Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There’s a kind of silence that feels like snow.

Not quiet because it’s peaceful — quiet because it’s heavy, stifled. Weight pressed down on everything, sound swallowed. Colours dulled.

That’s what the year feels like. Not bad, necessarily, but not good, either. Just… muffled.

Dad’s off chasing whispers of yellow eyes, wheelin’ and dealin’ like always. But this time, he’s trading Cas and calling it ‘strategy’. Like Cas is a round of silver bullets or a devil’s trap scrawled in flesh.

And me? I’m getting sent out alone now. A couple of salt-and-burns. Two poltergeists. One witch who looked too much like my mom and called me ‘baby’ before I put a bullet through her locket.

When we do see each other, me and Cas, it’s mostly in drive-thrus and pay-by-the-hour motels. We don’t talk much. There’s nothing to say that isn’t already a barely healed wound.

We sleep upright, shoes still on half the time, ready to just go — ready to be gone. Sometimes he lets his forehead fall against mine. Sometimes I forget to breathe.

It reminds me of being small. Of back when I didn’t know he wasn’t human. Back when I thought monsters only lived in closets and under beds, and not in blood.

But I know better now.

Now I know where the monsters live.

Sometimes, I hunt them.

Sometimes, I’m one of them.

The car smells like dusty upholstery, gas, and old fries from some town I don’t remember the name of. The kind of place that clings to you after you’ve left it. I drive with the windows down even though it’s cold. I don’t care. It’s better than pretending I can breathe with that smell in my nose.

Cas is gone again.

No protest, no goodbye, not even a nod this time. Just climbed into the back of some guy’s pickup with the same empty eyes and folded hands. Like a statue being moved. Like he wasn’t even there at all.

I hadn’t said anything either. What’s there to say?

I’d watched the truck drive off until the dust settled and I couldn’t see his silhouette in the window anymore. Then I got behind the wheel and drove west without checking the map. Didn’t ask Dad where I was supposed to go. Didn’t care.

The cassette player’s eating Ride the Lightning for the third time. I flip the tape anyway, even though this side’s only halfway done. I want something familiar. Something that doesn’t ask me how I’m feeling.

The sky's turning that weird shade between night and morning, like a bruise right before it fades.

I keep thinking if I drive far enough, I’ll hit a stretch of road we haven’t bled on.

I find a diner that looks like it’s been waiting for me since 1965. One of those cracked-sign, cracked-vinyl seats, cracked-screen door joints where the coffee is strong enough to sterilise a bullet wound.

I take the corner booth and stare out the window like there’s something out there worth looking at. The waitress slides a mug in front of me and doesn’t ask any questions, which is just about the nicest thing anyone’s done for me all week.

I order eggs and toast and don’t touch either. Just sit with my hands wrapped around the mug and listen to the coffee burn its way down.

She comes back around once, glances at the plate, and says nothing. I could kiss her for that.

I pull the leather-bound journal Sammy gave me for my last birthday from my coat pocket and flip to the next open page. It’s water-warped and stained in one corner with something dark. Could be blood. Could be ink. Could be the last coffee Cas made for me before he left, a peace offering for a transgression he didn’t commit.

I don’t write anything at first. Just tap the end of my pen against the blank page and stare.

Eventually, I write:

Cas is gone again. Said two weeks. Didn’t look at me when he said it.

I stare at the words until they blur, then cross them out and write:

No exit.

It makes no sense, but it feels more true.

I don’t remember getting back to the car. One second I’m watching the steam curl off the eggs I didn’t eat, and the next I’m behind the wheel, hands locked tight at ten and two around the cracked leather like I’m holding it together by force.

Cas’s hoodie is still in the backseat — I almost forget it’s there. It smells like motel soap and stale cigarette smoke and something vaguely minty. He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t like mint, but I think one of the people who ‘borrows’ him uses both. It clings to him for days after.

I pick it up, fold it, and put it on the passenger seat like that makes a difference. I don’t look at it again.

I don’t have a hunt scheduled, but I head towards one anyway. It’s something to do, somewhere to be.

If I drive fast enough, maybe I won’t have to think.

Maybe the passenger seat will stop being a black hole where my heart used to be.

The hunt is easy. Spirit attached to a cracked mirror in an old roadhouse out past the state line. The guy who runs the place says his wife used to do her makeup there. Died in the bathroom, slipped on the tile. I don’t ask questions. Just break the mirror, salt the edges, and burn the photos in the drawer.

It screams once. And then — silence.

I clean up the glass and leave without anyone seeing me.

Back in the car, I check the passenger seat like a habit.

It’s still empty.

Sometimes I dream about Cas without meaning to.

Not the real him. Not the tired, silent version that gets passed around like loose change. The one from before. From when I was a kid, and he used to quiz me on math facts and constellations and draw circles on my arm with the tip of his finger. Before we learned how much silence could say.

In the dreams, he talks. Says my name like it means something.

I always wake up feeling like I’ve missed a call.

I drive through a town with a payphone and call Bobby without knowing why. He picks up on the second ring and says my name like it’s not a bad word.

I don’t say anything.

Just listen to the line, let the silence hold me for a second, and hang up before he can ask if I’m okay.

I think about the last time Cas and I were really together.

Not just in the same room, but present. Real.

It was back in January, on my birthday of all days — a stupid milestone I’d stopped letting myself care about years ago — but somehow he made me feel it again, made it matter.

That night was slow, careful, like we were both afraid of breaking something neither of us had the words to name. It was the first time we crossed that line — crossed ‘the bridge’ as he’d taken to calling it — a memory that felt like it was gnawing on my spine. It had felt like stepping into a truth that had always been waiting for us. Sad, and beautiful, and so full of love that it almost hurt to hold it.

Everything changed, and nothing did. When it was over, we still had the same battles, the same cages waiting outside the door. But for a few hours, I got to lay my head against him and believe that that was what living was allowed to feel like.

It’s the only good memory I’ve let myself keep from this year. I revisit it like a wound I can’t stop poking — proof that it happened, proof that it mattered.

Dad calls once. I don’t answer.

He doesn’t leave a message.

Probably just wants to tell me where the next job is, or maybe to ask if I patched the shotgun hole in the duffel bag. He won’t ask about Cas. Won’t ask if I’m sleeping. Won’t say if he’s proud of me.

He never does.

I mentally delete the message that never came and keep driving.

Cas hums when he thinks I’m asleep.

He doesn’t sing, never has, but when he’s alone — or when he thinks he is — he hums. Same four note tune every time. Something slow, sad, familiar. I’ve never been able to place it.

It’s stuck in my head now. I tap it out against the steering wheel as I head nowhere in particular. Four notes, over and over, like a heartbeat

Sometimes I wonder if Cas knows how much I miss him. Not just when he’s gone, but when he’s here. When he’s sitting beside me, silent and still and not really looking at me.

I miss him, even then.

I miss the Cas who used to argue with me about my education, who once threatened to punch a guy in a gas station for looking at me wrong, who wore a fraying t-shirt with a dinosaur on it until it fell apart in the wash.

That Cas hasn’t been around for a long time. I don’t know if I’d recognise him if I saw him.

I don’t know if he’d recognise me either.

I sleep in the car that night. Not because I don’t have money for a room, but because I can’t stand the thought of lying on a bed Cas hasn’t been in.

I curl up in the driver’s seat with his hoodie draped over my chest like armour. It smells like him. Soap, mint, smoke, motel dust, blood.

I dream about his hands. Not touching me. Just existing.

Strong, pale, callused. The kind of hands that have done things no one should have to do, and still manage to be gentle when they hold a pen or light a match.

I wake up with a crick in my neck and the sun in my eyes.

The passenger seat is still empty.

He’s still gone.