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Dean sees the car first.
It’s gold and, objectively speaking, a piece of crap. It’s pulled over to the side of the dusty desert highway, nearly parked just off the road. The car is also, Dean notices, as he slows to a stop behind it to help the poor sucker who’s been stuck out in the summer day’s heat without air conditioning for god knows how long, empty.
“I’d never let that happen to you, Baby,” he says, patting the Impala’s console fondly. As usual, the Impala doesn’t reply. It’s alright, they have an understanding.
Dean luxuriates in the cool interior of the Impala and considers taking the opportunity to stretch his limbs, which have been, for the most part, in the same position for the last hundred or so miles. He doesn’t need a thermometer or a fancy application on a fancy smartphone like Sam to know that it’s hotter than hell outside, and then some. The blurry horizon is proof enough of the miserable condition outside. There’s a literal tumbleweed slowly tumbling along the stretch of desert he’s staring out at. Dean decides to stay in the car, since getting out of it would probably be more deleterious to his health and happiness than staying slightly cramped but infinitely not burned to a crisp inside.
He shimmies his phone out of his back pocket. He listens to a four minute voicemail from Sam, who lectures him about the importance of not using his phone while driving through the desert because it might drain his battery, and then where would you be, Dean? Huh? That reminds me, Jess’s cousin knew a guy who’s girlfriend — and watches with relative interest as aforementioned literal tumbleweed rolls softly into the abandoned Lincoln Continental.
For a moment, nothing happens. Sam continues to drone on about how his girlfriend’s cousin’s friend’s girlfriend almost died that one time she forgot to charge her phone before driving through Death Valley, which is very much not the situation Dean is currently (or ever will be) in. Then, almost like an afterthought, the most obnoxious alarm he’s ever heard goes off. The lights flash, the car screams, and Dean tosses his phone in the passenger seat and hightails it the fuck out of there, not sparing the car a second glance. Obviously the owner of the car got picked up already. Dean’s just bummed that their crap car hadn’t picked up with them.
Fifteen minutes and a whole lot of miles later, Dean sees a second thing in the distance. Another car? AAA must be popular out here.
“Hell of a day,” he comments to the Impala.
He nearly swerves out of his lane (not that it would matter, since the highway has been deserted for as long as he has been on it) when he gets close enough to the car to see that the car isn’t a car at all, but a person. A man, to be specific.
Dean braces the wheel with his knee and rubs his eyes to be sure that exhaustion hasn’t gotten to him. He’s been on the road all day — maybe he’s starting to see things? But no, that’s hardly likely, seeing as he’s driven far longer distances for much longer than he’s been driving today, and the worst thing that’s happened to him is a headache and a few unfortunate cramps. He thinks briefly that the man shaped thing is a mirage brought on by the desert heat, but the closer he gets to it, the clearer and more defined the shape becomes. He has to concede to the fact that yes, there’s a man in the middle of the desert, and yes, he probably needs his help, when the man turns around, presumably after hearing the rev of the Impala’s engine, and frantically waves an arm in the air.
At the end of his arm is a red container — a fuel can. Dean would laugh if he weren’t so shocked. Did he think he could walk to gas? In his other arm, he’s gently clutching something swaddled in what looks like his shirt, seeing as the guy is, as Dean now can plainly see, shirtless.
Dean skids to a stop in front of the man. He rushes to the door that Dean quickly leans over and unlocks; there’s a ungodly heat that follows the him in, and Dean recoils back onto his own side of the car. The guy just about chucks the fuel can into the back of the Impala and slams the door behind him, all while cradling the wrapped up thing in his arm. Dean stares at it.
“Please tell me that’s not a baby.”
The man huffs out a laugh, surprisingly hearty for the circumstances, and collapses against his side of the front seat, his head lolling to the side to face Dean but his eyes remaining closed. After a cursory glance, Dean continues to stare at the lump in the guy’s lap. It’s certainly not the kind of lump Dean’s used to looking at in random guys’s laps.
“It’s not a baby,” he croaks, and Dean sighs in relief. He turns his attention to the guy, who is, as previously established, shirtless. His skin is beet red and covered with sweat and sand, and his hair is grey with dust. “It’s a goldfish.”
“It’s a— what?’
“A goldfish,” the man says patiently, his voice like gravel in a blender. “His name is Ezekiel.” He unwraps his shirt from around the the lump and, sure enough, there is a little travel tank with a goldfish swimming in circles inside of it. Dean and Ezekiel make eye contact for a long beat before the goldfish swims into one of the clear walls that contains him and gets distracted by his own reflection. The guy drapes the shirt back over the container. “I’m thinking of changing his name Gadreel, though. He seems to prefer it.”
Dean’s feeling a bit like Ezekiel — Gadreel — himself, the way his mouth is gaping open. He rubs his eyes again, just to make sure he hasn’t completely lost it.
“That reminds me—“ The guy hisses as he leans back against the seat, slower this time, and obviously feeling the extent of the full body burn he’s got going on. “Ouch. My apologies; as I was going to ask — you wouldn’t happen to have water, would you? I’m afraid to say that I’ve been considering drinking some of Ezekiel’s water for the last…” he looks down at his watch, tapping it a few times. Numbers flash across the face of it.
Dean surreptitiously glances at his own watch, which stopped working when he forgot to take it off before taking a shower at the last motel he stayed in. Damn this man and Sam and all their high-tech watches that count more than just time.
“… four point seventeen miles,” the guy concludes, smiling sheepishly at Dean.
Dean’s still in shock about the fact that there’s a half dehydrated guy with a goldfish and a new fangled sports watch and who has, he has now noticed, really, really blue eyes, in his car, and that he found in the middle of the desert, of all places, that it takes him a moment to process what it is that the guy is actually saying to him.
“Water?” The guy repeats slowly, tilting his head to the side.
“I, uh, yeah, shit, yeah man, I’ve got water. Jesus Christ.” He reaches behind him into the back of the car, where he keeps a cooler. He grabs a few bottles of water, ignoring cans of beer and soda. “Jesus,” he says again for good measure, because apparently his vocabulary has been severely depleted. The guy struggles to open the first bottle, so after a moment Dean takes it gently from him, careful to avoid his fingers, which look just as burned as the rest of him, and opens it for him. He watches as the guy tips his head back and starts to drink like… well, like a parched man in the desert.
Suddenly, blessedly, his vocabulary returns. “Dude. How are you alive?”
Fuckin’ Christ. Apparently tactfulness is apparently still on the outs.
It takes a moment for the guy to respond, and he drinks nearly the entire bottle before doing so. He turns to Dean, looks him in the face (Dean’s heart definitely does not flutter when the guy catches his eye, shut up) and gravely and gravelly says, “The will of the Lord.”
“Oh,” Dean says, trying to reconcile this new information with the assumptions he had thus far made about the man in the passenger seat. Sure, the guy had a weird taste in goldfish names, but he definitely wasn’t expecting him to be a religious nut. But hey, the guy was cute, not to forget to mention extremely disheveled and probably in a considerate amount of pain, so Dean wouldn’t judge too hard. “That’s, uh, that’s nice?”
The man turns to stare out into the void of the desert, his face like stone. Pink, sweaty stone.
“‘Though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for though art with me —‘“ Suddenly, the guy turns to face Dean again. Dean watches with wide eyes as he leans forward and — and wriggles his eyebrows as he finishes with, “‘they rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’”
“I’m so confused right now,” Dean admits to the Impala, brushing his hand over the console forlornly. He looks up at the guy, who’s watching him serenely while simultaneously finishing off the second bottle Dean had given him. “I’m so confused right now,” Dean repeats, now addressing the man.
“I was just, as my brother Gabriel would put it, ‘fucking with you,’” the guy offers, gently wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his dirty hand. He frowns and inspects his hand, and then the rest of his body, as if noticing for the first time how unclean he is. “I apologize. I grew up in a extremely Christian family, and I suppose my humor is deeply rooted in biblical stories and language. Do you have a wet-nap?”
“You’re kind of a weird dude,” Dean says, brushing the guy’s knees as he reaches into the glove box to dig around for the left over few wet napkins from the last time he and Charlie got takeout. If his arm is tingling from where they touch, well, he’s not thinking about it. Much.
“Thank you,” the guy says, taking the packets Dean offers him. His knee falls to the side to bump Dean’s arm as he retreats back to his own side. Dean grips the steering wheel tight and waits for the tingling to go away. It doesn’t. “And, yes, I’ve been told. Came off the line with a crack in my chassis, as my cousin likes to say.”
There’s a pause, but before Dean can formulate a polite way to say that that doesn’t sound like something cousins should say to each other (although he wouldn’t know, he doesn’t have any cousins that he knows of), the guy is talking again.
“To answer your question — I’m a runner, so I guess being relatively in shape helped me not die of heat exhaustion, dehydration, et cetera.”
Dean’s eyes fall to the guy’s bare chest. Relatively in shape, his ass.
“And,” the man continues, adjusting Ezekiel/Gadreel’s tank so that it sits between his open legs. “I figured someone would have to come by eventually. I just wasn’t sure when. I thought that I might as well get a head start, instead of baking to death in my car.” He touches his burned shoulder gingerly, wincing. “I broke down this morning, before it got too hot. I wish I had had the forethought to bring extra layers. I forgot that fish cannot be in direct sunlight for extended periods of time, so I had to sacrifice my shirt.”
“Oh,” Dean says intelligently, because he’d be a liar if he said his brain wasn’t still struggling to catch up with reality. They say the third time’s the charm, so he rubs his eyes again — and the guy is still there, raggedy and dirty and pink and holding a fish between his legs and, since Dean’s being honest here, kind of incredibly beautiful.
“I’m Castiel, by the way,” the guy says, eyes vibrantly blue in contrast to his rosy face.
“Dean,” Dean says automatically.
Castiel smiles wide. Dean watches in awe as his eyes crinkle and his gums peak out from behind his lips. “Hello, Dean.” Castiel reaches out to place his hand on Dean’s shoulder, not squeezing it, just resting it there. The tingles in Dean’s body are amped up about a hundred and ten percent. “I am so very happy to meet you.”
“Right back ‘atcha, Castiel,” Dean says honestly.
“You can call me Cas,” Castiel says after a long moment of some intense soul searching eye contact. Or at least, that’s what it feels like to Dean.
“Cool,” Dean says. He thinks he’s going to have to amputate his arm, right where Cas’s hand rests, if he wants the tingling to ever fully go away. He looks at Cas and thinks that maybe the tingles aren’t too debilitating. That maybe he could get used to this, in the best way possible.
Which is a stupid thing to think, because he literally picked this guy up from the side of the road. He still thinks it, though.
Cas takes his hand off of Dean’s shoulder, and looks out pointedly at the road. Dean takes the hint and puts the car into drive.
“Do you want to go back to your car to get anything?” Dean asks, foot lightly holding the brakes. “Like, I don’t know, a shirt or something?”
“I’m fine as I am,” Cas says, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. Dean forgets himself for a moment as his eyes wander around Cas’s profile. And what a profile it is. The way his eyelashes look against his high, flushed cheekbones is too much for Dean to handle, and he looks away, coughing. “And, I have to admit, the thought of putting on a shirt at the moment is, for the lack of a better word, abhorrent. I am so sunburned, I don’t know if I’ll ever wear a shirt again.”
Dean’s definitely not going to complain.
“Good,” he says gruffly, pulling back onto the highway in the same direction he was going before. “Last I saw it, your car was going crazy. Like, seriously, crazy. What kind of alarm system is that?” He considers it for a moment. “Actually, I guess it’s pretty effective—“
“Alarm?” Cas asks. “That’s not how I left it.”
“Dude, I didn’t try to break in to it or anything,” Dean laughs. “It got hit by the world’s slowest tumbleweed.”
“I see,” Cas says, as if this is a perfectly reasonable explanation. “Yes, my car is rather… delicate, in that sense.”
Before he can stop himself, Dean says, “Your car is a piece of shit, in all senses.”
Dean breaks out in a sweat immediately. He can’t believe he just said that. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe his tact wasn’t still on the outs. Maybe he just never had tact to begin with.
“You know what they say, Dean,” Cas says, serene as ever. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
“Yeah, okay man.” Dean says, relieved that he hasn’t offended Beautiful Desert Goldfish Man. “Just, next time think about investing in treasure that won’t leave you stranded in the middle of the desert. You’re really lucky that I came along, you know? I haven’t seen another car on the road all day. Why didn’t you call for help?”
“My phone is dead,” Cas says simply. Dean can’t help but snort.
“Of course it is.” If Sam is so riled up hearing about Jess’s cousin’s friend’s girlfriend, he’s going to have a field day when he learns about Dean’s firsthand encounter with a victim of a dead phone. Dean finds himself curiously excited to tell Sam about Cas. He feels like he could talk about Castiel for hours.
From the corner of his eye, Dean sees Cas sit up to face him again.
“Like I said, Dean, I am very, very happy to have met you. But I must admit, that feeling extends beyond the fact that you most likely saved my life, or, at least, Ezekiel’s. That thing about walking through the shadow of death, and your rod comforting me? That was a flirtation. Just so you are aware.”
For the third time that day Dean pulls over to the side of the dusty highway. This time, it’s to give him time to catch his breath after the very sudden and very mysterious coughing fit that overcame him after Cas’s statement. Cas pats his back and graciously offers him a drink from the bottle he’d been working on.
“I’m glad I didn’t drink Ezekiel’s water,” Cas comments thoughtfully, still patting Dean’s back.
Dean nods in agreement, clearing his throat. Later though, after they drive to the pet store in the first town they come across to get fish food, after Cas’s car is towed to the motel they check in together at, after he places his broken watch next to Castiel’s fancy multipurpose one on the bathroom counter before he helps him “clean off,” twice, and then applies aloe vera virtually everywhere on Cas’s sunburned and hickey marked skin; after he and Cas lay on the crappy motel bed together, and watch Dr. Sexy reruns (and after Cas comments on just how appealing he finds Dr. Sexy’s cowboy boots and Dean secretly thinks that maybe, by some stroke of luck or, as Cas would suggest (not without a pinch of irony), an act of God, he found his soulmate in the middle of desert) -- after all that, with Cas sleeping off the day’s exhaustion in my arms, he has to admit that he’d still want to kiss Cas even if he drank from a toilet, let alone from Ezekiel/Gadreel’s well maintained travel tank.
“Hell of a day,” he whispers into Cas’s hair. Like the Impala, Cas’s hair doesn’t respond. But it’s alright. He and Cas have an understanding.