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“Let me get this straight,” Dean says. He’s rubbing at the tense furrow between his brows with his thumb, eyes closed as if he’s in pain. Castiel, watching, wants to pull Dean’s hand away and replace it with his mouth, kiss away the wrinkles. He has the feeling that Dean would not find this an acceptable course of action in public. “You wanted to go all-out on Halloween decorations this year. And you’re broke as shit. So you decided to reanimate a couple dozen corpses rather than shell out twenty bucks at Party City for some plastic bones.”
“I didn’t mean to,” the girl moans. Her head is in her hands and her short dark hair is a mess, pulled every which way. “I swear to God, I was just trying to raise one—I even picked out an unmarked grave, you know, one of the ones that’s been here for like, two hundred years? So I don’t, like. I dunno, upset the family, I guess? And I was just gonna have it sit by my door and move every once in a while when trick or treaters came by and freak people out, and then the next day, I swear, I was gonna put it back to rest.”
“Lady,” Dean says, “You raised a whole friggin’ cemetery.”
A bony hand holding a tissue extends into Castiel’s vision. Face crumpled up, the girl—Rebecca, twenty-one years old, a college student living off-campus—reaches out and takes the tissue. “Thanks,” she hiccups.
The skeleton clatters a little, like it’s saying You’re very welcome. Then it clacks back to the other room, where roughly a dozen skeletons are waiting patiently. There’s another twenty in the basement. Most of them have been completely decomposed, but a few have stubborn scraps of tissue still clinging to their bones.
Cas can’t decide what the look on Dean’s face is. He flicks his eyes over to Sam, who is trying very hard not to laugh. His mouth is pursed and tight at the edges as it always gets when he sees Dean doing something ridiculous and fails at keeping a straight face.
“It wasn’t a whole cemetery,” Castiel points out. “There were almost two hundred bodies laid to rest. Only thirty-three have arisen.”
“Only thirty-three,” Dean mutters. “Okay. Okay.” He drags his hand down his face. “And they’re not—doing anything?”
Rebecca’s voice goes shrill. “No! They just—nothing happened at first, and I thought it was a bust, I mean, it was a long shot, you know, it was just this stupid book I picked up from the store and I’ve never done something this big, it’s all little charms, and I thought, there’s no way I’ve got the juice to do this, and it probably won’t even work anyway, so I waited for like an hour after the spell and nothing happened so I just came home, right? And then I woke up! And there were—all of them! In my bedroom! Looking at me!”
“But they didn’t attack you,” Dean prompts, which even Cas can tell is a little insensitive, considering that the memory has brought a look of terror to Rebecca’s face.
Rebecca blows her nose. “No, they just. They didn’t speak or anything. But I screamed and I said, I don’t know, get away from me, or something, and they. They all went into the other room. And, my house was a bit of a mess, right, I mean, I’d been doing all this work trying to get the spell right and school is kicking my ass so I haven’t had the time to clean. And I came out in the morning. And everything was spotless. Everything. All my dishes were clean. They’dvacuumed the rug. They fixed my leaky faucet. They are bones!” she suddenly shouts, a little hysterical. “How does a pile of bones know how to fix my sink?”
“That poses a very interesting metaphysical question, actually,” Castiel says when neither Dean nor Sam say anything. “One must ask, is there some remnant of being that is left behind when the soul departs the body? Is it this soul residue, so to speak, that allows knowledge of such a task? Perhaps the skeleton once belonged to a plumber. Have you asked?”
“They don’t have tongues, Cas, they can’t speak,” Dean snaps. Cas narrows his eyes at him. He understands that Dean is short-tempered and knocked off-kilter by the fact that there’s not, exactly, a hunt here, but his tone was unwarranted.
“They don’t have tendons or muscles, either, yet they’re still entirely capable of moving around and retaining their shape,” Castiel says icily.
“Fucking magic,” Dean grumbles.
“They don’t speak,” Rebecca offers. “At least, not to me? They just. Follow me around and try to be—helpful. I found one of them trying to do my physics homework the other day. I mean? What the hell?”
A bony appendage prods at Castiel’s shoulder. He startles and turns around, tensing. There’s a skeleton standing behind him, holding a steaming cup of tea. It proffers the cup and looks as expectantly at him as a skull can look expectant.
“Um,” Castiel says. “Thank you.” He takes the cup and brings it to his nose. Chamomile and honey. A tiny splash of milk. He takes a sip. It tastes just as he expects it to taste and is perfectly straddling the line between too-hot and not-hot-enough.
Another skeleton brings a bowl of chips and sets it down on the coffee table, then scurries back to the kitchen.
“I’ve tried to send them back,” Rebecca says, sniffing. Another skeleton brings over three more cups of tea, balanced perfectly on a tray, and hands them out to Rebecca, Sam, and Dean. “I’ve tried. I mean—I can’t have anyone over with them just crawling all over the place! And yeah, they’re helpful, but.” Her voice lowers to a whisper, almost guilty. “They freak me out, okay? And I feel bad! Because I’m the one who summoned them, and they’re trying so hard to be helpful—thank you,” she interrupts herself in a normal voice as another skeleton (or perhaps it’s been the same skeleton the whole time) brings over a box of tissues. “They’re trying so hard to be helpful,” Rebecca repeats in a whisper, “but I just—ugh!” She shivers and clutches her tea close to her chest. “I haven’t even gone to class in a week, I’m scared they’re gonna get out and do—something.”
“Okay, Rebecca,” Sam says before Dean can say anything. “We’re gonna figure this out. I swear. These guys will be out of your hair, and your life will be back to normal before you know it.” He smiles at Rebecca, a look that Castiel can never get right: sympathetic, but not overly so, and reassuring and open and trustworthy all at the same time. Rebecca smiles back at him a little shakily.
They finish their tea before they go to be polite. Dean takes a handful of chips with him and pops them, one at a time, into his mouth, as they head back out to the Impala. He brushes the crumbs off on his pants, nose wrinkling a little, before he gets into the Impala. It’s Castiel’s turn to ride shotgun, and as soon as Dean has started the car and shifted into drive, Dean’s hand settles on his thigh, warm and broad and comforting. Castiel places his hand on top of Dean’s, rubs at his knuckles with his thumb.
“I gotta say,” Sam says from the backseat. “This has gotta be the weirdest case we’ve ever had.”
Dean scoffs. “That’s so not true, man. Remember the—” he snickers, clears his throat. “The fucking glitter, man. And your face.”
“Clowns are terrifying, Dean.”
“You looked like you were about to piss yourself, dude.”
“I reiterate: clowns. Are fucking. Terrifying. And, of the two of us, you’re the only one who’s actually pissed yourself, so …”
“I got hit by a car! And, I don’t even remember it. So shut your mouth, sasquatch.”
Castiel closes his eyes and tilts his head backwards. His boys, he thinks fondly. His family. These are the people he loves most in the world. Even though Sam and Dean are now trading insults back and forth at ever-increasing velocity, he thinks that this moment, right here, is what he fell for.
It turns out that returning the skeletons to the earth is actually a lot easier than what the spell-book told Rebecca to do, which was a whole bunch of nonsense about a long chant that needed to be recited from memory, specific incenses burning for precise stretches of time, and a ton of sigils which Cas takes one look at and declares to be bullshit.
(Even without his wings, dude’s a veritable walking encyclopedia, and nobody’s better with a blade than he is. Dean plants a kiss on Cas’ forehead before he remembers he doesn’t do that sort of thing in front of people. But Rebecca wasn’t really paying attention—she was looking at Sam with big doe-eyes, the poor girl—so Dean just kisses Cas’ forehead again and brings him into a one-sided hug as they stand over the open tome. Cas is blushing. Just his ears, but. It’s not adorable.)
All they gotta do is bring the skeletons back to their graves and have Rebecca tell them to—well, it’s in Latin and it’s kinda lengthy, but basically what it boils down to is go the fuck back to sleep. So. There’s that.
They do it at midnight, and Dean’s kind of disappointed at how easily the skeletons just mosey back into their own graves. One of them waves at Rebecca after it’s clambered back into its coffin, and waits until she waves back before it covers itself up.
“Weirdest case ever,” Dean mutters. At his side, Cas hums in agreement.
‘Course, the spell doesn’t cover up all the graves. So there goes the rest of the night, with the four of them shoveling dirt back on top of the thirty-three desecrated graves the skeletons had crawled out of the week before. They don’t finish until almost sunrise. Dean’s pleasantly surprised that Rebecca managed to keep up with them—she’s little, maybe five-one, and is clearly exhausted, but she hadn’t once complained all night.
They drive her back to her house and get out of the car to say a proper goodbye, hanging about awkwardly on the front stoop of her sagging little one-bedroom rental. “Um,” Rebecca starts, and then she covers her face with her hand. “That was really eloquent. Uh. Thanks for.” She gestures. “Everything.”
Sam stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. He smiles goofily at her like the giant puppy he is. Rebecca’s eyes go all soft and wobbly. Dude, Dean wants to say. Stop feeding her massive crush on you. He settles for elbowing Sam in the side, hard.
“I’m sorry your Halloween decoration plan didn’t work out,” Cas says a little awkwardly, a little too earnestly.
“Yeah, maybe next time just stick to stuff from Party City,” Dean adds dryly.
Rebecca heaves a sigh. “God, yeah. I’m never touching that book again. I’m happy with my charms. That’s it. No more skeletons. Ugh.”
“About that,” Dean says, and he points at her, raises his eyebrows until he’s certain she’s paying attention. “Look. The second you decide to step over that line and start dealing with demons or making hex bags or some shit, we will come back, and we will stop you.” He laughs, lets the tension ease. “We know where you live, after all.”
They say their round of goodbyes and wait for her to close the door behind her before they head back to the Impala. Dean slings an arm around Cas’ shoulders and tugs him close, rests his cheek on the crown of his head. “God, you smell gross,” he says.
“You smell very pleasing as well, Dean,” Cas says, voice as dry as the Sahara desert.
“How come nobody compliments how I smell when I’ve been filling in graves for six hours?” Sam asks theatrically.
“Go ask Rebecca, bet you she’d say you smell like musk.” Dean snickers.
They get into the car one after the other, doors slamming almost in sync. Sam’s up front this time, Cas in the back. Dean’s gonna need to wash the Impala’s interior when they get back to the Bunker after this. They’re probably getting graveyard dirt into every nook and cranny.
As they’re driving back to the motel, from the backseat Cas says, “I think we should get a skeleton to sit at the door of the Bunker. It would be festive. Not a real one, of course. Without a spell to hold it together, we’d merely have two-hundred and six bones sitting by the door in a pile, which defeats the purpose. But a fake skeleton.”
“You know what, Cas?” Dean says. “For you? I’ll buy a dozen fuckin’ plastic skeletons.”