A day later, Sam and Dean left the auditorium together, faces like bleeding seals.
"Pamela was so young. She was too precious for this world." Sam looked to the sky sadly as if expecting to see her spirit ascend to the heavens, but what he saw was the moldy high school ceiling. He saw it everywhere. In his dreams. All night.
"You didn't even know her, man. Don't sweat it," Dean said. He tried to clap Sam reassuringly on his back like a Bro. It didn't really do anything but awkward.
"She was in my US History class. She grabbed my ass sometimes."
"Good times."
There was a conversational pause as other kids walked past them out the doors. The In Memory of Pamela Barnes Memorial Assembly Assembly Gathering didn't seem to have phased them much. Her friends were not there. Stoners skip all assemblies always.
"I do feel like it's kind of my fault," Dean muttered mumblingly, walking towards his locker in auto pilot mode.
"Well, yes," Sam said reproachfully. "You hired a blind lighting technician."
"I didn't know she was blind! I thought she kept walking into walls because she was really really high."
"Is that any better?"
They came to a stop. Dean was unsurprised to see the weirdo that had somehow snuck into his heart standing in front of his locker. Dean had not yet dismissed the idea that this weirdo had tunnels connecting to the inside of his locker and/or the ability to teleport. What did come as a surprise was Uriel.
"Hello, Dean."
"Uh, hey to you too," said Sam. "Dean, does Castiel live outside your locker?"
Castiel blinked heavily as an ostrich does, unburying his head from a wedge of mind dirt. "I do not reside in Dean's locker."
"Get to the point, Castiel," Uriel said impatiently.
Dean groaned. "What's the battle plan this time? Also... where do you live, Cas?"
Castiel looked at Dean because he usually does that. "We have need of your skills, Dean."
"Yeah, I'm on the acapella team already, dude," Dean said, grinning. "Or did you not notice that you were shoving sheet music through the slots of my locker?"
Uriel rolled his eyes like great planetary bodies circling the sun. "Shut up, Winchester. You are needed."
Castiel's face hardened like a metapod. "Dean, it's the acapella club budget. We only had so much money, and we've spent much of it on endless pounds of sequins... Whether or not we can afford the scuba outfits for the next performance is questionable."
It slowly dawned on Dean. "You want me to..."
"Math just isn't Zachiariah's... area of expertise. We need you to compute the budget. Dean, you're our best hope."
"No. No way. You can't ask me to do this, Cas. Not this."
Castiel stared into Dean's soulful hazel eyes and drowned in the greenish brownish ocean of ocular liquid that sloshed within. "This is too much to ask, I know. But we have to ask it."
Dean looked back into Castiel's eyes. They were blue like a blue crayon in a box of crayola crayons, like a recycling bin, like the iTunes logo. Pure blue.
"Can I talk to Castiel alone?"
Uriel walked away, grumpily, as did Sam, who was glad to leave the gayze fest. Dean watched him walk away, and then resumed the festivities.
"What's going on, Cas? Since when does Uriel put a leash on you?"
Castiel looked embarrassed. "My superiors have begun to question my sympathies."
"Your sympathies?"
"I was getting too close to the humans in my charge. You. They feel I've begun to express emotions. The doorways to doubt. This can impair my judgement."
"You're telling me that you just started having emotions? You really are a robot aren't you?! Look, you really don't want me doing - did you just say humans?"
"Want it, no. But I have been told we need it."
"You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you won't like what walks back out," Dean said dramatically, his eyes burning with the passion and mistakes of a hundred thousand years. Cas's eyes reciprocated. "For what it's worth, I would give anything not to have you do this."
