Work Text:
“Hey, Cas,” Sam smiled.
Sam looked well, as always, and he sat in the café looking like he belonged there. In his hand was a cup of coffee, and beside it was a bran breakfast muffin. Sam’s eyes focused on the figure before him, however, who was wearing jeans and an ACDC shirt.
With a sigh, Cas pulled several pieces of paper from the bag at his side. He pushed them across the table sadly.
“Your brother wrote these for me,” Cas groaned sadly.
Sam’s expressions while reading Dean’s letters varied greatly. He seemed angry, then embarrassed, then ashamed, then scared, pleased, concerned, amused… When he read Dean’s final letter, though, he just shook his head sadly.
“How bad was it?” Cas asked suddenly, scanning Sam’s expression for any tell. “The drinking, I mean.”
“He, um,” Sam said, scratching his neck, “he would’ve drank my father under the table, which… isn’t a good thing. But he’s recovered now, I think.”
Cas nodded, looking out of the café windows to see people moving along the street casually. They at least weren’t burdened with the possibility of losing the one person they loved most. They wouldn’t have just abandoned the one person they loved most without warning. Cas let his head fall into his arms on the table.
“Um,” Sam struggled. After a minute, he shrugged, “At least we know he still loves you. You just need to go get him back.”
“How can I do that?” Cas asked.
“Sam, I’m hungry,” Dean whined. “Can we go home now? I have some burgers I wanna grill.”
“We just ate lunch, Dean!” Sam stared, wide eyed. “You ate an entire stack of ribs by yourself!”
“I gave up drinking for a while,” Dean shrugged. “Gotta fill the void somehow.”
Sam rolled his eyes, shook his head, and ushered Dean into the movie theater as planned. They managed to make it through the entire showing before Dean talked about dinner again. At that point, Sam just checked his watch with a satisfied nod.
“Well, hurry home, then,” Sam sighed exasperatedly. “I have errands to run. Let me borrow the impala? You can take the bus home, right?”
Dean looked wounded at the suggestion, but deep down, he felt he could use the walk to the bus stop. Reluctantly, he handed the keys to Sam, not letting go until Sam gave his mandatory promise to not damage her in any way. Afterward, looking back every once in a while to send mental well wishes to his Baby and lethal threats to Sam if he ruined her, Dean walked to the bus.
The driver nodded when Dean greeted him, and then Dean took a seat in the middle of the bus. He tried not to think.
‘Don’t,’ he thought to himself firmly. ‘Don’t.’
At some point, he started really noticing the pattern of the bus seats. They were blue with purple, orange, and green splotches that might have been in style years ago. Now they just looked tacky. Some of the seats were occupied on the bus, but the two nearest Dean were empty. Dean tried not to look, but he found himself searching. Against his will, his eyes looked for the sleepy passenger he’d met by chance months ago.
‘He has a family now,’ Dean told himself glumly, ‘and I’m not a part of it.’
The bus stopped three times before Dean’s exit. When it came time, though, Dean’s leaden feet moved slowly down the bus steps and onto the concrete sidewalk. In front of him were rose bushes, with one patch of flowers missing and a new sign that read, “Please do not pick the flowers.”
Slowly, one heavy foot falling after the other, Dean trudged to his apartment. He passed the store – the store – on the way.
‘Don’t,’ he told himself, but he looked anyway. Coincidentally, at that time there was a couple exiting the automatic doors with hands full of groceries.
By the time Dean reached the apartment building, he was a wreck.
‘Why did I send him away?’ he asked himself.
Then, with no small amount of sass, he answered himself, ‘Because you’re an idiot.’
‘He did leave you,’ he reasoned with himself while searching for his door key. ‘Although, he thought what he was doing was the right thing.’
‘How could it be the right thing if we aren’t together?’
The front door opened and Dean immediately knew something was off. He’d kept Cas’s roses on the floor by the door, too stubborn to move them, but now they were in a vase on the table. Aside from that, he heard a gasp from somewhere in the back of the apartment.
Slowly, Dean closed the door behind him and dropped his keys. Most intruders weren’t dumb enough to stumble into the Winchester apartment, but whenever someone felt bold, they learned from that flaw quickly. Dean stalked down the hallway toward his bedroom. Like a lion skirting around a herd in the tall grass, Dean moved quickly, quietly, and patiently.
When he reached the doorway, he saw the shadow of a man growing smaller as the man approached the doorway. With a sudden strike like a cobra, Dean spun into his room, knocking the man on his back.
Without hesitation, the man reached up to cover Dean’s eyes, bucking upward until Dean was pinned on his back on the floor. Stubbornly, Dean refused defeat and thrust his knee up blindly between the man’s legs. Before he made impact, however, the man dodged by rolling over. His eyes still covered by the intruder’s hands, Dean tried to throw his fists where he knew the head must be.
Impact.
He’d hit a shoulder, he thought, and that was all of the unbalancing that was needed for Dean to turn the tables on the attacker. Dean shoved an arm onto the man’s ribs, pushing him away and toward the ground. The man’s hand fell from Dean’s eyes with a grunt just as Dean straddled his hips in victory.
Panting, Dean opened his mouth both to congratulate and to goad the intruder. Before a word left his lips, however, he realized.
“Cas,” he barely whispered.
Indeed, Castiel’s bright blue eyes gazed up at Dean, his dark hair out of place from the brawling. Dean sat back on Cas’s thighs, trying to think what was different about him.
“You’re early,” Cas groaned. He was panting a little from the exercise. “The bus was supposed to arrive five minutes from now.”
“Cas,” Dean said again.
“I know you don’t want me here,” he said quickly, noting that Dean was not moving from his perch atop his legs. “I just had to come back to finish, so I borrowed a key from Sam. I’m done now, so I can leave if you want.”
“Done with what?” Dean asked.
Cas looked into Dean’s eyes, smiled, and nodded toward the wall.
“This,” Cas answered quietly.
That’s when Dean realized what was so different. There was paint along Cas’s jaw. At first it had seemed like a shadow, but now he saw the deep brown and dark burgundy shade on his chin. Dean frowned and looked up at the wall.