When Dean woke up the next morning, it was with a mysteriously sleeping angel with one arm around his waist, cuddling against his back and making him the little spoon. The previous night's activities stayed clear in his mind, and not that he was complaining or anything — the sound he'd gotten when Cas had come had been the best thing he'd heard in months, and that face, and the way that Cas couldn't stop moaning his name as Dean moved inside him, the way sweat collected on his upper lip and tasted so... not sweaty — but there was just something... off about the whole thing. Whether or not they'd meant everything they'd said the night didn't cross his mind, but even as he felt Cas's lips between his shoulder blades, Dean had to wonder if Cas would just fuck off back to Heaven when they were done here.

Sighing, he looked at the other bed, where Sam was playing Gabriel's little spoon, and at the sofa, where Bobby looked... surprisingly lonely, for being asleep and only just having clued Dean into his relationship with Crowley. Well, if Bobby could manage the whole sleeping alone business, then Dean didn't see any reason why he couldn't.

"Dean," Cas grumbled, nuzzling closer into him. "What time is it?"

"Early enough to catch breakfast at most places," Dean grunted. "Let's get everyone else up."

"We can wait a minute longer, can't we?" Dean wriggled, but the hold Cas had on him was too strong — fucking angels. The scars on Cas's chest rubbed into Dean's back and his breath rustled through the hair on the back of Dean's neck. And it felt right, Dean couldn't deny that. It felt better than he'd felt in months — his chest didn't feel empty, his heart didn't feel broken, he didn't feel so lost, and alone, and completely incapable of keeping his shit together while the world around him got busy burning — but if Cas was just going to leave again...

Dean let his hand drop onto Cas's and gently nudged it down, off his stomach. Cas made a small, bemused noise, and Dean explained, "Last night was great, Cas... but it doesn't change anything between us, okay?"

Cas withdrew his hand and nodded. Rolling away from Dean, he muttered that of course nothing had changed, he hadn't expected it to, but that he still saw no reason to get everyone up just yet. "We're on a tight schedule," he explained, "but Sam and Gabriel are so much less grating when they aren't conscious."

Agreeing with that, Dean grabbed his jeans off the floor and pulled them on.

Even though he could've simply angel-magiced himself clean, Cas called dibs on the shower — "Before Sam can make it smell like demon blood," he said — and left Dean twiddling his thumbs on the bed. Gabriel was the next one to rouse, and even though Sam followed soon thereafter and managed to keep his ass in the bed, something just struck Dean oddly. Maybe the littlest archangel was preoccupied with telling Sam what shirts of his did or didn't make him look like an art school dropout, but Dean was surethere was some kind of mischievous glint in his eyes. And, sure, granted Gabriel looked like that pretty much all the time, but Dean didn't trust the son of a bitch as far as he could throw him.

When Cas wandered out of the bathroom in only a towel, Dean knew this Something Is Rotten In The Motel Room feeling hadn't been misplaced.

Apparently, as Cas told it, the clothing he'd put on the counter — the trousers, tie, and office jockey button-down shirt — had disappeared while he'd cleaned himself. He had no idea where they'd gone off to, and he'd checked everywhere in the bathroom, but... he'd turned up nothing. Gabriel promptly started cat-calling, heckling, and otherwise relishing in the red twinge that rose to Cas's cheeks, but in true Castiel fashion, the blue-eyed angel just looked at Dean and sighed his favorite, world-weary, hopelessly confused sigh.

"Bobby and Sam are both considerably larger than I am," he said. (And, damn everything in the world ever, Dean had to snap his head back up to keep from staring at Cas's slender waist, the fine muscles of his abdomen, the jut of his hipbones… fuck, Dean would have to take care of himself in the shower.) "Could I borrow some of your clothes, Dean?"

Dean shoved his way past Cas to the shower, muttering, "Yeah, sure, fine. Pick out whatever you want. Still doesn't change anything."

The search for breakfast found the lot of them at McDonald's, and Cas wearing a pair of Dean's older jeans and a Metallica t-shirt underneath his trench coat. For as much as he'd bitched about the Twizzlers, he kept his mouth shut about the sausage egg McMuffin, and even stomached two of them himself. He said nothing about the music while they drove in the direction of omens that Sam could parse out from different news sources, following them as they jerked the Impala further up through Minnesota, all the way to Detroit and finally swerved down toward Lawrence.

And through all of this, Cas only told Dean that he was driving recklessly once. Worst part, Dean kind of agreed with the son of a bitch: he shouldn't have hit the curve as fast as he did, not when the road they were on had so much intermittent ice and barely any cell signal. One wrong move when he should've been handling the road better and they'd all end up in a ditch, with his baby wrecked all to shit and no reliable way to call for help, not even when Bobby caught up with them.

For a long stretch after that, Cas said nothing, except that he didn't want anything from the drive-through for lunch or that he thought maybe Sam should drive now. When the omens finally paused in Illinois, they'd been driving or attempting to get ahead of the demons for three days. The midday sun saw Dean, Cas, Sam, and Bobby heading up some snowy hill, surrounded by some snowy little trees, overlooking some snowy little neighborhood that was jam-packed full of demons, Dean jerked Cas to the side, away from the others (but not out of their earshot). "So... are we gonna talk about what's up with you or not?"

Castiel thought about this for a moment. "Or not," he said, his voice even, as though he was entirely unaware of the fact that he was throwing Dean-logic back at Dean.

"No, seriously, Cas: what the Hell is wrong with you today?" Trying to mask his concern and failing miserably, Dean glared at the angel and clenched his hand on Cas's wrist.

"Nothing is wrong with me," Castiel retorted. "Because nothing has changed between us — remember?"

Sam, for his part, just rolled his eyes and tried to focus on the task at hand. His brother and Cas could fuck around and debate who did or didn't love whom all they wanted; Sam just didn't want to end up as Lucifer's angel condom again. Or in any similar position, if anything could really be compared to that.

Maybe getting strapped to a comet, like Jimmy had said before of being Castiel's vessel.

Then again, Lucifer was more powerful than Castiel. Maybe having him around was more like having to listen to Dean and Cas trying to out-bitch each other for all eternity, while getting torn between ten different comets. ...Yeah, Sam thought as he hunkered down with his binoculars, that made sense.

Cupid watched over all of this with increasingly droopy, sad eyes, and a weight in his chest like someone had just shoved a boulder between his vessel's lungs and left it there. He flew behind the Impala, waiting for Dean or Castiel to kiss the other, or say I love you, or rip all their clothes off and have sex, or anything... but all they did was glare, and grunt, and huff, and be so stupid. And after Cupid and Gabriel had put in so much work, trying to get them back together...

And then they had to go and do productive things like demon-hunting, so Cupid wandered off and got a milkshake. It was chocolate, and delicious, but it didn't make him feel any better about the fact that Dean and Castiel had to be the stupidest, most stubborn, ridiculous, difficult creations underneath their Father's sky. Since cold didn't really bother him, Cupid sat down underneath one of the trees and started playing with a set of twigs that he dubbed "stupid Dean" and "stupid Castiel," muttering incensed dialogue under his breath:

"'Well, would you like to just admit our love and stop making everything difficult for everybody else, Cas? I mean, it seems kind of unfair to make Sam and Gabriel and Bobby and everyone ever put up with us when we're acting like big dummies.'

'Well, I don't know, Dean, I think that would make too much sense, and it'd mean getting off my high cloud and you getting off your high horse and both of us talking to each other like we don't have our heads up our butts and that would be difficult, what are emotions, I don't understand them!'

'You raise several good points, Cas. I guess it doesn't really matter that everyone who loves us wishes we would stop being miserable all over them just so long as we can act like idiots.'

'Exactly, Dean. And it definitely doesn't matter that we shared True Love's Kiss last night or that True Love's Kiss is always supposed to work or that we have Enochian binding sigils on our hearts because all that matters ever is that we get to cling to our big, fat, stupid, hypermasculine pride.'

'But I thought that you weren't even really masculine because angels have no gender, Cas! Jimmy had a male body until he up and died, but aren't you technically androgynous?'

'Why yes I am, Dean, but it doesn't matter! All that matters is that we get to keep our pride intact! Yaaaay!'"

And so on. And so on. And maybe Cupid didn't have a solid grasp on Dean's figures of speech, or on Castiel's, but Cupid thought that his ability to mimic their voices was unparalleled. (It wasn't, but thinking this made him feel better.) By the time Gabriel popped in by his side, Cupid had smashed his sticks into pieces and taken to simply sulking as though he'd gotten ditched on prom night. Curling his knees up to his chest, Cupid muttered about his intense dissatisfaction with the way that things were going and how frustrated he was with Dean and Castiel and why couldn't things just go according to plan.

"You're telling me, bro," Gabriel sighed. "And you know... I am so sick and tired of batting these two around."

"I just wish they'd see what's right in front of them! That was True Love's Kiss last night, Gabey! How could it NOT WORK?"

"You also thought a romantic dinner at an Italian restaurant would make them start fucking like bonobos in mating season."

Cupid frowned, and let his shoulders slouch. "I said that Lady and the Tramp was one of my favorite Disney movies of all time ever. You're the one who decided that—"

"This would be so much more interesting if we weren't staring down the chance that Belial's gone and gotten something right for a change."

"Gabey, if you would just listen to my ideas, then—" The bad posture got uncomfortable almost immediately, but Cupid maintained it in the hopes that Gabriel would look at him and see how utterly distraught he was.

Gabriel didn't. Instead, he took to pacing, and kept right on talking: "Because you know who's coming to dinner if she did, and jeez, is he going to be pissed at me."

"I know that Lucifer will be mad at you, but if you would—"

"And then he gets back inside Sam and we're all fucked ten ways to Sunday, because Michael's down there, Raphael doesn't care, and there is no way I'm not hopping the first comet to Pandora."

"Are you even paying attention to—"

"And Cas... well, I mean, he could try, but Lucy turned him into burrito mix last time, so I doubt we'll get that much."

Cupid huffed, then announced, "Gabriel wants Sam Winchester to screw him into the bed!"

"And, so help me Dad, bro — I'm not just going to sit around and wait for Lucifer to shiv me again. ...I'm gonna go get Lisa and the Virgin Fangirl. Hopefully, they'll get someone to listen to them."

As Gabriel made his way off in a flurry of feathers, Cupid couldn't help but roll his eyes. Irony normally wasn't in the Cherubim's wheelhouse, but it just seemed so wrong and appropriate that Gabriel would complain about people not listening to him. Cupid seethed so fiercely that one of the nearby trees briefly caught fire. So Mister Big Shot Mc-Hazel-Eyed Archangel Pants was going to go insist on being an individual, with no concern whatsoever for everyone else who was involved in this. Fine then. Cupid could manage on his own. Maybe, he thought as he headed back toward Heaven, he would just need to take things into his own hands.

"Cas, can you pass me the Doritos?"

Castiel rolled his eyes, looking down at the bag of chips at his hip. "They're very crunchy," he pointed out. "If there are any demons around, you might tip them off—"

("Yeah," Sam muttered under his breath, escaping both Dean's and Castiel's notice, "because your foreplay isn't going to do that anyway.")

"Between the three of us, we aren't equipped enough to handle an entire town of demons. Especially over Doritos. ...Have the Twizzlers instead." And, turning back to playing lookout, he lobbed the pack of licorice toward his charge.

"Oh, so now it's okay for me to eat my goddamn Twizzlers?"

("Well, you could just eat his dick and do all three of us a favor." It wasn't that Sam really thought a blow job would make Dean and Cas stop going at each other's throats, but maybe it would chill them out for long enough to save the fucking world. ...Again.)

"I don't believe that I said the Twizzlers were at all acceptable, merely that they are the lesser of the two evils in this situation." Castiel sighed, adjusting the zoom on his binoculars so that he could see into one house's second-story window. As soon as he saw the two demons having sex, his cheeks twinged the color of a raw hunk of salmon. "Also, I don't know why you bought Doritos in the first place when you knew that we were going on a mission that required stealth."

Groaning, Dean shook his head. "I bought them because I like my fucking Doritos and didn't want to have to pick up and leave in the middle of the stake-out to go get dinner, okay?"

"Which is exactly what you're making Bobby do," Castiel pointed out. "Although I still don't understand your obsession with bacon cheeseburgers, or why it was necessary that he go get them from Biggerson's when the McDonald's was closer."

"Yeah, well, that's because you've never had one, okay? And you can't compare a Biggerson's Blue Ribbon Big Mouth Bacon Burger Special to some mystery meat from Mickey D's, okay? ...It's like pie, you can't compare two different kinds of—"

"I don't understand your obsession with pie, either."

("And I don't understand why you two can't hunt demons quietly like normal people, but who knows, maybe I'm a traditionalist like that." If they didn't stop it soon, Sam was going to have to smack them both. He could feel the urge to do so bubbling up and making it that much harder to restrain himself.)

"Now that just fucking hurts me, okay, Cas? I put a lot of time and effort into finding you the right piece of pie, from the right place, with the fucking perfect whipped cream—"

"And then you didn't let me have any because you wanted to eat it off my chest. I was there as well, Dean. I remember what happened."

"Oh yeah? So how can you even begin to tell me that you don't understand my obsession with pie. Was that or was that not one of the single best nights of your life?"

"I would place it higher than the time Uriel got me drunk and we accidentally set Yersinia pestis on Sicily, but below that time you let me handcuff you to the bed and—"

"OH MY GOD," Sam exploded. "WILL YOU TWO SHUT UP AND FUCK ALREADY?"

A flush spread over Castiel's cheeks and quickly started receding; Dean's entire face and neck erupted in red. They tried to look at each other, but this only made the situation worse. Even Castel's irritatingly rosy glow hung around. "...Sam," the angel ventured, staring intently at the snow between his legs. "As an archangel, I feel it is my duty to inform you that blasphemy isn't—"

"Okay, you know what, Cas? I don't care." Sam dropped his binoculars and, noticing Dean's attempt to take advantage of the situation, snatched up the bag of Doritos and threw them into the forest. The crestfallen expression that Dean gave him didn't stop Sam from pointing strenuously at him and snapping, "And you... I get it. I went to Hell, hewent to Heaven, and you were miserable at Lisa's. But you weren't the only one having an awful time of things, okay? And I think I've been pretty good about putting up with your fourteen-year-old girl, 'he broke up with me, my life is over' bullshit — and..." He turned his pointing finger to Castiel, "that goes without mentioning your petulant, 'Dean had sex with someone other than me and has the emotional intelligence of a broken ankle' crap!"

"I never said anything of that nature—" Castiel started, only for Sam to cut him off:

"But you've been thinking it, Cas!" Even as he lowered his voice, Sam's face turned a shade of eggplant purple, and displayed some impressive muscular gymnastics. "You've been thinking it so loudly, I could practically hear it over the Impala's speakers. Do you know how fucking frustrating it is to sit in a car with two embittered ex-lovers when one of them keeps using his magical angel powers to rewind the tape of Alanis Morissette and make us listen to 'You Oughta Know' until I'm ready to throw up?"

"Sammy..." Dean reached out his hand, awkwardly patting Sam on the shoulder. "I think it's time for you to take a deep breath and calm down."

"No, Dean, fuck that." Sam paused just long enough to sigh and brush his hair off of his face. "It's time for you two to wise up. Neither of you are being particularly subtle here. We could bring Dad back to life and he wouldn't last five minutes before telling you to go do the horizontal Time Warp—"

(Still blushing, Castiel looked to Dean and whispered, "What's a Time Warp?"

"It's a dance... thing. From this movie... Tell you what. I'll show you Rocky Horror next time we're not chest-deep in demons." If Cas hung around for that long.)

Sam continued ranting as though they'd never interrupted him: "And I mean, come on, guys! You had pretty loud make up sex last night! Isn't that supposed to, you know... fix things?"

"Well, we had sex, sure, but it didn't change any—"

"You know what? Screw you guys," Sam concluded, unceremoniously interrupting Dean, standing up and brushing off the snow. "I'm going for a walk."

He stalked off without another word, and for a long while, Dean and Castiel sat in silence. "That was odd," the angel finally said, picking up his binoculars once more. In response to Dean asking what he meant, he replied, "Sam's normally more clever when he's upset."

They sat in silence together for long enough that the stars came out. Finally, Dean had to ask: "So, uh... what's Yersinia pestis? That some kind of demon?"

Castiel shook his head. "You people call it the Black Death."

"Wait... a couple of angels were responsible for the Black Death?" Castiel nodded, fixing his binoculars on a pair of children playing hopscotch underneath a streetlamp — both of them, demons. "I mean... 'scuze me if I'm wrong, but don't you think that's more up Pestilence's sleeve?"

"Oh, no. Pestilence merely controls bacteria, viruses, and parasites. My Father is the one who created them, and we have been known to use disease in order to make a point. Look at the Plagues of Egypt—"

"Like the Charlton Heston movie?" Dean tried to smirk, but it came out as more of a grin, and for the first time since he and Cas had been alone, his chuckle was earnest instead of bitter.

Castiel rolled his eyes with an uncommon amount of affection. "Like the Book of Exodus, Dean." They fell quiet again, for just a moment, as Dean's hand strayed toward Castiel's; the angel asked no questions, but slowly let his own edge closer to Dean's. The hunter forced a cough as an excuse to snatch his away, and covered the poor faking job by demanding to know what the impressive, theological point was for that. "There wasn't one, not really — though that didn't stop the people of the time from trying to find one. Scientists still haven't stopped, they have all these excuses about natural population control and poor hygiene and they have a few valid points, but ultimately it was two drunk angels getting rowdy."

"No offense meant, but it's hard to imagine you and Uriel getting anywhere near rowdy, Cas."

Castiel shrugged. "We'd just successfully exorcised Samhain, and we got carried away. ...Anyway, Anna... I believe the phrase you would use is chewed us out? for it, in the morning."

"Oh, Anna," Dean sighed. "She was a badass — before she went all Glenn Close on us." As soon as Dean used the pronoun, both he and Castiel pricked up; their gazes locked, and a brief flash of pink rose to Dean's cheeks. "Look, Cas, I... what Sam said, about you and me and... well, and us—"

"I'm aware of what he said, Dean. I was there too."

"No, I mean... was he serious?"

Castiel set his binoculars between his legs, and just looked down at the town with his own eyes. He sighed, and allowed his hand to stray back toward Dean's hip. "Was he telling the truth about you?" Dean tried to say about ten different things at once, and in the end, what came out was a jumbled mess of denial, snark, pointing the finger at his younger brother, cursing God, Gabriel, Crowley, Bela, Lucifer, Michael, and everyone short of his father and Cas, swear words, and mixed up syllables that translated to Have you seen my ducky love pellet? in Swedish. "It is not that Sam did not speak honestly about me and my... feelings for you, Dean," Castiel clarified, "but you've seemed so uncomfortable since I returned—"

"Well, yeah, because... maybe Sam wasn't exactly lying about me—"

"And I just..." It took effort, but Castiel forced himself to meet Dean's gaze (and he got a sinking, let-down feeling in his stomach when Dean blushed and looked away). "I didn't want to cause you any more pain." After Dean went quiet for too long, Castiel asked: "...What are you thinking?"

Dean snaked an arm around the angel's shoulders. "Cas, man... I am thinking that we have got to be two of the dumbest sons of bitches on the planet."

They kissed, but to their mutual chagrin, it didn't last long. Instead, someone cleared a throat behind them, and they practically leapt apart. It wasn't Sam, or Bobby, and as Castiel looked over the facade — which, he had to admit, was certainly a pretty one, with a black-leather jacket, a heart-shaped face, and honey blonde ringlets that reached the middle of her back — he couldn't have agreed more with Dean's assessment of their intelligence. Dealings with demons superseded discussions of love. Past the outward show of her meat-suit, the angel saw her true face, with its knotted gray skin and the dark halo that emanated off her like an oil spill. Narrowing his eyes, he hissed, "Hello, Belial."

"Belial?" Dean spluttered. "I — you — she... you mean Meg?"

Smirking, Meg took a knife out of the holster on her hip; the blade was gnarled, sharp enough to sing through the air as she idly rotated her wrist, and covered in a mess of sigils that made Castiel gulp. "You know... I never really got why my daddy named me Belial," she said. "It's nothing personal, really, I'm sure he had his reasons... but I really love being Meg. It's just so punchy."

Dean resorted to the tactic he knew the best: false bravado. "The Hell do you want, you black-eyed skank?"

"Just a talk."

"If you just want to talk," Castiel asked, "then why do you have a knife that looks like it was designed to kill angels?"

"Oh, this little thing?" She pretended to examine it. "You know, I'm kind of lucky that Sammy ripped Alastair to pieces. He'd kill me for figuring this trick out when he couldn't... but don't worry, Baby Blue Eyes. I'm not gonna use it on you... not yet anyway." She paused a moment, and her expression turned serious. "So my ritual, boys? It's gotta go down in the same place you shoved my Father back into his cage—"

"Stull's Cemetery?" Dean interjected.

"Ten points for having a functional memory, Dean-o. And because I'm the fair and balanced type, I'll even tell you when it's happening: tomorrow night." The smirk tugged at her lips again. "It's not like you could stop it anyway."

Dean reached for his pistol with the rock salt bullets, but she disappeared before he had the chance to fire. Castiel didn't ignore his casual use of blasphemy — "God dammit" — but took his hand and pointed out that, "I think this occasion calls for 'son of a bitch' instead."