Chapter Text
They probably should’ve paid better attention to the weather reports, but for once in their damn lives there was what looked like it might be an actual lull between Armageddons. No, really, it had been four whole days since the last time Dean had had to kill anything, and that had been a cockroach. A normal, boring, totally unremarkable cockroach. The fact that cockroaches could get into a bunker that was warded against the most powerful forces hell could muster seemed to Dean further proof that one of these days, roaches were going to be the real team to beat. When he expressed this opinion to Sam, who regarded cockroaches with only somewhat less trepidation than he reserved for clowns, Sam twitched visibly. Castiel, unsurprisingly, had wanted to keep it:
“Cas, you cannot have a cockroach as a pet.”
“Why not? I find its hardiness reassuring. It seems unjust to kill it. Who knows what trials and tribulations it has survived to make it here, in the dead of winter?”
“Because Sam will move out. Look at him, he’s terrified!” Dean stabbed a finger toward where Sam was cramming himself into the smallest space he could muster (which still took up approximately the same square footage as a small country) in the corner of the kitchen.
“I am not terrified!” Sam insisted, his eyes never straying from the inch-long insect scuttling along the base of the fridge, “I just don’t want the creepy little bastards anywhere near where I eat. Or sleep. Or—you know what? Fuck you.”
“You see? He’s gonna have a panic attack. You can’t keep it. We’ll get you a kitten or something.”
“Sam,” Cas assured him earnestly, “I promise I will keep Curtis away from your bedroom and the kitchen.”
“Oh, for the love of—you named him?” Dean inhaled a long, cleansing breath. “I’ve gotta nip this in the bud, before you build him a little habitat.”
As Cas opened his mouth, no doubt to start telling Dean about the floor plan he’d already drawn up for Curtis’s dream home, Dean strode across the kitchen and flattened Curtis with one heavy boot.
Sam was pathetically grateful, and Cas sulked for two days, skulking in dark corners of the bunker and muttering under his breath in Enochian, until Sam introduced him to icanhascheezburger.com.
Sam was the one who generally kept abreast of the internet in general, including weather reports, and, as he informed Dean from the doorway of the kitchen (he refused to enter it since Curtis’s appearance and untimely death) while Dean fixed a sandwich, he hadn’t seen his laptop in the last 48 hours.
“Next time you traumatize him, we’re hooking him up with cuteoverload.com on your laptop,” Sam told him, only half joking. “It’d be a mercy. Your browser might weep with gratitude at a reprieve from porn.”
Dean narrowly dodged stepping on the tiny monument Cas had built to Curtis. It was dominated by a small star of David crafted out of popsicle sticks (Cas insisted, for no reason Dean could figure, that Curtis had been Jewish) surrounded by tiny blue flowers that Cas had rustled up from God only knew where. He’d probably stepped outside and made a special trip to the Vatican’s botanical gardens or something.
“It’s not my fault he becomes weirdly attached. Would you rather I let him keep Curtis? By now he’d probably have found the little guy a mate, and in a month we’d have 10,000 tiny roaches swarming the place.” Sam paled noticeably and beat a hasty retreat. Dean, skirting carefully around Curtis’s memorial (because Cas hadn’t even slept in his bed the last three nights, let alone put out, and Dean wasn’t aiming for another sexless week), finished making his BLT.
Cas, presumably, was too busy occupying himself with poor-grammar-prone cats to worry about anything like a weather report, and Dean was four and a half seasons into a Netflix binge of Cake Boss and still going strong, which left no time to troll the local news.
Nevertheless, for guys who prided themselves on keeping the world safe, it was a little sad how oblivious they were to something that pretty much everyone within a radius of about 100 miles in every direction was talking about.
By the time they figured out what was going on, it was way too late.
On his way to get a late afternoon snack between episodes (the Cake Boss was gonna make a real working elevator cake!), Dean noticed the shadow of snowflakes falling outside the bunker, which wasn’t a huge surprise. It was, after all, January in Kansas. By the time he returned to the kitchen four hours later (because Sam, still boycotting the room, had bribed Dean into making him a sandwich with the promise of a pie run to Dean’s favorite bakery later), it was too dark to see anything outside the massive windows.