Title: The Guilt of Still Being

Chapter: Three

~~~~~~~~~~

The rest of the first week they cleaned and organized, Castiel finding a kindred spirit in Risa where those issues were concerned. She liked to have things organized, with everything in it’s place and so did he. Dean hadn’t ever been particularly neat. He’d leave dirty socks in odd places and half the time he hadn’t put things back where he’d found them. He wondered what Risa’s cabin had looked like. Had she tried decorating at all like she did here?

They made the panic room a home and cleaned both the kitchen and living room enough to use them. The rooms didn’t have the comfortably messed feel they’d had when Bobby lived here. The floors remained streaked with dirt and other matter. If they wanted to sit on the floor or lie down there, they had blankets to put down. One was permanently laid before the fire. They’d thrown out the trash strewn about and tossed out anything that wasn’t necessary that could get in the way if they needed to move quickly. The fireplace was welcome, a way to heat and cook while he tried to figure out why the generator wasn’t working.

Risa helped where she had the know-how and scrounged through the rooms for things they could use. In the attic, she found some sheets, blankets and clothes that had been boxed up and forgotten. She found the towels he’d missed as well. Together, they made the panic room as comfortable and defendable as they could.

During the day they worked, pushing themselves so they didn’t have to feel anything at all, and at night, they held each other and let exhaustion claim them for long hours at a time.

A week of hard work deserved a reward in Cas’s opinion and he brought out the half bottle of whiskey he’d found buried under trash. He’d kept it for such a moment as this, forcing himself not to drink it without her. With the fire going and a few blankets padding the floor before it, they were able to relax for a moment.

“So staying here was your plan?” Risa was beside him, lying down with her head propped on one hand. After her shower, she’d put on a dark blue robe she’d found in the attic. The box she’d found were mostly women’s clothes. Cas thought they’d probably been Bobby’s wife’s, things Bobby hadn’t been able to bear parting with. Had this robe Risa wore been something Bobby had given his wife? A birthday present? Christmas present? Something?

“For now. Until we absolutely have to move on. We can defend it and I think we should head to town soon and see if we can’t find some camping gear -- more sleeping bags, camping stove, things like that. We should stockpile as many essential goods as possible.” Setting his glass aside, he laid down facing her and placed a caressing hand on her hip. Lying closer, he could smell the clean soap scent on her skin, that same scent that was on him. They’d have to search for more soap of some kind soon. That sliver of soap had already dwindled to nearly nothing.

“Do you think it’s possible to live here?”

“Bobby certainly thought he could.” He slid his hand to the loose knot on the belt of the robe and worked the knot free.

“Bobby died.” She rolled onto her back, shifting a little, inviting him to touch her.

“Not through his own fault.” Bobby’s death hadn’t been his fault. He couldn’t have known one of the team who’d gone to help him get settled would become infected. Nor could he have known one of the team had an itchy trigger finger and would waste everyone just in case. That kid had fled back to the camp, admitted what he’d done and shot himself before Dean could do anything. “There’s a town nearby. Sioux Falls. We can go there, try the houses and businesses one by one, see what we can find.”

Castiel ran his fingers along the edge of the robe, then slipped them under it, palm flat on her naked belly, taking her invitation. Leaning over, he kissed her, slow and deep. He thought he’d taken enough from her this week and it was time to give back some of what he’d taken. He used his hands and mouth on her, drawing gasps and blissful sighs from her until she arched her back and cried out with a culmination of pleasure that left her body flushed and hot to the touch. Only then did he cover her body with his and find his own release inside of her.

They began venturing into town the next day, a slow, careful series of trips to look for food, clothing, and medicines. Each trip netted them something. Clothes for both of them, scrounged from a few different houses and businesses. Food such as rice and noodles and some canned goods. They even found a few medicines that made Castiel very happy and that camping gear he’d wanted.

They also found Croats. Not many, but enough to make the trips an exercise in danger and skill. Each successful trip was celebrated, one way or another. He preferred sex and liquor, or a pill or two. Risa? Not so much. She’d rather lie still with him and talk. The difference between men and women, he supposed. She wanted to talk, he wanted to screw.

He recalled Dean being that way as well. He remembered coming back from a successful hunt and watching Dean sweet talk two pretty young women into going back to the room with him. Cas also remembered Jo Harvelle’s reaction to that. Jo and Ellen had been with them off and on in those days. She’d sighed and shaken her head, sadness in her eyes. She and Ellen had exchanged a look and Ellen had handed Jo a few folded bills with an apologetic suggestion that she get her own room for a couple nights. Cas had spent that night and the next two with Ellen, learning a few more things about women.

Why hadn’t Dean ever looked at Jo? He’d wondered that then and now went back to that for a moment. Jo had certainly met Dean’s criteria of an attractive woman. What had stopped Dean from taking her to bed? Was it the fact that if he screwed her over, he’d have Ellen to deal with? Or that Jo admittedly wanted more than a few nights from a guy? Even in the Apocalypse Jo wanted something of a future. It was futile to wonder really, he supposed, as he doubted he’d ever have any answers.

He’d missed Ellen and Jo when they’d left, but like everything else, that hurt had faded away under a careful application of drugs, alcohol, women, and time.

Bobby’s house was a good place to hole up, that panic room an easy place to feel safe. Maybe they weren’t really safe, but it sure felt that way with the door closed and barred from the inside. They could sit inside and pretend the world was normal and they were there because they chose to be.

Castiel watched Risa place everything they’d found on shelves. She arranged them over and over, doing a daily inventory like he recalled Chuck doing at the camp. Clothes on the bottom shelves, food on the next two, with canned goods on the lower and packages on the upper, then medicines and toiletries on the top shelf. First one shelving unit, then another. He didn’t care how she organized them as long as he could find those pills he’d grabbed in town.

Reaching into his shirt pocket, he drew out a flat pill case and took two pills from it, swallowing them with a swig of water. He thought numbness was a good strategy at present. Maybe later he’d let himself feel a little more, but not now. Right now it hurt too much still to feel.

“Are we ever going to talk about it,” Risa asked, pausing in her task and looking over her shoulder at him. The words paralleled his action of taking the pills. Of course she wanted to discuss what he wanted to avoid. How could it be any differently?

“Talk about what?”

“Dean. Them. The people we left.” She took a breath. “What we’ve done.”

Leaning his head back, he stared up at the fan in the ceiling. “Do we have to?”

“I think so.”

Sighing, he drew his legs up onto the bed and crossed them. “Alright. Go for it, Risa.”

“Dean’s dead.” She came to him and sat beside him. “He’s gone as in really gone --”

“Generally what dead means, yes. Dean’s dead, all those people are dead, and we led Lucifer to them. Am I leaving anything out? That what you wanted to discuss? Or maybe you want to talk about this arrangement we have going here between us?”

Risa crossed her arms. “How about what happened to the other Dean? He wasn’t there when we came out.”

“Don’t know. Maybe he returned to his own time, or Lucifer took him. Does it matter where he went?”

“Was he even real?”

“You mean did we hallucinate him, like a collective thing?”

“I don’t know, maybe? If he went back, would all of this change?”

Cas groaned. “You really want to discuss time travel? Really? Is that your idea of a conversation we need to have?”

“No, I just…” she closed her eyes, shook her head, and reopened her eyes, “I want to talk about something other than finding supplies and what we need to think about to survive. I’m tired of it, Cas.”

Stretching out a hand, he cupped her cheek, swept his thumb along her cheekbone. “You want to go outside awhile?”

“There’s too many places for someone to hide out there. It’s not safe.”

“Agreed. Not what I asked. Do you want to go outside?”

Her gaze lifted to the ceiling. Outside meant potential danger. He could almost hear her thinking that. Being outside meant they could become infected. Slowly, Risa shook her head. “No. Not…not today. I just…. I feel like I have to do something. I can’t sit still in here.”

He pulled that pill case back out and handed it to her. “Here. Take one.”

She opened it, stared at the pills. “What are they?”

“Does it matter?”

Risa glanced at him, then back at the case. “What’ll they do?”

“Make you not care for awhile.” He brushed her hair back from her face with gentle fingers. “Take away some of the anxiety, the pain, the emotional hell going on in your head right now. Take one, Risa. Take one and lie down here with me for awhile.” Cas could see the desire for escape in her eyes. She wanted it, but he already knew she wasn’t going to take it.

She closed the case and shook her head. “No, Cas, I can’t.”

Taking it back, he returned it to his pocket. “Why not?”

“I’m not desperate enough.”

He smiled and laughed. “Yet.”

She stared at the floor. “Yet,” she agreed in a low whisper.

The time would come when she’d need something for escape. He knew that well. Everyone needed an escape eventually. What would her escape turn out to be?

~~~~~~~~~~

As the days passed, Risa began to understand Castiel’s moods, learning to anticipate them by little signs in his speech or even posture. He was moody as all hell, his moods in constant flux, much like her own. He could be up, down, and in-between all in a matter of minutes. Sometimes she wondered if he was bi-polar or something. Honestly, he behaved as though he didn’t have the learned checks and balances most people had for dealing with emotions. Made her wonder about his background before he’d met Dean. What sort of man had he been before the Apocalypse? What had happened that caused such devotion to Dean? She didn’t recall hearing anything about his past or if there’d been stories, she’d ignored them.

Perhaps one of these days she could get him to tell her.

She crafted several versions of herself for each emotional occasion, all carefully designed to give him what he needed at that moment. She did it for that sole reason of keeping him with her. He needed variety to deal, so she gave him that.

She’d be the temptress, enticing and seducing him or the woman wanting seduction. The versions grew darker from there. With no real outlet for his aggression, he tried to keep those feelings under wraps, yet every so often she saw that edge and knew he needed relief from it. Violent, passionate relief, something to purge the emotions from him.

On those days he was sullen and sarcastic, angry and hateful, becoming frustrated with the littlest of things, like opening a can or trying to fix the likely unfixable generator. He’d kick walls and doors, slam things around and even throw things.

On those days, she pretended to be afraid of him, and maybe the first couple times she had been. She’d do or say something to goad him until he grabbed her and held her down wherever they were in the house, but only in the house, never outside. They rarely went outside anyway unless they had to.

Was it messed up that she found it exciting when he grabbed her? He wouldn’t really hurt her, she knew that. There was never a moment when she thought he would. There was only anticipation and that thrill she got from it. Castiel didn’t hurt women, he loved them -- in any way they wanted him to.

Occasionally, Risa thought about the people they’d left. How many of them had Lucifer killed quickly and how many had suffered for hours as he’d tortured them for fun? Her dreams, when they weren’t filled with images of her own violent death, were filled with those images. Her mind came up with horrible things: them skinned alive, disemboweled, and so on. She’d wake trying to scream with images of those dying people still in her mind. It was a blessing when she didn’t remember her dreams.

Castiel dreamed, though his dreams seemed to be more pleasant than hers most of the time. She’d heard him cry out Dean’s name more than once and in a way that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than pleasure. Risa didn’t ask him about his dreams. She didn’t ask him if he’d taken Dean into his bed like he had others in the camp. It wasn’t something she thought she wanted to know.

Her own behavior was becoming erratic and she could see it even as she couldn’t stop it. She hated him one minute, then loved and needed him the next. She wanted him to leave her alone, but then she couldn’t bear it if he ever left her. Risa didn’t trust him and she did at the same time, a bunch of contradictory things that made sense and still didn’t. She was changing and he was changing and those changes weren’t good things.

Risa didn’t know how to stop the cycle they’d fallen into. For better or worse, usually worse, it got them through the days.

~~~~~~~~~~

With surprise, Castiel discovered another reason Dean had liked Risa. She would have played along with his fantasies. Dean had had a lot of fantasies. Cas remembered Dean describing them to him, unselfconscious in providing details because it was ‘only Cas’ and ‘educational’ for him. Dean had spoken a lot on things those days for merely those two reasons. He’d determined that Cas thought the porn magazines and movies too impersonal, that he couldn’t relate, so he’d sat him down and attempted to describe some typical fantasies for him. That he thought them impersonal wasn’t the case at all. He’d enjoyed both the magazines and movies, only not as openly as Dean at that time.

He hadn’t told Dean that Ellen Harvelle had already given him quite an education whenever they met up for jobs. He didn’t disclose how Ellen had seduced him the night Dean thought she was taking him clothes shopping. Ellen had already had the shopping done, drawing him into her room by his tie. To this day, Castiel wasn’t quite sure where Jo had been right then, because she hadn’t been with Ellen or Dean.

He didn’t say any of that because he’d liked the closeness those talks brought and the way Dean talked to him then, faintly reminiscent to the way he’d once spoken to Sam. Brotherly. Friendly. Intimate in a way.

Of course, Dean had discovered Cas’s sexual education had begun when he and Jo had opened the door to Jo and Ellen’s room a couple weeks later and found them together, Ellen balanced precariously on the dresser and Castiel’s body the only thing keeping her from falling. Jo had declared herself blind and Dean had calmly dragged Jo from the doorway and closed the door. He’d later remarked that Ellen had a nice rack for an older woman, but that evening had ended the talks on fantasies.

Dean had slammed a wall down between them then for some reason that Cas never had figured out.

He slid from the bed and reached for his clothes, drawing on his jeans.

Risa rolled over and sat up, drawing the sheet against her. “Maybe we could go back.”

Castiel fastened his jeans and turned to look at her, brows raising. “Back?”

“To the camp. It’s been over a month. Surely --”

“No. Lucifer probably left some Croats in case anyone did walk in and there’s no way the two of us could search successfully. There’d always be the chance we missed some.” He thought it had been much longer than a month, though neither of them had really been keeping track of the days that passed.

“How is that different from being here? We haven’t searched the entire property.”

“It just is.” He didn’t want to go back there now and see the bodies of all those people left behind. And the bodies of those he’d given pills to. Just the image of them lying on his bed as they’d been when he’d left the cabin brought a stab of shame and guilt to his chest. The last thing he wanted was to see the aftermath of that.

“So what do we do, Cas? Hide out here until we run out of everything? Screw each other to death?”

“Wouldn’t that be a helluva way to go out?” He put his hands on his hips and gave her a cocky smile. “I’m game if you are.”

She snorted, shook her head, and rolled her eyes. “Would you be serious?”

“I was. I brought some pills, Risa. We could take a few, have a last go at each other, then fall asleep in each other’s arms and never wake up.” He could see the offer tempted her, but Risa was a fighter to the end. His offer would be a very last resort. Him though? He could easily do exactly what he’d suggested. He thought he’d like to have her be the last woman in his life and the one he descended into death with.

“No. No pills, Castiel.”

“Okay.” He sat beside her. “Do you have any suggestions?”

The sheet slipped down. “No. I’m all out of suggestions.”

“Then I guess we hide out here until we’re forced to leave.”

She kicked at the covers until they were pulled free and she could toss them aside. “Great,” she snapped. Risa got up, pulling on a t-shirt the came to mid-thigh. “Just great.”

“What do you want from me, Risa? Hmm? A big plan? I don’t have one.”

“Dean would have,” she muttered just loud enough to hear.

Castiel uttered a harsh laugh. “Really? You think that? Do you have any idea how often he had no idea what he was doing next? At least half the time Dean didn’t have any sort of plan except ‘go in and kill whatever we’re hunting’.” And when Cas could still listen in on thoughts, he’d known it was actually less than half the time. “He’d fly by the seat of his pants.”

“He sure seemed to have plans when we went outside the camp.”

“Didn’t you ever notice they were all mostly the same? Shoot the Croats, not your teammates unless they’re infected, do what you’re told, and try not to get your sorry asses killed.” Which was pretty much their own plan when they left the house. He pulled on his shirt, then his socks. “Sure, there were little variables, but most of those plans he had came down to those things.”

Risa snorted. He’d noticed she was becoming more irritable by the day and had taken to pacing in whatever room she was in. Either that or moving things from one place to the next, organizing them over and over.

“Seriously, Risa. What do you expect from me here?” Bending, he retrieved his boots, then sat at a chair to put them on. “What am I supposed to do? You tell me what you want me to do here.”

“We’re going to run out of food and medicines.”

“So we go out and hunt for more.” The solution to that. She wanted a solution, right?

She visibly paled and crossed her arms. “Like it’s that easy.”

Anger flared up inside him. She knew very well what they had to do to survive. “It is that easy.”

“Bullshit it is.”

Boots on, he stood and snatched the truck keys off a nail on one of the shelving units. “Here, I’ll show you just how easy it is.”

He turned and headed for the stairs, avoiding Risa’s hands as she grabbed for him, shaking her off, taking the stairs two at a time. Behind him, he heard her scrambling to follow, her protests turning panicked.

“Cas stop! Please don’t go! Don’t leave!”

She followed him right out the door and into the afternoon sunlight and chill air, wearing only a t-shirt. No shoes, no pants, just a t-shirt. Risa clung to him, her body shivering from the cold and probably her panic, too. He couldn’t pry her fingers from his shirt. “Let go, Risa.”

“Don’t leave me!”

He got one hand loose but when he went to pry the other she just returned it to him. “Let go,” he yelled.

“Don’t go! I’ll do anything! I promise!” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I promise. Whatever you want me to do, just tell me and I’ll do it.” She was irrational in it, focusing on the leaving part and not the searching for supplies they needed part. “I’ll do it, just don’t go!”

Cas stopped trying to pry her hands from him and grasped her arms. “Stop it, Risa! I’m not leaving.” He shook her. “Just…stop.”

Her eyes were wide and she gulped in breaths, her hands holding on to his shirt so tightly that her knuckles were white. Tears wet her face. “Please.”

It wasn’t the word that stopped him, but how she seemed to fold down in his hands, her shoulders bowing, body sagging in his grip. He let go of her arms only to grab her and lift her against him. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, still clinging, tighter than before. “It’s okay,” he told her, “I won’t go.”

Taking a few steps back, he leaned against the truck and held her while she sobbed and shuddered against him. He ended up carrying her into the house before she’d finally let go and stand on her own.

She was embarrassed later by her behavior, quiet and contemplative, curled up in a fetal position on the bed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she whispered, still crying softly.

Castiel moved to the bed and sat, maneuvering her so that her head was on his lap. Then he picked up the book they’d been reading out loud and read to her while she sobbed.