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[ Dean sets the bottle back down after another few moments of inspection, quietly hoping it might manage to refill itself through hopefulness alone. As if they truly need more to drink - they don't, he knows it, knows that he didn't need more to drink the second he stepped foot in this bar - but that's not the point. Dean still wants to drown himself until nothing is left, until he doesn't have to wonder what it would be like here without Sam, without Cas, without these feelings nagging under his skin and laying to waste the reputation he's built of himself, walls he constructed that were meant to keep everything out and more.

But the comment makes him grin - perhaps, unusually. He's the rebel, the asshole, the guy without a plan, and he's laughing about the idea of the mess of teenagerdom. It's weird he knows, and he knows he's off the cuff about it in some screwball way, but Dean can almost think of nothing more ordered than when he was a teenager. Perhaps there was the inevitable chaos, the realm of girls he didn't understand and places he didn't yet know but there was a simplicity in the world in he occupied, in the body he held. His life was his father's and nothing more, and while the happiest of times held order and a life he could not believe in, with regularity he knew nothing more than what his father laid out in front of him.

A better source of chaos? Hell, maybe. The apocalypse. The Mark. He's not sure. But being a teenager? Still earns a grin. ]

I dunno, I can maybe think of a few. But gotta give 'em credit for pulling in a group of kids who know how to keep their head. I mean- just think'a the prom crowd in this place. The Heathers would lose their shit.

[ The only word that comes to mind for her teenage years is aimless, back when everything was still so fresh and the family friends - adoptive parents, whatever - that took her and Marc in were too busy to be more than a bank account and occasional sympathy. So instead of coping with things, she floated and fell into every bad habit in the book. Joined an organisation she knew would be filled with the things she feared most just because her brother - her best friend, both of those things - said he wanted to. Thought he had to.

(He didn't. He really, really didn't. She knows they never found out the full story. Just because they knew who ripped their parents' guts from their bodies doesn't mean they got the full story.)

And, somehow, Kate almost thinks that she would have handled this place better at 19 than at 30. Would have just accepted this as another shitty part of life rather than an attempt to drag her away from a life that was looking up - had been looking up for years.

Fuck it, they don't need more to drink at all, but now her mind's scanning through the depths of her younger years and the last of the bottle seems like as good a place as any to find a way to extinguish the thoughts that flare to life. ]

Never did prom. [ It isn't really a thing back home, only seen in American shows and movies. No one dressed up that much for a school disco either, no one saw them as anything less than embarrassing. ]

[ Sometimes Dean looks back on that boys home and thinks what a fuckin' mistake, looks back and tells himself that was the only thing I ever wanted. It was consistency in a world where there was very little save for motel rooms and looking after a little brother who didn't want to be looked after. But even under his father's regime, life had its consistency. There was order in the chaos and Dean told himself that was what was important, the only thing that mattered. He was his father's son and it was all he needed, the only rule he lived under.

The rest? Was a mess. School, girls, puberty - it was something he pushed aside and tried his hardest to laugh at, as if it didn't matter for him in the same way it mattered for everyone else. And maybe it didn't, his life was his and yet to everyone else, it faltered and skipped like a broken record, looked wrong and off kilter. He didn't have a home, hardly had a father, and talked back faster than any teenager should have been able.

But at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was what his father said. That, at least, was simple. And it is no longer - there's no father to provide order and while Dean likes it that way? It still complicates things, even when he looks back and lets the shadows of his father's existence override everything he does. ]

You and me both. [ He almost laughs at that: Him. Prom. What a joke, the very idea of its laughable, even if it's not the whole story. But it still stings in some weird way that his life was never a thing that anyone else could bear to live and it's why he pours out the last of the alcohol into their twin shot glasses and thinks that they need more when they don't. They don't. But god if he doesn't want to return back to his apartment even vaguely sober, his brain not yet fucked up enough to keep him from thinking. ] Might've missed it in the middle of a move, even if i'd wanted to go.

[ It was... an isolated time. Not literally. There were no locked doors or constant moving for them - in fact, most of Kate's teenage years looked normal to most people who glanced over. Rebellious, perhaps, with the vices and the skipping class, but normal.

Looking a bit closer would be enough to see that, despite the others surrounding her, Kate only ever seemed to stick with Marc. That she never seemed to really talk more than a couple of words to most of the people who filled up the spaces around them. That she almost never seemed to speak with Marc - but when you can live in each other's head, what is the use in physically exerting the effort to speak?

It was all a delicate, easily shattered facade of trying to do the same things everyone else does. Of getting drunk at house parties and in parks, playing stupid games that ended with some overexcited boy's hand sneaking a bit too far up a thigh in the corner of someone's living room. Getting kicked out of school discos because your friends spiked the drinks while you smoked in the bathroom.

Kate probably would have gone to prom, if it was at all a thing. How long she would have lasted there, with the awkward dancing and chaperones she imagines... that would be another question entirely.

She tips the last shot down her throat and shakes her head clear of some of the fuzz. Not a lot of it. Just enough to straighten her vision for a bit. ] Prob'ly didn't miss much. [ She shrugs, but it's awkward and exaggerated when alcohol impairs every movement. ] Get drunk. Get kicked out. [ Do it all in something fancier than jeans and a hoodie.

Which sounds like shit honestly. She never liked dressing up even when she was getting paid for it. ]

[ Dean's not truly sure what his idea of high school is supposed to be, or even what it was at the time. The boys home was a shameful place of refuge, another thing he never speaks on because it's off the beaten path, because it doesn't fit with the rest of his life, as if it's running just sideways to everything else. Like Lisa, it's not a story he's willing to tell to anyone, because he just doesn't know what to do with the idea of lost comfort when it was never his to begin with.

Though, it has to be said that Dean knows his childhood was a fucking mess, just like he knows it was in equal measure for Sam. Nothing could have stopped the way his father taught Sammy to hold a gun against the demons that were so obviously waiting in his closet and nothing could have changed Dean's dire need to go on hunts with their father in a way where he was included. How could school have possibly mattered in any of that when Dean was solely obsessed with becoming, one day, the man who raised him.

It mattered enough for him to get his GRE but even that feels a farce - education means nothing to Dean past the sad lie of normalcy, something he lost years ago, and it didn't mean anything to him then either. Just like the idea of prom, it was all idiotic and unnecessary and Kate's words make him actually manage a laugh, the booze opening him up to humor in a way he doesn't usually find. ]

Get high on the back lawn? Yeah, sounds like my kinda shindig. [ Because admitting to even more bad behavior is the best way to make friends. ] Tryin' to think if we even would'a been allowed to go.

[ Admitting to bad behaviour is a flawless way to make friends, at least when they're the last person who can judge that kind of behaviour. Even if getting high had never been her thing beyond a brief try once or twice behind the school building. It still sounds better than the awkwardness of teenage dance events. ]

... You here for the fireflies? [ It's hard to keep track of everyone and when and where they all met after a while, and the events blur together without a proper date system. But when speaking of highs it's hard to forget the little fuckers buzzing around her head like some weird halo. ]

[ Not everyone is aware of Dean's drug useage - even Sam is oblivious to it at times, lets Dean get away with having pills without a perscription, things he shouldn't be taking to keep him going or put him down for the count. Weed was never an attempt to be rebellious so much as it was... well, something that did the trick when nothing else did.

Mostly, Dean just does what he wants. Drugs included.

But he gives a couple of nods at the question before he wrinkles his noses in slight distaste. If only because they came from the gods. ] Think that was right around when Cas and I made it through the door. I gave him mine, he's still got 'em alive and kickin'.

( yeah, don't bring the pills thing up in front of Kate. recreational drugs, ones that aren't prescription, she has little problem with but...

well, it's her career now, isn't it?

her eyes slip away from the present for a moment, rolling the empty shotglass around on the table. )

They were nice.

( it's been a long time since she hasn't worried about something. )

... He does? Thought they didn't live that long.

Think he asked one of the gods to keep 'em alive for awhile longer. That or he just got lucky. [ Dean offers up a lazy grin before he leans back a bit in his chair and feels the world swim precariously, that edgy discomforting perfect kind of thing that means that nothing has to matter.

At least not for awhile. ]

Not that Cas ever gets lucky.

[ .... he's so funny. ]

( yes, Dean, that's a great thing to say right now. Kate snorts, laughing in that way you do after a few too many drinks - somehow slurring even wordless sounds. oh dear. )

Sure he could if given time.

[ Shut up it's the perfect thing to say. Considering you're talking to a guy whose-- well, at least one of his first concerns during the apocalypse was trying to get Cas laid. Which really doesn't help his case in the slightest but it's still 100% true.

But he very nearly rolls his eyes, that sort of thing that falls flat because he doesn't believe that in the slightest. And he's about to say so. ]

I'd put money on it taking more years than i've got fingers.

( we all have ways of coping with the apocalypse, or something. Kate tilts the empty shotglass, as if considering that bet, because-

well, this one worked out well for her, right? )

Mm, nah. Not bettin' on that.

( because there's a very obvious solution sitting in front of her but, well. that's for Dean to figure out his damn self. )

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