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Dean learned that not all people were straight in 1986. He was seven years old, and for once, his dad was actually around.
He sat on the edge of the motel bed, kicking his heels slowly against the wooden bed frame. Sammy lay behind him on top of the covers, either sleeping or staring at the ceiling, and his dad pored over an arcane-looking book at the room’s shitty table. The tv was on, and Dean wished it wasn’t. It was the news, but this wasn’t cool news like his dad looked out for. There weren’t any cows disappearing or weird weather things or anything. It was just politics, and that sucked.
“In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court today upheld anti-sodomy laws,” the news anchor, a blandly forgettable man in an ill-fitting suit, said. “The case of…”
Dean tuned it out. He didn’t know what that was, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to do something - his dad was finally here, for once, and it was just like when he wasn’t.
John Winchester looked up from his book, a cold expression of interest on his face as he watched the news.
“You see that?” John asked Dean. “Making the right damn decision for once.”
“‘Bout what?” Dean did not care, but his dad was talking to him and he wanted that to keep happening.
John said a word Dean did not know in a tone that made it very clear it was derogatory. “It’s wrong,” he said.
Dean’s eyebrows raised. Wrong was their business.
“Not that kinda wrong. They’re sick in the head.” John Winchester then said “Queers ” in the same tone he would use to say “shifters ” and a slightly more offensive tone than he would use to say taxes .”
Dean had no idea what his father was talking about, but he thought that his father was probably incapable of being wrong, and if his father thought queers were sick, whatever they were, then he was right.
When he was eleven, Dean found out his math teacher was a lesbian. This was also the day he found out what ‘lesbian’ meant. She had seemed pretty normal, he’d thought. Math sucked, but his teacher was just a regular lady.
The next day, John Winchester told him and Sammy to pack their bags. They were in a different state by nightfall.
When he was twelve, Dean started to notice girls. They were fun - he could always tell when a girl from his class had a crush, and he’d flirt back, because why not? It was funny to see them get all flustered.
His first kiss was with a girl named Clarissa. She’d already hit her growth spurt, so she stood a few inches taller than him, and she’d stolen her mom’s makeup and showed up to school every day with purple eyeshadow and pink lip gloss on.
“Have you ever kissed anyone?” she’d asked Dean at lunch one day.
Dean put down his peanut butter and jelly sandwich - or, peanut butter and maybe a little bit of jelly, because his dad hadn’t bought any more jelly in weeks and he’d made sure to make Sam’s sandwich first.
“No,” Dean said, “but I think we can do something about that.”
A group of Clarissa’s friends fell silent as she stood up from their picnic table and led Dean to the edge of the playground, just around a corner where the teachers couldn’t see. It had been nice. Her lip gloss tasted like strawberries, and Dean figured out pretty quickly that while he wasn’t the greatest at school, he was pretty damn good at kissing.
Dean was fourteen, and he’d never had a girlfriend. This was by choice: he had been at five schools in the two years since he’d kissed Clarissa, and she was far from the only girl he’d kissed. A good six or seven girls had asked Dean to a movie, and he’d gladly gone. Every time went pretty much the same:
The movie played out on the big screen, and Dean didn’t watch it. Instead, his eyes ran over his date. He made out with Sarah/Ella/Marie until the credits rolled, and he’d take them to a diner and get them a milkshake after.
“That was nice,” Becca/Amber/Janie would say. “Do you want to go out again next weekend?”
“Nah,” he would say sometimes. “Besides, I won’t be around long.”
Other times, he’d say “Sure. But I ain’t gonna start holding your hand in the hallways.”
He just didn’t see the point of a relationship. At the end of the year, or sooner, they would get thrown into the car and driven somewhere far enough away from their old school that nothing mattered, and have to start all over again. Better to not get attached. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun.
“That seems pretty cynical of you,” one girl had told him once. Her name had been Paris, and she was one year older than Dean. “Besides, you gonna mess around in movie theaters forever?”
Dean had shrugged. “Don’t see why not.”
“I mean, I’m down,” Paris had laughed. She had an on-again, off-again relationship with the point guard of the school’s basketball team. Dean thought they were currently on, but he wasn’t sure. “It’s fun. But pretending you don’t have feelings doesn’t make that true.”
“Do you want more fries?” Dean had asked, and Paris took a handful from Dean’s plate.
At sixteen, Dean had still never had a girlfriend, but he had a friend. Aside from Sammy, Aiden was the first friend Dean had ever had, and Sammy didn’t really count because Dean was more like a parent than a brother to him.
Because he’d never had a friend, not really, Dean wasn’t quite sure how that stuff worked. Friendship. But he tossed a football around with Aiden in his backyard on the weekends sometimes, even though Aiden’s spatial awareness was next to nonexistent and Dean usually ended up having to sprint halfway across the yard to catch the pass.
He never stayed over at Aiden’s house, even though he knew sleepovers were a pretty common thing.
“I gotta make Sam dinner,” he’d say. Or “I can’t leave my little brother alone, you know.” He was never lying - the older Dean got, the less John Winchester came around. And once Dean could drive? He could take himself to the grocery store, and drive Sam to his academic team meets, and it barely even registered that his father wasn’t there.
One day, in the height of summer, Dean stood, hands on his knees, catching his breath. The sun was hot enough he thought it was probably boiling his brains, but here he was, in Aiden’s backyard, messing around with the football.
He pulled the bottom of his shirt up to wipe his face, and when he dropped it, he saw Aiden looking at him.
This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the way this made Dean feel. Electric, somehow. Charged in the same way he felt when he sat in the back of a movie with a girl and her gaze dropped down to his lips.
Dean looked around the yard. It was empty. He could see over the fence to the neighbors’ yard; there was no one. He didn’t know why it felt so dangerous when he called, jokingly, “You like what you see?”
It took just one second too long for Aiden to say “Shut up, dumbass,” and Dean realized that yeah, Aiden did like what he saw. And that Dean very much did not mind that.
Dean blinked, and Aiden was in front of him, leaning against the back wall of his house. On his left, a window looked into the living room, where the TV played a daytime soap opera to an empty couch. One of his hands was bunched in Aiden’s shirt and the other leaned against the wall next to his head, propping himself up. Aiden’s eyes shone with expectation and wanting. He leaned forward, an invitation, and Dean wanted to meet him halfway. To find out if Aiden’s mouth would taste like Paris’s, or if it would be different somehow, how the scraggly half-beard Dean hadn’t managed to bully Aiden out of growing would feel.
He didn’t lean in.
Instead, he remembered his father, entering their motel room drunk one night, lip cracked and dripping blood.
“You shoulda seen the other guy,” his father slurred, clarity further hindered by his lip swelling. “Gave that fairy what he deserved.”
And suddenly Dean was several feet away from Aiden, shaking his head and shoving his hands in his pockets.
“You good?” Aiden asked softly.
“Yeah,” Dean lied. “I’m just not that way.”
Aiden didn’t say anything for just a moment too long. “Okay, man. Seemed like you were, but whatever. Sorry.”
“Well, I’m not, okay?”
Dean made a fist and dug his blunt nails into the palm of his hand until it hurt. When he lay in the dark that night, Sam on the other motel bed, Dean stared at the ceiling until he saw light come in through the window. He still wanted, a deep ache in the center of his chest, and he told himself over and over that it didn’t mean anything. He knew it was a lie.
He didn’t see Aiden again after that day. John came back from a hunt three weeks later and packed them up again, and Dean didn’t care at all.
At their next school, he met a girl named Cassie, and Dean thought, what the hell. She was sweet and she snapped at him when he said something stupid and for the first time, Dean felt an emotion that wasn’t love, but it wasn’t not love, either.
This time, he let himself care. He held her hand when she wanted, and went to the football game to support her friend on the cheer squad even though neither of them cared about the sport. Dean had sex for the first time in the bed of Cassie’s pickup, and he thought that she just might be the best thing to ever happen to him.
He left, of course. It was only his junior year, and he would move several more times before his C- average earned him a diploma. He’d never thought his thing with Cassie could be permanent, and she’d never suggested it. They were kids, after all. High schoolers learning how to love. And that was okay, but he found himself missing her sometimes. That was the problem with caring - once you let someone into your heart, you couldn’t just expect them to walk right back out.
Dean had long since given up caring when Lilith’s hellhounds ripped him to shreds. He picked up girls in seedy bars when he was on a hunt, he slept with waitresses in by-the-hour motel rooms. It wasn’t quite like that first time with Cassie, but it was still pretty damn good. This sex didn’t have anything to do with a relationship, or caring. It was just a chance for Dean and whatever girl he was with to let off some steam and have a little fun.
And he certainly did have fun. Sometimes, he got two girls at once, and that was an adventure. Once, a girl handed him lacy pink panties and raised her eyebrow, and who was he to refuse? Hell, he even tried ropes once or twice. And as he felt his soul be dragged to hell, he thought that maybe he hadn’t led a good life, but he’d protected his little brother, and he’d had a damn good time, and wasn’t that what mattered?
Dean was in hell.
And then he woke up.
He stood in an empty barn, newly painted sigils covering the walls, and he watched as Castiel, the man who claimed to be an angel, unfurled his wings. Sparks fell from the flickering lights, and Dean thought that whatever view he’d had of the universe, he was really goddamn wrong.
“Do you not think you deserve to be saved?” Castiel asked, tilting his head to the side like he was confused. His hair stuck up like he’d flown through a storm to get there, and maybe that’s what flying from Heaven was like.
Dean was lost. He didn’t know what was happening, except that a beautiful, terrifying man stood before him and looked into his soul with piercing blue eyes and told him that Heaven had chosen him to be saved, and Dean for the life of him could not think of why.
A few weeks later, Dean stood, face bloody, as Bobby killed the siren outside their motel room door.
“Good thing I got here when I did,” Bobby said. Dean nodded.
He would have preferred it if Bobby had gotten there the previous day. Hell, if Bobby had taken this case instead of them. He wouldn’t have been dumb enough to get snared by the fucking siren.
This was just one more reason Heaven should have left him in Hell. Because his siren took the form of FBI agent Nick Munroe, and it had lured Sammy in with promises of a better brother, one who would always trust him. That had hit Dean hard, the knowledge that he hadn’t been a great brother to Sam recently. But that hadn’t been how the siren had gotten to Dean.
That had happened on surveillance trips - trips it must have always known were fake, only tools to reel Dean in. To compliment his car, and quiz each other about music, and flirt just subtly enough they could pretend neither of them had said anything. If it had been anyone else, anything else, Dean thought he wouldn’t have done it. (This is a lie. It was just so easy to give in for once. To stop pretending he didn’t find men just as attractive as women, that he’d never been tempted.) But the siren had him under its spell, and when he - it - leaned across the center console of the Impala, Dean had kissed him, and he’d been gone.
If Heaven had seen that, Dean thought, and they saw everything, Castiel was probably regretting pulling him out of hell right about now.
Two months later, after he’d met Chuck and Castiel had helped Dean save Sam, Dean thought he might not have as much of a problem with Cas as he’d previously thought. Cas seemed to like him - he went against Heaven to help them, after all. And what did that mean? That Heaven was so bad, helping Dean was better? Or that, after all this time and all he’d seen, Cas still believed Dean was good?
He’s pretty sure he has an answer when Cas comes back from Heaven and that cold mask slides over his face. “I’m loyal to Heaven,” Cas practically spat. “Not to mankind, and not to you.”
And that hurt, more than Dean thought it should.
That hurt didn’t go away. It was weird, with Cas. He would be with them, freaking Dean out by appearing two inches away from him or quizzically asking Sam to explain Dean’s joke, and then a month later he would leave them. And Dean got it, he really did. Cas wasn’t with them, not really. He was a part of the team, but that’s all. And even that was because his goals aligned with theirs more often than not. Not because they were friends.
That knowledge didn’t make it hurt less when Lucifer snapped his fingers and Cas exploded in a shower of blood and flesh.
It didn’t make it okay when Cas betrayed them, when he absorbed the Leviathans and played God.
When he stayed behind in Purgatory for no goddamn reason except to torment Dean with the knowledge that he was still in there, suffering.
Because, at the end of it all, Dean wanted Cas to be their friend desperately. Somewhere along the line, he’d opened his heart, and he wasn’t willing to close it. Didn’t he and Sam deserve a friend?
When Cas died, again, when Dean watched the blade slide through him and the life flash from his vessel, Dean was devastated. But he stubbornly, determinedly refused to regret their friendship. It wouldn’t have hurt him if he hadn’t let himself get close to Cas, and he knew that. But he also knew that he was close to Cas, and that wasn’t changing anytime soon, and if he had to burn the world down to get his friend back he just might.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.
Dean was closer to Cas than Sam was. He knew that. But that didn’t mean Dean expected it.
They stood in a locked room, Billie stalking closer by the second. Cas opened his mouth, sacrificing himself again, as usual, it wasn’t his goddamn turn, but what he said made Dean freeze.
He and Cas hadn’t had the best relationship over the years. Not with all the betraying and dying and holy wars. And even though that hadn’t made Cas any less important to Dean, hadn’t even begun the process of chiseling him out of Dean’s heart, he’d sort of assumed it had made him less important to Cas. Becoming a demon wasn’t even the worst thing he’d done in the last few years, and that alone should be enough to drive an angel away. Even a fallen angel.
Clearly, it wasn’t.
Because Cas reached the end of his speech, and he met Dean’s eyes, tears running down his face.
“I love you,” he said, and he was gone.
Dean stood there and stared at the empty place where Cas had stood, and he thought, Oh, so that’s what I felt.