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When applying for college, Dean had never given much thought to his sleeping patterns. High school had been a torturous and seemingly endless loop of early morning bus rides and late night Xbox marathons. If he had given any thought to sleep it was to look forward to picking his own schedule for once. Naively, he thought college would be four easy years of a handful of afternoon classes and late nights full of fun, booze, and friendly, warm bodies.
Well.
He had been right about the late nights. Apparently professors were some sort of sadistic evolution of public school teachers. It was like they believed each student was enslaved to their class alone for the duration of term from the second the syllabus was handed out. He had several professors who gave out assignments like they were the only game in town and the apocalypse was nigh. Even Sam, smart as he was and taking only freshmen level classes, was stumbling through the end of January in a haze, already so buried in busywork and study groups that he had folded and joined Dean in his 5 cup a day coffee habit. Dean had generously not commented on this development, as Sam had also ceased having the energy to whine about the freshmen ten and his campaign to get his brother to join him on his early morning jogs at the gym. Like Dean had the energy for that shit.
Dean's current levels of fuck-giving saw him tucked in the corner of the science building 2nd floor, hoodie pulled down over his face and backpack temporarily converted into a pillow as he desperately attempted to cram in a 15 minute nap before math started.
“Are you alright?” a deep voice asked, breaking through the fog of the uncomfortable half-doze Dean had fallen into. Growling, Dean pushed back the lip of his hood, blinking blearily up at what appeared to be a mountain of tan from this angle. The guy -and Dean was only assuming it was a guy based off of the bone vibrating pitch of the voice that had woken him- was bundled up in what seemed to be at least two coats over a knit vest over a sweater. The coat was one of those long, bland deals that Dean always thought of as belonging to businessmen in New York who could afford to take a taxi everywhere. The face that looked down at Dean, holding a slightly offensive look of mixed concern and disapproval, was anything but middle aged wall street. Fuck. That 5 O'clock shadow and –were the guy’s eyes actually sparkling? Dean needed to go back to sleep. Exhaustion was apparently making him hallucinate.
“I was sleeping, “he grumped, clumsily pushing himself off the floor and into a sitting position. “Emphasis on the ‘was’. Haven’t you ever seen a guy sleep before?”
The guy stared down at him, and incredibly unimpressed frown creasing his face. “You looked more dead than asleep, except for the loud honking. You snore.”
“I do not! I wasn’t even that deeply asleep anyway, I was cat napping. I’ve got class in a few.”
“…Class started twenty minutes ago.”
Dean stared at him, then pulled out his phone. “SON OF A BITCH!”
-
Turns out Castiel, Dean vaguely remembered his name because the guy had to correct the professor several times the first day they had roll, was in his math class. Dean’s mind however, was soon distracted from thoughts of his odd classmate as he frantically tried to figure out what was being covered in lecture. Professor Shurly was hard enough to follow at the best of times. The man’s handwriting was illegible and Dean was pretty sure he was only allowed to teach math because C’s get degrees.
After class was over Dean dejectedly walked to the bus stop to wait for the campus shuttle. He and Sam were going to meet like they did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and catch their connection home together. Dean usually drove them both to campus for the day, but parking had mysteriously increased by a grand this term and he didn't want to risk his baby in the snow they had been having this year; not that he couldn't handle it, he was worried about all these assholes on campus who had never heard of snow tires or checking their mirrors before backing out.
The shuttle finally pulled up. The shivering mass of students piled in and Dean found himself shoved into a corner where he realized the student trying not to step on his feet or block the isle was the owner of the same brilliant-eyed, stubble wearing face from this morning.
“Dude, are you stalking me?”
Castiel looked mildly offended -or maybe just confused- at the accusation and was for sure about to deliver some sort of scathing retort when the bus gave an almighty lurch, as buses were prone to do when forcing their way into the press of rush hour traffic. The sudden 40° angle change caused new riders to yelp in surprise, seasoned riders to clutch at their bags grimly, and anyone not seated to go flying a couple of feet to the right, and in Dean’s case, caused him to suddenly have an armful of very disgruntled classmate. There was an awkward moment of desperate clutching and shuffling as they both tried to keep their feet while simultaneously trying to break apart and avoid crushing the 70 year old woman seated behind Dean.
In peril as he was of thrusting his ass in a senior citizen’s face on public transport Dean made the executive decision that he and Castiel were going to have to take one for the good of the team. Moving rapidly to avoid stomping on geriatric sneakers, Dean let go of the rail with one hand, grabbing Castiel around his shoulders and bear hugging the guy to his chest, forcing the slightly shorter man to give up his crusade for a hand bar that wouldn't support them against centrifugal force at this angle anyway and grasp onto Dean for dear life as the vicious bus driver made another rapid (and probably un-signaled) turn into West Campus Drive.
Embarrassed, Dean quickly dropped his arms, moving to give the guy space. Rather than pulling away however, his classmate tightened his grip, stepping forward to match Dean’s backward movement. More than a little surprised, and trying not to squirm with embarrassment now, Dean pulled back enough to give his suddenly over-friendly octopus a look that he hoped would communicate his incredulity with the situation.
The same look was all he got, mirrored back from a disgruntled, red nosed face.
“You’re warm,” his octopus said, as if accusing him of witchcraft.
“Uhh, yeah,” Dean said, coughing uncomfortably as he reached around to peel Castiel’s hand’s off him. “People tend to feel that way when you press yourself against them.”
He had only managed to jam his fingers under Cas’ vice-like grip—and seriously was the guy wearing two pairs of gloves?—when the shuttle lurched to a halt, throwing them back together.
People began piling out of the bus at the same rate that people were trying to push in. In the confusion and shuffle Dean missed his chance at grabbing a seat while trying to pretend the guy squeezing him around the waist wasn't completely off his rocker. The bus took off again and they were back to locking leg muscles in an attempt to keep vertical.
Suddenly, a shadow fell across the pair as Sam finally managed to politely push his way through the crowd of commuters to stand near his brother. ‘Heeeyyyyy,” Sam said, eyeing Dean and his new ‘friend’ with eyebrows raised. “What are you guys doing?”
Dean was definitely blushing now, and he resumed trying to wiggle out of his classmate’s hold. He managed to get his arms free at least and tried for an unconcerned nod in his brother’s direction. “Hey Sam,” he said, attempting to sound not at all aware that he had a guy plastered to his front in an apparent animalistic and instinctual search for warmth. “We still good for tonight?”
Sam nodded, his eyes still locked onto Dean’s octopus as the bus pulled up to their stop. “Yeah…let’s just get to Charlie’s before the blizzard sets in, ok? If I get sick I will totally fail Business Law.”
Cas tightened his grip, expression alarmed as Dean and Sam moved to face the exit.
“You can’t just leave me here!” he blurted out, to the bafflement of the brothers.
“Huh?”
“Take me with you,” he pleaded, all big blue eyes and pink noes and... awwwww hell. He could give Sam a run for his money.
With a quick glance up at his brother, who seemed to now be desperately hiding a grin, Dean found himself shrugging and, to both their surprise, taking Cas’ arm by the elbow –and when did he become Cas anyway? –asking “Star War or Indiana Jones? We haven’t decided yet but for real, we are getting some Harrison Ford in tonight.”
-
Charlie was surprised when they showed up with a guy in tow; Dean especially was notorious for never making friends without practically giving them a background check. But Charlie was a social butterfly and anyway; if Dean was going to invite a friend to movie night she wasn’t going to miss the chance to interrogate the guy.
Surprisingly enough, one movie night turned into two by way of Cas pathetically trailing after Dean when class got out, giving him sad, soulful looks until Dean relented with a huff and squished down next to him on the bus, rolling his eyes at the gleeful way Cas breached personal boundaries to shove his hands into Dean’s pockets and smoosh himself against Dean’s side. Dean cut the guy some slack since the first thing he had done the morning in class after their first movie night was to plop himself down in the seat next to Dean and accusingly jam his hands against Dean’s neck, causing Dean to yelp and smack the icy digits away. They had spent the rest of class furiously whispering questions back and forth, mostly consisting of “what the fuck did he just write on the board?” and “Do you think professor Shurly slept in that shirt?”, all the while trying between the two of them to warm Cas’s hands up enough to hold a pen.
When Sam hooked up with them on the shuttle he didn’t even blink at the sight of Cas practically inside of Dean’s clothes, he just sat down on the other side of Dean and mimicked Cas by shoving his own hands in Dean’s other pocket. “Dude!” Dean grumbled as they proceeded to squish him between them. He had to admit they padded him pretty well against the lack of shock pads in the bus seats. Not that it was comfy or anything. He totally wasn’t cool with cuddling. Or whatever they were doing.
And whatever it was that they were doing continued the next day when they practically sat in each other’s laps as they tried to do homework at the only table in the shitty campus cafeteria, and the day after that when Cas followed Sam and Dean home for the sole purpose of building a blanket fort over Dean’s legs with all the mismatched quilts they had in the apartment while Sam made cocoa. A few days turned into weeks into homework nights into game nights into lazy nothing days. February saw the group lying around Charlie’s apartment rather than the Winchester flat because she had the best TV room.
Dean and Cas were piled like puppies on the couch as was fast becoming routine for them. Cas was draped across Dean’s lap again while Dean precariously sprayed whipped cream into his cocoa, bits occasionally flying out to land on Cas’ face, much to Cas’ disgruntlement and everyone else’s disgust.
“Will you put that down?” Cas gripped, whipping drops of whipped cream off his face as Dean slurped at his drink. “You make a terrible heating pad when you wiggle around like that.”
“Geez, I feel so used!” Dean joked. “You only love me for my body. Heat that is. That’s the only reason you followed me home like some freaky octopus-lizard-person-thing,” He put one hand over his heart dramatically, mock pushing Cas off of him to set his cup down on the coffee table.
Cas fell to his side on the couch. “Actually, that was total bullshit on my part,” Cas said casually, taking advantage of his new position to snag Dean’s cocoa, taking a deep drink before setting the cup back with a sigh. “I had been stalking you for a while. You always looked so bored and lost in class. It was adorable. And you would meet your brother every day after class on the exact same bus I took home so I figured a friendship with you two would have the double benefit of looks and brains. I was just too chicken to talk to you till the opportunity was thrown in my face.”
Sam and Charlie exchanged a look. Dean figured it was over Cas’ lack of social skills but he wasn’t too worried about it, after all, Cas now had plenty of friends to practice on, right?
“Of course,” Cas continued, wiggling back over to drop his head back in Dean’s lap, “The fact that you are an incredibly comfortable hand warmer is always a plus.”
Dean laughed, messing Cas’ hair fondly. “You are such a freak dude.”
-
Their happy, i.e. warm and dry, times were interrupted by a flurry of slush weather that made it impossible to retain any body heat when wearing jeans. Health was the next thing to go. For five whole days Cas lost his voice, leaving Dean to fret over the unreasonable fear that his friend would die alone in the bathtub, unable to call for help as he drowned slowly in a haze of Mr. Bubble. It was in voicing this fear to Sam that lead to the discovery of the temperature of 101. °F that Dean had been secretly running. Needless to say, illness abounded for a week or two, and that lead Dean, once he was able to think straight and pee standing up again, to formulate a plan.
The idea had actually been brewing in the back of Dean’s mind for weeks, ever since Cas had begun to set himself as a fixture in Dean’s life. It seemed like the natural thing to do in his mind, but he knew that Sam would say he was mother-hening and give him no end of grief. But he worried about Cas, he couldn’t help it, and the scarf had been the most wonderful shade of gray blue and ten miles long. So he devised a new plan. He made his purchase and waited.
Midterms hit like a hurricane, barely giving them time to gather their defenses and board up the metaphorical windows of their fragile knowledge before sweeping everything away in a deluge of scan-trons and in-class essays. Cas worried himself into such an insomniac state that he ended up bursting into tears during his French oral exam, greatly alarming his professor and friends, who heard about it through a frantic text from Charlie. Needless to say, Dean broke several traffic laws to come pick up a red eyed and glowering Cas before the dude could smite someone in his embarrassment.
That wasn’t the end of the misery. Sam forgot to put his name on a test and spent almost all week in the office of the department head trying to prove he really was the owner of the better scoring of the three mysteriously unsigned reports from his section.
Dean was the last to fall, totally blanking on his in-class essay on WWII, and it was only after hours of gentle prodding by Cas and a bag of burgers from Sam when fin ally broke down and, in what he would forever deny was a fit of hysterics, admitted that he panicked and forgot the name of the damn war and ended up calling it ‘World War Hitler’ for the whole paper.
By the end of the week the trio was emotionally drained and physically wrecked. When they stepped out of the testing center for the last time that week (Sam had managed a 98% on his Business Statistics test while Dean and Cas had hung around for moral support) and found that the sky had generously decided to dump two feet of snow in just a little over an hour, Dean knew it was time.
“Alright, fuck this shit,” he said, drawing puzzled glances from Sam and Cas, both of whom already looked like kicked puppies at the thought of waiting for the bus in what looked to be the start of a promising blizzard.
He grabbed them both, Cas by the sleeve and Sam by the elbow, dragging them outside toward the Science Building, despite their surprised and petulant protests. Lucky for them all, the Science Building was only about a parking lot away, and the got inside without getting too frozen wet.
He left them shaking off the snow in bafflement as he sprinted around the corner to his locker. Grabbing the bag he slammed it shut, flipping closed the combination lock before he could change his mind.
Walking back slowly he triple checked the contents of the bag, reassuring himself that he had everything. Cas and Sam met him half way down the hallway and Dean was relieved to see they looked more baffled than peeved.
“Here,” Dean said gruffly, pulling out a smaller package from the bag and thrusting one at Cas before fumbling out a similar package for Sam. Suddenly anxious to see their response, Dean gripped the remaining package, paper crunching under his fingers as he watched Sam and Cas exchange a look before plucking open the wrappings. Surprised and pleased exclamations followed the unwrapping of two thick-knit stripped scarves, each two hands thick and extra-long for multiple layers of wrapping.
Breathing a small sigh of relief, Dean unwrapped his own package, tearing off the paper to pull out his own deep magenta striped scarf. “I was going to wait till break had really started, but now’s good since you two are such big babies anyway.” He flipped the scarf around his neck till he was satisfied and warming up. Cas was rapidly trying to do the same, clumsily tangling himself in its gray-blue length. Sam had only wrapped his a few times, his hands stroking admiringly down its knitting.
Sensing incoming words of thanks Dean cut them off at the pass. His embarrassment levels might start spiking at any time and he wanted to move this event along pronto.
“Come on,” he said, thumping them both on the shoulders and steering them towards the exit. “Let’s get to the café before Kevin starts flipping tables from the lack of caffeine.”
Dean’s little detour meant the trio had to run to catch the bus, but they managed to make it with the ease of long practice. There were only so many days one could show up early to class after all, and none of them were strangers to that mad rush across the icy parking lot in a desperate attempt to sleep in yet still make it to the first class of the day on time.
They got to the café each in one piece and were greeted by the gang waving to them from a booth, a rare piece of luck since they usually had to stand in a huddle in the corner due to the size of their group, unless Kevin managed to fight off other students for a table. Kevin took his coffee breaks very seriously.
“Sup bitches?” Charlie asked, giving the trio the eye as she took in the whole matching scarves ensemble.
“Ehh, nothing much,” Dean said as they passed her on the way to the counter to order their drinks. “Just the usual. My American Civ class played a rousing game of ‘how many old white men does it take to work a projector’ this morning.”
“Can’t wait to hear all about it,” Benny drawled from behind him, causing Sam to jump as the southerner shook snow off his face. His beard really did him no favors in this weather. He looked like a shitty, low budget snowman in an elementary school play.
“Shake a leg fellas,” he said, shooing them into an actual line instead of an indecisive muddle in front of the counter. “I got shop in an hour so move your pretty asses and get your orders in before I eat you.”
Cas rolled his eyes as he faced the barista, ordering a large chai tea and a blueberry muffin.
“That scarf looks great on you,” she remarked, smiling as she handed Cas his chai. “Really matches your eyes.”
“Yeah, and now you won’t be freezing your skinny ass off,” Benny said, grinning.
Instantly Dean’s good mood died. That was true, wasn’t it?
Cas wouldn’t be cold, exactly as planned. Cas wouldn’t need to huddle against Dean for body heat anymore. Hell, he probably never wanted Dean to be bear hugging him in public in the first place. He just couldn’t help it because he didn’t do well with the cold. No more hugging up to each other on the bus. No more pressing shoulder to shoulder in math. No more holding hands as they walked to Charlie’s place for movie night.
Why did that hurt so much?
He turned to look at Cas as his friend lit up like a candle, red sneaking up his ears in a way that only happens in people who don’t get a lot of sun.
“It was a gift from my boyfriend,” Cas told the woman, casting a pleased and shy look at Dean that practically knocked the wind out of him. And wait, what?
Inexplicably Dean felt like he was floating.
Cas had called them boyfriends. Is that what this was? Were they dating? Did Cas actually want to be his boyfriend? Did he want to be Cas’s?
Through the buzz of these thoughts Dean shook himself. Yeah. He really did. How else could he explain how instantly relieved he felt after hearing Cas tell a total stranger that they’re a couple?
He stepped forward, leaning in towards Cas, and before he could make up stupid reasons in his head not to do it, he planted a soft peck on the guy’s cheek. “That’s because my boyfriend does look so damn good in it,” he said, ignoring the woman’s startled giggle in favor of watching the blush that was now creeping up Cas’ face, which he was also physically occupied with as he gently ran his thumb down Cas’ scruffy jaw.
Their friends were giving them looks – mostly surprised— except for Sam, who gaped a bit before shoving his wallet at Charlie, who gleefully pulled out a $20. Dean didn’t give a fuck what they were up to because Cas was pulling him into a real, honest to god kiss.
