Chapter Text
Jody’s the one who gives them the case.
“Can’t really take time off to take care of it myself,” she says, “so I thought I’d pass it along, see if you boys mind taking a crack at it.”
“Sure,” Sam says. “I’ve got you on speakerphone, with Dean and Cas here. Go ahead.”
It’s probably a ghost, she tells them, haunting the pool clubhouse in a wealthy subdivision called Arcadia. A friend of hers used to live there, but she’s worried that first, a ghost means she won’t be able to sell the house; and second, that her neighbors might get hurt.
“It’s been weird noises, objects moving, pretty textbook stuff. Figure it won’t be much trouble for you lot to take care of. And I’ve already got a cover story for you. Marlene’s trying to sell the house, so you can go in pretending to be interested, maybe in a rent to own situation.”
Sam scoffs. “A planned neighborhood like that, obviously wealthy, is going to be fine with three grown men moving into a house together and not think it’s weird?”
“Kind of figured you and Eileen could play a couple, Sam,” Jody says dryly. “You know. The obvious choice here.”
And they’d all agreed that was probably the best plan, but Eileen was out on another hunt, and she wasn’t sure when she’d finish up and be able to meet up with them. An argument could be made that a ghost as low-stakes as this could keep, but they were bored and none of them wanted to take any chances that someone might get hurt. So that left—
“Happy anniversary!” Jack says, throwing his hands up as they walk into the house.
“Stop it, kid,” Dean grouses, waving him off. “It’s not our anniversary. Me and Cas aren’t actually married.”
“I know, but today is the first day of your pretend marriage. It still might be fun to celebrate.”
Dean grumbles but Can pats Jack’s shoulder and says “Thank you for thinking of us, Jack. I happily accept your congratulations.”
“Dude,” Dean hisses, half-betrayed, while Sam snickers behind him. Cas just ignores them.
The house that Jody’s friend Marlene was letting them use for the case was big and obviously well maintained. Arcadia was a cookie-cutter subdivision, all the houses standing like uniform soldiers guarding their lawns, eerily alike. They weren’t packed tightly together, but still close enough that avoiding your neighbors was more difficult than not. And there were certainly people interested when they’d pulled up, looking out windows or across lawns to see the new arrivals.
“Did you see those three dogs that lady across the street had?” Dean makes a noise of displeasure, looking over his shoulder towards the street. He grimaces. “Little monsters.”
“I thought they were cute,” Jack says, coming in behind Dean. Sam and Cas follow after, and Cas closes the door behind them. “They were very fluffy!”
“Yeah,” Dean says under his breath. “And loud.”
“Maybe we can meet them! Do you think your neighbor will let us pet them?”
“Hey,” Dean snaps. “We’re here to stop a ghost, not meet the Cleavers.”
“I’m sure there will be time to pet the dogs, Jack,” Cas tells him, his voice cold. His expression is hard, but when Dean glances over his eyes dart away. There’s nothing overtly wrong between the two of them, and Dean’s beyond grateful that Cas is back. But things haven’t quite… settled. Cas came back from the Empty human, and the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “This neighborhood seems friendly.”
“A little too friendly,” Dean argues. “And Jack, did you have to introduce us using our real names? It’s a case. This is supposed to be our cover. We can’t be Dean and Cas Kline, we need to use aliases.”
“I’m sorry, Dean, I wasn’t thinking,” Jack says. “I’ll come up with good code names to use.” He thinks for a minute. “I’ll be Shadow.”
Sam coughs to hide a laugh.
“Not really what I meant, dude,” Dean says. “I mean like a fake name. It’s still a regular name, just… not yours.”
“It’s okay, Dean,” Sam says. “As long as you two stay under the radar. Besides, this is weirdly close to our real life anyway. We are, basically, renting this house from Marlene, and she is Jody’s friend, so.” He shrugs, nonchalant about Jack’s slip with their names. “I don’t think there will be any harm in it.”
“You can still play your character,” Jack assures him. “I know you were practicing.”
“Practicing.” Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. “What the hell does that mean, Dean?”
“Watching several episodes of the early 2000s era show Desperate Housewives,” Jack says. “And a telenovela. And the
Dr. Sexy
episode where—”
“I’m a professional,” Dean says. He walks from the foyer into the kitchen off to the right. He looks over his shoulder at the others and gives them a shit-eating grin. “I’m always prepared.”
Jack and Sam are talking, but Dean ignores them. He’s not about to stand there and be insulted for his television choices. He starts opening the cabinets and looking around at what’s been left. Jody’s friend Marlene isn’t living there, but she left enough for it to be habitable, and apparently her son had been living there temporarily not long before. There’s a few dishes, a toaster, something Dean recognizes from YouTube rabbit holes as a sous vide machine, and an entire corner dedicated to coffee-making. He whistles. “Looks like Marlene was a coffee snob,” he says, fiddling with the switch on the electric kettle.
“Well you’re welcome to use anything here, she said,” Sam tells him, coming into the kitchen trailed by Cas and Jack. “Electricity’s on, so is wi-fi, some streaming services I think, and the HOA dues are paid.”
“What’s a fucking HOA?” Dean asks, bending down to look through the cabinets. This Marlene definitely seems like the kind of well-off bitch to have some Le Creuset. “Don’t they measure the blades of grass in your lawn and have stupid rules about how you can decorate?”
“It’s the homeowners’ association, Dean,” Cas says, sounding snooty as hell about it and staring up at the top of the cabinets like he’s trying to smite them. There’s a dried piece of vine, probably from a plant that used to be there that no one bothered to clean up, which apparently offends Cas somehow judging by his squinty eyed frown about it.
Dean opens his mouth to snark back when Sam interrupts. He prefaces this interruption with a loud, put-upon sigh, which in Dean’s opinion is just fucking overkill. “All the rules and regulations are in the stuff Jody forwarded to us, okay? Solve the case quickly and I doubt you’ll be here long enough for it to matter.”
“I’m willing to lick some boots, Sam—”
“ Dean —”
“But those assholes better not say a damn thing about Baby.” He stands up from his search of the cabinets, his bad knee twinging. He points at his brother. “That’s non-negotiable.”
“I”m pretty sure the only parking regulation is no street parking,” Sam says.
“Street parking? She’s a damn lady, Sam, I’m not—”
“Cas.” Sam sighs again and folds his arms over his chest. “Just make sure you know the rules, okay? And try to keep Dean from doing anything that will cause obvious problems.”
“I don’t need keeping in check,” Dean mutters.
Cas glowers. “Why is he my responsibility?”
“Hey, pull a guy from hell and maybe he’ll get attached,” Dean says, with a smile too sharp to be nice. It’s the first time he’s let his eyes linger on Cas, and a tiny part of him is disappointed that Cas is looking pointedly away. He’s in a posture mimicking Sam’s, with his arms crossed, and one hip is leaning against the counter with one foot tucked behind the other ankle.
“Jack, would you mind helping me get the rest of our things?” Cas asks. He straightens up and doesn’t wait for an answer, stalking out of the kitchen. Jack shoots a nervous glance to Sam, before following Cas. A second later, the front door shuts loudly.
Dean purses his lips and looks off to the side because he knows that Sam has eyes on him. “What crawled up his ass,” he says, happy to pretend that he hadn’t baited Cas.
“Jack and I are going back to the bunker,” Sam says. “There’s no need for all four of us here, not for something like this.” Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t acknowledge what Dean said. “So it’s just going to be you and Cas. Whatever’s been going on with you two?” Dean flushes and tries not to let the moment of panic he feels at that show on his face. “You need to get your shit together, Dean. Both of you.”
Instinct demands he argue, but Sam’s too used to his crap to fall for that. He’d see right through it, and then Dean might wind up in the position of having to explain what’s actually going on with him and Cas. That’s not something he’s ready to do.
“We, uh. We kind of had another fight. Right before we found out about this case.”
“I’m not sure I should be happy that the two of you actually talked or disappointed that you’re fighting again .”
And that’s fair. Things with Cas have been awkward. Not great, and Dean knows, when he lets himself think about it, that he hasn’t done much to make things better. If he’s really being honest he can admit that most of what he’s done to deal with it has probably made it worse.
After the end, after Chuck was defeated and life was starting over and Dean thought that he’d lost his best friend foreve… Cas came back.
Cas came back from the Empty without his grace. Human. It’s been challenging, to say the least and instead of dealing with it in any sort of healthy way, he and Dean have been circling around each other. Mostly because of Dean, but when he’d finally pulled his head out of his ass and stowed his own issues long enough to deal with things like a big boy, it had apparently been too little too late, because then Cas was avoiding him .
“We only fought because I tried to talk to him. And I know there’s been something going on with him, I know he’s hiding something, and-and maybe it’s not world ending, or apocalyptic, or something that’s gonna bring some new terror crashing around our ears, but.” He runs out of steam, licks dry lips and turns away, one hand running through the hair on the back of his head, the other in a fist on his hip. “I don’t understand why he won’t fucking talk to me.” He hadn’t meant to attack Cas, he hadn’t even meant to get as angry as he had. But Cas wouldn’t talk to him, and all he wanted was for things to go back to how they had been, go back to normal. He was angry at himself, too, because he knew that it was his own damn fault for screwing things up in the first place. If he’d been able to deal with things as soon as he’d gotten Cas back, then they wouldn’t have had that awkwardness hanging over them, and Cas wouldn’t have been able to deflect by yelling at Dean that there was plenty of other stuff they weren’t talking about either.
Sam sighs. “It’s… hard, Dean. I know you, and I know that you’re overthinking this, that you think fit means Cas doesn’t trust you, but I’m sure that’s not it. He’s dealing with a lot of shit, man, I think you just need to give him some space.”
Space had been what caused the problem in the first place, Dean thinks, but he doesn’t say that. He glances back at Sam, who seems to be gearing up for a big heart-to-heart, but luckily at that moment the front door bursts open.
“Sam!” Jack calls, feet pounding as he runs inside. “Dean!” He comes into the kitchen beaming, his eyes sparkling and an aura of bright energy nearly bouncing off him. “Guess what. The lady with the three terriers came back, and I got to pet them! Cas pet them, too, but I don’t think he liked it as much as I did. One of them slobbered on his hand, but I think it’s because he just really liked Cas. Oh, he’s still getting the boxes. I need to go back and help him.” And then, just as quickly as he’d come in, he went back out again.
Sam looks down, hiding a fond smile. “Think we should go out and help them?” he asks.
“Yeah.” Dean shrugs. “Why not?”
#
Everything about the case points to it being a milk run–all the typical signs of a ghost, and nothing weird or out of the real of what they’d consider normal. So they expect it to be open and shut, and because of that Dean didn’t bother packing much beyond the essentials.
That doesn’t mean that he didn’t give them a budget, though.
“We still gotta get into character,” he instructs, pointing over at Jack as he and Cas stare at him over the hood of the impala. Dean grins. “And that means costumes.”
Sam had opted to stay at the house. Dean had asked him–very nicely, if he did say so himself–to start unpacking, but Sam had his laptop open and was nodding half-heartedly when Dean said it, so he’s not holding out any hope for that. Jack, on the other hand, had been excited about the shopping trip, and insisted on accompanying him. Which worked out for Dean, since that meant he had a buffer for him and Cas. Shopping wasn’t exactly on his top ten greatest hits for fun shit to do, which was bad enough, but add in a surly, uncommunicative ex-angel and Dean figured he’d go out of his mind after twenty minutes.
They go to a mall, mostly because Jack gets excited about the “roles” they’re playing and decides they need options.
Jack marches them into a department store and leads them over to the men’s casual wear. The prices are exorbitant, at least in Dean’s opinion, but it’s to help them blend in and it’ll make Jack happy, so he tells himself it’s a justified expense. Jack is already poring over a rack of shirts, absorbed in trying to meet the brief Dean had given him, which was “Yuppie asshole, kid. Think somebody who plays golf and says shit like ‘in this economy?’ seriously.”
“Dean, do you think Arcadia Dean would wear salmon or coral?” Dean pops his head over the rack to look at Jack and the two sporty polos he’s deciding between.
“Those are the same color, bud.”
Jack shakes the left one “No, this is coral. It’s more orange.” Sensing Dean’s impatience, he turns to Cas. “What do you think? Arcadia Cas is his husband, after all. What color would he like?”
“Hmm.” Cas looks up from where he’s inspecting a display of khaki pants. Apparently, after the trenchcoat, he imprinted on the color. “They’re both nice, Jack. Why don’t you choose?”
With furrowed brows, Jack leans in. He looks like he’s searching for the secret of the universe in the polos. Dean scoffs. “Just get them both, Jack. I promise, it’s the same damn color.”
“Or neither,” Cas says.
“Why, does stepford Cas prefer apricot?”
“No,” he says, voice dry. His eyes flick over to the rack of shirts. He gives Dean a smug look that’s just a little mean. “Green. To match his husband’s eyes.”
Embarrassment hits him before Dean can stop it. He thrusts the green shirt he’d been holding back on the rack, nearly knocking a hanger to the floor. “Yeah, well. I’ll… match your fucking eyes,” he grumbles. He grabs a blue shirt and tucks it under his arm, and doesn’t think about how close the shade is. Cas has been avoiding him so much lately, it’s not like he’ll get the chance to compare it.
They pick up a few shirts for each of them, some slacks, and Cas even grabs another tie. Most of their decisions are based on what Dean thinks some rich, WASPy guys moving to the suburbs might wear, but since Cas wore the same cheap, poorly fitted suit for a decade and Jack has still been alive for single digit years, Dean’s going to claim the expertise on this one. They’ll make it work.
It’s not only Cas’s fashion sense that has changed since becoming human, though; his body has changed, too. Dean couldn’t say that they’ve had a real conversation about it, but what Cas did say was that suddenly going from something like a hurricane on a leash to just the leash has been disorienting.
“I had come to consider this form, this vessel, as mine,” Cas had told him, one broad hand resting flat across his heart. “But even though it was mine, it wasn’t everything. Now it is. A vessel is something you have, and a body is something you… are .” He looked down at his body, at himself, something shadowed in his eyes. “This is what I am.”
And he’d made himself a home in his body, taking Sam’s advice about health and fitness and starting an exercise regime. He’d gotten stronger, broader, putting on muscle so that now when Dean looked at him he was starting to notice broad shoulders and thick thighs. He was aging, too, with silver peeking through the sable thicket of his hair. Seeing him like that settled something in Dean, kept that little flame of belief still burning bright: Cas was making himself a home in his body, Cas was making himself a home with Dean.
Shopping isn’t so bad, with Jack there. Dean thinks he might feel almost as awkward with just Jack as with just Cas, though. Which really makes him think that maybe fixing some of his fucked up relationships should be a higher priority. When Cas has deigned to speak to him, he’s talked about Jack a lot. Encouraging Dean to reach out, to try to repair things, because while Jack might be a cosmic being of newly inconceivable power, he’s also still a kid who needs the support of his guardians. Dean doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to Jack. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do to fix things, either. He knows he fucked up with Jack, but how much was him and how much was because of Chuck? And how much does that distinction even matter?
After the mall, Dean takes them grocery shopping. He’s got a list of recipes he might want to try out in the new kitchen saved in his phone, and he’s picking through the aisles while scrolling through an anecdote about this guy’s experiences at some fancy pastry school. They’d split the list into three and each taken a section; which was definitely for efficiency’s sake, and not an excuse for Dean to avoid further awkwardness with Cas.
“Are you going to make a pie?” Jack asks.
Dean grunts. “Going to try. Thought me and—” He looks over at Cas, who’s reading the back of a bag of coconut flakes. Great. The ingredients on that must be riveting for him to be paying attention to it instead of Dean. “I mean, Cas is still getting used to the whole spectrum of human experience, right? I’ll give him some crap pie to whet his palette so he’s ready for the good stuff once I get better.”
“I’m sure your pie will be delicious, Dean,” Cas says. He still won’t look at him.
“Yeah, well. Guess we’ll see.”
They get to the check-out line and Dean sees a case of beer in their cart. Which is fine , they always get beer, but he had meant to take it off the list. He’d put it on the list in the first place hating himself for doing it, but justifying it because Cas would be there, too. But he’d meant to take it off. He’d really meant to take it off. Cas and Jack unload the shopping cart onto the conveyor belt, with Jack talking and Cas listening with a fond smile and the occasional soft, affirmative hum. Dean stares at the beer. His mouth feels dry and a pit in his stomach he’d boarded up starts to crack open.
“Dean?”
He jolts back to awareness and looks up, sees Cas staring at him with a frown, Jack’s brows furrowed with concern.
“Do you have the money?” Cas asks. “Your wallet. We have to pay.”
“Right, right,” Dean says. He shakes his head to try to snap himself out of it, and walks up to the card reader with a smile. “I got it, don’t worry.” He keeps his eyes on the screen as the transaction goes through. He does not say a word about the beer.
When they get back to the house, Sam hasn’t unpacked a thing and Dean shoots him a look of disgust that Sam ignores.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ve forwarded all the information from Jody to your email–again–so make sure to read up. The weird noises started up after an older woman who lived in the neighborhood died. Her family hasn’t sold the house yet, so it’s been empty. That might be a good place to start with the neighbors. Here’s the thing—her death was of natural causes. She was loved by everyone in the neighborhood from what Marlene said, kind of the honorary grandmother. She’s the most likely ghost, but it’s not clear why she might be sticking around.” Sam pauses to look at something on his computer. “Her name was Miriam Perez. Her husband passed about ten years ago. They had two children, so they’re the ones responsible for her estate now who’re selling the house.”
“Okay, sherlock, sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. What do you need us for?”
Sam rolls his eyes as he closes his laptop. “I’m telling you that it’s likely it’s her, Dean. You should still investigate. Arcadia is apparently very tight-knit, and the haunting, or whatever it is, has made them nervous. I’m sure they’ll open up about it once you get to talking to them.”
“Ugh.” Dean groans, throwing his head back. “So not only do I have to play happy home here, I have to make friends with the neighbors?”
“You like making friends, Dean,” Jack says. “Try to talk to the lady with the dogs. Her name is Kyleigh.”
“Kyleigh. What kind of name is—”
Jack does not let this interruption deter him. “A couple of houses down, I saw a really nice car pull in, too. Not as nice as Baby, but maybe the person who lives there is a ‘car guy’ too.” He uses air quotes around the words. “You could talk about that!”
“Yeah, whatever.” Dean walks over to the window and flicks away the curtain to look out. He doesn’t see anything interesting in any of the driveways. “‘S probably in the garage now,” he tells them. “Guess I’ll check it out later.”
Dean and Cas are going to be left mostly to their own devices, so after they all eat Jack and Sam get back in the car Sam had brought and head back toward the bunker.
“Bye!” Jack calls, waving out the window. “Enjoy the new place!”
Cas waves back, a restrained smile as he watches his son drive out of the neighborhood.
Once the car is gone, the energy that they’d been riding instantly fades and they’re left in an awkward stillness. Dean clears his throat. “So, uh. Did you want—”
“You can have the biggest bedroom,” Cas says. “I’ll stay in the guest room. Excuse me. I want to get my things unpacked.” And then he turns and goes back inside the house.
Dean stands there alone for a long moment, staring up at the darkening sky.