Title: Slope

Author: Arisprite

Summary: One day Dean found Cas with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Warnings: Sort of spoilers for 5x04, End!verse.

A/N: So this is going to be a series now, of all the End!Verse snippets that appear in my documents, since it seems to happen a lot. This is after Sam and Dean split up, but before he's said yes. Dean and Cas have been traveling together as Cas' angel mojo fades. The prompt is from a list found here 64damn-prompts. livejournal profile. I should say that I don't advocate smoking in any way, neither does Dean. But Cas clearly does...

30. Slope
One day Dean found Cas with a lit cigarette in his mouth, smoking it, not like an expert exactly, but like he'd done it before. The smell hovered around him, and Dean's eyes watered as he breathed in a huff of second hand smoke.

"Dude, what are you doing?" Dean asked, anger in his voice. Dean didn't like smoking, never had, never will, and one timehe caught Sam with a cigarette-he'd gotten the whaling of a lifetime.

"Smoking, Dean," Cas replied around the cig, in that I-think-that-should-be-obvious voice. Dean was regretting more and more teaching him about sarcasm. "Want one?"

Dean frowned, pursing his lips. "Since when have you been smoking? Who gave you those?"

Castiel removed the cigarette, and looked at it unblinkingly. "Those hunters we worked a job with two weeks ago."

Dean would kill those two. Dead beats who got mixed up in their hunt, and then refused to leave them alone. "They didn't think to tell you that smoking kills?"

Cas just looked at him. "Dean, everything we touch 'kills'. We're in more mortal danger in one day than most people will be in a lifetime."

Dean gaped at him. Didn't Cas get it? "But, smoking is bad for your lungs, and stuff." Sam would know, but Dean hadn't spoken to Sam in over a year.

"And fatty burgers are bad for your heart, but you eat them anyway." Was Cas' rejoinder. Dean felt annoyed and off-footed. Cas put the thing back to his lips, and took another drag, not even choking a bit. He closed his eyes, and Dean suddenly saw that Cas liked it. He wouldn't be stopping, not while there was cigarettes to smoke. Damn it all to hell and back. He couldn't win this fight.

"Not in my car." Dean finally grunted, and Cas nodded in acceptance, and breathed out a plume of foul smelling smoke. Dean waved it away with a hand. "And buy some freaking breath mints!"

Dean walked away, leaving Cas to finish in peace, and paced besides the car. They'd pulled in to fill her up, and Cas had slunk off somewhere. Now Dean knew where he was always going. But he still didn't like it.

It was just such a ...human thing to do. Cas had few of his old angelic habits left, and he drank as well as any man, but smoking? Dean knew it was an addiction, and that just rubbed him the wrong way. Not 'cause of Sam, and the blood, but simply because Cas was falling more and more each day, and Dean didn't want to see it. The world fell into ruin, and Dean's angel became human and broken, smoking because he liked how it felt. What was left?

Cas returned, smelling cleaner than someone who'd just finished a smoke should, some leftover angel mojo probably, and it explained how he hadn't noticed before, and they drove off. Dean tried not to look as Cas, with challenging eyes, tossed the half empty pack into the glove compartment.