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“Can I ask you something?”
Deanna doesn’t look up from packing. “Shoot,” she says, shoving a fistful of shirts into her duffel.
Sam hesitates because he knows how this is going to go over, but he also knows he can’t sit next to her in the car for another ten hours with this hanging in the air. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, she’s going to ask What’s up your ass, Sammy? and he really, really doesn’t want her behind the wheel when this comes up.
So he takes a breath and says, “This thing with you and Cas…”
Deanna freezes, but only for a second. “I take it back,” she says, and goes back to stuffing clothes in her bag. “No asking.”
“Dee—”
“There’s no thing, Sam.”
“Bull.”
Deanna glares, but if he hadn’t already known he was right about this, her reaction says it all. If it weren’t true, she’d have made some smartass remark, turned it back on him, laughed him off, and they’d be out the door already, Deanna making cracks about his girly feelings. Hell, even if it were true and she was just in deep denial about it, she’d have made some smartass remark, et cetera. But this isn’t some deep-seated thing. It’s right under the surface, threatening to break through any minute, and it’s starting to affect her judgement. She refused to bring Cas in on the last hunt (succeeding in driving him away via a shouting match that made Sam feel awkwardly like he was watching his parents fight), even though a whole pack of werewolves was really more than they should try to handle on their own. She nearly got her throat ripped out before Cas showed up anyway, and then nearly got it again when he took an ugly swipe to the shoulder and she turned her back on her own fight to make sure he was okay. Sam emptied four rounds into Deanna’s wolf, and she looked horrified and humiliated, and none of them spoke afterwards and Cas zapped off again and it’s just time for this crap to be out in the open before somebody gets killed.
Right now, that somebody is looking to be Sam.
“Look, maybe it’s not what I think it is,” he continues before Deanna can blurt out another denial. “But you can’t tell me it’s not something. He pulled you out of Hell—”
“He was ordered to.”
“But then he hung around. Even after he stopped taking orders. He hung around you. I mean, I know he didn’t like me, but I think we’re past that now, and you know, you’re the one who takes him out to bars, and shows him superhero movies, and teaches him how to act like a fed or a priest or whatever. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Cas spends a lot of time down here when there’s not even much going on. And I mean, you should see yourself when he shows up. You actually do, like, light up—”
“Jesus, Sam,” Deanna groans, and slings the duffel over her shoulder. “Look, how about we drop this right now, and when we get to Savannah, you can watch Love, Actually on my Netflix. You’ve already clogged up my recs with chick flicks anyway.” She jerks her head toward the door.
“Why is this a problem for you?” Sam asks, making no movement to leave. “It’s not like caring about people is some foreign emotion to you. Is it because you like women?”
Deanna’s eyes widen.
“Oh my god, give me some credit,” Sam says. “You think I didn’t notice there was something with Lisa? And Cassie, way back then, who was supposedly just an old friend? Dee, I don’t care. But that doesn’t mean you can’t like a guy.”
Deanna sighs overdramatically, slings the duffel to the floor and plops back onto the bed. “I like guys too, Sammy,” she says, folding her arms. “But Cas isn’t technically a guy anyway, so…”
“He kind of is. I mean, apart from the obvious, he’s a lot more human than he used to be. And a lot of that’s you. It’s almost like he’s…”
And Sam trails off, because oh.
“Yeah,” Deanna says quietly. “Yeah.”
For once, Sam doesn’t really know what to say. They all knew pretty early on that Cas was falling, and it was probably inevitable once he learned about Heaven’s whole apocalypse plan and opted not to be a part of it. Sam still feels bad for Cas losing his family and his powers, and sometimes guilty because none of that would be happening if he hadn’t crossed paths with them; but he also realizes that Cas made his choice knowing what it meant. But Deanna’s always been closer to Cas; she’s the one who ranted to him time and again about free will, the one he snatched from under Zachariah’s nose and stood with when he said “We’re making it up as we go” (and Sam won’t forget her irrepressible grin when she told him that story). From where she’s sitting, it probably looks a lot like Cas is falling, getting weaker, suffering, all because of her.
“Dee,” he begins, “it’s not your—”
“I want to get on the road before it gets dark,” she says, pushing off the bed and snatching up her duffel. “If you’re in the car before I start the engine, no Megadeth till we cross the Mississippi. Promise.”
Sam sighs, but the look on her face is so fragile and threatening at the same time that he just says, “All right,” and shoves his laptop into his bag and gets up. “Let’s hit the road.”
Deanna nods stiffly and heads out. Sam follows, praying—though he stops short of actually praying—that sometime mid-drive they’ll hear the rustle of feathers, and Deanna will stop white-knuckling the steering wheel, and crack half a smile when she looks in the rearview mirror.
Otherwise, it’s going to be a very long drive.