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“Better be… Hufflepuff!” The sorting hat shouted, and Castiel flushed in embarrassment. He could already hear the laughter of his older brothers coming from the Slytherin tables.
Michael and Luke, the twins, were starting their seventh year at Hogwarts, while Gabe was starting his fifth. He could feel the pitying gaze of his older sister, Anna, from the Ravenclaw tables as he walked slowly towards the other cheering Hufflepuffs.
He could still remember last year, when his parents had received the owl from Anna, letting them know which house she'd been sorted into. They’d been disappointed that she wasn't in Slytherin, as was the family tradition, but his mother had said “Well, at least it was Ravenclaw.” Naomi and Zachariah had met at Hogwarts, and had started dating when they both became the Slytherin prefects. They were indifferent to Ravenclaw, but had nothing but disdain for the other two houses. Gryffindor was for fools with no sense, and Hufflepuff for the leftovers that nobody else wanted, as far as they were concerned. Castiel expected a Howler from them any day now.
“Hi, you can sit here if you want,” said a voice, pulling Castiel out of his thoughts. It belonged to a boy with light brown hair and green eyes that sparkled, and he patted the empty bench next to him while smiling. Castiel recognized him as the first boy to be sorted into Hufflepuff today. He’d felt sorry for him at the time, but now they were in the same boat, so to speak.
“Umm…” Castiel said awkwardly.
“I'm Dean,” the boy introduced himself. “Maybe we can be friends?”
“Uhh, okay,” Castiel said shyly before sitting down in the offered seat. Dean seemed nice, and Castiel could probably use all the friends he could get right about now.
Three days later, the expected Howler arrived. Dean held Castiel’s hand during the entire time his mother’s and father’s voices screamed about how ashamed they were of him. Dean even hugged him while he cried afterwards, though he wasn’t the only one who tried to help the rejected first year.
That Howler actually led to a lot of new friends for Castiel, since the vast majority of the other kids didn’t agree with his parents in the slightest. A third year muggleborn Ravenclaw by the name of Charlie even offered to help him plot his revenge. She’d been amazingly talented with something called a computer before she received her Hogwarts letter by owl, and managed to use those skills to create new spells, one of which was how to send a Howler back to the person who sent it, with a new message on it. Naomi and Zachariah were not pleased, to say the least, when they had at least a dozen different children’s voices all yelling at them in defense of their youngest child. Though they never complained again about him being in Hufflepuff, so it must have worked.
While he did make many new friends at Hogwarts, Castiel had always stayed the closest with Dean. He seemed almost drawn to the freckled boy, and Dean never complained if he thought he was being clingy, unlike Michael and Luke. He also never played pranks on him like Gabe did, constantly. And Dean never thought he was above talking about things he deemed ‘stupid’ like Anna had always had the habit of doing. But he did give Castiel lots of hugs whenever he brought up any of these things, since he felt bad that his friend had such a crappy family.
Dean’s family, on the other hand, fascinated Castiel to no end. His father was John Winchester, the most famous Auror there was, and his mother was something muggles called a ‘hunter’. It turned out that not all muggles were unaware of the magical beasts around them, and some of them, like Dean’s mother and the rest of her family, fought against the bad ones that only lived to hurt people and cause suffering. Between the two of them, they’d taught their sons everything they knew. Dean had known how to do a Patronus charm since he was seven, and he liked to cast it when Castiel was feeling particularly down to cheer him up. The ghostly looking squirrel's antics never failed to make Castiel laugh.
The two Hufflepuffs were so close, in fact, that nobody was even slightly surprised when they started dating near the end of their third year. And they were even less surprised when the two announced their engagement only a few years after graduating.