When Castiel begins to accompany Dean and Sam on more hunts, riding with them in the Impala, Dean starts showing him all the bizarre roadside attractions that he and Sam got dragged to as children.

“Look, Cas, it’s a palace made of corn! Bet you’ve never seen one of these before!”

“World’s Largest Ball of Twine!”

Castiel doesn’t understand the appeal of any of it, but he lets it happen because Dean seems to find it amusing. Then they work a case in Wisconsin and Dean hauls him to the House on the Rock. (Sam refuses to go. Too many dolls dressed like clowns.)

“World’s largest carousel and probably the largest collection of creepy-ass dolls. I bet if you turned on the EMF in this place, it would light up like a Roman candle.”

“This place is repulsive. I would like to leave now.”

“I know, right?” Dean grins at him.

“If you also find this place repulsive, why did you bring me here?”

Dean shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t know. Nostalgia, maybe. People are fuckin’ weird, right? They collect tacky shit and they build palaces out of corn and none of it makes a lick of sense. I guess I just wanted to show you.”

Castiel nods in acceptance. They drive away with the windows rolled down, stopping at a roadside stand with a hand-painted sign advertising peach pie.

Later, they park out in the middle of nowhere, not even a cow in sight. They sit on the sun-warmed hood of the Impala and trade bites of pie using the single plastic fork that Dean found in the glove compartment. It’s sticky and sweet.

“I suppose I find it comforting,” Castiel says, “that humans don’t always make sense to you, either.”

Dean laughs. “Hell, Cas, most of the time, I don’t even make sense to myself.”

Castiel kisses him, fits their lips together, traces Dean’s tongue with his own. Dean tastes faintly of peaches and cinnamon.

“You make sense to me,” Castiel says, and Dean makes a very skeptical face. “For instance, right now, you want to take my clothes off in the back seat of your car.”

Dean laughs at him, but as it turns out, Castiel is right.

I really want Linda Tran to come back. What has she been doing all this time while Kevin’s been on Garth’s boat?

What if she’s becoming a badass hunter?

She doesn’t even intend to, but she goes back to work one day and one of her colleagues is complaining of flickering lights and cold spots in their new house and Linda just sort of sighs internally. But after work she goes over and solves the case. It doesn’t even take that long—the problem was a lock of hair in an old crate in the attic, creepy old Victorians—and she tells her colleagues that she just happens to know something about old electrical wiring and shrugs it off.

And they believe her, because she’s astoundingly competent at everything, now including ghost removal.

Linda already knows about holy water and borax and devil’s traps and exorcisms. But there must be more, so she drops out of her book club and starts visiting a different section of the library.

Then next week there’s a nest of vampires in the next town over, and she thinks about calling the Winchesters, but honestly it would just be quicker to do it herself. So she does her homework, then goes out and buys a machete. They don’t see it coming at all—nobody expects the 5’1” woman in sensible flats to be carrying a machete—so taking them out isn’t that hard. It’s even kind of satisfying, except she accidentally gets blood spatter across her favorite pantsuit.

Linda doesn’t mention any of this the next time she sees Kevin. She doesn’t want him to worry, after all.