Sam and Jess were taking up a good third of the kitchen eating breakfast when Dean stumbled in. He was fully dressed, as if a shaved face would make up for his slogging movements. "Where's my hat?" he mumbled, reaching for Sam's coffee cup while the other wasn't looking, preoccupied with passing a plate of toast to Jess.

"It's only eight." she commented; the toast made a distinctive crunch as she bit into it. She was wearing a short house coat; blonde hair still long and curly and gold and toes curled up in some long socks as she tried to ignore the shaky heater humming its way through the room. As far as lady-friends went, Dean liked Jess. She wasn't a prude and she never tried to drag Sam away from him; and to be fair, she and his brother did have a few things in common: Disregard for fashionable hairstyles and a More-Intelligent-Than-Thou attitude, for example. "What are you doing up on a Saturday?"

"He has a hot date with the tailor shop," Sam said, walking towards the pair after he had left the table. He crossed the room in about three steps. Freak, Dean thought on habit.

"Here." Sam clapped a grayed fedora on his brother's head. "You left it on the door knob. Idiot." He looked down and caught sight of his cup in Dean's palm. Jess laughed into her hands as Sam twisted his face into a scowl and Dean attempted Morse code with smug facial expressions.

Jess spoke up again after she thought their little tryst was finished. "So you found some place that hasn't shunned you yet?"

"Um," Dean looked around at the peeling yellow wallpaper next to the icebox and wondered how long he could stall for time. Jess – really Jessica Moore and using the shortened version of her god-given name was another insignificant thing she and Sam both did - knew that the Winchester brothers dabbled in the darker sides of American society; but, well, most people knew that. She had just moved up from New Jersey a few years after Sam and Dean had gone back to their old – one of their old – childhood places of residence; Jess had been living with a friend until Sam had come in and… Dean wasn't quite sure what he did, but eventually she had become an added attachment to their place, and not long after she had begun to question Sam and Dean as to why they always kept knives in their shoes and a firearm tucked somewhere and why they were called out to 'work' at midnight on a Tuesday and, well, like mentioned before, Jess wasn't stupid. Her disapproval of their particular line of work was certain, but she was blessedly not adamant to know the details – not enough to ask, at least, if only to keep her boyfriend and his brother in her good graces. Dean got the impression that Jess was more or less forced to live on the outskirts of their lives sometimes, but if that was how they all managed to live together, cramped into a two bedroom apartment in the Italian boroughs of Brooklyn, then so be it. It suited Dean just fine, at least.

"…Not really," he said finally, shifting on the tile and in his skin simultaneously as two pairs of eyes stared him down.

"He had to find a Russian place." Sam said pointedly, as if Dean was Sam's daughter or something, and had just arrived home with a bob and rolled stockings and a guy named Maurice on her metaphorical arm. Or something.

"It's just a tailor," Dean countered, feeling annoyance burn in him. He wasn't quite sure if it was inspired by the jabs from Sam combined with his forcefully early rising, or if it was just the idea of seeing that infuriatingly apathetic man at the shop again. Because. Well. Dean drained Sam's coffee, waved and slipped out the door.

Dean hated plenty of things, being taken advantage of particularly. Even with the receipt and the man's solid explanation, Dean kept on thinking of how his coat would be lost forever and how he'd be out ten bucks trying to replace it and this and that and everything else under the sun that could go wrong; so much so that by the time he was pulling open the front door to the shop his mouth was pressed in a thin line and his hands had become trembling white fists.

Mr. Novak was sitting behind the counter just like the day before. He looked tired, too. There was a newspaper opened next to him – an article he was half-reading. "Good morning," he said politely, before Dean even thought to cough for the man's attention. "You're early."

Dean cast a gaze to the right wall, finding the foggy memory of a clock that might have been hanging there from his first visit. He was rewarded with the time shown on a white face with black hands. "Just by five minutes," he replied, thinking of the two and a half miles he had walked through Brooklyn. The weather had promised to be bearable that day, and if he wasn't dying of the cold Dean took the option to exercise. As the heat of the building came to him, he felt the tips of his ears burn painfully, and his cheeks go numb and rosy. "Anyway," he continued, inching further into the store. "Do you have my suit?"

Mr. Novak blinked and straightened up, as if he had forgotten all about Dean or his job or Friday afternoon's tantrum in general. Dean was about to say something a lot less friendly to jar the other man's mind into action, but then Mr. Novak slowly swung off the stool he was perched on. "One minute." He promised, shuffling out of sight, his white shirt the last thing to fade out, back disappearing down the dusty corridor behind the counter.

It was odd, Dean thought; furrowing his brows and looking at his iced fingers. The anger burned out of him rather impressively, practically the same instant the other man exited the room: The force of heat – in his mind, in his gut – evaded him entirely, until he stood half frozen; his mind clear for the first time since Doctor Romano's death.

Dean hated that feeling.

He twitched his hands to make sure that they weren't as useless as he feared, and tried to distract himself by looking around the shop.

Predictably, there wasn't much. The front desk, a mail slot in the bleak white door. Two chairs and a coat rack sitting against a large window, its shades completely open this time.

It was clean, at least. But Dean had seen suit lapels that held his interest better than this room.

The left wall seemed to mirror the right in the fashion of having one stationary fixture stuck way up high. Versus a clock, however, there was a painting of a clean shaven Jesus Christ, who looked more like a dandy Dean had met at a juice joint that one time – the one that Sam had ended up knowing, small world - versus an ethereal figure from 1900-plus years ago. Figures. Dean went back to drumming his fingers on the antique wood. That was the only decent piece of furniture in the place. Then again, there wasn't much to pick from.

Mr. Novak came out and Dean could feel the scrutinizing stare that was now plastered on his face. It stuck on stubbornly, until even the tailor was forced to stare curiously around the two of them. Dean was silently offered his clothes inside a small, tan parcel, which he leafed through meticulously; feeling the fabric and trying to find a mistake.

A full minute later he glanced up, not sure if he would have been happier if his rotten premonitions were right in the first place; at least then he'd have an excuse to yell – to get back a more extreme feeling than just a mild irritation. He was grasping for something internally, and finding nothing of substance there, resorted to clenching the suit in his hands, feeling the soft fabric held together by the ends of Mr. Novak's fingers and skills.

"…Thanks," he said, feeling as if some fundamental part of him was fleeing at the word, ripped right out of his soul.

Mr. Novak probably saw that. Appreciated the fact that what Dean said, if reluctantly, was a miracle in itself, so he blessedly kept his mouth shut and sank back in his seat. He cast another look around the room, probably still wondering what Dean had been staring at. Dean couldn't quite force his feet to move more than a couple paces back as he warily watched the other man examine the walls. He shifted, and buying some time he pulled out his cigarette case and lighter.

"You want one?" he asked, not really thinking about it. He realized, with a shock, that it was chivalry holding him back, refusing to treat the incident simply as an insignificant event, meant to be discarded and forgotten about sometime next week. His unconscious reached out to the other as if there was something there worth seeing. His subconscious self was obviously crazy, never mind the fact that if it ever voiced itself, it sounded like Sam. It felt wrong to stay any longer, but the contemplation of simply leaving without another word made for an even worse impression on his imagination, so he resolved to stay for the five minutes it took to finish smoking. Then he would leave, and hopefully never come back.

"No thanks," the tailor said. "I roll my own."

"My Father rolled his own," Dean said. "Used to, anyway." He hadn't spoken of his Father in ages.

"Did he find a good brand, then?"

"He died." Dean focused on the grayed mountain of ash on the end of his stick, piling up and balancing. "Murdered. Not five years ago." Mr. Novak just stared as if he hadn't really heard Dean.

"Oh." He finally said – Dean was expecting the second half of that knee-jerk reaction; a mangled 'sorry' that didn't mean a damn thing; he was so used to it that he was surprised when it didn't come. Instead Dean followed a cloud of smoke as it rose up from his mouth; idly, he questioned whether the other man had ever killed anyone, or, if not that, then maybe watched someone else die. Dean liked to think neither happened to the man – for some reason – but there were just miles of stories of immigrants from the Eastern countries which had enough sorrow to drown a more fortunate person. Now Dean could only think of that morosely dull Jungle book Sam had made him read last summer. If the tailor even tried to make a socialist speech, Dean was going to hit him.

Mr. Novak glared at Dean's cigarette a moment before ripping off a dollar-sized piece of the morning paper and handing it out. "If you don't mind…" he didn't, and Dean took it, letting the ash float into the creases his palm made in the paper. "What were you staring at?" he asked, taking back his decisive silence. They shared another look.

"Just the shop. You've got to see, you know? For the hell of it, I guess."

"There isn't much to see here."

"Is the place new?"

"My family bought the building in 1922 – seven years is not very new to me. I don't know about you." Dean blinked, trying and failing to recall a fact of that sort being hissed out of Mr. Novak's mouth the night previous. "It's fine." Mr. Novak said, taking the flinch as a sign of embarrassment. "Adding more appealing features is a good idea, but it'd just be painting even more targets on the place – we can't afford that." Dean took one last long draw of his smoke and crushed the cigarette into the ashes, snuffing the tiny fire in his hands.

"They can't steal a coat of paint," he replied, before finally finding the will to turn and leave. The crumpled up paper and its contents were carried deep into a side alley by the winter winds. Dean crammed the clothes' package between the crook of his arm and stuck his hands in his coat pockets, trying not to think that his parting words had sounded friendly.

xxxx

A/N: 'The Jungle book' is a reference to Upton Sinclair's early twentieth century novel 'The Jungle' which might ring a bell if you've ever taken an American History course, of which I've taken several, living in New England and all. It was pretty much a soapbox for how horrible the American meatpacking industry was for Eastern European immigrants, and how only socialism could save us. It had the same amount of misery as Supernatural without the funniness or charm or hot guys. So, yeah, don't read that.