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Cas would have been lying if he said he had a plan.
He stepped off the crowded bus with his arms hugged to himself across his torso and his battered, dishwater-brown rucksack against his back. It hadn’t been his fault that the rains had come so swiftly last night- but he supposed it had been his fault that he had been caught in it. He hadn’t been able to find a decent shelter in time. The bus wasn’t an option he liked to take, but it gave him light and warmth and a place to sleep until his money ran out: and God help him, he didn’t want to stay in that last town a moment longer than he had to.
Literally, it was too close to home.
Shivering, he stilled. The light was low, and the November night was crusting silver at the edges, threatening frost. When he stepped onto the sidewalk the air distilled around him and the bus door folded shut at his back with a hiss.
He closed his eyes as he felt it pull away, leaving him under the yellow glow of the streetlight on a road that he did not know, in front of a row of small-town glass windows shining eerily in the growing dark. Water dripped from a nearby eave into a gutter, not quite frozen yet.
Turning to his right Cas followed the sidewalk until he found a covered doorway, abandoned and sheltered somewhat from the slight breeze. The bottom glass frame of the door had been shattered and partly replaced with board and duct tape that peeled at the sides but the ground was clean enough. No sick, no urine. No blood.
He settled down for the night in the corner. He shucked up his tattered sleeping bag close around his ears, and used his grimy, neatly-folded trenchcoat as a cushion on the boarded glass.
He woke at dawn. A headache and a chill crept up his throat on top of the usual stiff neck and bruises, and he blinked slowly at the weak sun and its long winter shadows.
Another day, another dollar.
Cas got up; he stretched. He ignored the keening hunger in his stomach- he would look for the closest cheap meal when the stores opened, when the people crept out of their homes and into their cars and up into the street to go to work. Before that, he had to set up shop somewhere, and the doorway wouldn’t do any good. It was too far from a supermarket, from a newspaper store, from a coffee shop- it was too far from a place the townspeople or the tourists would frequent.
Cas knew the score by now. He had caught the bus up north to Perseverance, Michigan, for a reason- he had heard through the grapevine that some regional Christmas arts fair was being held here, and he knew that that would mean the place would be full of non-locals in a week or so. Non-locals full of the joy of giving. Cas thought it was funny- to some people, even visiting the next town over was a reason to throw caution to the wind and be generous. Particularly in December- though Cas didn’t know quite why God only fitted into that idea then, and not the rest of the year round.
He found a park bench by a small café with a cliché name and propped up his pictures one by one on the seat.
They were pen paintings consisting of bright, thin lines in precise shapes- twisting, geometric spirals. Unearthly, almost three-dimensional, surrealistic cityscapes- he could make a planet appear like a bruise, a street an expanse of broad, exploding buildings. Perfectly graded spirals took flight from the page surrounded by patterns of crashes and bursts. These were loud, rude paintings- but they had coherence. The structure was not always obvious upon first glance, but Cas hoped that upon closer inspection the crosses would stamp on the ground and announce their position. As always, his former faith and devotion was the hinge of his work- the hook from which he could never escape, even subconsciously.
He propped them up with no real great hope that people would acknowledge them. He knew from experience that the general public generally preferred weak watercolours of pretty valleys, quaint houses, softly fading flowers in china vases, or depictions of city streets in the rain. Nice, neat, honest and demure paintings, with the ability to fade into the background.
They weren’t intricate enough for Cas. Plus, watercolours were too fiddly in the great outdoors, when he was constantly on the move. He liked to take his time over his work- it made the days go by quicker. He enjoyed the deliberation, the thought that went into exacting each line, into imagining each pattern and how it would look transposed from his bubbling mind onto the thin paper.
Also, pen was cheaper than paint.
He sat with his feet on the bench and curled himself under his trenchcoat, a tattered Stephen King book on his knees. It was a short story collection given to him when he passed through Minnesota a few months ago- ‘Different Seasons.’ He had read other books- often people swapped with him as he wandered- and he usually passed them on after the few days it took for him to read them.
This one he had kept. He returned to it, again and again. The pages had buckled and rippled under raindrops- the spine hung together so desperately he had to cradle it in his palms as he read to ensure it would not break further.
He read and read. As he did so, he dimly noted with pleasure that the grey sky did not become blacker, that it did not rain or snow, and that the cold was bearable. He had hardly glanced at the main street of the town beyond noticing that it looked exactly the same as the other small places he had slept in across the country. Linear, tiny- a grocery store, a bar, a small café. Shops with dreamcatchers in the windows. A church, and a town hall. Signs indicated there was a school somewhere. Maybe, he thought, there was a small branch of a regional bank.
As for the people? People passed by in their cars. People clutched their coats closer as they passed him on the sidewalk. Occasionally, they would glance to the side, perhaps in guilt, but more often they averted their gaze pointedly. Sometimes small children stopped, or they turned their heads as they passed with their hands in their mothers’. Cas always gave them as much of a smile as he could muster. Occasionally they smiled back, but more often they stared until they were tugged away.
One man bought Cas coffee that day and asked about his pictures. He even bought one for ten dollars- one of a large white church Cas had seen years ago in California. After the conversation had fizzled out and the (rather shy) man had left, Cas put the book aside and picked up his pens again to practice his sketching in the afternoon sunlight. He spent the next few hours attempting to convey the stars he saw in a puddle of water refusing to evaporate in a crack on the sidewalk.
The man had introduced himself as Chuck and had shaken his hand. Cas appreciated the kindness, but hated the pity in his eyes.
The pity was the worst. Cas sometimes thought he could bear it all- the hunger, the grubbiness, the rough and horrible elements- if it wasn’t for the way people looked at him as though he was too broken to be fixed. But he didn’t like to think on it, and every time he got close to dwelling on his situation, he delved a little harder into his book, or dug his pen a little harder into the page. Sometimes he moved, too, when his limbs got sore from sitting, when his legs twitched with inaction- but he did not go far. He had to conserve what energy he had. More often than not, the weakness he felt in his muscles would not allow him to wander comfortably.
He hated it. He hated, he hated it.
And, deeply, he hated himself.
But he would not think about it.
After sunset at five pm, when the road was busy with what passed as a rush hour in the middle of nowhere, Castiel used the ten dollars he had earned to buy himself a cheap mushroom soup and a sandwich in what looked to be the most dilapidated store in town. The cashier peered nervously at his note, but allowed him to leave with a gruff, “Take care, son.”
Cas settled into his sleeping bag in his doorway later. At night he prayed not to God, but to whatever kindness there was in the world that it would not snow that night, or the night after.
And then he dreamt of flesh and fire, and his father’s casket being lowered into the ground.
The next few days were more or less like the first. Perseverance was proving itself to be more or less the same as every other tiny and remote town he had spent his nights in the last year and a half. On the fourth evening, just before sunset, when the sun would be shattering the sky up into burnt and dusky colours if he were anywhere further south, he was jolted from his prolonged artistic reverie almost in fright.
It was the jacket he saw first. It caught his eye in the glittering, dusty snow, and seemed to pull the flakes around its torso in a sweeping spiral as the body that wore it crossed the street to his left.
Brown, big-shouldered, beat-up leather, dark against the muted white and silvery grey. Ochre scuff marks were gathered around the popped up, angular collar; along the seams; in the rivets where the elbows folded. A broad sheen shone across the back where the fabric caught the descending light. It seemed from this distance to be soft, well-worn, and warm against the late November wind.
Castiel stared. And stared. Grabbing his sketchpad he scribbled without looking at the paper, his hands urgently tracing the lines and curves of the back, of the movement his eyes observed.
He found himself staring, almost hungrily, elsewhere. More detail. More lines, more angles for his pen to portray. Where was he? The man who wore it? Turn around. The jacket was not enough; Cas breathed hard, breathed shocks of condensation into the cold, his heart beating wildly. Furious that he could not see the man’s face, Cas’s eyes tore downwards, to the legs, the bow-legs, in jeans- he threw strikes across the page for each stride, each confident stride. He measured in ink the cocky stance, the shoulders as they were thrown back. The hands, invisible, seemingly dug into front pockets. Cas cursed- hands were important, but he supposed he wouldn’t be able to see them from this distance in the detail he wanted anyway. He drew the lines feverishly though the breeze threw up the corners of his cheap practice pages, though his hands grew stiff and cold from exposure to the cold, cold air.
Finally looking at the mess of lines on his paper, he recognised the importance of the face.
The drawing would never be anything if the man did not turn.
“Turn, turn,” Cas whispered, heart continuing to thud.
In months he had not felt anything so urgent besides hunger.
“Turn,” he begged.
The man stood now in the doorway of a café Cas had thought was closed.
Soon, he had disappeared inside. He had not turned.
Cas was left with an incomplete sketch and empty, swirling snow.
Nonetheless, he waited.
He waited until his shoulders were shivering, until his conscience started breathing ‘this is ridiculous, Castiel, you need shelter,’— until the night was closing in, full and pewter grey, and until his bones were cold against the wood of the bench on which he sat. He watched the windows of the closed café which had steamed up, warm, in puffy clouds of condensation; he pulled on his gloves and sat with his sketchpad within reach, with his pen clenched in his fist and hugged around his body, tight.
He waited under the yellow glow of a streetlight, gazing into the chipped varnish of a closed wooden door. Neon light in the window, laughter from within: some music. He let the sound of it fall over him in drifts, each note a snowflake on the bitterly cold surface of his skin.
He remembered again, the jacket, and the shoulders that wore it. Cas felt himself driven by a kind of lunacy he could not quite believe. He had never thought himself capable of a feeling such as this; a feeling that at once felt more real than any cold that touched him, a feeling that made his heart race when he thought of the face that would complete his hasty sketch.
He could not fathom how a face he would not recognise, a face that, once glimpsed, would pass in a second, was suddenly more significant to him than the faces of every human that had passed every bench he had ever sat on, and the faces of those he had known in the years before he became what he was now.
Cas was clueless; Cas was an idiot. What normal person would do this?
Abnormal; abnormal; aberration.
‘You are an abberration!’
The sentence spoke, unwanted, from the dark pool of his memory and sent ripples down his spine in shivers. At once, all contemplation of the leather-jacketed man retreated from his mind and he sought to move. He stretched out his back and sat firmly with both feet on the ground- his hands were in his hair, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed firmly on the pavement.
He did not change his position again for a long while. The silence in the street was broken only by the slamming of car doors and the faint hum of the jukebox from the cafe the leather jacket had entered. Snow had begun to fall again; the flakes were like icy dandelion seeds blown in a wish.
Cas thought of the brothers who had abandoned him and the father he had loved, and the sketchpad dropped out of his lap and into the slush at his feet.
His eyes drifted shut. The water ate up the corners of his work and the ink ran like plumes across the paper.
Cas remained still. Sometimes the darkness pulled at the edges of his mind in a kind of black seeping poison. It was a hopelessness he sometimes couldn’t shake.
It was hope, he realised, that made him rash. Hope had made him leave his family in the first place; hope that there was a place in the world for him besides the one he had been ordered to take. It was the absence of hope that left him immobile.
Now here he was: Perseverance, Michigan! Oh, the irony was not lost on him. Was this the end of the road? Where else could he possibly go? Was he to keep chasing cheap tourists his whole life, selling his soul in pictures for ten dollars apiece by day and freezing in agony by night? Would he ever have a full stomach again, or a dry pair of socks, or a conversation that wasn’t driven half by charity and half by sheer desperation? Would anyone take him, touch him— would he ever be loved?
He had not moved an inch by the time the cafe door finally opened and the leather jacket stepped out and lit a pale cigarette.
Laughter followed him, and a shrill voice called: “Damnit, Dean, it’s freezing out there, shut the goddamn door!”
Cas did not see or hear the man- Dean- chuckle and oblige, nor did he notice that the object of his previous fascination was watching him curiously out of the very corner of his eye.
“Hey, man, you ok?”
Cas showed no signs of having heard him. He did not respond to the crunch of footsteps coming his way, or the gentle, repeated, “Hey.”
At the soft touch on his back, however, he gave a large start. “I’m sorry, I— oh,” Cas began. He did not think his eyes were working properly- black dots blurred his peripheral vision- but the mans face was perfectly in focus.
God, it was an artwork, even in the merciless light of the streetlamps. Freckles like fireworks; mouth of Cupid; and broad shoulders below a dark green scarf. Cas felt the black poison retreat under the man’s gaze and thought about the sketchbook on the ground- how would he dry it? and how would he retain the memory of this, the picture, in his head so he could capture it later?
“You alright there?” the man asked, his expression open, his voice deep and a little cracked with cold. “You looked a bit…”
He trailed off.
“I’m fine,” Cas said. “Thank you.”
“No worries.” He seemed unconvinced, and reluctant to leave him, and so he remained hovering around Cas’s bench, his hands stuffed firmly and stiffly in his pockets. This suited Cas fine- he took the opportunity to study the lines of the mans face with as much subtlety as he could muster. A faint whiff of cigarette smoke followed him- and that might have been whisky, too, he thought.
“Hey, are you— are you living out here?”
If Cas hadn’t still been in awe of the man, he might have found himself becoming annoyed at his incredulous, vaguely ignorant tone. What gave it away? thought Cas, more bitterly than usual. The sleeping bag stuffed haphazardly in the shitty rucksack? The tattered hat? The stubble that was becoming a beard? The smell? He didn’t answer, and instead averted his gaze to the ground once more.
“It must be below twenty at least. Ain’t you got somewhere to—“
The man stopped what he was saying, and bent down to pick up the sketchbook at Cas’s feet. The lines had run so badly on most of the sketches that they could not be made out, and from a few of the more heavily inked-in pages, the colour was collecting in small droplets and falling to the snow- splashes of blue, splashes of red.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cas said quickly, in response to a look of shock. “I have another one.”
The man frowned, and held Cas’s gaze until the latter’s heart almost cleaved in two. Cas thanked God there was no pity in the gaze- instead, a look of surprise turned into one of steely determination, and after a few seconds the sketchbook was tucked under one arm of the leather jacket and a hand was extended. “The name’s Dean Winchester.”
Dean Winchester.
“I’m Castiel,’ he said simply in response, and shook the hand that was offered.
“Good to meet you,” Dean sniffed, shuffling his feet in the snow rather awkwardly, glancing around with the air of a person who really doesn’t know how to say what he would like to. His gaze stopped on the book protruding from the front pocket of the rucksack, half of its pages now sprinkled with snow. A half-smile crept onto his face, and Cas was struck by how much humour suited it. Before he could help himself, he pictured Dean’s head thrown back with laughter, his greenish eyes lit with happiness and mirth— he felt his cheeks grow crimson.
“‘Difficult Loves,’” Dean nodded towards it. “Stephen King. You got to ‘The Body’ yet? ‘Cause that’s one of my favourites. Might be the favourite. You seen ‘Stand By Me’?”
Cas smiled himself. “Several times.”
Dean whistled; shook his head again, grinning. “River Phoenix, man. I loved that movie. That’s why I read it, I saw myself in all of them. ‘Cause you know, they’re all just little kids. But Gordie had it sussed, didn’t he? By the end.”
“We’re all supposed to have it sussed by the end,” Cas replied.
Their gazes locked. Time stretched on in ribbons ahead of them, like the road where the streetlights lost the tarmac at either end of the Main Street. Cas felt like he had had both feet on a pinnacle, and this was finally the point at which the wind had ceased attempting to make him fall. An almighty sense of calm had settled: all Cas could do was hope beyond hope that something would come of this silence. Dean seemed to be holding his breath.
“You should come inside,” he said finally. “It’s my friend Ellen’s cafe. She’d want you to come in, get something to drink. C’mon, man.”
He seemed to be pleading.
“C’mon, Cas. Come in outta the cold.”