The Angel, The Hunter and The Nephilim (Destiel x Daughter)

26. A Post-Castiel Life

All the other places in the area are booked for the night and there's just one two-bed room when they finally find a motel at midnight, after circling the town for over half an hour.
Dean is exhausted when he helps his daughter in the door and throws a glance towards the beds.
"Alright, how are we gonna do this? Do Sam and I have to do rock, scissor, paper for the bed and the couch so you can have a bed, or are you fine with me and you sharing one?"
"I'm just so tired, I don't even care," Leah says, her eyes half closed, so Dean helps her over to one of the beds while Sam stumbles in behind them with his luggage.
Leah pulls off her pants and her sweater and gets in under the covers while Dean gets the rest of the stuff they brought out of the car. His daughter is asleep hours before Dean gets into bed. And she fights again, she fights the nightmares, the traumas, the image she made up in her mind of Cas walking out that door to never come back. She never got to see it, Dean is thankful she never did, but she still had to listen to it all and she's made up a pretty good picture of it, he can only imagine.
Little does he know that she remembers more than she's let on.

Dean sits awake in the darkness by the window, the rain is pouring down outside. He's reading through her favorite book from where she last left off the day before. And to his surprise, since he's never been much of a reader, he finds himself having finished it and sees why it upset his daughter so much.
He reflects on it all himself. He still has no idea what to do, not about Leah and the way she's dissolving before his eyes, not about the whole Cas situation, whether he's coming back or not, and he wants to help his brother too. Leah deserves a family that's whole. She deserves everything in the world. Maybe he'll find a solution one day.

Leah starts twisting and turning again, she lets out a whimper, and it quickly turns into quiet sobbing. Dean sits there and looks at her for a moment, as the panic grows stronger and she starts flailing and crying out. He rushes over to the bed and holds her arms down, saying her name over and over again like he's done a lot of times lately.
Sam wakes up, he sits up in the bed rubbing his eyes, and he slides his legs over the edge of the bed, silently assessing the situation. Leah wakes with another tremble, sweating and sobbing, and Dean hauls her up in his arms and hugs her shaking body tightly. He strokes his daughter's hair over and over while she cries into his shirt that she's grabbed like it's the only thing that matters. It just hurts more and more seeing her like this.
"God, Leah, you're okay, you're okay, I'm right here," he whispers, and she's trembling like she was at the hospital when she couldn't see, when she was suffering from hypothermia, and when she was afraid that Dean had left. That fear is still wreaking havoc on her psyche, and she's almost inconsolable.
"Baby, it's okay," Dean mumbles into her hair with a shaking voice; he's about to reach his limit for being able to deal with all this on his own on a daily and nightly basis.
"I'm right here, okay?" he whispers. "I'm not gonna let go of you and I'm not gonna leave you. I'm gonna stay right here when you fall asleep again."
"I don't wanna fall asleep again," she cries and heaves for air. Dean and Sam swap quick, desperate looks. Sam shakes his head and looks down, at a loss for words. He can read his brother's mind and he himself knows that it's almost come to the breaking point.
"I'm not gonna leave either way. We can talk about it. Or anything at all, or I can just hold you and you can see if you wanna fall back asleep, okay?" he whispers into her hair and feels as her tense muscles finally calm down, being lulled quietly to rest.
"Do you want me to tell you a story?" he whispers, like he did when she was a kid and was crying because of a nightmare. All his best stories were from his own life, but Leah knows most of the stories from after she came into the family.
All the stories that are from before her time, would not work on calming down his daughter, because they all contain blood and gore and rolling vampire heads. He sighs, wondering what to proceed with, but she stops him by coming with an easy request.

"Tell me the story about the birth certificate and the motel room," she says, and her voice breaks ever so slightly.  Dean smiles at Sam, who smiles back, relieved that the stressful moment is over.
He hugs his daughter tighter and softly strokes her hair. 
"Once upon a time..."