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[jblmetalwork]

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[ccohanlon]

how i live

I woke at midnight, last night, to a hard sou’westerly and the floor moving in three directions at once — pitching, rolling, rising-and-falling. Now, six hours later, the wind has moderated. Everything is still. The rest of the world is obscured by grey mist and sporadic showers, as if the sky has fallen across the shore.

I climb up a short ladder to the companionway to check that all is well on deck — it’s the first thing I do every morning — then I return to my bunk to download email and read a couple of news sites on a laptop before my wife wakes and we have a cup of coffee together across the varnished teak table that separates our bunks.

We talk about what we want to do today and waste a minute or two trying to agree a time-table before giving up. For half a decade, we have scraped by with a minimum of routine or planning. We are singularly unadept at making lists or coordinating diaries. We end up doing most things together. Today, we will pick up some paint and shackles at a chandlery and find a local metal fabricator to repair or replicate a damaged stainless steel stanchion. We also have to buy some groceries. But first I want to repair our rubber dinghy.

My wife and I live on a 32-foot sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It is also an island on which we are trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom after several years of being homeless. Most days, we feel like castaways, with no hope of ever being rescued.

It’s hard to explain how we ended up here. Moving aboard was not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an act of quiet desperation. We had dropped out of a life in which I had somehow ended up running two well-known, medium-sized companies, one of them publicly listed — before those roles, I had been a musician, gambler, seaman, smuggler, photographer, magazine editor, and governmental adviser — and we had taken to wandering slowly across Europe, the UK, and North Africa. After a year holed up on the southern coast of Spain, a few miles east of Gibraltar, riding out the worst of the pandemic, we moved to southern Italy, where we acquired, and set about restoring, a small ruin, part of servants’ quarters attached to a 16th century Spanish castle, in a village not far from Lecce, in Puglia. We had just completed the work, two years later, when the local Questura, the office of the Carabinieri that oversees Italian immigration, rejected our third application for temporary residence and issued a formal instruction to us to leave Italy — and Europe’s Schengen zone.

The boat was not something we thought through in any detail. I had spent a lot of time at sea in my youth and had lived on sailing boats of various sizes on the Channel coasts of England and France, as well as in the Mediterranean. Which is to say, I had an understanding of their discomforts. But the prospect of resuming a life that, before we ended up in southern Italy, involved moving every three months — not just from one temporary accommodation to another but from one country to another, so as not to contravene the terms of our largely visa-less travel — had exhausted us. I made an offer on a cheap, neglected, 45-year-old, fibreglass sloop I had come across online and organised a marine surveyor to look it over for me. He gave it a cautious thumbs up.

I won’t forget my wife’s dolorous expression, a month later, when she saw the boat for the first time. It was in an industrial area of Southampton, on a dreich morning in early spring — bitterly cold, windy, and raining. Around us, the Itchen River’s ebb had revealed swathes of black, foul-smelling mud. Raised far from the sea, on the plains of north-eastern Oklahoma, my wife told me later she had been praying that our journey to this glum backwater was part of some elaborate practical joke.

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos created by those who live on sailboats full-time and voyage all over the world. The most popular, the so-called ‘influencers’, are young(ish) couples or families with capacious, often European-built, plastic catamarans or monohulls. Their videos focus less on the gritty, day-to-day grind of boat maintenance and passage-making and more on sojourns in ancient, stone-built harbours in the Mediterranean, white, sandy beaches and palm-fringed cays in the Caribbean, or improbably blue lagoons and solitary atolls in the South Pacific, where they barbecue fresh fish, paddle-board, kite-surf and practice yoga and aerial silks for the envy of hundreds of thousands of followers. My wife’s and my life aboard together is nothing like any of this.

We are both in our sixties — I am just a year away from seventy — and we have spent more than a decade on the move around the world, at first following eclectic opportunities for employment then, when those opportunities receded, in search of somewhere we might be able to settle with very little money. Four months after moving aboard our boat, we still think of ourselves as vagabond travellers, our boat a shambolic, floating vardo that we haven’t yet managed to turn into a home. We’re not really ‘cruisers’, despite the sense of community we sometimes find among them, but we are seafarers — historically, a marginal existence driven by necessity. A recent, 150-nautical-mile passage westward along the south coast of England was a shakedown during which we learned how to make our aged, shabby vessel more comfortable and easier to handle and to trust her capacity to keep us safe at sea.

She bore the name Endymion when we bought her — after my least favourite poem by John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever…”) — but we re-named her Wrack. Depending on the source, ‘wrack’ describes seaweeds or seagrasses that wash up along a shore or the scattered traces of a shipwreck, either of which might be metaphors for my wife and me in old age. It is certainly how we feel when we’re not at sea. Life aboard Wrack is spartan — fresh water stored in a dozen polyethylene jerry cans, no hot or cold running water, no refrigeration and when the temperature drops, no heating either — so, from time to time, we concede the cost of berthing in marinas to gain access to on-site laundries, showers, flushing toilets, and wi-fi. Whether we’re berthed or anchored somewhere, we shop for food once a week — mainly vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, and rice but little dairy and no meat — and eat one meal a day, cooked in the mid-afternoon on a two-burner gas stove.

The days we spend in close proximity to others’ lives ashore remind us how disenfranchised ours have become. We were homeless before we acquired Wrack, but now we are without a legal residence anywhere, even in our ‘home’ countries. We enter and exit borders uneasily as ‘visitors’, our stays limited to 90 or 180 days, depending on where we are. We have no access to banking, insurance, social services or, with a few exceptions, emergency health care. Even the modest Australian pensions we have a right to can only be received if we have been granted residence in countries with which Australia has reciprocal arrangements — and we haven’t. It’s hard even for other live-aboards to understand how deeply we are enmired in this peculiar bureaucratic statelessness. It’s harder for us to deal with it every day.

But life afloat provides consolations. We are ceaselessly attuned to the weather and our boat’s responses to subtle shifts in the sea state, tide and wind even when we are tethered to a dock. We appreciate the shelter — and surprising cosiness — the limited space below decks affords us but the impulse to surrender to the elements and let them propel us elsewhere is insistent. Our best days are offshore, even when the conditions are testing; the world shrinks to just the two of us, our boat and the implacable, mutable sea around us. Whatever problems we face ashore become, at least for the duration of a passage, abstract and insignificant. We sail without a specific destination — ‘towards’ rather than ‘to’, as traditional navigators would have it — and without purpose. Time drifts.

At least half of every day is spent maintaining, repairing, or re-organising the boat, an unavoidable and time-consuming part of our days, especially at sea. When we’re at anchor or berthed in a marina, we do what we can to sustain ourselves. Most afternoons are spent prospecting for drips of income from journalism and crowd-funding — a source inspired by those younger YouTube adventurers — or adding a few hundred words to a manuscript for a non-fiction book commissioned by a Dutch publisher, whose patience has been stretched to breaking point. Because of our visitor visa status, we can’t seek gainful employment ashore, and we have long since lost contact with any of the networks that once provided us with a higher-than-average income as freelancers. Our existence, by any definition, is impoverished and perilously marginal, we have little social life, yet we make the effort to appreciate our circumstances, even if it’s just to sit together in silence and absorb the elemental white noise of wind and sea, to do nothing, to not think.

Our precariousness burdens our four adult children, who have scattered to San Diego, Sydney, Berlin and Rome: “Where are you now?” our youngest asks. “How long will you be there?” We speak to each at least once a week. Not all of them long for fixedness but they do want desperately for us to have a ‘real home’, somewhere we can assemble occasionally as a family. We will be grandparents for the first time, soon. Like our few friends, our children worry that we might become lost — in every sense.

My wife and I are uncomfortably aware of our financial and physical vulnerability but at our ages, we can no longer cling to the faint hope that there’s an end to it. We have committed to an unlikely, reckless voyage. All we can do is maintain a rough dead reckoning of its course and embrace the uncharted and the relentless unexpected.

First published in The Idler, UK, 2023.

[violenceenthusiast]

ok i had a thought that makes me wanna dip my head in acid but in a soft way...

dean and claire having a father/daughter saturday of fun and low-grade mischief, going to an arcade and joke-fighting over what stuffed animal to get with their tickets and getting slushies and while they’re taking a break to grab burgers claire says ���yknow i’ve been meaning to go get- wanna come with me while i get a new piercing??”

and dean pinches in the direction of her ear a little and says “what, you don’t have enough of those already?” as if he doesn’t think they’re the coolest thing.

she waves him off, eyes flicking between the burger in her hands and the table “i don’t know i just thought it’d be something else fun to do today.”

dean’s only half teasing when he asks “you want me there to hold your hand?”

claire rolls her eyes and looks to the side with half a smile, “oh shut up.” but it’s true, she does want him there to hold her hand– she may be a hardcore hunter who will take a knife cut or a monster bite in stride, but she always gets a little nervous before each piercing. maybe having dean there will make it just a little more manageable.

––

they get to the studio and claire signs the forms, picks out her jewelry, takes a seat to wait while they get ready for her. dean is pacing, looking carefully in each case, at each display. the nice person behind the counter sees him looking and asks “did you want to get something pierced today too?” claire cracks a smile at that and dean looks up at the counter clerk a little wide-eyed, eyebrows raised and mouth half open in surprise, huffs out a breath and looks down as half a nervous smile pulls at the left side of his mouth. he sticks one hand in his pocket and gives one wave with the other as he says “ha. nah, no- just here for her today” as he gestures at claire. he goes to sit with her until the piercer calls them back to the room that’s set up for them.

claire is getting a conch piercing and it’s going more easily than usual- partly because dean is there with her, partly because there are shockingly few nerve endings in the middle of the ear cartilage, and partly because the woman doing the piercing is insanely pretty and insanely good at what she does (she used to be a phlebotomist so she knows a little something about blood, needles, nervousness, and a given person’s propensity for fainting). while the piercer is busy marking the ear, claire looks over at dean in his chair and unable to contain the question any longer asks him, “you ever thought about getting a piercing?”

“me? nah.. it’s just not- i mean they would’ve gotten ripped out for sure by some- by accident.” he was about to say ‘by some monster’ but caught himself before he really weirded out the nice piercer woman. he hadn’t thought about him and piercings in a long time. he had slowly stopped wearing even rings and bracelets as much over the years in case they got caught on something during a hunt (though now he had a new ring on his left hand that he never took off). a piece of jewelry actually in the body was even more of a ridiculous idea for a hunter. but he wasn’t a hunter any more, not really. hadn’t been for about a year. after chuck and getting cas back safe and human.. with sam and eileen running their witchy little hunter hub from the bunker.. it had just seemed like his opportunity and his time to break out of it all. wow okay in that split second he trailed so far off from where he started.. where did he start? ...piercings! right. he remembers being young and not being able to take his eyes off the men in bars with the metal glinting in their ears, noses, lips.. now he knew the staring had been more about the men than the jewelry but it hadn’t not been about the jewelry either. was this one of those things he got to think about now, again, for the first time in a lifetime?

claire takes a moment to make sure she isn’t woozy any more and gets up to go look in the mirror at her new adornment. she smiles and dean snaps out of his own little world to say “you like it?” 

she looks at him through the mirror “love it.” and then, mischievous, “your turn.”

“my turn??”

“oh absolutely.” a moment of raised eyebrows and incredulous silence then, “if you decide you hate it you can just take it out. c’mon i saw your face, you want one you can’t hide from me.”

she’s right. he protests weakly, but she knows him all too well at this point and she’s right and the goading from the piercer only encourages her.

“okay okay fine. but nothing too showy.”

they decide on a rook. it’s not too prominent but it’s definitely there, definitely unique, it will look okay on it’s own if he never gets another piercing, and if he has to jump in on an odd hunt it’s far enough into the ear that it would be hard for it to get caught on anything or ripped out. dean picks a simple, stainless steel piece with a lapis lazuli setting– blue for his husband (though if you asked him he would deny that’s why he chose it. but only at first).

he can’t believe how jittery he is about the whole thing, but this time claire holds his hand. it’s over before it’s begun and he thought it might be painful like the tattoo was, or like any of the number of painful little things that have happened to him over the years but it’s not, it mostly just feels strange. it’s nice to be surprised like that.

dean hops off the bench like claire did and goes to the mirror half expecting to hate what he sees. but he’s surprised for the second time in barely a minute. the glint of the metal in his ear doesn’t just look good, it looks right. like it was meant to be there and he had been awaiting it’s arrival but didn’t know it. something hard to name, something small, something he didn’t know was missing until he found it had just found its way to him, slotted into place and settled in his ribs. he feels quieter but also on fire– like he’d be satisfied to just sit and read a book, like he could face god and win (again).

from behind him claire asks, “like it?”

he smiles. “love it.”

––

they kick around for a little while longer, each of them forgetting about their new piercings until they catch sight of the other��s or until they catch their reflection in a shop window and take a second to admire the newness. eventually claire begrudgingly admits she has to get back to campus to get some work done. dean drops her off at her dorm with a hug and a “stay out of trouble”. 

dean makes the drive home to cas, just lost enough in happy thoughts and memories from the day that he forgets to put on any music until he’s already half way home. 

he gets to the house and finds cas watering the plants in the living room. he leans in the doorframe, watching his love gently tend to each plant in turn. dean doesn’t say anything, he knows cas knows he’s there and will greet him when he’s finished seeing to his darlings. in the meantime dean gets to delight in the sight of the curve of cas’ back as he bends this way and that to reach the plants, the delicate and reverent care he shows each leaf and vine.

cas finishes his routine, sets the water down and turns to greet dean. he freezes half way to saying hello because something is.. something.. something is... he can’t put a name to it, nothing is wrong but dean is.. shifted. not different.. but different. dean is holding his head oddly turned to the side and it doesn’t help either that dean is smiling around a secret and they both know it. cas narrows his eyes but brushes off the feeling long enough to cross the room and give dean a kiss, quick but whole and familiar. dean turns his head to look at a plant and ask a question about it and “accidentally” reveal his new addition. cas, who hasn’t taken a single step backwards since coming over to kiss dean, of course sees the jewelry immediately and exclaims before dean even has a chance to start his made-up question. 

after some very amusing joke-yelling from both sides, it’s revealed that cas just absolutely loves it. and not that dean was worried cas would hate it but dean was a little worried cas would hate it. or worse, that he would judge it. but cas loves that dean tried something new, loves that he chose something blue, loves that dean seems just that little bit more at home in himself. and from the slight blush in his cheeks and ears, dean can tell cas thinks it’s a little bit sexy too. 

––

dean keeps thinking about how much he liked getting a piercing. he gets it on a fundamental level now, gets claire and her array of silver and gold. he’s got the taste for it now, the itch. he’s thinking about going back for another one. or two. but what else, what next? he cheekily wonders about picking based on what would drive cas wild. 

...dean goes back in secret a month and a half later to get his nips pierced. it doesn’t stay secret for long. not from cas, at least. 

[leatafandom]

"Wow, it smells great in here," Dean called, sticking his head into the kitchen where Gabriel was in the process of making caramel on the bunker’s stove. Dean cast a glance at his brother as Sam held a cup of warmed cider in his hands, leaning against the stainless steel work table. "I'm hittin' the shower and then I'll be back for pie," Dean said, poking a dirt-covered finger at the oven and Gabriel. He’d had enough of Gabriel’s cooking to know the archangel’s food was always good, especially his desserts. Gabriel didn't look away from the bubbling pot as he smiled. "It'll be a while, anywho Dean-a-roo." Gabriel's wrist didn't stop feeling his brother pause beside Dean in the doorway. "And you're trying an apple, Cassie. You and the kid." Castiel huffed, rolling his eyes even though he nodded at his brother's insistence on teaching him how to enjoy human food. Dean chuckled, patting Castiel on the arm. Sam smirked behind his mug, chuckling into his warmed drink. "Sorry, he won't be budged, Cas," Sam said over the rim of his mug with a less than apologetic shrug. "You'll like them, and Jack has to try both kinds of the apples." Dean agreed, looking from his partner to Gabriel. "Candied and caramel, right?" Dean asked, looking at Gabriel's back. Gabriel nodded, smirking over his shoulder. "Like I could just make one kind of apple on a stick," Gabriel scoffed with a raised eyebrow. Dean raised his hands in defense. "My apologies, great archangel of baking." Gabriel chuckled at Dean's words, turning back to the stove as Dean turned to Castiel.  "Shower?" Castiel glanced down at his dirt and blood-covered clothing and hands. "What do you think, Dean?" Castiel questioned with a raised brow. Dean rolled his eyes with a smirk. "Come on, cranky," Dean said, shaking his head as he led Castiel to their room. "How can you be unhappy when we come home from a good ol' fashioned ghoul hunt to pie and caramel apples the day before Halloween?" Castiel sighed with a slight roll of his eyes, following Dean down the hall. "I'm very happy with our Halloween Eve desserts and my brother’s unexpected visit, Dean. Why would you think I wouldn't enjoy chasing dead things and you around a graveyard instead of going to an orchard?" Dean's groan echoed down the hallway making the couple in the kitchen laugh. Sam chuckled at the two as they continued down the hall, listening to Dean dig himself deeper. Gabriel smirked, tilting his head towards Sam.

Preview from Part Three of Seasonal Healing: Baking in the Bunker, coming Thursday to my Ao3.  

[winchesterwords]

“Why Not Me?” Dean Winchester x GN!Reader

Summary: The reader is a hunter who has been living with the Winchesters for some time and is quite flirtatious with everyone...except for Dean. What happens when Dean confronts them about it?

Word Count: 2716

Warning: None

Song I Wrote To: “Something I Need” by One Republic

Note: This one is something I thought of one night as I was falling asleep. This one is GN! 

--------

In the tense quiet of the Men of Letters Bunker, an Angel and a hunter were engaged in a serious battle. 

“I do not understand the purpose of this game,” Castiel said as he sat across from you, his eyes never leaving yours. 

“It’s a staring contest, Cas. The purpose is to not look away,” you explained. His brow furrowed as he continued to stare at you, but you could tell that he wasn’t really getting it. Also, it was then that you realized Angels didn’t actually need to blink. “This is futile, isn’t it?” you asked Sam who sat to your left.

“Absolutely,” he answered with a small smile. With a huff, you broke off the stare and slumped in your seat. Cas still looked just as confused. 

“Remind me to challenge Donna the next time we see her,” you grumbled and Sam nodded, trying not to laugh. 

It was just another day with the Winchesters and their Angel best friend. You had been tagging alongside the trio for a while now. After meeting Dean on a hunt in Alabama, you had joined them periodically on their missions and then eventually visited their secret hideout and just never left. 

Currently, you and the boys were at a crossroads with an angry spirit not far from the Bunker. You and Dean had trekked through a nearby graveyard but still couldn’t find the bones of one David Boss. By the time you had returned home, Sam had announced that he was going to call in the big guns. 

Also known as Rowena MacLeod. 

You had never met the witch but had heard many things about her from Sam, Dean, and Castiel. Some good, some bad, but it seemed to be a general census that the woman was as powerful as it gets. 

“Sam, where’s your witch?” Dean asked as he walked into the library. 

“She’s not my witch,” Sam grumbled, but Dean just grinned sending a wink towards you and Cas. The latter just rolled his eyes, already annoyed with Dean poking fun at his brother. You sat back and watch the three of them interact, incredibly entertained. 

Not long after, a loud banging echoed through the Bunker, and Sam jogged up the stairs to pull open the door. “Samuel!” a lovely Scottish voice said as light filtered down the stairs from outside. 

“Hey, Rowena, thanks for coming,” Sam said, shutting the door behind the witch. You stood up as a petite and fiery woman entered the room. 

“And who is this?” Rowena asked as she looked at you, her eyes scanning you from head to toe. You leaned back against the table, taking in your fill of the woman before you as well. 

“Rowena,” Sam said, “this is (Y/N). (Y/N), Rowena.” The witch strutted forward and offered her hand to you, you took it in your own with a smile. 

“Well, if I knew that you were this hot, I would have asked Sam to call you sooner,” you flirted with a wink. Rowena looked at Sam with her brows raised. 

“Oh, Samuel, I think I like this one!” Rowena said as you let go of her hand. Sam sighed and rolled his eyes. Castiel watched the interaction with exasperation as usual, but Dean wasn’t as amused. 

He never understood how you were so...open with everyone you met. You were a very flirtatious person and he had figured that out quite soon after working a case with you in Louisiana. However, while you tended to flirt with everyone, Sam and Cas included, you never aimed your winks and cheeky grins at him and he’d be lying if that fact didn’t keep him up at night. 

It didn’t take long for Sam to catch Rowena up on what was going on. Rowena was very familiar with the kind of spirit that you all were dealing with and knew just what to do to vanquish the rest of the spook that was still hanging around causing issues. 

“I am going to need to make a run into town,” Rowena said as she examined the pantry of spices and spell ingredients the Bunker had. Rowena then turned to you with a glint in her eyes. “Care to accompany me, Darling?” she asked and you were surprised by her offer, but then offered her your arm with a slight bow. 

“It’d be my honor,” you joked and she took it. 

“Ah! See boys,” she addressed Sam, Dean, and Cas, “this is how a woman should be treated.” 

“Just go get your spell stuff,” Dean said curtly and Rowena waved him off and the two of you floated from the room. Dean watched after you, his jaw clenched. As soon as the door shut behind you, Dean sighed and ran a hand through his hair. 

“What?” Sam asked. 

“Anyone else catch that?” Dean asked.

“Catch what?” Cas asked, sinking into a chair next to his best friend. 

“Rowena and (Y/N),” he said. “They were getting a bit...chummy.”

“Chummy?” Sam asked and Dean narrowed his eyes at his little brother.

 “You know what I mean,” Dean said.

“Dean, you know (Y/N), they’re like that with everyone. I don’t think it ever means anything,” Sam reminded him. 

“Yeah, whatever,” Dean grumbled. Over Dean’s shoulder, Cas and Sam shared a look that didn’t go unnoticed by the older Winchester. “Stop it, you two.”

---------- 

When you and Rowena returned, you both were laughing.

Sam, Dean, and Cas all looked up from their spots at the war table as the two of you skipped down the stairs. “Quite the witch in training you have here, boys,” Rowena complimented. You knocked her shoulder gently with a smile of your own.

“No, not me,” you said with a shake of your head. “I prefer the more physical side of hunting. Isn’t that right, handsome?” you asked Castiel who coughed awkwardly. Next to him, Dean just blinked, trying not to look at you.

“Well, I can’t argue that this one doesn’t have taste,” Rowena said as she walked by Cas, not being shy at all as she checked him out. Cas, who was used to it, just sighed and then followed after the witch to help her prepare for the spell.

Once Rowena had everything she needed, the spell went perfectly. You weren’t the biggest fan of magic. Any time you were around it, it never ended well. You knew that it was a part of being in the supernatural world and understanding it, but still, as soon as the chanting started, you took a step back.

Observing, you noticed how Sam watched Rowena very intently, making sure he understood everything she did. While out with her, Rowena had told you that Sam had a gift for the magical arts. She figured that out of any hunter she had ever met, he was the closest thing to a witch there was.

You hadn’t seen Sam work many spells, but with a mind like his, you knew she had to be right. Dean and Cas helped with the spell, handing Sam and Rowena whatever they needed, and soon enough, purple smoke rose from the pot Rowena was stirring, and then she was smiling.

“Well, there you go,” Rowena said with her signature smirk.

“That’s it?” Dean asked.

“Oh, Dean,” Rowena said gently, “this spirit was not a spirit at all, it was more of a remnant of an evil one long ago. Happens occasionally even if the bones are charred. However with a little bit of magic and the help of my lovely assistant,” she looked at Sam, “we are able to put poor Mr. Boss to rest.”

“It was that easy?” Dean asked.

“When you’re me, it is,” Rowena said with a wink and you chuckled from your spot by the bookcases.

“Well,” you announced, “I say we deserve a drink.”

“I second that,” Sam said. Soon everyone began relaxing. Rowena was going to head out in the morning so the Winchesters offered her a bed for the night.

Just as the witch finished telling a story about a young Crowley, you got up to go to the kitchen in search of another beer. Entering the kitchen, you ran into Dean who was leaning against the stainless steel counter.

“Want another one?” You asked, holding up your empty bottle as you tossed it into the bin. Dean glanced up from his phone that he had been scrolling on and then shook his head.

“No,” he said curtly and then walked from the room without another word. You looked after him in confusion. Dean had been weird around you lately and you weren’t exactly sure why. Although, you knew that he was working through a lot since he got the Mark.

The Mark of Cain had become more of a problem as the days went on. Everyone was trying to find a solution for removing the infernal thing, but so far everyone had nothing. Brushing off his cold shoulder, you grabbed another beer and left to rejoin the group.

When you returned to the Library, Dean was nowhere to be found. “Where’s Dean?” Sam asked.

“No idea,” you said, reclaiming your seat across from Rowena. “He just walked away when I asked him if he wanted another beer.”

“He’s probably in the garage,” Castiel said with a sigh as he stood up and headed out of the library, his trench coat swishing behind him. You turned your attention back to your drink as Sam and Rowena gave each other a knowing look.

—————

“(Y/N) knows that something is wrong,” Castiel said as he walked up to Dean who was leaning over Baby’s hood.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Dean said with a one-shouldered shrug.

“Right,” Cas said, leaning against the car. “Dean, look at me.” When the hunter finally relented and looked at the Angel, he crossed his arms.

“What?” He asked.

“You know,” Cas continued, “for someone who has always told me to embrace human emotions, you are quite horrible at it.”

“Wow, thank you,” Dean deadpanned with a roll of his eyes, but Cas was not done yet.

“You know that they care about you, Dean.”

“Do I?”

“Do you think that (Y/N) would still be around if they didn’t?” Cas asked. Dean furrowed his brow.

“Are you saying that I am difficult to be around, buddy?” Dean asked, a bit of humor lighting up his eyes.

“At times, yes,” Castiel admitted and Dean shook his head with a chuckle. He should have known Cas was one to always tell the truth.

“So, what kind of wise advice do you have for me this time, Cas?” Dean asked.

“I think I’m all out of wisdom, Dean, but I do know that you’ll figure it out,” Cas said as he headed back inside, “you always do.”

-----------

Later that night, you sat alone in the library flipping through an ancient text. After a while, the words started to blur together, but you forced yourself to stay awake. You had to. 

For him. 

There wasn’t much literature on the Mark of Cain, but you had to try. Even though you all had combed through every book in the Men of Letters’ libraries, you felt the need to go through it all again just in case any of you missed something. 

Reaching for the cup of coffee that now sat empty, you sighed. “You don’t have to do that, you know,” a voice came from behind you. Sitting up straighter, you saw Dean approaching you. He sat down next to you at the table, a tired look on his face.

“It can’t hurt,” you said with a shrug. You flipped another page and then his hand came across yours, stopping you. He then closed the book, gaining your full attention. It was silent for a moment before Dean finally clasped his hands together and looked at you in the eyes. 

“I’m sorry for being a dick earlier,” Dean said and you frowned slightly. 

“It’s okay,” you said. “I mean, I get it.” Dean shook his head, running a hand over his jaw. 

“No, you don’t,” he argued. Dean looked at you with almost a pleading look in his eyes as if he was nearly begging you to see the honesty and truth that he was feeling. 

“Dean, you don’t have to explain how that thing makes you feel. Besides, Cas and Claire, they already gave me the rundown. Sam, too, so don’t worry about it.” 

“It’s not the Mark,” Dean said softly and you froze for just a second before looking at him in confusion. You prided yourself on knowing what the Winchesters were always thinking. They were a lot easier to read than they thought, but at that moment, Dean was a solid wall that you couldn’t break through. 

“Then what is it?”

“It’s just... You’re just always so flirty with people,” Dean finally admitted and you had to bite your tongue from laughing out loud. Instead, you opted for a slight chuckle. Dean looked slightly embarrassed, but you grabbed his hand to reassure him. 

“Is that bad?” you asked, still trying to hide your smile. 

“No!” Dean exclaimed and then lowered his voice a bit. “No, not at all. I mean, look at me, who am I to judge, right?”

“And yet?” you asked. 

“You never do it with me. The flirting,” he said and you let go of his hand awkwardly. Dean noticed immediately and looked away. 

“Oh,” you said, unsure of what else to say. 

“Yeah,” Dean said, his voice lower than usual. You noticed that he did that when he was either embarrassed or nervous. Looking at him, you felt emotions swell in your chest that you hadn’t acknowledged in some time. It was easier to not think about Dean when in reality, he was all you thought about. 

“I guess,” you began and Dean looked back at you, surprised to hear you actually answering him. “I guess it’s because I get nervous.”  

“About what?” Dean asked. His green eyes drilled into yours and you figured now was as good a time as any to be honest. 

“With the others, with Cas or Sam, it’s just fun and lighthearted jokes. However, when it comes to you, it’s different.” 

“Why?” 

“Dean…” you said softly, trailing off. You looked at him, urging him to understand everything you were feeling just through a look. It took him longer than usual to pick up on what you were trying to say and then his face softened. 

“Oh,” he whispered and then very carefully took your hand in his. Dean lifted your hand and placed it under his chin, holding it tight as he looked at you. “I never realized.”

“I’m sorry if you thought that I didn’t…” you said. 

“Don’t apologize, (Y/N),” he said, shaking his head, his stubble scratching along your knuckles. “I was being an ass and stupid as usual. I guess we both weren’t seeing clearly.” You moved your hand from under his chin to the side of his face. Dean leaned into your palm and it was oddly intimate, but it felt nice. 

“Let me help you fight this,” you whispered, your other hand ghosting over the Mark that was branded on his right arm. “Please don’t make me lose you.”

“You won’t,” Dean promised, moving closer to you. “Especially not now. Hell, it’s going to take a lot more than this damn Mark to make me leave you.” Dean then reached forward and cupped his hands around the back of your neck and pulled you into him. Your lips met and you completely forgot about the book that lay in front of you. As you kissed Dean Winchester, the only word that came to mind was, Finally. 

In the other room, Sam and Rowena leaned around the corner, eavesdropping on the conversation. 

“I told you, Samuel, that friend of yours has good taste,” Rowena said with a grin. 

“I hate when you’re right,” Sam said with a mocking smile. 

“No, you don’t,” Rowena said and then reached up and patted his cheek with a wink before strutting back towards her room.

Sam rolled his eyes, took one more glance at his brother and you who were finally taking that leap, and then ran after his witch. 

TAGS: @akshi8278​ @havesaltwilltravel​

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[allie1804-fan]

Ile de Re (Chapter 1)

I wrote this fic  last year, mostly while on holiday on this lovely island.  If you are on Archive of Our Own, you may have seen it before. Written before Matrix 4 was announced and before Covid so sorry that the timelines are no longer realistic!

Summary

Keanu meets a chef to help him prepare for a movie role. Events conspire for them to spend even more time together than they planned and despite the large age gap, romance ensues.

1 2 3 4 5  6 7 8

April 2020

Keanu hung up the phone and quietly fist pumped to himself. He’d just had news that a new project had been green lit. It was one he’d been collaborating on for some time - where he’d play an American chef, somewhat down on his luck who was establishing a new restaurant in a rural French town. The thing that thrilled him most was that the project afforded him the chance to finally learn how to cook – at least a bit - because he’d need to demonstrate some skill in the film itself and to ‘find’ his character he wanted to understand more about the craft of being a chef – especially the passion that drove them.

He went to his office and pulled out his laptop, opening a file holding details of some chefs who Erwin’s team had tracked down that fit the bill in terms of the knowledge they had and their personal experiences. He dropped an e mail first to a chef names Yves Le Gouhier and another to a woman called Claire Bonnevin. They each had restaurants in LA but were French natives who had trained at home before heading to America to open restaurants of their own. He hoped that the guy would say yes since he felt he’d probably relate better to his experience however he checked out both of their bios and looked at restaurant reviews on line.

A few days later, the decision was made for him as to who would give him the coaching as Mr Le Gouhier was out of town for at least a couple of months, establishing a new restaurant whereas Ms Bonnevin was able to fit him in for some daily ‘classes’ starting the following week. Whilst mildly disappointed, he also recalled that he’d actually eaten at Ms Bonnevin’s place once and had really rated the cooking which mixed homespun flavours with Gallic finesse - the seafood there was to die for.  He responded quickly in the affirmative, and ever the perfectionist, asked if there was anything he needed to bring or any preparatory work he could do before Monday. Claire replied that if he could let her have a working copy of the script and tell her what his favourite meal was before the weekend – they could work on the skills he’d need to demonstrate in the film and, depending on what the meal was, also aim to make his favourite meal to a good standard by the end of the week. If he had some friends who’d like to eat what he made, then he should ask them if they were free.

“What a question!” he pondered, thinking about what his favourite meal was. Keanu was a man who liked to eat - so much so that he needed the counsel of his trainer Denise to keep off the pounds in between films! Would it be a good steak with garlicky greens and crushed potatoes?, veal with a cream and mushroom sauce, roast lamb with flageolets and dauphinois potatoes – this task was just making him hungry!  He decided on the latter thinking it would be a challenge and fitted with the style of cooking they had at “Le Chat Botte” which was Claire’s restaurant. The pressure of feeding something he’d made that wasn’t bacon and eggs or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was both thrilling and unnerving. He messaged his sister Kim, his mother and friends Rob, Alex and Josh who were all pleased to be free although they joked that they might need to go to Macdonald’s to fill up afterwards!

Monday came around and Keanu pulled up at “Le Chat Botte” at 9am prompt. Entering via the service entrance as instructed, he walked into a spotless kitchen with gleaming stainless steel work stations, hobs and ovens  ranged along one wall and a large wooden kitchen table in the centre which had 2 sets of chopping boards in different colours along with a variety of knives, spatulas and other cooking implements arranged side by side in the centre of the table. No-one was in sight though Keanu could hear the sound of a voice coming from an adjoining room. Walking across the kitchen he stuck his head round the door of what turned out to be an office where he saw a petite, dark haired woman he recognised (from her bio) as Claire Bonnevin  - she was speaking to someone on the phone in French. She raised her hand to him in greeting, mouthing sorry and hurried to complete the call.

“Oui, Oui, je te rapellerai demain  - mon nouvel client vient d’arriver, oui oui c’est lui, donc il faut que j’accroche.  D’accord d’accord, je sais. Au revoir”

Claire turned to Keanu blushing - she had the distinct impression that he’d understood that she’d just referred to him in her conversation.

“so sorry about that – that was my restaurant manager back home in France just giving me an update on my dad  - he’s not been too well recently so we’ve been talking every day” Her English accent was excellent with only a slight gallic note.

Keanu stuck out his hand

“Nice to meet you Ms Bonnevin and no problem – you didn’t need to rush them off the line on my account”

Claire smiled and shook his hand, “I heard you were impossibly polite! – of course I did, I was eating into your paid time – nice to meet you too by the way. Keanu grinned - Claire could feel the colour rising in her cheeks again  - she wasn’t exactly sure why - maybe it was the directness of his gaze or the brilliance of his smile.

“So, are you ready for your training?”

Keanu chuckled and responded with what he thought was the expected reply “hell yeah” but Claire didn’t react, “maybe the Matrix reference was unintentional” he thought – she was pretty young after all, (her bio said she was 35) so maybe she was one of the few whom it had passed by!

“So let’s go through to the kitchen and get started” she said leading the way back to the room where Keanu had entered earlier.

For the next 4 hours they talked through and tried out some of the particular skills that would be needed in kitchen scenes. Whilst they worked, they got to know each other a little with Claire wanting to find out about Keanu’s food knowledge and experience and Keanu quizzing her about her beginnings in the industry. He discovered that she grew up on a tiny west coast island in France called L’Ile de Re” where her Dad still owned a restaurant called, like hers in LA, “Le Chat Botte”.  He no longer worked as a chef there but lived in the little village where it was, hence the manager being able to keep Claire appraised of his health.  She’d learned her craft there and then moved on to train in Paris, New York and then LA to establish her namesake restaurant in the US.

For her part, from what Keanu said, she could see that despite not having grown up in a house where people had a passion for cooking, he nevertheless clearly had a passion for food  - from the humble sandwich to fine foods from around the globe. He was also a quick study, picking up the knife skills needed to finely chop onions and garlic on film that he’d need. She was a patient teacher, though she would occasionally break into French when she was struggling to communicate the exact technique such as when at first he couldn’t master the rotation of the knife needed to chop finely:

“tient tient, comme ca” she said, placing her hand over his to show how the blade needed to rock back and forth over the garlic.

At 12 they broke for lunch at which point Claire challenged Keanu to make her his best sandwich from the ingredients on hand. He asked her what she liked and created a layered club sandwich which she declared excellent. By the time he left at 1pm, Keanu was convinced that she was an excellent choice of teacher and one he’d enjoy learning from. He could hardly wait for the next day when they were going to study cuts of meat by going to Claire’s favourite butcher.

The week progressed with a mix of hands on cooking classes and continued trips to suppliers which served to explain the importance of provenance and quality ingredients. They also worked on timings  and started to plan the stages of creating the menu Keanu had planned for Friday’s lunch.

On Thursday Keanu tried out the dauphinois potatoes and was thrilled with the result - he was really starting to enjoy cooking and his rapid growth in skill. Claire praised him warmly and suggested he try a dessert as well for the next day.

“You could try something simple like a mousse au chocolat but I think you’re ready to really wow them”

“Oh yeah?” Keanu grinned “With what?”

“A tarte Tatin”

“What!, are you sure?”

“Absolutely – you’re an excellent student - let’s do one today together, you’ll master it I’m sure”

She showed him how to prepare the sugar and butter in a special tin that could go on the stove and then in the oven to finish. They prepped the apples placing them rounded side down in the tin and proceeded to caramelise the butter and sugar until it was a gorgeous molten mahogany. Then he learned how to make the shortcrust pastry using cool hands to rub the butter into the flour then bring it together to a dough which rested in the fridge. Once rolled out, he placed it onto the cooled apples, tucking in the edges round the sides. The result when they turned the tarte out (upside down to reveal the apples) was amazing – sweet, tender apples with the sugary caramel cut a little by freshly grated lemon rind and a melt in the mouth pastry to top it off.

“See!” she smiled, “I knew you could do it”

“No, you did it!” he grinned

“Well, OK so today we both did it but tomorrow it will all be down to you”

Friday came and Keanu got to the restaurant at 8am wanting to have as much time as possible to get everything perfect.

By 11.30 the lamb was resting, his gratin and tarte were in the oven and the beans were simmering gently.

The meal was beginning with a simple salade aux lardons  - it was time to dress it with the vinaigrette he’d made earlier. He started to toss it gently but some lettuce flipped out over the side

“Watch out you don’t drop too many said Claire – unless you want lots of children’ she laughed!

“What?” Keanu asked, shooting her a quizzical look.

“it’s a saying we have in France that the number of leaves you drop when you’re tossing the salad tells you the number of kids you’ll have.

“Oh right” he chuckled, “that’s cute, but it’s way too late for that”

“What do you mean?, you’d have time to have them if you wanted, surely”

“I’m too old Claire”

“What, you must only be what?”, she paused to look at him and consider his face “…. About 45”

“Ha ha” Keanu laughed heartily.

“No, I’m fifty five”

“Merde” she exclaimed “ce n’est pas possible!”

Keanu shook his head and smiled - he loved how she reverted to French when she was reacting spontaneously to something.  

“I’m afraid it’s true, so even if I had a wife or even a girlfriend, I still think it’s too late to be having babies. I might be dead before they’re 20 or 30.

Claire’s face clouded over

“Sorry I didn’t mean to be all maudlin” he said

“Don’t worry, it’s just my mother died when I was 25 so I know that’s hard – but people die all the time, young and old.

“Ain’t that the truth” Keanu agreed quietly, remembering his own past.

“and lots of guys have babies when they’re older. Maybe you shouldn’t rule it out”

“Maybe maybe, anyway, enough serious talk, we should raise a toast before our guests arrive”

He poured himself and Claire a glass of wine.

“Here’s to satisfied customers!” she said

“and here’s to you for being such an amazing teacher – I can’t believe you’ve got me this far so fast”

“well that’s really down to you” she replied, smiling, “you work so hard and learn so quickly, it’s very impressive”

“I don’t know about that!” he said blushing, “Anyway, let’s not get ahead ourselves, I haven’t served it yet!!

They put down their glasses and Claire went to see if the guests had arrived at the table they had set aside in the restaurant. Meanwhile Keanu busied himself with finishing the salad and carving the lamb which he was happy to see was just the right shade of pink. He put it in the warming oven and also took out the tarte Tatin praying that it would be as good as the one yesterday when he turned it out later. Finally, with the main course as ready as it could be, he took the salad and some French bread through to the dining room.

The meal went down a storm - at the end Keanu stood and raised a toast to Claire

“Thank you for all your kind words folks but we really need to toast this amazing lady who has taught this old meat head some cooking skill. He took her hand and placed it over his heart

“ thank you, thank you, merci beaucoups, I’ll be forever grateful!”

Claire laughed and blushed.

“Just wait until next week when we’ll have you working in the restaurant kitchen, then you might not be such a fan!”

He laughed

“That may be!”

They said their goodbyes to Keanu’s amazed guests and went to clean down the kitchen.

“How’s your dad by the way?”

“Oh about the same apparently – no better, but no worse, he just needs to take it easy and stay off his damn bike”

“Oh, a pushbike or a motorbike?” Keanu asked, his interest peaked

“A push bike – he’s not a racer guy like you!” Claire saw Keanu pull up each day often on different bikes so she knew about his passion for them.

“everyone goes everywhere on bikes on the Ile de Re” she continued - it’s a cyclist’s paradise with cycle paths across the salt marshes and oyster beds and through the forests. But he had a heart attack last year and whilst he is supposed to exercise, he just pushes himself too much and that worries me”

“Do you have any other family there to keep an eye on him?”

“No, I’m an only child and there are no aunts or uncles either.

“Is your father still alive? She asked.

“Yeah – well at least I haven’t heard otherwise! He left my mother when I was three and I haven’t seen him since I was 13.”

“Mon dieu that must have been tough growing up without a dad”

“Yeah well I had my mum and my sister - he wouldn’t have been a good role model anyway”

“I could see today that you adore Kim and your mother”

“Yeah, yeah  I do - family and friends are my rocks to come back to  - after every project that’s what I look forward to”

“You know you’re not at all what I expected!” Claire stated.

“Oh, how so?” he asked

“Well, a couple of people I mentioned you to said they heard you were a nice guy and very polite but I guess I just expected someone more ………..starry, you know!”

Keanu burst out laughing.

“Well I’ll take that as a complement” he said

“you should – you’ve made it a very easy first week of teaching” she smiled

“Well thanks” he said the colour rising in his cheeks.

They finished up in the kitchen and Keanu took his leave saying he’d see her at 9am prompt on Monday for his week in the working kitchen.  He’d enjoyed her company so much that he’d almost asked her to dinner but held himself in check. She was so much younger than him and he knew his feelings weren’t entirely platonic. She was very cute with olive skin, beautiful eyes and a slender yet not too skinny figure – he didn’t really have a type but she hit the spot with him. He’d just have to quash those thoughts, focus on the learning and keep things on a friendly footing.

https://allie1804-fan.tumblr.com/post/625977593110364160/ile-de-re-chapter-2

[ayankun]

coffee shop au bitches (working title)

here, have this rough draft of the first half of part 1.  consider it proof of concept.  (the concept is Destiel Coffee Shop AU, but actually good) (”good;” YMMV)

9.3k words; Cas is human like everyone else so to compensate I made him socially anxious af; there’s a brief unpleasantness wherein someone in customer service gets harassed so watch out for that I guess; Cas is also carrying a lot of baggage (literally and metaphorically) and it’s vague for now but a little wearisome so GLHF I promise when it’s done-done they all get the kind of happy endings they deserved from the show

The town of Lebanon, Kansas sprang up without warning, its tree-lined streets shockingly claustrophobic after the three hours of patchwork browns and greens streaming by the smudgy window, the rolling plains uninterrupted to the very ends of the earth until the blank blue September sky finally picked up where the horizon left off.

Castiel felt his eyes strain, forced to reel in his thousand-yard stare, as he squinted at the blur of tidy little houses perched along Lebanon's brief outskirts.  He blinked away from the window and pushed himself to his feet, sidling carefully into the aisle to pull his duffle down from the overhead rack.  In short order, the bus turned onto the tidy little Americana main street and rolled up to a tidy little bus stop, and, reaching back into his seat to retrieve his briefcase, he squinted out at this, too.  

The screech of well-worn brakes, the brace against the final lurch of inertia, the hiss and clack of the doors at the front and back folding open; with no more pomp and circumstance than that, Castiel's journey reached its end.  Clutching the handle of his briefcase and slinging the straps of his duffle over one shoulder, he edged down the aisle and nodded his thanks to the driver on his way down the steps.  Finally, Castiel planted his sensible shoes on the cracked sidewalk, looked carefully up and down the stretch of unremarkable, middle-of-nowhere civilization, and wondered what the hell he thought he was doing here.

The bus shrieked and rumbled back into the non-existent late afternoon traffic, a thick gout of black exhaust signaling its farewell, leaving Castiel behind before he had a chance to change his mind.  He watched its departure absently for half a moment, road-weary and numb.  Then he hiked his duffle a little more snug against his back, turned around, and began an unhurried stroll the shady two and a half blocks back to the motel on the south side of town.

---

"Been expecting you," the woman behind the counter said the second Castiel pulled open the glass door to the motel office.

He paused, looked over his shoulder, saw no one among the growing shadows of the motel's empty parking lot, no one except a trucker hopping out of his cab parked at the gas 'n sip on the opposite corner.  Castiel watched him jog across the street towards the Biggerson's, the lights of its enormous, highway-facing sign flickering on in welcome, and turned back to shoulder his way inside.  "I did reserve a room over the phone," Castiel said, approaching the counter, "And I was told that a few . . . personal items would be held for me at the front desk?"

The woman, Billie, according to her name tag, responded with a nod, less in answer to his question and more in the way one does when one is not surprised by what they've just heard.  She pulled the keyboard to the old desktop computer closer to herself with one hand, and held the other out, palm up, to Castiel.  "ID and credit card."

Setting his briefcase down on the floor, Castiel dug inside his overcoat's interior pocket for his wallet.  By rote he thumbed out the military ID to give her, but at the last second his heart gave a sharp little twist and he drew it back.  Her lips twitched, nonplussed, but she waited patiently until he handed her his driver's licence instead.  She studied the picture on it for a second, mouthed the name, and carefully considered the face on the photo compared to the face on the man in front of her.  He shifted his feet nervously, thinking he should have just given her the first one, if only to avoid looking any more disreputable than he already did.  

Evidently their hangdog looks matched to her satisfaction, though, and she snapped the plastic down onto the counter, shifted her attention to the computer to check him in.

"Room's yours for the week," she read off the screen as he retrieved his licence and put the credit card down in its place.  She slid it over to herself without looking, only glancing down to read the numbers, obsidian black fingernails clacking proficiently over the ten-key peripheral plugged into the side of the keyboard.  "Checkout's at eleven on the 25th."

When she slid the card back over to him, Castiel palmed it off the counter, put it back into the wallet behind his IDs (driver's license on top), tucked the wallet back into his overcoat.  "Um.  I'm not exactly sure yet -- I may need to extend my stay."  Absently, he wondered why he sounded like he was apologizing for it.

Billie looked up from the computer screen at him, neutral.  "Whatever you need.  We can do you by the week, month, whatever.  Got your card on file, so you just let me know when I should stop charging it."

Castiel tried a smile he didn't feel, thinking as he did so that he probably shouldn't have bothered with one, what with how it seemed to crumple his face in unnatural ways.  "I will let you know, thank you."

She pulled a blank key card from a drawer and ran it through the machine to code it for his room.  "Here you go," she said, slapping it onto the counter with another plasticky snap, "Room 401."

"Thank you," he said again, taking the key card and putting it into his coat's front pocket. She held up a hand to keep him from running straight off to the room, a slightly unnecessary gesture, since he had no intention to do so.  Not without the banker's box that she was now pulling out from under the counter.

It was sealed with tamper-evident tape, noticeably intact as she spun it 180 degrees so he could also see his name and a brief description of the contents inked with a tidy hand in the space provided on the lid.  Billie pushed the box toward him and then tapped a nail over one of the items on the contents list.  "She's parked out front."

Castiel peered down at the item she had indicated.  "Keys," it said, rather cryptically, in that unfamiliar, efficient script.  He nodded.  "Thank you."

He bent to pick up the handle of his briefcase, letting the duffle fall farther across his back as he did so in order to free up space under his arm for the banker's box.  It worked, albeit inelegantly, and he felt a little foolish as he fumbled the box off the counter and turned to go.  He felt even worse when Billie said to his back:  "I'm sorry for your loss."

No part of him wanted to say "thank you" again, so he just paused long enough to indicate that he had heard her, and then went out through the glass door and back into the shadowed parking lot without saying a damn thing.

---

Room 401 opened into a concise sort of entryway that pointed him toward a small kitchenette lit primarily by the glare of the Biggerson's sign falling in through the window.  The space featured a round table with peeling laminate, two plastic-and-stainless-steel chairs, a sink and a microwave and a loudly humming fridge.  It was downright lavish compared to the accommodations Castiel had shifted between for the better part of his life.

The banker's box went onto the table, to be ignored until the time came Castiel felt ready to pry inside.

He shrugged his duffle off onto the end of the bed, the briefcase going onto the floor at its foot.  Successfully offloaded, Castiel turned and sat beside the duffle with his hands in his lap, looking at the boxy little TV set sitting on top of a banged up little dresser; at the dusty looking armchair shoved back in the corner to his right, under a dusty looking lamp; at the dim alcove immediately to the right of the TV, keeping discreet the bathroom sink and mirror and the door to the toilet and shower.

He didn't know what to do now.

Twisting to look at the digital clock on the bedside table, he marked the time with no real interest.  Just after 6:30.  Not enough daylight left to try and find his way around town, too early to sleep.  Not that he really felt compelled to do either of those things.  Not that he felt compelled to do anything.

But he had to do something, though, didn't he?  He had to keep moving forward, in whatever small way he could manage.  He had to.

With a long sigh that seemed almost to empty him completely, Castiel got to his feet.  He pulled his overcoat off, went to the alcove closet to hang it up, stopped at the sink to splash some water on his face.  He took a moment to appreciate his appearance -- mournful and aggressively unkempt after two solid days on the road -- before stepping out of the alcove to retrieve the briefcase.  He opened it on the bed and slipped the laptop out, digging around for the charger, and brought both to the dresser, setting the laptop to one side and plugging it into the outlet he found by tracing the TV's power cord.

He stood there, hunched a little over the open laptop, waiting for it to wake from its hibernating state.  He could check his email, at least, or scroll through the news he'd missed while in the air and in taxis and in the air again and in buses that sailed too quickly through isolated islands of 4G signal that lit up only a single bar before going dark again.

His desktop loaded, the wallpaper a heavily-filtered photo he'd pulled from who-knew-where:  just an expanse of faded teal, adorned only by a single, old-fashioned kite, bold and bright with primary colors, pinned there on the sky by an unseen breeze for all eternity.  He had set it a long time ago and never changed it; the image was a small comfort, though for what reason, he couldn't tell.  It wasn't his memory.

The fleeting sense of well-being provided by the tranquil wallpaper faded as quickly as it had come.  The only Wi-Fi network in range was named "Big D's iPhone" and it was locked.  Castiel refreshed the network scan a few times, hoping to see something that looked like it was related to the motel, but nothing else appeared.  He fished his phone out of his pocket for a second opinion, but it, too, displayed just the one fishy looking hotspot and very little 4G, even though he swung it around like an idiot, dowsing the room for a signal, watching the littlest bar wink at him no matter which out-of-the-way corner he took it to.

He even found himself squeezing between the table and the window, pushing the curtain aside as if the radio waves were having trouble making it through the few millimeters of dusty fabric.  He knew better, but it couldn't hurt.  In the Biggerson's lot, catty corner to the motel, a sleek black muscle car came to life with an animal growl, and he watched it prowl out onto the street and streak out towards the highway, taking Big D's iPhone with it.

---

It wasn't Billie manning the motel office when Castiel made his way back inside.  He didn't know why this should surprise him, but the fact that his expectations had been subverted in such a minor way somehow made him stutter his step as he entered.

The woman lounging in the office chair with her boots on the counter didn't wear a nametag.  She did look up from her magazine -- Knives Illustrated -- but only for a second, just a cool, cursory glance to let him know that she knew he was there and also that she wasn't too bothered by it.

"Howdy there, Clarence," she drawled.

Castiel didn't look over his shoulder, this time, but he did falter to a premature stop halfway to the counter, searching the vast middle distance as he tried to quickly figure out if he had enough information to parse the greeting.  He didn't.

"My name is Castiel," he informed her cautiously, eyes lifting to meet hers over the cover of her magazine.

She turned a page.  "Knew it was something hokey like that."

"Yes, well . . . hello," he said, brow furrowing.  She turned another page and he pulled his hand down over his rough five o'clock shadow, a token from his time on the road.  He probably should have cleaned up before leaving the room, but here he was.  He stepped forward, "Excuse me--"

"You're excused," she sing-songed at him.  The magazine dropped just enough to reveal her razor-sharp grin; it was not too dissimilar to the image on the front cover.

"--I was wondering if you knew where I might find a decent Wi-Fi signal in town."  He arrived at the counter as he was speaking, and placed both his hands palms down on its surface.  When she didn't stop looking at him, he picked his hands back up and dropped them to his sides.

She went back to the magazine.  "Depends.  Business or pleasure?"

"Alright," Castiel said, defeated, hands clenching irritably at nothing, "I apologize for having bothered you.  Enjoy your evening."

He turned his back on her, and wasn't going to stop even when he heard the magazine slap closed and her boots clump to the floor, but still that's exactly what he ended up doing as she called, "Hold up, C."

It was the impromptu nickname more than anything, since hearing it inspired him to send a pinched look of consternation back in her direction, where she was now leaning towards him with her forearms planted on the counter, her straight dark hair falling over one shoulder.  "I was only having a little fun," she told him once she was sure she had secured his attention, "We don't get fresh meat like you too often around these parts, and a girl's got needs.  How could I resist?"

"That is a very forward way to speak to a customer," Castiel intoned, the dip of his head turning judgemental.  He'd seen looks like that before; his skin crawled when they were for him.  His hands balled up and flapped open again, trying to shake it off.  "Good night."

"Best bet's the Roadhouse," she told him just as he reached out to push open the door.  Again, he paused, against his better judgement, and she took that as her cue to continue, "Just head on up Main Street, you can't miss it.  If you hit the prairie, you've gone too far."

Castiel ducked his head, hiding the twitch of a small, rueful smile at the joke that slipped its way in at the last second.  "Thanks," he said, more to the half-opened door than to anyone else.

"You watch yourself out there, fresh meat," she hollered a parting warning as the door swung shut behind him, "The freaks come out at night."

---

Castiel walked back to his room to get his overcoat, taking in the rosy hues of twilight that striated the western sky dead ahead of him, chewing over the likelihood that the insouciant woman meant what she'd said.  He couldn't imagine that a small town like this would be terribly dangerous after dark, but, then again --

Stopping at the door to 401, he carefully prodded his better judgement into at least considering taking the car -- he looked at it from the corner of his eye, trying not to dwell too long on the idea that its previous owner would have left indelible personal traces behind -- and, sure enough, he wasn't ready to go digging.  Not in the box, and certainly not in the car.

Castiel gently shook out the fist he had made, swept his eyes over the brilliance of the western sky, and decided he was in the right kind of mood for a walk.

He unlocked his door, entered the room to grab his overcoat, stuffed the laptop back into the briefcase, exited again, pointed himself towards Main Street without giving the car another thought.

---

Turned out she was right about one thing, the Roadhouse was impossible to miss.

From the way the neon sign lit up the rustic wood siding of the cowboy-chic exterior, he half worried the establishment was a bar of some sort.  The windows were dark, the shades drawn down against the setting sun, so he only could only make a guess based on what the exterior looked like.  Hesitating on the sidewalk under a street lamp, Castiel squinted up at it and waged a minor civil war with himself as to whether it would be worth it to go in and find out.

He slowly turned around on the spot, in his little pool of light, casting up and down the nearly deserted street for some kind of sign that would help him choose one way or the other.  Small town Kansas didn't seem to have much going for it, in the way of nightlife; from what he could tell, the storefronts looked exclusively like the little mom-and-pops one would expect from the heartland -- the highway-adjacent Biggerson's the evident exception -- and all of these were either closed or closing.

He completed his inspection, coming face to face once again with the Roadhouse.  On the one hand, it purportedly had Wi-Fi, his current mission being to locate the same.  On the other hand, it looked like a bar, and he didn't want to walk in there with his out-of-towner face, with his uncool overcoat and his briefcase, and specifically avoid ordering alcohol.

He was just coming around to the idea that he could very well survive off the grid for a night when a pair of headlights attached to a shadow came roaring down from the north end of the street at him, the car banking into a smooth, undoubtedly illegal U-turn in the middle of the block, slinking confidently into the open space directly under Castiel's street lamp.  The engine cut off, then the lights, and then a man was ducking out of the driver's side, slamming the door shut behind him.

Castiel was stuck.  He hadn't counted on this particular type of social awkwardness, caught loitering on the street without anything to say for himself.  He averted his eyes, expecting the man to pass him by and go on with his business, but to his increasing embarrassment and frustration, the guy stepped up onto the sidewalk and shoved his keys into a pocket of his green canvas jacket and definitely didn't continue on his way.

"Coming or going?" he asked.  The voice was something of a deep growl, but the tone was friendly enough.  

Castiel looked up to be polite, or, at least, to be less weird.  "I don't know," he found himself saying.  Any chance to possibly come across as a reasonable human being was thoroughly smashed, he thought.  He couldn't talk his way out of this one, even if he tried.  Especially if he tried.  "I've only just arrived," he added.

The guy looked him up and down, not in a lecherous way, or even in a macho, sizing up the competition way; just an unguarded appraisal of his bus-rumpled appearance, the suspicious looking briefcase, the disconcerting way he was caught standing in the dark looking at the door of a place without going in.  The inspection was over in a second, and concluded with a good-natured nod and an open-handed wave that clearly said, "yeah, I figured out that much on my own."

"Well, we don't bite," the guy said aloud, slapping Castiel hard on the shoulder, making him rock from the impact and almost exactly undermining the sentiment.  He immediately turned and stepped up to the Roadhouse's door, hauling it open and beckoning back at Castiel to get his ass inside.  "C'mon, at this rate they'll be closed before you make up your mind."

If Castiel had been looking for some kind of sign, this was clearly providence's way of sending him one.

Even so, he realized he had started moving forward to accept the invitation without consciously meaning to, and, well, he had a lifetime of conditioning to thank for that.  Castiel, ever the good little soldier, taking orders at face value, instead of thinking for himself.  He frowned a little on the inside -- remembering to briefly tug a smile of thanks on the outside -- until the wave of warm, coffee-scented air hit him in the face along with the unavoidable understanding that the Roadhouse was not, in fact, a bar.

The relief of this revelation was powerful enough to enable him to put his weird little hangups back inside the box where they belonged, his outside smile going soft and honest around the edges, and he ducked his head sheepishly at the guy, who had followed him in.  Automatically angling himself towards the register, as one did one when one entered a coffee shop, he said, "I was informed there was Wi-Fi here.  Just not what 'here' was.  'The Roadhouse' sounds -- I thought perhaps it was a bar."

His honesty caught himself off-guard, uncertain as to where the need to explain himself to this stranger came from, exactly.  It was probably because he had already demonstrated the kind of small town friendliness that made Castiel feel like it would be read as rude if he didn't attempt a bit of smalltalk in return.  The guy looked like a nice enough sort of person to meet halfway; about Castiel's age, a little younger, perhaps; kind of a non-threatening good-ol'-boy with his ripped jeans, plaid flannel, and his not-quite-scruffy-not-quite-clean-cut style.  Castiel thought that maybe he could survive being social for a minute or two, with someone like this.

Instantly, this thought hit a bump in the road, as his new friend twisted a funny look at him.  "Got something against bars?"

Castiel dropped his eyes and tried to ignore his obvious misstep while he drifted into the back of the line, behind a towering mountain of a man in a black leather jacket.  Castiel wasn't short, by any stretch of the imagination, but the two men hemming him in were both taller still.  He thought about his answer to the question, flicking rapidly through the options, but wasn't able to pick one that was both simple and truthful before the guy abruptly leaned in.  This startled Castiel, who instinctively shifted away a half step, shoulder bumping up against the glass that separated him from a shiny brass espresso machine.

The guy didn't notice his discomfort, having breached Castiel's personal space to say in a stage whisper:  "If it's rough company you're worried about, nothin' to be afraid of, around here.  The real seedy joints are across town.  Ain't that right, Tiny?"

At this last, he straightened up and raised his voice some, directing the question straight past Castiel.

Castiel turned his head to see the huge leather jacket man fixing the tall canvas jacket man with a full-bodied glare.  He also, at this time, took in the man's shaved head and appreciated the twisting serpent logo coiled on the back of the jacket.  He shifted even closer to the espresso machine, clearing the space between the two men as best he could.

But "Tiny" didn't otherwise react, just turned back and stepped up to the register, boots heavy on the wooden floor.

"Wi-Fi's pretty decent here, yeah," Castiel's companion went on.  Castiel looked back to him, surprised to see him relaxed and indifferent, like he hadn't just specifically tried to antagonize a 400-pound member of a biker gang after dark.  "And the lattes are alright.  Fair warning:  your choices are pretty much either that or black coffee, those're the only things the kid can't mess up too bad."

Off the guy's nod over Castiel's shoulder, he obediently turned and saw the referenced kid -- in actuality, a young, sandy-haired man of about seventeen or eighteen -- working the espresso machine on the other side of the glass.  The milk frother hissed demonstratively for a moment, the kid's face pinched in comically serious concentration on the task, but when he shoved the arm back into the off position, he looked up to see who was watching him and broke out into one of the purest smiles Castiel had ever seen.

"Hello!" the kid said, sunnily, like Castiel was his closest friend and not a literal stranger gawking at him like a zoo animal.  The hand that had been operating the machine was summarily raised in greeting, palm forward, fingers wide.  He radiated a positively angelic energy that instantly made Castiel feel at ease, despite the anxiety of the last several minutes, somehow even despite the soul-crushing weight he'd brought with him to town.

"Hello . . . Jack," Castiel replied, after realizing he could make out the kid's name tag pinned to his apron.  Pinned to their apron, rather, as he belatedly noted the "they/them" pronoun declaration stuck on underneath the name with white label tape.  He smiled, the desire to return just a small portion of the hospitality he'd received so far rising ferociously inside him, one of the strongest emotions he'd had the pleasure of feeling in recent memory.  "I've been informed I should try one of your lattes."

He nodded at the stainless steel carafe of foamed milk in the kid's hand, and they looked down at it as if they'd forgotten it was there.  "Oh!  Yes, I suppose you should."  They poured the milk into a waiting paper cup of espresso, face contorting back into that look of supreme concentration for only as long as it took to pour, smiling back up at Castiel the second the task was done.  "I'm still learning how to make everything, but I'm getting better at the basics."

"Yeah, you are," the guy behind Castiel said, in that manner of speaking that was as aggressive as it was supportive.  Jack grinned shyly, ducking their head at the praise, and shuffled the drink off to the pick-up counter on the other side of the register.

Castiel looked back over to see the guy grinning after the kid, and a thought hit him.  "Are you their . . . parent?" he asked, tripping and catching himself on Jack's pronoun only slightly, a very jarring rush of panic hitting him in time to swerve around using the word "father," just in case gender-nonconformity ran in the family.

The . . . person met Castiel's eye and then looked away, shrugging a little.  "Oh me?  Nah.  I mean.  Sorta.  We're kind of just, looking after them, I guess you could say."

The use of the first-person plural pronoun seemed like something Castiel would pry into next, were he the prying sort.  Instead, he very, very briefly wondered what the average household looked like in Lebanon, Kansas, these days, or if he'd just stumbled into the exception on accident.

A hand was extended his way, along with a name.  "Dean," Castiel was told as he accepted the handshake, "He/him, in case you were wondering."

Castiel let out an inward sigh of relief, and the guy winked before adding:  "Aquarius.  Stones, not Beatles.  Star Wars and Star Trek, but not the garbage that came out after the nineties."  Dean let Castiel's hand go with a chewed-on smile and something of a self-deprecating eyebrow wag.  "That's basically all the important stuff you have to know about me up front."

"Castiel," he returned, "And . . . I am also a man."

Dean snorted a short little breath at that, eyes bright.  He rubbed his chin, scratching through the close-trimmed stubble.  "Castiel, huh?"

Castiel pressed his lips together and took a moment to take stock of the state of his shoes, squaring himself for the inevitable question about his uncommon name, but for once it didn't come.  Dean didn't have the chance to ask it.  When Castiel glanced up, Dean was looking over Castiel's shoulder in the direction of the register, all traces of his friendly disposition replaced by a cold scowl.

As one did, Castiel, too, turned to follow Dean's gaze, searching out the source of his sudden displeasure.  For a second he assumed it had something to do with Jack, maybe getting into some difficult situation with a customer, but at a glance he saw that he only had it half right.  Instead of Jack, it was the young woman behind the register, who pulled her wrist out of Tiny's pawlike grasp as Castiel watched.

Castiel's throat closed up, his second-hand anxiety over the situation momentarily flooring him.  Embarrassed, he looked away, out over the sparsely populated cafe, everyone he saw slowly doing the same:  turning back to their screens and their friends, pretending nothing had happened.

Everyone but Dean, Castiel saw as he finally looked back up at him.  Dean was still watching Tiny closely, his brow drawn down and his mouth set in a firm line.  He flicked his eyes down to Castiel when he caught him looking, and did a stuttered double take when he realized he had accidentally leveled that glare at him.

Dean relaxed his expression into something more neutral, obviously seeing the stress on Castiel's face; while Dean was clearly angered by Tiny's overreach, Castiel couldn't help but project a grim ache that he didn't want to name.  Dean's head tilted, as if he was slowly cottoning on to the depth of Castiel's discomfort the longer he looked at him, and Castiel saw his jaw clench the moment before they both looked sharply back over at the register, hearing the woman's voice rise, frustrated and disgusted, over the country twang of the canned music pumping through the coffee shop's speakers.

"You kiss your mama with that mouth?"  The young woman had taken a full step back into the space behind the counter, dodging out of the way of Tiny's reach.  Castiel could see fire in her eyes, and barely registered Jack standing nervously on her other side.

Tiny laughed, a rolling chuckle that filled Castiel's gut with acid.  The huge man leaned up against the counter, shoving a shoulder as far as it would go into the open space next to the register, and curled his hand around the far edge of the counter.  "Why, you jealous?  How 'bout you pucker up, sweetcheeks, let me show you what you're missing."

In an instant, the nerves and disgust flushed out of Castiel's system, and in its place a white-hot righteous anger swirled up.  His hands twitched, settling for fists, and he took a lurching step forward, his briefcase swinging roughly into his leg, the emotion spilling out of him in a growl of "Hey, asshole--"

"Yeah, alright--" Dean growled at the same time, taking the same step forward, bringing him even with Castiel, the two men suddenly a solid wall staring daggers into Tiny's back.

"Stay out of this, Dean," the young woman said, fierce.  The tone in her voice caused Jack to flinch, snatching back the reassuring hand they'd been tentatively reaching her way.

Tiny heaved himself off the counter, turning to face them slowly, deliberately, letting them appreciate his size and giving them ample time to reconsider the hill they might be about to die on.  Castiel's chin went up, eyes narrowed.  At his side, Dean sniffed and thumbed his nose, aggressively nonchalant.

A devil-may-care smile on his face, Dean put one arm wide.  "No can do, Jo.  There's a quick way to handle huge, steaming piles of human garbage like our friend Tiny here," he said, making stabbing motions with his hand at the man in question, "and I'd hate to see you lose your job over a broken jaw."

Castiel glanced sharply up at Dean, trying to gauge the realistic chances of an all-out brawl going down right here between the novelty mugs and the last of the day's homemade baked goods.  Lebanon, Kansas was quickly proving to be something other than the sleepy, middle of nowhere hamlet he had assumed it would be.  

In fairness, though, he had been warned that the freaks came out at night.

Dean didn't exactly look ready for a fight, though, loose-limbed and calm, fixing Tiny with a cocky grin that was daring the biker to make the first move.  Castiel forced his own shoulders down, his fist to relax around the handle of the briefcase he was gripping like a weapon.  He cut his eyes over to Tiny, who was equally not rising to the bait, just sneering at them for what he was reading as biteless bark.

"Like to see you try, pretty boy," Tiny said, digging in his heels.

Castiel frowned, seeing that the situation had ground into a stalemate before it had even started, two immovable objects sizing each other up, both content with the fact that the one who either struck first or walked away first would make himself the de facto loser of the conflict, one way or another.  Even so, Castiel strongly felt that neither of these two would be the type to walk away.  He raised a hand, palm out, and tried to press some sense into the moment before one of them exhausted their patience and decided to throw a match onto this powderkeg.

"No one has to try anything," he warned, making sure Dean knew he was included in the list of people encouraged to stand down, "Let's all conduct ourselves as civilized people.  Please, just leave the young woman alone, let her do her job in peace."

Tiny peered down at him and made it clear it wasn't about to back off just because a stranger in a rumpled trenchcoat asked him to play nice.

Dean, meanwhile, licked his bottom lip and looked like he might actually be considering his options.  He nodded, ducking his head as though coming to an overdue realization.

"See, I know Tiny's mom," Dean said, raising his eyebrows at Castiel.  

Castiel dropped his own right back at him, a suspicious squint pinching his face as he felt in his gut that the situation was about to spin off the axle in some unforeseen way, despite his best efforts to prevent that exact outcome.

Dean went on, unperturbed, sliding one hand into his pocket as he half turned away from Tiny, like he was just carrying on their friendly chat from before, like they didn't have a behemoth of an audience listening in.  "And I know she would be appalled -- shocked, even -- if she found out what her son was up to when she ain't looking.  Sweet old Martha, she's been in hospice for what, six weeks?  Seven?"  

He swiveled suddenly and jabbed his free hand at Tiny--  "Please, correct me if I'm wrong--"  Back to Castiel, he tapped his own chest twice to demonstrate-- "The ol' ticker's just not what it used to be, or so I hear.  Can't imagine what a bit of bad news might do to her delicate constitution."

As he said this last part, Dean's arm fell, and with it his cheery facade.  He rolled his head Tiny's direction, offering him one of the coldest, meanest looks Castiel had ever seen on a person.

All seven feet of Tiny was now quivering with a quiet kind of rage, his boiled egg of a head going pink as he struggled to hold it in, to not lose the game of chicken he and Dean were playing.  "You're not gonna tell my Ma nothing, you hear me?"

Dean exploded forward a half step, a finger viciously stabbing the air in the vicinity of Tiny's face.  "You stop being a dick, and I'll have nothing to tell," he roared.

"Dean!" Jo shouted over the top of him, slamming her hands down on the counter.

Everyone in the coffee shop flinched.  Castiel felt himself hang his head, feeling the sting as if he himself had been scolded.  But he'd made himself a part of it, stepped in and got involved, hadn't been able to prevent escalation.  He looked out of the corner of his eye at Jo, thinking that maybe he should apologize, but she was just glaring at Dean with hard eyes and a furious shake of her head.

"Out," she ordered.

Dean ignored the way she obviously meant him, and swung an open grin Tiny's way, canines and tongue showing.  "You heard the little lady."

Jo grit her teeth.  "Both of you, out.  We don't need your kind of trouble here."

Something about what she'd said or how she said it got Dean's attention.  He dropped his arms to his sides with a slap of canvas on canvas, twisting her way with a schoolboy pout pulling down his face.  "C'mon, Jo.  You know I didn't mean it.  You know me.  I would never--"

"Save it," she cut him off.  "Jack's shift ends in twenty-five minutes.  Go wait in the car."

There was a second where Dean gaped, fish out of water, at the order, but the cool, commanding look that came with it forcibly shut his mouth with an audible click and he reared back, bumping into Castiel slightly.  "Alrighty, then," he huffed, stomping the wrong way through the line and on towards the door without looking back.  

Castiel watched his boots retreat over the polished wood of the floor, heard the bang of the door being slammed open with more force than absolutely necessary, then tilted his head to catch Jo giving Tiny the same icy treatment.

"What are you waiting for, then, an invitation?  Go on, get.  And if you try something like that again, trust me, I won't bother with your Ma.  I'll go get mine."  She smiled, sweet and sharp, leaned forward over the counter, right into Tiny's personal space, to make sure her point wasn't missed.  "And we can see how many bones she can break before the Sheriff hauls her off your dead body."

An ominous kind of tension straightened Castiel's shoulders, surprised at Jo's candid threat, doubtful that hers would work where Dean's had failed.  After a moment, though, Tiny heaved his bulk away from the counter, gave Castiel a dirty look, and similarly made his inglorious retreat into the night.

Castiel wondered what was going to happen now between the two men, whether they were going to carry on in the street or just back off to lick their wounds until their next meeting.  He hoped Dean had sense enough to actually get in the car, at least.

"Next!"

Distracted from the errant thought of the well-being of a near stranger, Castiel turned to see Jo smiling at him from behind the register, the picture of award-winning customer service, and nothing like the stone-cold demon who had seconds ago threatened to have her mother bludgeon a customer to death.  He stepped up to place his order, thoroughly cowed.

"I apologize for the scene, for my part in it," he told her quietly as he leaned to one side to set the briefcase on the floor at his feet, reaching for his wallet.  "You clearly didn't need us to butt in, but still, I hope you're alright."

She waved his apology away, shaking her head.  "Nothing to be sorry for, it's fine.  Small town like this, hard for some folk to avoid bumping into the folk they shouldn't be bumping into.  It happens, you handle it, you move on.  What can I get started for you tonight?"

Castiel offered her a small smile, feeling it press a little tight around his eyes, his misplaced guilt swirling harder at her need to project such a tough exterior.  It was unfortunate and unfair that the world demanded the thickest skins from some people more than others, and his heart ached in a vague, nameless way, wishing there was something he could do to alleviate the need for someone so young to have constructed such a defensive worldview.

Off her expectant look, he willed himself to remember what he ought to be doing in the here and now.  He gave the menu board on the back wall a cursory review, not really consuming its contents in any meaningful way, until he looked down and caught Jack's eye from where the eager barista floated at a respectful distance between Jo and the espresso machine.

Castiel smiled, this time with notable ease as he remembered Dean's earlier suggestion.  "A small latte, please.  It came highly recommended."

"You got it," Jo nodded, punching the order into the register and pulling a cup from the stack.  "Your name?"  She looked up at him, reaching into a mug with a missing handle to fish out a Sharpie.

"Uh, Castiel," he supplied, and spelled it for her benefit, just in case.

"Castiel," she repeated, as most did when confronted with his name for the first time, trying it out for themselves, "That's got kind of a Biblical ring to it, doesn't it?  Don't tell me you're some kind of guardian angel?"  

"Hardly," Castiel murmured, dropping his gaze to focus on pulling the correct currency out of his wallet.

Jo passed the cup with his name on it to Jack, who immediately took it to the espresso machine and got to work, that same serious look of concentration commandeering their entire face for the duration.

"Anything else for you today?" she asked.  

It was one of those scripted niceties that Castiel truly appreciated about by-the-book social interactions.  A perfect sequitur that spared him the effort of trying to come up with one on his own.  "Do you have a password for the Wi-Fi?"

She nodded, slipping a business card sized piece of paper from a loose stack next to the register, and handed it over in trade for the cash he gave her in return.  As she punched open the till and dug around for his change, he glanced down at the code.  It read "N@turomDem0nto," which, as far as Wi-Fi passwords went, was certainly one.

The till banged shut with a ring, Jo handing him back his change.  Seeing his bemused look as he inspected the hotspot info, she explained, "Sorry, I know it's a little out there.  Our IT guy, Ash, he's a bit of a supernatural freak."

"I see," Castiel said agreeably, though he felt fairly certain that there was some additional piece of trivia he was missing to be able to recognize the significance of the unintelligible string of letters and numbers.  He put the paper into his pocket, dumped the loose change from his palm into the tip jar, and retrieved his briefcase.  "Thank you."

Jo's eyebrows came down, not unkindly, as her lips pursed in baffled amusement.  "No problem," she laughed, shaking her head at him.  "Jack'll have your drink out in a minute."  She waved him in the direction of the pickup counter, and Castiel went gratefully on his way, looking forward to the upcoming stretch of time where he didn't have to make small talk, or try to avoid physical altercations, or accidentally say "thank you" after tipping.

The remaining patrons of the Roadhouse appeared to have cleared out since he had last looked, but whether this was due to the late hour or the recent potential for violence, he couldn't be sure.  Castiel thought about Dean waiting for Jack out in that beast of a car; thought about Tiny (or men like him) lurking out on the streets.  

He pulled out his phone, noting the time as he thumbed to the Wi-Fi settings.  Again, the hotspot listing was sparse, just the one named after the Roadhouse -- finally, full bars -- and, to his muted surprise, "Big D's iPhone."

He was still looking curiously at the cafe's curtained windows, in the direction where he knew that sleek black muscle car with the animal growl was parked under a street lamp, when a bright voice chimed behind him:  "Here you go!"

Sliding his phone back into his pocket, Castiel turned to face Jack, finding a bloom of warmth filling the hollow of his chest to see them sliding his latte over with an exceedingly proud look on their face, certain of a job well done.  Right on the drink's tail, Castiel was surprised to see a small plate with a piece of apple pie being pushed his way as well.

He held up his hand to stop or question the freebie, thinking he hadn't done anything today to have earned getting rewarded with pie, but Jo popped up at Jack's side and gave him one of those looks he already recognized as meaning he wouldn't be allowed to decline.  His bottom lip pursed, he reached out and obediently pulled the plate the rest of the way over with one finger.

"At closing time, we either have trash all the leftover perishables or give 'em away," Jo explained.  She nodded down at the plate with something of a wicked grin, "Normally I'd be packing this up for Jack to take home for Dean, but here's hoping I can teach him something by revoking his pie privileges for one night."

Castiel's eyes went wide, and his hand flew off the rim of the plate as though it had burned him.  Before he could figure out a way to articulate how uncomfortable it made him to know he was stealing someone's pie, Jack laughed and shook their head.

"No, it's okay, really.  Sam's always saying Dean needs to watch what he eats.  So, you're helping!"  They chirped this last bit with a scrunch of the eyes and a jerky shrug of their shoulders.  Jo backed the assertion, a tilt of her head and a jag of her brow to say Castiel really didn't have the room to argue with either of them on this.

"Ah," Castiel said, eyeing the pie like it was a plate full of gold, feeling completely unworthy, "If that's the case. . ."

He looked up, met Jo's and then Jack's eyes, and told them solemnly, "I appreciate it."

Jack's endearing smile crinkled onto their face again, and Jo patted them on the arm.

"Hey, we're all set here," she said to Jack, "Why don't you clock out a little early, okay?  I won't tell my mom."

Castiel kept his small smile to himself, busied himself shifting his briefcase to his other hand as Jack eagerly tripped off to head out for the night.  Still, he lingered a little at the pickup counter, not missing the guarded way Jo eyed the front door, which gave nothing away as to what kind of trouble might still be skulking in the night on the other side.

She caught him noticing, which was fine, because his thoughts were running along similar tracks.  It gave him the cue to share his own.  "Um," he started, glancing away, "Would it be a problem if I stayed until closing?  There's, uh, no Wi-Fi at the motel."

When he looked back over at her, shy, she was giving him a soft eye roll with her mouth screwed up to one side to hide some kind of smile.  She chewed on the inside of her cheek a moment, then looked heavenward with a good-natured sigh.

"You know, for a guy who swears he's not a guardian angel--"

Behind her, Jack, who had traded their apron for a colorful windbreaker, swung through the half-door at the far end of the counter, on the other side of the espresso machine, and called out a chipper, "Good night, Jo!  Good night, sir, hope you enjoy your drink!"

Oh.  Castiel hastily lifted the paper cup, Jo waving her own goodbye as Jack trotted across the shop floor towards the exit.  He took a sip of the latte, cringing a little to discover that it was still far too hot to drink without caution; even so, he smiled at Jack and gestured with the cup.  "It's very good, thank you."

He was treated to another of those full-face, joyous smiles, and then Jack was out the door and Castiel was left alone with Jo, his scalding latte, and his unearned pie.  He thumbed the lip of the plastic to-go lid, only half-certain she had approved of him sticking around now that she was on her own behind the counter.  For all she knew, he could be just as rotten as any of them, just biding his time until--

"Please help yourself to our Wi-Fi for as long as you'd like," Jo told him, fixing him with a kind, if ever-so-slightly bemused, look.  

He nodded his thanks, and, using the bottom of his drink, shifted the pie plate over to the edge of the counter where he caught it in the fingers of the hand already tucked under the handle of the briefcase, maxing out his awkwardness in doing so.  Jo was biting her lip, watching the juggling act unfold before her, but she didn't otherwise comment.  With a short smile of parting, Castiel fled -- cautiously -- to a small table at one of the shaded windows, far from Jo and close to the door.

As he went, the sound of a car engine, startling in both how loud and how familiar it seemed to him, rumbled up through the coffee shop's backdrop of picked guitars and singing fiddles.  By the time Castiel took a seat, it had already roared off into the distance.  He was glad its driver seemed not to have run into any further trouble, after all.

Drink settled, pie settled, Castiel himself settled, he set the briefcase on the floor beside him and clicked it open just enough to drag the laptop out from the pocket. He slid it onto the table between his other items, determined to connect to the Wi-Fi and check his email, to do the one thing he had ventured out to do, even if only to say he had.

As suspected, he now saw no trace of "Big D's iPhone" nearby, and carefully punched in the access code to the Roadhouse's network.  The computer connected without fanfare.  Dutifully, he clicked on his email app and watched the logo splash pop up over the muted periwinkle of his desktop wallpaper.

While the program loaded up, he reached out and pulled the pie over and dug a chunk out of it with the fork that had been so kindly provided.  The first bite reminded him that he hadn't eaten since Kansas City, and his focus narrowed to the singular task of slicing and chewing until there was nothing left but crumbs stuck to the cinnamon-sugary tracks his fork made as it scraped over the plate's inexplicable cowboy boot pattern.

Returning the plate and fork to the table with a sigh, Castiel took up his latte, now sufficiently cooled, and sipped this while flicking his fingers over the laptop's trackpad, disinterestedly scrolling through his inbox.  The loss of a few of his taste buds notwithstanding, he found he was able to appreciate the quality of Jack's handiwork, and he felt retroactively absolved for the preemptive high marks he'd given.

He stopped scrolling.  Not that he'd been paying attention to the task anyway, but thinking about the young person's ineffable good cheer and the mercurial temper of their guardian had him staring at the curtain as if he could see straight through it, into the street and the night, imagining the shine of the street lamp off the hood of that dangerous-looking car.

He drank the rest of his latte while absorbed in the expanse of his mind's eye, the limitless vistas of the day's bus ride peppered with half-remembered moments of the evening so far,  impressions of the short stretch of Main Street Lebanon he'd traversed, the faces of strangers blending one into the next into the next.  There was one face in particular that he kept circling back to, though, and one moment that was sharper than the rest.

Standing under that street lamp, waiting.  Waiting for--

"Sorry to interrupt," Jo said, tentative, seeming to materialize at Castiel's table.

He whipped his head away from the window -- had he really just been staring blankly at the curtain this whole time?  What must she think -- and pushed back his chair to try to get with the program.  "Sorry -- you've probably been waiting--"

She laughed and held up her hands, and he slowed his frantic sweeping of his belongings from the table.  "Whoa, there.  I was just gonna give you a five-minute heads up, is all.  Didn't mean to spook you."

Castiel perched the briefcase he had snagged from the floor onto his vacated chair, and gently slid the laptop back inside.  "I'm fine," he said, snapping the clasp closed, "please don't let me hold you up."

"No worries," she told him, and when he darted his eyes over to her, she was giving him that slightly amused, slightly puzzled look she'd been giving him since he walked in.  She cleared his plate and cup from the table and made off with them.  He picked up his briefcase and pushed in the chair, standing purposelessly there at its side.

She looked back over her shoulder at him, seeing him not leaving.  "Five minutes," she said again, "and then I'm going to let you walk me to my car, okay?  You seem sweet, and I just can't help feeling like you'll have an aneurysm or something if I walk out there alone."

"Sorry," Castiel repeated.  He frowned, suddenly very invested in the stitching on his briefcase handle.  "I've overstepped again."

Jo pushed open the swinging half-door of the counter and regarded him from across the coffee shop floor.  "I'll let it slide, this once.  Just don't make a habit of it," she told him with mock-gravitas, fighting back a telling smile before disappearing into the back.

It was a joke, he could tell, something to dispel the awkward energy Castiel had fomented up around himself.  It worked, just a little, and he took a deep breath and let it out in a quiet sigh at himself.  Anyway, he could promise her that, and easily.  He didn't know exactly how long he'd end up spending in Lebanon, Kansas, but it wasn't like he was planning on sticking around forever.

He shuffled his feet, waiting on Jo's return, and willed himself to imagine opening that sealed box.  Digging out the keys to the wide, boxy, gold-colored Lincoln Continental.  Climbing into the driver's seat and watching this speck of a town vanish in the rearview mirror.

He wondered what tape would be playing in the deck, or maybe what radio station it was still set to.  What the scent of the air freshener hung over the mirror was, and whether the built-in ashtrays needed to be emptied.  What he might find forgotten under the seats.

All at once, a full-body shudder rolled over him, overwhelmed by all these questions with answers he couldn't yet face.  

"Ready?"

He looked up as Jo crossed to the door and flicked the bank of switches to shut off the overhead lights, leaving them both shadows lit faintly by the glow of the displays on the equipment behind the counter.

Ready?  Not in the slightest.

"After you," he murmured, reaching out to push the door open.

---

Castiel showered with military efficiency, the rushing water just about drowning out his empty thoughts.

He changed into his sleepwear mechanically, put himself into the bed, and flicked on the television because there was nothing else left to do.  The day was finally catching up to him, and his body ached as it reluctantly gave itself over to the support of the mattress.  His bones felt heavy, his eyes raw.  He flipped channels without comprehending anything he saw on the tiny screen.

Maybe it was the jangle of espresso in his veins, or maybe it was his internal clock's confusion regarding what time zone he'd ended up in, or maybe it was his white-knuckled refusal to find out what his subconscious had in store for him, but it was several long, dull, droning hours of late-night soaps and infomercials before Castiel finally let go and allowed himself to sleep.

[jblmetalwork]

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[sammysellshomes]

34792 Dorado Common, Fremont CA 94555 | Home for Sale

A gorgeous condo at a prime location!

Don’t miss this beautifully updated Fremont CA condo for sale. This two-story townhouse style property features 2 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, and 1,106 square feet of living space. 

If you're looking for a quality lifestyle in a desirable community setting, then this home is perfect for you! 

This must-see property is part of the Ardonwood community. This well-established neighborhood features cozy residences of high value. 

Living here means you have all the luxuries and amenities you and your loved ones could want. Big-name cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, and Silicon Valley are conveniently close. Fremont has everything for you, whether you prefer being in the great outdoors, exploring art and music, or seeking more culinary pursuits.

The picturesque city of Fremont is known for its nearly perfect weather, boasting beautiful warm temperatures year-round. It is also considered one of California’s most comfortable cities in which to live. 

Fremont is served by the Fremont Unified School District, one of the finest in Alameda County. Walk to Award winning Forest Park Elementary School.

This home has been meticulously maintained and upgraded. 

Recent updates include recessed lights throughout the home, under stairs storage cabinet, and cabinets above the inside laundry. A new metal screen door has been added to the main entrance and new carpets have been installed. 

There is also an attic access with pull down ladder, Bali/ Grabber custom cellular shades for all windows, and garage tiles floor in the patio area. On top of it all, the entire home has been recently painted with two-toned custom color and all bathrooms feature new vanities, countertops, and mirrors.

Relax and entertain in the generously-sized family room with a beautiful fireplace. The carpeted floors complement the neutral-toned walls, creating a perfect canvas for any design and furniture you’ll furnish this home with.

Enjoy delicious meals with your loved ones in the dining area of this Fremont CA condo. 

Enjoy this condo’s well-appointed kitchen!

Your inner chef will surely be thrilled with this home’s updated kitchen. 

It comes with stainless steel appliances, refrigerator, and granite countertop. This kitchen also has multiple cabinets so you can easily keep everything off of the counters. The cabinets have a corner Lazy Susan organizer for expanded storage. 

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Feel right at home with the well-lit and spacious master bedroom. This is the best place to rest and relax after a long day of work. 

Or if you are working from home, the bedroom is spacious enough to accommodate a desk and an office chair. It’s peaceful and away from distractions that you will find in the main living areas. 

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On top of all the amazing amenities, this home has a one-car finished painted garage plus one carport. 

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[thedreamsmith]

In Heat

@atc74​ @alleiradayne​ @arrowsandmixtapes​ @captain-s-rogers​

Warnings: Explicit smut, swearing, canon typical violence

Word count: 2706

Pairing: Dean x OFC

Summary:  Rhea has lived and hunted with the Winchesters for over a year, secretly pining after the elder brother, until she gets hit with a spiteful witch’s spell. It’s not subtle, either.

Dean’s POV

‘If you’re going to be a bitch,’ The sorceress snarled at Rhea as she raised her knife before her. ‘Then you can be a bitch in heat.’

Faster than any of them could anticipate, she hurled a bolt of golden light at the huntress, catching her directly in the chest.

‘That should keep you busy enough.’ The witch’s parting laugh was accompanied by a rustle of feathers and a raven rose from where she had just been standing.

Sam got off a couple of shots, but the bird escaped unharmed through an open skylight in the abandoned warehouse’s ceiling.

‘Rhea?’ The brothers rushed to her side, her gaze was unfocused as she got to her feet.

‘Where’d she go?’  Dean snapped at Sam. ‘Son of a bitch, we’ve been tracking her for a week.’

‘Uh, Dean?’ His brother’s voice held a hesitant note that drew his attention from the skylight. He followed his gaze to the third hunter with them. ‘I think we have a bigger problem.’

                                                                               ***

It had taken the combined effort of himself and Sam to get Rhea back to the bunker. Sam had had to drive, seeing as in her current condition, the huntress was making it very difficult for Dean to concentrate on anything.

‘What’s up with little Magpie?’ Crowley appeared beside Rowena without warning, head tipped to one side as he regarded Rhea mouthing at Dean’s collarbone. The sounds she was emitting were doing nothing to help the situation in his jeans.

‘Why do you care?’ Sam snapped at the demon, glowering at him from the opposite side of the table.

Crowley just shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Unlike the rest of you, she’s not a pain in my ass. She’s worked a few jobs for me in the past, mostly writing up contracts – she’s excellent with words. Must be all the research she’s done on the fae.’

Sam seemed to be gearing up for an argument when Rowena interrupted their bickering.

‘She got hit wi’ a spell. A powerful one.’ She was lent against a pillar, barely raising her eyes from the tome she was flipping through. ‘I don’t think I can undo this one, lads. Looks like you’re going to have to wait until it runs its course…or find another way to break it.’

The red-haired witch cast a meaningful look at him that he dutifully ignored. If it hadn’t been for the fraying grip on his self-control, he would’ve already hauled Rhea onto the table and fucked the magic out of her.

‘Cas, can’t you do something about this?’ Because Rhea was attempting to slip her hand beneath his shirt and her touch was everywhere…

‘I can try, but short of rendering her unconscious, I am not sure what else I can do.’ The angel laid a gentle hand on Rhea’s arm, trying to prise her from Dean’s person. ‘I need you to focus-‘

But he was cut off as Rhea whirled, pulling a knife and slamming him against the nearest pillar with the blade pressed to his jugular.

‘He’s mine.’ She snarled, eyes wild and teeth bared. ‘Don’t fucking touch him.’

For a moment no one moved, too taken aback at the normally easy-going hunter suddenly turning feral. Then everyone was in action, Sam moving into her line of sight, hands up and expression placating.

‘Rhea…’

‘Alright, that’s enough.’ Cas moved before she could react – touching two fingers two her brow and with a flash of white light she crumpled into his arms. ‘I will take her to her room and seal the door until we can figure out what to do.’

In a blink, both angel and hunter were gone, the only sign of their departure the fading echo of wingbeats.

‘Looks like things around here are finally getting a bit more interesting.’

Sam only spared the demon a sideways glance before turning on his brother.

‘Look, Dean, I don’t see why you won’t just-‘

‘I said no!’ He clenched his jaw so hard it felt his teeth would crack. ‘It’s not the same and you know it. What happens when the spell breaks and she wakes up having done something she didn’t want to? Why can’t you or Cas help her?’

‘Cause she hasn’t spent the last hour trying to get into our pants.’ Sam signed through his nose and glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Rhea wanting you isn’t a new thing – this spell just seems to have amplified her feelings.’

‘Sam is right.’ Dean started and whipped around as Cas’s gravelly voice sounded directly behind him. ‘Rhea has been radiating desire for months, all directed at you.’

‘It’s been nauseating, really.’ Crowley chipped in, grinning over the rim of a glass he’d somehow acquired.

‘Oh great. So everyone knew about this except me?’ He threw his hands up, nearly taking out a lamp in the process.

‘Pretty much.’ Rowena smirked, one side of her red-painted mouth drawn up.

‘If the feeling isn’t mutual, why don’t you love her and leave her, squirrel? And after you’ve broken her heart, maybe she’ll sell it to me; I’ve been trying to make her my right hand for years.’

The King of Hell only chuckled as Dean fisted his hand in his suit jacket and slammed him against the wall, one forearm pressed to his neck.

‘Shut your mouth, you son of a bitch.’ His voice was pitched low, but the promise of violence rippled like an undercurrent, dark and dangerous and just below the surface.

‘I’m right hear y’know!’ Rowena protested as Crowley spoke.

‘Oh look, the feeling is mutual. Looks like my work here is done. Bye, boys.’ With a final smirk, the demon vanished from his grip, leaving him clutching thin air.

‘Sonofabitch.’ Dean slapped his palm against the wall where Crowley’s head had just been.

‘Again, right here.’ The witch speared him with a glare that by all laws of physics should’ve set him on fire, no hoodoo required. ‘Now, you listen to me. You might be that lassie’s only chance for breaking this spell, so stop pretending like you haven’t been staring at her ass for the last year, get in there, and get busy.’

Momentarily lost for words, Dean gaped at the petite woman, then at his brother who was trying and failing to stifle his laughter. Asshat.

‘Fine. Fine.’ He rubbed a palm over his eyes. ‘Sammy, shut the hell up.’

With a final glare at the three of them, Dean stomped down the corridor with Sam’s laughter ringing in his ears.

                                                                       ****

He could hear her moans from outside her door - it seemed that Cas’s mojo hadn’t worked for very long. Letting out a long breath, Dean turned the handle and slipped into her room.

Soft lamplight illuminated the space, gleaming on the trinkets and blades that lined the shelves and walls. His heart almost stopped as his gaze found her. Holy fuck.

Her wine-red hair spilled around her head like a halo, her normally ivory skin flushed and turned to palest gold in the lamplight.

Her eyes were closed as she continued her ministrations – one slender hand worked at the apex of her thighs, back arching as her legs trembled.

His mouth went dry, and he was acutely, painfully aware of the aching press of his cock against the seam of his jeans. Rhea gasped as she buried a third finger inside herself, her thumb never ceasing in the pressure it applied to her clit. She was panting now, her cries coming at irregular intervals as she pushed herself closer and closer to the edge.

Dean could pinpoint the exact moment that she shattered, head thrown back and hand stilling momentarily as she chased her pleasure. His own hips jerked involuntarily and his grabbed onto a side table for balance, knocking over a picture frame in the process.

The noise alerted Rhea to his presence and she took him in with those crushing blue eyes as she rose from the bed on surprisingly steady legs. She stalked towards him like a predator, all lithe muscle beneath an hourglass figure like sweet sin.

Dean had seen plenty of naked women in his time – too many, probably – and this shouldn’t have been any different, but it was. This was Rhea, and she was looking at him in a way that had only happened in his dirtiest fantasies and he felt like a butterfly pinned to the wall by that cornflower gaze.

And then she was on him, pulling him down to cover his mouth with hers. The kiss was hot and hungry; the nip of her teeth on his bottom lip had him groaning into her mouth and fisting his hands at his sides.

‘Don’t you think we should talk about this, ah fuck, first, sweetheart?’ His head slammed back into the door as he tried to control his breathing. ‘You’re making this pretty damn, god, hard.’

‘That’s the plan, Winchester.’ She purred, smirking up at him from under her lashes and that snapped the final thread of his tattered self-control. ‘Please, Dean, I need this.’

One heartbeat, he had her in his arms, her long legs wrapped around his waist, vice-like.

Two heartbeats, he flipped their positions, pressing her against the door hard enough to rattle the hinges.

Three heartbeats, Rhea’s hands were under his Henley again, this time pushing it up and off to bare the lean muscles of his torso.

Four heartbeats, her lips were back on him; his mouth, his neck, his jaw, everywhere.  

Five heartbeats, he ground against her, the wetness between her legs already soaking the front of his jeans. He needed to be inside her. Yesterday.

He carried her back to the bed, setting her down and making quick work of the rest of his clothes. He hissed in a breath as the cool air brushed against his swollen cock, already leaking.

‘Turn over.’ He barely recognised his own voice, the rough way it caught in the back of his throat. ‘Just how much do you need me, darlin’?’

There was no hesitation as Rhea rolled onto her hands and knees, spreading her legs as she glanced back over her shoulder, eyes dark with unconcealed lust.

‘Please…’ He’d never heard her like this, never thought he would. On cases, around the bunker, she was teasing and kind, with a spine like stainless steel. But now she was melting in his hands as he grasped her waist, lining his cock up with her entrance. The spell had made her desperate, made her beg for him. ‘Dean, please. I need you.’

Rhea cried out as he pushed into her in one smooth thrust, seating himself fully in the warm, wet heat of her. She was already stretched from her solo-session earlier but she was still exquisitely tight around him as he filled her. Her whimpers became moans as he began to move, setting a rough pace from the beginning.

There would be time enough in the future to go slow, to map each other’s bodies and strengthen the bond that he already felt shimmering between them – but right now he settled for what they both wanted, what they both needed.

The slap of skin on skin filled the room, mixing with their shared moans. Dean kept his voice low, still holding on to some inhibitions in an occupied bunker with thin walls but Rhea had no such reservations. She didn’t bother to muffle her screams as he reached around to find the bundle of nerves between her legs, clawing at the sheets as she trembled around him.

She tensed and he saw stars, his thrusts becoming erratic as he barrelled towards the edge.

‘Fuck, Rhea you feel so good…’ Dean hauled the whimpering hunter up against him so that her back was flush to his chest. ‘I’m close… come for me, sweetheart.’

His arm was a vice around her midriff as his other hand continued it’s work at the apex of her thighs. She rested her head on his shoulder, her hair spilling down his back, baring her throat to him.

‘Dean…’ His name was almost a sob on her lips as he pressed sloppy, open-mouthed kisses to the column of her neck. ‘I’m gonna…I need to…’

‘That’s it, come for me.’ His stubble was rough against her skin as he slammed into her over and over, her full breasts bouncing with the motion. ‘Now.’

As if following his growled command and not the cresting tide of pleasure within her, she came hard around him, pulling him over the edge. Her whole body trembled in his arms as he spilled into her.

With a trembling gasp, the strength left her body and he tightened his grip as she slumped to the mattress. Gold light danced along her skin, rising from her form in shimmering whorls.

It worked.

Dean’s heartbeat was still racing hell-for-leather as he set Rhea down on the bed, too intoxicated by the aftershocks of his own orgasm and the rising panic over the what now? to worry about the mess.

‘Rhea? You still with me?’ He brushed his fingers over the sharp line of her cheekbone and the sprinkling of freckles beneath her dark lashes.

Her eyes fluttered open slowly, the dark lust replaced by bewilderment.

‘Dean?’ She pushed herself upright, hair spilling over her bare shoulders. Her jaw dropped as she took in his naked form, then her own state of post-sex disarray. ‘Oh my god… Did I…?’

‘Try to climb me like a tree?’ Dean offered her a lopsided grin. ‘Yeah, you did. It was pretty damn fun.’

Rhea groaned and buried her face in her palms and his stomach dropped.

‘Look, I’m sorry, really sorry. Just, we couldn’t find another way to break the spell and you seemed uh… interested in me so I lent a hand. I told Sammy that this was a bad idea. And why would you want me without a fucking hoodoo spell? You can do a hell of a lot better than my fucked-up ass.’

He pushed himself off the bed, scrambling for his discarded clothes. He wanted to be out of there as fast as possible, to find somewhere to hide with a bottle of whiskey and no one to bother him.

He’d just found his jeans when he felt a warm hand grab his wrist.

‘Dean.’ From her tone, it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get his attention. ‘I don’t regret it. Any of it.’ Her voice was soft as she looked up at him.

He swallowed thickly, trying to keep the hope from showing on his face because god damn it he’d been through too much, let down far too many times, so why should this be any different?

‘I’ve wanted this, wanted you for months. Sam and Cas were right. I’m in love with you, you idiot. I’m only embarrassed that I tried to get in your pants in front of everyone.’

Dean was pretty sure he was doing a fantastic impression of a landed fish as he blinked at her. It took him a second to process her words. I’ve wanted you for months. I’m in love with you.

‘Come here.’ Her smile was gentle, but her eyes gleamed with mischief. ‘I reckon we have a good while before anyone comes looking for us.’

And there she was, back to her old self again as Dean let her pull him back down onto the memory foam mattress. Her movements were languid, yet just as compelling as before as she tucked herself against his chest. He wrapped his arm around her waist, still not sure whether this was just some angel-induced fever dream.

‘This is real.’ His voice caught in his throat as he pressed his lips to the top of her head.

‘It is.’ Rhea reached up to cup his jaw in her palm and kissed him softly.

‘I love you too, darlin’.’ Dean let his own eyes shut as he breathed in her gunmetal and moonlight scent. He’d never admitted to anyone his fear of dying, not even Sam. To everyone he was the fearless hunter – facing death and danger every day. But knowing that this was waiting for him in heaven? He could live with that.

[leatafandom]

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#gabriel spn - 65 posts

Longest Tag: 137 characters

#which is deeply fucking random given that murhad was born & raised & lived his first 4 centuries in the ottoman empire what is that about

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

I surrender. I can't avoid the spoilers, but I'll try to remember not to reblog them.

20 notes • Posted 2021-12-20 14:08:58 GMT

#4

"Wow, it smells great in here," Dean called, sticking his head into the kitchen where Gabriel was in the process of making caramel on the bunker’s stove. Dean cast a glance at his brother as Sam held a cup of warmed cider in his hands, leaning against the stainless steel work table. "I'm hittin' the shower and then I'll be back for pie," Dean said, poking a dirt-covered finger at the oven and Gabriel. He’d had enough of Gabriel’s cooking to know the archangel’s food was always good, especially his desserts.

Gabriel didn't look away from the bubbling pot as he smiled. "It'll be a while, anywho Dean-a-roo." Gabriel's wrist didn't stop feeling his brother pause beside Dean in the doorway. "And you're trying an apple, Cassie. You and the kid."

Castiel huffed, rolling his eyes even though he nodded at his brother's insistence on teaching him how to enjoy human food. Dean chuckled, patting Castiel on the arm.

Sam smirked behind his mug, chuckling into his warmed drink. "Sorry, he won't be budged, Cas," Sam said over the rim of his mug with a less than apologetic shrug.

"You'll like them, and Jack has to try both kinds of the apples." Dean agreed, looking from his partner to Gabriel. "Candied and caramel, right?" Dean asked, looking at Gabriel's back.

Gabriel nodded, smirking over his shoulder. "Like I could just make one kind of apple on a stick," Gabriel scoffed with a raised eyebrow.

Dean raised his hands in defense. "My apologies, great archangel of baking." Gabriel chuckled at Dean's words, turning back to the stove as Dean turned to Castiel.  "Shower?"

Castiel glanced down at his dirt and blood-covered clothing and hands. "What do you think, Dean?" Castiel questioned with a raised brow.

Dean rolled his eyes with a smirk. "Come on, cranky," Dean said, shaking his head as he led Castiel to their room. "How can you be unhappy when we come home from a good ol' fashioned ghoul hunt to pie and caramel apples the day before Halloween?"

Castiel sighed with a slight roll of his eyes, following Dean down the hall. "I'm very happy with our Halloween Eve desserts and my brother’s unexpected visit, Dean. Why would you think I wouldn't enjoy chasing dead things and you around a graveyard instead of going to an orchard?"

Dean's groan echoed down the hallway making the couple in the kitchen laugh. Sam chuckled at the two as they continued down the hall, listening to Dean dig himself deeper. Gabriel smirked, tilting his head towards Sam.

Preview from Chapter Three of Seasonal Healing: Baking in the Bunker, coming Thursday to my Ao3.  

21 notes • Posted 2021-10-18 18:01:54 GMT

#3

Sam swallowed his nerves as he drove them the short distance to Dean's burial site. As the three walked towards the secluded forest of Dean's burial plot, Gabriel let out a loud whistle. The archangel spun around, surveying the devastation his younger sibling had caused when he released Dean’s soul.

“That hard to let go, baby bro?” Gabriel couldn’t help but mumble to himself as his eyes whirled around the quarter-mile radius of uprooted and blown apart trees.

Gabriel's foot poked at a broken stump near the preserved and pristine center of the circle of destruction. Gabriel’s face scrunched up as he reviewed the power blow out. His grace roamed around the circle, curiosity peaking within it. Sam raised an eyebrow at the damage. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but this hadn’t been it. Sam could feel Gabriel's waves of intrigue and amusement at the scene. The shared feeling only made Sam's curiosity grow. Sam cast a quick glance at Bobby, the man only offering him a shrug. Sam frowned, looking back at Gabriel as the archangel walked around the downed trees.

"Hey, Gabe? This isn't normal, is it?" Sam asked, watching his mate-to-be as he motioned to the circle of toppled trees around them with a pointed finger.

A quick smirk flashed across Gabriel's face, throwing a wink at Sam and Bobby's questioning looks. He quickly concealed his surprise at Castiel's emotional bout of force, not wanting to worry Sam or make assumptions about Castiel’s intentions. Seeking a distraction from the coming questions he snapped his fingers, bringing Dean's open coffin to the surface. Sam and Bobby let out a breath at seeing Dean whole again, remembering what was left of him when they buried him.

Sam tore his eyes away from the uninjured looking body of his brother. Hazel eyes met Gabriel's twinkling honey brown again, opening his mouth wanting to press him before stopping short. There was always a reason for Gabriel's verbal avoidance. Sam shook his head and pulled himself up to his full height, letting the question go and taking the avoidance tactic for what it was. If Gabriel didn’t tell him, he didn’t need to know, yet. Gabriel offered a small smile as a wave of trust flowed from Sam along with the promise of later.

Switching his focus to Dean, Sam joined Bobby at his brother's open coffin. Sam's face softened, taking in Dean’s peaceful expression. His cheeks looked full and his skin was untouched by claws. Sam’s mind filled with the still fresh memory of Dean's mangled body. Dean needed to be out of the coffin, now.

Preview from the New Chapter of Learn: The Return of Dean Winchester by Leata on Ao3. 

The new chapter should be up this week. I just gotta read through it one more time. 

22 notes • Posted 2021-03-23 18:16:58 GMT

#2

Since I needed the reminder yesterday and I really need it today:

It is okay to not be emotional available for others for advice or to vent. It is okay to say "I'm sorry, I can't today. But I promise we will talk about this, I just can't right now." No matter how many times you have to say it or what they say back, it is okay to not be okay. To need time to figure it out before being able to support and take on someone else's emotions. It is not selfish. It's not rude. You deserve time just as much as anyone else.

26 notes • Posted 2021-06-05 13:00:54 GMT

#1

Can anyone recommend some good Adam x Michael fics? I've fallen in love with this ship and I crave more.

41 notes • Posted 2021-12-15 11:39:05 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[mattzerella-sticks]

i’d like to teach the world to sing - chapter 4: like a den of lions, only more bloodthirsty

Mar del Vista, California - 1972

The groovy counterculture that dominated conversation in the past few years still clings to the landscape, floating around like smoke off a burning joint. Changed by the fires of war, Manson, and life into something new. Less trusting, optimistic, and innocent.

Cas is just one of many disillusioned hippies, saddled with a general distrust even before the movement self-imploded. Wary of about everything. Perfect for his line of work, where what’s on the surface might not match the truth underneath. It’s not an easy life, but he’s comfortable with how it goes. Coasting until he hears a case he has no business accepting. For one, it’s about a missing teen. And another, it’s personal.

Except Jack’s disappearance, like every other case he’s worked, isn’t so cut and dry. Like a rock skipping across a then-placid lake, the ripples stretch far and wide. Those waves slamming at Cas; of cops, federal agents, hippie cultists, and a certain green-eyed detective who’s a little too interested in Cas’s investigation.

Will Cas find Jack? Or will he drown in the tides.

Excerpt:

           Cas fiddles with the brim of his hat, leg bouncing while he sits in the clinical interrogation room. Focuses on the tight weaving of the headpiece instead of peering at hidden faces behind the two-way mirror or banging an obnoxious rhythm on the stainless-steel table. Although his control falters. Rebellious urges rising from within, whispering tempting dares in his ear.

           The door opens, and suddenly the voices louden; target coming into sight. Dean barely glances up from his notepad, an air of stiff boredom hanging around him. Expression masked with the same coating that hides the pigs behind their special fencing. “Cas-tee-el Novak…” Dean drawls, finally deigning Cas with his attention, “Your parents knew you’d end up a hippie freak and helped the process along or did you come up with this name after a bad trip?”

           Scoffing, Cas slumps in his seat. “Neither. I was named after an angel, though I’m loathe to admit it.”

           “An angel?” Dean snickers, lips curling in a smirk. “You are far from that.”

           “I’m not sure about that. All the best angels are the fallen ones.” Cas fires with a vicious verbal backhand, winking. Throws Dean off his rhythm with a severe blush. “Did you really not know what my name was after years of… crossing paths?”

           “Didn’t care enough to ask around. Figured Cas was short for something. Not Castiel but… less strange than my other guesses.” The lame response makes pride swell in Cas’s chest, claiming victory. He readies himself for the next volley, Dean checking his notes. “We’re not here to discuss your name, though.”

           “I would hope so, could have easily done that without all the hassle of taking my fingerprints and snapping a few bad pictures of me…”

           Dean levels a heavy stare at Castiel, mirth dying in his eyes. “What were you doing at the Kline residence?”

           “Is that where I was?” Cas asks, tone hollow and airy, “I thought that was my pad… it makes sense though, when the key wouldn’t unlock the door. Damn reefer – messes with your head, you know.”

           “I know.” Dean tenses, flipping the notepad closed as he bites his bottom lip. “I mean I don’t know,” he continues, opening the notes again, “I’ve never smoked the stuff but… Nixon’s camp, the science of drugs, and seeing all the – we cops talk and, some of what’s in the reports…”

           Cas leans across the table, resting his chin on his knuckles. Blinks innocently up at Dean while an imaginary tail curls around his midsection. “Really? You never…” He darts his gaze quickly behind Dean, cheeks straining from the wideness of his smile. “You can be honest with me, Dean. I won’t judge. Unlike your little friends jerking off to this shitshow like the voyeurs they are.”

           Dean slams his hands on the table, startling him. “Dammit Cas,” he hisses, meeting him halfway across the table, “Can you not poke bears for five minutes?”

           He sees the grassy knolls of Dean’s eyes shake with how close they are. Pulling away, Cas’s good humor deflates. “Sorry,” he says, “I’m allergic to authority, and following the rules gives me hives.”

           “Clearly.”

           “I can show you the slip from my doctor if you doubt me.”

           Pinching the space between his brows, Dean sighs. “I’d rather you tell me why you were jumping the fence over at the Kline residence.”

           Cas scoffs, fixing his hat back onto his head. “I wasn’t jumping the fence.”

           “I saw you, Castiel Novak, jumping over what most people know as a fence – a barrier that separates open space from enclosed spaces, usually private property – with my own two eyes.” Dean strangles his notepad, losing patience. “How is that not jumping the fence?”

           His argument follows a strong line of logic. Cas will never allow Dean to catch him admitting his wrongdoing, though. He still has a few tricks that will curve the straightforward arrow Dean draws. “Well yes,” he starts, “in that sense I was jumping the fence. But only because I told Kelly I would do so.”

           “What?”

           “Kelly Kline? The woman of the house? She and I, we go way back,” he drawls, eyebrows waggling, “And I was visiting her, in the neighborhood and blah blah blah… she had to go run some errands except I had the worst stomach cramps. Told her she can go while I deal with my business, and then I’ll head out on my way. Except she must have forgotten to leave a key for me, so I can lock the door after myself! I didn’t want to leave her front door all open like that.” Cas pouts, pressing a hand up against his mouth. “Someone could take advantage and break in.”

           Dean scowls, “You and Ms. Kline have a… prior relationship?”

(read chapter 4)

(start from the beginning)

[ugotdibsmodesto-blog]

U Got Dibs Restaurant Supply Modesto

Website:

Top Rated Restaurant POS Management In Modesto | U Got Dibs

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E-mail: admin@ugotdibs.net

Managers and owners of restaurants often spend many hours ensuring that the operation continues in a smooth and efficient manner. Restaurants operate in fragile ecosystems. One small disruption in their efficiency may cause a bottleneck slowing down the entire rhythm. In the back of the house, this is often the case. It is vitally important that orders are passed to the serving staff quickly in order to keep customers satisfied and provide the type of eating experience that brings them back for more. One obvious key is that dishwashing crews must operate at peak efficiency or the smooth operation in the kitchen suffers. However, even the best trained and hardest working dishwashing staff may become overwhelmed easily during an equipment failure. This can bring the entire operation to a screeching halt. Thus, it is important that you select high quality and reliable equipment. These four important steps will help you to find the best possible commercial dishwashers for your establishment.

You need to determine the washing capacity when shopping for commercial dishwashers. The machine should be large enough to handle the job. Owners of new restaurants will want to see what similarly sized restaurants in the area use. It is better to buy equipment which is larger than what you think you need rather than smaller. This seemingly extravagant expense allows room for growth of customer base as the restaurant is established in the community. It prevents the need of having to scrap equipment that becomes too small quickly to purchase larger equipment. Restaurants that are already established in the community will also have an idea of the volume of machine that is needed. Talk with the dishwashing staff. They often have the best idea of the appropriateness of the old equipment. If there was a constant pinch and lag in cleaning dishes, the old machine was too small and this is the ideal time for an upgrade that can speed service and increase capacity.

A second step is to consider the workflow. Dishwashing in a restaurant is never a one-step process. Owners and managers must be very conscious of the individual tasks needed to complete the task of washing a large number of dishes and how they must flow for smooth operations and greatest possible efficiency. Start by isolating each individual task needed during the process of washing dishes. While they may vary due to individual needs of the operation, they generally include: rinsing, racking, dishwashing, and restocking.

Commercial dishwashers also require setup of the stations in an optimized manner to make the most of the workflow. The stations may be designed using stainless steel tables, sinks and countertops that have been customized for your particular workflow and to fit the area. A large sink offering a rinse nozzle and scrubbing pads for removal of stuck-on food should be the first station. Rinsing is removal of the residual food that should not enter the dishwasher. Dishwashers are much more efficient when staff is thorough in this task. The efficiency of the rinsing task varies due to the dishes used, so there needs to be a large setup area that allows incoming dishes to stack up without slowing the performance of the task. Racking is transferring the dishes that have been rinsed to the racks designed to fit inside the dishwasher. The racking area needs to be located between the sink and dishwasher. It should be large enough that several racks are accommodated so that rinsing does not need to be slowed while waiting for the dishwasher to complete its cycle.

Lastly, for best performance of commercial dishwashers, a station needs setting up to contain the machine itself. The station should be in line with the other stations and can vary according to the model that is selected. Dishwashers are available in many different varieties, and most establishments select according to available space as well as price. While under the counter dishwashers are often cheapest, they are much slower, smaller and simply not designed for high-volume operations. Corner units are somewhat better, but the best, if money and space are available, are the straight through units. With these models, it is possible to load the dishes from one side and retrieve them from the other at the end of the wash cycle. This offers high efficiency that allows the user to continue rinsing as quickly as possible with no need to clear the area of dishes that have been washed. The straight through unit should provide a drain area on the opposite side of the rinse area where the clean dishes can be inspected before returning to the dining area or kitchen. Commercial dishwashers can be purchased from stores offering restaurant supplies.

[lowcarbnutrients]

5 Non-Stick Pans That Won`t Give You Cancer

Research has proven to that food preparation with Teflon-type cookware could reveal you to poisonous chemicals that might trigger cancer.

What can you prepare with instead? Here's a list of your best alternatives, every one of which are offered in kitchen area stores as well as big box and also chain store or online.

Cast Iron - For decades I have actually been utilizing cast iron for 5 factors: it's unbreakable, it's inexpensive, it's easy to clean, it's functional and it works! When cast iron is effectively seasoned, you could prepare absolutely anything in it, though you wouldn't actually have to utilize it for meals that need boiling water. However it's great for sauteeing, frying, braising, cooking and also preparing something as simple as clambered eggs. Plus, it works also on the stovetop as it does in the stove. If you're cooking a meal that needs to be browned on the top, you can easily relocate your actors iron frying pan or casserole from the array to the stove broiler without missing out on a beat.

Clean it with a straightforward scrub brush or Brillo-type pad and also hot soapy water, after that either completely dry it with a towel, or simply put it back on the array for a min and also allow the heat evaporate whatever water continues to be. One downside is that cast iron weighes. But I directly like the workout I get recruiting it and also find that other than a 10-qt Dutch oven, it's never way too much to handle.

Stainless Steel - Stainless-steel is superb for steaming potatoes, rice as well as pasta, or for browning as well as sauteeing foods. Stainless-steel can tolerate high heats, reports TwoKitchenJunkies.com in The Ultimate Overview of Healthy Cookware, unlike nonstick frying pans, which are hazardous when exposed to high heats up. And as long as the stainless cookware (or any kind of pots and pans, for that matter) doesn't have plastic manages, it could go from the range to the stove. The downside of stainless is that food can promptly burn if the heat obtains too high or the pan gets as well dry. After that, the frying pan could be tough to scrub tidy. The denser or heavier the frying pan is, the far better it will go to carrying out heat and the easier it will be to clean.

Aluminum - Aluminum cooks a great deal like stainless-steel, yet is a bit lighter. Food preparation at high warmth will not produce harmful fumes, like Teflon-type pots and also frying pans. There is some concern that light weight aluminum can leach right into food and also potentially have human health troubles. I have light weight aluminum 9 × 13 cooking pans that I utilized to likewise bake pasta in. I saw that the pasta would sometimes select up a light weight aluminum preference, because the acidic tomato sauce in the pasta reacted with the light weight aluminum in a corrosive way.

TheKitchn. com suggests making use of non-reactive cookware like stainless steel whenever your dish contains acidic or alkaline active ingredients. Light weight aluminum is excellent for boiling water, sauteeing veggies as well as hot meat-- though do not deglaze the pan with an acid-based fluid! That said, you can get anodized aluminum, which produces a leach-resistant, non-stick surface. The rate will be comparable to stainless steel.

Stoneware and Ceramics - Stoneware and also ceramics could make great casserole recipes. Beware of those glazed inside with materials that might consist of lead or various other harmful chemicals. Converse Costa (CA) Wellness Services advises against using standard glazed terra-cotta (clay) crockery from Mexico and other Latin American nations, as it is likely infected with lead. In a similar way, the Department of the Atmosphere in Australia cautions against utilizing very embellished conventional dishes from some Eastern nations, and also antique pots as well as pans that are heavily decorated.

Glass - Glass is fantastic for kitchenware, though it's primarily offered as a pot, instead of a skillet, and as baking pans, pie plate and also covered dish dishes. It's non reactive, budget friendly and also could go from the stove to the table, as long as you set it on a pot holder or non-metal trivet until it cools down. One drawback is that if you put warm glass on a cool steel surface area, like the top of a cooktop array or a metal trivet, it could ruin right into a thousand items. So use glass-- yet utilize it thoroughly, and take notice of severe temperature level shifts.

If you currently make use of non-stick pots and pans and also intend to remove it, do not contribute it to another person. Either send it back to the supplier, or simply toss it away. If you need to continue cooking with it, use it on extremely reduced heat and also just for steaming water or various other activities that have little chance of burning. Do not utilize steel tools, like spatulas or mixing spoons, as those could scrape the nonstick layer off as well as into the food you're cooking.