How (thanks to Gabriel) Dean and Castiel raised each other (and Sam)

Chapter 15- Rock Opera

AN: Follows directly from the last chapter. Sam is 19, Dean is 23.

Chapter Fifteen

Patience, Missouri was a wide spot on the road. A few stores huddled around each other, small dots of human civilization against the vast grey sky. Sam pulled into the dirt parking lot of the Dew Drop Inn, sending a dust cloud up behind them. Dean was waiting, leaning against the Impala's trunk.

"Took long enough." He said in lieu of hello when Sam got out of the car.

"Hit an accident on the interstate. Tried to call you."

"Reception out here sucks." Dean rubbed the heel of his hand over his forehead. "I don't know what to make of this one. Called Dad and Bobby and they said they'd think on it, but nothing rang a bell for them straight off the bat."

"You said there was singing." Cas prompted as he stretched out of the car. Muscle cramps were a plague. He never could get used to the idea that his body needed to move once in awhile. Human fidgeting made much more sense to him now. "Is it spontaneous?"

"What the fuck, Sam?" Dean turned on his brother. "I told you not to bring him!"

"He's not luggage, Dean! If he wants to come, he comes!" Sam shouted back. "He's got rights!"

"I'll bring the bags in." Castiel hefted Sam's duffel and his own out of the trunk, taking the room key from Dean's jacket pocket while the two of them carried on.

He could hear their argument rising and falling even with the door between them. The room was on the far end of awful, even for the Winchesters. Both beds had ancient sagging mattresses, the carpet smelled moldy and there was barely room for the table someone had jammed into one corner along with a dubious chair. Dean's bed hadn't been remade. Castiel set Sam's bag down on the other bed and tucked his own under the table. Pulling out a book, he decided that Dean's bed looked slightly sounder than the chair.

The sheets were clean at least as he tucked his knees up to balance the book on them. It was a collection of Celtic myths, straddling the line between research and reading for pleasure. He'd become fond of Brigit as he dug his roots deeper into her old home and he had begun trying to trace her transformation from goddess to saint, curious about her easy adaptability from divine to mortal and back again.

He became involved in the dissection of a quirk in Arthurian myth that suggested Avalon was Brigit's true home when the mattress sagged further with added weight. He went on reading.

"Cas." Dean sat at Castiel's feet, staring down at the mouldering carpet with the look of a disciplined child. "I'm sorry that I...look. I just worry about you."

"I can defend myself."

"I don't- but you're not-" Dean growled in frustration. "This could get ugly and you don't have the kind of training you need to fight off something like this. What if you get hurt?"

"Then I will eventually heal. I'm not made of glass." He gave in, setting aside his book. "I know I am diminished. Certainly I am weaker than you and Sam. Perhaps I always will be. I cannot control that, but nor can I sit and wait for you like Penelope forever weaving."

"I come home more often than every forty years." Dean protested, but the rounding of his shoulders telegraphed his understanding. "And you're hardly my wife."

"Hardly." Castiel agreed dryly, wrapping an arm around his knees to draw himself in tighter. "Tell me about the case."

"I-"

"The case." Castiel snapped. "Unless you want to have an argument. I had assumed you'd already had your fill of that today."

"Shit, ok." Dean flinched back as if he'd been struck, but Castiel wasn't sorry. Something about this place left him raw-nerved and edgy. "So, it started with a two deaths. One last year, a young woman named Dana Wilson was found stabbed to death right at the edge of town. She was a fighter, seventeen stab wounds and a dozen defensive wounds to take her down. Here's where it gets weird, coroner puts her time of death at about sunset on a Saturday night. There should have been witnesses, at the very least people must have heard her. Yet not a single person stepped forward. Population seventeen hundred and no suspects."