in which Charlie meets Cas (and maybe Chuck isn't as dead as we thought)
Charlie shows up two weeks after the angels fall, parking her car in the woods behind the bunker and walking three miles because, apparently, that’s how you handle secret bunkers on TV. Dean wants to roll his eyes, but if he’s honest with himself he’s glad for the company: Sam’s healing, but it’s slow, and he spends most of his time asleep, or staring blankly at walls while Dean tries alternately to cajole him into eating, or annoy him into it, swallowing down broth resentfully just to get Dean to stop hovering. The rest of the bunker isn’t a hell of a lot better: Kevin’s locked himself in the library with the angel tablet and all the junk food on earth, there’s a broken-down demon crying to chick flicks in their dungeon, and Castiel, once they finally found him just south of Topeka, hasn’t been awake for more than three hours in one shot, burrowed underneath all of the bedding they could spare and some of Dean’s that he probably couldn’t. It took six comforters alone to get him to stop shivering; Dean’s getting tired of being the most stable person in the Batcave. It’s freaking unnatural.
The knock on the door nearly gives Dean (another) heart attack; he’s got his gun out of his pant pocket and trained on impenetrable steel even before his phone buzzes, Charlie’s number and a r u guys home? leaving him feeling slightly ridiculous, despite himself. He tucks the glock back into a drawer and pulls open the door, is promptly sent staggering backwards by a hug that shouldn’t be able to involve that much force, given the size of its instigator.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me.” Dean breathes into her hair. She smells like overpriced shampoo and incense sticks, and Dean’s eyes prickle. He didn’t realize how much he missed her. “I’m glad you’re okay, kiddo.”
“Me? I’m not the one out chasing all the—” she makes a whistling sound that probably translates roughly into either ‘comets’ or ‘falling angels;’ Dean isn’t entirely sure how much she knows about what happened, doesn’t entirely want to ask. In the end he doesn’t have to, because Charlie pushes past him, looking around the bunker. “It’s freaking crazy out there, I had to off-road it just to get up here. Where’s Sam, is he okay? What happened with the trials?” Her voice drops with worry. “Castiel wasn’t one of those fiery ball things, was he?”
Dean is swept up in a wave of rapid-fire questions; he raises a hand to his head, trying to figure out what statement he should go at first. He settles for a broad, “wait, how did you—”
And apparently absolutely no one is on Dean’s side today, because it’s at this moment, after a good three days of refusing to leave his bed and the massive pile of blankets and pillows he’s been burrowed underneath, that Castiel finally chooses to drag his ass out of the spare room he’s claimed as his own, hair sticking up at all angles and three days’ worth of stubble shading his jaw. He’s wearing Dean’s boxers and an old concert t-shirt, scratching at his skin where the elastic rides too-low on his hip bones, and Dean spares a look over at Charlie, suddenly aware exactly what this looks like. He looks….well, he looks fucked.
Is fucked, if Dean’s feeling cynical. They all are. But definitely not in the way Charlie’s expression suggests she’s assuming.
