Castiel had never been a "public transit" sort of guy. Cars, sure. School buses, okay. (He was plagued with motion sickness as a child. The amount of times his parents had had to pull over so that he could puke into a sewer grate was staggering.) But trains, metro, street cars? No way. There was something about the vague smell of alleyways and the uncomfortable proximity to complete strangers that totally put him off.
This had never been an issue before. His family, while large, was fairly well-off and easily afforded cars for each of castiel's brothers and him. When he flew the coop, he took his halfway-shabby Margot-Tenenbaum-esque Toyota with him to college and his various part-time jobs had kept it running ever since. He didn't overuse it. He didn't underuse it. He tried his best not to spill coffee in its cushions and vacuumed the crumbs from out of its cracks on a semi-regular basis.
The problem was that he had never really been a lucky guy. Luck had come naturally to his brothers, in a way that baffled and confused him. Castiel, as a kid, would fall off his bike attempting the same thing his brothers had just failed at and get a broken leg instead of a scraped knee. 'Fragile,' his mom called him. Told his teachers. Smoothed his hair and kept him inside while the others played outside.
He developed a paradoxical and insatiable greed for adventure, while simultaneously developing deep-rooted fear of the unknown. He had struggled with it for most of his (what some might call) adult life, which really only happened to be the first few years of college. A writer, he told his parents. I want to write.
'I want to die,' he thought mournfully, staring at his car. In the course of a week, everything had gone wrong. At first it was just a few tries to start it up; then it started making a weird clanking noise and leaking smoke if he drove for more than twenty minutes. Finally, last night on his way home, the poor thing had given a mighty, sputtering cough and gone completely silent.
He had been forced to leave it on the side of the road a few blocks away from his rundown apartment, on a street that was notorious for its hit-and-runs. It was as he'd feared; the left mirror along with most of the paint along the side was gone.
Today was not the day to deal with it. He had several classes to go to, as well as a maybe-date that he still wasn't quite sure about. The girl had said 'sure,' when he'd asked if maybe she wanted to go see a movie sometime. Wasn't that how it worked on TV? But didn't the girls respond more enthusiastically? She had given him her number, and he'd called after maybe three hours. His roommate (an abrasive but loyal individual by the name of Chuck) said she was really into him, but Castiel didn't have much experience with "really into". Girls that didn't act like his sister confused him.
So tomorrow, then. Tomorrow he would find the nearest mechanic and find out whether or not his trusty old Toyota was worth saving. In the meantime:
Public transit.