A/N: This is the next story in a mild AU/canon divergence series called The Other Guardian 'verse. There's a detailed note about it on my profile page, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam.
This story is a set of drabbles set over the summer; it follows "Starbright," and focuses on the evolution of Castiel's feelings as he and Sam grow closer, moment by tiny moment. Rotating perspectives, including Dean's; this story is still technically pre-slash, but getting closer to full slash all the time.
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Dean wasn't one of those guys who pretended he knew everything. Well, maybe he was sometimes when he was two-thirds drunk at a one-third empty bar and three-thirds of the hot chicks were looking for pub quiz partners, but any guy with half a ball would have done the same in that situation. And how the hell was he supposed to know that Newton's Law and Murphy's Law were different things? Sam was the smartass in the family. But if there was one thing Dean knew up, back, and u-turned, it was his brother, and there was definitely something weird going on with Sam.
Sam was up to something. Or maybe not up to, per se—maybe into was closer, as in he'd stuck his enormous clown-sized foot right into a great big pile of it.
Sam was getting squirrelier by the day. Dean wasn't a huge fan himself of the girly feeling-gush Sam forced on him like a red wine enema once every two weeks, but even so, he was mighty tired of getting the patented Winchester shake-and-shrug from his brother every time he asked what was on his mind while Sam stared out the passenger window, mooning over literally nothing. If wheat fields could blush, Sam would have left a red trail from Laramie to fuckin' Logansport. Then there was the illicit affair Sam was apparently having with the color blue; from Cool Ranch Doritos to Oreos to Rice Krispy Treats, Dean had never seen so much navy foil wrap in his entire life as a road warrior. He'd even caught his brother fingering a Blazin' Blue Hi-C juice box that Sam never would've touched if he wasn't currently possessed by the restless spirit of a blue gummy bear. Sam hadn't looked sideways at a juice box since he was about thirteen.
And Sam's taste buds weren't the only things that had reverted. Sam's first round of puberty had been bad enough, like watching a baby giraffe try to prance through a dollhouse. But somehow even though he was twenty-four instead of fourteen and a fully grown man—overgrown, honestly—Sam was right back in the thick of it again, catching his sleeves on coat racks and car doors and tripping over everything from table legs to his own floppy feet. And then there was the stuttering, and the blushing, and a sickening level of lash-batting…Dean had never seen a six-foot-four human wrecking ball bat his eyelashes before, but Sam was taking that talent and going pro.
And the most damning part of all was that Sam had been keeping secrets from him. Three distinct times now Sam had slipped off to the library without him and refused to tell him why, and twice more Dean had come up behind his brother while he was clacking away on his keyboard and Sam had slammed the laptop closed so fast Dean was surprised he didn't lose a fingertip. Dean wished it was porn, especially since it hadn't escaped his notice that Sam had been in a dry spell about as long as the Gobi Desert, but he just knew his brother too well—and besides, what kind of library stocked porn anywhere but the employee locker room? Which meant Sam was up to something else. Something he didn't want Dean to see. Something Dean just knew had to do with that nerdy douchebag who called himself Castiel.
It had come to Dean's attention that Cas was hanging around more than usual, and it wasn't for him. It wasn't even for them. Somehow, even though he was supposed to be Dean's guardian angel, Castiel was suddenly only interested in Sam.
And what the hell was that about, anyway? Last time Dean had checked, Cas was no more capable of being interested in something than a toaster or a bargain package of socks. And Sam? Really? Twenty-four good years of field tests proved Dean was way more interesting than his geeky little brother—at least with biker chicks and barflies, and really, who else's opinion would you want?
It wasn't like anything was really going on between them, Dean told himself as he pulled into the parking lot of yet another public library, peering up at the dusty brickwork through the bug splat on the windshield. It was just a phase—Sam was angel-crushing, and Cas was just reflecting his concentration like a satellite dish. They'd get over it soon enough—especially since Castiel was about as emotionally capable as said satellite dish. It wasn't worth wasting the brain cells it would take not to care.
But that just left one thing—whatever Sam had been up to at the library. Dean swung the Impala into one of the handicap spots at the front of the library's bare lot and grabbed his phone.
"Hello? Dean?"
Sam sounded confused and a little hoarse, like he'd had his head shoved up the musty ass-crack of a hundred-year-old bookshelf for the last six hours. Dean rolled his eyes and checked his teeth in the rearview mirror.
"No, Sam. It's your other awesome big brother, making a special trip to pick you up from the lamest library in Idaho instead of leaving your ass to hitchhike to the hotel. The hell are you working on in there? You know what, never mind—I'll come in and see for myself."
"Ah—don't worry about it, Dean. I'm done," Sam promised. "I actually put everything away already," he added, his lie all the more obvious because Dean could hear papers rustling and books thumping closed in the background.
"Bull," Dean told his phone. Too bad Sam had already hung up, and the phone didn't really care who was full of shit.
.x.
Castiel had never paid much attention to the human form. He was aware that it was a serial preoccupation of theirs—he had observed the way Dean's eyes tracked every window advertisement and passing figure with a vaguely feminine shape—but the concept of form was already strange to angels, and any particular idealization of that form was difficult for Castiel to conceptualize. The differences between humans were so subtle in any case as to be almost indiscernible. Or so he had maintained over his centuries as a soldier in the highest war. His assignment to the Winchesters and subsequent tenure on the lower plain had begun to change that, one of so many things that were not as simple as he had always believed.
What had not changed was the reality that, even after all these months, he had never been distracted by the human form. Not until this moment.
"Cas! Um, what—what are you…did you need something?"
Castiel paused in the doorway of the bathroom, staring back into very startled hazel eyes. He had descended to look in on the Winchesters and found them in the aftermath of a case, patching their wounds in a new hotel room, as indistinguishable as the last. Dean had his hands full stitching a cut on his forearm and complaining about the angel's timing, mostly in words Castiel did not understand—if the Millennium Falcon was as late as your ass, that first movie would've ended very differently!—but he had offered Castiel a tube of pain-relieving cream and told him to take it to Sam.
Sam was in the bathroom. Castiel had been warned about that specific niche of human architecture, but since he was acting on Dean's instructions, he took this as an exception and pushed the door open.
He was not certain what he had expected to find. But he was caught off guard by the image of Sam standing before the mirror in a pair of thin shorts, his torso bare, one arm curled over his head as he craned his neck and twisted to catch a glimpse of the dark bruises fluttering over his spine—and somehow, without intending to, Castiel found he had paused in the doorway, momentarily distracted by the contours and lines of this particular human form, the way the uneven shadows of the buzzing incandescent light settled in the curve of his lower back. He had not quite worked out yet why that was so distracting when Sam's eyes caught his in the mirror and the hunter spun around, gasping as he accidentally bashed his knee against the pipes under the sink.
"Ah, shit…um…Dean?" Sam had called to the room beyond him, rubbing his knee with one hand and yanking a towel from the rack with the other. He didn't seem to know what to do with it, though; Castiel watched as Sam made an aborted effort to wrap it around himself and ended by just draping it against his legs, covering the light blue shorts which the angel had not previously guessed to be embarrassing. He could hear Dean laughing somewhere at his back.
"Dude, learn to knock!"
Castiel glanced back at the voice, and then his gaze returned to Sam, looking nervous and unsure as he brushed straggled hair back behind his ear. The angel frowned. Sam was not naked, so that could not be the concern. Perhaps he was upset because Castiel had not announced himself; Dead was often rebuking him for that.
"Hello, Sam," he offered. Sam tried for a smile, but didn't quite manage it.
"Hey, Cas. Ah…I was gonna be out in just a minute. Maybe you could…?" He left the end of the sentence hanging, and Castiel knew enough about humans by now to know there was a question implied there, but was less certain what it was. He held out the bottle of ointment.
"Dean asked me to bring this to you," he said. Sam reached out and plucked it from his hand almost too fast to feel the brush of their fingers passing.
"Great. Um…" Sam nodded toward the door again, his right hand still clenched in the weave of the towel. Castiel tipped his head.
"Do you need assistance applying—"
"No!" Sam assured him, a little more urgently than before. "No, I'm good. I mean…thanks anyway, Cas."
"You are…welcome," Castiel tried, taking a step back so he was out of the way of the door. But just before Sam pushed it shut again, Castiel glanced once more down the long line of his body, committing to memory the image of that strip of tanned flesh between door and doorframe, muted and warm under the yellow light. He turned away as the latch clicked shut.
Human form had never interested him before. He wondered what was so different about Sam's.
