A/N: Second set. This one has only four, as the pieces were longer this time around. I am working on the prompts, trust me. The next chapter will feature a few.
To repeat: One word prompts as a title for a piece, or a scene that I will attempt to work into this 'verse. Go wild, people. The harder it is it for me to figure it out, the more determined I am to do it. I'm a masochist like that.
1. Fly
It's not that easy, of course. There's too much not being said for that one night's half a conversation to settle everything.
The garage starts out every spring clean and clear of clutter, then gets progressively more messy until the end of winter rolls around and all that's left is a narrow, winding path picking its way through the assorted junk, and Dean ends up spending one weekend at the beginning of every spring cleaning it back out enough to pull the Impala in. The tarp he normally leaves it under protects it from summer rain and winter snow easily enough, but only the garage will keep it safe from spring hail and- far more importantly- spring tornadoes, which just love to take large heavy objects such as vehicles and throw them around like children's toys.
He's just closing the door, preparing to start the car, when there's the sound of a rush of feathers, like a bird flying by his ear, and Castiel is suddenly in the passenger's seat. Dean, reacting on instinct, nearly jams the car key into Cas' left eye, but the angel catches his arm and takes the keys away with insulting ease.
"Powers are back, huh?" Dean asks, after giving himself a minute or two to steady his heart rate and find something to say other than very explicit threats that he will never be able to follow through on detailing what will happen the next time Cas just pops in like that. He should be afraid, he is distantly aware- there's a fully-powered angel sitting in his car, one who has just demonstrated how much stronger and more capable he is than any human, and if this has all been an act so Castiel would have a safe place to stay until he heals, this is the moment for the big reveal.
"Yes," Cas says, and hands the keys back. "I didn't mean to startle you. I sometimes forget how nervous humans can be."
Dean starts the car and just sits and listens to the engine for a moment. Better days, he thinks. "Next time stop after the 'didn't mean to startle you' part," he advises, putting the car into drive. Cas looks vaguely alarmed as the car lurches forward, as if he isn't sure he wants on this ride, even if it's only for twenty feet.
The car is a luxury Dean can't really justify other than for simple nostalgia's sake. Perhaps Before such a thing would be considered frivolous and wasteful. But these days, everyone has something they hang onto that gives them the chance to close their eyes and pretend, just for a little while, that the Apocalypse never happened. Dean keeps promising himself that one day he'll chuck this whole Farmer Joe routine and drive down south to Texas and set up shop there, where gas is still readily available and anyone with even a vague understanding of mechanics is welcome. He never does.
"So you can fly now," he says, carefully neutral.
"Yes."
"Anywhere in the world, blink of an eye," Dean continues. "Least, that's what they say."
"Who are they?" Castiel asks, honestly curious, and Dean instantly decides that he doesn't want to even try explaining the ubiquitous 'they' to an angel.
"Just people," he dodges. He doesn't say anything else, focusing on making sure he's pulled as far forward as he can get.
But Castiel is no fool, and apparently forgets nothing. "Most of California is underwater," he says, using the same solemn tone as he had during that tense conversation after he'd returned from hiding from Coleman and his boys. "Even if your brother survived, he would not still be there."
Dean yanks the key out of the ignition and swings the car door open. "Did I ask?" he demands harshly, and gets out and slams the door shut behind him before Cas can answer.
Nobody truly knows what happened in California. What they do know is the Pacific Ocean rose by about two hundred feet within a four-hour window. The San Francisco Bay had flooded and spilled over into the valley to the immediate east that runs right up the heart of California. Of course, low-lying port cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were submerged within a matter of minutes, wiping out a significant chunk of California's population. To say most of California is underwater is largely incorrect; only about a third of it is. More accurate is to say most of the habitable parts of California are underwater.
Dean could ask what happened to make the Pacific rise up like that. Castiel would likely be one of the very few people who could provide the answer. He doesn't ask.
"So no point in going to California?" he asks instead. Castiel had zapped himself out of the car and is lingering silently by the door to the house, once again knowing he had said something wrong and once again not knowing what.
"I can take you if you want to go," the angel says carefully, neither a confirmation nor denial.
"How about Rio?" Dean continues, forcing himself onto a lighter topic. When Cas merely looks at him blankly, he clarifies. "de Janeiro? Party town in Brazil?"
"You want to go to Brazil?" Cas looks well and truly lost now.
"Is it still there?" Dean asks, as slowly as he can without literally spelling it out.
"Yes."
"New Orleans is probably a lost cause," Dean mutters to himself, but before he can ask about Amsterdam, Cas is responding.
"New Orleans survived," he says. Dean blinks at that.
"It survived? The only things keeping that city above water is a couple of floodwalls and a lot of prayer, and it survived the Apocalypse?"
"Do you want to go?" Cas asks, all angelic patience. Dean, standing at the garage door, turns away, looks out over the quiet glory of Kansas in the spring. The fields are showing the barest covering of green and the sky is choked with grey-bottomed clouds that have been sporadically dropping rain by the bucketful all week. He hated this place growing up.
"Ask me tomorrow," he says simply, and closes the garage door.
2. Storm
He can tell something is off the moment he gets up. The air is too still, too tense, and everything is quiet. Late March is when the birds all simultaneously go insane, trying to outdo each other in general obnoxiousness, and once upon a time the air would have been filled with the pervasive sound of lawn mowers, choking and chugging sullenly after having been started for the first time in four months. These days, the grass grows long.
Cereal goes stale but not bad, so Dean's stuck with off-brand Cheerios from Before and milk fresher than he cares to think about. He takes his bowl and heads outside where the air is thick with the smell of rain, that peculiar mix of wet earth and ozone. After a moment's thought, he steps off the porch and heads over to the barn, circling it to get the best view of the northwest sky.
Cas is already there. Dean, focused on both his cereal and giving the angel a vaguely polite grunt in greeting, doesn't see what he's looking at until he's standing beside him.
"Whoa," he says simply, almost dropping his spoon in his distraction.
Storms in spring are common in farm country. The ocean relocating closer to the mountains has only increased the storms' intensity, whipping them up and sending them rolling down the mountains and across the plains beyond like an avalanche. This one stretches across the horizon, a tall grey line powering its way towards them. Even from this distance, Dean can see the brief, brilliant flashes of white from lightning dancing throughout the towering cloud. A storm like this, the question isn't how many square miles it covers, but how many states.
"Mother Nature at her bitchiest," Dean says after a long consideration. He can feel Castiel's curious gaze on him, but the angel doesn't ask, probably just stowing it away in the mental file labeled Human Weirdness.
"They've been talking about it for the last three hours on the radio," he says instead. Dean pauses in the middle of stabbing his spoon into the mud-like goop his cereal has become and looks at him.
"Radio?" he echoes. He's thinking of the emergency radio that had become standard in every home After, especially in places like here where the weather is prone to violent temper tantrums. Instead he's offered the military radio given to him by Coleman. He'd tossed it on the entryway table, confident that he'd never use it but making sure it was easy to find just in case. Clearly, Cas' time as guest of the militia had given him some basic understanding of the working of these things, for it was on- only dead air now, but with the steady background static that said it was receiving a signal.
"You haven't…" Dean begins, tapping the Talk button with his thumb.
"No," Cas says, thankfully not taking offense at the admittedly insulting implication. He spares Dean another glance, confusion almost tangible. "I believe they are actually following the storm."
"Stormchasers," Dean says, nodding. Knowing full well that that didn't answer any questions, he explains. "They… well, they chase storms. Used to be for kicks mostly, but now they're the closest thing we have to weathermen."
It occurs to him, in the silence that follows, that he might be raising more questions than he's answering.
"They'll announce it over the emergency radio if there's anything to worry about," he continues, then pauses as a thought occurs to him. "Is there some way you can tell if there's going to be a tornado?"
"No," the angel says. "Not now. But storms change quickly."
Dean pokes at his cereal and contemplates making himself some coffee. The first fuel run of the year- supposedly every six weeks, in reality four or five times a year- typically rolls in around this time, and they always bring with them stuff from the ports along the Gulf coast. The coffee these days sucks, but it's still coffee, and a shot or two of the whiskey Dad made sure he always had on hand can make even swamp water go down smooth.
He looks out at the storm again, the wind cold against his face. He doesn't need angels or stormchasers to tell him about this monster. He's seen its type before.
"Is there something to be done to prepare?" Cas asks. Dean snorts.
"We get these all the time, every spring and most summers," he says. He scoops up half a spoonful of cereal and lazily flicks it, food-fight style, out into the empty field in front of him. "We're used to them. Always prepared for these."
If the angel has anything else to say, it has to wait, as the radio chooses that moment to explode in excited, chattering voices. Dean ambles over to the house's back door as he listens to the chasers jabber about hail and wind speeds.
Three hours later, the storm has almost arrived. The thunder is a constant low rumbling sound, like listening to a motorcycle a street away, and the wind is shaking the trees so hard a few of the more fragile branches have already snapped off. Dean imagines more than a few saplings will be going to the woodpile before tomorrow. Lightning flickers, a game of flashlight tag in the sky, and the clouds boil and churn. And still standing outside, exactly where Dean had last seen him, is Castiel.
Dean doesn't quite run over to him, but it's a little too fast to be called a walk, and he's painfully aware of every further step he takes from the dry, warm safety of the house.
"Okay, I don't know what you think you're doing, but it's time to go in now," he tells the angel. He has to yell to be heard, as the wind snatches his words away.
"I like storms," Cas says, and Dean takes a moment to process this. Cas has never expressed such an opinion, never given any indication of a preference. He's never said anything starting with I like or I don't like before. As far as Dean knows, it's an angel thing. They aren't supposed to care about the little things like that.
"The house has windows," he says. "And a covered porch, if you're that into it."
A fork of lightning stabs at the ground, the lightning itself almost purple. For one moment Cas' eyes go unfocused, as though he's seeing something else far away and long ago, before he comes back to the moment. The wind is carrying rain to them by now, handfuls of raindrops that splatter against them, ice cold and needle sharp.
"Look," Dean says, desperate last-ditch attempt, "storms are fun to watch, but not to actually be in, trust me. Come inside and see if you wanna come back out once it's here." He nearly stumbles over the 'trust me' part but doesn't think Cas notices.
After a moment, the angel turns away from the wind, following Dean back inside.
3. Human
Dean leaves his young guest in the front yard, tending to her ride, and heads back inside and up to his room. A moment later, armed with a change of clothes and real shoes, he comes back down and takes a left into the dining room where Cas has set up shop.
The spare bedroom Castiel has somewhat moved into used to be Dean's, back when he was a kid. In the closet, the angel had found his old backpack from senior year, thrown in there the last day and never retrieved, and had pulled out all the books. The science and math textbooks had been discarded after a blank stare- apparently, angels aren't too concerned about how or why things work, just so long as they do- but the history textbook he had kept, and he spends his spare time crossing out the mistakes and writing corrections in the margins. There's a lot of writing crammed onto most of the pages. Dean doesn't really see the point, but it keeps Cas busy in a way that does not include passively stalking Dean, so he leaves well enough alone.
"Here," Dean says, dropping the pile of clothes on a bare spot on the table. "Get changed. We're going out."
"We?" Castiel echoes. "And why do I need to change?"
"Because no one wears stuff like that anymore," Dean explains patiently. He's trying to behave himself with Cas, who with the minor exception of a few creepy moments has proven himself to be an ideal roommate. "If you're gonna live here, you gotta know how to at least look human. Otherwise it'll be the militia all over again."
At the mention of the militia, Castiel hunches down a little, shoulders rising defensively. It's all Dean needs to say to circumvent an argument that is well over a week old and has yet to meet any sort of permanent resolution. The clothes are Dean's, and therefore a little too big on Cas, but it works. Dean waits until he comes down from the guest room and stops him before he can head outside.
"Couple things," he says. "Anyone asks, your name is Cas. Do not say Castiel, that's an angel name."
Cas forgoes pointing out the blindingly obvious.
"And no powers," Dean continues. "Not for anything, all right? And try not to stare at people either, they don't like that."
There's a brief moment where Dean considers hashing out some sort of backstory, then ultimately rejects the idea. Most people don't ask too many questions anymore, and the few who do are plenty used to their questions going unanswered.
The girl outside is Katherine Miller. She's all of nine years old and can barely remember life Before. She had asked Dean once what he missed most about the easy life and he'd had to bullshit his way through the response, as 'everything' didn't seem to be what she was looking for. Her ride is a horse, a common solution to the gasoline shortage. Naturally the animal whickers and noses at Cas, falling quickly in love with the angel. Katie pulls it around and away with the expertise of someone who has spent years on horseback and talks as they walk.
"So mom said to come out and get you 'cause that big windstorm th'other day blew over one of the fences, she don't know which, and the cows are wandering wild."
"Cows wandering wild," Dean grins. "Unless there's a red cape or a clown involved, 'cows' and 'wild' simply do not belong in the same sentence."
For his trouble, he gets two equally blank looks.
"Never mind," he says, waving it off. "I don't wrangle livestock, Katie."
"Yeah, no, she's got the Richardson boys helpin' her with that," Katie says airily. "She jus' wants ya to rebuild the fence."
Dean looks over at Cas, who had put the human between himself and the horse and has been walking in total silence. If he has an opinion on building fences, he isn't showing it. Katie, for her part, has barely looked away from the angel, but it seems more the intense curiosity of a child starved for new experiences and different people, not the 'oh my god what is he' sort of stare that Dean had been halfway expecting.
"By the way," Dean says, finally putting the girl out of her misery, "this is Cas. Cas, Katie."
"Hi," Katie greets. She gets a 'hello' in return from the angel and smiles shyly. She's old enough not to ask the awkward questions, and also apparently old enough for spontaneous crushes, Dean sees, and tries not to smile.
The Miller property is only a little bigger than the Winchester's. Most of the farm land went to the Richardsons just After, leaving the divorcee Christina Miller and her daughter with about an acre or so and a half dozen cows. Christina shamelessly uses Mitch Richardson's three grown sons to help her with her livestock and her crops- either a small field or a giant vegetable patch, depending on how you choose to look at it- and pays for it with some of the best cooking Dean has ever known.
She greets the two fence builders cheerfully, sparing Cas one brief, curious glance, before pointing them out back to the loaded-up pickup. As they head out the door she tosses Dean a plastic grocery bag packed with two lunches. Dean manages to hustle Cas out before the angel feels the need to explain that he doesn't eat.
Getting Cas into the truck is easy, but Dean finds himself trying not to take too much offense at the angel's rigid posture while the truck is moving. He swallows the urge to comment about how he's been driving since he was fourteen and has yet to kill anyone, but he does manage to find just about every pothole in the worn dirt road. He feels like a dick for it soon enough, though, when they're actually working. Cas is a quiet, competent worker, and takes orders well- his angel nature, if Dean has to guess, angels being the perfect soldiers. He gouges himself pretty good on the barbed wire a couple of times, but as per Dean's no-power-no-matter-what rule, merely suffers through rather than healing it.
Christina makes them supper when they return to the house and gently probes for information on Dean's new friend. Dean ends up fielding all the questions, as Cas seems to have adopted a 'no talking around the humans' philosophy, and answers as honestly as he can- a refugee from militia territory, he says, and drops in a mention of living in Chicago just Before, and Christina changes the subject with a sympathetic glance towards Cas. She talks instead about town gossip and weather patterns, which all means next to nothing to Dean, who has not even a small patch of farmland or livestock and very little interest in the goings-on in town. He's far more interested in Cas' reaction to the pot roast he's been picking at, watching the angel's face as he experiences each new taste and texture.
They leave while it's still early enough to make it home before nightfall. Christina pushes a foil-topped baking dish into Dean's hands and gives him cooking directions. Once they're on the road, he pauses long enough to peel the foil back and smells cheese and tomato sauce.
"Lasagna," he almost whines to Cas. "I think I love that woman."
The angel merely holds up his injured hand. "May I heal this now?" he asks, tugging slightly at the band-aids Katie had so carefully applied.
"Yes," Dean says, and inhales the scent of the lasagna once more before covering it again.
"They accepted me as human," Cas says as the start walking again, peeling the band-aids off and rubbing his thumb over the unblemished skin beneath. "Was that the point behind my being there?"
"Socialization for angels," Dean mutters. "You keep hanging around, sooner or later, someone's gonna figure it out. Needs to be people who know you, know you aren't interested in hurting anyone."
"Your word would not be enough?" Cas asks, and Dean snorts.
"Hell no. Word gets out, my head's gonna be on the chopping block just as much as yours."
Castiel contemplates this silently as Dean clutches his lasagna protectively close and daydreams about leftovers. He'll have to crank up the generator to get the fridge working, but it'll be worth it.
Then a hand lands on his shoulder and the world lurches, likes he's in a washer that just went into spin cycle. He lands on his feet in his own front yard and chokes on the rising wave of nausea. Cas rescues the lasagna from him as he staggers a few steps away, gagging and retching. After a moment he catches his breath and straightens up.
"Don't do that again," he orders hoarsely once he's sure he can open his mouth without throwing up. Castiel nods once and hands him the lasagna like it's worth far more than just a few good meals and heads inside without a word.
Dean clutches at the baking dish and stares at the door, thinking about the world on a platter and unspoken promises.
4. Sam
The Lake Perry Country Club and Golf Course is over twenty miles from the house. As he has better things to do than walk that, Dean drives instead, a rare luxury that he fully enjoys by cranking up the radio and rolling down the windows and stretching his baby's legs. Thank god for Kansas flatness, he thinks as he's pushing ninety down the main roads.
Had Castiel asked, Dean would've told him where he was going. He doesn't know how he would have explained it, but he would have tried. But Cas didn't ask, didn't even poke his head out from wherever he hangs out when he's not in the dining room. He has it easy, really- he had wound up in the barn of the one person living in farm country who isn't a farmer, and one of the very few people in the world who wouldn't kill a helpless angel. Or worse; Dean hasn't yet asked what the militia wanted with an angel, and doesn't think he'll ever find the nerve for that one.
Some of the roads in the world survived intact, but a majority of them- including every single one of the international highways in America- are shattered and shifted. Old 70, which runs through north Lawrence, has a series of breaks just before town, where it looks like someone cut across the road and shifted the piece over, so the yellow line down the middle runs into the white line marking the right shoulder. The road leading out of Lawrence goes good for about nineteen miles before hitting a patch that looks like a crumpled-up paper bag. There's a dirt track that runs beside it but tires are hard to patch and harder to replace, so Dean parks on the shoulder and walks the last mile. No one bothers to steal cars these days.
The country club was one of those places that only the wealthy and entitled knew about Before. After the great social equalizer that was the Apocalypse, it's now public property. Dean heads past the club itself, not really feeling like talking to anyone, and into the green beyond.
Three quarters of the world's population, he had told the angel. He hadn't been lying or exaggerating- not so far as he knows, at least, communication these days being so spotty. Kansas had suffered along with the rest of the world, the victim of impossible weather and violent tremors, unknown plagues and violent hysteria. Big cities like Wichita and Topeka had been targeted by demon raids, leaving sections of the city burning in their wake. But Kansas had been largely untouched. The hammer had fallen east of here, in southern Missouri, and north in Chicago. The relatively unremarkable college town of Lawrence had huddled on the fringes, watching in horror and waiting its turn for extinction, until- mere days after it had all begun- silence had fallen. And thanks to Castiel, Dean alone knows why it had suddenly gone so quiet.
Still, enough people had died here that the cemeteries overflowed. And it didn't feel right anymore, being buried next to a church. The bloodthirsty angels of the Apocalypse had rather taken the shine off of Christianity. So the golf course had been converted, markers erected in lieu of anything else since the staggering number of the dead had led to the bodies all being cremated en masse, a la the German concentration camps. Human pragmatism meeting human romanticism, Dean thinks wryly- they erect monuments to the lost and dump the ashes of the dead into bricked-over pits.
April third, four years ago today, he heard about California. Four years ago today he learned his brother is most likely dead.
It's a longer walk to the proper area than it was to get here from the car. Dean stays off the path, where the greens keeper trolls on a rickety old golf cart, looking for people to play tour guide for. He knows his way around well enough. Past the seventh hole, around the water hazard that is now a thriving frog pond whose vocal residents can be heard for half a mile, beyond the gate that had been set up more to separate it from the rest of the area than to keep people out, and into the world of the lost, friends and family whose fate is unknown. The names are carved in alphabetical order onto large marble tiles- floor tiles in the country club, or so goes the rumor, but Dean thinks he recognizes it from a high school field trip the state capitol building in Topeka- and the tiles are sorted by state. There are twenty-nine tiles. Illinois has five and California has seven.
Dean stops at the last tile in the California row. He doesn't come here often, only on this anniversary, and so he isn't exactly familiar with this. He starts at the bottom and scans up and stops at Sam's name, staring at the carving in the black marble, imprinting it in his mind. Four years can feel like a lifetime in one moment and only seconds the next. He doesn't know why he comes out here every year, except it's the sort of thing Sam would do so Dean does it in his stead. Then he thinks of Castiel.
After a long bout of soul searching he's finally figured out why he's helping the angel- he needs to have someone to take care of, someone to look after. It's not that he needs to be needed. It's just that he's a big brother, and a damn good one, and that lost-little-boy vulnerability in Cas had instantly appealed to all the big brother instincts Dean possesses.
"You'd like him," he says, startling at the sound of his own voice. Then he smirks, thinking of quiet somber smart Cas, so very different from the brash and bold Dean, even subdued as his personality has been by loss and circumstance. "He'd like you. Probably better than he likes me."
Dean contemplates the marble tile, which in the end is just a big chunk of pretty rock. Alive or dead, Sam can't hear him, and won't be responding. He turns away, obligation met, and starts the long walk back. Every year he promises himself he won't waste precious time or fuel by coming out here next year. Every year he proves himself a liar.
Castiel, thankfully, never asks about it.
