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Sam’s deep into another attempt—fifth, to be precise—at cataloguing Storage Room 3 of the Bunker when he realizes—for the fifth time, you know, precisely—that this particular organization system is not gonna be compatible with Storage Room 3’s particular set of objects. He looks at the makeshift ledger in front of him. Then he looks over to his mug of Dean Motherfucking Winchester's patented all-nighter beer-coffee cocktail. It tastes absolutely awful on a good day and is most likely disgustingly lukewarm by this point, having been sitting there for the past hour. He looks back at the ledger. He reaches for the mug.
"Sam?" It's Cas leaning into the room, one hand on the doorframe, that saves him from mindlessly chugging the rest of the mixture in a halfhearted attempt to keep from falling asleep, because while it may be ten in the morning, he really has been up all night working on this and the lack of windows in the Bunker doesn’t exactly inspire a healthy sleep schedule on a good day. Seriously, who designed it like that? Well. A secretive (paranoid?) society requiring an absurd, apocalypse-level amount of protection from the outside world, that's who. But still, not even one teensy tiny little window? Just to let the sunlight in?
"Sam!"
Sam jolts, nearly spilling the beer-coffee on himself. Shit. "Sorry, Cas. I'm a bit…"
"Incredibly sleep deprived?" Cas suggests. He’s gotten better at using that passive-aggressively snarky tone that makes Sam want to bash his own head into a wall. A Winchester classic. (Both the tone and the head bashing thing, if Sam’s being honest.)
"Yeah." Sam sighs. "I didn't even used to care about this kind of thing. I mean, it's not like we had disorganized cursed artifact storage rooms to care about before, but. You know what I mean."
Cas tilts his head at Sam. "Why do you care now, then? Why not leave it disorganized? Nothing bad has come of it so far."
Sam takes a moment to contemplate this. The moment lasts a little longer than it should, because he nearly starts falling asleep, but he gets there. "You're right, Cas! Fuck this." He shoves himself up from the floor, where he'd set up base camp near the first rows of shelves. "Let's do something fun instead. Or sleep. Either way."
"I actually came to you because it's Friday."
"Friday?" It was Thursday last he'd checked. Then again, that had been like twelve hours ago. If Dean was here he'd have dragged Sam off to bed ages ago, but Dean's on a hunt—getting back today—and Sam had taken advantage of this opportunity to utterly ruin his sleep schedule even further.
Cas stares at him. It seems awfully like a "you're making me severely concerned about your mental health again" sort of stare. Then again, Cas doesn't do facial expressions so much in general, so it might just be, you know, his face. "Yes. Farmers Market day."
"Oh." The Lebanon Farmers Market is open all weekend, but Sam and Cas always go on Fridays. Except for the past three months, because it's been closed—pandemic and all. Very inconvenient when it comes to forcing fresh, healthy produce down Dean's throat and also to getting the kind of bread that Dean is very picky about using to make his special grilled cheese sandwiches, which are not so fresh or healthy but which Sam could happily eat at least three of in one sitting. "It's back already?"
"That's what the website said when I checked it a few days ago."
Sam reaches down for his laptop to double check. The Farmers Market will be reopening this weekend, the Facebook page says. Also, We request that only one person per household attend. He makes a face.
"What's the issue?" asks Cas, who has gotten quite good at interpreting Sam's various expressions (unlike Dean’s. Dean's emotions are like—like someone doodled with magic marker all over his brain and then set up funhouse mirrors inside—he's not very easy to understand sometimes, is the point).
"'One person per household,’" Sam quotes. "We can't both go."
"But it's our ‘thing.’” The words are plaintive. And include audible air quotes.
"Yeah. And it would probably be fine anyway, since you're an angel who I'm assuming can't get or spread viruses, but they don't know that." Sam sighs. "If there was a way we could both go without breaking the one person per household rule…" He vaguely wonders if any of the cursed objects strewn about on the floor could be of some assistance. If only they had let themselves be properly catalogued.
Cas is staring at him again, and this time, Sam definitely gets the feeling it's supposed to mean something. He waits for some helpfully elaborative dialogue. It doesn't come; the moment is apparently destined to consist solely of staring at each other in silence, Cas intensely and Sam—well, Sam pretty blankly. Then Sam registers that he's staring at an actual, incorporeal angel inside an actual… utilized …body. Certain things click into place.
"Wait, seriously?" Sam blurts out. "You—I—"
"Sam, I want my organic honey."
Sam can't argue with that.
It's while he's carrying Jimmy Novak's corpse to his bedroom with Cas nestled contentedly underneath his skin that he gets a sudden, vivid flash of a memory from three days before: "Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone," Dean had said.
We should do this more often, Cas thinks at Sam from within his own mind. Jimmy's vessel tends to itch.
Sam's not sure whether to be horrified, amused, or offended that his best friend only wants to possess his body because the other body on hand gets "itchy." Then he replays that thought process and spares a moment to contemplate how absolutely fucking insane his life is. He doesn't often allow himself this indulgence, but he figures just this once won't do much harm. Definitely not more harm than this whole situation getting back to Dean, who would most certainly file the course of action they've chosen here under the "stupid" category.
Apparently Cas has been following his train of thought, because Sam can feel him start to worry. It's kind of endearing, actually. But it's also giving Sam a twisting feeling in his gut, and he doesn't exactly need someone else's anxiety on top of his own, thanks very much, so he says reassuringly, "Dean doesn't have to know."
Okay, that actually sounds a lot more sketchy than reassuring now that he thinks about it. He has the sudden, depressing thought that he might be the bad influence in this relationship.
It was my idea first, Cas reminds him, and then adds thoughtfully, But I am inarguably the being of holy goodness here, so that's...not the most helpful. Sam decides to ignore the issue for now. They have bigger concerns—namely, getting out of here before Dean gets home.
Jimmy's body looks kind of peaceful lying on Sam's bed, actually. Sam has a brief mental image of folding Jimmy's hands over his chest so it looks like he's sleeping like they do with dead people in coffins. Then he reminds that particular thought that he only allows himself to be a freak on Sundays and Wednesdays and occasionally the Sabbath. He leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him.
The next step is leaving Dean a note, which Sam nearly forgets about until Cas takes over his hands to grab a piece of paper and scrawl out Back soon . They look at it for a second before Sam nudges him to add Off to get produce , and then Cas takes the liberty of including Don't go in Sam's room at the bottom, which might raise some questions seeing as it’s in Sam's own handwriting and also because Dean has a nasty habit of doing the exact opposite of whatever his little brother tells him to do when Sam's not there to pull out the puppy eyes.
But they're both impatient to get going, so they leave it in favor of grabbing a mask and a canvas bag and heading out the door, to the motorcycle Sam likes to keep around back of the Bunker for when Dean's taken the Impala and all the old—“classic.” Sure.—cars in the garage are looking even more unappealing than usual. And then they're off, wind in their hair and bag slung over their shoulder like they're in a library-rental coming-of-age movie, if those normally featured a dude with a centuries-old soul and a codependent relationship with his brother and the celestial being that's currently inhabiting his body. Really, all they need is a little bit of teenage rebellion and an overdone romance trope and there you have it.
Well, we are rebelling against your older brother's wishes. And this could be considered a romantic date in certain contexts, Cas offers helpfully. Sam tries very hard not to think about those contexts. He's fairly sure he's blushing right now and fairly extremely sure Cas is laughing at him for it. None of these things are appreciated.
What is appreciated is that it's a warm day out; once they make it to downtown Lebanon, pull up to a curb and start walking the last couple blocks, Sam is able to properly relish in the sun warming their skin. He can tell Cas is enjoying it too. By the time they've made it halfway there, there have already been several instances of Cas taking over the body and pausing them in their walk solely because he’d gotten sidetracked by the hanging flower baskets outside the stores or an especially sunny patch of sidewalk.
Another pleasant part of their surroundings that reminds Sam just how nice getting out of their freaky underground bunker is—the live acoustic guitar, which gets more and more audible the closer they come to the market. Cas decides to comment on this observation by thinking at Sam, This is a nice change from Led Zeppelin , and while Jimmy's deep voice would have given those words no inflection, the whole sharing-a-body thing makes the passive aggression so readable to Sam right now that he can’t help but laugh. The people on the sidewalk around them start to give them a wide berth, which makes Cas so amused that it turns into the two of them laughing together even harder.
They probably think we're crazy, Sam thinks, careful not to talk out loud lest their already dubious image among the people of Lebanon (his guess is that they come off as potentially gay hermits who buy ten pounds of salt a week) be tarnished even more. Then he remembers that that image probably only applies to him—given that Dean's practically best friends with everyone in town while he only ventures in for the market and when he has to pick up things for Rowena, which has resulted in him having to ask the local store clerks for help locating her creepy spell ingredients at least three times now—and he decides he might as well give up on presenting as a normal person.
Besides, we have both technically been clinically insane in the past, so they would not be entirely wrong, adds Cas.
Helpful. Thanks.
They're almost there now, and reach the first stalls with growing excitement. It's been so long since they've been around people who 1) aren’t walking, talking epitomes of toxic masculinity, 2) don’t constantly act like they have objective moral superiority to everyone around them, and 3) are just generally normal (and even sane!). Also known as people who are not one Dean Winchester. Sam kind of feels like a pet who's finally been let out of the house. Or, well, escaped from said house, anyway. If the house in question was a super creepy and insane underground bunker. Has he mentioned he hates living in an underground bunker?
He’s just decided to ruminate on this hatred on his way to a vegetable stand when he blinks for a little too long and suddenly finds his body veering toward a stall in the opposite direction. Woah, Cas. "They have masks with honey bees on them," Cas says out loud, sounding excited in a rather desperate kind of way. "And flowers. Look at all the flower patterns, Sam."
They take a few minutes to browse the stall with Cas taking point in the body, which doesn’t go as smoothly as one might expect—one being Sam. Sam was expecting a basic, ordinary task to go smoothly, for some apparently foolish reason—due to Cas continuously making comments to Sam about masks that the body isn’t actually looking at, because he keeps forgetting to use Sam’s human senses instead of his freaky angel ones, like, seriously, if Sam could see his true form he wouldn’t be surprised if it had kaleidoscope bug eyes or some shit, so that line of communication isn’t really working out, and also at one point Sam notices the vendor staring at them and realizes after several painfully long moments of panicking about what might be wrong that Cas forgot to make the damn body blink and they’ve been staring at everything unblinking for the past five minutes, and Sam has to practically fight with Cas just to get him to give up control of at least a portion of the body—just give me enough room to make us look like normal people, I mean person, shit are we even breathing right now—before finally Cas is able to settle on what he wants and they can get the fuck out of there.
They end up with several of the masks, which are soft under their fingers, much better than the surgical one they have on right now. We could have matching flower masks, Sam thinks, before mentally snickering at the thought of Dean begrudgingly wearing one.
They're all mine, Cas says stubbornly. It’s kind of adorable.
It wasn't your money , Sam returns mildly, mostly for the sake of the banter.
The money belongs to no one. Charlie set it up for you through a credit card scam that's somehow even more illegal than what you were doing before. Give me the hands, I want to put on the one with the sunflowers.
Sam relinquishes control of the hands. The one with the sunflowers is donned.
They must make quite the sight, a guy over six feet tall draped in flannel with thick jeans, work boots, a canvas bag, and a sunshine yellow mask, trundling through the Farmers Market. They go from stall to stall switching control back and forth whenever one of them sees something they want to get, which causes a few uncomfortable moments where the body gets metaphorically tugged back and forth before someone begrudgingly gives in. But by the time an hour and a half has gone by and they've settled on a bench for a rest, they've collected four loaves of bread, three bags of salad greens, a box of rather self-indulgently bought baked goods that they’ve mutually agreed not to tell Dean about, and a headband that clashes just slightly with the mask and is definitely something Dean would make fun of them for but that keeps their hair out of their eyes well enough. It has pink swirls on it, which was what drew Cas to it initially and what is now giving Sam just a little bit of pleasure to wear, because fuck that macho hunter stuff. Anyway. A good haul.
They're about to remove the mask to sneak a bite of one of the pastries when a woman sits down next to them on the bench. Sam can practically see her smiling even past the mask. She's looking at them kind of expectantly. Sam is so not in the mood to deal with socialization beyond How much for a head of lettuce? and Is this whole wheat? So he pushes Cas to the front, because he's mean like that.
"Hello," Cas says, sounding perturbed at having been forcibly made to do the interacting.
"Hey," she says. "I think I've seen you here before once or twice." The expectant look continues.
"Okay," says Cas. Sam is torn between mentally groaning in humiliation and cheering Cas on for the complete lack of encouragement when it comes to continuing the conversation.
"My name's Lacey." The woman is apparently determined to cheerily press on. "It's nice to properly meet you.”
"My name is Sam," says Cas. Sam notes with some growing concern that Cas is starting to get a bit more satisfaction out of this than he should be. Cas?
"What a nice name." It's easy to imagine Lacey's smile growing even wider. If Sam had control he'd be glaring right now. "What sort of things are you interested in, Sam?"
"Demonology," Cas says promptly.
His voice is deadpan. His emotions, Sam can sense, are bordering on a disturbing sort of satisfaction.
"I'm sorry?"
"The study of demons and demonic rituals. I also have great interest in general witchcraft."
Sam can practically sense Lacey's smile dropping. "Is that—um—related to your career?"
"You'd be surprised at how applicable such practices are to my daily life."
Lacey shifts on the bench. "Well. That's...nice. I volunteer at the local animal shelter," she adds, noticeably brighter.
Cas lets their voice pick up a more excited tone. "What a coincidence. I've been needing a cat skull for a summoning, and they're normally so hard to find."
Sam only lets himself take back control and burst out laughing once Lacy has hurried out of sight. As far as impressions of him go... "Cas, what the fuck. " It comes out closer to a wheeze than an actual sentence as he curls in on himself and tries to breathe through the uncontrollable laughter.
We do need a cat skull.
"I mean." Sam winces. "Yeah."
More importantly, you needed her to go away.
The laughter eases up as Sam takes in Cas's sincerity. "Thank you. I appreciate it."
Of course. Cas sounds awfully pleased with himself. We should eat now.
The pastry is delicious. Cas has been eager to try eating several things while they're here, because while he might forget to use Sam's human senses sometimes, he's still able to tap into them when he likes—such as to experience food as, well, food instead of literal molecules. Cas seems to enjoy the pastry just as much as Sam. He adjusts their headband and tilts his face in the vague direction of the sun as if he can feel their skin soaking up the light, and Sam takes a moment to appreciate being able to feel Cas's contentment, and more than that, his joy. There's no apocalypse on the horizon, no one is betraying each other for demons or angels or misguided good intent, and—perhaps most importantly, Sam thinks—they're not currently deep inside a bunker without even one tiny little window. He loves it, and he loves that Cas loves it, and he loves that they can share that love with each other.
Then his phone starts ringing.
Sam lets out an audible sigh, contemplating how much of a mistake it might be to ignore it and how many more mistakes he can afford to make until the sliding scale that is his need for redemption tips so far to one side he just dies—letting a phone call go probably won’t be the needle on top of the haystack, and while with just how much the universe hates him he can never be too sure, he’s ready to take the plunge and leave whoever’s calling him stranded—until: Maybe you should take that, says Cas.
Sam’s next sigh is even bigger. He reaches for the cell and begrudgingly pulls it out. The caller ID on the screen reads Dean Winchester .
Maybe you shouldn’t take that, says Cas.
But it’s Dean. And while Sam could just pretend he didn’t see who it was, or never even heard the phone ring, or, hell, left it back in Storage Room 3, and explain this all to Dean when they get back home, he’s also spent enough years having his older brother chew him out for getting in trouble that he’s pretty sure Dean has a sixth sense for it and would absolutely be one hundred percent aware that Sam had made a conscious decision not to answer his call.
“Hi,” says Sam into the phone, and then immediately gets distracted by Cas, who’s let through that he’s considering an attempt to gain control of the body’s right hand in order to drop the phone on the ground.
Stop that, thinks Sam. I’m all out of screen protectors. He tunes back in to what appears to be a rather intense recap of Dean’s day. The unfortunate tirade seems to have been going on for a few seconds now.
“—and then I open the door to your room—”
“The note did say not to do that,” tries Sam.
“—and on the bed—”
“I know what’s on the bed, you don’t have to say it—”
“—a damn body—”
Sam winces, adjusting the phone so Dean’s raised voice is a bit further from his ear.
“—and I’m having to wonder if Cas just happens to have died while I was out before I realize, oh, it’s probably just his vessel, lying there like—” Dean is sounding somewhat hysterical right now. Sam hadn’t known his voice could go that high. He tries to interrupt before Dean can get any further into this vocal reenactment—“Dean, listen, just for a second, just calm down and let me explain.”
Dean goes on talking about damn bodies and why one shouldn’t have to expect to find them lying on beds for a few more seconds until, presumably, Sam’s words catch up to him. There are a few seconds of silence. Then comes the ever-threatening word: “Well?”
“Um.” Sam hadn’t actually thought this far ahead. “The market was open.”
“Thanks, Sam,” says Dean. “That explains a lot.”
Sam and Cas take a second to come to the mutual agreement that Dean’s sarcasm there was unnecessary. Then they have a silent mental tussle over how unhelpful Cas is making himself to the current conversation. Can you at least tell me what to say, Sam sighs, once it’s become clear that Cas is under no circumstances taking control of the situation while Dean is still on the line.
Friday is market day, offers Cas.
“Friday,” Sam starts before reaching sudden clarity on just how dumb this sounds, but he can’t backtrack now. “Friday is market day. For Cas and I.”
“Sam. ”
“And they only allow one person from each household, and, um.”
“If you’re going to keep talking around—“ Dean stops speaking quite suddenly. Sam can barely hear him breathing on the other end. Long seconds pass.
“Sam,” Dean starts, very, very slowly. Sam feels a jolt of trepidation wash over him, just like when he was seven and stole the last of Dean’s Halloween candy, and Dean had come home to find the empty pillowcase and Sam could do nothing but try to cover his chocolatey mouth with his hand and wait for the horrible moment when his betrayal would be made clear for his brother. It’s one of the worst things to hear, Sam thinks—the sound of the gears in Dean’s mind finally clicking into place.
“When only one person can go somewhere, Sammy,” Dean continues now, still speaking slowly and with an uneasy amount of exasperation in his voice, “then one of you goes there, and the other one stays at the Bunker to hold down the fort. The solution is not to stuff yourselves into one body just because neither of you want to miss out on picking out boxes of leaves to eat!” His voice has yet again risen in pitch. Sam doesn’t think it’s an enjoyable experience for either of them.
Then a few specific words actually register for him. “Boxes of—Dean, do you mean salads? ”
“Whatever,” says Dean. “Hey, you better not hang up on me!”
Sixth sense, Sam swears it. His finger hovers over the end call button a moment longer before he slowly lowers his hand and puts the phone back up to his ear.
“As I was saying, we’ve got a situation here. So wrap up your little hippie adventure and get your ass back to the Bunker.”
Sam tries to recall when Dean had said anything about a situation. No elaboration seems to be forthcoming, so he starts running through all the possible scenarios he can think of that would count as a “situation” to Dean Winchester. Demons at their door? Angels? Both? Had Heaven and Hell teamed up to—
Sam gets vertigo from how quickly he’s shoved backwards in their collective consciousness. Calm down, Cas directs at him, and then out loud, “What’s the situation, Dean?”
Oh. Sam needs to stop accidentally hyperventilating. It happens far too frequently in his day-to-day life. Not that people purposefully hyperventilate, he doesn’t think. He just needs to stop panicking in general. Or, well, that’s a bit of a lofty goal, so maybe if it was just toned down a bit. Like, only one panic attack a week or something. He could probably swing that. It’s all in the breathing, right? Like right now, Cas is making the body breathe pretty slowly, and that’s why Sam is relaxing. And before, he was hyperventilating, and also getting a little panicked. Correlation. So he just needs to—
What you need to do is stop psychoanalyzing yourself, Cas interrupts. Listen.
Oops.
Dean apparently hasn’t noticed the sudden lack of tone in Sam’s voice and therefore hasn’t realized it’s not actually Sam that’s talking, which Sam can literally feel Cas’s gratefulness for like a tangible wave of Thank Heaven I’m not the one getting chewed out right now. “I’m not sure what it is, exactly,” Dean is saying. Grinding out, really, like it’s taking every ounce of energy in his body to not still be yelling at them in the eighth octave. “Like a cross between an octopus and—and something. Something with fangs. And the ability to float. I think it came from this weird wooden box that was open on the floor, but I wasn’t looking at the situation too closely, so if you two wouldn’t mind getting back here to clean up your mess…”
“I haven’t heard of something like that before. What have you been doing to fend it off so far?”
“Well, it was in a storage room, so I just kinda…closed the door.”
While Cas tries to find the words to grasp Dean’s admittedly lacking solution to the situation, Sam tries to tell himself that this is surely, absolutely, definitely not his fault. It can’t be. Things get loose in the storage rooms all the time, especially things that come from randomly open weird wooden boxes on the floor.
Except they don’t. Is the thing. Actually.
Cas presumably senses Sam’s urge to know just what storage room Dean is referring to, because that’s the next question he asks. “Hell if I know,” grouses Dean. “You think I pay attention to those tiny little numbers on the doors? And I’m not going back down that hallway, either.”
Sam mentally rolls his eyes. Cas takes it on himself to do so physically as well. It’s a nice gesture. Sam appreciates being able to express his exasperation with Dean as much as possible at all times.
“Sam and I will be there soon,” sighs Cas, and hangs up before Dean can get out more than “Cas?! ”
A few minutes later—silent, disgruntled minutes of packing up their bag and glaring at the ground and walking slowly out of the market—they’re riding home. The wind feels a bit colder on the way back, cutting through them with a little more strength. Ahead of them awaits a mysterious, possibly life-threatening, one hundred percent worse than the Farmers Market, annoyingly existent Situation to deal with. Of course there’s a situation, thinks Sam in despairing resignation. There’s always something.
He only meant to think it to himself, but a moment later Cas is sending a feeling of warmth through him, all reassurance and love. And a little bit of Cas’s own disappointment, but it feels better when they’re sharing it, it really does. They send each other warm thoughts the whole way home. Sam definitely isn’t blushing again.
I believe you, says Cas, quaintly insincere.
Shut up, says Sam. But nicely.
When they finally make it home to the garage, they take a moment to collect themselves before pushing open the door to the Bunker with a distressing amount of trepidation. Dean is waiting for them on the other side. He takes a few seconds to look them up and down. Cas starts to fidget under his gaze, but Sam makes the body still. Neither of them can read Dean’s expression.
“What,” he finally starts, “is in your hair.”
Sam reaches up self-consciously to feel the headband. “It’s, um. It—“
“Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
That’s probably for the best, if Sam’s being honest. He lets Cas take control over the body as Dean leads them further inside, sulking in the back of his own mind over the fact that they’re trapped in this stupid bunker once again. If he thinks about it hard enough, he can almost remember what the sunlight felt like on his skin…
They’ve got to get a window.
The three of them start down the hallway, their two sets of footsteps echoing around the space. Which is odd, because that echo doesn’t normally happen, and Sam is pretty sure walls don’t just decide to start echoing out of nowhere. Or at all. Unless the walls are sentient, and he probably wouldn’t be all that surprised if these ones were—freaked out, for sure, but he’d contain himself long enough to hold Dean back from trying to shoot infrastructure—but why would a sentient wall only utilize its sentience in order to echo on certain days and not on others? Surely it would have done something equally, if not more, noticeable by now, unless it was purposefully hiding its sentience, but of course the Men of Letters would have something in their files about their walls being sentient and he’d have read about it by now, except there are files scattered all around the Bunker and he hadn’t even gotten through the ones Storage Room 3, speaking of which—
It’s not an echo, says Cas. It’s whatever you let escape, throwing itself against the walls.
Sam attempts to make his consciousness smaller in shame. It doesn’t work very well, he doesn’t think. Cas gives him a nudge of disapproval.
Don’t poke me like that, Sam mutters. If I knew how I’d give my own mind spikes so you wouldn’t poke me anymore.
Almost six percent of my true form manifests as the spikes of a porcupine, Cas proffers for no apparent reason. Well, not no reason, Sam is sure, but a mysterious one, some reason that lives far away in the fog of a distant mountaintop where only Cas could reach anyway.
“Get outta each other,” Dean huffs, breaking Sam out of his thoughts and Cas out of, well, also Sam’s thoughts, as he comes to a stop in front of…no way.
No. Way. He did not seriously drag Jimmy Novak all the way down here and lay the body up against the wall.
Except he did. Sam contemplates, for perhaps the fourth or fifth time in the past month alone, the merits of disowning his older brother. He can practically feel the ghost of John glaring daggers into the back of his head just for thinking it—or bullets, more likely, John was never much of a dagger person. Actually, he’s pretty sure he is being glared at right now, by Dean. Dean and John have very similar glares.
“Close your eyes,” sighs Cas, and Sam, idiotically enough, nearly tries to close his own. Cas laughs at him quietly in his own voice before starting to detach from his soul—which, on the list of weirdest sensations ever, ranks extremely high, beat only by the jabbing nerve-based pinpricks all over his skin achieved a few years ago after downing a coffee with five shots of caffeine while listening to Lucifer sing a vintage love song in the background—and after a few seconds of this physical version of white noise, Sam is suddenly, jarringly alone in his own body, and Cas is standing up from the floor and wiping floor dirt off of Jimmy’s sleeves.
Sam takes a moment to stretch, and also to remember how to breathe on his own, because that’s causing some problems. Then he slowly looks up to face the plaque on the door ahead of them. Storage Room 3 , it reads, as though it has no regard for Sam’s sliding scale of necessitated redemption and would be perfectly happy to see him suffer just that much more.
“Well. Oops on that one,” says Sam. He thinks maybe he shouldn’t have gone so long without sleep.
He can hear it properly now, the clanging and thudding of whatever’s in that storage room. He starts to turn to make some sort of desperate plea to Dean, thinks better of it, and turns to Cas instead to exchange wary looks. But before they can even come up with some sort of plan—for example, stocking up on weapons to use against this thing, or perhaps sneaking back out of the Bunker and running away to someplace sunny and warm and with a nice, solid view of the sky (yes, the bar is that low, has he mentioned he hates it here)—Dean has swung the door open and shoved them inside.
The room is dark—the bulbs must have blown. They can’t see a thing past the first few feet, which means they can’t see whatever creature is waiting to kill them. Hopefully not actually kill, though. Brutally maim, perhaps? Sam supposes they’ll find out soon. He tries to remain optimistic; it could always be worse. He could be back in the Cage being tortured by an archangel who’s psychosexually obsessed with him. He could still be in that time loop being…tortured by…an archangel…who’s psychosexually obsessed with him…(okay, wow, why does that keep happening?). He could be sitting in economics class at Stanford trying desperately not to fall asleep. He could be chugging his fifth all-nighter beer-coffee cocktail. Life isn’t so bad at the moment, really.
“I’m getting some sort of signal from it,” Cas says, edging further into the room as the clanging gets louder. “Like echolocation, but with a distinct malicious intent.”
Okay, so life could be way better, too.
“Wish us luck?” Sam grinds out, staring pointedly at Dean, who’s standing safe and vindictive in the lit hallway behind them.
“Yeah, sure, don’t die. Oh, and don’t either of you ever do that freaky possession shit again,” Dean snaps, before closing the door on them both.
Sam looks at Cas. Cas looks at Sam.
“You know,” says Cas, “this creature would probably be a lot easier to take care of if I was in a more comfortable vessel and you had more power at your disposal.”
“ I think this creature will be a lot easier to take care of if there isn’t any chance of it eating Jimmy’s abandoned body,” Sam says irritably.
The creature in question lets out an ear-piercing noise that’s somewhere between a scream and a squeak and no less terrifying for the latter. Something whooshes past them just a few feet away and knocks something else off a shelf, where it promptly shatters on the floor. Sam can only hope it was the leftover mug of Dean drink and not some kind of cursed vase or something. But, you know. With his luck.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says hurriedly, reaching out blindly to grab at Cas’s arm. He’s not entirely sure that’s what he ends up grabbing. “Um. Yes. Yes, let’s do it.”
The room starts to fill with a now-familiar blinding light, and suddenly they’re one again. Cas takes an annoyingly long moment to do the metaphysical version of a stretch underneath Sam’s skin, and then, as the wall closest to them shudders audibly and the thing lets out another shriek, suggests, Maybe you should aim for a better sleep schedule in the future. Situations like this could be avoided.
Maybe, Sam thinks, if the Bunker had a window. He feels the cool, unearthly metal of Cas’s angel blade slide smoothly into their hand.
And by the way, he adds, as Cas nudges their eyesight to adjust to the dark room and spins to face whatever’s in there with them, it’s back to Jimmy’s body as soon as we finish here. Dean is not finding out about this.
Yes, says Cas. Obviously.
They’ll have to get back to the Farmers Market another day.