Chapter Text
It’s just after six in the morning, and Castiel is cleaning the slushie machine. He’s refilling the dispensers for raspberry and cherry, he's wiping away the mess from the day before. This is something Spangler should have done last night, but Spangler spends all his shifts responding to YouTube comments on his phone, and none of his shifts doing any actual work. So Castiel gets to do it instead.
Ava will be coming in at eight. In the meantime, Castiel drinks a lot of coffee and puts out most of the day’s delivery. He is tired today. He’s tired most days. There are so many different kinds of soda to shelve. There are so many colors of Gatorade.
When he’s finished, he looks at the rows of bottles, each one ordered and neat. His eyes drift across them for a while and he doesn’t really think about much.
It’s been raining all morning. There’s a constant drumming against the roof and the windows, and when Castiel looks out at the parking lot, he can watch the water bounce up from the ground. There are long, low howls of wind. Hollow-sounding, he thinks. A little sad.
The ceiling light above the coffee machine is flickering again. Nora replaced the bulb last week, but that hasn't really changed anything at all. It might be a ghost. Castiel has been considering that lately. Probably not, but maybe. He can’t tell yet.
A dark spirit comes into the store that morning, wanting cigarettes. The spirit has taken the form of a man in a light brown coat, but its presence swirls around it, ugly and strange. Castiel watches it warily throughout the transaction, but nothing happens. It just buys some Marlboro Reds.
Castiel can’t always sense them, the spirits and creatures and everything else. But mostly, he can. He sees a lot, and these days, he just tries to ignore it. No one is ever pleased to find out what he knows, and it’s never done him any good.
Ava arrives at seven fifty-five. Her umbrella half-crumples itself over her head as she forces her way across the parking lot, fighting against the wind. She stands in the open entrance and shakes some rain off the umbrella, then closes the door and stands there in her oversized green coat.
“Morning,” she says to Castiel. She wipes her boots on the mat. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” he tells her. She’s walking towards the counter, heading for the back. “Do you want some coffee?” he asks.
Ava huffs, almost a laugh. “Yeah,” she says. “Only always. Thanks.”
So Castiel flips the coffee machine on again. He watches the light above it flicker, on and off, on and off.
The morning is a slow one. The minutes stretch themselves out, dragging on too long. Ava puts a football game on the television. A woman buys four cherry slushies, and they see her drop one in the parking lot outside. Castiel goes to bring her a new one, but she’s already in her car, the lost slushie abandoned to the rain. He stands in the open doorway. He watches the rivulets of icy red run slowly towards the drain.
“Cas?” Ava says from the cash register. Castiel blinks. He remembers to shut the door again, to turn back inside.
He likes Ava. She doesn’t avoid work the way Harry does, and she never seems to mind working with Castiel. She’ll be moving soon, to start a graduate degree in Massachusetts, and she’s very excited about it. It’s nice. She’ll be doing some kind of genetics research. She reads interesting-looking textbooks on her breaks these days.
Around lunchtime, a customer decides that his struggle to find a particular brand of beer must be due to the Gas-n-Sip’s goddamn fucking incompetence. Castiel watches the man's face for a while, the angry movements of his mouth. He waits for him to stop talking.
Eventually the door bangs shut with the man's departure, and a girl who is a werewolf pays for gas. She buys beef jerky and a light blue Gatorade. She looks tired. She’s been trying very hard, for a long time, not to hurt anybody. Castiel doesn’t say anything about this. It would only alarm her, and it wouldn't help.
He’s learned, at least.
Her weariness, though, her dull, aching heart, twists tight in his chest, even after she’s driven away.
He’s restocking the chips and Ava’s having her lunch when the door creaks open again. It's Dean. Castiel looks down at the shelf and carefully places another bag of Doritos. His hand crinkles the packaging.
Dean is a regular customer. The Gas-n-Sip has quite a few. The store is in the city, close to a lot of the office buildings, and it’s on plenty of people’s journeys to work. Dean gets his gas here, and often, on his lunch break, he comes to buy coffee.
The Gas-n-Sip’s coffee is terrible. Castiel hasn’t brought up this issue with Dean, though. For business reasons. Nora wouldn’t be pleased.
Dean’s been holding his suit jacket over his head, where it's not quite sheltered him from his trip through the rain. Inside now, he puts the jacket back on, tugging the front straight, and he scrubs at his hair with a hand. He glances over at the counter, and then around the store. When he sees Castiel, he grins, crooked and nice.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” says Castiel.
Dean goes to get his coffee. Castiel takes the Doritos box over to the counter, by the coffee machine. He sets the box down for now. He is supposed to be at the counter when there are customers.
Dean is considering the television. “You like football?” he asks Castiel, his eyes on the game.
“Ava likes football,” Castiel corrects. Dean turns back to look at him. He seems to be thinking that over, as though it's something more complicated than it actually is. But then he just smiles again. Castiel feels his own mouth curl upwards in response.