A/N: Oi, boring chapter. Didn't wanna be written. Doesn't help that I kind of changed direction and so had no idea what this chapter was supposed to accomplish.

No sexy-fun-times in this chapter, but no worries, the smut will return soon enough.

He only realizes his phone is ringing because he happens to glance over right as the screen lights up with the incoming call. By the time he reaches it, it's already moved over to missed call, and Cas can't help but wince when he sees who he's been accidentally ignoring.

The phone starts ringing again, and he hesitates before answering it. "Rachel, I'm sorry, I-"

"Why aren't you answering?" she interrupts.

"I missed one call," Cas says, frowning in confusion. Before he can ask for clarification, he hears a pounding at the front door.

His sister does not look remotely pleased to see him. She scowls at him, opens her mouth to say something, then stops and looks at him.

"Is that an iPod?" she asks with a befuddled look. Cas glances down at the little gizmo in his hand.

"Yes."

She stares at him for a long moment. "Why do you have an iPod?"

"Because the only other option was sabotaging the CD player in the store's break room," Cas says, stepping aside to let her up the stairs.

"I won't ask," she says after a moment, and Cas shrugs. She'll figure it out in a minute anyways, when the new girl puts on her music downstairs.

"Did you need something?" he asks as he follows her into the living room.

"Do you even know what day it is?" she counters, looking around aimlessly. "And where's the dog?"

"Thursday. Gabriel took her, probably to the park to meet women."

Rachel shakes her head at that. Gabriel's love life is complicated and doesn't tolerate closer scrutiny. His siblings have long ago accepted that he's just weird, and they will never properly understand him, and that he is allowed to meddle in their lives while their doing so in his is forbidden.

"It's Friday, Cas," she tells him, leaving the other half of the conversation behind. "And you have somewhere to be, remember?"

He looks at her in question. Before she can answer, the opening notes of a certain teen heartthrob's latest CD starts drifting up through the floor. Rachel looks down at the carpet, then back up at her brother.

"Well," she says casually, "I understand the iPod now."

"I don't remember agreeing to do anything today," Cas says, running his thumb over the pause button again. Dean had suggested the iPod the morning after he'd spent the night, when Justin Bieber's heavily synthesized voice had done its best to interrupt round three.

"We didn't set the date in specific," Rachel says as she heads over to the couch. "But Sam is back in town, and I'm meeting them for lunch as a sort of follow-up. I asked if you would be there and you said yes."

Presumably he'd agreed to this- if he had agreed at all, Rachel has a way of stretching the truth when it suits her- before he'd started sleeping with Sam's brother. This has 'awkward situation' written all over it. He hesitates, trying to find the best way to gently turn her down, then catches the look on her face and realizes he can't safely do so.

"I'll probably need to bail out early," Rachel continues. "All I need you to do is be there, and not make faces at the romantic mushiness."

"I'll need a ride home," Cas says, already heading towards his bedroom, because Rachel has never deemed a t-shirt and jeans acceptable and he long ago gave up fighting that pointless battle.

"You need a new car," Rachel corrects, raising her voice a little so he can hear her. Cas doesn't point out the flaw in her argument- in the week since his car had died, he hasn't been inconvenienced once by not having a vehicle available.

When he comes back out a minute later, he finds her at the kitchen counter, the empty cinnamon roll box in her hand. She looks at him, part curiosity and part shock. "What's this?"

"Cinnabon," Cas says. "There's one down the street." He has no idea where, is simply taking Dean's word for it.

"I know," she says, and now there's a knowing smile tugging at her lips. "But you don't eat Cinnabon. You wouldn't eat at all, if you could get away with it."

Cas gets his keys- he has no desire to repeat the whole locked-out incident- and studiously avoids looking at her as he starts down the stairs. "Are you coming?"

"You know what worries me?" she asks when she catches up a minute later. He looks at her, polite interest. "You don't change. You wouldn't have a cell phone if it weren't for the fact that ninety percent of the people in this town use texting as their primary method of communication. And now you're eating breakfast and using an iPod? That's huge, for you."

"I eat breakfast sometimes, and the iPod is in self-defense," he explains, gesturing towards the store during the last part. "You're reading too much into it."

"Maybe," Rachel admits. "I'd be really worried if you'd already gotten a new car." She pauses a moment. "Is it anyone I know?"

Cas considers the question. He's not ashamed of this whatever-it-is he has with Dean- it's far too early to be pinning names to it- but he's not keen on dropping this particular bomb on his apparently uninformed sister right now. On the other hand, he's a crap liar.

"Yes," he says, as compromise, and takes his iPod out of his pocket in a none-too-subtle way of ending the conversation.

Rachel, wisely, lets it go.

The wrap-up meeting is only one aspect of what Rachel calls the 'personal touch', which also includes hijacking her siblings into helping her. Cas has suffered through these meetings before and has the horror stories to prove it- like the one that ended with them getting kicked out of the restaurant after the happy couple had slipped into the store room for a quick makeout session, or that one time where the wife proudly announced they were already pregnant, and had spent the two-hour lunch sitting beside Cas and flipping through a baby name book and pointing out her favorites. That particular encounter had left Cas with a morbid fear of the phrase so what do you think, because what it apparently really means is now give me your opinion so I can tell you why you're wrong.

Sam and Jess hadn't really struck him as that sort, though, which meant instead that this was just going to be really boring.

They meet at the restaurant, a cute little café on the edge of town, out where the locals live and the students rarely venture. Rachel tries to make Cas leave his iPod in the car but he refuses, and when she starts to argue he walks off- it worked well against Dean, the other night, and it works again, and Cas realizes he has a new tactic in sibling warfare. He balks at the door, lets Rachel head inside before him as he pulls out his cell phone.

"I'm having lunch with your brother," he says without preamble, when Dean answers. He's at work, and is presumably busy, but Cas isn't the clingy sort who needs to call every fifteen minutes, so when he does call- all of two times, so far- Dean answers pretty quickly.

"Okay," Dean replies, a little blankly. "Why?"

"Rachel," Cas tells him, glancing through the café's glass front. Rachel is talking to one of the waiters, not sparing a single look back at him. "It's one of her things."

Dean seems to be waiting for this conversation to start making sense, while Cas doesn't really know how to phrase this. Ideally, he would have skipped this whole lunch thing, but Rachel refuses to go to these alone- she has her own horror stories, and finds it easier to handle things, or make excuses and flee, when she has backup. And Raphael is busy, and Gabriel too uncontrollable.

"Is there something you would like me to say to him? Or not say?" he asks finally, still groping blindly for the proper words.

"I dunno," Dean says, sounding distant, like he's put Cas on speakerphone while he does something else. "Probably not gonna come up, so why bother?"

"Your brother is not stupid, Dean," Cas says patiently. "He'll figure it out eventually."

There's a brief pause. Then Dean, sounding much closer, says, "We're not talking about just lunch anymore, are we?"

Cas isn't any more comfortable with this topic than Dean, and so dodges the lead-in. "You're right, it shouldn't come up. I was asking just in case."

"And just in case, what would you say?" It sounds like a challenge, but Cas knows Dean well enough by now to know it's just a front, a façade- although a front to cover what, he can't yet tell.

"I won't lie to your brother for you, Dean," Cas says somberly, as the waiter walks away and Rachel turns and gestures to him.

"Didn't ask you to."

"I have to go," he says, because this conversation started out awkward and is verging now on hostile. As far as he's concerned, the brothers Winchester can sort this out between themselves. Cas isn't getting caught in the middle of this.

"Have fun," Dean says, teasing, knowing full well Cas isn't going to enjoy anything that forces him to be in other people's company for any length of time.

Rachel is starting to look impatient, and the waiter has returned, menus in hand. Cas gives Dean a grunt, acknowledging his drollery even if he won't rise to it, and hangs up. Then he takes a deep, bracing breath, and heads inside.

Sam remembers his name- not surprising, considering the whole pseudo-bachelor-party thing- but Jess has to be prompted. Cas himself needs a kick in the shin from Rachel to remember he should stand to greet the newcomers.

Lunch is as mind-numbingly boring an affair as he'd feared. Cas spends most of the time picking at his sandwich, listening with one ear to the conversation around him. He'd eaten the last cinnamon roll this morning, and Rachel hadn't been wrong, earlier, when she'd said he wouldn't bother eating at all if it weren't for the inconvenience of starving. His plans for today, food-wise, had been either the leftover pizza in the fridge or whatever fast food restaurant was in distance if he felt like walking. Or whatever Dean brought, should he come over, for he's always good to eat and figured out very early on that if he wanted food, he needed to bring it himself.

And Dean is right- he's never mentioned, until Cas himself goes and steps in it.

The meal is over, the two women chatting about some girly thing, they're waiting for the bill, and all is well, until Sam, checking his phone for the time or missed calls or whatever, says to himself, "Guess I'll need Dean's new number."

"Do you even know where he is?" Jess asks.

"Nebraska, probably," Sam says.

At the same time, eyes fixed on their waiter as he approaches with their bill and brain quite obviously absent, Cas says, "He's still here."

There's an odd sort of silence. Naturally, it doesn't last long.

"And how do you know that?" Rachel half-demands, cutting Sam off at the pass. Rather than risk a look at his sister or prolong the waiter's presence by dithering over splitting the bill, Cas holds out his credit card without bothering to take the bill. The waiter takes it and turns smartly on his heel.

"He works for your friend Bobby now," he tells Sam. Then, to Rachel, "He was the one who helped me when my car broke down." And please God let that be the end of it, he thinks, cursing himself. Normally remembering to think before he opens his mouth isn't a problem.

But Rachel knows him too well, hears what he isn't saying. Her eyes go wide and she makes a dismayed noise deep in her throat. He can almost hear what she carefully refrains from saying, the disappointment and the pity in her tone as she says it. He looks away from her, to Sam who isn't much better, looking at Cas as he is with a calculating expression. Cas doesn't know how much Dean had said to Sam, before he'd left, but Sam has obviously noticed something.

Dean is going to have a field day with this- Cas can go twelve years without bothering to tell his family that he's gay, but apparently can't last an hour without mentioning Dean. And now, Rachel is very visibly brewing a scathing lecture on his choice of playmates- her words, not his- and Sam is looking like a similar chat might not be that far off in Dean's future. He wonders idly how he can be so painfully transparent to these people, when most find him about as easy to read as a statue.

Then the waiter returns, and Cas takes long enough working out the tip and adding it all up that one might think he's counting it all out on his fingers like a six-year-old. In the meantime Jess, who has at best only half an idea of what's going on, starts talking about something else- Cas isn't sure what, but he doesn't hear Dean's name and so relaxes a bit.

It takes a good twenty minutes for them to leave, even after that. They hover by the door, making the waiter who would be the maître d' in an actual restaurant nervous. Cas contemplates pulling out his iPod, but decides against it- he will undoubtedly need it for the ride home, to prevent the lecture. So he stands vaguely by, shifting his weight restlessly, trying to find some socially acceptable way to say can we go now?

As they're heading to the car, saying their final goodbyes, Sam catches his eye.

"See you around," he says, and oh yeah, Dean's gonna be hearing about this.

Cas slides into the passenger seat of the car, spares his sister a glance and tries not to flinch at the look she's giving him.

"Don't you dare," she says when he starts to slip his hand into his pocket to retrieve his iPod. He decides not to risk it, at least until they're within tolerable walking distance of his loft. Instead he waits, more or less patiently, for his sister to pass judgment.

"Why?" she asks finally. "Is it some rebellion thing? Did we accept your career, your being gay, too easily, so this is all you have left to shock us with?"

"It's not about you, either you personally or the family," Cas says, trying not to say 'the family' as someone in The Godfather would say it. Not that his family isn't a little Mafia-ish at times.

"He's a jerk," Rachel snaps.

"So am I, sometimes," Cas replies, and there's nothing she can say to that, because it's true.

"So that's what you like," she says instead. "Self-centered pricks. And here I was hoping that thing with Balthazar was a fluke."

"Glad you approve," Cas says dryly, and Rachel sighs. She reaches over and puts her hand over his.

"Sweetie," she begins, and he recognizes this as an apology for whatever feathers she may have ruffled, for no one in his family uses pet names like that, "I'm just worried, all right? It's allowed. And don't worry, I won't do anything. I learned a long time ago not to bother trying to run your life for you."

She had indeed learned that. The family stubborn streak, bred bone-deep in all five children, runs strongest in Cas. During his childhood, whenever Rachel had taken it upon herself to tell him to do something, he simply ignored her and went about doing whatever he pleased. She had taken the hint and given up before he'd hit the double digits.

"How long have you two been- seeing each other?" she asks, faltering mid-sentence. Cas gives her a warning look.

"Three or four days," he says after a moment.

Rachel makes a noise, one that sounds like censure, thankfully suppressed.

"I hope you know what you're doing," she says, once all hint of disapproval has been purged from her tone.

He doesn't bother asking her what she thinks he wants out of this. In this regard, he's more like the carefree Gabriel. Settling down just isn't his style.

"Is it done?" he asks, when Rachel makes the turn onto Massachusetts. Rachel gives him a confused look, so he explains. "The wedding thing."

"Yes," she says. "I've got the pictures ordered- it would be a lot easier if you did that yourself- so it's done."

She pulls into the parking lot, stopping abruptly. Both the car's passengers stare at the only occupied spot in the lot- more specifically, at the acid-green Corvette filling the spot.

"Well, I would offer to come up and help, but I'd probably only make it worse," Rachel says.

"He's returning the dog," Cas says, feeling absolutely no desire to get out and go face his brother. Gabriel will be as bad as Rachel, in some ways, worse in others. Cas had managed to avoid anything resembling a conversation earlier because he'd practically thrown Lady at Gabriel and slammed the door shut behind her. There's no avoiding this one, though.

The new girl, whose name Cas hasn't yet learned, is still at the register. She looks annoyed, and gives Cas a dark look. It isn't until he's halfway up the stairs that he realizes she isn't playing her music. Gabriel is good for something, it seems, although what he'd done to earn this silence, Cas doesn't want to know.

Lady starts barking right before he reaches the door, and he calls her name, trying to shut her up. It works, mostly- she stops barking, although her whimpers and the scrabbling of her claws on the door only increase. She tumbles out onto his feet when he gets the door open, and trips on his heels as she follows him back inside.

Gabriel is waiting for him in the middle of the living room, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. Cas eyes him warily. He hasn't seen Gabriel's whole innocent routine in a while, and rarely likes what follows when he does see it.

"So you remember the morning of the wedding," Gabriel says, as if continuing a conversation they were in the middle of. "I gave you a ride, you said you'd owe me one?"

"Within reason," Cas reminds him.

"Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I might be needing to call that in."

Cas waits. Gabriel hesitates, unsure of himself, and if anything that's even more worrying.

"My landlord and I had a bit of a disagreement," he says finally, and Cas doesn't bother biting back his groan.

"No."

"And now I need a place to crash for a few days," Gabriel rolls on, regardless. "And Raphael and I would kill each other, and Rachel and me…." He pauses for a moment to consider it. "Well, we'd kill each other."

"No, Gabriel."

"And you and me, we're not much better, but it'd take you a while longer to reach the kill-each-other point."

"You got a dog, gave it to me even though I didn't want her, and shamed me into keeping her," Cas says. "And now you're giving me another roommate?"

"Three days," Gabriel replies. "Three days, and if his little hissy fit hasn't blown over, I'll go get a hotel room or something."

Cas wants to tell him to go get one now, but he knows Gabriel can't really afford it, and knows better than to offer to pay for it himself.

"I'll even take a hike when your boyfriend shows up," his brother continues, and Cas gives him a sharp look. Gabriel merely points wordlessly to the Cinnabon box on the counter.

Maybe Cas is a little too predictable, if his siblings can all tell he's had someone staying over the past few nights because of one cinnamon roll box.

Dean has a brother of his own, Cas reminds himself. If nothing else, he'll understand why Cas never really had a choice.

"Three days," he says, and Gabriel starts grinning. "And that's it."

"You won't regret it," Gabriel promises.

"Of course I will," Cas shoots back. "I already do."

Gabriel shrugs it off, heads past Cas and down the stairs, presumably to go get his stuff from his car. Cas takes the free moment to call Dean, but the phone rings through to voice mail. He doesn't bother leaving a message.

Lady, standing at the top of the stairs like some tiny fierce guardian, looks at him and wags her tail a little. Then her head snaps back around at the sound of Gabriel on the stairs outside, singing some unidentifiable song, and she starts barking. Cas sighs and rubs at his temples.

This ought to be interesting.