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“No. No way in hell.” Dean sets her jaw, putting a hand up towards Cas in a universal stop gesture.
“Dean, you’re filthy.”
She looks down at herself, the mud and sewage and bits of gore clinging to her nice, safe, reliable jacket and jeans, and she can already feel it caking onto her skin. She stinks, and it’s her fault, but that doesn’t mean she should have to suffer the consequences. Their stuff is hundreds of feet sunk into the Mississippi river by now, and there’s no getting it back- not that there was anything valuable in there.
Just. You know.
Most of their money and all of their clothes.
All they had left was a trunk full of weapons and enough cash in the glovebox to cover two nights at a motel far away from the new town they’d gained a reputation in and enough gas to get there.
“It’s a freaking dress, dude. No. Absolutely not.” She purses her lips and shakes her head, squaring her shoulders. “Either wear it in the dark and privacy of wherever you can find such a thing, or man up. Can’t- can’t you rob a Salvation Army or something?”
He looks at her with those big fucking eyes and says, with all the sincerity in the world, “That would be unethical, Dean.”
“And stealing from a lost and found isn’t?”
“Oh, these people are never coming back. It was a couple on vacation, he accidentally brought his mistresses’ bag from their last vacation, and so he dumped it in a panic- just like her, actually-”
“Cas.”
“Yeah?”
“So not the point.”
Cas just stares at her with those stupid puppy dog eyes and Dean knows she just has to keep with the game plan- deny, deny, deny, get him to leave, and then…
Well, that part doesn’t matter as much.
In the other room the sounds of the shower abruptly end, and Dean glares at the door.
“And why the hell are you showering?”
“You got some of your crap on me when I had to pull you out of the river,” Sam calls back, “but I still have clothes to change into.”
Sure enough, thirty seconds later Sam emerges in his perfectly intact clothes, toweling off his hair. He grabs the car keys off the nightstand. “Well. I’m off to scam our way into new credit cards. And IDs. And-”
“We get it,” Dean interjects, “I fucked up.”
“Used all our essentials as a distraction-”
“Yeah, OK, but you shouldn’t be the one doing the scamming, Sammy, that’s all me!”
Almost looking offended, Sam insists, “I am fine at lying. And you can’t go anywhere looking like that.”
“So let me have your clothes, and you wear the stupid sundress.”
Sam makes a face at her and then he’s out the door and Dean can hear the car starting up and goddamnit, she hates it when she loses control of the situation.
When she looks back to the angel, Cas is sitting on the foot of the bed with his hands folded in his lap. He’s staring at them with great concentration, like he’s trying to figure out something that just doesn’t make sense to him.
“Dean,” he starts gingerly, like he’s afraid to ask but really doesn’t know, “what’s wrong with the dress?”
“What’s wrong with the- you can’t be serious.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”
“Because I’m a freaking guy, Cas.”
“Why?”
Dean blinks.
“Because-”
Well.
“Because I’ve got a dick.”
“In that bar in New York, the girls there-”
“They weren’t really girls, Cas.”
“Why?”
Jesus, he’s like a little kid sometimes.
“They’re just putting on an outfit, man, it’s- it’s- I don’t know, they had bad childhoods, and-” she can feel herself getting red in the face, failing to distinguish herself from everything she hates, but she still can’t bring herself to think he. God, it’s freaking pathetic. “They’re just different.”
“Every girl is different.”
“Oh, don’t give me that feminist crap. Gender is real, and I’m not wearing a dress.”
Cas looks at her like he’s sad.
Dean really, really doesn’t like it.
“Fine.” His voice is back to gravely and he stands up, but he leaves the dresses on the bed. There’s three, all of them have slightly different patterns. Dean pretends not to notice that Cas still gave her options. “I’m going to go. At least take a shower.”
“I’ll wear a towel.”
Cas opens his mouth as if he has something to say but wisely bites his tongue. In a blink he’s disappeared from the room and Dean’s left to her own devices.
She looks around the room for a few seconds as if she’s trying to make sure he’s really gone.
Hesitantly she reaches towards the one on top, a soft-looking white dress with a floral pattern, but she sees the grime under her fingernails and stops before she can touch and ruin it.
The shower runs hot and almost painful her skin. With the crappy washcloth she scrubs down every inch of her body, even past when the sewage feel is gone. It’s almost like she’s trying to scrub something else off of her, something that will get Cas to leave her alone, to let her step back into her clothes and feel OK about how she fills them out.
It never works.
But maybe this time it could, if she scrubbed enough of her skin down to the bone.
When she’s clean enough to step out onto the cold tile floor, she wraps the towel around her body and that itself is almost like a dress. She clenches her jaw and tries to forget about it, but when she sees her silhouette in the cloudy mirror it doesn’t just go away.
For a moment, if she squints, she could almost imagine her shape changing. Moulding into something new. Something clean, something soft.
She hugs the towel tighter and opens the door. All the steam rushes out and the room, thankfully, is still empty.
Lying back on the squeaky, uncomfortable bed she reaches carefully into the pocket of the jeans she’ll just have to throw out for the pack of cigarettes she’d smartly wrapped in a plastic bag before taking to the sewers. The lighter takes a few clicks to work, but she’s so, so glad this room already stinks.
Maybe these cigarettes are laced with something, though, because when she stamps the first out on the complimentary dish, her hand reaches for the first dress still lying at the end of the bed. She just lets her hand sit there, feeling the fabric. It’s kind of stretchy, like maybe it would accommodate her shoulders. That's the issue with most dresses. They aren’t built for girls like her.
Guys like her.
She doesn’t know why she said those things to Cas. the more she smokes the worse she feels about it. She doesn’t need to confuse him any more than he is, and all of this is just… confusing.
Eventually she’s sick of smoking cigarettes and the room stinks and her towel’s still damp by the time she’s dry, and she figures she can’t open the window naked- even if it is in the middle of nowhere. If they do come back, on an actual job, chances are Dean will look very very different.
Back in her normal clothes.
She slips into the dress without thinking about it, tugging the elastic up over her shoulders. It clings to her but flows, loose and breathable. When she walks over to the window to crack it slightly it swishes around her ankles and god, it’s nicer than any two dollar junk she’d gotten from a secondhand store the rare nights Sam’s been out and she had nothing better to do than to get wasted. If only there was beer in this motel.
She doesn’t like dresses, not really.
If it were up to her she’d be wearing jeans with room for hips and a buttoned-up flannel with a waist, maybe some nice and pointed boots. She wouldn’t even like her hair long, maybe she’d grow it out just enough to tickle her ears. She wouldn’t even want boobs, not really. As hot as they were on other people, she can’t help but think they would just get in the way. And bras seem too complicated to figure out. Don’t they hurt to grow?
Her ideal female body would be useful, not whatever soft figure she cut in the mirror now.
But she can’t help but be entranced by whatever this is, following her own gaze, holding one hand on her opposite shoulder as if covering her chest, watching where it clung and where it didn’t. Just how much she looks like her mother.
She tears herself away from the mirror and stomps over to the bedside table to grab a cigarette, struggling to get the lighter to spark.
“If you’re a girl like this-”
“JESUS,” Dean jumps, turning around and reaching for a gun at her hip that couldn’t be attached anywhere on this dress, “don’t do that to a guy, Cas!” She clutches her heart in a dramatic gesture, wishing she had something to hide behind. Squaring her shoulders and puffing up her chest feels weirder, so instead she just stands there.
“Sorry.” He takes a few steps up to close the distance between them. “Do you need some help with that?”
He gestures at her cigarette and she lifts it to her lips, trying to flick her lighter. Instead of doing his magic on the lighter fluid he reaches up and touches the tip of his finger to the cigarette. It sparks and a bit of heat flicks on her face for half a second before the embers turn a bright orange and he takes a warm breath in, holding the smoke for a second before blowing it to the side. Cas doesn’t get out of her space.
“I didn’t know you smoked.” His eyes always have a concerned way of looking at her, and she doesn’t know how to interpret that.
“Only when no one’s looking.”
“Oh.”
…
“What were you saying?”
“Hm?” He tilts his head to the side like a puppy.
“When you popped up. You were asking something.”
“Oh.”
When he doesn’t elaborate, Dean raises her eyebrow.
“I was wondering if- if you were a girl. Like this, you know. Dressed up.”
“Are you a man because of your shirt and tie?” She bites back before she can think it through.
“I’m not a man at all.”
“Oh? What are you?”
He shrugs. “I am myself.”
She doesn’t know what she means and she doesn't know what she means, she just knows he’s pissing her off. It’s not even him, it’s just everything. It’s crawling like worms on her nerves. She doesn’t think she’s clean just yet. She should shower again.
“And…” he bites the inside of his cheek and she can tell from the way he winces. She takes one more drag, holding her cigarette between her fingers. “If I were to kiss you…” her heart leaps in her chest, “would that be alright now?”
His eyes are so big, so earnest.
“Yeah,” she mutters, leaning in to close the distance between them. “Yeah, that’d be alright.”
At her side, her cigarette burns to ash, and she just lets it.