Chapter Text
Dean carefully set the ladder against the side of the house and jiggled it at the base a couple of times to be sure it was sturdy on the ground. This was probably a fool’s errand, but damn it all, he used to love Christmas and he was tired of moping around. Screw dead parents and a brother that didn’t talk to him and screw IEDs and amputations and nerve damage. He was going to put up Christmas lights on this house this year if it killed him.
… which it just might, he thought, as he stuck the end of the string of lights through a carabiner clipped to his belt loop, and started climbing the ladder. He could have practiced one-handed ladder climbing before it got to the darkest and wettest time of the year, maybe.
He carefully put the string against the eave, and tried to hold it in place with the stump of his left arm while his right reached into his back pocket for the staple gun. Then he abandoned the staple gun to catch the lights as they slithered away from him, and sighed heavily.
The second time they got away from him while he was going for the staple gun, he growled.
“Son of a bitch!” he shouted the third time, loud enough to startle Kevin as he was getting into his car in the driveway further down the block. The kid stared at him, and Dean just rolled his eyes. Kevin was a nervous little bean and apparently he found Dean intimidating. Or so his mother Linda said, who was not intimidated by God nor man as far as he could tell. They were nice enough neighbors. They’d made him a huge freezer bag full of pot stickers when he moved back into the Winchester family house last year.
Dean growled, and pressed harder with his stump, letting himself have the whine of pain since nobody could hear him anyway. He’d figured out how to navigate plenty of difficult stuff with only one hand, and he was not going to let the Sisyphean bullshit of Christmas lights be the thing that defeated him.
He finally got the first staple in, and yelped triumphantly. It should go easier now, he figured, and leaned forward to add a second staple. It was just going to take forever, because he’d have to move the ladder so much.
As far as he could piece it together later, he just leaned over too far. He’d gotten into a rhythm around the time he reached the porch stairs, and he’d been thinking about sending Sam a photo of the house when it was done. Maybe the holidays would work their magic and Sam would be more receptive to some kind of communication this time. Dean was never sure if he hadn’t secured the ladder right or what, but he definitely leaned too far and he and the ladder both went down like a sack of bricks.
His top half was what hit the paved path from the sidewalk to his front porch, and he knew immediately he’d dinged his head pretty good, even though his body was more urgently preoccupied with having the wind knocked out of it. He just lay there, wheezing and trying to get his breath back, and he felt dizzy and confused as he stared at his legs, which were tangled up with the ladder and Mom’s neglected azalea bushes.
“Mr. Winchester?” he heard someone calling out to him, and he tried to sit up.
Pain lanced through his head and one of his legs, and he couldn’t help his shout.
“Don’t try to move just yet,” the voice said, and it was a very iconic deep voice that Dean knew. Dean couldn’t see much, but he could see white sneakers and the damp cuffs of chinos cutting across the lawn toward him.
“Oh, hey Pastor Novak,” he mumbled.
Fuck, how embarrassing. This was embarrassing no matter what, honestly, but the neighbor who’d seen him just had to be the neighbor he actively tried to avoid.
“Mr. Winchester, I think you should keep still,” Pastor Novak said gravely, sinking to his knees at Dean’s side. “Can you wiggle your feet?”
“Not if I’m fuckin’ keeping still,” he said, and was shocked to hear the straight-laced, cardigan-wearing guy let out a rusty chuckle.
“You got me there,” Pastor Novak said. “Okay, keep as still as you can while wiggling your feet.”
Dean’s left foot wiggled just fine, but the right one was a different story.
“Son of a bitch,” he huffed. “Think my leg’s broken. Hit my head pretty hard, too.”
“I’m going to call an ambulance now,” Pastor Novak said, taking a cell phone out of his pocket.
“Aw, shit,” Dean said. “I could drive myself.”
“With a broken leg?” he asked skeptically. “Please, just keep calm and let me do this, okay?”
God, why did it have to be the incredibly hot and incredibly married pastor?
Dean felt himself drifting a little while his neighbor was on the phone, and he grunted in annoyance every time the guy reached out and shook his shoulder and forced him to make eye contact again. Were pastors allowed to be this mean?
“Mr. Winchester? Hey, look at me!”
“What?”
“The ambulance is on its way, and until then, you are going to keep talking to me.”
“Don’t want to,” Dean said stubbornly, closing his eyes against the dizziness and nausea. “I curse too much and you’re a pastor.”
Pastor Novak chuckled again, and Dean squinted an eye open to see why that was funny.
“If I was that bothered by swearing, I’d have a very hard time navigating the world,” he explained, and there was a weird, sad smile on his face. Dean didn’t like that, didn’t like it when people were sad, so he reached up and tried to touch the pastor’s mouth and fix it, but his hand felt clumsy. The guy actually took his hand and held it, like he thought that was what Dean had been going for, like it didn’t bother him to do that. “But you should know that I’m—well, I’m not a pastor anymore.”
“Whoa,” Dean said, wishing his vision would quit doing the blurry thing so he could see him better. “So I shouldn’t call you Pastor Novak? Since when?”
“Since six months ago,” the guy said. “And you can call me Castiel, if you want. Or Mr. Novak if you prefer the formality.”
“Formality sucks, I ain’t in the service anymore so I don’t gotta call anybody ‘sir,’” Dean said. “You should call me Dean.”
“Okay, Dean.”
The ambulance showed up pretty soon after that, and Dean couldn’t seem to make his hand let go of Pasto—Castiel’s hand. He was cold and things were confusing and he felt shitty, and Castiel was being really nice to him. The EMTs were trying to encourage him to knock it off and let them examine him, but that just made him dig in his heels harder.
“Would it be all right if I rode in the ambulance with you?” Castiel asked them. “I don’t mind, if it would make him more comfortable.”
Dean was finding it harder and harder to talk, but he managed to make an approving noise, so a minute later they hit the road with Castiel sitting right next to Dean, continuing to hold his hand while the EMT shone a flashlight in his eyes and said things Dean couldn’t really understand to his partner.
“Your wife?” Dean suddenly remembered, trying to look at Castiel. “Shouldn’t you tell her that you left?”
“Ah, well,” Castiel said, spots of red appearing on his cheeks, “I don’t have a wife anymore, either.”
“Shit, dude,” Dean said. “Didn’t think anybody was having a worse year than me, but maybe you are.”
“I’ll continue counting myself fortunate to have all my limbs,” Castiel said wryly. “I think the title is safely yours.”
The thing about Dean’s arm being blown off was that people mostly pretended they couldn’t see it and talked around it like it was a fart at a dinner party. And Dean? Hated that. It was bullshit. Especially when he could see them trying to talk about it behind his back when he was still there. Castiel just fucking saying it was about the most refreshing thing Dean had ever heard, and he started laughing. The EMTs were looking at the guy like he was a huge asshole, even though he was sitting here in an ambulance holding a dude’s hand, and Dean just fucking lost it.
Of course, laughing with a concussion was dicey, and Dean ended up puking all over the blanket they’d draped over him. Oh yeah… he had the “Worst Year Ever” award in the bag.
Dean turned out to be pretty lucky; he had a hairline fracture in his ankle and he was able to get by with a boot and a cane. If he’d needed a cast and had to try to use crutches, he might as well have just joined the goddamn circus because only an acrobat or a clown was going to do that with one arm. The hospital kept him under observation overnight, because of the concussion, so thank fuck for VA insurance. Probably it was going to take him a year of paperwork to get them to pay for it, but it would happen eventually.
He was not happy to find out that he wasn’t going to be able to look at screens for a few days. He still had two weeks left before the holiday break for his online classes, and there was no way he was going to finish his assignments on time, which meant asking for an extension and having to carry them over into the spring semester, which sucked ass.
Castiel had stayed until Dean was diagnosed and treated and put into a room for observation, which was beyond nice of him, but he had eventually gone home. Dean wished he’d thought to ask if Castiel might be willing to pick him up when he was released, but he didn’t even have the guy’s phone number. He had to take a cab home, which was also the worst because he didn’t have that kind of spare cash to be wasting on that kind of crap. His VA disability payments were a joke and he worked the graveyard shift at the gas station. He wasn’t exactly rolling in the dough.
When the cab dropped him off, he honestly thought for a second that his concussion had him seeing things. He was just standing there in yesterday’s clothes, staring, until the cabbie started complaining about when Dean was gonna pay his fare so he could get on with his day.
“Yeah, sure, sorry,” Dean said, forking over the money. The cab left him, and he tentatively approached his house. His decorated house. Somebody had finished putting up the lights, and put the wreath on the door and the stupid damn miniature reindeer with the red velvet bows on their necks that went to either side of the front door. He’d left it all in a box on his porch yesterday. The box and the ladder were gone, though at the moment Dean didn’t really care where to.
On top of all that, somebody had installed a temporary ramp over the stairs that led up to the porch. Dean had been worried about how he was going to get up them, but it looked like somebody had already worried about that for him.
He went to put his key in the front lock and realized he’d left the house unlocked yesterday, and he limped inside with at least some worry that somebody would have stolen the TV or his vinyl collection or his mom’s jewelry or something, but it looked untouched.
He was starving by then, so he went for the kitchen. His head still hurt pretty bad, and he just wanted to eat something as quickly as possible and go lay down in the dark for a while. He was dumbfounded to find three covered dishes that didn’t belong to him in the fridge and a foil-covered plate of gingerbread cookies on the island. The sticky note on top of the cookies said, Get well soon! :) The neighbors, which did not do as much to solve the mystery as much as the note-writer might have thought it did.
There was a knock on the front door. Dean groaned, but went to answer it.
Castiel stood on the other side, holding out a store-bought pie. “I don’t cook.”
“Okay?”
“Everybody coordinated to bring you something, since we weren’t sure if you were going to be able to feed yourself when you got home. I don’t know if you saw that there were a few dishes in your fridge.”
“Everybody?”
“Well, everybody except me because I don’t cook.”
“I hope you can figure out the problem with trying to hand me that,” Dean said as Castiel tried to hold the pie out again.
Castiel stared at him for a second, the one-handed man who needed said hand for the cane he was using, then he let out one of those stupidly hot hoarse chuckles. “No, yep, I see it now. If it’s all right with you, I can leave this in your kitchen.”
Dean wanted to be alone really badly right now. He wanted to be wallowing. “Jes-Jeepers!” Dean quickly corrected himself before he could take the Lord’s name in vain. Castiel maybe wasn’t a pastor anymore, and Dean was very curious about why that happened, but he probably still didn’t like Dean saying “Jesus” like that. “Fine, but then go away because I need to take painkillers and sleep forever.”
“Oh,” Castiel said softly. “I’m sorry to hear you’re in pain.”
Dean felt squirmy at the amount of sincerity in that. “Yeah, well, I’ve had worse,” he said as he gestured Castiel inside. “So who put up my decorations and the ramp?”
“Oh, that was me.”
“Wait, really? You built that?”
“Are you surprised that I know how?”
“No,” Dean said, even though the answer was yes. The guy lived in knitted cardigans and pristine white sneakers; sue him for thinking Castiel might not be good with his hands. “It must have been a lot of work.”
“Not much,” Castiel said with a shrug. “I wanted to help.”
“Um, thank you.”
Dean was so tired and his head hurt so much that he found himself leaning against the kitchen island just to stay upright. He was probably supposed to be more gracious than this, offer the guy something to drink at least, but he just couldn’t deal with it right now.
“Dean, are you all right?”
He startled when Castiel put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Fuck, sorry, shit I shouldn’t swear, oh, no, you don’t care. I just feel like crap. Sorry.”
“I’ll leave you alone so you can rest now, but Dean? I’m right next door if you need help.”
Dean bristled, because he’d had his fill of well-meaning shitheads thinking he couldn’t take care of himself after his amputation. But Castiel was holding his hands palm up, as if in surrender or defense of some kind.
“I just mean, a broken ankle makes a lot of things more difficult, and a concussion on top probably doesn’t help. So… if I can do anything for you, I’d like to. Okay?”
“Yeah, whatever man,” Dean sighed, and watched Castiel let himself out. He wasn’t going to ask for shit, obviously. Still, free food was free food. He was too tired to get anything out of the fridge and heat it up now, so he just dug into Castiel’s pie, straight from the package with a fork. Cherry crumble, awesome.
He only managed a few bites before dragging himself to the living room and collapsing onto the couch with a grunt. He was out like a light immediately.
Dean had already told the gas station that he needed a couple of days off while he was in the taxi on the way home from the hospital. He hadn’t anticipated that it would mean sitting around alone in the middle of the night, wide awake with nothing to do. He couldn’t read or watch TV or anything because it all made his head hurt, even just turning the lights on was making his head hurt, and trying to do normal chores like clean the bathroom or vacuum the carpets was not really an option with the broken ankle. So he was reduced to sitting around, listening to his parent’s old vinyls with the volume low by the light of a single lamp.
He used to have friends. Even people who might be awake at three in the morning and wouldn’t be mad about getting a phone call from someone who needed company in the middle of the night. But he’d fallen out of touch with most because of being active duty, and the rest he’d shoved away and alienated because he’d been a big bundle of snarling raw nerves after his discharge. He should have at least had Sam, but Sam was never going to forgive him for joining the military industrial complex and being unreachable when Mom and Dad died. And maybe that was fair. Maybe Dean wouldn't have forgiven Sam either, if he’d been the one who had to handle identifying their bodies and arranging their funeral alone.
Dean was lying on the couch, staring out of the window into the darkness and wondering how bad the side effects would be if he took an extra dose of painkillers, so he was perfectly positioned to see the light in the window next door turn on. He tried turning on his side and ignoring it, because it was none of his business what Castiel Novak, former pastor of the Lord, was doing up in the middle of the night. But of course, that was just not how Dean was built, and he found himself limping over to the window and peeking.
Castiel, in a pair of sad, overly-long boxer shorts and nothing else, stood impatiently in front of his microwave. Dean should not be looking, but holy shit what that man was hiding under all the cardigans was hard to look away from. He was stacked, and his chest and belly had a dusting of hair that made Dean’s mouth go dry. When Castiel suddenly turned around to go to his sink, Dean stumbled back from his window, heart pounding. He was not going to be a fucking creeper.
He resolutely went and threw himself down on the couch again, but a few minutes later his eyes crept back to the window, and he could see the flickering blue light that indicated that Castiel had turned his TV on. A thought seized Dean, and wouldn’t let him go. They were both up, right? Maybe it wasn’t that weird.
A further fifteen minutes of hemming and hawing later, Dean was fully dressed and on Castiel’s front porch. He was afraid to ring the bell in case it was really loud in the stillness of the night around him. He didn’t need any of the other neighbors to see him doing this. So he knocked, a little too softly. He could barely hear it himself. He overcompensated on the second attempt and knocked way to loud. He winced and cast a guilty look behind him.
He almost just turned around and booked it for his own house, to leave Castiel wondering if he was hearing things or getting pranked by middle schoolers, or something. But when he started to turn, he remembered he was gimpy and would never make it before being seen. So he just… stood there.
Castiel opened the door with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his hair in wild disarray. “Dean? What happened, are you okay?”
Dean couldn’t even meet his eyes, and founding himself addressing Castiel’s bare feet. “I’m fine. I just. Can’t sleep, and also can’t read or look at anything bright without giving myself a headache so I can’t watch a movie or do my homework either, and I’m bored and driving myself crazy. And I saw that you were up. And I know that this is definitely not what you fucking had in mind when you said I could ask for help, but uh…” Dean jerked his head toward where he had a tupperware pinned to his chest with his arm stump. “I brought those gingerbread cookies?”
He finally chanced a glance up, and Castiel was smiling at him. It crinkled up his eyes, and Dean felt the heat returning to his belly. This was such a mistake.
“Would you like to come in?”
“Are you sure? I’m sorry, this was stupid.”
“Dean. Come in.”
Dean carefully shuffled inside, feeling like an idiot.
“I’ve, uh, been learning a lot about myself after my divorce,” Castiel said, leading him further inside. “It turns out that I don’t really love having a quiet house or sleeping alone, and also that I’m something of a night owl. I think having some company might be nice, actually.”
Dean was looking around as he followed Castiel into his living room, and he was sort of shocked. The place was beyond minimalist, it was barren. The open-floor-plan room that started at the kitchen was devoid of any furniture beyond a sofa and the TV. There were still marks in the carpet where he was pretty sure a dining table and chairs were supposed to be, and there wasn’t anything on the walls, either. No artwork or photos. No potted plants. There wasn’t even a coffee table; Castiel’s half-eaten bowl of microwave popcorn was just sitting on the sofa.
“Have a seat, if you like,” Castiel said, waving at the sofa. “I’ll go, uh, put some pants on.”
Instead of sitting down, Dean wandered into the kitchen and snooped. In the fridge, he found a stick of butter, an open quart of milk and another of orange juice, and baby carrots. The freezer was stuffed with microwaveable meals.
“Wow,” he muttered.
“If you want something to drink, options are limited,” Castiel said behind him. “Sorry, I don’t really drink soda or beer or anything, and I rarely have guests.”
Dean whirled around, a guilty apology on the tip of his tongue.
“I meant it when I said I can’t cook,” Castiel said, cutting him off before he could say anything. He had a small, wry smile on his face. “Daphne did all of that, I never really learned. I eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches these days.”
Dean flicked a glance over the mostly-empty room next to the kitchen.
“We chose to handle it as a no-fault divorce in which I wouldn’t owe her alimony, but one of the compromises we made was that she could take anything she wanted with her,” Castiel said, understanding the question. “She picked it all out, so it seemed fair. And was good for me, since I didn’t know when I was going to be able to find a job.”
“Oh,” Dean said, feeling like an idiot for asking even though he literally hadn’t asked. “I can see if the gas station is hiring.”
Castiel actually smiled at that. “I did actually just land a job, but thank you. I’m going to be teaching some religious studies classes and basic Latin at the community college starting next month.”
“I go there,” Dean said. “The college. I don’t have a major yet, though. Um, sorry, that’s not important. I meant to say congratulations on the job.”
“Thank you, Dean,” Castiel said. “Should we take some milk and cookies over to sit down? I’d love to hear what you think of the school. I confess that I’m a bit nervous about becoming a teacher, and it might help if I knew better about what to expect.”
“Sure,” Dean said. “I didn’t want to impose or anything, so if you just wanted some peace and quiet to watch TV, I can just. Go home.”
Castiel tilted his head. “Wait. You said, when you were coming in, that it was giving you a headache to look at the TV”
“Yeah, but that’s not—”
Castiel just about sprinted across the room to turn the TV off. “There we go. Now, please do get comfortable, I wasn’t kidding when I said the company was welcome and I’m glad you came over. I’d love to hear about your classes.”
Like Dean was a spooked horse, Castiel slowly herded Dean to the sofa and deposited milk and cookies there. He started asking questions about the college campus, about Dean’s professors, and Dean finally felt himself start to relax and believe the guy wasn’t just being excessively nice and actually was glad to have a neighbor drop in on him in the middle of the night.
Castiel seemed to really like talking to him. He laughed a lot at Dean’s corny dad jokes, and Dean’s stomach kept clenching up. He had to stop thinking about how attractive the guy was. He tried to just be glad for the company, like Castiel seemed to be.
He found himself becoming very drowsy again somewhere near five a.m., because the concussion was fucking him up. He kept thinking he would get up to go back to his house in just a minute, but Castiel had draped a blanket over his lap and was reading something out loud at him from his phone, and he never quite managed to do it.
Dean awoke fully clothed on someone else’s sofa mid-morning. He didn’t worry, because it would hardly be the first time he’d slept over after a hookup or a party or something. A gravelly low voice was humming in the kitchen, which felt cozy. He couldn’t quite remember who he’d hooked up with, but the guy sounded hot. He smiled lazily, thinking about the possibility of morning blowjobs before he’d inevitably need to find his clothes and get going while the getting was good.
But looking at the mid-morning sunlight through the window made pain spike in his head, which made him suddenly remember where he was. He scrambled up before remembering that his ankle was also busted, and immediately falling back down with a grunt of pain. And that set the damaged nerves in his arm to screaming at him, because the universe hated him personally.
“Good morning, Dean,” Castiel greeted him from the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Fuck, sorry, I can’t believe I fell asleep here,” Dean said. “Shit!”
“No, it’s fine, don’t—”
Dean saw his cane leaned against the sofa, grabbed it, and hauled himself up again. “Sorry, man, uh, thanks a lot for—thanks.” He hobbled to the door as fast as he could go, which was embarrassingly not fast. He could barely see past all the different places his body was sending pain signals from, and it was kicking up his heart rate, which was going to give him a panic attack if he didn’t get to his meds and a hot shower with the lights off in the next couple of minutes.
“Dean,” Castiel said with concern, leaving the kitchen and crossing the empty expanse where his furniture used to be. “Everything is fine, you don’t need to—”
“I gotta go,” Dean panted, and slammed the door closed behind him.