The Geometry of Loneliness

The town looked like it was built from damp wood and old secrets. Neon signs flickered against puddles, casting broken colors on cracked asphalt. Dean sat in the Impala outside a diner shaped like a shoebox, chewing through a cold burger and pretending it tasted like anything. The wrapper crinkled in the quiet. He turned the volume knob up another notch. Boston filled the car, tinny through the old speakers, big enough to push the silence back a few feet.

On the passenger seat, there was a stack of printouts and photocopies from the tiny library down the street. Four disappearances in as many months, all after sunset, no connection except the same thin stretch of highway that cut through the hills like a suggestion. It felt like a haunting. Routine. Dig up an old grave, burn the bones, tell the sheriff he got lucky. Sam would’ve already flagged the cemetery maps and lined up the dates against obituaries by now, but Sam was neck-deep in university archives across the state and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Maybe the day after.

Dean wiped his fingers on a napkin and reached for the top page. The first victim: Mallory Parks, twenty-six, veterinary assistant, last seen locking up the clinic. No signs of struggle. Missing for five days. Her mother’s quote in the local paper circled in blue ink: “She was always careful.” Everyone’s careful until something wants them more.

He scrolled through the notes on his phone. A list of old deaths near the highway. A family accident twenty years back. A farmhand crushed under a tractor. A girl drowning in the quarry. One of them was bound to be the kind of restless spirit that clung to asphalt and throat-burned whiskey. It had that smell. He could almost taste salt on the back of his tongue.

The loneliness crept in anyway, patient as fog. It settled in the spaces between one thought and the next. Sam would have made a joke about small towns and pie. He would have fallen asleep with his head against the window while Dean drove circles around nothing. Dean took another bite he didn’t want and reached to skip the track to something louder. AC/DC. The bass thumped his sternum. Better.

He took the Impala up the road to the motel—there was always a motel—and it was the kind made of thin walls and humming lights and carpet with a stubborn, permanent stain shaped like a map of someplace you’d never want to go. He carried his gear bag inside, tossed it on the bed furthest from the door out of habit, and spread the printouts across the tiny round table under the window. The air smelled like old coffee and something chemical. He turned on the TV just for noise, then clicked it off again when the motion made the corner of his eye twitch.

He talked to himself without saying words. It was a rhythm he knew. Grief catches, accelerant, iron nails, desecrated ground. He clicked his pen. He circled the dates. Three days between the first two. Then twenty. Then almost a month. That annoyed him. Ghosts had patterns. Things with patterns gave you something to push back against. This felt like a hand held just out of view, wiggling its fingers.

He pulled a bag of chips from the duffel and tore it open with his teeth. It was late enough that the sky pressed heavy on the windows and made reflections. For a second he saw himself in the glass—tired, older than he liked—and looked away before the thought could land.

The second victim had a brother who worked at the hardware store. The clerk there told Dean she’d been “kind of quiet lately,” the kind of nothing observation people said when they felt helpless. Dean wrote that down too, because sometimes nothing meant something. He put a star by the stretch of road outside town where they’d found a shoe in the ditch, a small white sneaker that must have once been unscuffed. The sheriff’s report called it “irrelevant.” Dean didn’t like the word.

He sucked down a mouthful of lukewarm soda he’d forgotten on the nightstand, made a face, and shoved it aside. The clock said 10:41. He’d give the cemetery another look in the morning. The trees out there were heavy and wet, and the ground had that spring to it that made digging faster. He didn’t love doing it alone. He’d done a lot of things alone. He didn’t need to add more.

His phone buzzed: a text from Sam. Still at the archive. Might have a lead on a similar case in Idaho, 1998. Dean thumbed back a reply that said, Keep me posted. Don’t fall asleep in the stacks. He added an eye-roll emoji and deleted it before sending, the reflex dying in his chest. He put the phone face-down.

The waitress at the diner had given him a pie box “for the road.” He didn’t even remember agreeing, but there it was beside his boots on the floor, steam fogging the little plastic window. He pulled it onto the table and ate a few forkfuls straight from the tin. It didn’t taste like anything either, but the sugar settled something ragged at the edges.

He laid out a county map and marked the last known positions with a black X. When he drew a line between them, it curved like a crescent. It didn’t point anywhere useful. He traced it again just to have his hands doing something. The music rattled from his phone now, propped against the lamp. He turned it up again, grinned without feeling it, and told himself this was nothing he hadn’t done a hundred times.

Rain started low and soft on the roof, then gathered itself into a steady rush that made the room feel smaller. He swallowed another bite of pie and flipped to the autopsy—no, not autopsy. Missing. No bodies. No blood. No calls in the night with a voice shaking like a wire. He pressed his thumb into the page until it smudged the ink, then let go.

He could almost believe it was a salt-and-burn if not for the way the dates didn’t behave, the way his skin prickled when he took the road by the quarry, the way the hair on the back of his neck stood up in the library aisles when the fluorescent light stuttered. That came from experience, not a case file. He ignored it the way he ignored the hollow spot in his chest he kept filling with gas station food and guitar solos.

He rolled his shoulders, picked up the pen, and wrote: Start with the graves. Always start with the graves. His handwriting looked steadier than he felt. He shoved the empty burger wrapper into the trash, set the pie aside, and sat back, letting the music take up the parts of the room his voice would have filled if he had anyone to talk to.

He would sleep in his clothes and wake up early. He would get coffee that tasted like burnt nails. He would dig. It would be simple. It needed to be. He nodded to no one, cut the music, and let the rain talk to the window while the motel’s humming light settled into a thin, persistent buzz behind his eyes.

The call came right after dawn, when the motel room was gray and thin and the coffee had the texture of ash. Sheriff’s office. A woman’s voice, brisk to cover the worry. “We found her,” she said, and Dean was out the door with his jacket half on and his keys biting his palm.

They’d picked Mallory Parks up at a bus stop outside town. She was sitting with her hands folded, eyes open to nothing. No injuries. No sign of a struggle. “She wouldn’t answer me,” the deputy said as he led Dean down a tile corridor that smelled like disinfectant and rain-soaked wool. “Still breathing, though. The doctor says she’s fine.” The deputy’s mouth worked around the last word like it didn’t fit.

Fine. Dean nodded like it meant something. He braced for a body and got a person—barely. Mallory sat propped against a pillow under the harsh light, hair still damp as if someone had tried to wake her with water. Pupils normal. Skin normal. Heart monitor chirping a good, steady rhythm. Her gaze tracked nothing. It slid past him like he wasn’t there and landed on a blank spot on the wall, as if she’d been told to look at it and forgot why.

He took a step closer, hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t reach for her shoulder like he could shake her back into herself. “Mallory,” he said softly, and felt foolish saying her name when it was clear it wouldn’t find purchase. He tried again, louder. Nothing.

The deputy shifted. “Doc says it’s shock.”

“Sure,” Dean said, because what else was there. He took in the room the way he always did—window latch, weight of the door, the soft squeak of the IV pole wheel—and his skin prickled. The hairs on his arms rose. He inhaled once, slow. Under the detergent and latex and burned coffee drifting from the nurse station, something bright, unfamiliar. Not a smell, exactly. More a memory of standing outside in a thunderstorm and waiting for the first strike. It raised a clean ache in his teeth.

Grace.

It was faint, almost gone, a ghost of a fingerprint on glass. If he hadn’t spent months of his life standing too close to a being who carried heaven in the lines of his hands, he would have missed it. He let his gaze drift to the corner of the ceiling where shadows pooled. Nothing visible, but his nerves hummed like taut wire.

He swallowed. The taste of ozone clung to the back of his tongue. The deputy—Miller, his badge said—watched him with a mixture of suspicion and hope. “So, uh, Agent,” Miller said, “you seen something like this before?”

Dean plastered on the authority. “Bits and pieces,” he said, and let the words be vague. He took his time walking the room, stalling as if looking for physical signs: scratches on the sill, stray dirt on the floor. All the while that not-smell pressed on him from the empty air. It wasn’t fresh. It was hours old and thinning. Whoever—or whatever—had been there was long gone.

He stopped next to the bed and looked at Mallory. Freckles on the bridge of her nose darkened against pale skin. A faint bruise on her knuckle like she’d hit something—maybe a counter edge in the clinic, or something else. He wanted to promise her something he could deliver. He adjusted the hospital sheet instead, nudged it so it lay flat across her shins.

He needed help. The thought flared and he set his teeth against it like that would smother it. He’d done angel-adjacent weirdness without calling in the angel. He could keep going, line up symbols and hypotheses and swear at a chalkboard. He could also waste time and watch another person’s eyes go empty. The faint pressure in his chest that had been building since last night pushed up against his ribs.

His hand found his phone before he let himself think too long. He stepped into the hall. It was quieter out there, the hum of vents and distant voices muffled by the closed door. He stared at the contact on the screen until the edges of the letters blurred, then keyed it with a sure thumb. It rang exactly once.

“Dean.” The word hit his ear warm, immediate. It sounded like recognition, like certainty. It tightened something central and stupid inside him.

He kept his voice flat. “Yeah, hey. We’ve got a situation.” He made sure the tone was clipped, nothing extra to hang anything on. “Victim from our case showed up. Alive. Catatonic.”

“Where are you?”

“Jefferson Memorial Hospital. Room 314.” He could hear the impatience in himself and smoothed it out. “It’s not… regular. There’s a trace in the room. Faint. You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” A pause, quick and heavy. “I’m coming.”

“You don’t have to—” The reflex came out before he could stop it, the old defensive posture snapping into place. He leaned back against the cool cinderblock wall and stared at a poster advertising hand-washing techniques. “I just need a consult. Grace check, tell me if I’m chasing the right thing.”

“Dean,” Cas said, and even through the phone, it was that quiet way he had of saying his name like he meant it to be something steady. “I will be there in a moment.”

Dean made his voice dry. “Try the door like a normal person. People get jumpy when the lights flicker.”

“Noted.”

The line went dead. Dean lowered the phone and took one steadying breath he would deny taking. Relief slid through him like a muscle unclenching. He told himself it was tactical. Another set of eyes. A better set. A resource. Nothing more.

He put his phone away and stepped back into the room. The deputy lifted his chin in a question. “My partner’s on his way,” Dean said easily. “Consultant. Knows… patterns.” He sidestepped the truth and made it sound boring on purpose. “We’ll take another look.”

Miller exhaled like he’d been waiting to hear that someone else might have an answer. “Good,” he said. “Good.” He glanced at Mallory, then lowered his voice. “It’s like she’s in there and not. Gives me the creeps.”

Dean’s gaze caught on the delicate flutter of her pulse at her throat. He thought of the grace in the air thinning by the second. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

He took up a spot at the foot of the bed and folded his arms, pretending this was just another hospital room and he was just another agent monitoring a witness. His eyes tracked the second hand on the wall clock. Each click was stupidly loud. He let his mind drift to the smell that wasn’t a smell and the hand he’d feel on his shoulder as he got told he was wrong or right in five words. He told himself he wasn’t counting down.

The door opened on a rush of cooler air. Footsteps paused in the threshold. Dean didn’t turn immediately. He watched Mallory’s face for the slightest change, anything to justify this choice. Then he looked up.

Castiel stood there in the same rumpled coat, the same sharp, tired eyes cataloging the view in a heartbeat. His gaze flicked to Dean first—always, always—and then to Mallory. Something unreadable tightened in his expression at the edges.

“You took your time,” Dean said, dry, and it came out steadier than he felt.

Cas didn’t smile. He stepped inside and the faint, burnt-sugar buzz of grace in the room met the deeper, steadier hum of his and settled. The air pressure changed. It was subtle. Dean felt it in his teeth. He kept his hands tucked into his jacket pockets to stop them from doing something stupid like reaching. He let the professional mask settle over his features and nodded at the bed. “Tell me what I’m missing.”

Dean left the hospital with Cas’s assessment still thrumming in his head—“old, thinned by morning,” “not hostile in essence but used like a blade.” They’d kept it clinical in front of the deputy, but the room had felt different the second Cas walked in, like the air knew its owner. By the time Dean got back to the motel, the rain had turned to a wet fog that pressed at the windows. He shut the door, tossed his keys onto the table, and flipped on the lamp. Cheap yellow light spread across the clutter of notes, receipts, and a map pinned with thumbtacks. He didn’t bother tidying. He stood, waiting.

The room went still, a pause in the hum of the wall heater, and then there was the quiet shift he’d learned to recognize—the subtle tilt of everything toward a point that hadn’t been there a second ago. The lamp flickered once, just enough to make his pulse skip. Then Cas was there, between the bed and the table, trench coat damp at the shoulders, hair darker from the mist outside. The space shrank around him, familiar in a way that was both relief and pressure. Dean exhaled like he’d been holding his breath without noticing.

“You could knock,” Dean said, because habit was safer than the other thing he wanted to say.

“I tried the door,” Castiel replied, glancing at the handle. “It is flimsy.” His gaze swept the room, landing on the open file on the bed, the map, Dean. It was an inventory and a reassurance rolled into one look. “May I?”

Dean gestured to the mess. “Have at it.” He moved around to give Cas room that the room didn’t have, their shoulders almost brushing. The knowledge of that almost hung between them, charged and careful.

Cas shrugged off a drop of water from his hair and stepped up to the table. He reached for the top file with that careful, precise way of touching things that mattered. His fingers skimmed a corner, then settled. He read quickly, eyes not so much moving as absorbing. Dean watched the way his mouth tightened at certain lines. He pretended he was just tracking progress, and not counting the breaths between them.

“You felt it,” Cas said after a moment, not looking up.

“Yeah,” Dean said. He reached for the coffee on the nightstand and remembered it was cold. He left it there. “Barely. Like the ghost of a storm.”

Cas’s jaw shifted, something like agreement in the motion. “Residual grace,” he said, low. “Not the victim’s. Not yours.” He closed his eyes, not in prayer but like he was placing himself back in that sterile hospital room. “Faded, but… familiar. Not in identity. In intent.” His brow pulled together. “Lonely.”

Dean’s throat went tight for a second. He squinted at the map. “That a thing grace can be? Lonely?”

“Grace carries what we are,” Cas said. He set the file down gently. “When it is used, it leaves behind a resonance. Like a voice in a room after someone stops speaking.” He paused on that, eyes on the paper but not seeing it. “This felt like a voice that hasn’t been answered in a long time.”

Dean swallowed around something that didn’t want to be there. “And it put her on ice?”

“It severed a connection.” Cas opened the next file, flipping past photographs to a page of Dean’s notes, a scrawl that made Cas’s mouth twitch at the angle of the letters. His fingers hovered over the line Dean had underlined twice: Where do they go when they’re still here? “Not completely. That’s why she returned.”

His attention shifted to a blurry photo of the victim’s apartment. Cas lifted it, bringing it closer as if the print might confess more under scrutiny. Dean watched the way his focus sharpened, pupils narrowing and expanding like a lens pulling in light. Cas looked almost… protective, but of what, Dean couldn’t tell.

“You okay?” Dean asked before he could convince himself not to.

Cas’s hand stilled on the photo. “Yes.” The word was automatic. He set the picture down, careful to align it with the corner of the folder. “It is not an angel I recognize. But the pattern—what it was trying to fill—” He broke off, eyes flicking up, caught on Dean’s face with a frankness that hit like stepping into sunlight. “It is uncomfortably familiar.”

Dean’s mouth went dry. He shifted his weight, picking up a pen just to have something in his hand. “Meaning?”

Cas’s gaze dipped to the pen, then back. “Meaning there was intent to comfort, but it was twisted by hunger. My kind are not immune to such mistakes.” He said it like it hurt, not in the way a cut hurts, but in the way memory does.

Dean didn’t make a joke. He set the pen down. The room hummed, heater ticking back on. He felt the heat of Cas’s body next to him, the steady warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. “So not an angel, but something using angel leftovers.”

“Perhaps drawn to it.” Cas’s voice softened. “Or to the absence the grace recognized.” He flattened his palm on a page of timestamps, eyes shuttering for a breath. “Despair is… loud. It is easy to find. It is harder to heal.”

Dean breathed out a quiet laugh that wasn’t funny. “Tell me about it.”

Cas looked at him, really looked, and Dean felt seen in a way he wasn’t prepared for in a motel room that smelled like damp carpet and cheap soap. Cas didn’t say anything to break it. He only reached for a different folder, the one with the photo of the bus stop where Mallory had been found. His thumb brushed the edge with unthinking care, as if the picture itself could bruise.

“The signature at the hospital,” he said, pulling himself back to doctrine. “It had a pulse. As if something had been there more than once.” He tapped lightly. “We should assume it will return to the places it marked, or to the people who echo it.”

Dean nodded, grateful for something that felt like ground. “I can shake the sheriff for patterns. Cameras by the bus station, maybe traffic cams. See if the same shadow shows up where it shouldn’t.”

Cas’s mouth bent, almost approval, almost worry. “Be cautious,” he said quietly. “It will notice you if you look too hard.”

“Story of my life,” Dean muttered. He reached absently for the six-pack on the dresser, tossed a can across the short gap between them before the thought fully formed. It was muscle memory. “Here.”

Cas caught it easily. He stared down at the can like it was a puzzle. The ring-pull glinted in the lamplight. He held it, weighing, and then set it on the table unopened. “It’s unnecessary,” he said, the familiar phrase shaped softer than before.

Dean’s cheeks went hot for no good reason. “Right. Yeah. Habit.” He scratched at his jaw. “Sam’s the beer buddy. You’re more… uh… tea? Light from the Lord?” He winced at himself and made a face. “Never mind.”

Cas’s eyes crinkled, the ghost of a smile there and gone. He looked back down at the notes. “Your habits are not… unwelcome,” he said, as if the words cost him something and were worth it anyway.

Silence lounged out between them, gentler now. The heater clicked again. Dean could hear the rain sharpen outside, a fresh sheet against the window. He drifted closer without thinking, the line of their sleeves almost touching. He could feel the static that seemed to live around Cas, subtle and present, like standing close to a radio tuned just off station.

“Do you think she heard anything?” Dean asked, nodding toward the hospital across town no one could see from here. “Like… inside that blank space.”

Cas considered, head tilting the way it did when he was measuring truth. “I think she felt absence. And I think something tried to fill it with itself.” His voice dropped. “It is a poor substitute.”

Dean’s throat worked. He wanted to say something flip, defang the subject, but the look on Cas’s face stopped him. There was a tiredness at the edges of him tonight that had nothing to do with the rain. A quiet sadness Dean didn’t know how to name.

He pushed the map closer. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s figure where it’ll try next.” He kept his tone brisk. He didn’t move away.

Cas nodded. He leaned in, shoulder nearly touching Dean’s, and pointed to three pins in a rough triangle. “Here,” he said, fingertips close enough that Dean could feel the ghost of their warmth. “And here. Patterns like to complete themselves.”

Dean followed the line of Cas’s hand, the slow cadence of his words settling some restless part of him. “Then we’ll be waiting,” he said, and for the first time that day, the plan didn’t feel like a lie he was telling himself to stay upright.

Cas’s answering hum was low and approving. He stayed where he was, close enough that Dean could count the breaths until it felt normal again. Outside, the rain eased. Inside, the room had never felt more full.

The sheriff’s office smelled like old paper and burnt coffee. Dean had a badge in his pocket and a confident stride that got him past the receptionist without a second look. He slotted himself into the role like a jacket he’d worn a hundred times, shoulders loose, mouth set in that near-smile that said I’m here to help and also don’t waste my time.

Castiel followed, trench coat damp at the hem from the puddle outside. He didn’t mimic the human ease. He never did. He moved like he carried his own gravity, gaze steady and unblinking, making the room feel narrower and colder with each step. A deputy glanced up and then away too fast, the way people do when they’ve looked at the sun by accident.

Sheriff Halbrook met them at the threshold of his office, a square man with a weathered jaw and suspicion lodged between his brows. Dean flashed the badge, let it speak first. “Agents Monroe and Ford,” he said smoothly. “We appreciate you making time, Sheriff.”

Halbrook’s eyes flicked from Dean’s badge to his face and then to Cas…and stuck. Dean watched the beat too long drag out, then slid half a step forward, cutting the line of sight between them just enough to redirect it. “We’re consulting on the disappearances. Four victims in six weeks isn’t small-town coincidence.”

The sheriff motioned them inside, but he kept glancing at Cas like he was waiting for him to blink. Cas didn’t. He stood off Dean’s shoulder, hands at his sides, quiet and focused in a way that read as dangerous to people who didn’t know him.

Dean took the wooden chair without waiting, made himself look comfortable. He set the file down like a prop and leaned in, forearms on his knees, voice dropping into that calm cadence that got people talking. “We’re not here to step on your toes. Just want to compare notes, see if anything slipped through the cracks. You’ve got patrol logs, witness statements, traffic cam footage from the bus stop on Third?”

“Some of it,” Halbrook said. He cleared his throat, eyes snagging on Castiel again. Dean could feel it like a tug on the edge of his jacket. “You said FBI?”

Dean smiled with just a flash of teeth. “That’s right.”

“And your partner…?”

“Is very good at his job,” Dean said lightly, and let the words land with enough finality that the sheriff’s mouth clicked shut with a faint click. He slid a pen across the desk. “Walk me through the first scene.”

Halbrook’s jaw worked. He pulled a folder toward him, flipping it open with a rough finger. The pictures were familiar: yellow police tape, a damp trailhead, a discarded scarf. Dean let his eyes skim, not dwelling. Beside him, he knew Cas was cataloging every shadow, every angle of light in those photographs. He didn’t look to confirm. He didn’t need to.

“The girl was found at dawn,” Halbrook said. “No prints, no signs of struggle. Just gone. We thought she got turned around on the trail until the second one. Same circumstances.”

Dean tapped the corner of the photo, a casual gesture that kept Halbrook anchored. “Any noise complaints the night before? Power surges? We’ve seen cases where electronics act up.”

“Power grid’s old,” the sheriff said, grateful to focus on something normal. “It flickers. That’s not unusual.”

Cas finally spoke, and his voice was even and low, cutting cleanly through the room. “Was there a smell.”

Halbrook blinked. “A smell?”

“Ozone,” Cas clarified, eyes fixed on the sheriff with no effort to soften the scrutiny. “Burnt air. It would not be strong.”

The sheriff shifted in his chair. “I didn’t notice.” He swallowed. “One of my deputies said the hairs on his arms stood up. Static. I told him it was the weather.”

Dean nodded like the piece clicked into something he expected. He could feel Cas’s attention sharpen at his side. “We’ll want to talk to that deputy,” Dean said. “And anyone else who felt something off.”

“Look,” Halbrook said, impatience creeping in to cover unease. “We’ve got it handled here. Folks are scared, sure, but it’s a small department. Outsiders make people nervous.”

“Outsiders make people nervous when there’s no control,” Dean said, tone still friendly, handleable. “We’re not here to spook your town. We’re here to stop more of this.” He nudged the photo with two fingers, then met Halbrook’s eyes. “You want more people going catatonic on your watch?”

Halbrook exhaled through his nose, a concession if not an agreement. His gaze slid to Cas again; the comfort he’d reclaimed faltered. Dean leaned back, creating a wall of denim and attitude between them. He crooked a grin that said I’ve got the leash, even if that wasn’t true and never would be. “He’s not the one you need to worry about, Sheriff. He’s just got one of those faces.”

Cas’s head tipped, the smallest shift toward Dean. Dean didn’t look. He kept his eyes on the sheriff and widened the smile until it edged into ridiculous. “You should see him at a potluck.”

That got a short huff of breath from Halbrook. The worst of the tension bled out of the room. He pulled a stack of forms from a drawer, slid them across. “I can give you copies. Patrol routes, incident reports. If you start knocking on doors, you clear it with me.”

“Absolutely,” Dean said. “You’ll be our first call.”

It was a lie, and Halbrook knew it, but he let it pass in favor of shoving the paperwork toward Dean like a truce. Dean flipped through pages, asking targeted questions that made Halbrook feel useful. Times, names, oddities that weren’t odd until they lined up. Every time the sheriff’s attention drifted toward Cas, Dean gave it somewhere else to land. A note on a margin. A cracked clock on the wall. The coffee maker that burbled unhappily on the filing cabinet.

Cas remained silent, but Dean could sense the way he took in the room. The cadence of footsteps in the hall. The weight of what hadn’t been said. The quiet pressure of his stare earned them leverage, even as it made the sheriff itchy. Dean used it like a tool, like heat in a cold room—dangerous if you stood too close, useful if you knew the distance.

“Deputy’s name?” Dean asked.

“Ramos,” Halbrook said. “He’s on lunch.”

“We’ll catch him after,” Dean said. He stacked the files, squared them with a neat snap, and stood. His knee brushed Cas’s coat as he rose, a point of contact that steadied him in a way he didn’t examine. “We appreciate the cooperation.”

Halbrook stood too, shaking Dean’s hand with firm reluctance. When he turned to Cas, he hesitated. Cas didn’t offer his hand. He just looked at the sheriff with that unblinking focus until Halbrook shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and nodded instead.

Outside the office, the hallway felt brighter, louder. Dean didn’t breathe out until the door clicked shut behind them. He shot Cas a sidelong look. “You know you scare the crap out of people, right?”

Cas’s brow furrowed. “I was listening.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Dean said, voice softening on the edge of a smirk. “Next time blink.”

“I do not need to,” Cas said, earnest and faintly puzzled.

Dean shook his head, unable to stop the warmth that curled through his chest at the sincerity of it. He nudged Cas with his shoulder as they walked, a brief, grounding push that lingered more than it should have. “Come on, Potluck. Let’s go make nice with Ramos and see if your ozone hunch holds.” He didn’t say thank you for backing my play, for being there in the room like a force you could lean against. He didn’t need to. He could feel Cas there, close enough to catch the static on his skin, quiet as a held breath. Outside, the rain had started again, thin and steady, and Dean felt that strange sense of something like momentum waiting just past the door.

The motel door stuck on the swollen frame, and Dean had to shove his shoulder into it to get it open. The room greeted them with that damp, old carpet smell and the rattle of a window unit trying too hard. He set the sheriff’s files on the little table, next to the lamp with the crooked shade, and the keys clattered against the wood. He let the sound sit.

“Home sweet dump,” he said, mostly to fill the air. He crossed to the mini-fridge, kneeling on the cracked vinyl to wrench it open. The cold air touched his face, and he let it cool the heat running down his spine from the day. He pulled out two beers without thinking, the caps clinking together, easy as breathing.

“Here,” he said, tossing one over his shoulder with an easy arc.

Castiel caught it without looking, fingers closing around the aluminum with unerring precision. He looked down at the can like it had appeared from nowhere, thumb tracing the bead of condensation that formed in the warm air. He turned it once, reading the label with that same concentration he’d given to the sheriff’s incident reports.

Dean popped his own cap with the edge of the rickety table, the hiss sharp and brief. The first swallow slid down hot and familiar, the bitterness grounding him more than the chair did when he flopped into it. He watched Cas over the rim of the bottle, the way the angel’s attention narrowed in on nothing and everything at once.

“It’s just beer, man,” Dean said, trying to keep it light. “You crack it open, you pretend it tastes good, you make a face if it doesn’t. That’s the ritual.”

Castiel’s gaze lifted to him, steady and close to fond if Dean let himself call it that. “It is unnecessary,” he said, and his voice was simple, no judgment in it. He held the can out, arm halfway between them like a bridge he wasn’t sure how to cross. “For me.”

Dean’s throat went tight in a way that had nothing to do with the carbonation. He took another pull to cover it, then reached out and took the can back, their fingers brushing. Cool skin, cool metal, and the little zing of contact that made him too aware of his hand.

“Right,” Dean said, setting the extra beer on the table. The can rocked once and settled. “Right. Forgot.” He tried to shrug it off. “More for me.”

He didn't pop it. He didn’t want to hear the sound of something falling flat.

Cas drifted further into the room, the trench coat brushing the edge of the bedspread. He didn’t sit. He never sat first. His eyes tracked the walls like there was writing only he could see, and maybe there was—the afterimage of grace, the thin fingerprints of a thing that ate at the edges. He came to a stop at the window and pushed two fingers into the gap in the curtain, looking out at the gray parking lot, the rain pocking little dark spots on the asphalt. The light made a halo against his ear, pale and human and nothing like the memory of wings.

Dean pretended to study the files. He fanned a few pages, not really reading. The sheriff’s handwriting crawled across incident reports, words he already knew: missing, last seen, no sign of struggle. He could still feel the weight of Cas’s hand catching that beer. He could still hear the quiet I don’t need what you need. It brushed the bruise he didn’t admit was there.

“You did good with Halbrook,” he said finally, not looking up. “The whole stone statue thing. Very intimidating. I think he’s going to have nightmares about you.”

“I was trying not to startle him,” Cas said, still at the window. He let the curtain fall back into place, the fabric whispering against his knuckles. “You make it easier for them.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean said, flipping a page and not seeing it. “I’m a people person.”

A soft pause. “You are.”

It landed warmer than the beer, and Dean wasn’t ready for the way it loosened something inside him. He cleared his throat, let the chair creak as he leaned back. The second beer sat between them on the table, sweating a small ring into the wood.

“You know, you could try it,” Dean said, because the silence stretched and he needed to fill it with something that wasn’t the hollow space where his offering sat unused. “Just the sip. Not because you need it. Because—” He stopped himself short of because I handed it to you. Because I thought of you. Because I wanted us to be doing the same thing for five minutes.

Cas turned, hands loose at his sides. “I do not need to pretend,” he said, not unkind. “But I understand the custom.” His eyes flicked to the can. “It is a way to be together.”

Dean huffed, a sound that wanted to be a laugh and wasn’t. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the idea.”

Cas took a step toward the table, then stopped, the careful line he walked between yes and no visible in the set of his shoulders. He didn’t reach for the beer. Instead, he reached for the files, drawn to utility like always. His fingers skimmed the edges without lifting a sheet. He stood close enough that Dean could see the fine lines of his knuckles, the faint shadow of dust on his cuff. The space between them buzzed.

“The deputy,” Cas said, drawing them back to safer ground. “Ramos. He felt the static. That is… relevant.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, grateful and annoyed in equal measure at how easily Cas could pivot them away from what was raw. “We’ll catch him after his lunch. Burger Barn on Fourth.” He lifted the bottle, tipped it toward the window. “Hope he likes onion rings.”

“I do not have a preference for onion rings,” Cas said, solemn as scripture.

Dean couldn’t help it; that one pulled a real laugh out of him. It surprised them both. He saw Cas’s mouth do that small, puzzled quirk it did when he was pleased and didn’t know how to show it. The breath in the room eased, even if the gap stayed.

He took another swallow, then set the bottle down carefully next to the full can. Side by side, identical, except one was opened to the air and one wasn’t. He didn’t think about the metaphor; he didn’t want to give it that much room.

“Next time,” Dean said, watching the glass door on the mini-fridge fog up, “I’ll just hand you a—what, a battery? A book? Something you do… need.” The word felt clumsy.

Cas’s gaze softened. “I want what you offer,” he said, and the simplicity of it made Dean still. Cas added, almost apologetic, “I may not understand all of it.”

Dean looked up. The angel held his eyes like he always did, steady and impossible to look away from. Something inside Dean shifted, quiet and profound. He nodded once, a small concession to a truth he couldn’t put words to. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Cas inclined his head, and the moment folded back into the room like it had always lived there. The window unit clicked, the rain drummed steady. The second beer kept sweating. Dean slid the sheriff’s folder to the center of the table and tapped it with two fingers.

“After Ramos, we hit the trailhead again,” he said. “You said ozone. Maybe there’s a residual. Maybe you can feel something I can’t.”

“I can,” Cas said.

Dean didn’t even pretend that didn’t comfort him. He stood, the chair scraping, and reached for his jacket. On impulse, he picked up the unopened can and tucked it back into the mini-fridge, like putting away a promise he wasn’t ready to break. When he straightened, Cas was watching him with that small, unreadable smile that wasn’t really a smile at all, more a softening around the eyes.

“Come on,” Dean said, jerking his chin toward the door. “Let’s go make a deputy nervous.”

Cas stepped closer, close enough that Dean could feel the warmth through the thin motel air. He didn’t touch him. He didn’t need to. “I do not intend to make him nervous,” he said.

“Yeah,” Dean said, opening the door into the damp hallway. “You never do.” He held it until Cas passed, the brush of coat and the smell of rain and something electric sliding across his skin like a whisper he’d pretend not to hear. He let the door swing shut behind them, leaving the little room and the waiting beer to cool in the hum of the broken air.