Author's Note: I haven't been on FanFiction in a few months, since I finished my Newsies trilogy that took me about two years to write. Honestly, I didn't really intend to come back anytime soon. I've been busy trying to write a book I can hopefully get published. However, I was scrolling through Pinterest the other day and came across some High School Destiel fanart. Sometimes you just can't help writing a story and that's exactly what happened with this one. One minute I was thinking how fun it would be to write a story like this and a few hours later, I hit 7,000 words on it. So I figured, what the hell, I had wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo anyway.

So here's my AU High School Destiel story. (The first chapter is pretty short. The rest hopefully be a little longer.) I hope you enjoy it. I sure am enjoying getting to write it.

And I Was Lost

A Castiel/Dean Winchester High School Story

by Kirsten Erin

Chapter 1

The Winchesters were a famous bunch when I was at Lawrence High School. They weren't high school royalty or anything like that; in fact, they were pretty much the opposite. They were more infamous than famous, I guess. They were attractive enough to be popular, but too strange. Dean was too hotheaded and got in too many fights to be on anyone's good side, Charlie was a lesbian and so geeky that you could feel your IQ heightening just by being in her vicinity, and Sam was just, well, Sam. They were my friends, so I guess I could be a little more flattering than that, but that's just the way most people saw them.

Beyond that, there was all the rumors that wrapped the Winchesters up like morose giftwrap. Mary Winchester had been murdered when they were kids and no one had ever been caught for it. Some people thought their dad had done it. I can see why they might think that. The Winchester siblings had all shown up to school at least once with bruises that they couldn't account for. Even Charlie came in with a black eye once, which set the rumor mill churning for days. Some people thought Dean had given that one to her, though that was the stupidest of all their theories. Everyone knew that to even look at Charlie or Sam wrong meant earning Dean's particular ire. No, John Winchester was the one to give her that bruise, but that's part of my story, so we'll come to that later. He may have given Charlie that bruise, but John Winchester didn't kill his wife. I know that because this story is all about how we found Mary's murderer.

I guess I should explain who I am before I ramble any longer. My name is Castiel Novak. Yeah, it's a pretty ridiculous name, but it is what it is. My mother claims it was my Dad's idea. Most people just call me Cas. I have one older brother, Michael, and we live with my mother since my father ran off when I was a kid. I've never even met him, not that I really care to. Mom's a workaholic, though, so it kinda feels like Michael runs my life most of the time, or he tries to anyway. We aren't particularly close, especially since he doesn't like the Winchesters and the Winchesters are pretty much my best friends. You can imagine that causes some issues.

We live next door to my cousins, which can be cool some of the time, but is mostly just exhausting. Out of the three of them, Loki is the only one I can stand to be around. Luke's too, well, scary and Anna's too self-righteous. Loki can be pretty cool when he isn't trying to out-funny everyone else. When he's just being normal, he's a pretty okay guy.

I started hanging out with the Winchesters during freshman year. Technically, Dean's the only one in my grade, but he's always been really close with his siblings, so hanging out with him usually means hanging out with them. Giving someone your slice of pie is probably a weird way to start a friendship, but to Dean, that's like throwing yourself in front of a bus to push him out of the way, so we were pretty fast friends after that. I was really thankful for it too, because it was the first week of freshman year and I was having trouble making friends up to that point, so it was nice to have someone like Dean take a liking to me. I mean, we fight every once in a while, but I could intentionally wreck his beloved Impala and I have no doubt that Dean would still have my back if I needed him. That's what a real friendship looks like.

Anyway, now we're in our junior year. In fact, we're about a week in. Charlie and Sam are in the grade below us and it's nice to have them around most of the time. Barring the time that Charlie and Sam started yelling at each other in the hallway about something last year and made the most awkward scene ever. Dean and I had to jump in and break it up before one of them tackled the other. I wish I could remember what that fight was about now. Still, they're good kids and get along well enough most of the time. I really did enjoy having them around at school.

I think the only real downside to them being at Lawrence High is the fact that the amount of fistfights Dean and I had been in increased exponentially when the two of them showed up. Like I said before, even looking at Charlie or Sam wrong will make you hurt pretty soon if Dean finds out about it. Sam took a lot of shit freshman year for being smaller. He started to hit his growth spurt now, so I figure that'll end soon. Charlie got shit for being a lesbian and that had been out in the open since she was in middle school, so I was pretty certain that cause for fighting wouldn't be going away. I always hoped people would become more tolerant, but I wasn't about to hold my breath for it. After all, we're talking about the town that threw a fit when Mrs. Harvelle got married and kept her own last name.

I wasn't the kind of guy who usually got in to fights, but Dean Winchester definitely was. And friendship means having each other's back, especially in a fight.

Thankfully, protecting each other seemed to be the one thing John Winchester didn't mind the siblings doing. In fact, he seemed to encourage it, from what I could tell. He may be one son of a bitch, but I think there is some part of him that really does love his kids. I always wondered if some part of him knew the way he treated them was wrong and maybe he taught them to defend each other to keep him from going to far, hurting one of them too much.

I didn't sit down to write this because I wanted to bitch about John Winchester or analyze why he did what he did when he raised them. No, I'm here to tell you about how Dean, Sam, Charlie, and I discovered that there was more to Mary Winchester's death than we had been been told and how we set about finding the man who killed her.