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“You ready to go?” Sam’s hovering at the passenger door, watching Dean like he’s worried the memory loss spell might relapse.
“Yeah, just….”
There’s an idea forming in his mind, and he decides to take the opportunity before their hours-long drive back to the bunker.
“I’m gonna make a call real quick. Five minutes.”
He turns back towards the sidewalk before Sam can protest and slips his phone out of his pocket, opening his contact list and choosing the one listed Cas.
Hearing the phone ring in his ear, he realizes he’s not exactly sure what he’s doing or why he’s doing it.
All he knows is that he can still remember forgetting Cas, piece by piece: his voice, his face, their years of history together. To be fair, he forgot everything. He forgot his own mother, his own brother, but the thing that really bugs him is that when Rowena reversed the spell, his memories of Cas were the slowest to come back. They feel stubborn, like he has to fight to recall them.
He feels dozens of memories still returning somewhere in the back of his mind, like he’s in the process of redownloading everything that was deleted.
The phone stops ringing and Cas picks up. “Dean?”
Hearing his voice now helps everything in the past become sharper.
Dean says, “Hey,” and paces up the sidewalk, realizing that he has literally nothing to say.
“Do you need help on that case?”
“No, no, we uh- We just wrapped it up.”
There’s a pause on the other line and Dean starts kicking himself for thinking this would be anything but awkward, before Cas says, “Is this a…” he pauses conspiratorially before finishing, “Brogibsby situation?”
Dean blinks, smiles. “It’s Poughkeepsie. And no, we’re good, seriously.”
“Why’d you call?”
Cutting right to the chase. Dean sticks his hand in his pocket and says, “It’s nothing, it’s…. Ok, so long story short, a witch wiped my memory and we got the cure, I’m fine, but I thought calling would help me remember a few details.”
Another pause, and then Cas says, “Is it?”
“…Yeah.” They really need to do this less often. Or maybe more often. Whichever one makes it feel less weird. “Anyways, how’s your case going?” He glances over his shoulder, sees Sam still standing at his door, arms folded on the hood of the car while he waits.
“Same as before,” Cas answers.
Dean starts pacing back towards the car. “Alright, well, me and Sam are headed back.”
“Dean?”
Something in Cas’s voice makes him slow down, and he stops on the sidewalk just far enough to still be out of Sam’s earshot.
“Yeah?”
“If you forgot everything and couldn’t remember,” he says slowly, like he’s thinking this out as he says it, “I’d tell you everything.”
Dean furrows his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“If you ever forget, you wouldn’t lose everything. I know you’d be stubborn and I know it would be difficult to tell you, but I’d find a way. You wouldn’t stay in the dark.”
Dean doesn’t know what to say.
He’s used to the whole Sam routine of giving comfort, but this feels different somehow. Most of the time he talks with Sam about feelings he feels like he’s in a chick flick, but what Cas is promising him here… it feels like he’s just telling the truth. Like it’s effortless.
“I- thanks, Cas.”
Dean thinks of him when he returns to his car and they hit the road.
Permanently forgetting everything is something he never knew to be afraid of, but knowing that those around him would never let him truly forget, that they would make sure he doesn’t lose everything… it’s a real comfort.
His memories are filling in more and more by the minute, and Dean’s looking forward to solidifying them even further when he sees Cas again.