We are not traitors

This is one of the nights when he's not hunting. Or not hunting like he normally does.

Things are quieter now, those deceptive stretches when there isn't any seriously overt insanity but everything is still hard. There's the thing with Castiel, and he['s starting to worry about money again, and there's also the pull he feels sometimes - not to run, not to abandon anyone or anything, but a memory of a time when life had been at once much simpler and so much more complicated.

He'll always be fractured, just a little.

So tonight he's read to the girls and kissed them goodnight, grabbed his keys, taken off on the bike. He'd told Neil he'll be back. He knows he doesn't have to volunteer more than that.

He's not intending to go to the amusement park, but clearly some part of him is, because he's not surprised when he gets there. It's like a giant metal graveyard at night, all skeletons and dead things, and as he pulls through the gates and rolls to a stop, it feels good.

He swings his leg over the bike and lifts off his helmet, scanning everything. "Lisbeth?"

He waits a bit. He knows she's back, knows she's okay - Neil has told him as much, and at least for the first week or so afterward he hasn't felt like pushing things beyond that. Hasn't wanted that himself. It's not that he's afraid to talk about what happened down there in the dark - he's afraid of very little these days. But it's heavy, it has weight and size, and he wants to hold it for a while. Meditate on it. Feel what it's done to him, and what it's still doing.

But at last he does want to know for himself. How she is.

He's out in mid-afternoon headed vaguely toward a coffee shop when he decides. Swinging out of foot traffic, he leans back against the end of a storefront and pulls out his cell phone. But calling feels too forward somehow.

it's mike, the text reads. wanna get coffee?