11

THE AIR IS THICK WITH A DIZZYING MIX OF EXPENSIVE perfumes and cologne. Music thrums against Cas' temples like a headache.

The room is decorated with coy laughter and whispered secrets and people offering him smiles and drinks on silver platters. Everything is an unmistakable hallmark of a party hosted by Iverson's resident golden boy, Vincent Castellano, and the very definition of everything that makes Cas want to gouge his own eyes out.

Though Cas had started the evening fulfilling social obligations through excruciating small talk with Harrison and the others, it hadn't taken him long to detach himself from the group. Solitude, after all, is where Cas thrives.

He reflexively accepts a glass given to him by a willowy girl in an emerald dress, though he has no intention of drinking. She says her name. Amelie. Or was it Amelia? Amelie/Amelia says something else that Cas doesn't catch over the pounding music. He asks her to repeat herself and she points to her jewellery-clad wrist, neat brows drawn in what appears to be distant concern. Has she lost something? Cas wonders if there's a polite way to tell Amelie/Amelia he has no interest in helping her find it.

After failing to respond to her vague demands, Amelie/Amelia rolls her eyes and takes Cas' wrist in her manicured hand, lifting his bloodstained cuff like it's a piece of incriminating evidence. This is when he realises he's wearing the same shirt he wore to the diner over a week ago, the one he had forgotten to dispose of — or properly clean at the very least.

Cas smirks at the stain, feeling the same thrill as when he had ruined it in the first place. He savours the thought of his father, fuming at the sight of his pedigree son barely able to pick out a clean shirt for a frat party. Defying him was a small but effective way to lift Cas' mood.

"What happened?" Amelie/Amelia asks, finally loud enough to be heard over the room's cacophonous drone.

Removing his arm from her grip, Cas pushes up his sleeves. "Nose bleed," he says smoothly.

Amelie/Amelia scrunches her petite nose at the unpleasant turn of the conversation. To her credit, she makes a speedy recovery.

"You don't seem like the fighting type," she says airily, and it's clear to Cas now that she's attempting to flirt with him.

Cas steals a glance to the crowd just beyond her, looking for a reasonable excuse to remove himself from the conversation.

"I'm not, I actually... Oh, for the love of–"

The sight of Harrison stumbling very un-soberly towards him truthfully wouldn't have been Cas's excuse of choice but at this given moment he's grateful enough to take what he can get to avoid any further interaction Amelie/Amelia. Without further explanation, Cas hands off his full glass to her before cutting his way through the heavily perfumed crowd to make contact with Harrison before Harrison makes contact with the floor.

"What the hell, man?" Cas says by way of greeting. "What happened to staying sober tonight?"

Harrison isn't looking at him. Somehow, it's almost as if he's looking through him at something just beyond Cas. Cas gives a furtive glance over his shoulder — nothing but a sea of frat boys with their bejewelled partners made buoyant by their wealth and status. As he turns back, Cas scrutinises his friend for a moment, looking into his eyes for redness or dilated pupils. Harrison's stares back, deep brown eyes gleaming with an eerie kind of vacancy. Cas glances away quickly.

"Let's get out of here, yeah?"

When Harrison doesn't respond, Cas sighs, draping Harrison's arm over his shoulders, and half escorts, half drags him outside.

- ✧ -

With significant difficulty, they make their way down the grandiose stairs of the Castellano estate, Cas practically carrying Harrison. The night air is cool and laced with the thick perfume of expensive gardening, the moon bathing them in a regal glow. The scene would be almost nice if Cas weren't lugging his incapacitated friend behind him.

After much deliberation, they reach Cas' car, a handsome russet mustang that stands out amongst the sea of sleek silver and black Porsche's and Tesla's. With one arm still keeping Harrison upright, Cas uses the other to search his pocket. Just as he retrieves his keys, Harrison grabs Cas' wrist.

"Hey! What are y–"

When his eyes meet Harrison's, Cas feels that same, tangible dread he felt that night at the diner. That same wrongness he felt deep in his gut. Under the pale moonlight, Harrison's vacation-tanned skin has become a sickly pale shade, his eyes black as lakes in the low light.

He twists Cas's arm.

"Ow! Fuck! Harrison what the hell–"

This is when Cas notices something dark and viscous seeping from Harrison's hand and down Cas' arm. Not blood, but something darker. Like ink bleeding from a pen.

Shock paralyses him, then everything happens at once. Before he can react, Cas is being held in a chokehold, gasping for air.

Just as stars begin to blink across his vision, instinct kicks in and Cas finds the strength to elbow Harrison in the stomach. Harrison doesn't flinch. Cas kicks, punches, anything. Anything to escape, but Harrison just holds him tighter.

"Sam–" he gasps, voice rasping and on the verge of disappearing altogether. "Stop."

Cas closes his eyes, breath shallow and body weak, accepting his fate, letting the darkness swallow him whole.

The tension around his throat releases.

Cas' eyes fly open, and he slumps to the floor, taking gulps of precious air, his body quivering, fragile. As he rakes a shaking hand through his hair he notices his arm is clean, bearing no sign of the inky substance.

He looks around and Harrison is gone.

- ✧ -

"Sinclair?"

At the sound of the voice, time snaps back into place as if it had been falling behind in the moments before. How long had Cas been sitting here, slumped against his car, accompanied only by his ragged breaths? Five minutes? Twenty? An hour?

Cas lifts his head, slowly and with great difficulty as though his skull was made of lead. A silhouette advances towards him, lanky and confident in its stride. A car goes by and for a split second, the figure is illuminated by the flash of passing headlights.

Harrison.

Cas forgets how to move, or at least his limbs do. All instinct and logic urges him to get his ass off the ground where he's most vulnerable and react. Do something. Anything.

Cas doesn't move.

"Hey, man," Harrison says, his tone amicable in a way was both alarming and unsettling given his last wordless encounter with Cas. "What's your deal? Ditching without me? That's low."

His laugh sounds hollow in Cas' ears. Everything feels muffled like he's in a dream. Cas presses his fingertips just beneath his jaw. He concentrates on the slow, surprisingly steady pulse of his kicking heart. Had it gotten slower? If anything, the adrenaline pumping through his system should be making it faster-

"Dude, are you with me? I thought you were going sober tonight?"

What happened to staying sober tonight? It's Cas' own words echoed back at him.

That same wrongness he had felt minutes before begins to creep back under his skin.

"You just attacked me," Cas rasps, lacking any conviction, feeling the rawness in his voice. "You... you nearly killed me."

Harrison steps back, opening his mouth and then closing it again, features robbed of any remaining mirth. Finally, he manages, "Dude, are you okay?"

Cas' head starts to hurt, or at least he remembers that his head is hurting. It's like being stuck in a waking dream. Nothing makes any sense, everything dulled and slightly ethereal, intangible, not quite there.

"Look, I don't know what happened to you, but I didn't attack you." Harrison's words are slow, deliberate, as though he's trying to calm Cas. Or coax him down from a ledge. "Let's get in the car and I'll drive us back."

Cas had been so sure it was Harrison. It had to have been him. He'd had the same features, sharp cheekbones, sleek, straight nose, the same dark eyes. But before they been darker than usual, hadn't they?

"So... So if you didn't attack me then who the fuck did I drag outside with me?"

Harrison begins to gnaw on his lower lip, a gesture so incongruent to his usual self-assured nature it makes Cas' stomach coil unpleasantly. "You went out here alone. I saw you. You looked kinda... gone. So I waited to see if you would come back and when you didn't I came out here-"

"Wait," Cas sits up straighter. "You're saying you watched me walk out here on my own and then you followed me out here, after the fact?"

"Yes... That's exactly what I'm saying, what are you saying?"

Cas scrubs a hand down his face. He must have hallucinated again. He must have.

He feels tired, tired, tired.

"I need to make a call," Cas says eventually, hauling himself off the floor, unlocking his car and yanking the passenger side door open.

Ignoring Harrison's questioning, ("What the hell is going on right now? Who attacked you? Are you going to stop being a dick and answer me, Sinclair?") Cas begins to search his glove box. He digs and digs through empty CD cases and candy wrappers and an old sportscar magazine he has no recollection of purchasing until he finds an aggressively scrunched up ball of paper. Cas does his best to smooth it out on his knee.

Harrison, exasperated, says, "I guess I'll just wait in the car."

Cas, barely acknowledging Harrison intentionally knocking shoulders with him on his way around to the driver's side, pulls out his phone from his back pocket, heart beating heavy.

He calls the number.