There had been a time when Daphne Allen had been quite active in her church. Every Wednesday a representative from her community would come calling with a pie or a broccoli casserole and a look of grim determination. They would sit in her uncomfortable rustic rocking chairs, smiling and nodding for the absolute bare minimum of time required by Christian charity, and then flee for their homes. Daphne considered these infrequent companions her friends, although she had a hard time recollecting which name belonged to which face.
But a visit every once in a while was the least they could do, honestly, considering the amount of time and energy Daphne had put into their church. She was there every Sunday, a half hour before they started and an hour after service had ended, chatting enthusiastically with whoever would stand still long enough for her to pin down. The quicker she talked the harder it was for them to get a word in and squeeze out of the conversation.
She was the woman that people avoided sitting next to on donut Sunday. Daphne's solution to this problem of course was to be the one who volunteered to pick the donuts up after church, and then to be the one smiling blandly handing them out to every parishioner.
Everyone had looked at her differently after Emmanuel though. She had beamed as she walked into church that first day, escorting the gentleman she had found in the woods as though he was something she had accomplished and for which she deserved praise.
Suddenly everyone was talking to her.
"And how exactly did you two meet?" Father Wickfield had asked, eyeing her dark haired and absurdly handsome companion, who had been standing immobile and staring intensely at the cross over the altar for the past six minutes
"Where did he come from?" Asked Nancy Sue, the community service and event organizer.
"How long have you known him?" Asked Nick the organist.
"We're just worried" all of them had said, in one way or another, "We're worried that he's taking advantage of you." "We just want you to be safe."
But Daphne had just smiled bashfully and pulled her man closer to her side. They didn't understand. None of them had been there the day she found him on her afternoon walk through the forest behind her house. She'd been power-walking, listening on her iPod to some spiritual music (not gospel, she found gospel music too ethnic) when she had seen him. He had been sitting cross-legged on the ground, naked, soaking wet, and for the first time in her life Daphne had been confronted with a real life male penis. It just lay there by his thigh, being terrifying.
It wasn't until he said "Hello" in his deep, strange voice that she had looked up from his extremities to see his lovely face.
Right away she knew that she had been blessed. God had given her this man to take care of. She escorted the strange, nude man to her home. He listened to her as though every word that she spoke held a deep personal meaning for him. When she shared her deep love for God he didn't nod patronizingly like everyone else, his eyes cut into her soul and loved what they saw.
The fact that he was so vulnerable and lost had just convinced her further that she was the one who was meant to nurture this man, to lead him back into the light.
The first night he had stayed in her home she had let him wear her dad's old clothes that she kept in a box up in the attic. He'd eaten the canned soup she made him, looking at his spoon with an expression of sweet confusion, and slept on her couch. The second night, after finding out that he really had no idea who he was or where he came from, she had gone to and chosen Emmanuel for him. The third night she had invited him to her bed.
Daphne had trembled that night as she slipped on her comfortable cotton nightshirt with a picture of a cartoon moose on it. Emmanuel lay in her queen size bed, underneath a handmade quilt, flat on his back without moving at all. In fact, he remained perfectly still even after she had run her hand up his shirt and begun caressing his chest. It wasn't until she had straddled him and rubbed her whole body against his prone form that he responded at all.
"What are you doing?" He'd asked.
"I'm showing you how much I love you Emmanuel." She had whispered in his ear, closing her eyes and grinding her crotch against his. "I just love you so much."
The next morning had been Sunday. She'd introduced Emmanuel to everyone at church as her fiancé. When Pastor Wickfield had refused to perform the service she had made one up on her own. Emmanuel didn't seem to mind. They were married in a week.
People at church stopped paying her visits once Emmanuel began miraculously healing people. In practice Christian charity has limits, and this wasn't one of those speaking-in-tongues, snake charming churches you saw on the news that believed in that sort of healing nonsense. Daphne didn't care though, she had her Emmanuel and she didn't need anything else.
Ever since the pretty man with the green eyes and too-long eyelashes came and kidnapped her Emmanuel, she had prayed every day for his return. She sat still in her home, or in the woods by the lake where she had found him, wringing her hands together and whispering heartfelt pleas to God for hours.
So it came as something of a shock when she walked back into her home, which had returned depressingly to a state of loneliness unbroken even by weekly church visits, to find her Emmanuel waiting for her in their living room.
"Manny?" She whispered, frozen to the spot in her doorframe. Emmanuel was by the refrigerator, dressed in messy scrubs and a dirty tan overcoat, shifting his weight from foot to foot anxiously. His hair was messy and he badly needed a shave. He looked up at her with trepidation, and his eyes were as clear and blue as they ever were, if a bit more anxiety ridden.
"Daphne, I've decorated." Emmanuel said, with a strange apologetic smile.
Daphne stared at Emmanuel in confused silence for a few seconds, unable to comprehend what he had said. He sheepishly pointed upwards. Hanging from the ceiling was a "Happy Birthday" banner that she distinctly remembered putting away in the attic last year. Next to it was a banner that she usually hung at the front of the house for Thanksgiving, which had a turkey in a football helmet on it. Christmas lights were strung from every corner of the room spreading out into the living room, illuminating both her plastic Halloween candy bucket and an Easter Bunny figurine she'd forgotten that she'd ever owned.
"Why…? What?" Daphne looked back at her husband, shook her head as though to clear it, and threw herself into Emmanuel's arms. Her tears soaked into the shoulder of his overcoat, which smelled like a combination of musty car trunk and dried blood. "You're home!" She sobbed into his shoulder.
"I… I am not actually home." Emmanuel said apologetically, and the shock of that made Daphne pull back for a moment.
"Emmanuel!" She said, exhaling warmly and caressing his face with her palm, "God has blessed us and brought you back to me!"
"My name is not Emmanuel." Daphne's husband said, looking at her face sadly. "And God had nothing to do with it. I… I had hoped that the decorations would help, but I think I was wrong." His eyes flicked upwards.
"Help what?" Daphne looked around again at her guerrilla decorated home. Every holiday item she owned was on garish display, and the end effect was somewhat tacky and schizophrenic.
"Daphne, I am here to say goodbye. You helped me when I was lost, but I'm better now, and I have to go sort myself out."
Daphne took a few steps back from her husband. Nothing he was saying made any sense to her.
"You promised to love me forever." Daphne said, her voice surprisingly cool considering the tears that were still leaking from her eyes, like her body hadn't quite caught up with all the emotions she was feeling.
"I had amnesia." He responded, raising a fair point. Emmanuel looked both the same and different from how she remembered him. He had always been so serious and sad before, now he seemed jittery, manic, strange. His eyes kept shifting from item to item in the house, never meeting her gaze.
"We're husband and wife." Daphne said.
Castiel's eyes widened slightly, and he began to shift his weight between his feet more rapidly. "In Segovia Spain…" He spoke quickly and nervously, "a native delicacy is piglet roasted so tender you can cut its head off with a plate." The thought of that seemed to upset him further. "One wonders if the cultural significance outweighs the moral dubiousness of dining on an infant life form."
Daphne continued to stare at her husband. He was so precious and delicate, with his scrubs and his odd mannerisms. She was reminded of his first night in her home, when she could hear him gasping and crying in his sleep from her position upstairs. "You aren't all right Emmanuel." Daphne said, shaking her head and taking several steps toward her husband. "I don't know what they did to you, but you aren't all right."
"I'm better than I've been in a long time Daphne." Emmanuel said, walking backwards away from his wife. "I have to leave you. I just wanted to thank you for taking care of me." He tilted his head to the side apologetically. "And suggest that in the future perhaps you wait a bit before pursuing physical intimacy with someone who cannot remember their own name."
Daphne shook her head in confusion, but she was too upset to deal with the nonsense spilling out of her husband's mouth. "Stay!" She managed to beg.
"I can only help myself now, Daphne. Goodbye." Emmanuel disappeared as Daphne tried to clutch him again. Abandoned and confused, Daphne just let herself cry, sinking down to the floor of her kitchen. Above her, her Happy Birthday banner waved sadly in the slight gusts from her central air conditioning.
Castiel waited in the car obediently while Meg went in to speak to the Winchesters, like a puppy in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Meg had been in San Antonio Texas when Cas zapped in front of her a few days earlier. She was eating at a taco cart at the side of the road, and had flushed a bit when she saw that Cas had seen her. It's difficult to look sexy and devious whilst eating a weird sweet corn/cheese/mayonnaise/chili pepper thing out of a Styrofoam cup.
"I can't deal with your shit today, Angel." She'd said to the scruffy man addressing her from the side of the road. A bystander might have thought they were dating.
Castiel refused to tell Meg why he was so upset, but was in a particularly stubborn state of craziness. No matter how much Meg tried to convince him to just zap them both to Montana to meet up with Dean and Sam he would refuse, and explain something about the way Loons care for their young or some shit. She'd stolen a car but Castiel had a stint of moral exactitude and refused to enter it since it hadn't been properly paid for, so she'd had to rent a fucking car to drive them to see the dumbass hunting brothers extraordinaire. By the time she'd knocked on Sam and Dean's door Meg was just about through with everything.
Castiel hadn't had a very pleasant drive either honestly. Getting stabbed in the arm with a pen every time he mentioned monkeys did not make for a soothing 10 hours. Obviously not mentioning monkeys was out of the question. They were so interesting. By the time Dean leaned his head down to the driver's side window of the car Cas was a bit tense, intent on staring right ahead and not saying anything at all about sex or kissing or love or anything.
He opened with a pretty great line about lipstick. And monkeys, of course.
Dean rolled his eyes and wrangled Cas into the cabin. Neither of them mentioned the kiss for a while, but things were awkward. Cas could even tell, and he was particularly bad at picking up on these things. He told Dean and Sam about how his Garrison had been murdered and how Kevin Tran had been taken by Dick. Once Crowley showed up he got very uncomfortable and had a much harder time figuring out what was a normal thing to say and what was a crazy thing to say.
Dean watched sadly as Cas flinched and sputtered his way through interacting with Crowley. If they hadn't needed Crowley so desperately to finally get Dick, he would have knocked him in the jaw for some of the shit he was saying to his angel. Cas just pottered around saying vaguely good-natured things, and Dean missed his intimidating tax-accountant angel friend more than ever.
Crowley eventually tossed his vial of blood over to the Winchesters. Dean wasn't stupid enough to think it was actually Crowley's blood, he figured they had at best a 20% chance that the demon wasn't backstabbing them. Eventually Crowley fucked off to wherever kings of hell go when not immediately occupied by Leviathan smushing business.
Meg had a mini freak out.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU LET ME IN THIS FUCKING CABIN AFTER SUMMONING CROWLEY!?" She shrieked at Sam, her eyes going black unintentionally in her rage.
"You pushed your way in here sweetheart." Dean snapped, stepping futilely between Sam and the very pissed off she-demon. "You want to lay low? Go lay low! Jesus!"
"Don't 'sweetheart' me, shithead." Meg growled, but her tone lowered and her eyes clicked back to humanity.
"Meg, I won't let anyone hurt you." Castiel said, stepping up from behind her and trying to put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
"Oh fuck off, Anthony Perkins, go suck your boyfriend's dick or something" Meg threw Castiel's hand off her shoulder with a disgusted sneer. Castiel flushed and stepped back, staring at anything in the room that was not Dean. Sam's eyes narrowed and he looked at Meg as though he'd just remembered how delicious all that blood flowing through her veins was. For all her sass Meg was still trembling slightly, and she jumped at the sound of a tree branch tapping the window. She looked back over at Sam and Dean, face grim. "I assume you borderline alcoholics have beer? I need one."
"He just saved your friggin' life, bitch." Dean growled, indicating Castiel with a slight tilt of his head.
Meg rolled her eyes. "Oh whatever. He dragged you out of hell with one hand, and you didn't even kiss back."
Dean's eyes widened, face flushing a deep crimson. Meg smirked. Judging from Dean's visible embarrassment, she had nailed it. Dean glanced over at Castiel, sitting on a table in the corner trying to take up as little space as possible, like maybe Dean wouldn't see him or something.
"You told her?" Dean whispered, almost too angry to enunciate words.
"Monkeys?" Cas suggested.
"Dean." Sam's voice was calming, as it always was. He put a gigantic hand on his brother's shoulder, and shook him gently. "Bigger fish to fry?"
Dean looked up to meet his brother's eyes. They'd been together for so long at this point that they could communicate with a glance. There was something vaguely pathetic about two brothers entering their thirties who were still that dependent on one another, but nothing about Sam and Dean's life had been what you could call normal.
And Sam was telling Dean that he and Cas needed to sort this shit out so they could stop the world from ending with the bare minimum of teenage girl type angst.
"Cas, we need to talk." Dean muttered, and he took Castiel by the trenchoat-clad arm and led him forcefully outside.
Castiel and Dean ended up sitting across from one another at an old, rickety picnic table that Rufus had used to lay his shotgun on when he'd go outside to look at the stars. It still smelled vaguely of really good whisky. Dean had his eyes shut, and was rubbing his temples in what seemed to be a combination of irritation and frustration.
Castiel's eyes were open, and on Dean.
"I talked to Daphne." Cas said.
"Who? Oh." Dean asked, thinking at first that Cas was just spewing some more crazy shit before he remembered that Daphne was the name of Cas's i.e. Emmanuel's wife. "How is she?"
"I'm beginning to think she was never really well." Castiel admitted sadly.
"Oh." Dean sighed. "She did seem pretty eager to marry your crazy ass."
For a moment the two of them continued to sit in awkward silence. Dean played with the peeling paint that was starting to come off of the edge of the table. Castiel sat with something of his old stillness, the way he used to be before he really grew accustomed to inhabiting a human body.
It was Dean who eventually broke the silence.
"Why the fuck would you tell Meg you kissed me?" He asked.
"I… she…" Castiel looked nervously down at the table, before he could meet Dean's eyes again. "I had no one else to tell."
"Then don't tell anybody!" Dean growled. Castiel continued to look at Dean's face, but his expression was so sad he looked like an elementary school girl getting shouted at for forgetting her raincoat. Dean sighed. "I'm sorry about your Garrison by the way." He said. "That's gotta suck."
That forced Castiel's gaze away from Dean's again, which had not been Dean's intent. Cas looked the way Dean felt after his father died.
"You've lost quite a few friends lately as well." Castiel muttered, voice utterly miserable.
Both of them returned to their former uncomfortable silence. Dean almost missed Cas's random facts about monkeys and bees.
"Cas. This whole kiss thing," Dean plowed gracelessly forward in the conversation. The Winchesters viewed dealing with human emotion like pulling off a Band-Aid, it was a necessary evil, best to get it over with as quickly as possible. " I'm just gonna chalk this up to you being new to, uh, sex, ok?" Dean said. Cas looked up again, worriedly.
"I've been watching human beings procreate for millennia, Dean." He said very seriously.
"Jesus Cas, you can't just say shit like that. Gross. And no, sex is one of those things that you can totally get in theory and then completely fuck up in practice."
Cas looked down at his hands.
"Dean, no matter what you say, or think, I do love you." Castiel spoke haltingly, and Dean groaned and held his head between his hands. "And…" Cas continued, like he had started a roller coaster ride and couldn't get off now, "I think the love that I feel for you is the sort of love that your father had for your mother, or that Daphne wanted to have for me."
Dean squinched his eyes shut and shook his head between his hands.
"No. Cas. Not now. Jesus." Dean's voice was a growl, and his eyes glittered angrily. "Do you realize how many people have died this year? Bobby died Cas. And now he's back and it's kind of worse, but Bobby died."
Castiel's eyes widened in nervous horror.
"Jo's dead. Ellen's dead." Dean continued, starting to lose it. "That nice lady that we worked with that one time? Dead. That freaky guy who helped us hide out? Dead. You Cas? You were dead. You walked into a lake and you DIED right in front of us, Cas. People can't get anywhere fucking near us and get out of it ok. We talked to that Kevin kid for like three hours and now he's getting fucking tortured. I HAVE TO KILL SOME LEVIATHANS RIGHT NOW CAS. I CAN'T WORRY ABOUT HOW FUCKING MUCH I WANT TO KISS YOU."
Cas stared directly into Dean's eyes. His friend, normally so cool and calm, was shaking with anger and fear, and breathing heavily in an attempt to keep himself under control. Castiel's face returned to a careful state of blankness.
"I understand. And I am sorry." Castiel said, and he gave a small nod to his visibly upset friend. After a brief pause, he tilted his head to one side. "Would you like a sandwich?" He asked.
Without waiting for an answer Castiel did that thing where he disappeared but not in a way that you immediately noticed. Dean sighed and took in his lonely surroundings. Their conversation didn't seem to have resolved much, but he felt a little bit of the tension drain out of his shoulders.
Three hundred miles away, Castiel started the long process of soothing and comforting a wild pig that he thought Dean might find particularly tasty in sandwich form.
Dean stood up from the picnic table with a groan. He rubbed his eye and was embarrassed to find that he had allowed himself to tear up. Unac-fucking-ceptable Winchester. It was Leviathan killing time. If he died, great. If he didn't, he and Cas could work whatever the fuck this was out later.
They'd have time to talk later.
