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The road narrows along with the skyline and Dean decides he has to stop for the night. Maybe not stop; as late as it has been, Dean doesn’t really want to extend his journey. It’s a whole cycle. If he doesn’t get back home today, he’ll get back tomorrow. If he gets back tomorrow, he’ll spend tomorrow resting it off, probably, old geezer that he is now. And then Sunday he might have to leave for another case again, potentially alone again, and sometimes you just want a day off, okay? He’s sure there’s impending grocery store runs and more than four hampers of laundry waiting for him back home that’ll have to be another fortnight if he doesn’t make it back home tonight. Not like there was ever an option, he can’t afford staying for the night.
But it’s past twelve, and his clothes smell funky, and the 24/7 Open Blue Diner with flickering Es he’s already parked at looks very welcoming right now.
It’s warm the way diners are, but there are not any other patrons except for himself and a woman with her hair down sitting with her back to him. The smell of onions caramelized in noon lingers in the air as he flops to the faux leather couch, cracking his joints as he settles.
The kid at the counter looks at him, saying she’ll be with him in a moment with a single nod, and Dean nods back, pulling out his phone from his back pocket.
Several texts from several people blink at him, random texts coupled with texts asking about his whereabouts and wellbeing. His thumb places the call before he realizes, but Cas’ last text, a ‘did you eat anything? how long will you be?’ was only forty minutes ago. Dean takes a wild bet and swipes Call before he knows it. Maybe he’s still up.
He is. “Hello, Dean.”
Dean’s jaw hurts when he smiles. It’s a rusty thing, as far as smiles go. He could pass it off as a half hearted grimace if prompted, but it’s a smile. An honest to his heart, can’t-help-it smile. He’s not ashamed to say he got owned by the ghoul in the first half of the match, if the way face feels stuffed and stretched is anything to go by. Too much for Sam being sure he could take this one solo. Whatever. Smile not leaving his face, it’s an involuntary action at this point, really, he replies, “Hey, Cas.”
The lady turns at him, probably to tell him to keep it down, and Dean already has his apologetic face on, but then her face freezes in recognition.
Well fuck, who’d have thought...
“Are you alright?” Cas goes on, something something text, something something Jack, something something dinner, but Dean just looks, not in disbelief but in his unpreparedness. He knows he’s making a fool outta himself, batting his eyelids like a diva from the 50s, but that tends to happen around her.
Dean Winchester blinks at her, once, twice, then lowering his voice, breaking eye contact just for a moment, talks back into his phone. “I’ll call, yeah, I’ll call you back, Cas. Mhm, no, today. ‘Kay, me too.”
His voice is deeper, way deeper than she remembers, but he makes up for it with his body. He’s bigger and bulkier, an ugly suede jacket stretching around his shoulder and cheeks filled. Hair unkempt and face bruised, he looks scarier, shoulders hunched and eyes sunken in, but he also looks-
“Cassie.” He breathes out, and yeah, there it is.
It’s just something about Dean that does this to her, the way not many people have been able to before, after what- a damn decade? More? It’s just her heart opening up in response to her name, somewhere to keep a disyllabic word that Dean manages to deliver like a present.
“Dean Winchester,” she grins. “Never thought I’d see you again.”
Dean ducks his head, shy and sweet, and looking up, asks, “Have a coffee with me?”
She was just about to leave, but damn him.
Damn him, but maybe another cup of caffeine will do her good for the ride back home. As if he can see her giving in, Dean grins, and damn him, but it’s the same Ohio smile she remembers. It’s a wonder that she remembers at all, isn’t it? Really makes you think.
Ohio was a riot. It was college, so, sure, there were best friends by the dozens, a hobby of hooking up with nameless guys, pot to smoke and cheap alcohol to throw up at 4 am.
There was also Dean, who’d not noticed her the first three days at the library, clacking away at the keys and glaring at the computer screen as if he was angry at it, but offered her a smoke on day four as she timed her exit in time with his, and a kiss that didn’t seem to end on day five by the shelves filled with biographies.
“This is,” Dean chuckles, clutching at the awkwardness and not letting it go.
It is. It really is. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Small talk hasn’t been their thing ever. Dean in Ohio had looked at her and grinned, boyish and smug, and offered her a cigarette; the guy sitting in front of her smiles at her all warm and awkward, and adds a cube of sugar to his coffee.
“Just one?” Cassie can’t help asking. Last coffee she gave him had three cubes of sugar, and if he’d had it his way it’d have been four.
“You’re the one to talk,” he huffs, goodnaturedly, guarded still. “Only cream, no sweet, still?”
“You know it.”
“Well. Didn’t wanna die of diabetes of all things.”
“And yet, you gonna order a double cheeseburger at-,” she makes a show of checking her watch, grinning at the knowledge of Dean biting his cheek to keep from smiling, “-twelve fifty-two am. High cholesterol isn’t any easier for an old man like you, Dean.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he laughs, “not everyone has a magic glam up in their forties, alright. Cut me some slack.”
“Well, thank you, grandpa, I thought you hadn’t noticed, what with the bad eyesight an’ all.”
It’s good, it’s really good, the way Dean flips her off and smiles into his coffee. As if he’s reminiscing the same things she is. If she were still twenty three she’d knock her knees to his, and he’d hook their pinkies into the disguise of a knot. She’s forty two now and she looks at him and feels a pang of light right in her chest, brimming with memory so bright it can eat them whole.
There’s so much about him that she remembers, intrinsic details that you only know when you let someone inside in lieu of intimacy, and there’s so much that’s changed. So much that she doesn’t know.
She’s debating if she wants to know the newer stories and other specific details, when Dean asks, “How’s it going, Cassie?” and for a brief moment Cassie wonders if it’s something to do with not being sure if she wants Dean in on the two decades worth of life he wasn’t invited to.
Damn him. “It’s- it’s going good, Dean. I’m the chief editor of the, the place I’m at.”
“That’s great!” Dean gleams, “That’s, wow. Congrats, lady.”
“What about you? Still,” she pauses, cautious of overstepping suddenly.
“Hunting? Yeah, sure, in a way.”
“So you, um, still, move around hunting- ghosts.”
“Mhm, you don’t know, Cassie, you don’t- ‘twas a shitshow, but it’s. Good, it’s better now.”
There’s more for Dean to say, the way he swipes his tongue on his bottom tongue, so she waits. She still doesn’t believe it some days, a misremembered dream of sorts, the rumored haunted dorm room Dean was sniffing in Ohio, or the truck on a rampage in Missouri. But Dean’s real, and he still, well, hunts. That’s as real as it gets.
“It’s great now. We, me and- you remember Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, us and his girlfriend, and uh, there’s Cas,” he looks away, then at her again. Cas, the name she turned at, she recognizes something in his voice. It’s the way he says it, similar to her own, the syllables softening in his mouth. “We’ve uh- we’ve expanded. We work in groups now, take up less cases. There are networks of hunters all over, younger better kids who know a thing or two.”
Cassie nods, “Uh huh, that’s-”
“You didn’t get a thing, did ya?” Dean smirks. He stills, sobering, more for himself than her she reckons, then continues, “It’s just, we’re going easy on ourselves, for a change, you know? Not skinny dipping in Hades, all that.”
“Yeah, the shiner you got shinin’ there tells me so.”
“Shut up,” he says, wincing as his third finger traces the burst of sea green stretching from his canthus to the top of his brow. Such is the silence that stretches along with his movement, irresistible to trail and painful to poke at.
She still pokes at it. “Care to share a smoke?”
Dean likes to pretend he doesn’t smoke as much as he used to. He doesn’t, really, still in practice from when he started cutting back when he had the mark, but he takes the Marlboro she offers. They’re standing out now, Dean leaning with his ass against the hood of his car. He sees the way the blue then yellow flicker reddens as it touches the paper, and leans forward so Cassie lights his cigarette.
Dean remembers being angry, buttoning his shirt outside Cassie’s flat. He inhales and the smoke feels the same kind of fill that it did when he pulled one out and smoked inside his car for the first and last time.
He isn’t bitter about it, though. Wasn’t bitter then, isn’t now. Just angry, is all. Anger doesn’t dissipate over time, not until you forgive them, and Dean forgave Cassie the moment he saw her back in Missouri.
She’s gorgeous, as it is. She’s gained some weight and her clothes are more practical. Her face, now fuller and softened around the edges, holds laugh lines near her lips and his eyes, small tributaries that make her glow behind the smoke she puffs out. Dean realizes he’s staring, but only when he figures she’s staring at him in return.
He exhales a waft of grey smoke stark against the ink of night, and taps the edge of his cig before he asks, “What?”
“You said you’d come back,” she says.
“Were you waiting for me?”
She clicks her tongue in denial.
“For what it’s worth,” Dean says, “I thought about it. Kinda glad I didn’t though.”
She frowns, not looking hurt but it’s a near thing. “What does that mean?”
“It’s. After Sam died,” he waves his hand to dismiss her wide eyes, “I- there was a. Lisa, and uh, her kid. I wanted to, if I was thinking any clearer then I’d have come back to you.”
“But you. Yeah.”
“Yeah. I fucked up their life, I’ll tell you that. They didn’t deserve that. I wasn’t right, not myself. If there’s one thing I know, I know you’d have kicked my ass about it.”
She laughs. It’s clear in the night and Dean feels guilty. Well, what’s new.
“And I don’t regret it, Cassie. I can’t bring myself to.” The words are being pried out of him, and he’s letting it happen. Honesty, ‘naked’ vulnerability, that’s all Mia asks of him most days. “It was fucked, these years. I’m glad it wasn’t you.”
“What we had was- it was really something, Dean.”
Dean hums.
She pitches her voice lower, kicks at a stray pebble. “You tell me. What’s worse- not loving someone enough or being the one who loves more?”
“Ouch.” Dean says. That was an unexpected blow. Dean still swings his bat just so. “I don’t know. You know what’s the worst, though?”
“What, love?”
“Love.” He lets that rest in the air around them, the weight of a confession that is not worth a nickel now, but still priceless in all ways that count. “But also, the absence of it, I think.” He admits. “We were really something.”
She kicks the pebble towards him. “Two roads, yellow woods, yada yada.” She looks up at the sky for a second, then looks at him. “I don’t regret it either, ya know?”
“Yeah?”
“People like us,” she inhales, then lets the smoke sit inside her, exhales, “we don’t ask for much, do we? Just, to- someone who’s here despite. You understood. Many before you, after you, they didn’t.”
Dean nods. He does get it, has had girls call him a perverted bitch to his face after they find out. He remembers the way Cassie had traced her eyes along his body, in reverence and reference, the way he had noticed her accentuating the shapes of her frame that he layered to hide. Had it been someone else, a hookup at a bar being so intent on the way his chest fell on his stomach, he’d have fled. With Cassie there was reciprocation. There was a knowledge that he wouldn't be hurt. And he wasn’t.
Cassie continues. “Neil did. And he’s here. Livin’ the picket fence life, two and a half cats; it’s real good, Dean. ”
The way she confesses, her acceptance to being content has him feeling some kinda way. Grateful, of all things, for what he has left. And it’s not enough, but it’s also so much more than he deserves. He doesn’t start wallowing here, though, he and Cas have an appointment at Mia’s later this month. Dean makes a note in his head to tell Cas he’s grateful, to tell Mia he has a lot.
To Cassie he says, “Cats, huh? Didn’t know you were a cat person. Is that a Cas thing?”
“Uh?” She quirks her brow knowingly. “Cas?”
“Shut up,” he presses his lips, who’re busy betraying him to curve into a smile. “He’s. Yeah, Cas. Dude's been pestering me for a cat for months now. ”
She punches him in the shoulder, grinning fully. “Good for you, man. You were really gone on me, huh? Catching yourself another Cassie. Dude.”
“You wish.” He laughs. “You’ve got nothing on him.”
“Hey, now. Be nice.”
Dean mimics zipping his lips, earning another shove from her. Their cigarettes are reduced to nubs under their shoes now, the smell of smoke fleeting.
“You could meet Cas,” He says out of nowhere. He hadn’t planned on it, but now that the offer’s out he’s not gonna withdraw. “Jack would love you.”
“Jack?”
“Yeah, he’s our, uh, we kinda adopted him. Long story.”
She nods. “Guess I'll have meet them for the story, then, huh?” She says, pulling out her phone and offering it to him.
He’s twenty four again, outside a library, a reminder of smoke in the air and his lungs and a flip phone in his hand, as he saves his number on her phone as Dean W.
“Call me, Cassie.” He turns around to unlock his car and gets inside. “I'm hoping to hear from you.”
She smiles— wide lips and glinting teeth, and pulls her jacket taut across her midriff. He revs as she stands there, waving at him until he peels off and finds the highway. Her silhouette in the rearview mirror turns and Dean picks up his phone.
Five seconds, and then a promised voice answers him. “Hello, Dean.”
His jaw still sends a shock of wince as he smiles, but just as it happens, he can’t help it. “Hey you, Cas.”