#ashxnfeathers

      “Well if it isn’t the infamous ---” Realisation, recognition, hit him like a freight train.

Dean’s been using the ‘last night on Earth’ thing to get laid for years now. Hard eyed hunters soften when he’d play up his youth, his desire to spend his last night on Earth with them. 

(It’s fucked up, but you do what you got to do.)

And now it’s really going to be their last friggin night on Earth, and he has no idea what to do with Cas. 

It’s not like he can take her to a brothel or anything. (Not like he can stand the thought of some smarmy, smug asshole putting his hands on her.) 

So Dean does the only thing he can think of. He gets the bartender to change his five over to quarters, and feeds them all into the jukebox, picking song after song after song. 

There’s only a few old drunks at the bar, no one who cares when Bruce Springsteen comes through the speakers, singing about a Tunnel of Love. Dean can feel those bright blue eyes on him long before he walks back to the table and holds out a hand.

“Last night on Earth, might as well dance, huh?”

She’s hesitant when she puts that pale hand in his, but pliant. Dean tucks Cas against his chest, a hand pressed against the small of her back as they sway. 

It’s not a bad way to spend your last night on Earth. 

Oh, god. Trench coat -- the old fashioned kind -- over crumpled suit. Look of fixed concentration. All this wrapped up in someone wandering where Charlie would really rather they didn’t wander, and --

“You know what I thought about, that whole time I was getting sliced up down in hell?”

She should have been dead. For good this time. Wiped off the face of God’s green little Earth. But somebody somewhere saw fit to shove her back down in the pit and leave her.

(She’s still not sure if she’s grateful, or pissed.)

And she sure as hell doesn’t wait for Cas to answer her before she continues. “I thought about you. My fingers in all that messy hair of yours. Make you look like my mussed up choir boy again, not this downtrodden martyr thing you’ve got going on now.”

She gestures to him lazily, expression twisted in disinterest. (There’s a pang in her cold, black little heart. Cas looks like he’s been on the rack beside her.)

“About all the ways I was going to dirty you up. But it looks like the world did all the heavy lifting for me.”

    That’s not my name!

The words echo between them, and they break Sam’s heart.

This isn’t an easy job. It takes and takes and takes, and rare are the days where it gives anything back. Sam wishes, often and whole-heartedly and for each of his patients, that there’ll be a day he never has to see them again.

Only one or two will ever make it back into ‘normal’ life. Even for the rest of them, though, there’s degrees. They can move on from this ward to a different one, to a different hospital -- they can get better, even if they can’t get good.

Those are the days Sam longs for. When someone walks out of those doors, and doesn’t come back.

Jimmy will be here a long time. Knows it in the pit of his tired heart, and regrets it on the man’s behalf.

          Always has been that small fascination with the angel ; his flutter of wings something caught in his ear ( quick , even the gather of air for flight is brief --- barely noticeable ) . Perhaps it’s a bird thing . or , perhaps it’s something else , something almost kindred , along with a confusion he’s slow to unravel ( he too , maybe , understands humans just that little bit more ) .