A/N: Hi guys! I'm sorry about not posting last week. I was out of town and I couldn't get any wifi and thus, couldn't post a new chapter. But here I am now, and I'm sorry about the irregularity! Hope you enjoy this!
~ Chapter Fourteen ~
"Cas, where r u guys?"
Castiel showed Anna's text message to Dean with a light tap on his shoulder, who just shrugged and rested his head against the window of the car.
"In my car."
Anna was quick to respond. "Why arent you sitting with everyone else?"
"Dean doesn't want to right now."
A longer pause passed between messages – Castiel chewed his lip and stared out the window for at least the 47th time since they'd sat down in the car before glancing over at Dean again. His cheek was bruised and darkening into a painful-looking purple, and the rest of his face pink with splotches, a thin cut sliced over his cheekbone. It looked awful, and Dean probably felt even worse, considering that he didn't bother explaining what happened when Castiel gawked at the first sight of it. Dean just shook his head and asked if they could sit somewhere private. Castiel was loath to turn him down, but not knowing what had happened to his friend was eating at him more so than the increasing heat inside the car.
"Well why not? We're perfectly delightful people, he should know that by now"
"Yes." So that wasn't one of his most artful responses.
Nonetheless, Anna gave up after the last message and Castiel was thankful for the distraction to cease in its buzzing existence.
He swallowed hard and turned in his seat, drumming his fingers on his leg, contemplating offering to give Dean an early ride home first or making him explain what happened. "Dean?"
"I don't want to talk about it." His response was immediate and he didn't raise his eyes when he spoke, though Castiel couldn't even tell whether or not his eyes were even open from this angle.
"I can't help you if you don't talk to me."
"I don't want help." Dean mumbled, folding his arms across his chest and heavily leaning against the window and car door.
"Well you look like crap, and you need it."
Dean rolled his eyes and shot Castiel the most indignant look he'd ever seen in his life. "No need to sugarcoat it, Cas."
"I didn't."
Another resentful eye roll. "You're hopeless when it comes to social norms, I swear."
Castiel let the snide remark go and reached for Dean's hand. "Please tell me what happened."
Dean sighed as Castiel took his hand, staring back for a few moments before sighing again and tugging his hand away. "D'ya know Crowley?"
Castiel squinted at him. "The senior with the odd haircut?"
Dean nodded. "Yeah."
A pause.
"What about Crowley?"
"He said we were fags and that everyone knew it." The phrase came out as a growl as Dean curled up against the car door again.
Castiel cringed. Didn't they think that they could have avoided this at some point? Regardless of whether or not they had, they had been horribly and truly wrong, and somehow neither of them had believed it until a problem had arose and promptly punched Dean in the face. Great. "And then what?"
Dean glanced back at over at Castiel with some kind of strange smile in his eyes that died almost as soon as it had appeared. "Then I tried to hit him for it, but one of those goons that follows him around all the time got in the way and slugged me instead."
Dean was rubbing at his cheek while he said it, like the memory made the pain from punch resurface. Castiel reached out towards him again, this time letting his thumb brush Dean's cheekbone, to which Dean winced and hissed under his breath; Castiel pulled his shaking hand back, dismayed to see the blot of blood on the pad of his thumb.
He unlocked the glove box at Dean's knees, pulled out a handful of napkins and shut it once more. He folded one napkin and held it up to Dean's face, though he was still holding his own hand over the damage, protecting it, though finally he moved it and allowed Castiel to press the napkin into it.
"Thanks," Dean mumbled after a few moments of letting Castiel help him, though the cut was still bleeding, not profusely, but it was.
/
As it turned out, Cas dabbing at his cut made his face look not so horrible, though he knew he wasn't looking very attractive to anyone with eyes anymore. The cut still stung and his cheek hurt to touch and it was more noticeable than he'd thought, so Dean spent his remaining two classes in the back of the room when possible, with his head down where no one would even bother looking at him. It probably helped that his last two classes were two in which his friends weren't in – they would've asked, and Dean didn't have the energy nor the motivation to explain how he'd gotten his ass handed to him by some freaky kid's goon. But crap, how would he explain that to his parents?
They would probably throw a fit, his mom would demand that they go talk to the principal or whichever person on campus was responsible for student safety, while his dad was likely to explode and tell Dean that he could defend himself better than this, and then Sam? Sam would just give him a puppy-eyed look that made him feel both ashamed and irrationally uncomfortable.
…So maybe avoiding his family for as long as possible would be good, right?
"Tell me again why you want to spend the night at my house?" Cas was unpacking his backpack at his locker after school, giving Dean an extremely cross look.
"I don't want my parents to see," he grimaced and pointedly gestured towards his face, "this."
Cas gave him a substantially dejected look and chewed his lip as he started situating the books he wanted in his backpack. "You know you can't hide from them forever."
"I know, but it looks bad right now and I figure it'll look better by tomorrow, right?"
Cas just shrugged, still having that concerned, unmoving expression painted across his face. "I suppose you're right."
"Is that a yes?" Dean put on his best, not-at-school-boyfriend-winning smile, hoping that it was on the side of cute and not creepy because of his purpling face.
"Yes."
He grinned and pulled out his cell phone as they walked to the parking lot, dialing his mom's number first – Dean was pretty sure she got off work early today, or had a day off or something along those lines.
She picked up on the second ring, her voice sounding like a wide smile and a warm hug that he would never admit to enjoying under no circumstances ever. "Hi Dean, what is it?"
The conversation was short and sweet – all he had to do was explain to his mom that he and Cas had a project to work on and that it would probably take a long time, so would she mind if he spent the night at his house. Mary said it was all right with her if it was okay with Cas' parents for a school night, to which Dean just assumed that they wouldn't be home as usual and told her that it was. Lying to his parents, especially his mom though, felt wrong, particularly since they had never really done anything of their own free will to harm him. The only detrimental thing that Dean could think of being related to his parents was the constant moving around throughout childhood, but he had long since come to terms with the fact that because John was in the military, it couldn't be helped.
Dean thought about this as he followed Cas' car, remembering how pissy he'd get as a kid when they'd eventually have to move from a place he'd finally gotten comfortable in. Up to the second grade it wasn't such a big deal, hell, they moved around at least once a year then, but after the fourth and fifth grade, making new friends was a tedious, painful process that kid-Dean would've loved to bypass given any and all chances. But even in the truly terrible places they had lived (see Florida, Minnesota and Mississippi), their living arrangements would occasionally overlap with the Harveles', and Dean would have someone to lean on during the first weeks at a new school. Jo was like a cousin to him really, if not the sister he never asked for, since what she lacked in height or ability to interact with others at times, she made up for in familiar, Winchester-ish spunk, and he could respect that. So much so, actually that he had a big fat crush on her when they were both nine and going to the same crappy school in Florida. He could only remember Florida as hot, uncomfortable and full of every kind of weirdo imaginable.
Cas finally parked in his driveway and Dean parked across and back half a block, just in case one or both of Cas' parents decided to make a surprise visit to their son while Dean was over – Dean was about 96% sure that Cas' mom still loathed him, and for that reason, he would not allow himself to be caught by her in that house ever again. One seething look of disgust from that icy-eyed woman was enough for his lifetime and the next, thank you very much.
Walking into the Novak house was always overwhelming – the smell of pine sol and fabric softener and furniture polish was just extremely powerful when in the same room, and though Cas never seemed to appreciate or be bothered by it, let alone notice it, Dean was incessantly amused by it. His homes never smelled so clean, never had and most likely never would, so the fact that Cas kept this house so damn spotless was kind of refreshing. He decided he liked it a little.
/
Dean had managed to focus on his homework for about two hours, and stay awake for two hours and fifteen minutes, as he was now snoring on the couch with a textbook in his lap. Castiel considered getting up from his seat at the dining room table and waking him, but also just letting him have a short nap; they both knew that he'd had a long day.
Deciding that he'd let Dean sleep for a little while, Castiel went back to work at trying to finish a hefty set of trigonometry problems. He found that he enjoyed the rhythm that accompanied this work, as it was about 45 problems all doing the exact same function with different numbers. And he was halfway done with it when his phone started violently buzzing in his pocket – Anna was calling him.
"Hello?"
"So what happened to you guys at lunch?"
Castiel sighed at Anna's apparent bypass of telephone manners and held the phone to his ear with his shoulder, resuming the listless math problems, "I told you already, Anna, we were in my car."
"I know that, dork, you said that Dean didn't want to sit with us. What gives?"
"Do we really have to have this conversation right now?"
"Yes, actually. My mom's not home for twenty more minutes and if she catches me procrastinating on my homework again today she'll take my phone away and I can't deal with that right now, Cas."
"No Anna, I just meant that Dean's in the room with me right now and–"
"Then why don't you give him the phone, I'll hear it from him or you right now, I don't really care!"
"I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"He's taking a nap."
"Wait, is he in your bed?" She sounded genuinely amused as she said that, sounding vaguely as though she was holding her breath in her bizarre anticipation.
"No, he's on the couch." Castiel squinted at his math problems – what was there to be so amused about?
"Alright, sorry, I can almost hear you trying to figure out my reaction, and it's not worth hurting yourself over, Cassie. Can you just tell me what the deal was today?"
Castiel gave in, resigning himself to try and explain what had happened to Dean without giving too many details, though that wasn't a difficult task, as he didn't have many details to give in the first place – Dean had barely told him any sort of detail or in depth explanation today, and Castiel planned to try and draw it out of him later. But Anna didn't even seem to be remotely surprised that Crowley was the one behind Dean's bruised face and cut cheekbone, but she did seem angry enough to do something, which worried Castiel – Anna wasn't the type of person to just watch something happen and pick up the pieces afterwards, like Castiel had so many times wished she were. Instead, she would be the type of person to get involved as soon as she possibly could, kicking, screaming, and fighting for the people she cared for and what she believed in no matter the possible consequences. She had a lot of character and motivation in her, to say the least.