Grey

Chapter 9

He thinks about Castiel. A lot.

Sometimes he thinks he hears wings, or catches a note of something in the air that smells like mate, like Castiel, and he's sure that Cas is standing right behind him, just out of sight. That he'll turn around and he'll be standing there, too close, looking at Dean with that weird half-frown of his and his hair all mussed up and crazy. He's so certain that his heart races and he forgets to breathe and then he turns around and –

He's never there.

Dean stares at empty rooms and carparks and every time his heart seems to shrivel up inside his chest then slide down his ribcage to land somewhere near his stomach.

Waking hours are a constant stream of painful memories. His brain bounces from Sam to Cas to Sam again. Stopping thoughts of one just seems to send him spiralling into thoughts of the other.

When it gets real bad he calls Bobby and lets the old hunter catch him up on the latest. Hunters are still hunting and those hunters are still calling Bobby Singer for backup, cover and help with the occasional shallow grave.

Talking about hauntings and werewolves is a pretty good distraction and Bobby knows how to weave a story in a sarcastically entertaining way. Of course inevitably he asks about Sam, if Bobby has found anything, and the conversation draws to a stilted close. Bobby would call him the instant he found something, Dean knows it, but he can't help but ask anyway.

For every day he spends with Lisa and Ben, Sam spends almost 4 months in Hell. A week on Earth – over 2 years down below. A month? Well that's pretty much a decade. Every morning when Dean wakes up he adjusts the tally.

A month after he turned up on Lisa's doorstep, (ten years for Sam), Dean realizes he's got no real urge to leave. He misses hunting, but the thought of doing it alone, of the passenger seat of the Impala empty, is just too painful.

He looks through the paper for jobs instead of hunts and a week later, (twelve years), gets hired on by a local construction firm as manual labor. He's no Bobby with fake IDs, but he pulls together a work history and an identity solid enough for real work – solid enough to pay taxes. He doesn't want to risk bringing any shit down on Lisa with fraud or anything.

No one suspects him of being an omega. He slips into the 'douchey beta' persona Sam had always given him shit for, ("Over compensating much Dean?"), with ease.The construction crew are a mix of alphas and betas and they're alright enough guys. Dean's got plenty in common to get along with most of them – cars, guns, girls... But the way they talk about male omegas, well, there's no way in hell he'd have been given the job if the boss had known he was a 'bitch'. No way he'd be invited over to watch football or eat crappy BBQ with their mates and kids.

As it is, the guys seem kinda impressed by Dean 'Wesson'. He's tall and built for a beta, and the fact that he'd got the gorgeous Lisa, a female omega and yoga instructor to boot, warming his bed means even the alphas are all buddy buddy with him. Betas hardly ever 'score' a girl like Lisa. An omega. A gorgeous one at that. They figure he must something special.

It's depressing as hell, but also kinda amusing. Sometimes Dean imagines how they'd react if he let slip that he was actually an omega. The disbelief and horror. It'd end badly, but shit, when Steve or Jay start with their alpha posturing - ranting about crap like how they picked up some bitch and took turns drilling him in the backseat of Jay's car, or when an omega makes the mistake of walking past close enough for them to scent him and they try to outdo each other with catcalls and offers of hard fucks and knots – well, Dean can't help but fantasize about beating the shit out of them then revealing they got their asses handed to them by a bitch.