After 48 agonizing hours, Cas still hasn’t responded. Dean tries, and fails, not to read too much into it.
After 60 hours, he’s playing with the vague certainty that he’s actually just been hallucinating Cas for the last week and a half.
At 68, he’s rediscovered the container of brownies in his freezer, which doesn’t exactly confirm Cas’s existence, but feels slightly more affirming in that Dean isn’t so far gone he believes himself capable of manifesting fudge frosting and rainbow sprinkles out of thin air, let alone a whole man.
At the roughly 73 hour mark, he’s damn convinced Cas must be real, because at some point he lost the plot and let himself get snacky on a second brownie, and at no point has Dean ever even made weed butter without close supervision, let alone a batch so strong that he’s beginning to hear colors at two o’clock in the afternoon.
On the dot of 74 hours, he’s got Charlie cursing a blue streak in one ear and Jeff Beck’s guitar wailing in the other, and it’s overwhelming in a way that could have been unbearable if he hadn’t let her convince him to pirate Skyrim at some point yesterday (“How many times do I have to tell you: we don’t bankroll Todd Howard’s nonsense in this house, Dean!”); he’s too busy figuring out how he came to be fighting a dragon and a mammoth at the same time in armor that is nowhere near adequate for the job, and furthermore, how to not die, to let the simmering drone of real-world anxiety muscle its way into a starring role.
At 74 hours and a quarter, Dean dies a valiant, hard-fought death--having slain both the mammoth and the dragon and depleted his stash of health potions, he looted his spoils from the bodies and limped onward into the mountains, only to be beset by a sabre cat who rips out his poor Argonian’s throat in short order.
Dean drops his head back to the couch, drops his controller to the floor, and lets out a sigh of despair that has Charlie tuning back in again despite the fact that it’s been nothing but the frantic tap-tap-tap of button smashing and one mumbled “eat my sword, motherfucker,” on her end for several minutes now.
“What’s happening, handmaiden? Use your words.”
“I died, and I’m still too high,” he says plaintively. “It’s fucking with me.”
“I know, baby,” she tells him, “but deep breaths--we’re coping, remember? You can always start again.” She must pause her game, because he hears the distinct click of her setting her own controller down on their glass-topped coffee table, then the rapid bubble of water that signifies her taking an atrociously large hit off of the stupid dalek bong she loves so much.
“Just because you can’t handle your own shit,” she gulps, but then she wheezes out a laugh that has her coughing and spluttering like a rookie.
find the rest on AO3 (and go give @casarts some major love for her beautiful pieces!)
