Title: Blood and Anesthetic

Chapter: 14

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dean woke with the worst hangover he’d had in years, having the vague impression that there should be a woman in bed with him. He remembered kissing Jo and then kissing… someone else? The curves under his hands hadn’t been Jo’s, but the perfume had been the same one she now wore and the woman had had long hair. So where was she?

Raising his head a fraction, he peered at the bathroom. The door was open, no sound coming from it and the light off. His cabin was silent, blessedly dark, with no light at all to make the ache in his head turn to a jackhammer throbbing. Dean closed his eyes, his fuzzy thoughts meandering over the evening, recalling Jo with ease and her definite refusal, yet after that it was confusing. There was a woman’s voice saying something about sleeping it off. Her mouth against his, body beneath his hands…. She’d made a noise of surprise. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, attempting to bring the scene into focus. The line of her body hadn’t been pliant, but rather stiff and tense. Vibrant blue eyes open very wide with a hint of alarm…

Blue eyes.

There was only one woman in the camp with eyes that blue that he knew of.

Melanie.

“Oh hell no,” Dean groaned. After his smug words to Jo about avoiding certain situations, he’d managed to drink himself right into one.

But what had happened? The last thing he remembered was…nothing concrete at all. No real memory of anyone aside from Jo, only dream-like impressions swirling about his mind. What had he done? He opened his eyes, trying to ignore the tiny stabs of pain any movement caused. The fact that he wasn’t naked under the covers didn’t bring any comfort, for he’d been known to completely change clothes while drunk with no memory of doing so. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he’d showered and put on briefs after she’d gone.

He groaned again and let his eyes slip shut. When he opened them again, the cabin was much lighter and Cas was there. He stood beside the bed staring down at Dean, a little smirk that looked heinous and evil upon his lips.

“What did I say about watching me sleep,” Dean snapped. Speaking made his head hurt more and he winced.

“Not to do it,” Cas replied with an unrepentant quirk of a brow. “But I’m not watching you sleep. I’m watching you wake up.” He held out a nearly empty bottle of Wild Turkey, twisting the cap off. “Hair of the dog?”

The thought of ingesting more alcohol made his stomach turn and he swallowed hard, upper lip curling. “Uh-uh.”

“Quite some night you had.” He capped the bottle, set it down, and moved about the room, tossing all the curtains open.

Dean sucked in a breath. “Damn it, Cas, shut the damn curtains and quit shouting!” With one hand, he groped for the covers, dragging them up over his head, only to have Cas tug them away, ignoring that directive. “I swear Lucifer’s giving me a lobotomy right this second and you are not helping.”

“Wakey, wakey, hands off --”

“Do not finish that sentence,” he held up a finger, “or you’ll be in as much pain as I am.”

Castiel chuckled. “Relax. Jo’s in worse shape than you, though Melanie managed to get some water and pills down her before she passed out. Of course they came back up a couple hours later when she started puking. I spent all night holding her hair back from her face. Hard to imagine a woman her size holding that much --”

Dean scrambled from the bed and into the bathroom. He thought he heard Cas laughing again over the sound of his own retching. This was payback, wasn’t it? He recalled being nearly this obnoxious himself the first time Cas had had the joy of a hangover. And the next time, and the time after that…. He went back out, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight. “Where’s Melanie?”

“I don’t know.” Cas shrugged. “I haven’t seen her in hours. Why?” He turned, hands resting on his hips. “Was she…here last night?” The question had a leading edge to it, as though he already knew the answer and was curious as to what Dean would say. Cas’s answer could mean he’d last seen her anytime from the previous night to this morning.

“How about you tell me? Was she?” He returned to bed, snatching the covers close and lying back. The sunlight still caused severe pain, but he knew if he closed the curtains, Cas would be enough of an ass to open them again.

“Don’t you remember? That’d break her heart, you know. If she had been here and in a compromising position, that is. That you didn’t even remember her being here?” His brows rose and he clucked his tongue. “Quite a situation.”

“Situation? What situation?”

Cas sank onto the couch, arms laying along the back of it. “Tell you what: I’ll confirm that she and Jo were both here last night.”

“I remember Jo being here.” He closed his eyes. “Please tell me you’re not going to be sadistic and make me play twenty questions when my head is about to explode.”

“It’s a distinct possibility. Payback is such a bitch sometimes.”

“Remember this the next time you get blitzed, Cas.”

Another chuckle. “Dean, I’m blitzed most of the time anymore.”

Good point. “So tell me about Melanie. Is she okay?”

“Should she not be,” Cas countered, his tone giving Dean the sudden suspicion that Cas wasn’t about to tell him anything about her. He was going to make Dean ask questions and never actually tell him anything.

An added ache began to grow between his eyes, something very much like a tension headache. “Cas, I’m so not in the mood for this.”

“Mood for what? We’re having a nice conversation here.”

“You’re being sadistic.”

He scoffed at that. “I am not, but you’re going to want to have a good chat with Melanie later on today. Today would be best. Don’t put it off.”

Opening his eyes, Dean raised his head and stared at him, trying to get a sense of what that comment meant. “Did I do something stupid?”

“Define ‘stupid’.” Cas crossed his ankles.

This was going to be a long day.

~~~~~~~~~~

He was being a dick and felt fully justified in indulging himself in that behavior. Why? Three reasons.

One: Jo. He’d been afraid, right around five a.m., that Jo wasn’t going to recover, that she had alcohol poisoning and was going to die because Dean had insisted she match him drink for drink. Dean should have known better. Jo no longer drank like she used to. Her tolerance was much lower than the last time the two had done shots together.

The recklessness of that pissed him off. It was one thing for Dean to be reckless with his own life, but another entirely to be careless with someone else’s, especially when that someone was Jo.

Jo wasn’t going to be off the hook on that one either, though he planned to wait until she wasn’t hungover. He’d still like to have sex with her in the near future and telling her while she was hungover that her choice to agree to Dean’s recklessness was stupid would make the bed a might chilly at night.

Two: Melanie, in a roundabout way really. Was it sad that two out of three of his reasons were women?

While she shouldn’t have pranced into Dean’s cabin like she had, and would also get some words from Cas on that later, the fact remained that Mr. ‘High and Mighty, I Don’t Want Her That Way’ had taken the opportunity to do some groping after claiming he wouldn’t ever behave in such a way with her.

Yeah, Cas knew the liquor had contributed and likely been the sole reason for it, but he wanted Dean to be very aware of that whole saying and doing thing. He couldn’t say one thing and do another even if he was blotto when he did it. He’d said he wouldn’t, had done a little, and was going to have to deal with the consequences of that.

Was it wrong to want to rag him over it?

Probably, but he was going to do it anyway.

Sometimes childish human behavior could be quite gratifying.

Three: Pure payback. When Dean hadn’t been drinking enough to have a hangover, he was often insufferable to friends who had, namely to Cas. He still recalled Dean’s cheerful and innocent-toned suggestion that drinking a little soda might help his throat after a night of throwing up, something about the bubbles soothing. Castiel had been stupid and trusting enough to actually believe him until the first painful swallow had gone down. Then, there’d been such incidents as the alarm clock set for dawn when he’d only gotten to bed at four and the greasy, fried breakfast Dean had brought into Cas’s room to eat. The list could go on.

It was easier to hide a hangover here, but Dean still sometimes caught him with one.

So, no, he had no problem with being a sadistic dick this morning.

~~~~~~~~~~

She slept all morning and when she did wake up, Melanie alternated between thinking about Dean and thinking about Cas. She wondered what Dean thought of her now and if Jo’s words were true about Cas. Her thoughts twisted about them even more when Cas chewed her out very nicely for having gone to look in on Dean in the first place.

He made good points she hadn’t thought of. Like how it was stupid to go into a man’s cabin like that alone even if it was Dean and even if he was drunk. Drunken men were sometimes amorous and Melanie wasn’t physically strong enough to extricate herself from a situation if said drunken amorous man became insistent. It could have turned extremely bad and Cas made it clear he could have walked in on a different scene had one little thing gone a different way.

And Castiel was so pleasant about it, his voice calm and low, as though they were discussing the weather.

Melanie sat beside him on her bed, tuning out the last rehash of those points -- he was making them again for emphasis -- and studying him. Physically, he was the same as she’d always known him: dark hair that didn’t look like he’d combed it half the time, a rakish perpetual five o’clock shadow that was almost a beard but not quite grown enough to count in her opinion, and lean muscled body.

If what Jo had said was true and not drunken ramblings, then what did that mean about Cas now? Was he still an angel then? If so, then how did that fit in with what she knew an angel was supposed to be like?

“Melanie?” His fingers snapped right in front of her face several times.

She blinked, jerking back a little. “Yeah?”

He was doing that piercing stare thing again, the one so deep and concentrated that she felt naked beneath it. “Something else on your mind?”

“No. I’m listening.” She hadn’t been at the last part, but he’d only been repeating what he’d already said about Dean and how stupid she’d been.

He cocked his head to one side. “Nothing you want to discuss?”

“Uh-uh.”

Still staring at her, he waited with brows raised, then nodded. “Okay. Then I’ll be going.” Leaning over, he gave her a gentle, soft kiss at the corner of her mouth.

Her thoughts on him kept returning to that angel ‘what-if’ as the hours passed. Melanie found it far more distressing that she may have been having sex with an angel than she found Dean’s drunken groping the previous night and the bursting of her huge crush bubble on him. Her crush was nothing compared to the other. Her crush was a silly little girly thing. Cas, though? It was a serious thing, a topic with some weight to it that had the potential to really freak her out if she kept thinking about it.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jo woke to Castiel against her, an arm wrapped about her. He groaned when she tried to get up, a sound that caused pinpricks of agony to lance her skull, and tightened his arm around her. The curtains were all closed, but enough light was filtering through them that she knew it was midday.

“Don’t go, Jo,” he whispered. “I just got comfortable. I was up all night looking in on you and Dean, I spent this morning with Dean, and then Melanie needed some attention before Dean found her.”

“But I’m hungry. I need sustenance.” She was hungry too, her stomach growling right then to punctuate that claim. “What happened with Mel?”

“You’ll just puke it up in an hour because you’re still drunk. Wouldn’t it be easier not to eat at all?” His hand grasped the covers, adjusting them, then returning to her. “Don’t worry about Mel. I handled it.”

Maybe he was right and maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t change the fact that she was hungry now. “I’m not still drunk. What happened?”

“You’re slurring your words, honey. That means you’re still soused. Go back to sleep. We’ll sleep here together all afternoon and get up for dinner.” He shifted position a little behind her. “And it was nothing with Melanie. Just a slight incident between her and….” He yawned, body shuddering against her. “It was easily taken care of.”

“I need a shower.” It registered in slow degrees that he’d called her ‘honey’. He’d never done that before. “Her and who?”

He released her and rolled onto his back. “You got me there. You do need a shower.” One hand made a languid gesture towards the bathroom. “Bathe.”

It was quickly apparent that he was right in her still being drunk from the night before. She was in that peculiar intoxicated state that sometimes happened after being horrendously smashed where it sort of felt like she’d sobered up to a hangover state. She was no longer giggly or happy, though her head did hurt, and she was hungry. Experience told her that she had enough time to shower and bolt down a few crackers if she could find any in the cabin before she started feeling drunk again and needed to sleep the rest of it off.

When she emerged from the shower, she found Castiel had changed the pillowcase on her pillow and had a paper plate with a couple thick slices of dry bread in his hands. Jo snatched them up, devouring them with the towel still wrapped around her and her hair wet. “Mmm. I love you,” she told him. “Have I said that yet today?”

“You have not.” Pulling her to him with gentle hands, he ran a comb through her hair and braided it. “Love you, too.”

“Melanie?” Jo polished off the bread. Her stomach still rumbled, but at least it wasn’t as loud. “You mentioned her.”

“What about her?”

“What happened? What incident? What did I miss?”

Cas tugged the towel loose. “Later. Come back to bed.”

No amount of talking would sway him and Jo settled back into bed with him, falling asleep with her head on his chest.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty questions had produced nothing but annoyance on Dean’s part, so he had to go straight to Melanie to find out what, if anything, had happened. Sometimes Dean missed the days of heading out of town to avoid such discussions. He’d rather just ignore whatever it was, but since Cas had pretty much told him he’d been stupid and needed to talk to Melanie, he thought he might bow to Cas’s wisdom on her -- sort of like Cas accepting some of Dean’s wisdom on Jo, like: don’t play poker with her, she wins every hand.

This brought back the very reason his arrangement with Nina worked out so well. All the talking about your feelings crap involved with nice young women like Melanie. How did Cas do it all the time?

Be like Cas, he told himself. Talk to her in that quiet, calm way he uses for things with women. Think ‘understanding’ and not about how much you really wish you didn’t have to do this at all.

The realization that he was now looking to Cas for how to handle a woman almost made him snicker at the irony.

He fortified himself with enough painkiller to fell an elephant and went in search of her, finding her in supplies, working the late afternoon shift. “Melanie.”

“Hi.” She glanced up from her clipboard, cheeks a little flushed. Her tone wasn’t cold or angry, nor was it overly warm. It could mean anything. Maybe something had happened between them and she was nervous. Or maybe she was simply distracted by the inventory.

Cas said she’d been there, but in what context? There were a lot of variables he didn’t know. Why had she been there? Had he grabbed her outside and dragged her in like a caveman? Or coaxed her? He knew she was very susceptible to being coaxed with soft words and a gentle tone. Or had she been there for another reason entirely? Too many things he didn’t know.

Maybe drinking that much Wild Turkey in one sitting hadn’t been such a good idea no matter what day it had been.

“How’s the count coming,” he asked. The shelves weren’t as full as they’d been in the past. He thought that in another couple years, they were going to have to rely on what they could grow and hunt for as pickings became slim on the shelves of the abandoned stores. Still, there were less people around due to Croatoan, so maybe it’d balance out somehow?

She frowned, making a tick on the paper. “About like usual.” Tipping her head back, she counted cans, squinting and using her pencil to point at each one, then made another notation. Shelf completed, she tapped the pencil on the papers. “Do you want something? Because I need to count those shelves next….”

“And I’m in the way,” he finished for her, taking a step back from the shelves. “Take a break with me.” He expected her to shrug and agree, because that’s what she’d done a couple times before. This time she didn’t, which made him blink in surprise. This time, Melanie showed a bit of backbone.

“I just got started.” Her lips pressed together into a thin line, the tiniest bit of irritation showing through. Aside from that first glance, she hadn’t looked at him again. “I can’t just walk away from my job before I’ve even done any real work. It’s irresponsible.”

“I’m sure Chuck won’t mind.” There wasn’t anybody but the three of them in there anyway.

“I mind.”

“It’s not a request. Take a break with me.”

She closed her eyes and sighed, managing to convey how very put upon the order made her feel. Her eyes snapped open, rolling a little, annoyance clear. “Fine.” Her fingers tightened on the clipboard.

Yup, he decided, something had happened. All he had to do was figure out what. Stretching out a hand, he plucked the clipboard and pencil from her, tugging when she didn’t release them immediately, setting them on the shelf and calling out, “Chuck? Melanie’s stepping outside with me a minute.”

“Okay,” was the amiable reply.

He led her out from the cabin a ways, to one of the picnic tables, where she sat on one side and he leaned against the table. “You came to my cabin last night --”

She crossed her arms, tongue slipping out to wet her lips, gaze looking everywhere but at him. “I never should have gone in. I know that, okay? Cas already talked to me about it.”

“But you did. So --”

“I was only trying to help. Jo was passed out and I thought maybe you needed help, too, and then….” She shook her head, heaving another sigh. “I wasn’t throwing myself at you, Dean, I swear. I wasn’t thinking anything like that. Cas said it was stupid of me to just go in like that and that I was damn lucky you were too drunk to do anything. He says it could have been really bad and that I shouldn’t ever do that again except with him because I already know how he’ll probably react.”

He sat as well, crossing his arms on the table edge. “Right.” She was actually making this easy, doing all the talking. Dean started to relax.

Her gaze raised, touched his for a second and moved on again, to study the area around them. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” Melanie bit her lower lip, teeth grazing it. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Well…as long as you’re promising….”

“I do, I really do. I promise. It won’t happen again, I mean it.” She started to get up, then stopped, sitting back down. “Can…can I talk to you a minute? It’s about Cas.”

“About Cas? Sure.” The relief from dodging the talking feelings bullet with her filled him and he smiled. “Shoot.”

“Well…you knew him before, right?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, I knew Cas then. I’ve known him for a few years now.”

“Castiel’s an unusual name.”

“It is,” he agreed, wondering where she was taking this line of conversation. Hadn’t Cas already told her everything she’d ever wanted to know about him? All she had to do was ask him. Cas seemed pretty open to any of them about most anything. So why wasn’t she asking Cas whatever it was she was building up to asking?

“I can’t think of where it might have originated, like what country.”

“It’s a very old, ancient name I’ve heard.” As in thousands of years and heaven as the country, if heaven could be considered a country. “Is that what you wanted to talk about? His name?”

“No. It’s probably a silly question….” She drew invisible circles on the table with one finger.

“There are no silly questions. Lay it on me. There’s very little about Castiel that I don’t know by now. I’m like an authority on him.”

Her glance flicked up and Melanie stared at him, head tilting a fraction to one side. He had the impression that she was almost afraid to ask her question, but then she drew in a sharp breath, leaning across the table. “Is he a fallen angel?”

All levity left him. How was he supposed to answer that? And how was it, that out of all the people in the camp, it was Melanie asking?