensity comes through, sentences low and rushed as though the world were ending yet again. From what Jimmy can understand, for Dean it is—it always is one way or another, nothing seems to go right for this man, righteous as he's supposed to be—and then his own throat is moving, Castiel is talking and the angel's never been able to get it quite right so the words burn all the way up.
They're offered food, out of some old habit, and to Jimmy's surprise Castiel accepts. The grace that fills his head turns every silence into a buzzing hum, the taste of the greasy lo mein is as faded as everything else Jimmy can sense these days, and Dean's eyes are too bright against the dull colors of the motel room, but this is the best meal he's had in a long, long time.
Dean's staring at him. At Castiel, really, but sometimes it's nice to imagine people can still see him.
Castiel starts talking to him inside his mind, the angel's voice a booming that overlays the static. It's been several years since the demons found his family, he's told—and since those hours of freedom left implicit but it's almost all Jimmy thinks about anyway, when he can bring himself to concentrate enough—and this is the most Castiel can offer him at the moment.
It occurs to him that this is some kind of anniversary, and that maybe he should be angry, or something, he's not sure; when he stopped being able to remember home, he stopped caring.