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The first time it happened, there was not enough coffee in the world to get Castiel to his first class in the morning. It was statistics anyway, and it was already all he could do to stay awake in that. The doodles in his notebook always started out as impressive sketches, and ended with the ink line of shame as he passed out and dragged his pen across the page. Gabriel had joked that he should put together a portfolio of all of the best ones and title it "Dreams of Statistics," and submit it as his next art assignment. Gabriel was a jackass, but he would be lying if he said he hadn't considered it.
Today, it wasn't even worth walking into class just to pass out on a hard desk when he had a perfectly decent bed he needed to make up lost time with.
Lost time. He smiled indulgently into his pillow and rolled onto his stomach happily. Lost time spent with Sam Winchester's voice was no such thing.
***
Sam blinked at the professor several times, then cleared his throat. "I, uh...I would assume there's precedent in Marbury vs. Madison, sir."
Lame. So lame. Marbury vs. Madison. Like he was a freshman! God, he was never staying up all night again, unless it was to study his ass off so he didn't have to listen to Tyson Brady sniggering behind him in class. Marbury vs. Madison? That was every freshman's go-to case.
Dr. Cuthbert shrugged a little. The look on his face was one of disappointment, but he nodded. "You could make that argument, I suppose."
Which meant he wouldn't. But he supposed an idiot like Sam might. God, he was going to fail out of pre-law. Then what? Fixing cars, drinking booze? Family business?
"Mr. Brady, what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking Sam had a late one last night," he quipped, and the class collectively snorted and laughed.
Sam sighed. This was all Castiel's fault. He had been doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing, reading the papers on the Michigan case, when his phone had lit up. Castiel needed to know the assignment for Dr. Abner's class, and he had gone and used his amazing voice, the one that made Sam's whole body warm on the rare occasions that he spoke in their Artistic License and Intellectual Properties course. It was Castiel's fault he had not gotten a minute of sleep last night, and had followed that by falling unconscious ten minutes before Dr. Cuthbert wanted his opinion on the briefs. He had started awake only because a lifetime of trying to hide behind his big brother had given him a spider sense when people were staring at him.
God. Castiel. It wasn't fair for a guy to be incredibly hot, wickedly smart, ridiculously interesting, and a sadistic insomniac with a killer voice all at the same time. Sam blamed Castiel.
***
Castiel never missed a design class. But his brain was having trouble wrapping around the question of how an artist is meant to be present as an idiosyncratic personality in the work he produces. His piece today would be fantastic, if what he was trying to be present in was a bunch of crap.
Dr. Anael was looking at his work sideways when he opened his eyes.
Apparently he had managed to fall asleep standing up. That had to be a new low.
"It's...it's not exactly up to your usual quality, is it?"
Castiel sighed heavily. "No, ma'am. That is, I hope you don't consider my usual quality to be this shitty."
She smiled softly. "You need more sleep, Castiel." Then she moved on to verbally destroy Matt Uriel's work, which gave Castiel a bit of sick pleasure. At his worst, drooling passed out on a canvas, he was a better artist than Uriel.
Castiel licked his lips, then smiled to himself. He took down his soulless abomination and replaced it with a new canvas. New energy went through him, and he ignored the assignment and everything around him, and got to work, and this time he focused on the conversation that had robbed him of sleep the night before.
There had been awkward pauses between Castiel receiving the information for the assignment he had finished two days ago and the beginning of a real conversation. He had asked Sam what he thought of the course and the professor, what it was like being pre-law in a class half-filled with eccentric artists. Sam had laughed at that and asked what it was like to be an eccentric artist in a class half-filled with stuffy pre-sharks. Things had flowed easier after that, and before he knew it, he was lying in his loft, snuggling into his pillow and pretending it was Sam.
The man was brilliant, and that was a fact. Brilliant in every way. As the night wore on, they argued about whether or not something counted as art if its creator did not consider or intend it to be so, and whether intellectual works like informal blogs on the Internet were protected, and debated whether understanding the technical aspects of art made one an artist. They covered animals creating art, and that dissolved into jokes about animals writing the nation's laws, and Castiel had practically purred when Sam had laughed.
Sam was laughing, and it was because he was enjoying Castiel. The man was just delicious.
One or the other had nearly dozed off several times as they each struggled to find reasons not to hang up. By the time Castiel's sleepy brain slipped up and he mentioned how he had completed their assignment for Dr. Abner, he had cringed but not even bothered to deny it when Sam called him out on it. That had woken them both fully.
That was the moment he was painting now. That moment when he confessed just wanting an excuse to call Sam, and having paid Charlie Bradbury in bagels and cheat codes to give up his phone number three days before, and that it had taken all that time to get up the nerve to call. Sam had laughed again, and commented that he would have to tease Charlie that he now knew exactly how much she could be bought for, and Castiel had been relieved to find the pleased sound in Sam's voice.
That was three o'clock, and by three thirty, he was confessing again, to having had "an interest" in Sam since the moment he had shot down Castiel's argument about an artist's rights being more important than the public's in the first days of class.
"You were right," he had said. "I still don't agree with everything you said, but I hadn't considered the overall implications of my argument. The precedent it set, I think you said."
"That's why the world needs artists and lawyers," Sam said kindly.
"I think I should have a lawyer in my life."
"Hm," Sam responded. "That's funny. I've thought recently that I could use an artist in mine."
Castiel was never going to sleep again.
Or so he thought. It turned out no matter how smitten with someone you are, eventually your body goes to sleep even if you're standing up at a canvas in front of the artist you respect most in the entire world.
Dr. Anael was behind him. He could feel it. Slowly, he turned around and flinched at her intense scrutiny.
"That's not the assignment, Castiel," she said quietly.
"I figured I had already screwed up the assignment. So..."
"It's incredible. You did that in twenty minutes?"
He bit his lip. "Yes, but...I worked on it all night."
Dr. Anael looked at it a moment longer, then smiled at him. "You have a beautiful muse, Castiel."
"Yes, ma'am," he murmured. "You have no idea."