The updates are coming, slow and steady I'm afraid. I lost a day to writing 'Ghost light' thanks for all the wonderful reviews on that btw made my week. I've got a pretty huge project in the works that's taking a lot of my plotting energy, but I've also got half a chapter for 'Cheerleader' in the works.
Dean's family, lovely as it is as a unit, is full of interfering dicks.
He's retreated to the utility room to...well, to sulk in essence, though he'd prefer to term it brooding. He's thinking about the novel that Castiel's reading, the one he wrote years ago and is still, despite the overwhelming lack of interest in it from anyone else, pretty damn proud of.
It's essentially a simple story, a man is taken over by an angel, taken away from his home and family, and undergoes so many trials in service to the celestial hitchhiker that when he is restored to himself he has no memory of his life. The remainder of the book detailed his struggle to find himself as he worked his amnesiac way across middle America, taking diner jobs and living from hand to mouth until he fell in love again - realising that he could never be the same man he'd been.
There's a lot of himself in that novel, and he knows that Cas is aware of that.
It's in the middle of this session of brooding that his mother decides to come in and put on a load of laundry.
"Oh, Dean, I didn't know you were in here." She tosses wadded up clothing into the washer. "Actually...I meant to have a little talk with you."
Dean tenses. Over the last four years 'little talk' has evolved into a euphemism for the 'you should start dating again' speech.
"You know...you're still young..." his mother begins right on cue.
Dean so does not want to hear this now. As if responding to some kind of mom-bat-signal that 'the talk' is beginning, his father opens the door and ambles in.
"Dean..." he glances at Mary for confirmation that an intervention is already in session. "We're worried about you..."
"I'm fine." Dean draws his feet up and swivels so that he can sit on the bed and not lie on it – a vulnerable position if ever there was one.
"You can go out there and meet someone...no one's expecting you to be celibate forever." His mother insists gently.
The idea that his mother is telling him to go get laid? That's going to stick with him, and not for the better.
Jo is the next person to come around the door, followed by Bobby and Ellen.
"Hey, why are we all in here?" Jo asks brightly.
"We're talking to Dean about his relationship deficit." John says, without even cracking a smile.
"Oh, yay." Jo sits on the end of the bed. "You do so need to get laid."
Dean looks to Bobby for sanity.
"It has been four years son." His almost-uncle says persuasively.
"Longest dry spell I ever had was two." Ellen chips in, one thumb cocked in the side of her belt.
Dean really hopes that this turns out to be a nightmare. Odds are not looking good. He figures in a nightmare he'd be naked, or on a plane or standing next to Will Farrell in his Elf costume.
"You have like..." Jo makes a hand gesture known to men everywhere. "Cleaned the pipes, right? 'cos four years without is like..."
Castiel and Sam enter the room on the tail end of that sentence.
Dean kind of wants to die.
Sam at least looks embarrassed. Castiel's eyes just go wide and he bites his lip apologetically.
Jo looks at him expectantly.
"I'm going for a drive." He announces loudly, standing up and shouldering his way out of the room.
"Be back by six." His mother shouts after him. "We're expecting company."
Dean freezes.
"Who?" he yells back in the direction of the laundry room.
"You remember that nice son of the Drapers? Balthazar."
"Shit." Dean clenches his fists.
"Yeah, him." Sam calls out, which at least makes him smile.
Aside from himself and Sam, Balthazar is the only gay male of his parent's acquaintance. Dean remembers him being very British, a little overweight and very lurky. That's about it.
He continues his way through the cabin and out to his car, starting the engine (what has accumulated a new grinding noise) and speeding off down the gravel drive like he's eighteen again and almost expected to drive like a dick.
Dean drives out to the lighthouse and parks up, sitting on the bonnet in the teeth shredding wind. He kind of wishes had a beer, that this could in fact be like one of the times he steamed out of the house as a teenager – that he could sit somewhere quiet and alone, drink himself stupid and forget about that hard stuff for once.
He'd done the same when Lisa told him she was pregnant.
Before that, when he'd fought with his Dad over the stupid stuff teenagers fight about, when he'd had a bad day at school.
The time he'd gotten wasted and tried to kiss Cory Jamerson after prom.
When Lisa was sick it had never been an option. He had Anna and Adam to look after, not to mention baby Ben and the house and his job.
He wasn't a teenager anymore, and this wasn't a case of hot headed idiocy.
Dean knew he was in an impossible situation.
He'd had his family, his whole family, and that had been enough for him, it really had. He wasn't looking for another person like Lisa, she'd been...well, he wouldn't have given up so much to raise kids with someone who wasn't worth it. And Lisa had been worth it. Smart, gorgeous, funny and able to cut through his bullshit with barely a pause for thought. Lisa may have been a woman, but she'd also been the love of his life.
Anna, Adam and Ben were the three most important things in his life. Dean couldn't imagine three better kids, three more perfect combinations of him and Lisa. They were worth every moment of stress over mortgage repayments and hospital bills and orthodontist visits.
They were worth making it to his age before he realised what it was that he'd been harbouring in himself.
It wasn't something he'd been 'missing' – he meant it when he said Lisa was the love of his life, his eventual acknowledgment of his attraction to men was never something that detracted from his happiness with her.
But now...now there was Cas.
Dean leant back against the windscreen of his car. They were quite similar to each other, Dean and his impala. Past it, a little rusty but still for the most part dependable. To most people just a fixture of a bygone year, but to the right person, the right set of eyes...
Some people saw the impala for what it was, classic, cantankerous and interesting, right down to the grooves in her tires.
Cas looked at him like that.
Dean could feel it in him, the look that Castiel gives him, like he's deep and dark and full of enthralling memories and experiences and ideas. Like he's surprising and new and good. The way Cas looks at Anna and Adam and Ben, not like they're amazing attachments of Dean, but like Lisa used to look at them – like amazing, new people who were still growing and constantly working to surprise them.
And Castiel, with his broken heart, his own 'love of all time' buried before they really had a chance.
Dean can relate. He can see the two halves of Castiel's grief, his guilt and his sadness.
He knows what that feels like.
The wind intensifies and the sky is already growing dark before and around him. Dean's legs and ass have frozen on the cold bonnet.
He gets into the car and drives back to the cabin, just in time to meet a black Mercedes on the drive.
The car pulls up and a tall, skinny blond guy gets out, underdressed for the cold in a grey tee and black blazer. There's a long silver chain around his neck with a small cross on it.
Dean climbs out of the impala, looking the guy up and down and decides that he looks kind of like Sting.
It doesn't really click with him until the guy crosses the short expanse of gravel between them and smirks at him.
"Dean, good to see you again darling."
"Balthazar?" He can't help the surprise in his voice, what he remembers of Balthazar is far from flattering to the gracefully nonchalant man in front of him. Clearly Balthazar is revelling in Dean's reaction to his own surprise transformation.
"Yes...God, it's been a long time..." he pokes his tongue into his cheek coquettishly "too long, I think."
"Going on, what, five years?" Dean supplies, his good upbringing prompting him into conversation.
"Yes." Balthazar draws it out, flirtatious nature taking a back seat to sympathy for a second. "I heard about Lisa...I'm so sorry."
Dean shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about Lisa with a stranger.
It occurs to him that at least he's met Balthazar before. With Castiel he was talking about Lisa within an hour of them meeting.
He hog ties that thought and shuts it in the trunk of his mental-impala – leading Balthazar into the house and calling out to the rest of his family.
No one answers.
Crafty assholes.
"We appear to be alone." Balthazar says conspiratorially.
"We do at that." Dean says, glaring into the silent cabin.
"So...any chance of a brandy?" Balthazar says, wriggling out of his blazer and displaying taught, tanned arms and stomach as he does so.
Dean, for the record that will surely be brought against him in the future, knowing his luck, is not actually attracted to Balthazar.
The dude's hot - no doubt about it. But he's not really Dean's type, as far as he has a type. He's a little too polished, and English and...Dean's kind of...afraid of Austin Powers...there, he said it.
And, he's never been one to just, throw it around. Once he likes someone he likes everything about them – he can't diversify his attentions.
So, it's hard to focus on tall, thin and blond when he's caught up in blue-eyed-tawny-and-unavailable.
Plus, he's never been a fan of Sting.
The guy just bugs him.
"Seriously? We're supposed to be hiding. Can't you wait to read it?" Sam hisses from somewhere in the kitchen.
Balthazar smirks at him. Dean frowns at the kitchen door.
"It's around here somewhere, and I think Dean wants it back soon." Castiel's voice pipes up.
"Are you sure? and I thought you had it in the..." Sam opens the kitchen door and spots Dean and the now radiantly amused Balthazar. "Oh crap."
"Hey Sam." Dean says with forced joviality. "Whatcha doing?"
Sam has the grace to blush.
Castiel peers around him, looking decidedly racoon like with ruffled dark hair and a black and navy plaid shirt on over his jeans.
Dean hates the little clench his heart gives at seeing him. Though he does realise two things on the heels of that guilt.
The first is that the book Castiel brought Sam into downstairs to look for is currently in Castiel's room where he left it earlier.
The second is that, Castiel's probably heard a little something about Balthazar Draper from his family – but that it was probably of the British-and-overweight variety.
Judging by the none-too-pleased expression on Castiel's face as he spots the new and improved Balthazar, he was not expecting a male model with an accent.
Dean can sense already that this is going to go badly for someone...
He honestly has no idea who.