Dead of Night 15

-.-.-.-.-

Anniversaries

-.-.-.-.-

"I'm seriously not believing you don't remember that guy. Hanna showed us his picture about fifteen times," Cas exclaimed in exasperation, looking over from his knife and the rhythmic grate of his whetting stone. Finas shrugged beside him on the deflated couch, handsome face noncommittal and grim as he tended to his own knife.

It was an odd show of dispassion for the kid, honestly. Finas liked Cross, too, even if the older man was a bit confounded by his high energy and usually left the two younguns to chatter endlessly about their adventures together while he sulked off to the side. Or that was how it seemed to Cas; to Finas, it was simply prudently getting out of the way of a train-wreck of a conversation that, if he tried to follow along, would probably leave him bleeding from his ears.

"I can barely remember him, even now," Finas admitted after a long pause, interrupting his partner's surly muttering about head injuries and impaired short-term memory. His deep voice was solemn and, although Cas was the only one who could have hoped to pick the nuance up, troubled. Finas shook his head. "I can't remember his face, only his shirt."

"He was kinda pushing 'iconic' a little too hard," Casimiro admitted, thinking back on the black tie and the orange shirt. Mostly the tie. What hunter wore something around their neck that was basically a silk noose? Someone with a serious death wish, that's who.

It was almost like the guy was subconsciously wearing something memorable because he knew he was forgettable … or because he was a hunter (or at least a supernatural interloper) and he wanted people looking at his clothes and not his face, so he could dodge any police line-ups. That was the inspiration behind half of Casimiro's flashy hunting clothing, or so he told Finas. Mostly, that red leather jacket just had to be bought, and he did his best work when he looked good.

The young hunter sat back, propping his scarred brown hands and their pointy contents on his crossed leg. Maybe there was something odd about Hanna's new partner, even past the whole 'Hanna-has-a-partner' thing, which sat uncomfortably beside the 'Hanna-is-dead' thing, which Casimiro absolutely wasn't addressing at the moment. He could feel his memory of the man sort of looking for an exit in his head — scrounging around for a crack to slip through — but still, he remembered him. Then again, Cas saw a lot of things with his eye that normal people didn't. He was used to saying holy shit did you see that and having Finas shrug. Then again, considering what was hiding in people's peripheries all the time, maybe it was better that most were blind to it. Better to spend your life unknowingly living in danger than ducking around every corner.

Cas looked over at his partner, studying his moody profile for as long as he dared before he put down his knife and his whetting stone and exhaled slowly.

"You alright, Eeyore?"

He had tried everything over the past two nights. Finas' favorite food, his favorite music, jokes he hated but would smile at because he hated them. After leaving Hanna the previous night, they had scrounged around on the docks and turned up empty-handed, retreating to their apartment to sleep the brightness away behind their black-out curtains and fresh salt lines. That evening, they had saddled up again and managed to stake one. It was their first hit in two weeks. Bursting with victory and relief, Cas had jabbed at Finas again and again, sticking his elbows into his partner's stocky side in a way that usually never failed to get him to smile. But each time, Finas just looked out the car window or made a dull affirmative noise.

Punishing him.

"Lighten up, man. One of our pals just got killed and magicked into an undead pile of bones, that's nothing to drag face about. In our line of work, that's practically mundane."

Despite his almost desperately sardonic tone, there was no answer. Finas kept his eyes on his gun, which he was cleaning for the second time that night. It was only eleven. Cas deflated permanently, or so it seemed: the dejected feeling that rolled through him at the sight of his partner like this seemed to last for days. With far more effort than it should have taken, Cas palmed his hair out of his eyes.

"You're gettin' serious on me again, Fin," he muttered into his lap.

"Our mission has never been anything but serious, no matter how you insist on treating it like a joyride."

"Finny … seriously?"

Cas sounded genuinely tired: a rarity. Finas only used the word mission when he was feeling particularly grim and burgeoning with sour zealotry. Finas turned and gave his younger partner a withering glance.

"And what would you call it?"

Casimiro knew he was in dangerous territory by the soft, challenging timber of Finas' voice, but couldn't stop himself from slapping his hands down on his knees and gesturing at the air in frustration.

"I don't know, man. A business?" he offered, falling back onto the couch resentfully when Finas snorted and looked away from him. He locked up and got a little defensive at that, but still tried not to whine and thus piss Finas off even further. "It has its fun parts! 'Mission' makes it seem like we're doomed to do this or something."

The sharp, morbid clack of Finas emptying his gun chamber said he didn't at all disagree with that definition. Anger flaring sullenly, Casimiro glared over at their overflowing gun-case, knowing he had to redirect and deflect or else he would say something he'd regret. Then he realized he really, really needed to say something, regardless of whether it was a smart move.

Casimiro turned around and fixed his partner and best friend with a scathing glare of his own, lip curling with the thorny, built-up aggression of several slow, difficult, silent nights and dead-end hunts.

"Look, what the hell crawled up your ass and died? You've been like this for a week, now. No one ever called you the life of the party, but either tell me what's up with you or quit glaring holes in the back of my head like I pissed you off."

Finas didn't flinch. Then again, Finas never flinched at anything. Ever.

His thick frame was totally unsuited for such a small, quick and useless motion. The older man looked to the side of their weapon-cluttered living room, painted the noncommittal shade of cream every cheap east-side apartment claimed. The pair didn't bother to paint it, not because they had no grand artistic vision, but because they knew they could be gone again the next day. That life-fact of hunting made for sparse living and a preference for bland shades of paint.

Finas waited for a moment, feeling the heft and weight of the gun in his hands and the blankness of the walls, then spoke.

"I would expect you to get so wrapped up in the joy of hunting vampires that you would forget the date."

"The date?"

It was a foreign subject and a number-language he didn't speak. Casimiro went by Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays, or seasons, at a stretch. It was cold, so it was a Tuesday in winter and that was honestly the extent of the younger hunter's knowledge. Then he remembered a Wednesday in winter approximately four seasons ago and his tough, stringy heart touched the back of his throat.

As if the last grisly strand of the rope holding him had been snapped, he slumped forward, fingers digging into his knees.

"Oh. Christ."

Finas's blue eyes pinned him into the couch, but only for a second. They flickered away, settling back on his gun — and thank god, because that gaze pretty much voided all the breath in Casimiro's body, turning him into a creaking husk. The young hunter sat and felt the void opening around him, given shape and depth by a simple numbering system. When he couldn't stand it anymore, he gave a harrowed smirk and looked over at Finas.

"So what, you're upset because I didn't get you a death-day present? I'd say if you're around for the anniversary of your own death, you're pretty much a certified bad-ass."

"Casimiro," Finas hissed dangerously, pure anger daggering from his blue eyes and the manic clench of his big hands on his gun.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, fuck," Cas grit out hastily, miserably, closing his eyes and putting his hands up. God, he was seriously out of control if he could say shit like that, but it seemed like the only thing that would come out of his mouth. Especially when facing such a void.

What could anyone say that would make sense of it? Especially when being serious wasn't going to change a damn thing at the end of the night? He had been allergic to mature conversations before this, but now his defense mechanisms were just kicking him in the ankles. Shit.

"This was not part of the plan," Finas said to his left after a long, long pause, voice unspeakably dark.

Understatement of the fucking year. Cas wanted to say it, wanted to actually yell it as he yanked at Finas' lapels and begged his voice to hit some other timbre than endlessly grim and judgmental, but Casimiro restrained himself to pressing his slack face into his hands.

"There was a plan?" Cas asked, voice patchy, then shut up. Knowing he would make another stupid crack again if he kept his mouth open. Make things harder on himself, like he was so talented at doing.

Finas rose from the couch with his gun with a movement that, though unconscious, still held all of his natural power. He walked with awful slowness over to the rack, before putting it in its place of pride, right at the top.

Cas felt him turn around and not look at him.

"You swore we would only use so much magic. Just enough magic that we wouldn't become what we hunted."

"And we did!" Cas shot back, tearing his face from his palms and feeling his defense unraveling even before the true attack began.

"And what of not consorting with those we hunt?" Finas demanded, gesturing sharply to the side.

The older hunter let the accusation hang in the stale air of their apartment before saying what Cas knew he would, even though he'd only said it once, right after it happened. Just remembering it, Cas's throat started to tighten. Finas looked at him, tangled emotions evident in the stiff line of his mouth and the wounded fierceness in his eyes.

"You sold your soul to save me, Casimiro."

"And my eye," Casimiro added after a moment, squinting a little. "Which, y'know, I'm pretty sure I miss more than my soul. Yeah, the cold itchy feeling is pretty bad but this whole depth perception thing is a real bitch, and I —"

"Casimiro."

"I love you," Casimiro said, his voice suddenly weak. Weak as his hands, which hovered like they wanted to grab onto Finas' wide, broad, invincible shoulders as he bent forward, pained. His mismatched eyes were locked on his partner, the light in them fearsome and almost worshipful. Panicked.

"I love you, Finas. And not in the gay way, or anything, I just … you know I do. You know you're my best friend, my … god, you're my life. I would have gone insane without you. Then I bugged you until you came with me on that run, I made you come with me, and then that thing … you don't remember. You weren't there. Not like I was."

Cas' voice faltered and broke. Somewhere, he knew he wasn't making much sense. Of course Finas had been there, he had died, but while Finas may have remembered a horrible sensation before everything went black, he hadn't seen it. He hadn't had those precious few blood-spattered feet between himself and his dead body, or the vertical feet to fall that made the crack of his knees so painful and yet so unimportant.

The young hunter shut his eyes as the memory sliced through him: Finas' powerful hands curled on the floor, slick with red. His empty blue eyes and that horrible gash across his broad chest, red-greased marble of his ribs glinting underneath the gore. The complete lack of movement. The void that had opened in Cas at that moment had no match, even now, after the deal had been struck. Honestly, he had been lucky to escape with his mind intact — or maybe he hadn't.

In fact, he was relatively sure he hadn't. Not after seeing that.

"Would've done anything to save you. Even if it meant I died."

"You are dead," Finas said quietly, tone unreadable.

"No, I'm … pretty alive." Cas managed a faint, damaged smile, patting his chest and looking nauseated. "I'm just not gonna like the place I go when I do die."

It was another one of those things that they never said aloud. They had managed to avoid it for a whole year, burying it and biting it back and hiding in the stealthy silence and canned dialogue that hunts required (the blind enjoyment that Cas pursued so fervently because it did leave him blind), until Cas finally decided he was tired of ducking from it.

But starting it all was really hard when he went past the obvious facts, because Cas realized he just didn't know what he should say. Was he trying to make it better, justify it or make excuses? In the void, all the things he wanted to say (had wanted to say ever since that night a year ago) took over his soupy gut, pushing aside his common sense. His voice took on that whining quality that he knew Finas detested, but he couldn't stop himself.

"I just did the first thing I thought of," he pleaded, like he was bleeding an infected cut.

"Summoned a demon."

Finas' voice was twice as cold as his blue eyes.

"The words just came into my head. I swear I'd only looked in that spell-book once, and it just … it was insane, man. Insane. I was desperate and I think that thing … heard me."

Cas looked down, shivering from just saying it. The very thought made his teeth ache, his head throb. He caught himself wondering how many uncomfortable truths could be packed into one night and realized they would probably hit their quota and surpass it. The entire thing was just too fucked up.

Threadbare and glinting with black metal and powder, their living room remained a haunting still life of two men and one life. They only had one between them anymore, so they had to share it, and the cracks were beginning to show. Pressing around them was the same cold silence that began one awful night seven years ago — the one that screamed that Finas wasn't facing what was happening, not really.

If Cas wanted anything out of what remained of his life, it was to never hear that awful ringing nothingness again.

-.-.-.-

He had come to help the family, in so much as he always helped families in houses where vamps struck.

It was his job, and he had been doing it since he was legal to drive. Other nineteen-year-olds worked at convenience stores and attended community college: Casimiro collected guns, brought a whole new meaning to the term 'stake-out' on a nightly basis and came home to his shitty apartment covered in cold blood. Family was complicated and also very much dead. Vamps. With that gone, he turned to what he knew he could do, and he did it well. He had only gotten arrested three times and counted each of those with a dash of pride and at least one scar per incarceration. He never had known when to shut up and crusty inmates didn't take kindly to that, but he preferred to think that his usual relocation to solitary had more to do with protecting the assholes from him.

One run-of-the-mill night in summer, Casimiro had tracked a vamp and his fledgling all the way to the grand-looking house on Porter, and knew he hadn't been detected because the door was wide open and had stopped creaking long ago. The sticky night seemed to pour into the house, slow and dark as molasses, and deepen both its shadows and the held breath of the wooden staircase. Looking around the manicured neighborhood carefully and snapping his goggles down, Cas crept past the white porch railing and through the front door. Vamps couldn't enter unless invited, but they had nasty ways of getting around that when hunting white meat in suburbia: they posed as mechanics or inspectors of some sort, putting up the act just long enough to get an offhanded wave into the human's home. After that, the contents of the house were practically canned food.

Cas knew that a group of vamps had been making tours around that part of town; he just wasn't expecting a hit for another day or two. They had surprised him. He didn't like being surprised any more than any other egotistical nineteen-year-old did.

He found the nastiest of surprises in the upper bedroom of the trim white house, splattered between the pastel flowers on the wall.

From the way the pretty blond woman was sprawled beside her child's white gingerbread bed, the fangs had caught them when she was checking up on her; the cough syrup on the bedside table finished the story. The vermin made a packaged meal of the two for him and his fledgling. Left sticky puddles of blood under them that shone red-black in the bars of moonlight from the picture window.

Cas cursed softly as the scent of congealing blood swamped his nose and throat, making that ugly ache build quickly in his chest. He never let it peak (he usually killed something before that happened and bled himself of a little of the pain), but the feeling wasn't even close to unbearable when the bedroom door opened behind him. The hunter whirled, spooked, but where he expected to find a black-clothed monster there only stood a stocky man, sleepy-eyed and shirtless, pushing tentatively at the door.

Pale light shone in from the hall, haloing his shaggy brown hair. The man's halved silhouette stood as an icon for fathers with sick children everywhere.

"Millie? Is she alright?"

Feeling suddenly trapped in the small, pink bedroom – the stifling, still grave – Cas put his gloved hands up, backing into the wall. Almost knocking over a stand-up dollhouse, he put as much distance as he could between himself and the woman's pale body, which was twisted like a lotus leaf on the downy pink carpet. But the man wasn't even looking at him.

He was looking at his wife, dead on the floor, two red holes in her neck. All the sleep disappeared from his eyes, voiding the blue irises like water and leaving them winter-sky hollow.

There was blood in the carpet and the air. The little pink room, once so safe, smelled like death and that smell settled on the soft cooling bodies of a wife and a daughter. One leg jerked forward, then the other, and Casimiro, who had never been fucking caught like this before, tried to disappear into the wall as the muscled man crumpled to his knees. Breathing in sharply, he bundled the woman's lifeless body into his arms, thick fingers pushing through her lank blond hair and the blood sliming it to her head. He pushed and pushed and held her, and finally when her head rolled heavily onto his shoulder, limp on the punctured white stalk of her neck, he started to shake.

He screamed his wife's name, raw and loud, and that was all Casimiro heard in the way of grief from the man he would come to know as Finas.

He didn't even say his daughter's name. It was like he couldn't even look at her, arranged like a rumpled doll on the red-stained comforter, all ruddy fever-bloom drained to a stark white. Cas detected that trembling barrier right off, so heavy and destructive it was almost palpable, and knew it wasn't right in so far as shattering grief could ever be right.

Then again, Cas was usually long gone before the grieving process began, so it was all he could do to look away from the man's haunted expression and trembling hands and cock his shotgun.

"Don't worry. I'll fucking splatter the thing that killed her," he said roughly, saying it wasn't him who did it even as he knew how poor of a consolation it was. It was just something he said: it was the one thing he could do to stop more shit like this from happening, to lessen fangs' bloody mark on the world, because he knew from personal experience he couldn't bring loved-ones back to life. It was just fact.

Cas started to stalk past him, like he always did, except the man staggered to his feet as he passed, and his hard hand clapped on his shoulder and stopped him without even trying.

"Help you," he rasped. His hand didn't even shake and that alone had Casimiro staring like he'd seen another monster.

"What? No," he said confusedly, because people didn't offer that, which is what it seemed like the man was doing.

It wasn't right. Your family went down and you survived, then you went down anyways on your knees and cried or tried to kill yourself. You didn't ask for a gun like it was the sanest and most efficient option.

The man stared at him, something unnamable shifting in his face (the same thing that let him cope so viciously with the strange man in his house and the fact there were things in the night that stole people's lives, or perhaps that was just the weight of his wife in his arms), then his lip curled a fraction and he reached for the bristling belt around Casimiro's waist. His naked arms bulged, huge and cruel. Casimiro tried to dance back the second he realized what was going on, skin suddenly chilly underneath his underarmor.

"No, no, you can't just … you can't fuckin' do that!"

It came bursting out of him, but the older man's face was unfathomably cold as he ripped the gun out of his belt-strap like people weren't supposed to be able to do and cocked it like a professional.

"Where do I shoot?" he demanded in a way that wasn't demanding at all, but a monotone that nonetheless made Cas's chest lock up.

"The head. You shoot the head, then you stake the heart," the hunter recited numbly, because there was nothing else to do now that the man had his gun. He was utterly silenced by the demonic fierceness in his ice-blue eyes, the silent hatred and insanity. Cas unconsciously reached for him with a faint exclamation as the man stalked away; the  muscles worked hard in his back, shifting and bunching up so he looked like a white-skinned monster himself.

The man managed to put a bullet through the sire's temple before Cas got there, adding a new blood-spatter to the walls of his bedroom, where the pair had been coming for him.

The fledgling was helpless without her sire. She went down easy. All it took was a stake for each of them and they dusted, leaving a sickeningly oily coating of grey that settled onto the carpet. Finas watched it sink into his floor with a ragged tension in his heavy arms and the beastly line of his back that left the young hunter the most unsettled he'd ever been when facing down two exterminated vamps — and even as Cas left him there in his empty bedroom, he knew it was only a matter of time before he saw him again.

Only a week later, he had tracked Casimiro down and was in his fucking living room, waiting for him.

It wasn't as if the young hunter had an exceptional home security system — it was just a shitty apartment and the door itself would give way before the cheap lock ever did — because he hardly had to worry about vamps wandering in uninvited. Their little 'hospitality' law would stop them before the locks ever became an issue. This was before he expanded his hunting repertoire with Finas' help and he had to worry about things like salting windows. Still, the fact that his door was hanging splintered from its hinges didn't really do much for him in the 'I like this guy' department.

To his credit, Casimiro had his own way of sending signals: he just sat down on his ratty couch and started cleaning his knife until the guy talked.

"I want to help you," the man said, just like the night in the house.

He stood looking out of Casimiro's scummy living room window with his big hands clasped urbanely behind his back. He was wearing a simple button-down and slacks that nonetheless appeared indescribably sloppy and disordered in a way that went down to the very threads of it all. It was like his hands had been shaking compulsively on every single button, or maybe his skin was in pieces beneath it. Cas didn't like it. At all.

He wasn't even okay with the concept of partners, even if he was sort of okay with the way the man had handled himself — the skill part, not the cavernous emotions part that helped him do it. Cas looked up at the man like he was waiting for a crack to open up beneath his skin, to splinter his heavy jaw and grey-ringed eyes. He stunk of repressed stress. Instability.

His wife had died seven days ago, as had his little girl. Not the sanest of times to be making life-decisions like becoming a vampire hunter and living on the fringes of society.

"Sit down, you're scaring the hell out of me," Casimiro muttered at length, motioning to the couch. Which was true. So fucking true, and Cas wasn't scared of many things.

The man left his window and sat down beside him. Looking at his slightly-askew possessions later, Cas realized that Finas had been inspecting his gear before he got there. Touching it and weighing it against the hole in his chest. He knew later, his future best friend was already absorbing the life of a vampire hunter, seeing if it was something he was physically capable of. Already psyching himself into the job that would let him not think about his gouged-out life even as he ghost-battled it every day.

No one ever said Finas was slow on the uptake. It's just when it got to that psychotic level of readiness that Cas learned to be worried.

"I won't get in your way. I only ask for enough training to not interfere with whatever system you have worked out. You will not be responsible for my life. I will figure out the rest."

Christ, how could he technically ask something and have it come out like he was telling the hunter how it would be, no exception? He would say it didn't work like that, but it would be useless. Casimiro shrugged sullenly, just settling for the facts.

"It's a full-time job, man. Weird hours, weird injuries. Nightly chance of arrest. Not something you can do and keep up rent on big houses."

"I don't want that house anymore," he said softly, and Cas could feel the distance in his deep voice. It was that distance that drew him inevitably closer to the older man, made him believe that he needed something violent and strange and otherworldly to string his life up by, just to cope. Just like him.

At that moment, he was just unspeakably uncomfortable with the big man beside him. Regretting inviting him onto his precious couch, Casimiro made a vague sound and reached for a block of wood and, after absently flipping the knife in his hand, dug into it. Guided by years of experience, he shaped the stake skillfully and quickly, brown eyes dull as his visitor watched him. Wood shards littered the cushion in moments.

"How do you do it?" the man asked, and Cas didn't know whether he was talking about the stake-carving thing or the making-rent thing or the seeing-people's-families-torn-apart-by-fucking-monsters-on-a-nightly-basis thing.

From the intensity of his eyes, probably the last one, but even Cas couldn't put it down to a science: it was one of those things that, if he spoke it aloud, he might lose track of it or catch a stray thread and it would all collapse as he walked further along. It was something that occurred beneath the skin, quiet as photosynthesis and twice as vital to surviving. Something you had to do in the dark of your eyelids.

He swallowed and settled for the safest option. Paycheck.

"People hire me to hunt stuff. Once you get hooked into the supernatural network, there are tons of people out there who need bogies exterminated. I'm the only one around here that's got the equipment and know-how to do it: usually they just point and scream, leave it to me to identify it and shoot it, and pay afterwards."

"So you're a... supernatural hit-man."

"Guess you could say that," Cas admitted, shaving off a huge curl of wood with a jerk of his wrist and whittling the point to a nasty dagger of a splinter. He looked up and shook the knife. "But mostly vamps. If it has fangs, I kill it. No exceptions."

The awful eagerness in Finas' eyes was only outshone by the vapid winter-blue sea of unfeeling, which plainly scared the shit out of Casimiro, but they were still partners by nightfall.

-.-.-.-.-

It took every ounce of strength in Cas to break that awful stalwart silence — and then even more to say what he'd been holding back for a year.

"Listen. I'm not one to bitch about treating gifts with the proper respect. I know you didn't want to come back. I know I dragged you out kicking and screaming. I know about …"

Cas ducked his head. If he believed in that afterlife stuff, Finas would have been with his wife and child. Since Finas wouldn't talk about it, his best friend was forced to believe he had ripped him from their angel arms. Taken away the thing he wanted most in the world, even including life itself.

The fact he never would have found Finas without their bloodless, fang-marked bodies bundled in that bedroom was, and had always been, a particular pain for Cas. No one with a soul could feel grateful about those morbid circumstances and yet, sometimes, on dark days, he still fucking managed it. Now, by simple courtesy of the hole in his chest, he was free to feel it all the time.

"Yeah, you got the rest of your natural life to think about what you're missing out on — and hey, you can even cut it short if you want to. We've got all the necessary equipment. Sixty cents and some gunpowder and you can go back to Millie tonight."

Cas used the name and winced on the inside, stomach giving a horrified convulsion. It wasn't even the heartless taunt that did it. Was it sick that he had never learned Finas' daughter's name? Or was it sicker that Finas had never told him?

"But I got six years and three hours left. Six years flat at midnight, and then eternity. All I'm gonna ask is that you smile once in a while and give me a life worth living. Give me a scrap book I can be proud of when I go below." Cas looked down at his knees, then up at his best friend, face unreadable. "Let 'em know it was worth it."

There was a reason he didn't think in dates and numbers. Otherwise, his life – or what was left of it – was nothing but a massive count down.

He sat motionlessly, isolated and chilled by the gravity of his situation for the first time since he made the deal. His deal with the devil. It had just taken him a year to swallow it. But the seismic heave of his regret and fear and utter sureness had reached across the cold air between the two men, drawing Finas toward him with rushed footsteps.

The couch creaked; Cas looked over to find Finas looking at him with those blue eyes half full, face tense with emotion. The older hunter reached over and slid a big hand around his thin arm, and that buried emotion blasted Cas in half, making him shake.

"Cas."

The warm, hoarse name made him clench his eyes shut; the tears that crept down his nose were completely out of his control. He realized, maybe, that he thought he was being brave when really he was being stupid. Finas made a low noise that was angry and mournful and hopeless and determined at the same time, full of surrender and ragged fight and all the more true for its paradoxes.

He gripped Cas' other arm and pulled him closer, breathing through his teeth and matching each of his partner's caving, miserable breaths as Cas cried for the first time since he had sold his soul and even further back. Through the haze of his tears, Cas could feel the anger coming out of his best friend's strong frame, but also a sorrow too deep to put into words.

The fact that this irresponsible young man — his irresponsible young man, his loud, irreverent and invincible Casimiro – had done something so crushing and so serious for him hurt Finas. It broke the fiber of Cas' spirit for him, because of him. He, Finas, wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth that.

He was supposed to be protecting Casimiro, but when he had died doing it, Cas gave up everything for him.

"I'm sorry," Finas whispered at last, voice rough and mangled by the horror pushing at the back of his throat.

Sorry for dying, sorry Cas couldn't live without him, sorry for ruining what time he had left with his own anger and regrets.

"Me too, man." Cas smiled, a dented and wounded thing full of buried vitriol and helplessness. That was the last straw for his partner. Finas reached forward and yanked Casimiro to his sturdy cavernous chest, which still wasn't filled no matter the cost the boy had paid. "Me, too."

His big fingers pushed through Cas's soft hair as the young man leaned against his shaking chest, wetness coating Finas' cheeks soundlessly. The sobs stayed buried in his chest, shaking his heart in staccato and keeping him alive as the black night passed them by, reducing Casimiro to smoke hour by hour. He gripped onto the texture and weight and warmth of his partner, the bawling impetuous young man who had brought him to his wife's deathbed and yet become his best friend, until Cas sniffed noisily and drew back. Finas' big hand grabbed his cheek, stopping them forehead to forehead.

Casimiro still felt warm. He didn't feel dead, but the milky sheen of his left eye marked him as half gone. Half what they hunted, and more dangerous than ever before in the face of temptation now that he had nothing to lose.

"I should kill you," Finas said sadly. His gloved thumb ran over Cas's jaw, testing his dark, rich skin as if waiting to see it peel away, replaced by an undead white.

"I know," Cas murmured, and wrapped his arms around his best friend and stayed there on his broad shoulder like a child, their knees gently entangled, until it struck midnight.