Summary: Cassie goes back to Athens for a professor's funeral and runs into the professor's ghost instead. It's been years since she last saw Dean but he still promises he'll be there as soon as he can, just like he had when she last crossed paths with a ghost.
She has him meet her in the reading room at the library. Of all the places they could go at O.U., it's probably the one where they share the most memories. (Maybe they can make a few more this weekend.)
Dean/Cassie, quite a while post-Route 666 (exact date left ambiguous), reunion at the library (sequel to my first meeting fic Archival Quality)
3.4k words | rated T | read on AO3
Supernatural things are extremely uncommon, right? After all, Cassie's only ever come across one of them in her entire life, and even though when she'd known Dean he'd mentioned seeing lots of them, he had to travel around and seek them out.
So the odds are that there's a perfectly normal explanation for this.
Isn't there?
Cassie pulls out her phone, shivering uncontrollably—which is probably because she just had a bad fright and besides, the room is drafty; it's not like the cold she's feeling was directly caused by the ghost she thought she saw or anything. She has no idea whether the last number Dean gave her even works; he's texted her a few times over the years when he changed his number, but it's been several years since she had even that much contact from him. (The thought crosses her mind that if he doesn't pick up, it's equally likely that he's lost his phone or that he's died, and she might never be able to find out which.)
She flips through her contacts list anyway and hits Dean's name. She keeps a close eye on the classroom in front of her while the phone rings (her back is pressed up against the wall although she doesn't know whether walls do any good when it comes to ghosts), but the late Professor Wittenberg does not reappear. By the time the phone has rung four times, Cassie has basically resigned herself to never knowing whether Dean's alive, and is trying to mentally move on to figuring out how to handle a ghost all by herself when she doesn't have a clue what she's doing but at least she knows ghosts are real when nobody else here is even going to know that much. (Or maybe she's as crazy as she once accused Dean of being and it's nothing more than her imagination.)
Then there's a click on the other end of the line and the ringing stops. Cassie holds her breath.
"Hello?"
It's Dean. He's alive. It's so good to hear his voice. Cassie realizes she's blinking back tears, and scrubs at her eyes. She can relax now. Dean's going to solve the problem. It's going to be okay. "Dean," she breathes.
"Cassie?" There's a rustle of movement from his end, and Cassie pictures Dean sitting up straighter. She hopes he's as happy to hear her voice as she is his, though she doubts it. She's probably nothing more than a half-forgotten memory. She just hopes she's a good memory.
"Hey Dean," she says, and can't keep herself from smiling just from knowing she's this close to him again, that maybe he might even come to see her (or rather, to see the ghost she may have discovered).
"Hey Cassie," Dean says. "What's up? Don't tell me you've got something for me."
"Yeah, I do," Cassie says.
"I guess that's not surprising for a reporter to stumble across something up our alley," Dean says. "You always were good at your job."
"Thanks," Cassie says. "But this actually isn't a job thing, it's personal. I'm in Athens, actually."
"Oh wow," Dean says. "I've got a lot of good memories from there. And one really bad one."
"Yeah, me too. I'm pretty sure my bad memory is the same as yours, just from a different perspective. But we had some good times, didn't we? I went by that little ice cream parlor we used to go to yesterday, but they're a frozen yogurt and smoothie shop now. The bookstore next to it is still there though."
"Blech," says Dean, as she expected, so she doesn't tell him that she got a berries and mixed greens smoothie that was actually really delicious. "So you there to stay or just passing through?"
"One of my professors passed so I came for the funeral. But...uh...weird things have been happening and I'm pretty sure I just saw his ghost in the journalism building, and also it's really cold in here but that might just be me freaking out—"
"Cassie, are you still in the room where you saw the ghost?"
"Yeah. Is that bad?"
"It's not ideal. Do you have any iron or salt with you, or maybe there might be some in the room?"
"I'm in a random deserted classroom, which isn't exactly known for stocking salt. I see assorted metal around me but I have no idea what sort of metal it is."
"Probably not iron unless it's a really old classroom. Okay, I want you to get out of there and go somewhere that isn't a university building and doesn't have anything to do with the professor, so that there shouldn't be any reason for him to show up there. And I want you to stay on the phone with me while you do it."
It feels weird, fleeing from nothing. Cassie hurries frantically through the halls of the journalism building and it's all bright and cheerily lit and nothing is chasing her, but her heart still pounds like she's running a marathon. None of her fellow alumni who came out for Professor Wittenberg's funeral seem to be around; she hopes they're all just somewhere off campus reminiscing over old times, and not that any of them were hurt by the ghost. There's a few current students around, but none of them gives a second glance to the crazy running lady with the big purse and the phone pressed to her ear. But hey, there's always the chance that they assume she's a successful business woman who's just busy, as opposed to, like, an old maid reporter who is starting to see things. "Okay, I'm out of the building," Cassie reports. "I didn't see him."
"Good," Dean says, and he doesn't sound like he thinks she's crazy at least. "Okay, so you're at O.U.? I'm driving out from Kansas so it's going to take me a bit to get to you. You got a hotel room or something that you can hole up in for the night?"
Cassie can't quite seem to catch her breath, and she's not sure if it's from fear that the ghost is still about to jump out at her, or whether it's at the thought of seeing Dean again. "Sure, I can stay there," she says, glancing about the sunny campus because she feels like the ghost could turn up anywhere, at any moment. "You'll be here tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Google's saying it's a fourteen-hour drive and I can probably do it faster, but I might need to pull over and get a few hours' sleep at a rest stop if you want me to be able to talk to you when I get there and not just doze off on your shoulder."
"That doesn't sound so bad," Cassie says, and she can feel her cheeks heating. Cuddling with her ex-boyfriend (especially after he drove all night to come to her rescue) actually sounds really nice, but she's not about to let him get too big of a head.
There's a murmur of conversation on the other end of the line. "Oh hey," Dean says, "actually Sam says he can come too, so we can split the driving. So I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning."
"The library opens at seven," Cassie says. "You want to meet there?"
"Well, maybe not that bright and early," Dean says. "Now that I'm bringing Sam, I have to give him time to pack all his girly hair care products."
"If you wait till nine, then the archives are open too. You remember where the reading room is?"
"How could I forget?" he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
"I'll meet you there, then. Tomorrow morning. Text me."
"See you soon."
This isn't at all how Cassie pictured spending this weekend when she received the invitation to Professor Wittenberg's memorial service, but even though she's still scared and liable to jump at shadows, she can feel a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She's missed Dean so much. They'd had some good times together.
~~~
Cassie doesn't sleep very well that night; memories of Professor Wittenberg's icy touch on her shoulder blend together with memories of the two times Dean walked away from her into dreams that don't make any sense but still leave her bolting awake, heart pounding. Around 6 am, she finally gives up on trying to sleep and just watches game shows on the hotel room TV while she drinks cup after cup of coffee. (It only makes her more jittery, but she needs something to do.)
Dean texts at half past eight to let her know they're an hour out. Cassie decides that sitting in her hotel room shivering isn't helping, so she goes ahead and leaves for the library.
Even with the time it takes to drive onto campus, find parking, and walk to the library, she still gets to the archives before they open. She leans against the wall outside the sliding glass door and remembers far more enjoyable times of waiting for these rooms to be unlocked. She and Dean would walk over together in the morning after sneaking him out of her dorm room. They'd try to time things so that they didn't get here too early but they also wanted to make the most of their time, and so maybe they'd get here at ten-till or maybe the librarian would be running late, and anyway the long and the short of it is that Cassie has had some of the best kisses of her life leaning up against the bookcases that used to line the wall to her right (they're no longer there, she notes with disappointment, gone like the ice cream shop). Then the door would unlock, and they'd untangle themselves from each other, and with only a moment's hesitation they'd switch right back into work mode, her working on her senior research paper and Dean working on his—well, he'd told her he was writing a book but somehow it didn't occur to Cassie before now but that was obviously a lie. In the midst of all the other things he'd finally told her the truth about, he never mentioned what he was really doing with that weathered old journal from the Ohio University library archives.
But the sting of all Dean's lies has been well tempered by time, and it doesn't even hurt; she just tells herself it will give them something to talk about if she asks him about it when he gets there. And then it's 8:59 and the librarian is unlocking the reading room door a minute early, and Cassie is the only one there that early which feels so familiar even though she hasn't done this in so long. She thanks the librarian with a smile and fills out the form he gives her. As a reporter, it's easy for her to invent a reason that she needs to be doing research in the archives. She hopes Dean won't have any trouble, but then, his job probably still gives him plenty of practice with lying.
The tables are arranged exactly the same as they'd been so many years ago, when she'd been coming here every day throughout the winter quarter and always sitting in the same chair at the back of the room where people would leave her alone. She'd started out spring quarter expecting it to be second verse, same as the first; but it had only been a week later when she'd come in to find that it wasn't just dusty professor types who had research they needed to do here, and that one particular definitely-not-a-professor was both very good-looking and very amenable to her flirting with him.
Those had been a good couple of months. They'd had some great times together, and even though it had all ended so badly Cassie doesn't regret their relationship one bit. And not just because he probably saved her and her mom's life later on, but just because she'd been happy, and she'd learned a lot about herself, and she thinks she might not be the person she is today if their paths hadn't crossed.
She realizes she's still standing by the door, staring at the tables. Hoping the librarian hasn't noticed, she hurries over to their table, the one she used to know so well. She's pretty sure it's the same one; she can't quite remember which little scratches in the wood were there back in the day, but somewhere beneath any conscious memory they just feel familiar. She contemplates sitting in the chair Dean had sat in most days (after the first), "stealing" his chair as he once had hers. But even after all these years, there's only one chair here she's ever thought of as hers, and she doesn't feel like abandoning it now. It probably isn't the exact same chair (although they certainly haven't replaced or reupholstered any of them in the intervening years) but it still feels like home as she sits down in the chair she's sat in every single day she's ever been in this room—except for the day she met Dean Winchester. (That had been a good day.)
The librarian brings her the book that she'd requested; she'd only asked for it because she needed something to preserve her research cover, but it's a self-published history of the university written by someone who was a professor here in the '70s and '80s, and it actually looks pretty interesting. As she pages through it, she forgets about ghosts and kisses and everything but the feeling of researching a topic and how good it feels as information unfolds in front of you and you know you're closer to understanding it than you were the day before.
"Cassie?"
Apparently she also forgets that Dean said he'd be here not long after the reading room opened. "Dean!"
"Nice chair."
"Thanks," she says, leaning back in the chair, hoping the pose shows off her figure and doesn't highlight every pound she's gained since college (which isn't all that much honestly but she still feels self-conscious about it). "It's the one I always sit in when I come here, unless someone's gotten to it first." He looks really good. A lot older than she remembers him, of course, but then so is everyone else she's seen this weekend. More than that, he just looks a bit worn, but he makes worn look hotter than it has any right to.
"And do you come here often?" He sits down in the chair next to her, the same one he used to have when they were a couple, when their lives were so much simpler. Those were good times.
"Not as often as I'd like," Cassie says, doing her best to summon a flirtatious smile to her face despite all the stress of the last twenty-four hours.
The smile must not be convincing though, because Dean's face rapidly grows more serious. "So, tell me about the ghost you saw."
Right. He's here because she found something in his line of work, not because he wanted to see her. "So one of my journalism professors, Greg Wittenberg, passed away a few weeks back. I got an email from the journalism department—all of us alumni were invited to the funeral—and his classes had really meant a lot to me and I had plenty of leave saved up, so I went ahead and took the time off from work and drove up here."
She keeps telling him the story of what had happened the day after she'd arrived, how she'd been wandering around the journalism building for old time's sake and found an empty classroom that turned out not to be nearly as empty as she expected. Dean taps away on his phone the whole time she's talking and doesn't make eye contact. The librarian looks over at them a few times but Cassie's keeping her voice low (hopefully low enough that he doesn't realize she's talking crazy talk about dead people and ghosts) and nobody else is here, and so he doesn't seem to think it's worth his while to come over and kick them out or tell them to be quiet.
"So yeah, that's about it," she says finally to the top of Dean's head (because he's still staring down at his phone). "He didn't seem...threatening, per se? I mean, I felt scared but that was more because ghosts are scary in general, you know? Well, maybe you don't know, you're probably not scared of ghosts. But the last one I saw—the only one I've ever seen—was the truck that murdered my father."
"Hey, I might be used to ghosts but I still give them healthy respect," Dean says, and finally, finally looks up from his phone and looks her in the eye. "And you have every right to be scared of them, but I promise I'm not going to let you get hurt."
"That's sweet," Cassie says.
"So," Dean says. "I've texted all of that to Sam. The next step in the hunt is just doing a bunch of boring research into Wittenberg's background and the circumstances of his death, which isn't really a two-person job. So even though you and I are both really good at boring research"—he tips his head to indicate the room they're in, where so many hours of both their lives were devoted to that exact thing—"I think we can dump that on Sam for the time being. Which leaves me at loose ends. You got any ideas on how I could kill a few hours?"
Cassie could point out that research would probably go faster if two or three people were working on it instead of just one, but she doesn't. Dean already knows that, after all, no matter what he might claim to the contrary. "I remember killing a lot of hours in this very room," she says. "Do you remember how nice it was just sitting next to each other? We were working on separate things but we weren't alone. That was some of my favorite research I've ever done."
"Mine, too," Dean says. "I was kind of frustrated when my dad gave me that assignment, but by the end of it I was looking forward every day to going to the library. Which, let me tell you, is the only time in my life that I've felt that way about the library."
"What, not today?"
"Okay, maybe today, too." Dean smiles and leans towards her. "You remember a couple of times when the librarian stepped out of the room or we thought it was worth risking her wrath? And we took a tiny little research break for a different sort of fun?"
"What's the worst he can do, kick us out?" Cassie whispers back. "That's not nearly the threat it would have been when we were younger."
"My thoughts exactly," Dean says, and leans forward more, but then he hesitates. "I'm not moving too fast for you, am I?"
"It's not like I've never kissed you before," Cassie says. She touches his cheek and he lets her keep her hand there, stroking the stubble on his jaw. "We can talk later about whether this means anything. For now, I'm having a much better weekend now that I've handed the ghost thing off to someone who knows how to handle it and I don't have to be scared anymore. So I just want to have some fun. Killing time in the O.U. reading room. Just like old times."
"Just like old times," Dean says, and finally crosses the last few inches to kiss her.
Dean's always been good at kissing, and whatever practice he's gotten in the intervening years hasn't dulled his skills at all. It's been a few years since Cassie kissed anyone at all, and longer still since she kissed Dean, but her body remembers right away how this goes. She leans into him, and her hand finds the back of his head and she still remembers that place where his nape is most sensitive and makes him gasp against her mouth as she runs her fingers against the grain of his hair. The years melt away in her memory, and it's almost like being in college again. Those were good times. (Maybe this weekend can be just as good.)
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Summary: The good news is, Dad finally let Dean do a job on his own. The bad news is, it's a dry research job in a windowless library reading room. But Dean will take what he can get…and besides, just because the books in the library are dull doesn't mean the company has to be.
Dean/Cassie, Stanford Era (Athens Era), first meeting like it says on the tin
4k words | rated T | read on AO3
The Archives and Special Collections floor of the Ohio University library requires special permission and paperwork to access it; Dean finds that you can't just walk in like you can the rest of the seven-story building. But the middle-aged librarian guarding the reading room seems bored, like she doesn't get many visitors, and frankly she is absolutely rocking the stereotypical librarian look—sensible heels, glasses that bring out the blue in her eyes, a plain wool sweater that fits her just right in all the right places—so Dean finds it no hardship to flirt with her a bit, enough that she'll remember him when he comes back tomorrow (and every day after that, and isn't Dean just thrilled to be planning on spending most of his April holed up in a windowless library reading room, thanks so much Dad). He figures if she remembers him, maybe she won't feel the need to give his identification as much of a stern onceover as she's doing now. Dean paid a lot of money for that fake ID so that it would be able to stand up to the sort of stare she's giving it, but still he doesn't want to take more chances than he has to. So he compliments her necklace—which is just the right length to land at the perfect point in the V of her sweater and she knows it—and she laughs him off but she's blushing as she hands his fake ID back, and after another minute she rubber stamps his paperwork and lets him into the sanctum sanctorum and she's smiling so as days of staring at books without seeing the sun go, it's not too bad so far.
This early in the morning on a weekend, it doesn't seem like anybody else is interested in doing research. Dean doesn't blame them: he certainly wouldn't be here if Dad hadn't insisted. But Dean's been telling Dad for a while that he can take the training wheels off, he's old enough to work a job on his own, and in return Dad had given him this assignment. Which isn't a job so much as it's just a bunch of dry research, and it isn't even on his own because Dad got the two of them an apartment on the north side of town by the river, and Dad's going to be using that as a home base for an assortment of far more interesting hunts in Pennsylvania and West Virginia (and maybe a few hunts right here in Ohio if Dean unearths some for him) while Dean holes up safe and sound and bored in the library.
But there was one thing that was very clear as Dean read between the lines of the assignment Dad was giving him, and that was that if he failed at this task or he turned it down, then Dad won't get around to letting him do another job on his own until approximately the first of never. Which doesn't seem fair: he's twenty-five, for God's sake. Most guys aren't still under their parents' wings at that age. And sure, Dean knows they aren't most people, and he knows why that is, but it still stings a bit now and then. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks of the whole situation; Dad's a hard man to convince once he's got something in his head, so Dean's got to just take what he can get.
So he goes to a table in the far corner of the room, where he'll be out of the way even if more researchers actually show their faces as the day draws on. One of the chairs is askew; it feels a bit more friendly than the other three that are all hard wood edges pushed tightly against the gloomy wood table. So he pulls that chair the rest of the way out, and sits down, and sets his notebook and pencil down on the table in front of him. And then he waits, as patiently as he knows how. But one of the benefits of being the only person here is that nobody else needs the hot librarian's help, so he doesn't have to wait very long before she's setting down the worn leather journal he'd asked for on the table in front of him with another pink-cheeked smile that Dean lazily returns with barely a thought, already focused on the book in front of him.
The earliest dates in the journal are turn of the century (okay, technically they've recently turned into yet another century—another millennium actually—but even though he's had several years to get used to it, Dean still feels weird that the year doesn't start with a 1 anymore, so as far as he's concerned the turn of the century still counts as back in 1900). But even though the paper has to be even more than a century old, it's good quality and doesn't flake apart as he pages carefully through it.
According to Dad's preliminary research, Warren Grafton's prime hunting years were between 1910 and '20, but Dad wants Dean to go through the entire thing, even before Grafton moved to Ohio. He'd gone into his whole spiel about being thorough and dealing with things properly the first time so you don't have to go back and mop up after your mistakes, but Dean's already heard that same speech on a variety of hunts so he'd tuned him out pretty quick. If Dad wants this done so bad, why can't he do it? (Probably because he'd be just as bored by the whole situation as Dean is, but unlike Dean, he has the authority to do something about that.
Dean's up to 1902 now, squinting at the cramped old-fashioned handwriting. He spots the word "spirit" halfway down the page, and reaches for his own notebook (just a cardboard-bound spiral thing from the college bookstore, nothing so fancy as Dad's or Grafton's journals) to transcribe the sparse details provided about the hunt in question. This one is from back when Grafton was in New York, so Dean doesn't need to do anything beyond just writing it down. Once he gets to the Ohio hunts, he's going to need to cross-reference them with the newspaper archives, which is going to be a pain.
He finishes noting down the few details of the New York ghost hunt and keeps going.
By the time he's ready for an early lunch, he's halfway through 1905. He gets permission from the librarian to leave his notebook and the journal there on the table, and heads out for just long enough to get a sandwich from the café across the quad and to text Dad with a report talking up how much progress he's already made. (Dad doesn't reply, but then, he rarely does. Hopefully he at least read it.)
Then it's back to the grindstone. The reading room is still empty except for Dean and the librarian, and stays that way until May 1906. (The journal is slower going now, with an entry every couple of days instead of one or two a month.) Then the automatic door slides open and Dean immediately glances up, because his eyes desperately need a break from Warren Grafton's enthusiastically loopy cursive. The newcomer looks about the right age to be a student here, and she's got a backpack as overloaded as any of the college students' Dean had seen on campus, but below it she's wearing a leather jacket that really compliments her svelte figure. Which is gorgeous, and Dean really hopes she's going to take the backpack off because it's making her hunch over a bit and her jacket is bunched up in a few places, and if she looks this good while lugging around twenty pounds of textbooks, she's going to look even more awesome when she takes it off.
She exchanges a quick smile and a nod with the librarian, who has obviously seen her before because she doesn't ask for ID. Then the newcomer heads straight for Dean's table, even though there's three others in the room that are all completely empty. She's probably seen Dean staring, and he turns back to his research in a hurry, though he can't help keeping an eye on her out of the corner of his eye. "You're in my seat," she snaps, sliding that heavy backpack off of her shoulders and letting it fall onto the table right next to Warren Grafton's journal.
Dean leans back in his chair and makes eye contact before rolling his eyes and giving a slow obvious gaze around the rest of the room. There are literally three other tables, with more than a dozen other chairs, in this room, and every single one of them is empty except for Dean's. Then he turns back to her (her mouth is gorgeous this close up, lower lip all plush and covered in the sort of glossy stuff that makes a mess but would be totally worth it). He raises an eyebrow, not bothering to voice the obvious question.
She huffs and pulls the chair next to him out from the table; when she flounces into it, her gorgeous curly hair bounces a bit. "I always sit there," she adds. The gaze of her deep brown eyes is so steady, it feels like she could look right through him.
"Well, sorry, sweetheart," Dean says, hoping she didn't notice how much he was staring at her mouth. "I guess you forgot to write your name on it."
That earns him an eye-roll but he's pretty sure he glimpsed the corners of her mouth starting to curve up before she turned away, standing up to fetch some books from the bookcase along the wall. Her curls bounce fetchingly as she piles the books in her arms. Dean debates whether to offer to help with them—like, she was flirting by sitting down next to him, wasn't she? Or was she just that frustrated to find someone in her usual seat? Dean had just thought the pulled-out chair was more convenient, it's not like the chair was giving off has-recently-been-sat-in-by-a-hot-coed vibes or anything. He's still lost in thought, Grafton's journal lying open on the table in front of him, and then the curls bounce one last time and she sits back down in that same chair right next to Dean. Is it his imagination, or did she scoot it over a few inches closer?
"So what are you working on?" Dean asks with a lazy grin. She opens her notebook—a spiral one like his own, but with a pretty cover so she probably picked it out special and didn't just grab whatever the college bookstore had. She's keeping her head down, avoiding eye contact, but she's smiling enough that Dean doesn't think she minds the question. "I'm working on a book," Dean volunteers, which is a lie but he can't exactly tell her the truth. "Looking at contributions of immigrants to Ohio around the turn of the century."
She looks up at him then, and Dean just knows she's about to tell him all about her project (and smart girls like that just love to talk about things they're working on...it doesn't even take any talking to get an in with a girl like that as long as you're honestly truly willing to listen to them talk, which is easy because there's nothing much hotter than listening to a smart girl talk about smart nerd stuff, no matter whether Dean understands what she's talking about or not). But then the librarian shows up with a pile of old books that she sets down in front of the girl before shushing Dean firmly. Dean always thought getting shushed by a librarian would be kind of hot, especially when she's as much of a looker as this one is. But Dean's way more interested in the girl next to him now, so the only emotion he experiences at the librarian's forceful whisper is frustration.
But if he gets himself kicked out, not only will he not be able to finish the Grafton project (which Dad would not be happy about at all), but the girl next to him looks like the type who probably spends all her spare time here (after all, she's been here enough to have decided she has a claim to one particular chair) so it's not like that would help him get to know her better anyway. So Dean shrugs, and doesn't roll his eyes at the maybe-not-so-hot-after-all librarian until she's turned away to return to her desk at the front of the room. The girl next to Dean sees, though; she gives him a glance that attempts to look stern, but her deep brown eyes are dancing with amusement so Dean's pretty sure she doesn't actually disapprove.
The librarian is back at her desk now, and the pretty girl has opened one of the books without saying anything. Dean tries to go back to the Grafton journal, but it's harder to get his head around Grafton's messy cursive now that he's taken a break. Dean reads the entry from May 20, 1906 three times and barely understands a word of it. He looks back up, just to give his eyes a break, and the girl is looking at him.
"I'm Cassie," she whispers. "I'm writing my senior thesis. History of Ohio news reporting in the nineteenth century." There's a slight noise from the librarian's desk and Cassie cuts off quickly, glancing towards the front of the room and then right back again once she's confirmed that the librarian isn't glaring at her. She bends her head to her book again.
"So why news reporting?" Dean asks, also in a whisper. "Is that something you're interested in or just something your advisor picked for you?"
"What makes you think I'd tell that to someone who stole my chair?" she asks without looking up from her book. She's grinning broadly, and Dean starts to think that maybe it wouldn't be that awful to get kicked out of the library for whispering too loudly if it means getting to talk to her more.
He's momentarily tempted to call her bluff and hand over the chair she keeps asking for, but on the other hand, that would be giving up his one advantage and he doesn't want to do that too quickly. So he leans back in the chair, settling his shoulders more firmly against the backrest, and strokes the armrest in a way that he hopes shows off his hands without being, like, creepy or anything. "It's a good chair," he whispers.
She huffs and puts a hand over her mouth to conceal how much he's totally making her smile. Dean wishes he could tell if she's blushing too, but her smooth skin, which he really wants to touch to find out if it's as soft as it looks, is a bit too dark to show a blush easily. Dean on the other hand is probably going to start blushing really soon if he's not careful, and there's no way Cassie won't notice if he does because she seems really sharp. But she also seems to be firmly ensconced in her book again, so Dean lets himself look at her for another few seconds, because why not? Eventually, he drags himself away and settles down with the May 20th entry once again, promising himself that this time the cursive won't get the better of him no matter how tangled it is.
He makes it through the end of May before looking up again. Cassie's still staring down at her book, but Dean caught a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye, like maybe she glanced away from him right before he looked at her. Dean turns quickly back to the journal so she won't catch him staring if she looks back his way. He can feel his cheeks heating, which feels like an overreaction considering this is just some random girl who's barely said a few words to him, but then there's something special about her.
And the one good thing about Dad giving him a boring weeks-long assignment is, he has time to get to know her properly, if she'll have him. None of his usual thing where he's leaving town the next day so nothing he does matters and either whatever girl he finds is on the same page about having a good time for one night or she's not, but either way he'll never see her again. This time is different. Cassie is different. He's not quite sure how different yet, but he just knows that he desperately wants to know everything about her, not just the things that one stranger tells another. He even wants to know all about Ohio news reporting in the nineteenth century, and he's literally never spared a thought for that before in his life.
He glances back up, and once again he's pretty sure that she looked away just a moment earlier. On the page in front of him, Warren Grafton is making oblique references to a ghost over in Cincinnati, and Dean ought to be paying more attention to it (although for now he just has to copy it out; the specific details won't matter until he goes to verify everything, which he is not looking forward to but at least that's not for a while yet) but he feels like he could stare at Cassie forever.
He can't make up his mind whether he ought to try to find a book about the history of news reporting in Ohio and read up on it so that he'll know the basics of what she's talking about when he asks her more about her thesis, or whether she'd probably rather tell him all about it. It's not like the average person on the street knows much about the history of reporting, do they? So she's probably used to starting at square one when she tells people about it. Dean barely spares any thoughts for the words he's writing out as he copies out the details about Grafton's poltergeist; he can always check them later when he goes to check newspaper articles from the month in question. If Cassie is used to telling people about her thesis, though, maybe she's tired of talking about it. Maybe he ought to ask her about something else.
This really shouldn't be this hard; Dean knows how to talk to girls. But he just doesn't want to screw this one up.
The automatic glass door slides open and someone else comes into the reading room. Dean keeps looking at the journal (just in case Cassie looks up to see the newcomer, he doesn't want her to catch him staring) but he can hear the librarian murmuring as she presumably asks what books they need or whatever. The footsteps don't come any closer, and out of the corner of his eye Dean can see that there's now a man sitting at one of the other tables. Because that's what normal people do when there's plenty of tables in a room with almost no people. Good thing Dean's never been particularly interested in normal. (He wonders if the guy thinks Dean and Cassie are together, since they're sitting right next to each other. Dean suddenly really, really hopes the guy thinks that, because if Dean's not the only person thinking it then that makes it somehow the tiniest bit more real, doesn't it?)
Grafton must have lost the pen he'd been using at first and had to get a new one. Or, wait, he's probably using a fountain pen, so did he just refill it with different ink or something? Well, regardless, the new ink sucks. It's faded much worse than the earlier entries and Dean has to sound out each word one by one—especially since Grafton's handwriting still sucks, too, and half the time he seems to be on a train when he's writing entries—and it's an absolute slog because three quarters of the time the entry isn't even about anything interesting once he finally figures out what the hell Grafton is going on about.
He is so ready for dinner. But next to him, Cassie is working her way through some old book of her own (though at least hers isn't handwritten) and she doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, and if Dean leaves now he's worried that somehow he'll never see her again. And besides, she claims to want his chair more than she wants him, and so it feels a bit like admitting defeat to abandon the field of battle and leave the spoils to the victor (even if the spoils are merely a wooden chair that he only cares about because the gorgeous girl next to him cares about it). So he tells himself he's not that hungry, really, and he keeps reading. By this point, he's going ten minutes or more between portions of the journal that he actually needs to copy out, but Grafton was writing in his journal every single day at this point (and all with that same pen with the rotten ink) so Dean is still stuck in 1906 and seems likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.
"Hey, chair thief," Cassie whispers. "You forgot to tell me your name."
"Maybe I just didn't want to test whether the librarian has the authority to ban me permanently if I break the rules about talking," Dean whispers back. "This is the only place that has the resources I need for my book." He grins. "I'm Dean, by the way."
"Well, Dean," Cassie replies, still in a whisper (and Dean thinks his name sounds amazing in her mouth), "I think having a different chair is slowing me down because I'm still not done with the section I'd hoped to finish today. I think you ought to make that up to me somehow."
"It's a little late to switch chairs."
"I know. That might have helped earlier, but by this point I think you need to do something more substantial."
There's a rustle from the front of the room as the librarian gets up from her desk, and Dean exchanges a quick panicked glance with Cassie before they both quickly bend back to their books in silence. But it's a false alarm: the librarian stays on the other side of the room, moving a few piles of books around, and doesn't come shush them or tell them off. So Dean decides it's worth risking a little bit more whispering, even though he knows Dad would not be happy if he ends up having to go through Grafton's journal himself because Dean got himself banned from the library or whatever. "If I brought you dinner, would that be enough to fix the situation?"
She smiles broadly, eyes dancing mischievously. "It might. And discussing the situation over dinner will give us plenty of time to determine whether further reparations are in order. Like, I might need somebody to walk me home since I'm out so much later than I planned."
"I'm ready for dinner now," Dean whispers, making a note of what entry he's leaving off at since he obviously can't leave a bookmark in the journal. "So if you want to come along, I'd enjoy the company. Though I suppose that means I'll be leaving your chair unoccupied, so if you want, you can stay here and steal it back."
"Maybe I don't care that much about the chair," she says archly, and closes her book. "Dinner would be lovely, thank you."
At the front of the room, the librarian clears her throat—Cassie's kind of been letting the whispering thing slip—but by this point Dean's finding it really hard to care whether he gets banned from the library. When it comes to Grafton's messy loopy scrawl or Cassie's bouncy loopy hair, he knows which one he'd rather be looking at, and it's the one he's looking down at right now as he pulls Cassie's chair out for her and follows her out of the reading room. Right now, Dean doesn't mind at all being stuck in Ohio for the next few weeks. He's just glad he has an excuse to stick around.
Summary: A year after Cassie last saw Dean Winchester, she gets an unsigned letter in the mail. Normally she wouldn't permanently mark her body on the say-so of a letter with no return address and no way to ask questions...but, well, she trusts Dean and feels sure he has a good reason. (But that doesn't mean she's about to just ignore her curiosity about this symbol, even if Dean does say she'd be safer if she stays out of things.)
2k words | rated T | read on AO3
It's been a year since Dean Winchester drove out of her life, and yet Cassie still recognizes his handwriting instantly when the letter with no return address shows up in the mail. He didn't sign it, either, which is probably for the best because these days, when she googles his name, more and more wanted posters show up. (Even the murder charges don't phase her, though; Dean proved himself trustworthy last year—he came when she called and it turned out he'd never lied to her, not about anything—and she doesn't plan to stop trusting him any time soon.) But she doesn't know what all Dean might be mixed up in these days, so she makes sure to take the mail inside and bolt the front door shut before slitting the envelope open.
Two pieces of paper fall out. One is a short letter, also unsigned but in that handwriting that she would know anywhere, after any amount of time had passed. The other is a drawing, a simple black-and-white design of a five-pointed star inside a circle of flames. It's not a symbol Cassie's ever seen before. She sets it aside and picks up the letter.
Hey Cassie,
I hope you're alright. I promise I'm not trying to push my way back into your life but I wanted to warn you about something. I probably shouldn't give you all the details because you're safely out of it all and I don't want to drag you into a mess you don't deserve, but you should get a tattoo of this symbol. It's a safety thing. I don't think anyone would come after you (Sam's the only person in my life who even knows you exist and he wouldn't risk your safety any more than I would) but if someone did and I left you unprotected I couldn't forgive myself.
There's another short line below that but it's scribbled out. Cassie thinks it might say "I miss you" but maybe she's just deluding herself. After all, she misses him; she hadn't realized it, hadn't even really thought about Dean very much over the last year (mainly because it hurts a lot to think about him, even though it's a different sort of pain than it had been over the previous year, after they'd broken up but before she'd realized he'd been lying). But now as she touches the piece of paper that he'd touched, all that longing comes flooding back.
She crinkles the rough motel notepaper between her fingers. She's never gotten a tattoo before; there's never been anything she felt strongly enough about to be worth permanently modifying her body. She doesn't like pain, either, and as she pushes away those initial thoughts of Dean (and his mouth on hers, his hands on her back, and oh she misses him so) and thinks about what the letter had actually said, her first inclination is that she really doesn't feel like getting a tattoo. She's experiencing equal parts fear and frustration, that she doesn't want to put herself through that pain but also why does her ex-boyfriend who hasn't spoken to her in a year think he has the right to send her an anonymous letter insisting that she mark herself with a symbol that certainly doesn't fit her aesthetic. What right does Dean—Dean who used to have permission to touch her and to hold her and to love her, and she knows that if he came back she'd let him do all those things again in a heartbeat—what right does he have to tell her what to do with her body now that he's left her behind?
But of course she knows it's not about control, that he has good reasons to ask this of her. And now all the memories of their relationship are flooding back, and Cassie can't deny that Dean's presence in her life has had far more permanent effects than just surface marks on skin, no matter what those marks look like. If she'd never met Dean, she might be grieving both her parents now, and who knows how many other people from her community—or she might just be dead, tattoo-less skin cremated into ash with the rest of her after her father's murderer killed her too. So in the greater scheme of things, what do a few lines on her skin really matter? Besides, there's so many good memories from her senior year, of joy and belonging, and doesn't every relationship leave the people in it different than they were before they met? So why not have a physical reminder to go along with it?
Besides, Dean wouldn't have asked this of her if it weren't important.
She waits till the next time she's going shopping up in St. Louis. This tattoo is just for her, and she doesn't want anyone in town knowing about it, whether they'd think differently of her or not. The artist seems bored when she shows him the photo of what she wants (she left the paper Dean sent her locked in her desk at home, just in case); he asks her if she's sure she doesn't want any colors or more details or maybe stick a flower in there, and a multitude of other suggestions until Cassie finally cuts him off with "Just exactly like in the picture, please." He does a good job, though, quick and competent, and it doesn't hurt as much as Cassie worried it might.
She gets to peek at it there in the shop, to make sure he got the lines right (they look close enough as far as Cassie can tell, though she's never had a particularly strong eye for art; her specialty has always been words). Then the artist bandages it up with Tegaderm and some other stuff Cassie's never heard of, and she keeps it covered up for the rest of her shopping trip and for the week that follows, until it's finished with the initial healing. There's no further word from Dean. She wonders if he wonders whether she got the tattoo. She's not sure whether she'd rather if he assumed that of course she would understand that it was important and do what he said; or if maybe he's out there somewhere terribly nervous because he assumes that she threw the letter in the trash (after all, he didn't even say please) and remained unprotected from whatever unknown danger this symbol is supposed to protect her from.
Once a week has passed, she finally takes off the covering and looks at this newest addition to her body. She's locked up everything that Dean sent her in the bottom of a drawer in her desk, and so the little circle of flames on her hip is the only indication that the whole thing wasn't some sort of absurd dream. It itches a bit, though not as bad (yet, she warns herself) as the artist had warned her it might. She runs her fingers along her hip bone, tracing the circle. She can't quite stop herself from imagining that it's Dean's hand there, gently caressing the marks that he had asked (told) her to put on her skin. She wonders if he has one just like it, and where it is. He hadn't had any tattoos when she'd known him, or if he had he'd hid them very very well. She thinks a tattoo would look good on him, dark ink spilling over pale skin on his...well, somewhere, she's not really sure where on his body to picture it. Somewhere hidden, definitely. Would he have put it on his hip, like her? She runs her fingers over her hip bone again, imagining Dean's fingers in place of her own, not pressing hard enough to hurt, but firmly enough that she couldn't forget he was there.
Does she even really remember what his touch felt like anymore? It's been a whole year. She can imagine that the fingers on her hips are Dean's, but perhaps that's only because she's forgotten what they truly feel like, that she's only deluding herself when she imagines that her hands are anything like his. His hands are strong and sturdy. And probably dirty and bloodstained too, but perfect nonetheless and she wishes they were here on her body right now.
She takes a photo of her hip and texts it to the last number she had for Dean. She hasn't heard anything from him since the day he drove away from Cape Girardeau, and although she waits patiently he doesn't reply to this text either. She hopes he received it at least, that maybe that little glimpse of her skin reminded him of what he's missing. (Who is she fooling? He probably lost that phone or threw it away months ago. She just hopes the number hasn't been reassigned to anyone else, but if so they at least have the politeness to just ignore the suggestive photo instead of dumping cold water on her with a "wrong number" text.)
She wonders what the significance of this symbol is. Now that she'll be carrying it on her body for the rest of her life, she figures she has a right to wonder about something like that. Sure, Dean said he didn't want her to get mixed up in whatever situation the symbol has to do with, but then Dean gave up the right to tell her what to do a long time ago. (She'd done her best to make him think he'd never had that right at all because she was an independent woman and he was her boyfriend of barely more than a month at most—but if she's honest with herself, she'd always trusted him enough to listen when he asked her to do something. And here she is permanently altering a part of herself just because Dean sent her an unsigned note, so she has to admit she still grants him that right more than she might try to tell herself she does.)
She's not entirely certain how best to go about finding out more when all she has is a symbol. There's no text she can just google, and using image search ("circle star flames", "star inside a circle supernatural") to look for anything that might resemble it only turns up a couple of paranoid-sounding blogs full of all-caps ranting. She bookmarks them to take a closer look at later (maybe they'll at least help her generate some better keywords she can use for future googling) but they don't seem particularly informative at first glance.
She doubts Dean would respond if she texted or called him, considering his letter—besides its lack of signature—didn't provide an address or a new phone number or any way of contacting him at all. But on the bright side, that means it's going to be a bit harder for him to talk her out of doing this. She's a journalist: she's supposed to be curious. And supernatural things have already stolen her dad from her, so no matter what Dean says about "I don't want to drag you into a mess" she's already in that mess, has been since the day her dad died and always will be.
Cape Girardeau's library is nothing much to speak of, and besides she already went looking there for information about supernatural things last year and found nothing. The state's best libraries are all up in St. Louis, with a much bigger public library system but a sizable university library as well. She thinks she'll drive up there again sometime soon, next time she has a free weekend. Because why not? Dean tells her she's safely out of it all, but is she really? When her mother still cries herself to sleep almost every night, and when Cassie herself just got a strange symbol permanently etched into her skin to protect herself from some unknown threat. And if she's not really safely away, then isn't the best way to be safe to learn even more about what she's facing?
There's a dangerous world out there. Dean had tried to pull himself away from it once, when he'd dated her, and obviously that hadn't worked. Now Cassie is beginning to think that hiding from that world isn't working for her any more than it worked for him. She wants to know more. She needs to know more.
She traces a finger—no fantasies of Dean this time, just her own small index finger, slim but unyielding—over the marks on her hip. She's going to know, and that's a promise.
Summary: Cassie's really proud that she managed to subtly find out what Dean's favorite dessert is. She's never made pie before, but how bad can it be?
Dean/Cassie, Athens Era (Stanford Era), one-month anniversary
2k words | rated T | read on AO3
In almost four whole years of living in the dorms, this is somehow the very first time Cassie has set foot in any of the dorm kitchens. She knows she has every right to—she pays the same rent as anybody else, after all—but she's just been busy. Her journalism professors are very demanding: it's the good sort of demanding, where she knows they're preparing her well for her future, but still their classes take a lot of her time. And last year she decided to switch her English minor to a full second major, so that's been taking a lot of time too.
To be honest, she probably doesn't have time for a relationship on top of all that, but Dean is sweet and thoughtful and pretty much the best thing to happen to her all year, so she's been making time anyway. And today is their one month anniversary (of both their first meeting and their first date—they'd moved fast, which Cassie doesn't regret one bit). So she figures today is worth taking just a little bit more time away from her studies. Not much time—she's got her creative writing textbook and her laptop on the counter so she can work on homework as soon as this goes in the oven—but still she can spare just enough time to do something special.
Because of the whole pressed-for-time thing, she didn't do as much research for this project as she'd like, but that's not unusual for her. She's always been the sort to over-research things, preferring not to start them until she knows everything there could possibly be to know about them. (Dean's a good match for her that way; he's the only person she knows who spends as much time in the library archives as she does.) But since she didn't have enough time to learn how to do this properly, and she's only going to have one try to get it right, she settled for buying premade pie crust. All of her research established that pie crust is persnickety, and since Cassie hasn't baked since high school (and she had her mom looking over her shoulder then), she doesn't want to take unnecessary risks.
She's not entirely sure whether these two pie crusts are actually supposed to be used together (one came in a tin, which seemed like a lifesaver at the time because she didn't own a pie tin, while the other came all rolled up in a box and she can't seem to convince it to lie flat), but she's too committed to stop now. She told Dean to be here in an hour and it's going to take almost all of that time to bake. She pours the filling in as soon as it's hot, without leaving it to cook as long as the instructions say. Then she's fighting with that ridiculous top crust that's already half rolled up on itself in the five minutes since she let go of it. She's supposed to flute the edges together somehow, but the edges on the premade crust come pre-fluted and after a few minutes of flailing she hasn't gotten them to stick together at all but has spent a lot of time handling the crust with warm frustrated fingers which is exactly what all the books said is the worst thing you can do to pie crust. So she just chucks some aluminum foil around the edges (which she read a tip about in another of the cookbooks she was using for research, and it makes her feel a bit less of a novice if she's using a trick that even some experienced bakers probably don't know) and presses on the foil a bit until it feels like maybe some of it is maybe sort of stuck together. And hopefully not completely ruined by all the heat from her fingers.
She hopes Dean likes berries. She'd been quite proud of how subtly she'd raised the topic of their favorite desserts, and she hadn't wanted to ruin it by demanding what kind of pie he liked when all he ever said was that he liked pie (he had repeated this and rephrased it several times, because apparently it was a big thing for him and he really liked it, but in none of those statements had he gotten more specific than just "pie"). She'd figured that a mixed berry pie was about as stereotypically "pie" as one could get, so if he didn't like it, he should have said so. And it took a lot less work than apple or any of the other platonic ideals of pie that she could think of, because she just had to buy a bag of frozen fruit in the same grocery store trip as when she'd bought the crusts.
And besides, it's in the oven now, for better or for worse, so there's no use doubting herself now. Dean's going to appreciate her thoughtfulness and effort because he's the sort of guy who pays attention to that kind of thing. And he's going to love the pie, because hey, it's pie, how bad can it be?
And in the meantime, she has a creative writing assignment to complete (the second to last for this quarter, thank goodness—the main thing she's learned in this class is that she definitely prefers nonfiction writing) and her boyfriend is going to be here in an hour. So she's going to sit back, and enjoy smelling her pie as it bakes, and finish the only assignment she has due before the weekend, so that when Dean gets here she can enjoy their anniversary date with a clean conscience.
~~~
Something smells amazing.
Dean's been to a lot of places around Ohio University over the last month, but he's never been to the kitchen in Cassie's dorm, and he's beginning to think he really should have. It's kind of a small drab room, but it smells like heaven, and there's the girl he loves right in the middle of it, smiling up at him. So it's basically perfect.
"Hey, sweetheart," he says, pulling out the other chair at the table and dropping into it. "How's your day?"
Cassie closes her laptop. "Better now you're here," she says. "I've decided I hate creative writing."
"Aw, but you're such a creative person!"
"I thought I was, but every time I try to write a story it feels like every bit of that creativity just suddenly drains away, and all I'm left with is the most boring version of myself. But I've got something I'm halfway happy with and that will just have to be good enough, because I don't want to have to think about it anymore tonight."
"So does that mean you're going to tell me what smells so good?"
Cassie looks at her watch. "Not for three more minutes," she says, leaning towards him. "Got any ideas on how we could kill time till then?"
"I might have a few," Dean says, and kisses her.
It feels like it's only about ten seconds later when the alarm on her watch goes off, and Cassie pulls away.
"Can't that wait another minute?" Dean asks, fingers still threaded through her curls, though as Cassie keeps backing up, he lets go so that he won't accidentally tug on them and hurt her.
"Nope, I've got to check on this," Cassie says, but the laughter in her eyes makes him sure that she'll come back to pick up where they left off just as soon as she can. In the meantime, he watches as she pulls oversized oven mitts onto her hands and opens the oven door, leaning fetchingly over it to retrieve whatever it is that smells so good. "Oh," she says as she retrieves a pan, and all the joy is suddenly gone from her voice. "It's—oh."
Dean rushes to her side. She's staring down at what once must have been a pie, but is now blackened beyond all recognition. "You made me a pie?" Dean exclaims. No one's ever made him a pie before. Cassie is awesome.
"I guess the oven must not work right," Cassie says. She's set the pie on top of the stove but she's still staring at it all downcast and she sounds like she might cry. "I've heard the other girls complain about the kitchen, but I thought they just meant people leaving dirty dishes in here and that there's not enough counter space. I didn't know they meant—" She sniffles. "Or maybe I just did it wrong."
"No, it's definitely the oven," Dean says, and starts rubbing her shoulders. "It just can't deal with the awesomeness of you and pie combined. And who can blame it? I mean, having pie and my girlfriend in the same room? That's never happened to me before and I already think it's awesome. And I haven't even tasted the pie yet."
He was hoping the encouragement might help stave off Cassie's disappointment, but it's not enough and she bursts into tears. "And you're not going to," she says. "It's ruined."
"It's still pie, isn't it?" Dean says, keeping one hand on her shoulders and moving the other one up to massage her neck. "Yeah, the crust has seen better days but I bet the inside's still good."
"You don't have to say that just to make me feel better," Cassie says, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan.
"I love pie too much to lie to you, sweetheart."
Cassie leans back against his hands a bit, and he keeps moving, stroking her shoulders and neck, then moving further up and tracing the delicate shell of her ears—so perfectly shaped and soft under her hands, just like the rest of Cassie. She's still sniffling a bit, but her head's up again, no longer downcast and dejected. She's too strong to let anything throw her for long. She would have made a good hunter that way, though Dean would never, ever want to drag her down into that muck with him.
"I just wanted to do something to make our anniversary special," Cassie says quietly, turning towards him to nestle herself more snuggly in the circle of his arms.
Dean's first reaction is It's our anniversary??? but he manages not to blurt that out. He's never had an anniversary before. What are you supposed to do on an anniversary—gifts? Cassie obviously thought it was a good occasion for special food, which Dean didn't think to bring any of. Dad mostly spends his own anniversary getting drunk and staring off into space, which Dean's sure is definitely not what you're supposed to do in the kind of situation he's in now. Also he's quite certain that a crying girlfriend is also something you don't want on an anniversary, so he's got to do something to fix that. "That's great," he says, since he's got to say something. "I really appreciate it, and I'm sorry it didn't go the way you planned. What do you say we open it up and eat the filling? It smells amazing, how bad can it be?"
"Sure, let's do that," Cassie says, with only a slight quaver in her voice. "It'll be kind of like a cobbler or a crisp."
Dean actually hasn't had either of those desserts before, but he figures if they're anything like pie, they must be good. "Yeah."
Cassie gets bowls and forks from the cupboard and doesn't cry anymore, because she's tough like that. She's softer and gentler than anyone else in Dean's life, but she's got just as much of a backbone as any of them. How'd he end up so lucky as to end up with a girl as awesome as her? And for a whole month too, he's still not quite sure how that happened.
He doesn't want to stop at just a month. He wants a year, maybe even a lifetime with her. He still doesn't really know how the whole being-in-a-relationship thing works, but he wants to learn it with her.
"Here," Cassie says, handing him a bowl of juicy cooked berries with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. "Happy anniversary, Dean."
"Happy anniversary, Cassie," Dean says, gazing into those beautiful eyes. He takes a bite, and he was right—the filling turned out absolutely delicious, the cooked berries bursting with bright flavor. It's as good as most pies he's had before, even without the crust. Maybe better, because all those pies were made in bulk and bought at a store or restaurant. This one was made especially for him. He has a girl who cares enough about him to make him pie. That's amazing. He takes another bite of the juicy filling, watching as the hot berries slowly melt the ice cream in his bowl and paint it with vivid purples and reds. It just might be the best thing he's ever tasted.
It tastes even better a few minutes later, when he's kissing it off of Cassie's lips. He could get used to this, he really could.
Summary: Cassie learned to hunt when she was growing up, but her parents don't want her to follow in their risk-taking footsteps, and she tells herself she's fine with leaving that life behind. When she meets a cute guy in the library during her first week of classes, she hopes for a nice normal romance (but when is anything ever that simple?)
Dean/Cassie, Athens/Stanford Era-ish, role reversal AU
3.4k words | rated T | read on AO3
Cassie doesn't have any assignments yet, but she heads straight for the library anyway, as soon as she's gotten through new student orientation and finished her first day of classes. Her parents are spending a lot of money for her to be here, and she wants to make the most of it.
She hasn't asked where the money came from, and she's not going to. Hunting doesn't pay well (it doesn't pay, period). Dad's best friend Clayton—who knows far too many of their secrets—has been happy to give Mom and Dad part-time work at his car dealership whenever they're in town for long enough (and not too bashed up by their latest run-in with a ghost or a werewolf). But Cassie's pretty sure part-time work doesn't even support a family in the style that Mom and Dad have managed, much less cover college tuition.
Honestly, there's a lot of things in her parents' pasts, not just their sources of income, that Cassie's parents don't want her asking too many questions about. (Too bad they raised a daughter who just loves asking questions.) They got their start in lawbreaking early, convincing a sympathetic pastor to marry them in 1963 when interracial relationships wouldn't be legal in Missouri until four years later; and ever since then they've continued to be far more concerned about what's right than about what's legal.
It was only a couple of months after they'd gotten married when the ghost of Cyrus Dorian (Mom's ex-boyfriend, whose death is another question Cassie's parents shy away from) had started causing problems. After a few days of terror, Mom had gotten the idea to call Dad's mom's sister, Cassie's great-aunt Elda, who knew what was what (she'd dated a hunter once, but more immediately applicable was the fact that she knew quite a bit of hoodoo). Elda had driven up to Missouri and helped them solve their murderous ghost problem, and after that, Cassie's parents had wanted to help others in the same way. Or at least, that's the way they've always told the story to Cassie, who wasn't even born for more than a decade afterwards (once they'd settled down enough from hunting that they were ready to live in one place and raise a family). They're probably still keeping plenty of secrets in the cracks in between the words they do tell her. They've always wanted her to be safe.
Which is why, even though they taught her how to hunt, they don't want her to be a hunter. Dad was very firm about that. He and Mom have taken a lot of risks in their lives and they don't want their only child to do the same. Cassie would be annoyed, except that she knows how much they love her, and she can see how hard they're trying, what with paying for her college and letting her major in whatever she wants and all. So she's going to give this her best shot. She's going to take a full load every quarter, and hopefully double major (except she can't decide between English or history for a second major so for now she's only declared journalism) and she's absolutely not going to go looking for any hunts.
But it doesn't mean she can't go looking for other ways to spend her time. The library is mostly deserted, probably because nobody has any assignments yet and they're not all tryhards with nothing better to do with their time, like she is. There's a lot of study tables on this floor, almost all of them empty, but she heads for one that's occupied. Just because she's planning on filling up every free moment with classes and schoolwork doesn't mean she can't try to make friends along the way as well. The guy she's interrupting probably doesn't have any assignments due immediately either, so hopefully he'll have time to chat—and he's very good looking. Cassie sets her bag down on the table next to him. "Hi, I'm Cassie. Mind if I sit here?"
He's even cuter when he looks up and smiles at her. "'Course. I'm Dean."
"Nice to meet you," Cassie says, sliding into the chair closest to him. "I'm a freshman, majoring in journalism. Well, news writing and editing specifically." It's the classic college student introduction and she's got it down to a science by now; she's only been here since Friday and she's already said something along those lines close to a hundred times.
"I'm a freshman too," Dean says. "Undeclared." He sounds like it's nowhere near the first time he's said it, either. He leans back a bit in his chair and looks at her, still with that gorgeous smile. "It's not like I'm just undecided between two options either, I really don't know what I want to do so I'm just taking general ed classes for my first year or two."
"That sounds like a good plan," Cassie says. "My advisor in high school said that if you didn't know what you wanted to do in college, it was best to take some time off, but that if that didn't work for you, then starting with filling the G.E. requirements at least you can figure out if you click with any of them and want to learn more."
"That's what I'm hoping will happen," Dean says. "Hopefully once I'm a year or two in I'll have a better idea of whether I want to stick around. I'm not sure I'm really the college type, but my brother wouldn't let me hear the end of it until I agreed to go. And he's in college too now, so I don't need to be at home looking after him anymore."
Cassie gives him an encouraging smile and starts taking her notebooks out of her bag so it looks like she's actually here to study and not just like she has no idea what else to do with herself. "So are you close in age? Since you're both starting college around the same time."
Dean gives her another lazy grin, the kind that she's pretty sure means he's as interested in getting to know her more as she is him. "Nah, I stayed at home for a few years after I finished high school. My dad's kind of a mess, so I needed to stick around and look after my brother."
"I'm sure he appreciated that," Cassie says, though she's generally heard that teenagers aren't as appreciative as they ought to be. She wouldn't know; she's never had siblings. She always thought the idea of having a little brother or sister sounded really nice. But Mom and Dad got so freaked out at the idea of merely keeping one daughter safe from all the creepy things that go bump in the night, and they hadn't wanted to increase their risk by having another one. Either that, or Mom had just been too old by the time they'd decided to risk having kids at all. Or maybe both. It's hard to get a straight answer out of them; they have too much practice lying about their less legal activities to be able to turn those instincts off completely, even when talking to their daughter.
Dean is turning a pencil over and over in his hands. "I hope so," he says eventually.
"So is he here, too, or did he go somewhere else?"
Dean grins wider at this. "Wiz kid got himself a full ride to Stanford."
"That's fantastic! What about you, you didn't want to go somewhere closer to him?"
"Nah, I only applied to schools in the Midwest. Like I said, my dad's got some health problems, and I didn't want to leave him completely alone. I'd hoped to stay a bit closer than this—we're from Kansas—but Ohio's still close enough that I can drive home in a day, and they gave me the best scholarship."
"It's a good distance, isn't it?" Cassie agrees. "I'm from Missouri. I think Mom and Dad wanted me to stay closer where they could keep an eye on me...I'm an only child and they're having a bit of trouble getting used to an empty nest." It's harder because they know what sort of dangers lurk out there for the unsuspecting to stumble upon. They've taught her all they can, but they know better than anybody that sometimes that's not enough. But families really aren't what Cassie wants to be talking about right now, not when there's a cute boy sitting right next to her. She reaches out and takes Dean's hand, running her thumb over the backs of his knuckles. "So now we're both out here on our own, far away from our families and everybody we ever knew," she says. "I don't know about you, but I'm gonna need some new friends. Do you know anybody who might want to be friends with me?"
~~~
Dean is enthusiastically interested in getting to know Cassie better, which suits Cassie just fine. They end up having to sneak Dean out of her dorm well after lights out that night, and then the next night it's Cassie's turn to try to get out of his dorm without setting off the emergency exit alarm or getting spotted by the RAs at the front desk. (Thankfully, Dean's roommate is away at some party or other, since unlike Cassie, he doesn't have doting overprotective hunter parents who decided to spend extra money from who-knows-where on a single.) Since his room is only on the second floor, she decides it would be simplest to just jump out the window. Dean freaks out a bit (he seems to have some overprotective tendencies but honestly it's kind of sweet the way he worries about her). Cassie shrugs: it's not like she hasn't fallen from greater heights with much less time to prepare. She rolls herself onto the window ledge and grabs onto it as she swings out into space. She hangs for a moment from her hands, and then drops the last few feet onto the ground with a decent amount of grace. So far, so good, though she's going to have to keep working out if she's going to maintain this level of flexibility now that she's no longer hunting.
Dean is staring down at her, eyes wide and cheeks a bit pink, and Cassie's sure he was watching every single moment of her little performance. She waves up at him and calls "See you tomorrow," then runs off before he can start asking inconvenient questions about whether she's ever jumped out a window before and why (it was a ghost hunt gone wrong, and Dad had begged her not to tell Mom—but he'd sprained his ankle and he loved Mom too much to be good at lying to her anyway, so he'd ended up telling Mom as soon as they got home).
The next day, Cassie waits for Dean in the library—it's still not busy so she can take the same table that they met at on that very first day, same as they have every day since then. Cassie's beginning to think of it as their table, and she's quite enjoying the idea of being one half of a 'they'. Her parents would be happy for her, she thinks, finding a nice normal-person romance. She hasn't told them about Dean yet, but maybe if this keeps going as well as it has, maybe she'll tell them about him in a week or two. They call regularly enough that she'll probably have to dodge the topic to be able to wait even that long. It's nice to think of them still worrying about her back in her old world of hunting and family and home. This new place doesn't feel like home yet, but it's so far away from everything she once knew, and sometimes she thinks it's kind of nice to leave all that behind but sometimes she kind of misses it.
"Hey," Dean says, rushing up to the table and tossing his bag down. "Sorry I'm late."
"That's alright," Cassie says. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I was on the phone with my dad and it wasn't the sort of thing that I could really hang up on him for, y'know?"
"You said he has health problems?"
"Yeah. My mom died when I was little, in a fire, and my dad had a hallucination that he'd seen her on the ceiling right before she died. 'Cause of the trauma, the doctors say. So she's been on all sorts of psych meds since then, but they aren't always enough. So I had to talk him down because he was having a flashback." Dean looks up at Cassie with a shy grin, but she's too distracted by everything he's just said to fully appreciate it. "But enough about me," he continues. "How was your day? Did you enjoy your classes?" He reaches out and takes her hand. "See, I already know you're enough of a nerd that I can talk about classes like they're something you could actually enjoy. Although honestly I did kind of enjoy my math class today. I didn't think I was good at math, but when the teacher explained stuff it all actually made sense, so that was cool."
"Wait," Cassie says, and clutches his hand back, fingernails digging tight into his skin. "You said your mom died—what started the fire?"
"Nobody ever said for sure," Dean says. "It started right there in my brother's nursery. That's the room my mom died in, and my dad almost died there too trying to get her out. He got Sammy out first though, and gave him to me to carry him outside."
"Did you see your mom?"
"I don't know. The shrinks said you can form false memories, so I figure I'm probably just imagining that I saw her from hearing Dad's stories and stuff."
Cassie rubs the back of his hand gently with her thumb and uses her calmest talking-to-witnesses voice. Because that's what he is right now, even though he's also her maybe-sort-of boyfriend and not just some random stranger who it won't matter if she lies to. Not that she ever lies to witnesses more than she has to, but still, she doesn't want to hurt Dean. She's probably hurting him just by digging all this up, but she has a feeling it needs to be done if she's going to keep him safe. "So you thought you saw your mom on the ceiling, too?" she asks quietly.
Dean blinks, scared but trying to hide it. "Maybe? Does it matter? I never told any of the shrinks that, though. Didn't want 'em to dope me up with all those meds they've got Dad on. We needed someone to look after Sammy, after all."
"And it sounds like you did a great job of it," Cassie says, and swallows. All of her dealing-with-witnesses instincts are coming right back to her, and it's not fair, because this was supposed to be a nice normal relationship, her first steps into the civilian world. And it's not right, because Dean is a good person—she's only known him a few days and she's already knows that he's gentle and hard-working and terribly devoted to the people he cares about—and she doesn't want to treat him like just another interchangeable cog in every hunter's battle between good and evil. "Tell me more about your math class?"
For someone who claims he's never been good at math, Dean does just fine explaining the concepts he'd learned that morning in a way that makes sense to Cassie. They agree that when she goes to fulfill her G.E. math requirement, she needs to take from the same teacher he has for this class, but Cassie thinks it's more than just the teacher. Dean is hungrier to learn than maybe even he realizes, and he has a chance to thrive here in college.
And here's Cassie, about to turn his life upside down. But maybe it can stand to wait a little longer. Until they know each other better. "Hey Dean," she says when he turns to go, bag packed and all ready for his next class (that he claims he's not looking forward to but she's pretty sure it's just because he doesn't want to admit to be too interested in anything; she hopes as they get to know each other better he'll be more willing to open up about that sort of thing). "If we don't suddenly hate each other's company after we've known each other a few more weeks, you wanna invite me home for Thanksgiving?"
Dean blushes. "I might."
"No need to make plans now, but think about it. So your dad won't have to be alone for the holiday." And so she can do a bit of discreet investigation, not that she's going to tell Dean that quite yet.
She promised her parents she wouldn't hunt while she's in college, but this isn't a hunt, just an investigation. It'll be practice for being a reporter someday (or at least, that's what she'll tell her parents, but she knows she's lying to herself). Dean sounds like he's had a tough life, and if something supernatural is responsible for that, then she feels like she owes it to him to help him. Because she likes him, and because her parents taught her to help people, and because if she doesn't help him then who will?
He's leaning against the table watching her, and she looks him over appraisingly. He might not be a half-bad hunter himself, if things had gone differently. He's rangy, but with plenty of muscle where it counts, and a good head on his shoulders, even though he can be a bit shy about letting on how smart he is. If his mom's death turns out to be supernatural, maybe Cassie will have to teach him how to hunt. That sounds kind of fun, honestly. There would be plenty of chances to cop a feel when she's standing close enough to show him the right way to hold a gun or throw a punch. And he'd look good doing it, too...if he scraped his knuckles a bit it would only make him look hotter...
"Earth to Cassie!" Dean's hand brushes a curl away from her cheek, and she realizes she's been staring in silence for a little too long. (Though a guy who looks like he does is probably used to women losing higher cognitive function in his vicinity once in a while.) "Penny for your thoughts."
Cassie doesn't tell him anything about what she was thinking, just laughs gently. "You're going to be late to class if you don't hurry," she tells him, and gives him a kiss to send him on his way.
She watches him go, ducking agilely between the close-packed study tables. She's not going to say anything about this to him until she's looked further into what happened to his mom. If it turns out to be nothing, then she'll never need to mention it to him, and she can keep trying to leave hunting behind her. But if it is something supernatural, then he deserves to know, and she's going to tell him.
She just wants his life to be okay, because she already likes him a lot and wants good things for him. She doesn't know whether she'll be a part of his future (though she finds herself daydreaming about it already, and it just feels so right), and she doesn't know whether she'll have to break the news to him about the wider world out there or whether she can let him keep his innocence. But one way or another, she hopes his life won't end up worse for having met her. If his life ends up better (and maybe they even live happily ever after), then that will be a bonus, but she's not counting on it. She's not counting on anything, really. Because she's an investigator, and she hasn't done her investigation yet.
But she's going to. And for all that her parents didn't want her to hunt anymore...she's honestly looking forward to this.
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Summary: At her father's funeral, Cassie reflects on losing her dad and Dean. But at least one of them is still out there, even if he's no longer with her.
Dean/Cassie (only Cassie is present), shortly post-Route 666, mourning (a father, a relationship) but with hope
800 words | rated G | read on AO3
She wishes Dean could have stayed for the funeral.
(Maybe he could have, but she didn't ask. It's better this way, not asking for anything she isn't sure he's willing to give. This way they can end this relationship with smiles on both their faces this time around, instead of a "no" being the last thing she hears from him. Same as it was the last thing he heard from her, before.)
Everything happened so fast: Clayton, Dad, Jimmy, Mayor Todd—each time they were all still reeling from the preceding tragedy when the next came upon them. Everybody around her in the church sanctuary is still on edge, worried that they'll wake up tomorrow morning and find out someone else has died. Cassie is the only person who knows that it's over, and even she can't tell anyone what she knows or how she knows it, or they'll just call her crazy (like she called Dean, once, but he's not, he's brave and strong and wise, wiser than she'd ever guessed when they'd been dating).
She wonders what would have happened if she'd believed Dean from the beginning, if maybe somehow Dad wouldn't be lying stiff and still in a box there in the front of the church. Next to Cassie, Mom starts sniffling, and Cassie puts an arm around her shoulders. So many secrets, and Mom and Dad thought they were doing the right thing but now all that's left is four bodies to bury and a half-burnt truck that the Winchesters dumped back in the swamp, hopefully never to be seen again.
She wishes Dad could have met Dean. Dad would have liked him, she thinks. He's a good man. And he saved Cassie's life which would definitely get him into Dad's good books even if he hadn't managed to start out there. (Back when they'd been dating, she'd noticed that Dean always had a tendency to be a bit abrasive to anyone he perceived as an authority figure. Though Dad was a wise man and she has a feeling he would have known to look past that.) As much as Cassie wishes that they could have saved Dad too—saved everybody, if only she'd realized what was happening sooner and if only Mom had realized she shouldn't keep that secret any longer—she knows Dad would have cared most about her and Mom being safe. Which they are, thanks to Dean and his brother, and Cassie hopes that somewhere out there Dad's looking down and knows what happened.
It's that thought that finally makes tears spring to her eyes in earnest, and she mops at her face with the lace hankie that Mom had ironed this morning and given her to tuck in her sleeve. Dad loved them both so much, and he'd be so happy that both of his girls are still alive and safe, but Cassie just wishes he was here to see it.
She wishes Dean were here, too. But she knows he wouldn't be happy here, settled down and domestic.
When he came back to the house after destroying the ghost of Cyrus Dorian's truck, he'd been terribly glad to see that Cassie was safe and sound, but it was clear that what he felt for her would never be enough to keep him here. He's got more people to save, not just a single ex-girlfriend no matter how much she's realized she loves him after all.
She feels like she's gained Dean back and lost him all over again, all in the same week that she lost her father. But she knows Dad loved her, and she knows Dean loved her too. But there's a big wide world out there that he cares about, too, and there's so many people who need saving, who don't know the things he knows, just like Cassie once didn't. (She misses that innocence. She doesn't like knowing that there are frightening dangerous entities out there, ghosts and monsters and all those things that Dean ranted about that sounded so crazy before she kicked him out. She was happier like that, but happiness doesn't keep people alive. It got her dad killed.)
She wishes Dean could have stayed for the funeral, but she's doing her best to remind herself that she's glad he didn't. He's out there saving people who would die without him. Maybe there's some other girl who won't lose her father the way Cassie lost hers, because Dean will get there in time.
It's good to know he's out there. And if she ever needs him again—well, she hopes she never will, at least not in that way, but at least next time the phone call is sure to be a lot less awkward and painful.
Augh I have a lot left to write for my day 2 fic for Dean/Cassie week...I'd be tempted to throw it out and try to come up with a smaller (ha I'm so bad at that) idea that I could write from scratch, but I already have 500 words and a full outline and besides I like the title I came up with. So I guess I'm just going to be really busy today...
(On the bright side, my fics for day 3 & 4 are completely finished and day 5 has a full first draft. On the this-is-still-gonna-be-a-super-busy-week side, day 6 & 7 are barely started and also my May the Fourth fic would be happier with several thousand more words though I might be able to add most of those in post-deadline edits.)
