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Baby’s wheels rumbled over the train line that crossed the road behind Singer’s Auto. The rhythmic thumps that the 1967 Chevy gave out as she slowed, easing over the empty tracks, tickled something in the back of Dean’s mind; that same thump, every day after school and twice on the weekends. He’d been sitting in the passenger seat then, telling his dad what he’d done at school that day (he’d never tried hard enough) and what his plans were for the evening (to help at the auto shop and watch his brother, of course). Grown a couple times over since then, Dean adjusted his hands on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, settling his fingers into long-worn grooves at ten and two, and pushed his dad’s voice from his mind. He focused on navigating Bobby’s crowded scrap yard instead, moving past the stacked piles of metal ghosts and turning into the gap in the chain link that led to the old blue house.
“Took you damn long enough,” Bobby grumbled from the porch as Dean pulled up. His voice hadn’t changed one bit since Dean had last seen him, but his face showed the time that had passed since Dean’s freshman year. He still wore the same old cap, and streaks of black oil still adorned the front of the puffy vest he kept zipped right up to his neck. Bobby never had liked the cold.
Dean’s heart clenched and then soothed, beating steady. “Got lost,” he called as he slid out of the Impala and swung the door shut, walking around to the trunk to pull out his threadbare surplus duffle. “Been a while since I was in this podunk town, y’know.”
Bobby merely grunted, giving Dean a slow nod as he approached up the steps. He let Dean make it onto the deck boards of the porch before speaking again, giving him a slow up and down. “Lookin’ alright,” he declared. “But a hot meal wouldn’t hurt.”
“Never does,” Dean agreed.
“Karen’s made her five-alarm chili. You always liked it.”
“Missed it,” Dean agreed, ignoring the crack in his voice like he knew Bobby would. Ignoring the passed years, too, like he knew Bobby would.
“Sam would only ever eat the one-alarm chili,” Bobby recalled, a tiny smile tweaking his heavy, graying mustache.
“Yeah,” Dean said, an easier grin coming over his face. “Good thing he’s not getting in until next week, because he’s still a pussy.”
“None of that language in my house!” Karen’s midwestern drawl cut over the creaking of the front door as she pulled it open, stepping to the side to admit Dean into the hallway. She had a dish rag in one hand.
“Weren’t in the house,” Bobby grumbled.
Nodding sagely, Dean threw Bobby a wink before he backed him up. “Old man’s right. We’re on the porch.”
“You two are gonna be the death of me.” Karen flapped her rag toward the kitchen. “Get in here, both of you, before you let the biters in.”
Dean pretended he didn’t notice Bobby struggle to stand out of his Adirondack chair. He moved on ahead, into the house, the familiar pine and home cooking scent of it hitting him like a tire iron to the heart. Pulling Karen into a hug, he whispered behind her ear, “It’s good to be back.”
“To be home,” she corrected him gently. “You boys have always had a home here.”
Dean didn’t dare choke out a response, so he followed his nose to the kitchen.
The chili was just as good as Dean remembered, and just as hot. He patiently answered Karen’s questions as he dabbed his sweating forehead with a gaudily-patterned fabric napkin. He reassured her that the drive up hadn’t been any trouble, that he was fine staying in the guest room for a week until he could meet with the owner of the fixer-upper he’d seen online, and that he would stop by for Sunday dinners.
“And if you want to bring anyone, of course,” Karen said with a vague twitch of a smile, “you’re more than welcome.”
“The boy hasn’t been here an hour,” Bobby muttered from the other end of the table.
Dean chuckled and shook his head. “Not even my dating game is that strong. Close, though. Maybe by tomorrow. Not sure the single folks of Sioux Falls knew they were waiting for a middle-aged dropout, but here I am.”
It was true enough; Dean had game and always had. But he had been single a long time—by choice, he’d told himself. Or something sorta like it, anyway.
Bobby snorted and went back to shoveling his chili with a thick wedge of cornbread. Karen merely smiled, shaking her head. “You dated some when you were here, back in school,” she said. “And there were other people you had crushes on—don’t deny it, we all saw! Some of those folks might still be around.”
A flash of blue stirred in the back of Dean’s mind. A very particular shade; a blue of kindness, of curiosity, of longing. He bit down on a wide smile, holding tight onto a quiet peal of laughter at the warm, if brief, memories that this town stirred up. It wouldn’t do to have Karen think he was laughing at her.
“You’re right, you’re right,” he conceded. “Though I’m sure most of the kids I went to school with are either left as soon as they could or got married and had twelve babies if they stayed nearby.”
Bobby let out an unintelligible snort while Karen clucked, raising her fork and shaking her head. The graying blonde strands that framed her face swung back and forth. “Now you mind here, Dean Michael! Just because you followed Sam down to California for a while there doesn’t mean you get to bring those graces back here! There’s good people in this town.”
“Of course there are,” Dean said mildly, smiling as he scooped up some more fiery chili.
“And Karen knows every one of ’em, of course,” Bobby chimed in solemnly, his eyes dancing as they met Dean’s.
“Some of us aren’t anti-social,” Karen said, a playful smile belying her sharp tone.
“I’m not anti-social,” Bobby announced as he pushed his seat back. “I just don’t like folks.”
Dean’s chest was warmer than it had been in months, and it wasn’t only because Karen got a bit heavy-handed with the cayenne and smoked paprika. She was right; this was home. Dean had felt lost since his dad had passed a few months before. Even Sam—as independent and contrary as they came and more likely to lock horns with John than play happy families—had been affected by his sudden death in a way that set him adrift. The timing of Bobby’s out-of-the-blue phone call wasn’t lost on Dean. It was a suspicious time to decide to take a step back from his auto shop—he’d had that bum leg for years—and to decide that Dean would be the one he trained up to leave it to. But Dean wouldn’t mention it. Neither would Bobby.
It only took a few days after Bobby’s call for Sam to start looking for jobs nearby. It wasn’t even a question. It just felt like this was where they’d always been meant to return to—a tiny town with rusting road signs and chain-link fences straight out of the nineties, where kids still wore hand-me-down clothes and the clerks at the Dollar General asked after your mee-maw’s gout.
Bobby, and Karen, and their all-American little town. Dean hadn’t been born here, but it was the place where his heart had been (in more ways than one) since he’d turned fourteen years old.
“I’ll have some beef jerky and a pack of menthols.”
Dean grinned across the Gas’n’Sip counter as he dropped a bag of tough, teriyaki-flavored meat snacks onto it, catching the eye of the clerk deliberately.
And holy shit, those were some eyes to catch. They were brighter than the fresh spring sky outside, the kind of blue that made the air seem sweeter.
The tired-looking associate had a quiet air about him otherwise, but those eyes were loud.
Surely there could only be one pair of eyes like that? It had to be him...
Wordless, their shared gaze held for a moment longer than was civil before the guy turned, reaching down to grab Dean’s cigarette order from the wall behind him. As he straightened back up, the corner of his mouth twitched upward; barely a smile, but more than he’d been wearing when Dean had spotted him from the other end of the aisle.
“Cas, right?” Dean asked, flicking his eyes down to the guy’s polyester Gas’n’Sip vest and searching for his name tag. His name tag that said—huh? He’d been pretty sure... “Or...Steve?”
“Cas, yes,” not-Steve echoed, squinting at Dean before he followed his eyeline down to the plastic badge on his pocket. “Oh. I must’ve picked up Steve’s vest after break. Cas is right—Castiel. How do you know my name?”
More confidently, Dean tried another winning grin as he dug in his back pocket for his wallet. “Guess you don’t remember me. We went to school together. For a couple months, anyway. I moved around a lot. I was a freshman and I think you were a senior; you were in that play they did about those books, the monster-hunting ones, right? And I did the—”
“The lights, even though you didn’t want to, just because your little brother was too shy to do theatre at his school, so you were proving a point,” Castiel finished, his tiny smile growing. “Dean Winchester.”
Dean chuckled as he handed over a twenty. “Well, at least I left some kind of impression, though I’m not really sure what kind that was.”
Castiel quickly rang up the two items in front of him. “A pretty good one, I suppose, as I don’t recall much else about the play—other than it wasn’t that good.”
“There were spaceships at one point, weren’t there?”
“And robots,” Castiel said sagely.
“Sounds like I missed a great show.”
“You never saw it?” Castiel asked, gathering change from the register. “That would explain why the lighting was so terrible.”
Laughing softly, Dean shoved the coins into his pocket, not bothering to count them. “Yeah, we moved away right before opening night. I thought the theatre teacher was going to have an aneurysm when I told her. There was a vein popping in her temple and everything.”
It was Castiel’s turn to laugh, and it was a deep, rumbling sound that Dean immediately wanted to coax out again. Castiel folded his arms, leaning on the counter as he asked, “So, what brings you back here now?”
“Moved back to help out a family friend at his garage, since he’s getting older and crabbier these days,” Dean answered. “Wasn’t much keeping me anywhere else, and my little brother found a law practice to buy into in the next town over.”
Castiel nodded as he gently pushed the jerky and menthols toward Dean, then tucked his hand back in next to his ribs. “Sounds like you’ll be around town for a while, then?”
Dean held Castiel’s offered gaze for a moment, smiling slowly. “Yeah, permanent move. So... I guess I’ll see you around?”
“Guess so,” Castiel echoed, straightening back up behind the counter, ready for the next customer.
Dean gathered his handful of bad decisions from the surface, revealing the peeling lotto ads beneath. He couldn’t help but throw Castiel a little wink before heading out. As the Gas’n’Sip’s cheerful entrance bell sounded above his head, Dean paused halfway through the door and cast a look back over his shoulder.
The customer that had been behind Dean was talking animatedly, but Castiel’s eyes lingered on Dean instead.
There weren’t a lot of shopping options near Dean’s apartment. Or around town altogether, really. A moderate-sized Hy-Vee had popped up on the better side of town since Dean had left, but otherwise the cluttered yet unstocked Dollar General and the ancient Gas’n’Sip were pretty much it. For the most part, Dean didn’t really have any issues with dodging Dollar General’s racks of out of season pool noodles and clearance candy to grab himself a Hungry Man dinner or some spray to clean his rental’s moldy shower. His dollars were very general, and very few, so it worked for him; he wasn’t a fancy store guy, and the walkable options near home had everything he needed. Until he started looking for something he could give to Cas.
It was a dumb idea from the beginning, he told himself as he sidled down a narrow aisle between a row of plastic baby dolls and a tall display of adult diapers. Why had he even had the thought of getting something for Cas? As an excuse to see him? Cas worked at the Gas’n’Sip, Dean didn’t need an excuse to go there. He had plenty of legitimate reasons to go there. Like gas. And sips. But he wanted to move his conversations with Castiel past his jerky flavor of the day. And one of Dean’s love languages was looking after people and providing for them what he could. (Okay, he wasn’t sure that was an actual love language, or if it was, that it was called anything like that. He’d just had a girlfriend once who’d screeched at him multiple times that he wasn’t observing her love language. He probably wasn’t; he still didn’t know what it had been.)
Reasons—or lack thereof—for getting Cas a gift aside, what was he going to get him? Dean stared listlessly at the violently yellow shelf edge labels proclaiming Dollar General’s weekly sales. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much use for a gallon of off-brand pediatric electrolytes, watery windshield washer fluid, peppermint cat chews, or a five-dollar drain snake.
Well…actually, the sink in his ratchety renovation house was a little clogged.
Muttering beneath his breath, Dean paid for his Salisbury steak frozen dinner and his drain snake and stomped out of the door. It’d been a stupid idea anyway.
The wind was picking up as he stepped onto the forecourt, a chill breeze whistling through the meshwork heads of the cheap, plastic fishing nets for children that were peering out of a plastic bin, their long poles rattling deep in the dingy depths. Dollar General was a law until itself; they were miles from the beach, and it was March. An elderly employee in a flapping yellow and black tabard slipped out of the closing door behind Dean, waylaying the wheezing electronic whoosh halfway and shoving her way outside. She grumbled something to Dean about the gusty weather, to which Dean dipped his head and let out a friendly, non-committal sound. He didn’t want to get stuck in a conversation about how when she was younger, the winds were different.
“You have a good night now, ma’am,” Dean said amiably, using the generic rural dismissal that he’d grown up giving to every older lady in town. (Because if he hadn’t, Karen and Bobby would’ve heard about it within the hour.)
He sidestepped around the woman, lifting his unbagged drain snake in the air so it wouldn’t smack her on the pass, and stepped off the concrete slabs onto the tarmac. She called a cheery goodbye as she wheeled a tall rack of brightly colored, desperately water-starved plants inside out of the wind.
Wait!
Dean spun on his heel and dived back toward the store at such speed that the old clerk pressed a hand to her chest, spreading her fingers over her sternum. “By gaw, son! You gave me a start!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly, far too enthusiastic for his words. “I just noticed the plants!”
She blinked, her other hand still on the upright of the metal rack that was halfway through the door. “Yes?”
“I was looking for a gift for someone, you see, and a plant would be perfect.” Dean had seen Castiel caring for the small array of sad Gas’n’Sip plants several times when he’d stopped by. He remembered the little smile on his face, and how careful his large fingers were as he lifted their leaves one by one.
“One of these plants?” the lady asked, quite rightly skeptical.
The metal rack offered a sad lot. Some of the plastic pots were empty other than a dried, brown curl that could’ve been a used pipe cleaner or discarded scrap of string just as easily as it could’ve once been a plant. Dean was fairly sure some of them were scraps of string. Most were dry and shriveled, the store employees generally far too work-worn to give a shit about watering the frost-hardy annuals. There were a few that still boasted pretty colors, their heads drooping but defiant against Dollar General’s floral torture.
“How much?” Dean asked, reaching out to grab a tiny, sad pot that looked—to his untrained eye—a little better than the rest.
"Son, just take it," the woman said, waving him away. "Half of these’ll end up in the trash anyway, and I’m about to lock my register.”
Dean thanked the lady profusely, making her day with a wink and a smile before he headed back across the tarmac. He settled his prize into the crook of his arm, ignoring the speckles of dried dirt that dusted across the sleeve of his jacket; it was already covered in engine oil and Red N Tacky grease from the hours he’d spent working on a totaled Ford F-150 under Bobby’s watchful eye.
The little plant, bent but hopeful, bobbed its wobbly head at him the whole two blocks back to his tiny, crumbling house. It was feeble, but if it got Castiel chatting with him about more than jerky, then as far as Dean was concerned, it was the prettiest half-dead plant in the world.
Dean didn’t need to go to the Gas’n’Sip half as much as he actually went there. His car glove box was getting overloaded with jerky packets. It was a slightly pathetic truth, but hey, he’d been single for a long-ass time, and Castiel was…well, Cas was special.
“Special.” That sounded pretty dumb.
But as he watched Castiel through the ad-adorned window of the gas station, Dean knew there wasn’t any other word that captured him like that one did.
There’d always been something about him, from the first time Dean had seen him. He wasn’t one of the popular kids, more of a drifter between friend groups that had kind words for most and scathing commentary for the rest. He hung out frequently with the stoners and the burnouts, but when Dean heard him talk it was always obvious how incredibly smart he was—too smart for half his teachers, it seemed. He volunteered at a cat shelter, someone had told Dean once. And he was beautiful. Back then, in Dean’s high school era, hardly anyone ever admitted to stuff like that. It wasn’t done. But Dean had seen Cas sitting cross legged under a tree on the back field, laughing with Meg Masters, the girl in the year above Dean who everyone said was a lesbian. Cas wouldn’t have been offended, Dean liked to think, if he’d have known. Dean’s flirting game might not’ve been what it would become in his twenties—he was barely more than a kid—but when Cas’s hand would bump his in the dark crush behind the curtains at rehearsals, or when their eyes would linger a little too long peering out from the wings of the stage… Maybe, he’d thought in the years since, maybe it hadn’t been just him.
Grown Castiel, lord of his little Gas’n’Sip kingdom, still had something special about him. And he still stared, too, though it wasn’t from behind curtains. If anything, his gaze was even more intense than it’d been as a teen.
On the other side of the lotto-printed glass, Castiel was tending to the sad little selection of plants that lived on a shaky metal shelf near the register. They seemed to arrive battered and broken, shriveled from being shipped in from whatever shitty wholesaler provided them to all of the Gas’n’Sips across the state. (Dean wondered, briefly, if it was the same company that provided the depressing Dollar General plants.) Castiel doted on them: watering them, wiping their leaves, feeding them with plant food that Dean was pretty sure he bought himself. Dean had even seen him re-pot a few, a disapproving frown on his face as he carefully eased them from their dented, too-small plastic pots. He smiled proudly whenever someone purchased one.
Yeah, Dean had made the right choice. He avoided pumping his fist in the air to preserve his dignity, but he wanted to.
Leaning his forearms on the roof of his Impala, Dean gently squeezed the pot he held between his palms. This…yeah, this was kinda dumb. But what the hell.
Gathering his courage, Dean rolled his shoulders in his leather jacket and straightened his spine. He’d been good at this kinda stuff once, for Gods’ sake. Damn good.
He’d waited for a few moments outside, leaning on his car, until the last customer had left. It was late, and the nighttime chill of the first days of spring chased him through the door.
The bell overhead jangled merrily. At the other end of the aisle, Castiel was done tending his plants for the night, and he’d moved on to wiping down the glass chiller doors. He looked up as Dean came in, his polite customer-service smile growing to something more genuine as he took him in.
“Hello, Dean.”
God damn it, no one should look as pretty in fluorescent lighting as this fucker did. Yet, somehow, the dodgy flickering of the bulb in the milk refrigerator highlighted Castiel’s cheekbones and the tips of his wild hair, and he looked almost angelic in the glow. Not that Dean would, like, say that, or anything. Instead, he swallowed down a low whimper and simply said, “Hey, Cas. Looking good today.”
Castiel squinted deeply, flicking his eyes down to his blue vest and faded jeans before he looked back at Dean. “Thank you?”
Dean couldn’t help a low, huffing chuckle. As if what Castiel was wearing had any bearing on how gorgeous he was. “You’re welcome.”
“What can I get you today?” Castiel asked, stepping away from the coolers and moving toward his post behind the counter. “More beef jerky?”
“Sure,” said Dean, deliberately pushing away the mental image of the six packages he already had sitting in the pantry of his tiny house.
Castiel reached over the counter, snagging a bag of Dean’s usual from the display in front of it.
“Actually,” Dean said, striding up to the counter with a confidence he wasn’t sure he actually had, “I just stopped by because I got you something.”
Castiel’s blink was slow, the flashing neon lights high up on the window making his eyes twinkle.
“Here,” said Dean, pushing the tiny pot onto the counter between them.
The corner of Castiel’s lip curled up. “You brought me a half-dead plant?”
“I always see you taking care of the flowers here,” Dean began to explain hurriedly. “It kinda seemed like you enjoyed it; you’re good at it, anyway. I was checking out at the store last night and this sad little guy demanded to come along with my frozen dinner.”
“For me,” Castiel checked again, a soft pink brightening his skin beneath several days’ worth of scruff.
Dean nodded. “Yup. I don’t know much about plants or anything, but I just...I thought you might like it.”
Smiling wider, Castiel reached out and pulled the tiny, light pot toward himself. “Narcissus,” he said, carefully grasping a long, floppy leaf between his fingers.
“I thought they were daffodils?”
“Same thing.” Castiel’s eyes remained on the plant. “This stem is going to have to go, it’s been broken entirely...but there’s a couple more growing here, tiny ones. Given a few days of light and water, she’ll live.”
“Cool,” Dean said, still feeling awkward.
“Thank you,” Castiel said, his eyes snapping up unexpectedly. “This is—It was very kind of you to think of me.”
Dean shrugged, smiling at Castiel with all the charm he could muster. “It’s not much, really. I think about you plenty.”
Castiel’s lips parted, working for a couple of seconds as if he was fighting with his words, but then his mouth closed and he just smiled, his eyes dropping shyly back to the plant. “I’m very fond of plants,” he confessed down to the pot, “but I don’t really have any of my own.”
“Well, I see neglected little guys like this in stores all the time,” Dean said hopefully. “Maybe we should change that.”
Their eyes met, a soft smile shared between them, and the clock above the counter ticked on for a few extended moments.
A bang jolted them back to Earth; a crappy Volvo pulled up beyond the window, the owner slamming its multi-colored door as he got out to use the gas pump. Dean hurriedly grabbed his wallet from his back pocket, slamming down a ten for the jerky.
Castiel rang him up and wished him a good night, and Dean managed to echo the sentiment without choking on his tongue. When he reached the door, his customary look back showed Castiel gazing down at the sickly daffodil, stroking one of its leaves with a flushed, bright smile.
Dean still threw the busted-up Volvo a dirty look as he walked across the parking lot, though.
“Pansies,” Castiel declared, smoothing his thumb along the underside of one of the tiny scraps of greenery. “They haven’t had enough sun, and the couple of blooms they’d managed to put out have withered.”
“Can you fix ‘em?” Dean asked, leaning his hip on the counter.
“I can try,” Castiel said decisively, nodding as he brought his eyes back up to Dean. “There’s hope.”
“If anyone can do it, it’s you, buddy.”
Castiel seemed flattered by the simple compliment. He moistened his lips and adjusted his vest, as if he couldn’t decide what to do with his hands. “Jerky?” he asked after a moment.
Dean laughed, shaking his head. What was the point of the ruse, now? “Nah,” he said. “I just came to see you.”
“Oh,” Castiel said, ducking his eyes down to the pansies as if it would hide the way his face split into a blushing grin, gummy and endearing.
“I’ve been bringing you plant orphans for a month now; there’s really only so much jerky a guy can handle,” Dean said, amping up the watts of his smile a little. “Totally worth it to flirt with you, but hey, gotta think of my sodium intake.”
Castiel’s laugh never ceased to make Dean’s stomach flutter.
Taking the pot of three tiny pansy plants from the counter, Castiel turned to duck into the stockroom, holding the door open with his foot just long enough to slip them onto a shelf inside. Dean spotted a spare Gas’n’Sip vest, neatly folded; a thin wallet; and a set of car keys on the shelf. Nothing else.
The door creaked closed as Castiel returned to the counter, the tiny smile Dean loved so much firmly in place. “A month’s worth of plants has given me plenty to care for,” he said. “I won’t have space for many more, unfortunately.”
“Shame,” Dean said. “They were such a good excuse to stop by and see you.”
Castiel fiddled with the zipper of his vest for a moment as he softly said, “You don’t need an excuse.”
“Glad to hear it,” Dean said, beaming. He let his grin rest on Castiel for a moment before he solemnly added, “Though I guess I still need to ask after their health.”
“Of course. Regular updates,” Castiel agreed, his eyes stuck on Dean. He stared a lot. Dean kinda liked it.
“Well, hey,” Dean said flirtatiously, “maybe one of these days I should visit them, y’know? Just so they don’t feel abandoned.”
Like a switch had flipped, Dean watched Castiel’s smile disappear. His shoulders tensed, and his hand darted out to grab the handle of the broom that he’d been using when Dean had come in.
What had he—
“I’m sorry,” Castiel said, stepping out from behind the counter. “I don’t think that will be possible.”
Confused, Dean was left standing by the register as Castiel resumed his sweeping, his eyes fixed determinedly on the floor.
“Oh, for fucks’ sake!” Dean hissed at the handle of the plastic, folding duster in his hand. Karen had given it to him, with a whole box of refills, in a basket of housewarming goodies when he’d moved into his place. Which Dean was incredibly grateful for, because the neglected, two-up-two-down a couple of streets over from Bobby’s garage needed a hell of a lot of cleaning. (It needed more than just cleaning, but a man had to start somewhere.) The duster did its job just great, until it decided to fold itself in two halfway through each of Dean’s cleaning sprees, showering him with decades of cobwebs and weird cabinet grease. Dean wouldn’t be beaten, though. He’d fix up this house. It’s not like he had anything else going on in his life, anyway.
“The house is coming along great,” Sam said dryly from the hallway behind Dean.
Goddamn it. Dean was gonna regret giving his little brother a key. “Mornin’ Sam,” he said, hastily brushing clumps of fuzz off the front of his plaid shirt.
“I came to see if you wanted to come hiking with me, but I see now that you’re terribly busy.” Sam eyed a teetering tower of boxes in the hall—Dean’s trashy novel collection—before edging sideways around them.
Dean stepped down from the stool he’d been balanced on, tackling the kitchen cupboard tops; the latest tactical maneuver in his house war. He squinted at Sam and waggled his floppy duster in utter confusion. “Me…hiking? You wanted me to go hiking with you? Are you in the right house? I’m your brother, Dean.”
Sam huffed and rolled his eyes. “You might like it if you gave it a try.”
“Can you smell toast? Is this a nine-one-one situation?”
Sam didn’t dignify that with an answer, crossing his arms over his chest instead. “Without including Bobby’s and the garage—because that’s work—when was the last time you left the house?”
“Last week,” Dean said sulkily. “I went to the Gas’n’Sip.”
“That’s not a social outing, Dean.”
Dean bit back an argument. It was, for him. Or it had been, before he fucked it up somehow. “It’s not like there’s a lot of places to go around here, Sam,” he deflected.
“You have a car,” Sam threw back.
“I go for drives all the time!”
“Yeah, alone!”
“What’s your point here, Samantha?”
“You’re never gonna find a date or a—”
“Maybe I don’t want to!”
“I call bullshit,” Sam said calmly. Fuck, it’d be so much easier if he yelled and argued. Instead of standing there all serene-like and good brotherly, because he damn well knew that he was right.
Dean’s shoulders dropped and he let out a long, whistling sigh. “What do you want me to say here, Sam? I’ll settle in, I’ll find someone maybe, in my own time.”
“I don’t doubt it. I just want to know what you’re sulking over. Bobby says you’ve had a face like a slapped ass all week.”
“So you’re gossiping about me with the old man now?”
“Yes,” Sam said blithely. “So, spill.”
So, defeated, Dean did. There wasn’t much to share, really—it wasn’t like Castiel had said “fuck off, I don’t like you, never come here again”—but Dean was feeling a little tender about it, and he didn’t appreciate Sam’s skeptical expression. The judgy wrinkles his raised eyebrow caused across his big ol’ forehead were pissing Dean off.
“Don’t suppose you thought about…oh, I don’t know, talking to him?”
“I wasn’t the one that cut the conversation off, I was talking to him!”
“You know full well what I mean, jerk.”
“I don’t wanna discuss it, Sam. And I don’t wanna hike, either.” Dean didn’t like raising his voice at his brother—he reminded himself of his dad when he did that, and rarely was that a positive—but he wasn’t in the mood for Sam’s sunnier worldviews, not right then.
Sam regarded him for a long moment, then nodded. “Alright,” he said softly.
Oh, what the hell. That was worse. Ugh. Dean pushed away the icky feelings and turned toward the kitchen counter, reaching to grab the jug from the coffee machine. “Want a coffee before you go?” he asked.
“Sure.”
They settled into comfortable silence as Dean prepared his caffeinated olive branch for Sam. Behind him, Sam wandered around the kitchen, poking into boxes here and there, and peering up at the stained ceiling. It’d take Dean a while to fix this place up, he knew, but it’d be homely someday. The perfect eternal bachelor pad.
Sam made thoughtful noises as he progressed around the room, then paused near the rotting window sill. “You’re killing your plants,” he said as Dean dunked the spoon in the awful, healthy sugar substitute that he kept on hand for Sam’s visits. “They need water, or light, or something.”
Dean’s chest tightened, and he let out an agreeing grunt. “Yeah, I know. I’m not very good at nurturing things, I guess.”
When Dean turned, handing Sam his chipped mug, he was treated to his brother’s concerned, soft expression.
“What?” he asked.
“You know that’s not true,” Sam said. “You practically raised me. That’s gotta count as nurturing.”
“Yeah, well,” Dean said, moving over to the window so that he could poke experimentally at the half-dead pots of greenery he’d been unable to stop himself buying despite having no one to give them to. “Turns out I can do people better than plants.”
“I agree, you’re much better with people than with plants,” Sam said smugly. “So go talk to Cas.”
Dean let out a long, resigned sigh, letting it whistle through his lips for a moment as he regarded the crispy leaves of a beheaded annual that he’d found at the Hy-Vee uptown.
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”
Dean avoided the Gas’n’Sip for two weeks, all in all. It wasn’t like he didn’t plan to go back, but he had the overwhelming feeling that he should apologize for something—for what, though? For a few more days after Sam’s visit, he turned his and Castiel’s last encounter over and over in his head, but he still couldn’t put his finger on what he’d done wrong.
When he almost flattened his thumb with a hammer, Bobby cussed him out of the garage and told him to run down to the diner for lunch, take a break, and get his head on straight.
The nearest diner to the garage was half a block past the Gas’n’Sip, and Dean couldn’t help but walk slowly, taking a sneaky look through the window as he cut through the lot out front. A blonde woman stood behind the counter; maybe Castiel was taking a day off.
The diner-slash-deli provided a polystyrene box with a hot ham sandwich and a bag of chips. There weren’t any sickly plants at the register, because it wasn’t that kind of place—the habit to look was already ingrained—but there were cute little bouquets of spring tulips wrapped in simple cellophane, being sold to raise money for the local high school’s something-or-other.
Dean hesitated for a moment, but...what the hell? Apology flowers were a thing.
Okay, maybe they were mostly a thing if you were actually dating, but whatever. Couldn’t blame a guy for trying.
As Dean made his way back out to the sidewalk, his plastic baggie of lunch dangling from one hand and flowers in the other, movement across the street caught his eye. A distinctly unattractive car—it was probably supposed to be “gold” but Dean could only begrudgingly label it “kinda-shiny tan”—pulled up close to the curb. It was an older Lincoln, one that, given some care and attention, could have been a certain kind of classic. Instead, this particular specimen had rusty bumpers and an unnecessarily springy suspension.
Out of the driver’s seat popped Castiel.
Dean smiled to himself. Somehow, the car’s ugliness suddenly seemed charming.
Too far away to yell a greeting, Dean raised his arm to wave. Castiel didn’t pause to look across the street, though, stepping straight into the empty laundromat. Dean took a moment to check for traffic, and by the time he was halfway across the road, Castiel had emerged onto the pavement once more.
Castiel wasn’t wearing his blue polyester Gas’n’Sip vest, though the rest of his uniform appeared to be in place—he was wearing the same jeans as always, and a thin white dress shirt that he’d roughly rolled up to just below his elbows. On any normal day, Dean would have dwelled on Castiel’s exposed forearms, but for once his attention was abruptly dragged elsewhere: the front of Castiel’s shirt was bright red. Not dried-blood red (thank God) or spilled-some-soup red. No, it was vivid, chemical red. And...a bit blue, too, now that he was looking. There were even some areas where the red and blue overlapped and Castiel looked a little purple.
In fact, he was drenched in the exact colors of—
Dean clamped his mouth shut as he stepped onto the pavement a few doors up from the laundromat, biting back an eruptive laugh. Poor Castiel. He was very clearly wearing the innards of the Gas’n’Sip slushie machine. The thing seemed to require emergency surgery on the regular, and Dean had caught Castiel up to his elbows in the machine’s guts more than once. Clearly, today’s operation had been unsuccessful and somewhat explosive.
No wonder he hadn’t been behind the counter of the gas station. He’d had a slushie bath.
“Hey, Cas!” Dean called, raising his voice over the lunchtime hubbub of Main Street.
Castiel seemed not to hear, his attention directed grumpily down at his color-splashed shirt until he reached his car once more. He yanked open the back door and pulled out a pile of squishy-looking fabric. He gathered it up in his arms, squashing it into the crook of his elbow as he began to make his way back into the laundromat. His other hand reached up and began to pop open the front of his stained button-down, revealing a simple white undershirt.
Dean’s footsteps slowed. He’d been planning to approach Castiel and apologize for whatever their miscommunication had been. But…
The navy fabric bundle that Castiel had grabbed from the back of his car looked like a sleeping bag.
A fuzzy alarm was ringing in the back of Dean’s head.
Maybe Cas had been camping. The weather had been a bit chilly for it, only a few weeks into spring, but even so, Dean futilely hoped Castiel was a dedicated outdoorsy type. Fuck, he really hoped that was it.
Feet moving without thinking, Dean approached Castiel’s banged-up Lincoln. It was neat inside. On the back seat, there was a tidy little pile of paperback books, pages bent and covers creased from use. Ducking forward to look through the window before he could help himself, Dean spotted a cooler wedged down in the back footwell. The passenger seat held a small stack of folded clothes: work pants, a couple of white t-shirts, a severely over-washed maroon hoodie. A wash bag sat on top of the pile. It was slightly unzipped, and a toothbrush handle poked out.
None of those things held Dean’s attention, though. No, what made his heart stop was the back window.
Behind the headrests of the back seats, a flat board had been placed, forming a firm, makeshift shelf. On the top of the board there was a line of potted plants, absorbing the weak spring sunshine through the Lincoln’s rear window.
A tiny pot of daffodils, almost done blooming; a low, flat pot of pansies; the hyacinths Dean had found three weeks before at the grocery store; a pair of purple primroses that had almost been thrown out at the farmer’s market.
Dean’s knuckles whitened around the stupid apology flowers that he still held in his hand. Not wanting to be caught spying, he straightened up. Through the laundromat window he could see Castiel, stripped down to a white undershirt, stuffing his sleeping bag and button-down into a washing machine.
Castiel was living in his car. He was homeless. Dean’s dumb comment about visiting the plants—that was it. That was what had upset Castiel, what had caused him to shut down.
Dean swallowed, his throat tighter than it had any right to be.
He should go. Clear as day, Dean realized: Castiel hadn’t wanted Dean to know this. He didn’t have any right to pry into Castiel’s life uninvited.
Dean placed the bunch of apology tulips under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side of the Lincoln. He didn’t leave a note.
It was a clear evening, and the soft scent of spring filled Dean’s lungs with a fresh tingle as he sucked in a deep, grounding breath. The yellowish light from within the Gas’n’Sip spilled out across the concrete, battling the approaching sunset. Dean was standing off to the side of the lot, leaning back against the hood of Castiel’s car.
He’d spent the entire rest of the day working out what to do, what to say.
Eventually, he’d decided that pretending that he didn’t know that Castiel was homeless felt like lying. He wouldn’t pry into Castiel’s circumstances any further, that wasn’t his place; what Castiel decided to share or not was his own choice. But fuck, he couldn’t just act like he didn’t know.
More importantly, he couldn’t let Castiel go on apparently thinking that it mattered.
Dean wasn’t an idiot, he’d lived life. It was rarely perfect. Whatever had happened or was happening to Castiel so that he’d ended up living out of one of the ugliest cars known to man…well, there but for the grace of God had gone Dean, on more than one occasion. Or probably some other cosmic entity, because God surely didn’t give a damn about Dean Winchester.
He wouldn’t force Castiel to talk about it if he didn’t want to, but he wouldn’t play dumb either.
Of course, when Dean had arrived at the Gas’n’Sip near what he hoped would be the end of Castiel’s day shift, he’d had no fucking idea what to say. So he hadn’t gone inside, and was now hovering near the Lincoln like a creeper. Great. He was really endearing himself, he was sure.
The breeze picked up. Dean folded his arms over his chest, tucking his chilled fingers under his arms. He’d only been waiting for about ten minutes, but the cool air was making him uncomfortable. Even with the days lengthening and spring having sprung in full force, the nights were still cold. If Dean was chilly just standing here in the evening, what was it like for Castiel in his thin sleeping bag at night?
How long had he been sleeping like that? The winter had been harsh, and—
The front door of the Gas’n’Sip jingled, pulling Dean sharply out of his darkly circling thoughts.
Castiel didn’t notice Dean at first. He walked across the front of the building, looking down at his hands as he fiddled with his keys. His uniform vest was over one arm, bunching up near his elbow, and the top two buttons of his white shirt were undone.
Dean watched him approach silently, willing him to raise his messy, wind-tousled head and notice the nervous idiot half-sitting on his car hood.
When Castiel finally looked up, his face fell blank, then fearful, then carefully blank once more. He moved closer, but his footsteps notably slowed.
“Hello, Dean,” he all but whispered, his eyes flicking between his parked car and Dean.
Dean had a bunch of words in his head, whole speeches he’d written and scrapped and mentally edited with a thick, red pen the whole time he’d been waiting. Of course, every word failed him.
“Uh, hi,” he said, hoping his smile looked at least a little less strained than he felt.
Castiel’s eyes continued to dart between Dean and the Lincoln. He’d stopped moving, still several steps away, and his shoulders edged downwards. Slumping. Resigned. Dean saw his lips press together, shaky, the breaths he pulled in through his nose growing heavier and more uneven.
Blinking heavily, Castiel’s red-rimmed eyes dropped away from Dean to the concrete floor of the parking lot, focused intently on the tiny scraps of gravel that littered the surface. Shakily, he sucked in a breath and croaked, “Dean, I—”
“Guess you got the flowers, then,” Dean blurted instinctually, tipping his head toward the front of the car, indicating where he’d left them tucked under the windshield wiper.
"Did you want them back?" Castiel asked, his voice thick. There was a tremble to his chin that Dean, ever the gentleman, pretended not to notice.
“What? No!” Dean couldn’t help but huff out a laugh. “If that’s your way of rejecting a guy, I’ve gotta say: it’s a little harsh.”
“Dean—” Castiel cut himself off with a huff that sounded like it was half-misery and half-frustration. He finally took a step closer, gesturing to the front of the Lincoln before he looked back at Dean. “I’m a gas station attendant that sleeps in my car!”
Dean raised a hand to the crown of his head, rubbing at his hair for a moment while he sorted out his words; apparently, he was going to have to use some. Not his strongest talent, but he had a feeling Castiel was worth the effort.
“You’re gorgeous,” Dean began, talking to a spot just beneath Castiel’s collarbone because it was easier. “Like, the type of beautiful where I can’t help but smile when I look at you. You’re funny—really dry and hilarious—and you don’t even mean to be, half the time, and that’s what makes it better. You remember ridiculous details like what my brother did in a play twenty years ago. You’re reliable. You have a job that plenty of people would look down on, but you take it seriously. You care, Cas—you care about everything from making sure old ladies get the right kind of milk to reviving half-dead damn plants.”
Castiel was staring, his pink-flushed lips parted in the golden evening light. His body seemed like it wanted to keep moving forward, his hand twitching at his side and the toe of his shoe shifting just a fraction against the concrete, even though he didn’t manage any response at all.
“Those things I just said?” Dean said more quietly, less forceful. “None of them have anything to do with your address.”
“You can’t just pretend like it doesn’t matter,” Castiel snapped. He’d have seemed annoyed—brow furrowed tight—if he didn’t look so hopeless.
“It doesn’t.”
Castiel snorted, shaking his head as he looked away from Dean, over to the edge of the parking lot where the concrete became uneven and faded away into scrubland.
“I’m not saying I don’t care,” Dean clarified. “Of course I do. It’s dangerous, for one thing, and yeah, I’m gonna worry—I’m gonna want to help. But it doesn’t matter.”
Castiel’s eyes came back to Dean’s. In the perfect photographer’s light that the hour before sunset in spring provided, his eyes looked bluer than ever. That blue was on a mural somewhere, Dean was certain, on a chapel ceiling where angels looked down on undeserving postulants. Dean wasn’t worthy of it.
The setting sun highlighted the growing wetness that clung precariously to Castiel’s lower eyelashes. Stubbornly, he sniffed and shook his head as he said, “I didn’t want you to know.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, tearing his gaze away and down to his own scuffed boots. “I get that. I didn’t mean to pry or anything. Kinda found out by accident—I saw you at the laundromat yesterday. I called out but I don’t think you heard me. I’m sorry.”
Castiel didn’t answer. Dean gave him space for a moment, studying the dust that clung to the sides of his boots before he eventually looked up. Looking down at the ground also, Castiel rubbed a hand across his face, smearing one or two silent tear tracks, his shoulders hunched.
He looked miserable.
He looked like the kid Dean had known, one who’d had a kind word for everyone but never seemed to receive many in turn. The kid who’d sit with his shoulder pressed into a friend’s, propping up a whole circle of stoners like he was desperate for the smallest touch, and would let everyone around him talk with a soft smile. A kid that, like all kids, probably just wanted to be understood.
Dean took a breath and raised his arms. “I’ll understand if you’d prefer I just left, but on the off chance...would you like a hug, instead?”
Blinking damply, Castiel raised a stubborn scowl to Dean’s face. But, wordlessly, he stepped forward. He smelled like coffee and warm detergent. As Dean wrapped his arms around his shoulders, Castiel slumped.
“I’m embarrassed,” he murmured into the air beyond Dean’s shoulder.
“And I’m good with cars.”
Castiel pulled back, squinting at Dean in confusion.
“What? I thought we were stating the obvious.”
Castiel let out another huff at that, but it was accompanied by a small curl to his lips. Tiny, but precious. Dean’s hands were still resting on his elbows, having slid down respectfully to give him room to step back. He didn’t, though, hovering in Dean’s personal space.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Castiel said.
“I figure you can tell me whatever you’re comfortable saying over dinner.”
“You seem pretty confident that I like you, too.” Castiel was fighting a smirk, his still-pink cheeks moving as his lips pressed tight. “I never said as much.”
Dean lifted his hand from Castiel’s elbow, gently knocking his jaw with his knuckle. “Yeah, you’re kinda quiet,” he admitted, perfectly solemn and soft. “But your body isn’t.”
Castiel’s head tilted—notably into Dean’s hand, rather than away from it—his eyebrows pulled together in confusion.
“You stare a lot,” Dean pointed out, grinning.
“I—well, yes. I suppose I do.”
Dean’s grin grew bigger.
“You’re very pretty,” Castiel added defensively, shoving lightly at Dean’s bicep. “And very kind.”
Dean wouldn’t have admitted to preening exactly, but hey, given who was complimenting him, he was happy. “So...still a no on taking me to visit our plant babies, I guess, but was that a yes on taking you out for dinner?”
Castiel laughed, shaking his head as he gave Dean another little shove, toward the passenger door this time. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll drive, and we can do both.”
Dinner was a sad excuse for a first date; bar top seats at the diner up the street, with Cas still in his work clothes and Dean splattered with various fluids found beneath a leaking Buick at Bobby’s. But Dean didn’t care. He got to stare at all the different blues that made up Cas’s unique colors as the waitress dropped off paper-rolled silverware, and he got to nudge Cas’s knee comfortingly with his own as he explained about the drug habit that had ballooned out of control with his parents’ sudden passing shortly after high school.
Cas fiddled with a paper napkin, tearing it to shreds as he bluntly laid out how he’d lost everything multiple times over, and yet—to Dean’s genuine admiration—had never given up, even in a town small enough that it never let anyone change. Dean couldn’t help the bloom of pride in his chest as Cas told him he’d just gone two years with nothing in his system but a little weed and his prescription anxiety meds, which it turned out had been the key to most things. When he looked up, he met Dean’s gaze stubbornly. Not fearlessly—the shake in his voice betrayed his apprehension, but clearly Cas wasn’t a man to back down, in more ways than one.
“So that’s pretty much it,” he said, shrugging as if he didn’t care, and proving just how much he did. “Finding a job was hard, but the lady that runs the Gas’n’Sip, Nora, her younger brother died of an overdose about eight years back.”
“So she gave you a chance,” Dean said, nodding.
“Yes,” Castiel said dryly, “she did. I’ve been there nearly a year now, and she’s been good to me. I’ve almost saved enough for an apartment, and she’s going to give me a reference. She’s even stopped triple-counting the register after I leave.”
Dean winced. “That’s, uh, great,” he said.
Cas gave him a wry smile. “More than I deserve, honestly.”
Dean fixed Cas with a chastising look, about to point out that ‘deserving’ didn’t factor into addiction in any way—but the sullen waitress came back, smacking her gum as she delivered two skinny burgers and some under-salted fries.
The moment was gone, but Dean remembered his point. So, he told Cas about coming back to Sioux Falls—about his alcoholic father wrapping his car around a tree, and about his own drinking and depression after.
“Don’t know where my life would be headed, if it wasn’t for Bobby and Karen, and my little brother,” he said.
Cas was quiet. There had to be more questions—more explanations, for both of them.
But, Dean thought to himself, even when one of Cas’s little plants was desperately thirsty, he didn’t flood it with water. He trickled it in, bit by bit, acclimatizing the traumatized roots to better times.
They could do that. A little water, a little food…a little sunlight. And together, they could bloom.
