“You couldn’t try weed first?” Dean is saying, hands on his hips. “No gateway drug for you, you just roll on through like the freshman that you are and you go straight for the shrooms. An awesome decision.”

From somewhere underneath a pile of blankets, Castiel says, “Stop being a dragon.”

“I am not a dragon.”

“Then why are you a dragon.”

“Cas.”

“Why do you have scales.”

Dean sighs. This is like the first time Sam got high, only not, because Sam didn’t get high in the middle of the apocalypse. Well, that’s Cas for you, always the different one. Always has to be a pain in Dean’s ass. Well, that was Sammy too, though. Dean has a tendency to stick with people who are big pains in the ass; he never got around to kicking that habit.

When his brother got high, Sammy laughed nonstop for forty five minutes, and the people in the next room over made a noise complaint. Cas, though, he’s forty five minutes into his trip and mostly he has been a pile of blankets on the floor.

They are never going to get to Camp Chitaqua at this rate.

The pile of blankets shivers. “Dean. Even in the dark, there are colors.”

“I bet there are, buddy.”

“Come see this green.”

“Can you come out from under those blankets?”

The blankets shake in protest.

At least there are no croats up here. At least this abandoned house is not yet crumbling and dirty. Still, Dean is tired, and he just wants to get to fucking Chitaqua already and see if there really are survivors there, or if it’s just another false lead. But now Cas is tripping balls, because when Cas found psylocybins growing in a shoebox in what looked like a teenager’s room, Dean was stupid enough to say, “…I guess,” when Cas asked him if these mushrooms were edible.

“I feel sick,” the blankets confess.

“Ride it out, cowboy. It’ll pass.” Dean plops himself down on an armchair, resigning himself to the fact that they will not reach Chitaqua by nightfall after all.

“My stomach feels like a book with a cracked spine.”

“Yeah? What’s this book about?” Dean asks.

“I’m not sure. Maybe sandwiches.” The blankets shift in a manner that manages to be contemplative. “Dean, I think sandwiches are like books.”

“Yeah?”

“The good stuff is on the inside.”

“Sure.”

“And I am like a sandwich that is oooonly bread.”

Dean says, “Hey, bread is good.”

“No good stuff inside me,” Cas sighs. “Just drugs. I am like a drug sandwich, but also blankets.”

“You sure are.”

“Lions,” Cas replies.

It takes another twenty minutes to talk Cas out from under the blankets, and he is sweating and disoriented in the sudden light, cringing at it as he totters into the next room. Dean follows him like the good trip-sitter he is.

“You didn’t even leave any shrooms for me, you selfish bastard,” Dean says, as Cas crawls around on all fours inspecting the kitchen tiles.

“The floor has depth,” Cas says in surprise.

He keeps coming back to the blankets, though. Dean convinces Cas not to hide under them again, in case he suffocates himself, and Cas decides that the next best thing is to bring them to the bathroom and put them in the tub.

“Help me with the blankets,” Cas says, carrying an armload of them, and because it’s the most reasonable request he’s made so far, Dean does. They stuff the bathtub full of blankets, and then Cas climbs in and sits cross-legged atop their handiwork, looking intensely satisfied.

He looks up at Dean, and pats the space next to him expectantly.

“Bathrooms, huh?” Cas says, as Dean takes a seat beside him.

“It most definitely is a bathroom,” Dean agrees.

“These mushrooms move me,” Cas says. “I almost understand time again.”

And then he doesn’t say anything else for a long while.