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"I'm gonna be vain for a second here." Dean warns.

"How unlike you. What a shock." Rachel replies monotonously and Dean narrows his eyes at her.

"You are too comfortable around me! This is an interviewer- interviewee relationship here, no more sarcasm."

"I'll try my best."

"Can I continue?"

"Please, you were about to embark on a rare bout of narcissism."

"I give up with you. Don't expect a good tip at the end of this." Dean grumbles but his mouth twitches slightly. "As I was saying, I'm gonna be vain because I think we wrote a really good song after our induction."

"Dean, they use that song in car commercials now! Please don't tell me you were leading up to the song about your impala."

Dean pretends to look hurt, and maybe slightly is. "'Never In Fact Homeless' is more than just a car commercial song!"

"Tell that to the car companies then."

"That song was important to me! Baby is still the only car I drive, she's never once let me down, she deserves a song for that!"

"Okay, alright, I just thought you would prefer to talk about 'Freedom Is A Length Of Rope.'"

"You sniff out dirt better than any gossip magazine out there. Alright, I'll tell you how that song came to be and then we'll never talk about it again. But don't think this gets you out of hearing about Baby's song!"

October 20, 1997

The honeymoon period was officially over.

It was harder when the kids were gone, when it was just Dean and Cas alone in a too big house together. Dean doesn't even want to think of the day when the kids will start visiting less frequently, when they decide to move out on their own. Dean doesn't think they'll last that long.

It's too quiet. There's two many words left unspoken, too many bitten tongues. Dean wants to pretend like nothing's wrong, Cas can't do that anymore. They're both tired of the harassment they face outside of their home and of the silence they face within it. Dean used to be able to get by on the simplest of things; the steady sound of Cas' breathing as he slept, smiles exchanged sleepily over cups of coffee in the morning, grocery lists signed with smiley faces. The little things that made all the trouble worth it.

It's hard to pretend that the backlash they face doesn't faze them. Cas can only wash the spray-painted slurs off his car so many times. Dean can only turn his head away from the tabloids so often. The hate doesn't even have to be aimed at them to still feel like a direct hit. The off-colour jokes dropped into casual conversation by friends are just as bad. And so Dean finds himself looking at women more, reminiscing about his days with Lisa, while Cas withdraws further from him. They make numerous last-ditch attempts at salvation but even those are half-hearted.

"We could move somewhere else, start fresh in a new home." Cas says one day, looking out the window to their garden. He knows Dean will say no, his family is here, the band is here, their life is here.

"We could travel for a while, take off work for a little bit." Dean offers another day, but Cas shakes his head and says "We'd still have to come back."

Neither of them states the obvious, that if Dean wasn't in the spotlight they wouldn't have as much of an issue. That the fame that brought them together is driving them apart. Dean can't help but think that their relationship is so anti-climatic after so many years of build up, just falling apart at the first hard shove. They'd survived worse in the past, this was just proving to be one storm they couldn't weather. And at times Dean could feel the futility of even trying, they couldn't marry, might never be able to, and it would be so much easier to just turn around, find a wife and only have to weather criticism over a bad song or two.

But maybe The Beatles had it right, something about Cas made the idea of being with anyone else unimaginable. And as Dean stares at him across the kitchen table, he can't help but think that maybe that's enough to stick around. That maybe the glue keeping them together is the fact that no one else will be Cas,so why bother trying to search elsewhere for what he already has in front of him? And so he makes a decision he'll never regret; he chooses to believe that that will always be enough for him. And so he allows himself a small smile and says "Things would be so much easier if one of us had been born a woman."

"There's nothing easy about being female, Dean. They're generally regarded in society as the lesser sex and face high levels of sexism on a daily basis-" Cas begins and Dean sighs.

"That's not what I meant by it. I just...we'd be...we'd be free. Free to be us, free to do as we pleased. No one would care."

It's Cas' next words that name Dean's song.

"And there you have it. Now let me get back to the other song; so I was driving down this really long stretch of highway, went on for miles and miles, just me and the impala-" Dean starts on another tale but Rachel puts her head in her hands until he stops.

"You wrote this gorgeous, powerful melody that really spoke out against societal oppression and all you wanna talk about is a car."

"How many times do I have to say it? The impala is more than just a car, go back through your notes and you'll find a real story there." Dean says earnestly.

"Why are you so afraid to address the topic? You have no problem screaming that song out at concerts, although you don't do it that often, but you can't talk about it now."

"Because part of me is still ashamed for how I turned out. It's ingrained into you so deeply that you're some kind of fucked up for not settling nicely into heteronormativity. And you know, our fans for the most part are great, like Charlie and I could be fucking horses and they wouldn't care as long as we still put aside the time to release an album every so often. But every once and a while someone jackass will put in his two cents and it still really gets to me. I don't think I'll ever be completely okay with who I am, but I try my best to get over it for my sake, for Charlie's sake, Cas' sake, and all the people out there like me who are struggling. I'll keep on keeping on if it means that even just one person will hate themselves a little bit less. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with us anyway, and if some higher power really had a problem with the way we live, they wouldn't have created people like Cas for people like me."

"I hope you know that is getting priority over your car." Rachel's hands fly across the keyboard in her attempt not to miss a single one of Dean's words.

"Alright, alright...but only if you mention that song at least once, and not in reference to the commercial."

"I'll do my best."

"Good. I don't make enough royalties for that plug to be worth it."