The Silence Between Stars

The first body is faceup in a field of brittle frost, the grass pressed in a halo around her like the wind itself stopped to watch. Eyes open, glassed over, pointed straight at the cloudless Montana sky. Dean's breath fogs when he crouches, hands on his knees, trying not to think about the way her mouth is parted like she was about to say something and never did.

“Coroner says time of death between midnight and two,” Sam recites, flipping pages in the thin file the county sheriff handed over like it was a hot coal. “No signs of struggle. No toxins in the preliminary panel. No burns, no punctures, nothing. Just—”

“Just dead,” Dean finishes, staring at the pattern of white ice crystals caught in the woman’s hair. He leans in, fingers hovering over her neck, resisting the urge to touch. He hates when there’s nothing to touch. There’s comfort in wounds and bruises, in the mechanics of damage. This is too clean. “Name?”

“Marla Dines,” Sam says. “Forty-two. Worked at the hardware store. Her sister found her at dawn while walking the dog.”

Castiel stands a few feet away, coat hem darkened with frost, his gaze lifted to the pale blue. He hasn’t moved since they got here. He’s quiet—quieter than his usual silence. Dean glances at him once, twice, then looks away and pulls a small penlight from his pocket, angling it over Marla’s eyes. No response, nothing living, just the dilated stillness of something frozen mid-wonder.

“Doesn’t fit a pattern we know,” Sam says, the soft snap of the file as he closes it. “Unless you count weird as a pattern.”

“In our line of work?” Dean stands, rolling his shoulders against the cold that’s settling under his jacket. “Weird is the baseline. It’s the polite way the universe says ‘screw you.’”

The field is quiet except for the distant bleat of cattle and the wind fingering the barbed wire fence. Dean stares up, squinting against the brightness. There’s nothing there. Not even a bird.

“Cas,” he says finally, without looking. “You getting anything?”

Castiel lowers his head. For a moment Dean thinks he won’t answer. Then: “Her face is…peaceful.”

“That’s not intel,” Dean bites back, sharper than he means to be. He gestures at the sky. “Is there anything up there? Any—angelic nonsense? Trumpets? Light show we missed?”

Castiel’s jaw shifts. He looks tired in a way that isn’t about sleep. “No trumpets. No light. If there was, it’s gone.”

Dean grunts. He wants a direction, wants to point the Impala and go. Instead he looks at Sam. “This the first?”

“Third,” Sam says. He flips to the back. “Wesley Park, twenty-seven. Found on his roof, same posture. And an older man, Jonah Keller, seventy-one, in his cornfield. All within a thirty-mile radius. All eyes turned up.”

“Stargazers,” Dean mutters. He crouches again, looking at the faint smudge of dirt under Marla’s nails. “Maybe they saw a satellite. Maybe they saw God. Either way, it killed them.”

Sam snorts, but not unkindly. “You think God’s slumming it in Gallatin County, man?”

“Not any God that returns calls.” Dean flashes him a half-smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. He straightens, nods toward the sheriff’s car parked by the road. “We’ll need her contacts. Friends. Hobbies.”

Sam lifts a brow. “You’re going to say hobbies with a straight face?”

Dean ignores him, turns back to Cas. “You ever seen something like this?”

Castiel’s gaze slips past him, back to the woman on the ground, then to the sky. He doesn’t answer the question. Instead: “It’s…quiet here. The kind of quiet that’s not empty, just…waiting.”

Dean’s mouth tightens. He tucks the penlight away. “Great. Fantastic. Nature poetry. Let’s get out of here before my toes fall off.”

They give their statements to the sheriff; Sam handles the charm. Dean says as little as necessary, thanks her for the access, promises to be in touch, the routine words smooth from wear. He doesn’t look back at the sheeted shape as they walk to the car.

The drive into town is a ribbon of two-lane cutting through yellow grass and skeletal fence posts. Dean turns the radio up—Zeppelin, familiar and loud—until it feels like it fills the space in his chest where the cold sat. Cas is in the back seat, his gaze spread thin over the passing landscape, like he’s counting fence posts or breaths.

“Hardware store first?” Sam asks, glancing at him over a handful of notes.

“Hardware store,” Dean confirms. “Then the old guy’s place. We’ll swing by Wesley’s after.”

“Wesley worked nights,” Sam says, scanning. “A warehouse outside town. He’d come home and sit on his roof with a telescope. Neighbor said he did it for hours.”

“Telescope.” Dean taps the steering wheel. The word unsettles something he can’t name. He glances in the rearview. Cas’s eyes are on the sky again, not the windshield, not even the road.

“You got something you want to say?” Dean asks, dialing the volume down without making a thing of it.

Castiel’s gaze drops to meet his in the mirror, blue and unreadable. “There are distances between stars that humans measure in light. In truth, they’re mostly nothing. Empty.” He tilts his head, as if listening. “Except it isn’t empty. Not really.”

Dean swallows. His mouth is dry. “And?”

“Sometimes,” Cas says softly, “people look into that not-empty, and it looks back.”

Sam shifts in his seat. “You think something is…looking back here?”

“I think,” Cas says, “something is hungry for attention.”

Dean doesn’t let the shiver climb his spine. He concentrates on the next turn, on the familiar weight of the Impala under his hands, the rumble of the engine. He can fix an engine. He can’t fix a sky.

The hardware store bells jingle when they push inside. It smells like wood shavings and machine oil. A woman behind the counter looks up and swallows when she sees their suits, a practiced wariness. Sam does the smiling. Dean does the standing in a way that makes people talk. Cas wanders a little, fingers trailing over bins of screws like he’s reading them.

“She liked the radios,” the woman says eventually, eyes damp. “She said the old stuff had…soul. She was sweet. Quiet. Kept to herself but…you know when someone’s got a whole world in their head? Like that.”

Dean nods. He asks about purchases, about late nights, about anything strange. He keeps his voice level, his eyes soft. He’s good at this part. He pretends it doesn’t bother him that the bell over the door rings whenever anyone comes in, like a countdown he can’t see.

Back in the car, he drops into the driver’s seat with more force than he means to. “Radios,” he says. “Telescopes. Looking up and listening in.”

Sam rubs his temple. “We need to check the other houses. See what they’ve got. Maybe something connects.”

Dean turns the key. The engine purrs. He feels Cas’s gaze on the back of his neck, a pressure that says I’m here, and also something else, something pulled thin. He starts to make a joke to cut it, to put their usual shape back on, but the words dry up at the look on Cas’s face reflected in the side window—quiet, contemplative, like the field, like the sky.

So he drives, and keeps his hands steady on the wheel, and pretends the road is the only thing they’re following.

The bunker settles into its usual night sounds: the cycling hum of vents, the low thud of pipes, the clock on the far wall ticking like it forgot how to be subtle. The library lamps cast amber over leather and wood, islands of light surrounded by old dark. Sam turned in hours ago after combing county records, his footsteps fading down the corridor. Dean claimed he was going to grab food, but the takeout bag sits unopened on the map table, grease starting to seep, while the Impala’s keys lie beside it like he dropped them and forgot.

Castiel is at the end of a long table buried in books. The pile beside him is a mess of Men of Letters journals, Enochian fragments transcribed in the scribe’s unfriendly hand, and a photocopy of a ritual diagram so old the edges are black with the shadow of the scanner. He doesn’t move much. He reads like he listens: still, focused, every muscle quiet. He doesn’t need the glasses Dean keeps thinking about buying him. His finger traces a line of script; he tilts his head the slightest degree, unreadable.

Dean lingers in the doorway for a beat. He doesn’t know why he’s quiet. It’s not like Cas can’t hear him coming from a county away if he wants to. Still, he keeps his steps softer than usual as he crosses the library, the styrofoam cup in his hand warming his palm. The coffee is fresh, strong, the kind he makes for himself when he needs to stay up and keep his hands busy. He tells himself he made an extra one because it’s stupid to microwave old coffee after midnight, not because of anything that feels like a habit.

“You look like a bat got into the archives,” he says, setting the cup on the table just left of Cas’s elbow. He aims for casual and hits somewhere near it.

Castiel’s eyes flick to the cup, then to Dean’s face, then back to the Enochian. “Bats are mammals,” he says, distracted. “They wouldn’t be interested in paper unless it contained insects.”

“Good to know we’re safe from the bat book club.” Dean tugs a chair out with his foot and drops into it sideways, forearm on the backrest, watching Cas pretend he didn’t just get him coffee. He pushes it a little closer with one finger. “It’s hot.”

Cas glances again. The corner of his mouth thinks about moving and doesn’t. He picks up the cup like it’s something delicate and takes a sip. His throat moves. His lashes lower. Dean looks away before he can notice he noticed.

“There’s a pattern,” Cas says, putting the cup down with a soft click. He shifts one of the journals toward Dean. The page is dense with symbols. “Not of death. Of attention.”

Dean leans in, close enough to smell ink and paper and the faint ozone that clings to Cas even when he’s been human for days. “Speak English, professor.”

“In certain historical accounts, there are references to voices perceived during astronomical events.” Cas taps a column of cramped notes. “Auroras. Comets. Meteor showers. The witnesses describe…music. Not sound exactly. A pressure. They often report an uplift of the head, exposure of the throat.” His eyes lift, meeting Dean’s. “A posture of offering.”

Dean’s mouth goes tight. He pictures Marla in the frost, Wesley on his roof, Jonah in his field. “And then they’re dead.”

“Not always.” Cas reaches for another book, the sleeve of his coat brushing Dean’s fingers. He doesn’t apologize. He never does. “Sometimes it ends in sleep. Sometimes blindness. Sometimes a profound feeling of being observed that persists for days.” He pauses, listening inward to something Dean can’t hear. “What you might call being haunted by attention.”

Dean snorts because the other option is shivering. “You really know how to sell a party.”

Cas’s hand settles on the page, knuckles pale. The sigils painted in the margin shine under the lamp. “There are…entities. In the spaces between. Not angels. Not demons. Things that formed when there was only expansion and empty heat. They don’t have intention in the way we understand it. But they turn toward focus. A human looking up is…an invitation.”

Dean scrubs a hand over his jaw. The stubble rasps under his palm. “So they’re lonely.”

“That word implies they want something specific,” Cas says quietly. “I think they respond to the act of wanting. Desire itself is a signal.”

Dean doesn’t let that sit long enough to get under his skin. He points at a sketched symbol, the ink gone gray with time. “This do anything for us?”

“It’s a ward,” Cas says. “Incomplete. The scribe didn’t finish the transliteration.” He pushes the cup away from the book, careful. “There’s more in the Men of Letters catalog. Volume K-12 through K-15. I can find them.”

“You’ve been at this for hours.” Dean nods at the stack. “You’re gonna burn out your vessel if you keep staring at angel Sudoku.”

Cas’s eyes flicker down to the coffee again, as if reconsidering what it means to accept it. He takes another sip, and something very small eases in his shoulders. “I can endure more than you.”

“Not a competition I’m interested in losing.” Dean slouches deeper, ankle hooked over his knee, like posture can make this normal. He watches Cas work, the way he turns pages with his fingertips, careful even when he’s not aware of being careful. He watches the tiny furrow between his brows when a line doesn’t make sense, the way it smooths when it does. The lamp throws a pool of light over the table, cutting Cas’s face into planes and shadows, the blue of his eyes gone almost gray in the color of the room.

The clock ticks. The vent hums. Somewhere, water moves through old pipes. The bunker is a beast breathing around them.

After a while, Dean gets up without a word and disappears into the stacks. He returns with the volumes Cas named, dropping them in a controlled thud. He doesn’t ask if it helps. Cas’s small nod answers anyway.

They fall into a rhythm. Cas reads aloud the pieces that matter. Dean translates when an archaic English word trips the tongue. They scribble, copy, circle, cross out. Dean’s handwriting is brash and angled; Cas’s is precise. The coffee cools. Dean gets up and switches it for the second cup he made and pretended he didn’t. Cas doesn’t comment. He wraps his hands around it like heat matters to him.

At some point, Dean’s shoulder leans against the back of Cas’s chair, weight settling so the contact is constant but ignorable. Cas doesn’t move away. He breathes, steady. It’s not loud, but Dean can hear it, can feel the rise and fall where their space meets.

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean says finally, not sure which of them he’s telling. His voice is low, for the room, for this hour. “We always do.”

Cas turns his head. The lamplight puts a thin gold line along his cheekbone. He holds Dean’s gaze a second too long. Then he nods, once, solemn. “Yes.”

Dean clears his throat. He points at the last incomplete line. “Finish that, and I’ll, uh, make sure the coffee doesn’t…get cold.”

“It already is cold,” Cas says, and then—there it is—his mouth presses into something like a smile. Small. Real. It hits Dean harder than it should.

“Yeah,” Dean says. He reaches for the cup and replaces it with the one still steaming. They don’t talk about the extra he had waiting. They don’t talk about why he knew he’d need it.

They keep working. The night wears on. The page fills, line by line, with a shape that starts to look like an answer. Outside, somewhere far above the bunker’s concrete skin, the sky stretches wide and indifferent. Down here, in the cut of lamplight, they make a small, stubborn circle and hold it.

The morning starts gray and thin. Frost rims the edges of the Impala’s windshield until the wipers smear it into damp crescents. Dean lets the engine idle longer than necessary, listening for any complaint he can fix because it’s easier than thinking about anything else. When he’s satisfied she sounds right, he slides in, knocks his knuckles against the dash, and cranks the radio to drown out the quiet in his head.

Zeppelin spills into the car, the kind of driving beat that fits the long, two-lane ribbon of Montana backroad. Gravel spits as he pulls out of the bunker’s access road and onto the highway. Sam took off in the morning with a promise to dig through purchase histories and shipping invoices. Dean drew the short straw for next-of-kin, but he didn’t argue. Movement helps. Music helps. The hum in his bones quiets when he’s got a wheel under his hands.

Cas rides shotgun. He wears the same coat, the same tie pulled too tight, the same look like he’s seeing both the world and something through it. He presses his palm against the passenger window like he’s testing the glass’s reality, then rests his arm on the door and leans his head back. The breath he lets out fogs a faint oval on the pane, then fades.

They pass bare trees, rusted mailboxes, fields with the frost still clinging like the earth doesn’t want to wake. Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel, sings under his breath on the lines he knows better than the back of his hand. “Been a long time since I rock and rolled…” The lyrics feel good in his mouth, and he makes them louder, pushes the volume up another notch.

Cas doesn’t blink. His gaze is fixed on the distance where the sky presses down on the land. Dean glances over once, twice. The set of Cas’s mouth says he’s listening to something else entirely. The volume, the engine, the sweep of tires—none of it touches whatever room Cas is sitting in inside his head.

Dean sighs and reaches for the dial. Zeppelin drops to a murmur. The cabin noise softens until it’s just the road and the low, familiar rattle of something in the glove box that he keeps meaning to fix and doesn’t.

“Hey,” Dean says, because quiet with Cas is easy until it’s not. “You’re gonna burn a hole through the horizon if you keep staring like that.”

Cas’s eyes shift a fraction, like it takes effort to come back to the confines of car and steel. “I won’t damage the horizon.”

“It was a figure of speech, Professor Bat Club.” Dean flicks a look at him that lands, this time, with a small aim at light. “What’s in there?” He taps his own temple with two fingers. “And if you say ‘many things,’ we’re pulling over so I can find a ditch to scream into.”

Cas’s mouth pulls, almost that not-quite-smile again. It doesn’t last. He returns his eyes to the sky, the pallor of morning making his irises look almost transparent. “The emptiness,” he says, voice low, like he’s trying not to disturb something.

Dean’s hand tightens on the wheel. He gives himself a beat to pretend that word doesn’t land exactly where it always does—under the sternum, under the jokes. “That’s cheerful.”

Cas shakes his head. “Not emptiness as in absence. The emptiness between stars isn’t nothing. It’s…a medium. A field. It’s alive with particles you can’t see and forces you can’t feel because your bodies aren’t built to perceive them.” He pauses. The Impala eats a quarter mile. “It’s very loud. And very quiet.”

Dean blows air through his nose. “You saying the victims, they tuned into that.”

“I think they turned their faces to it,” Cas says. “They wanted. They listened. Something listened back. Not with intent. More like…a tide moved because the moon was there.” He moves his hand in the air, measuring out a distance between forefinger and thumb that doesn’t correspond to anything in the car. “When you stand outside at night, you feel small because you think you are looking at infinity. But there are distances there that even my mind can’t contain without…compression. Without loss. It’s not just space. It’s a kind of attention that doesn’t have a source. An ache stretched from one end of the universe to the other.”

Dean swallows. The road hums. The yellow lines whip past in steady dashes. “You…feel that. Now.”

“I always have,” Cas says simply. “But here it is closer.” He turns his head to Dean, studying his profile like it’s a constellation he’s trying to fix a name to. “Humans carry it in your chests. In your throats. You call it wanting. It’s a frequency. To certain things, it reads like a beacon.”

Dean’s laugh breaks too sharp, then he smooths it out. “I’m not a damn lighthouse.”

“You are to me,” Cas says, with no irony at all. He looks away before Dean can do anything with that, his gaze catching on the thin skein of cloud across the late morning sky. “The victims looked too long. They were open in a way that made them…available.”

Dean chews on that. He can’t fight a tide. He can shoot a monster. He can punch an angel. He can carve a sigil. “So we build them an umbrella,” he says, thinking of the ward they almost finished, of the way the ink dried under warm lamplight. “Something that keeps the…attention out.”

“For most, yes.” Cas’s fingers flex on the door, restless. “For some, it will require more. There are people who are—” He searches for the word, and the silence stretches just long enough to be a choice. “—thin. The world passes through them more easily. It’s not their fault.”

Dean thinks of Marla’s face tilted back into frost. He thinks of Wesley’s neck exposed to the cold dawn. He turns the volume down one more notch because the words don’t need to push against noise. “You ever feel like that.” He keeps it casual. He fails. “Thin.”

Cas’s head tips toward him, a question in the movement. He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s careful. “I was made to be permeable. My purpose was to let the orders of Heaven move through me without friction. That has changed.” He looks at Dean’s hands. Dean doesn’t know what he sees there. He doesn’t ask. “Sometimes the emptiness…gets inside. It’s not bad. It’s just…there. It spreads out. It makes everything…quiet.”

Dean wants to joke. He wants to say something about how that sounds like the worst meditation app ever. He doesn’t. The curve of the road brings them past a stand of pines, their dark needles still wet. The light catches on the water and throws a brief scatter of brightness into the car, across Cas’s cheek, across Dean’s knuckles.

“Okay,” Dean says, like he knows what to do with this, like he can build a wall against a tide and call it done. “So we get ahead of it. We put the word out about the equipment, we track the seller, we finish those wards. We keep the thin people thicker.”

Cas huffs, not quite a laugh. “That’s not how it works.”

“Let me have the metaphor, man, I’m on a roll.” Dean risks another glance. Cas’s profile is calm again, the raw thing that opened in him tucked away under lines that are more familiar, more manageable. “We’ll fix it.”

Cas makes a sound, quiet agreement or something like it. He looks back at the horizon, but the tension in the angle of his shoulders loosens half an inch.

Dean reaches out without thinking and turns the radio down to a whisper, one hand returning to the wheel before Cas can read anything in the shape of the gesture. The car moves through the gray morning, steady, and for a few miles the emptiness between stars feels more like space they can drive through and less like something waiting to pull them apart. The mailbox they’re looking for will be on the right, blue paint flaked and leaning. Dean watches for it, jaw set, the words Cas left hanging in the cab like a second atmosphere. He doesn’t say them back. He doesn’t have to. He keeps his eyes on the road and the car between the lines. Cas watches the sky. The Impala carries both.

The mailbox is there—blue, flaking, leaning the way Cas said some people do. Dean turns into the gravel drive, the Impala crunching slow. The house is a single-story ranch with siding that needs paint and a porch that’s held together by stubbornness and habit. A wind chime made out of forks hangs and barely stirs. There’s a faded plastic tricycle near the steps. No kids inside now. Dean feels that before he thinks it.

He flips his badge open at the door like muscle memory and smiles like it’s supposed to save anything. When the woman answers, she’s got that tight look around her eyes that says she hasn’t slept. She’s late thirties, a sweatshirt two sizes too big, hair pulled into a knot that’s given up. Her name is Hannah Rourke; they know that from the file. The man hovering a few feet behind her is older by a handful of years, pale, knuckles white on the edge of the hallway table. Husband. Father. Andrew.

“Mrs. Rourke? Andrew?” Dean’s voice softens, shaping itself around the words he always says. “Agents Daniels and Novak.” He flashes the badge. “We’re really sorry for your loss. We’d like to ask a few questions about Wesley, if you’re up for it.”

The woman swallows. Her eyes flick to Cas, then back. She steps aside. “Yeah,” she says. “Come in.”

They take seats at a small kitchen table covered in a wipeable tablecloth with strawberries on it. A coffee pot is half-full and burned. There’s a plate of untouched toast. Everything smells like anxiety and the ghost of cinnamon.

Dean starts the way he always does, testing where the floor might give. “We know this is hard. We’re just trying to get a picture of what Wesley was doing the last few days. You mentioned to the local PD he liked astronomy. That right?”

Andrew nods. “He’d sit out on the porch with his radio. Said he could pick up the satellites sometimes. NASA feeds. He… he liked the sound. Said it felt like… like something was singing, but too quiet to hear unless you really tried.”

Hannah looks at her hands. Her nails are bitten down to the quick. “He had this old radio. Not the one I remember from when he was a kid—this one was bigger, all knobs. He bought it at some swap meet two towns over. I told him it was junk. He said it was special.”

Dean leans forward, elbows on his knees, the picture of engaged professional. “Did he talk about anyone he bought it from? Any new friends, folks he was chatting up online? We’ve got reports of… uh…” He flicks his eyes to his notebook, losing the thread for a second when the word emptiness ripples through him again, unbidden. “Uh, radio clubs. You know, meetups.”

Hannah’s face shutters. “Are you trying to say he got involved with some cult? Because he wasn’t a crazy person.” There’s heat in it, brittle.

Dean lifts a hand, placating. “No, ma’am, that’s not what I meant. I just—”

Cas speaks before the apology is fully formed. “Wesley wasn’t crazy,” he says, and his voice isn’t polished or trained. It’s just flat and honest in a way that tilts the room. Hannah’s shoulders drop a fraction at the name on a stranger’s tongue. “He was curious. He wanted to understand what he heard. People who want that often look like they are looking at nothing when they’re looking at everything. It can be frightening to watch.”

Andrew’s mouth tightens and then loosens. He looks at Cas like he’s seeing past the stupid coat and the poorly-tied tie. “He got… quiet,” he says. “He wasn’t partying. He wasn’t out late. He was on the porch. He’d make us come out and listen. He’d get this… look.”

“Like he wasn’t here,” Hannah supplies, voice lower now, the anger cooled to grief. “He’d forget I was talking. I’d say his name three times. He’d blink and laugh and say sorry like it was a joke.”

Cas nods like he understands it physically. “He was listening to a frequency that made him feel small and full at the same time,” he says. “Do you remember anything different the last night? Any smells? The way the air felt?”

Dean angles him a look. It’s not a question he would’ve asked. Hannah blinks. “The air?” She thinks. Her brow furrows, and then something clicks. “It was cold. Colder than it should have been. There was frost on the porch rail even though it wasn’t that cold. He said, ‘Hear that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t hear anything.’ He laughed and said, ‘That’s because you’re not listening.’” Her face crumples around the memory. “I grabbed his sleeve. He shrugged me off. Gentle, but like I was interrupting something important.”

Andrew’s jaw works. He lifts his hand and presses his thumb into the edge of the table until the skin blanches. “He was writing things down. Numbers. Strings of numbers. He said they were coordinates. I asked him for what. He said, ‘Home.’ He never said that word like that before.”

Cas leans forward, hands flat on the table, but he doesn’t touch them. He holds their gaze like a bridge. “Can we see the notebook?”

Hannah stands without questioning the authority in his tone. She goes to the hallway, returns with a spiral-bound lined notebook, the cover bent, a sticker half-peeled. She sets it in front of Cas. Dean watches as Cas opens it with careful fingers. The pages are filled with numbers and short lines of looping script. The handwriting changes; some lines look like they were written without looking at the page.

Dean points to a sequence. “That look like anything to you, Samwise?” It’s automatic, the wrong name sliding out. He catches it and swallows it back. “Cas.” The correction comes rough. He pretends it’s nothing.

Cas doesn’t call attention to it. He scans, eyes moving fast, mouth a tight line. “They’re not coordinates,” he says finally. “Not to a place you can drive to.” He looks up at Hannah and Andrew. “He wasn’t trying to leave you.”

Hannah’s eyes fill. “Then what was he doing?”

“He was answering,” Cas says simply. “Something called to him, and he answered. You couldn’t have stopped it by being louder. You couldn’t have fixed it by taking the radio away. I’m sorry.”

Dean watches the way the apology lands, not as blame but as permission to stop digging for a fault line in themselves. Hannah’s shoulders shake once, then still. Andrew reaches for her hand and squeezes.

“Did he say the name of the person he bought the radio from?” Dean asks, back on his feet inside the job because Cas opened the floor and held it steady.

“Guy at the swap.” Andrew rubs at his temple. “Didn’t give a name. Talked weird. Like he was reading, but there wasn’t a paper. You asked me that before, I couldn’t… it didn’t stick.” He closes his eyes, forces it. “He called the radio ‘resonant.’ Said it had a good ear.”

Dean meets Cas’s gaze over the notebook. There’s a spark there—confirmation, not satisfaction. Dean feels something like pride twist in his chest, unexpected and clean. He clears his throat. “We’ll take pictures of these pages, with your permission,” he says to Hannah. “We’re going to find the guy who sold it and make sure nobody else gets one.”

Hannah nods, tears running without drama now. “You really think you can?”

“Yes,” Cas says, and there’s no bravado in it, just a steady weight. “We will.”

Dean takes the photos, page after page, the shutter sound too loud in the quiet kitchen. He gives Hannah a card with a number that rings to an empty voicemail box he checks twice a day. When they stand, Andrew looks at Cas again, gives him a small, grateful nod. Cas returns it with something that almost looks like gentleness reshaped to fit a human face.

Out on the porch, the air bites. Dean pauses at the top step, looking back through the glass at the kitchen where the two of them hold on to each other like they’ll float away otherwise. He swallows hard and looks at Cas.

“Nice save,” he says, light on the surface, genuine under it.

Cas squints at him through the gray. “You were doing fine.”

“Yeah, I was about to accuse their dead kid of joining a space cult.” Dean lets the corner of his mouth kick up. “The air thing… that was something.”

“I remembered frost on the bodies,” Cas says, simple as that. “And what it feels like when something too big moves close.”

Dean holds his eyes a second longer than he means to, the impressed surprise not masked fast enough. He nods like they’re just two guys doing a job and starts down the steps. The Impala waits, her doors cold to the touch. As Dean reaches for the handle, the wind chime of forks jangles once, a small, bright sound in the heavy morning. Cas glances at it, then at Dean. Neither of them say what it sounds like: an answer hanging in the air, waiting for the next question.

The motel is the kind with threadbare carpet and a painting of a horse that’s more brown blotches than animal. Road noise hums faintly through the thin walls. Dean drops the duffel on the circular table by the window, flicks on the lamp with the crooked shade, and spreads out the contents with practiced economy: oil, rags, brushes, dismantled guns. The metal clink is familiar, grounding.

Cas takes the chair near the AC unit, coat folded over the back like it might slip away if he doesn’t anchor it. He watches like he always does—quietly, not hovering, present enough to feel like gravity. The radio from the Rourkes’ porch follows Dean in the phantom way a case does. Numbers on paper, frost in June. He lines up the .45’s slide and spring as if straight edges will keep that cold from settling under his skin.

He checks the barrel, runs a patch through. Cas doesn’t speak. The silence isn’t empty; it’s layered. Years of fights, saves, apologies, and all the things left unsaid stack in the air like unread pages. Dean pretends he’s not aware of it. He is.

He sets the .45 aside, reaches for the sawed-off. The motion is muscle memory. He tries not to think about the way Hannah’s face had gone slack with relief when Cas said you couldn’t have stopped it. He tries not to think about Cas at the table, hands flat, voice steady, reaching across a grief he seemed to know from the inside.

He sighs, too soft to be anything but acknowledgment, and wipes the rag along the barrel with more care than necessary. The motel’s vent clicks and groans before coughing out a reluctant breath of cold air. The smell of gun oil is sharp and clean.

“You were good with them,” Dean says, without looking up. Compliments are safer when they sneak in sideways. “Not your usual freak-the-normals routine. No offense.”

“None taken.” Cas’s voice is flat, but not distant. “They were in pain. Precision matters when people are in pain.”

Dean snorts, amused in spite of himself. “Yeah, well, you nailed it.” He taps a shell between his fingers. “Cool ‘we’re not taking your kid to space’ vibe. Ten out of ten.”

Cas’s head tilts, that bird-bone angle that means he’s trying to index human humor. “I only told the truth.”

“Yeah.” Dean glances up, catches Cas’s gaze, and looks away before the contact can turn into something with weight. “That’s your thing.”

He sets the shotgun aside, pulls the slide on the nine mil, checks it with deft fingers. He can feel Cas’s eyes like a hand between his shoulders. It’s not uncomfortable. It’s just—there. The familiar press of a presence he’s gotten used to needing.

He hears himself say, “You look like you’re going to start rearranging the minibar by height if I don’t give you something to do.” His mouth moves toward humor because it’s easier than the other road. He flicks his chin toward the pile of spent shells. “You want to make yourself useful, count those. I’m trying something crazy—like knowing how much ammo we actually have.”

Cas’s attention drops obediently to the brass. He reaches, collects them with deliberate care, the pads of his fingers clicking against the table. “There are twelve,” he says after a beat. “There were thirteen when you left the bunker.”

“Yeah, I burned one on a beer can outside Great Falls.” Dean shrugs, mouth tugging at itself. “Science.”

Cas looks up. “Beer cans don’t require ammunition.”

“Wasn’t the beer can I was testing.” Dean lifts the nine mil, sights down an invisible line across the room, then sets it back. “Recoil’s off. Thought the mag was sticking. It wasn’t. Turned out it was my charming disposition.”

Cas’s brow creases minutely. “Your disposition affects your firearms?”

“Buddy, my disposition affects everything within a ten-foot radius.” He gestures loosely to the room. “Plants wilt. Squirrels complain. Women weep.”

Cas’s mouth moves before his eyes catch up. It’s small at first, the tiniest pull at one corner. He seems almost surprised by it. The smile settles, honest and unguarded, cutting straight through Dean like a clean shot. It’s nothing. It’s everything.

Heat prickles under Dean’s collar. He looks away fast, busies himself with the oil as if the rag needs wringing. He swallows, covers the tightness in his chest with a scoff. “There it is,” he says, aiming for flippant. “A real smile. Put it on the calendar.”

Cas’s smile doesn’t fade. It softens, the edges warm. “Dean,” he says, like a fact and a question at once.

Dean’s hands are steady. He keeps them that way. “Don’t get used to it. You start encouraging me, next thing you know I’m going to be insufferable.” He sets the nine aside, reaches for the Colt. The weight of it is good in his palm. He flips the cylinder out and starts methodical checks.

“I already find you insufferable,” Cas says, and it’s dry enough to make the corner of Dean’s mouth twitch again.

“Wow. Guess I walked into that.” He flicks his eyes up. Cas doesn’t look away. The blue is sharp even in the weak motel light, cutting through the thin shade, clear as noon sky. Dean holds it for half a second too long, then drops it like it burned. “You think that radio guy’s our swap meet angel?” he asks, knuckles knocking a rhythm on the table to keep the air moving.

Cas’s humor folds back into the case smoothly, like it was never a separate thing. “It fits. The phrasing. The cold. The way the numbers were written.”

“Like an answer.” Dean nods once, jaw ticking. He clicks the cylinder shut with a satisfying snick. “We’ll track him. Sam’ll dig up the vendor list. I’ll charm some ham nerds.”

“You don’t need to charm them,” Cas says. “You need to listen.”

“Yeah.” Dean lets out a breath. “I heard that today.”

Silence moves in again, not empty. The AC coughs. Somewhere, a siren bounces off low buildings and gets swallowed by distance. Dean wipes the last curve of the Colt, sets it down, and lines up everything in squared little rows. Order achieved, at least on the table.

Cas leans back in the chair, the posture almost human now. “You brought me coffee last night,” he says, a fact placed carefully on the table between the shells and the oil.

Dean’s spine goes a little straighter. “Yeah, well. You were up. Thought you could use it.” He keeps his eyes on the guns, doesn’t give the moment his face.

“It was very sweet.”

Dean snorts too loudly. “I’m not sweet.”

“I didn’t say you are.” There’s no tease in Cas’s tone. Just simple observation. “The coffee was.”

Dean laughs once, a quiet crack of sound that defuses the coil in his chest. “Yeah, well, don’t tell anybody. Got a rep to maintain.” He stacks the rags, tosses one in Cas’s direction without thinking. “Here. Make yourself useful. Wipe down the knives.”

Cas catches the rag clumsily, like it surprises him every time objects travel through air. He takes a blade, moves the cloth along the length with care, following Dean’s exact motions, as if matching an old ritual step by step. It shouldn’t matter. It does. The rhythm of two sets of hands working is louder than the AC, louder than the road.

Dean feels the ease settle, light and dangerous. He shoves the warm thrum down into his ribs where he keeps everything he doesn’t want to look at too closely. He clears his throat, scratches at his cheek with the back of his hand, and grins just enough to turn the moment back toward safe ground.

“Don’t cut yourself,” he says. “I’m not kissing your boo-boo.”

Cas’s eyes flick up. The smile is back, small and real. “I’ll be careful,” he says. “For both our sakes.”

Dean’s pulse kicks once, traitorous. He reaches for the next gun. The work goes on. The night stretches, quiet and full, holding them in the small space between words.