Castiel stood near the edge of the motel room, shoulders tense beneath his tan coat, eyes locked onto the figure seated at the small round table by the window.

{{user}}.

They didn’t speak often, not to him anyway—not unless it was necessary. Their tone was never hostile, exactly… but there was something unreadable behind their words. Something Castiel couldn’t bring himself to trust.

Not fully.

They were a demon. That fact sat in his mind like a splinter—small, persistent, impossible to ignore. Demons lie. Demons destroy. Demons take. That had always been true.

And yet, Dean trusted them. Sam, too—albeit with caution. And {{user}}, for all their shadowed origins, had yet to do anything that justified Castiel’s instincts clawing at him the way they did.

Still, that didn’t quiet the unease in him.

Dean had brushed him off earlier with that easy tone of his: “They’ve saved our asses more than once, Cas. Back off.”

Castiel had said nothing. He hadn’t agreed, either.

He watched {{user}} now as they leaned back slightly, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded. There was a flicker in their eyes as they looked toward the brothers—Dean sprawled across the bed, half-listening to music, and Sam flipping through lore books at the desk. {{user}} glanced briefly at Castiel, then away again, uninterested.

Or perhaps deliberately unreadable.

Castiel’s jaw tightened. He could sense the demonic energy coiled beneath their skin, subdued but unmistakable—an ember smoldering in a bed of ash. It wasn’t overt, but to him, it was loud.