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Sometimes he stands tall, arms flung wide like some old tv preacher, feet planted on the rusted roof of his old car. Sometimes he sits, cross-legged and hunched on the hood, and complains about the cold metal on his ass before he begins. It starts the same way, though.
Every Sunday morning, or at least on the Sundays when he feels like it or it’s not raining or not too cold or he’s not still out from the night before, when the sun starts pushing through the clouds and the night shift is just getting off, he’ll make his way to the old Impala along with Bill or Rachel or one of the kids and he’ll tell them, “ring the bells.”
And whichever kid is lucky enough to be chosen this time stabs away at the worn out car horn, and they don’t know the old songs so they make them up as they go. Sometimes, Dean’s on a shift and walking the perimeter when the horn blares out, faded and off and tinny and nothing like church bells, and the part of him still living in the past that he hasn’t managed to bury yet thinks, dad would kill me if he heard her like that. On the other days when the racket pulls him from sleep he thinks that this’ll be the day he rips that car to shreds, this is the last straw, but he never does.
And at the noise people will gather, loose and easy in the early dawn, and Dean thinks it must be the spectacle of the thing that draws them out of warm beds or away from duty, the sight of a man who was an angel preaching in the lyrics of Billy Joel on an old car at the end of the world. Sometimes it’s snippets of lines, mixed up and scrunched together until Dean can’t tell what song they came from, until he thinks he never really like Billy Joel anyways. Once Cas just recites the entirety of “No Man’s Land” and calls it a day.
“We didn’t start the fire, children. It was always burning, since the world’s been turning. Believe me, I was there. I know.” Dean hears him on a circuit of the outer fences and shakes his head, wondering when the hell he had time to memorize this shit between Falling and everything going to hell in a handbasket.
Dean hears him one morning talking about the Impala, patting her hood as he goes, but when he rounds the corner and comes into view Cas catches his eye and grins. “I’ll tell you, he never traveled heavy, yes, he always rode alone, and he put many older guns to shame, and he never had a sweetheart, and he never had a home, but the angels and the demons knew his name. I was there, I know,” he says, and he grins, and laughs a little, and Dean turns away and grits his teeth.
The morning after their final plans had been made he hears the horns blaring, and despite himself he goes, stands in the shadows of the nearest building and watches them gather. Cas sits, for a long time quiet, on the hood of his old car, searching the faces in front of him. Dean can see them getting uneasy, shifting from foot to foot, but they wait for their ragged shepherd to speak.
Cas catches Dean’s eye where he leans in the shadow, and Dean turns to leave, doesn’t want to or can’t hear this, but the words follow him, mocking and sad and condemning. “Where’s the orchestra? After all, this is my big night on the town, my introduction to the theater crowd. I assumed the show would have a song, so I was wrong. At least I understand all the innuendo and the irony, and I appreciate the roles the actors played, the point the author made, and after the closing lines, and after the curtain falls on empty chairs, where’s my orchestra?”