Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The man he’s riding with is a nice guy, Dean thinks. Cas, is his name. About 30 years old.

Dean had thought he was nice from the first time the guy fucked him. He wasn’t too rough about it, even though he paid enough that he could be. He touched Dean’s hair when Dean blew him, which made Dean embarrassingly hard.

He doesn’t get a lot of affection, out here on the road, living truckstop to truckstop. It’s why even the hint of it had had Dean gambling, offering his ass up for the next few weeks if the guy agreed to take him along for the ride.

Man mentioned he was riding out to Cali, and Dean had thrown his chips in on that pretty much right away. It’s a good way to get murdered, he knows, riding along with some trucker you met behind the men’s room.

Cas hadn’t seemed like a murderer then, though, and he still doesn’t now, six days and half a dozen blowjobs later. The man doesn’t talk much, but he doesn’t hit much, either, or at all, which is just fine in Dean’s book.

He likes the quiet, for the most part. He really likes not getting thrown around.

He’s used to it, by now, with these lonely guys all too anxious to prove they’re still real men after Dean sucks ‘em off. Doesn’t mean he likes getting roughed up, though, even if he knows he can handle it.

The past couple days have been a nice break. Get fucked once or twice a day, with the occasional lazy blow job mixed in. It’s the least amount of work he’s had to do in a long time, for the biggest reward he’s had in years.

Not just a ride in the general direction of Sammy, but a safe place to sleep, and three solid meals a day. The guy lets him knock out on the small cab bed behind the seats pretty much whenever he wants, even at night, even when it ends up with both of them in it. And during the day, it’s every couple hours that they’re pulling into some rest stop, and Cas is coming back to the truck 15 minutes later holding a sandwich for Dean.

Yeah. Like Dean said, nice guy.

Nice guy, weird and quiet, but gentle, and oddly thoughtful. Dean can’t pretend it isn’t a relief, to get decent sleep for a few days, to have a full stomach.

For a strange, half mute long haul trucker, Cas takes pretty damn good care of Dean, without being asked to. Like Dean is a girl, or something. Like he’s the guy’s own fag to keep.

It makes Dean kind of embarrassed, but kind of flattered, too. He’s never really been treated like that before, and he hasn’t really been very sure how to respond.

“You don’t gotta keep buying me crap,” he’d tried saying at one point on the 2nd day, when Cas had handed him yet another McDonald’s cheeseburger.

“You have to eat something,” the man had said bluntly back, before pulling out of the parking lot and back onto the road.

It had been a good point, so Dean hadn’t argued, but just quietly chowed down on his Big Mac. It had made him uncomfortable, though, so he’d tried a few minutes later to give the man road head, which had been quietly rejected.

“That’s not safe,” Cas had said, and Dean had just grunted, sitting back in the passenger’s seat and trying not to show his embarrassment on his face.

“Sure.”

Like that’s ever stopped anyone.

Cas is a weirdo, though. So Dean figures he’s going to have to get a bit more creative to find ways to pay the guy back.

Which brings them to today. Day six of riding together, day six of getting fucked by only one guy. Day six of owing that guy an increasing amount of money, despite the fact that the man never says anything to indicate he expects Dean to pay him back.

Doesn’t matter. Dean doesn’t roll that way. He’d agreed to sell his ass for a ride to Cali, not all this pampering, nice as it is. He’s getting antsy, not having had a chance to make back any of the cash he owes the trucker since he’d first started riding with him last Tuesday. The pit stops they’ve made are quick and pointed, efficient drop offs and load ups of cargo that are over too fast for Dean to find any marks.

But today he’s determined. He’ll find some way to stall for time, or whatever. He’s bitten his nails down to the quick thinking about it, anxious every time Cas starts to slow down.

It’s never the actual stop they’re going towards. Just natural variations of driving for hours on end. Dean has no idea what time or where they’ll actually be pulling over today, because Cas hasn’t told him, because the man doesn’t really talk much at all.

Silent as Lurch, the man just stares out of the dashboard and drives quietly, unaware or uncaring of Dean’s occasional glances towards his sturdy form. He’d fucked Dean twice this morning before they’d pulled out of the rest stop, an ache that Dean is still feeling, but the man hasn’t said a word outside of that since then.

It’s been four hours. It’s approaching noon. They’re nearing Toledo, Ohio, according to the road signs they’re passing. The trucker must be planning on making a stop for lunch somewhere soon.

Fast food. Always fast food, or cheap gas station snacks. It won’t give Dean enough time to do what he needs to, and he can’t count on the unloading stop that he isn’t even sure is actually coming.

Sitting half curled up in the passenger’s seat, knees up and seatbelt forgotten, Dean picks at the ragged skin around the edges of his fingernails as he tries to get up the courage to speak. It’s 101 degrees outside, and all four of the dashboard fans are blasting. Yet his skin still sticks to the pleather cushioning, and his body feels sticky and too hot.

His throat feels dry.

“Hey, man.”

The trucker sitting across from him doesn’t react. Doesn’t take his eyes off the road.

He has a cigarette half hanging out of his mouth, barely smoldering, and Dean has the paranoid thought that the man might put it out on Dean’s skin.

Nah. He’s been sweet on you. Guy’s just weird, that’s all.

He doesn’t seem to know too well how to react to human conversation. Not an uncommon trait, in long haul truckers, but this guy seems even worse at it than Dean has come to expect.

He clears his throat uncomfortably. Sits up a bit, in his seat.

“Hey, man,” he says, slightly louder, as his skin peels painfully off the seat beneath him. “I’m- I’m really hot, right now, man. You think we could take a break?”

Cas glances briefly over to Dean before refocusing his attention on the highway.

There’s a pause of a few awkward seconds, before Cas says, “There’s a rest stop about 35 minutes away.”

“Sure.”

That’s what Dean expected. He saw the sign advertising the Arby’s about two miles back.

Not what he needs. Not to get this over with, finally.

“Yeah, it’s just. My legs are cramping from all this driving. You think we could…I don’t know. Get some air?”

He’s not sure exactly what he’s asking for, except to stop for more than the five minutes it takes Cas to run into a McDonalds and come back out carrying grub. He can’t work with that, those damn production lines way too efficient for Dean to use the time as a suitable distraction.

It’s what it is, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t anxious as hell asking the question. Cas has been all sweet to him so far, and all, but it’s not like Dean doesn’t know that can’t change.

Especially if he starts to make a fuss, and be more effort to tug along than he’s worth.

He chews his lip as Cas seems to mull this over, staring blankly out at the smaller cars overtaking them on the road.

And he feels more relief than he really should when Cas says, “Alright,” finally, and changes lanes like he’s getting ready to pull off the highway.

Dean perks up.

“We gettin’ off?”

Grunting, Cas nods in the general direction of the upcoming exit with his head.

“Can’t park my truck in the city. But there’s a smaller stop not too far out of it. Got a diner, and a big enough parking lot that we won’t have a problem.”

It’s the most Dean’s heard the man speak in one go since he started riding with him the better part of a week ago.

“A diner?” Dean asks, kind of startled at the suggestion. “I don’t have the cash for that.”

“That’s not an issue,” Cas says back, waving him off.

Overly generous, as always, like Dean isn’t just some two dollar whore he picked up at a truck stop. Like he’s his girlfriend, or something, who he doesn’t mind having to take out to eat.

Chewing it all over, Dean sits back in his seat, untangling his cramped legs as he watches the world outside the window shift from highway and into civilization. A diner hadn’t really been what he had in mind, but he supposes he can work with that. Run down place like this, there’s probably at least a couple bums hanging around out the back.

“I ain’t gone to a restaurant in years,” he says honestly, unsure why he offers the information.

Cas doesn’t answer for a few seconds again, but then he does, kind of stilted.

“Me either,” he echoes, and that’s the end of that.

*********

It’s not even ten minutes later that they’re pulling into the diner’s parking lot. It’s a run down, crappy looking joint, and still twenty times nicer than anything Dean’s been around for a decade.

That makes him a little nervous.

“Hey, listen, we don’t have to stop here if you don’t want to…” he says, kind of uncertainly.

Cas turns off the ignition.

“It has air conditioning. You’re right, you’ve been cooped up long enough.”

Then he unbuckles his own seatbelt, and opens the cab door, and hops down from the perch. Dean has the unnerving thought that the man might come around to try to help him get down if he doesn’t do it himself, so he unwinds himself from his seat and jumps down to the asphalt before the man has the chance to get around to his door.

His legs really are cramping, and he has to stifle a groan as he stands up straight for the first time in hours. Apparently not alone in that feeling, he’s treated to the sight of Cas stretching when he looks up.

It’s a bright, sunny day, and the sunlight reflects off the pavement in a way that makes it almost painful to look at anything. Somehow the brightness of the light only highlights what Cas looks like, though, and Dean is struck, not for the first time, by how good looking the man is.

He could be a damn model. What is he doing out here, in such a weird fucking lonely job?

But he knows the answer to his own question before he’s even finished thinking of it. Good looks don’t get you very far, or get you anywhere, if you don’t got the people skills to back them up.

Hell if Dean doesn’t know that from personal experience. It’s not like his own pretty face has gotten him much more than a bunch of dicks stuffed into it.

He winces, shaking his head slightly as if to dislodge his thoughts from them. Self-pity has never been something he finds appealing, and he’s got a job to do right now, if he can wrangle himself away.

Not yet.

He’s gotta get Cas seated and happy first. Somehow he doesn’t think the man will react great if Dean just tells him he’s gotta go suck someone else’s dick.

“We doin’ this, or what?” he says instead, because he doesn’t have a death wish.

Cas, putting a hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun, gives a curt nod.

The diner, when they enter it, is dimly lit and dingy. It really does have air conditioning, though, which is a relief after the blazing heat.

There’s not really anyone around, at least not obviously, so Dean just sort of hovers near the entrance, not sure how he’s supposed to behave in here.

It’s been a minute since he’s spent time anywhere other than run down motels and back alleys.

Despite what he’d said about not having been to a restaurant in a long time, though, Cas doesn’t seem to be experiencing the same level of discomfort as Dean is. He looks around briefly for a waitress, and, when he doesn’t see one, seats himself. Deciding to follow the man’s lead, Dean slides into the booth across from the trucker.

He taps at the linoleum of the table as he cases out the place, scanning the patrons. There’s a couple old guys who might be willing to follow him out back for some funny business, if he can catch their eye and attention without Cas catching on.

Not too unlikely. The trucker is staring off into space out the window they’re next to. Gazing with a fairly contemplative look at his huge truck, like he’s a cowboy getting emotional about his horse or something.

Weird guy.

“Think they got menus here?” he asks the man, after a minute. Picking at the napkin in front of him and tearing the corners up into shreds.

One of the gray haired bums is looking back at him, but Dean can’t tell yet if they’re on the same page here. Could just be a crazy guy, who’s pissed off and piss drunk and unaware.

Unaware like Cas is. The man, tired, doesn’t notice Dean and the bum eyeing each other up.

“Doubt it,” he tells Dean, absently. “These places usually just have the same ten things you can get anywhere else in America.”

Grunting in acknowledgement, Dean hunches over in his seat.

He doesn’t have time to figure out if he’s on the right track with the bum in the corner. It’s now or never, while Cas is finally seated in one place.

“Get me whatever’s cheapest, then,” he says, sliding back out of the booth and standing up again. “I gotta piss.”

Without another word, he walks off, towards what he’s guessing is a door that leads out towards the back.

He’s right, and he’s greeted by the smell of dumpster trash as he enters the gravel filled alley. Muggy as hell, there’s flies all over the place here, and a reek that no breeze could send away.

He hears the rush of cars from the highway in the distance. There’s broken glass on the ground, that Dean is going to have to be careful not to cut himself on if he ends up on his knees.

When he ends up on his knees. He hadn’t risked looking back at the bum to check if he was going to follow Dean out here, but he only has to wait half a minute before the rusty door is opening again.

The bum looks at him, and Dean looks back, full of intention.

Let's get this over with, Dean thinks to himself flatly, unhappy. He’s been spoiled the last few days, and is already more resentful of having to suck some unwashed tramp off.

But he’s being stupid. This is his life, and Cas is just a blip in it. He shouldn’t get used to living the high life just because the trucker likes to play house.

“It’s thirty for a BJ,” he says bluntly.

“How much for your ass?”

“Not for sale. Don’t got the time.”

The bum scoffs, but doesn’t try to rape him, which is a win in Dean’s book.

“Your mouth isn’t worth 30.”

“Sure it is,” Dean answers back, a blatant lie.

He’s good at what he does, but that doesn’t make him worth solid money. Everyone knows he’s a used up, half dead hooker, and no one wants to play premium for some else’s sloppy 2nds, or 25ths.

The bum scoffs again, and Dean scowls. He doesn’t have time for this, with Cas waiting on him inside.

“20. Take it or leave it. I can find someone else if I need to.”

Also a blatant lie, but the bum doesn’t know that. Nor does he seem to care, tired of not having his cock in Dean’s mouth.

“Whatever.”

The man unzips his pants, and Dean goes to his knees. The cock that gets shoved between his lips is small, which is a relief, but tastes foul.

Unwashed, as Dean suspected. He can smell the alcohol on the man even from down here. It’s the way he’s used to doing this, gross and quick and ugly, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it, especially after the last couple of pampered days.

Stop letting yourself get used to that, he tells himself, wincing, as the man above him grabs his hair and pistons aggressively in and out of his mouth.

It’s uncomfortable, and nasty, and not worth the $20. But he doesn’t really have much of a choice about putting up with it, with Cas waiting inside about to drop even more cash.

It stresses him out. The $20 is probably barely enough to cover this meal, even if he cheaps out on it. He’s going to have to figure out a way to do this again pretty soon, if he doesn’t want Cas to get annoyed.

$20 is something, though, at least, and Dean is relieved to have it when the man finally finishes. He swallows his load down, which the bum seems to like, and gets an extra dollar crumpled up and thrown at him for his effort.

$21. Great. Dean wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as the man zips up his pants.

“You’re good at that, kid,” he says.

Dean stares at the ground.

“Thanks,” he says back, clutching the meager bills he’s earned in his hand.

Then the man is gone, as fast as he came, and Dean blinks unhappiness out of his eyes. Strangely, he has the urge to go back in the diner and get right on his knees again, for Cas, in front of everyone, just to get the bum’s taste out of his mouth.

He likes Cas’s taste better. It’s clean, and masculine.

What a strange urge.

He pushes it firmly aside.

And he pulls himself together, like he always does, like he’s always had to, multiple times a day. Brushing the gravel stuck to his knees off his jeans, he stands up, pretending he doesn’t feel awful. He’s not going to be a baby about something he’s done near every damn day for ten years.

The door creaks when he enters the diner back through it again, and thumps behind him as it closes, as he’s greeted with a rush of cool air.

The air conditioner is directly above the door, and seems to be about 100 years old. It works, but is loud as all hell, and musty. Dean still revels in the feeling of blasting cool air for a few seconds, as his eyes re-adjust to the dim lights.

The bum is gone. Guess he figured shitty diner food isn’t worth the humiliation of eating in the same place as Dean.

He’s relieved, but it still makes his stomach twist a little. He half expects Cas to be gone too, when he looks over to their booth.

But no. The man is still there. Smoking another cigarette, staring down at the table.

He has a burger, untouched, in front of him. There’s another untouched burger on the other side of the table, right in front of where Dean had left from.

It….doesn’t look crappy, unlike the rest of the diner. It looks really good, actually. And not. Not cheap.

Dean isn’t sure how he feels.

He comes back over to Cas with the bills clutched tight enough in his hand that he can feel sweat condensing on his palm.

“Pretty sure you’re not supposed to smoke in here,” he says quietly.

Cas doesn’t look up, like some cool John Wick character who’s above reacting to dialogue.

Except that Dean’s pretty sure the man just doesn’t realize he’s supposed to.

“No one cares,” the man answers, bluntly. Then, “Food came.”

Dean hums in acknowledgment, and slides back into the booth with a huff. He stuffs the money in his pocket, deciding to table that conversation for later on.

“This doesn’t look like the cheapest thing on the menu,” he comments, wiping his palm on his jeans.

“It’s not,” Cas agrees. “Eat.”

Conflicted, Dean purses his lips, but does eat, when Cas finally does look back up at him. The man has an intimidating undertone to his mannerisms, despite the gentleness. He feels like someone Dean doesn’t want to cross.

The burger, when Dean bites into it, is hot and greasy and overflowing with cheese and caramelized onions. It’s by far the best thing Dean’s eaten in years, and pretty soon, he’s forgotten all about his hesitation.

As if he’s starving, he devours the food in front of him like a dying man, like he hasn’t eaten in days. If he wasn’t enjoying himself so much, he might find it ironic. He’s been better fed this past week than he can ever remember being in his entire life.

Yet, here he is. Dean licks the grease off his fingers when he’s finally finished.

“Shit, that was good,” he breathes, and Cas hums in agreement.

Only then does Dean notice how hard Cas is staring at him, how he’s been staring at him with that strange intensity since the moment he picked up his food.

The man’s own burger sits still untouched between them. Abruptly self-conscious, Dean blushes, and looks at his empty plate.

“Sorry,” he mutters, not sure what he’s apologizing for.

Cas tilts his head.

“For what?”

Uncertain, Dean shrugs, then says, “Eatin’ like a pig while you’re watching?”

“I like watching you eat.”

The trucker speaks with complete bluntness, without embarrassment. Surprised, Dean looks back up at him in confusion, feeling his blush deepen to the point that it must be visible on his face.

Stupid. He just sucked a stranger’s dick in a back alley not even 10 minutes ago, but it’s this weird fuckin’ crap that’s making him blush.

He can’t help it, though. He’s used to hooking, to giving blowjobs. He’s not used to having hot, overly generous truckers stare intently at him and earnestly say they like watching him eat.

Hands having nothing to do now that his food is gone, they go back to picking at the napkin he’d abandoned before.

“Geeze, you sure have a way with words,” he comments, a little weakly. “You’ve got a kink or something?”

“Maybe.”

Cas doesn’t seem embarrassed to admit it out loud.

He’s too weird to be embarrassed. Dean finds himself wishing he was that weird too.

But, no. He’s just normal enough to feel the full rush of awkwardness that comes with having this conversation, while being too weird to just get up and walk away like he probably should.

“I’ll blow you when we get back to the truck, then,” he offers, ears pinkening. “You gonna eat your burger, or you gonna jack off to me eating that one too?”

Getting the hint, finally, Cas puts out his cigarette, picks his own food up and eats it in silence. Unlike the trucker, Dean feels too weird to watch him. He just stares, melancholy, out towards the truck like Cas earlier had been. Thinking life would be easier, actually, if they were just cowboys, and that stupid truck was an old run down horse.

**********

Dean does blow Cas once they get back to the truck, inside the cab, squished between the man’s knees. He’d do it outside the truck in public if Cas wanted him to, but Cas doesn’t seem to get off on humiliating him like that.

Instead, he seems to get off on other, weirder things, like watching Dean eat burgers, and petting Dean’s hair as he gets his cock sucked.

Like every other time they’ve done this, Cas is forceful, but not very rough with him, and Dean gets hard as a rock inside his jeans just from the sound of the man telling him he’s doing a good job.

“That’s good, Dean, that’s good,” the man pants, as Dean struggles not to touch his own cock.

Distantly, he wonders if it makes him a pervert, getting off on blowing some rough trade guy he barely knows.

He doesn’t really care either way. When Cas finishes, Dean regrets having swallowed for the bum out back, because it feels less authentic now when he does it for Cas.

Stupid way to feel. There’s nothing authentic about giving a blowjob in some overheated truck.

But…he likes Cas. There isn’t really any other way he can prove it to him. Not like the cash he makes otherwise is even going to make up for the cost of keeping him along, much less make some kind of dent in Cas’s life.

He feels embarrassed, again, as he pulls away, and hyper aware of the wadded up bills in his front pocket.

“Are you…?” Cas asks him from above, still sounding out of breath as he gestures.

Down towards Dean’s crotch, which isn’t a movement that’s hard to interpret at all.

Dean sits back on his heels and licks his lips before wiping his hand across them. He can’t tell how much of the heat he’s feeling is from the weather, and how much is coming from inside himself.

“Nah,” he lies, hunching over himself a little to hide any evidence. “Tired today, you know?”

“It’s hot,” Cas agrees, nodding seriously. As if that’s a reason not to get hard.

Dean snorts, and stands up, turning away so Cas doesn’t see the front of him.

He doesn’t know exactly why he’s lying about what’s going on between his legs right now, or why he’s acting like it’s something Cas shouldn’t know.

It’s not like Cas hasn’t jacked him off a couple of times already too, and not like he doesn’t know a guy like him doesn’t mind doing it. It would hurt his feelings, probably, if Dean totally rejected him, cause he’s the kind of guy that gives a shit if his whores are just barely holding themselves back from throwing up.

Dean is certainly not doing that. He’s closer to the opposite end of that spectrum, actually.

It makes him feel vulnerable, how much he likes this weird guy with a burger fetish. Makes him feel exposed, to want like this, when he knows it’s not gonna last.

His boner starts to calm down as he stares out the window at the asphalt. Hearing Cas zipping up his pants again and sighing, Dean sighs too, and turns around.

“Hey,” he starts.

He’s still standing between Cas’s legs.

The trucker looks up at him, expectantly, and Dean doesn’t know what to say.

The man has extremely blue eyes, and brown hair that’s so dark it’s almost black. Dean had thought it was black, actually, but the sunlight spilling through the windshield now is intense enough to show him he was wrong.

Dean swallows, and shifts his weight. He leans back against the dashboard behind him, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Hey,” he tries again. “Back there, in the diner….do you really get off on watching me eat?”

He doesn’t know why he asks, because it doesn’t matter either way. Cas can do whatever he wants with him, as long as they’re riding together. If he wants to stuff Dean full of twinkies and make him do the hula, Dean would say Aloha Sir yes sir and comply.

But he just kind of wants to know, because it maybe changes some things about how Cas has been treating him. He doesn’t know if he’d be relieved or not, if this is really some kink thing, because it would make it all easier, but would also…make him feel kind of bad.

Which is. Stupid.

But Dean is stupid.

It’s not like Cas actually likes him, or anything. It’s not even like he really knows Cas enough to actually like him back.

He just likes having a break from his usual shitty life. And likes that Cas seems to not think twice about giving that to him.

It would make it weird, if it was all just some freak fetish. Make Cas more like all the other guys he blows, day in and day out.

So he feels kind of anxious, as Cas frowns, like he’s considering. Knowing more hinges on the way that Cas answers than it should.

“I don’t know,” the trucker says, unhelpfully, but continuously earnest. “It’s not like I get hard from making you eat.”

“You feed me a lot,” Dean points out, and Cas looks confused at this.

“Well, you’re stuck in my truck with me all day. Obviously I have to feed you.”

It is, once again, a fair point.

“Sure,” Dean concedes, looking at his feet.

He feels the back of his neck burning, from the sunlight coming in through the windshield. Uncertain, and not satisfied that this is enough of a festish thing to not be his problem, he reaches down into his pocket and pulls out the crumpled bills.

“Here,” he says, cramming them into Cas’s hand very quickly. Cas takes the money with continued bewilderment, clearly not understanding what it is.

“For the burger,” Dean explains, eyes sliding away in embarrassment. “And- maybe some of the other stuff, too. I can make more, soon, and I’ll pay you back for the rest.”

There’s quiet, and Dean feels uncomfortable standing in between Cas’s legs all of a sudden. He feels his heart rate pick up a bit as the silence stretches on, and on, and on, and on.

“Where did you get this?”

Dean bites his lip.

“Blew a guy out back when you were waiting for the food to come,” he admits eventually, quietly. “I lied when I said I needed to go piss.”

The noise that comes out of Cas’s mouth is something between a cough and a grunt of discomfort, surprise caught out quick by the reality of who he’s decided to allow into his life.

Like he wants to be startled, but his own cynicism cuts the feeling short before it can fully develop. Shock cut down at the knees, as the man remembers that Dean is a two dollar whore he found on the side of the road.

Dean feels ashamed.

“Sorry,” he mutters, even though he isn’t. “Don’t like owing people for things.”

“You mean food?”

“I mean everything.”

It’s the truth, and it shouldn’t be so humiliating to say out loud, not when it’s supposed to be a point of pride for Dean.

But something about this feels strange, makes him feel small, for not being able to accept what Cas clearly thinks of as even less than a favor. Just basic consideration, for some hooker he’s traveling with.

Not wanting to look the man in the eye, Dean looks down and starts picking at his nails again. Nervous, and uncertain about how Cas is going to respond now.

“Gotta pay you back somehow,” he adds after a moment, uneasily.

“You’re already sucking my dick, Dean,” the trucker says back, blunt as a hammer.

Then he stands up, and Dean flinches, feeling like he’s made a mistake, and maybe Cas is angry. It’s not like he doesn’t know how possessive some guys can get about their fags.

But when the trucker reaches for him, it’s not to hit him, or choke him, but to rather forcefully put the money right back into the hand it had come from.

It feels sweaty and damp from the many hot palms it’s been passed between recently. Dean looks down at it uncomprehendingly, then back up at Cas at last.

“Don’t do this again, Dean,” the man tells him seriously.

There’s a flat kind of severity to the words, like he really isn’t kidding around.

Swallowing, Dean nods.

“Sure,” he says, and then, when Cas doesn’t let go of him, “Yes. Yes, I won’t do it again. Promise.”

Only then does Cas finally drop his wrist, and take a step back from him. And Dean shivers, feeling strangely like he misses the closeness once it’s gone.

Chapter Text

He’s laying half dressed on the trundle bed behind the car seats, playing with an old rubix cube he found forgotten on the floor.

Cas, who’s already driving, glances back at him in the rearview mirror. His eyes are dark, and intense as the moment he’d spotted Dean. It seems to be a personality trait of his, Dean has come to realize. Just coming off at every moment like he’s about to snap.

It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The man is just weird as hell, and attracted to Dean.

Dean can hardly blame him for that. He hadn’t bothered to put anything besides his boxers back on, after they’d fucked this morning. He has little modesty left in him, at this point, and no reason to cover up in this heat.

It’s only slightly cooler than yesterday, the leech of the early morning sun just barely starting to suck away the cool of night. It leaves a yellow glow on the highway ahead of them, and casts them both in orange in the inside of the truck’s cab.

“You can go back to sleep, if you want,” Cas tells him flatly, tearing his eyes away from Dean’s spread out, half nude body to look back at the road.

“Nah. I’m up now. Don’t sleep once I’m fucked awake.”

The trucker grunts in acknowledgement, neutral, like Dean hadn’t said anything erotic.

“Sorry I woke you so early, then,” he says, after a moment of silence.

Dean, redirecting his attention from the rubix cube, looks over to Cas with a smirk.

“I’m not.”

He says it bluntly, trying to match the man’s open and uncomplicated attitude around all this. Briefly, he sees Cas’s gaze flicker back to him in the mirror, for less than a second before it’s back on the road.

The trucker doesn’t say anything at Dean’s comment, but that’s ok. Dean doesn’t need him to. He’s being honest, having no regrets about how he’d been awoken this morning, with Cas halfway through the process of flipping him over and pulling off his ratty jeans.

It was hot. Cas is hot. Kind of dominant, and possessive, but in a way that’s so earnest it implies he doesn’t even mean to be. He’s not posturing, or making a point about anything. He’s just….like that, and doesn’t seem to question the way he gets all up in Dean’s space.

Dean can’t say he hates it. His hole aches a bit, but that’s always true. He certainly has had worse reasons to have to deal with some soreness down there.

Having a hot, possessive trucker have his way with him first thing in the morning has to be up there in the top three. Not that Dean’s had too many great sexual experiences, but he’s got a couple under his belt.

He’s starting to think this whole trip will be one of them. Cas doesn’t seem to question his right to fuck Dean whenever he wants, without question, without any conversation about it or warning at all.

Which is hot. Dean’s not used to that attitude, without it being accompanied by violence. The man still hasn’t hit him, even after the twenty-one dollar debacle of the day before.

“Are you still mad at me?” Dean had mumbled this morning, seconds after the man had cum, hot and rough, in his ass.

There’d been no question about what he was referring to, because there’d been no question about why Cas had just fucked him so hard and possessive. Fucked out and dizzy, he’d probably looked like a mess, and had still been wondering, at that point, if there was more aggression to come.

But Cas seemed to have gotten whatever angry instincts he’d had out of his system, and had pulled out of Dean’s hole without hurting him. Seemingly satisfied that he’d laid back his claim on his whore, he’d just looked down at Dean’s splayed body with eyes that leaked hunger, tucking himself back into his jeans while Dean, naked, had made no move to re-dress.

That had been a good call. Cas seemed to like it.

“No, sweetheart,” Cas had said, voice low and gravely. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”

Yeah. Hot.

Dean smirks again as he flips one of the cubes in his hands to red. He’s got one side done, now, but the rest don’t seem to be happening any time soon.

Sighing, he lets his arm flop down besides him, and rolls over, from his back to his stomach.

“Isn’t Chicago like nine hours away from here?” he asks, staring off into space.

“Yes,” Cas says simply, and Dean rolls his eyes, and groans.

“I’m not gonna make it that long. I’m gonna die of boredom if we don’t pull over.”

It’s not something he would have had the guts to say yesterday, if he’d had the guts to open his stupid mouth for a reason besides sucking cock at all.

It’s still not maybe the wisest thing to comment on. He’d agreed to come along for however long it takes to get to California, and complaining about it isn’t going to speed anything up.

He could still get on Cas’s bad side with that kind of attitude, a place he very, very firmly doesn’t want to be. But something had shifted between them since yesterday, something that makes Dean feel a little more open, and free.

The way Cas had gotten all up in his space when he tried to pay the man back, the way he’d told him not to try that shit again…it had scared him a little, at the time, but now it makes him feel safer. Makes him feel like he can get away with a little more attitude, without Cas deciding he’s not worth the sass and throwing him out.

If the fingerprint shaped bruises on his hips are anything to go by, it’s going to take more than a little whining for Cas to decide to kick him to the curb.

He knows he’s right when Cas, instead of slamming on the breaks or throwing something back at him, just frowns at Dean’s comment.

“You could play some music,” he offers, nodding towards the dashboard.

Perking up immediately, Dean lifts his head.

“Yeah? You don’t mind it?”

“Why would I mind.”

“I dunno, I just get the vibe that you’re more of a ‘suffer in silence’ kind of guy.”

He’s kidding, or at least, being sarcastic, the feeling that he can be safe to tease now having it all come out at once after it having been bottled up for so long. Once again, Cas doesn’t seem to mind, or get angry, but he also doesn’t seem to get it.

“I don’t mind silence. I don’t suffer,” the trucker says, with an edge of confusion. Then, awkward, he adds, “I don’t mind music either. I just don’t know what to play.”

It’s an odd thing to say, and Dean’s brow furrows slightly, not sure what Cas means, or if he should care.

What kind of guy doesn’t know what kind of music he likes? Dean wonders.

The guy is what, 30? 31? With a job that gives him almost nothing else to do to?

But then Dean decides it doesn’t matter, because it just means that he’s going to get to be in charge of what radio channels they listen to. Getting excited at the prospect of having unfettered access to it, he pushes himself up, grabbing one of Cas’s discarded flannels as he slides himself off of the bed.

“You don’t know what you’re missing, man,” he tells Cas confidently, as he shoves his arms through the sleeves without asking if he can. Leaving the buttons undone, he doesn’t bother with pants, and climbs over to the passenger’s seat in just his boxers and the undone shirt.

It leaves much of his skin exposed and vulnerable to the sticky ripping of the pleather seat as he climbs into it, but he ignores the pull of it, too hot to bother dressing right. Leaning in towards the radio dial, he turns it on, and switches it right towards channel 101.7, the same station he used to listen to in the car with his dad, the same station he used to fall asleep with Sammy to as the Impala rocked back and forth.

“You’re gonna love this,” he says confidently, happier than he’s been in a very long while. “Classic rock, dude, everyone loves it. Nothing better than the old school rock and roll hits.”

“Is this rock and roll?” Cas asks him, as the sound of drums and acoustic guitar fill the space around them. “I thought it was…louder.”

Dean snorts at the judgment in Cas’s voice.

“Nah, man, you’re thinking of metal. And some of the more hardcore bands from the 80s and shit.” He points at the dashboard. “This is the good shit. That old school classic sound. Newer stuff is fine too, but nothing beats the 70s when it comes to rock.”

“Hm.”

Cas doesn’t agree with him, but neither does he disagree, and Dean tilts his head back as the flowing lines of the music wash over them both. He has a nagging suspicion that the trucker has no fucking clue what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter. As long as Dean’s not pissing him off, he’s content to chatter on endlessly, or shut the fuck up, and appreciate what he hears.

It’s been a long time since he had real access to music. Months, since Dad died, and even then, he was never really the one who got to decide to turn it on.

So it’s real nice, now, to just sit back and listen as the sun rises, and Dean shuts his eyes as he falls quiet, enjoying the peace, and the music, and the company all the same.

There were voices down the corridor

I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel California

Such a lovely place

Such a lovely face

Plenty of room at the Hotel California

Any time of year

You can find it here

“I know this one,” Cas says after a minute, sounding surprised with himself.

Dean, without opening his eyes, smirks.

“Everyone knows this one, man. It’s The Eagles.”

“The who?”

“No, not The Who. The Eagles. They’re a…you know what, nevermind.”

He gives up on explaining when he cracks his eyes open, and sees the lost look on Cas’s face.

It’s endearing, and Dean laughs a little.

“You live under a rock or something, man?”

Cas frowns.

“Something like that, I guess.”

There’s an undertone to his words that’s a little darker, a little more serious, that implies something neither of them probably want to get into right now. Knowing better than to pry, Dean puts his curiosity aside and opens his other eye, just sort of relaxing. Deciding it’s better not to talk about some things, some days, better to just take the happiness in the short, unexpected bursts when it comes.

Feeling vibrations of the road hum beneath him, he adjusts himself a little, shifting his weight from one side to another in his seat. The white noise of the cars driving past adds a subcurrent to the humming music that only makes it feel all the more real.

He sighs.

“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” he comments, absently. Picking at his nails again, but out of nothing more sinister than mere restlessness this time.

“Ironic?” Cas asks, and Dean rolls his eyes, then his head, turning it dramatically to look towards the other man.

“Yeah, man, ironic. Hotel California playing while you’ve got me in the car?”

Cas once again looks confused. It seems to be his default state, when he isn’t in the midst of a possessive intensity. Flicking his blinkers on as Dean watches him, his brow furrows as he seems to concentrate on changing lanes as smoothly as possible.

“Because you’re going to California?” he asks blankly, and Dean barks out a short laugh.

“Because I’m a fucking hooker, Cas,” he tells the man, as they finish merging, and Cas finally has the chance to tear his eyes away from the road.

Glancing back over at Dean, Dean can tell that the man still doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“It’s about a hooker?”

“It’s about a brothel.”

The trucker blinks.

“Oh. I thought it was about a hotel.”

It’s so ridiculously oblivious that Dean would think he’s being made fun of, if it wasn’t Cas he was talking to, if he hadn’t spent the last week figuring out that this particular trucker is the weirdest fucking guy in the entire world. As it is, the admission only makes a burst of fondness spill over inside of Dean, and he smiles a little.

“You’re really literal, you know that?”

Cas nods.

“Yes. So I’ve been told.”

Dean snorts.

“That’s ok. My kid brother Sammy’s a bit like that too. At least he was, when he was little. Doesn’t matter to me.”

There’s a moment of silence after he says that, before Cas says, “I didn’t know you have a brother.”

And Dean just kind of tenses, and looks at his knees awkwardly.

“Yeah, he’s in college in California. That’s why I’m tryin’ to get out there. Haven’t seen him in a bit.”

It’s an understatement, if there ever was one. It’s been years since he saw Sam, ever since the kid had run off to Stanford with his early acceptance letter clutched in his hand at 16.

He was so hurt, at the time, but the more time that has passed, the more he gets it. Who wants to stick around in the life they’d been leading, jumping between one motel and another every few days, cleaning up dad’s vomit and messes and unpaid bills?

Dean had only done it for so long because he’s a pathetic mess of a person, unlike his brother. As much of a mess as his dad was, he could never have left him. He knew the man wasn’t going to survive on his own.

Well. As it turns out, he hadn’t been able to survive with him, either. Now Dean doesn’t know what to do with himself, except seek out Sam, try to look after him the same way he’d been looking out for dad. Someone’s gotta do something with the money he makes in back alleys, and he knows it certainly isn’t going to be him.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Cas asks, sounding like he actually gives a shit, for some reason.

Dean can’t imagine why.

The music has changed, now, is playing Stairway to Heaven, and he reaches out to turn it down a little, because it feels weird to listen to right now.

“Four years,” he says uncomfortably. Then, desperate to change the subject. “You got a family?”

Like he has a fuckin’ death wish or something. That ain’t shit any of these guys want to talk about with a hooker, especially not way out here on the roads.

Cas doesn’t get angry, but that’s where his exceptionality ends, with this topic. The man frowns, hands around the steering wheel tightening in a way that Dean can see.

“Yes, I have a family. A very large one.” He pauses. “I haven’t seen them in much longer than four years.”

And he doesn’t say anything else, and Dean gets the hint, finally. Learning to keep his mouth shut, he just hums in acknowledgement, and turns the music back up.

“Tell me if this shit starts to annoy you,” he says, gesturing to the dashboard. “I’ll turn it off.”

The trucker nods, and they go back to being quiet together, with nothing but Robert Plant’s voice between them, crooning about heaven and buying your way through its doors.

Chapter Text

The way it works is that the truckers load their trucks up during the day with cargo, and make their way across the country to the next stop, to deliver their shit and load it up with something new. In between, and at night, they stop at rest stops to do the bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive as a person, like eat and sleep and occasionally shower, and even more occasionally fuck some slut like Dean in a back room.

Dean is surprised by how insecure he feels about it, whenever they stop somewhere, surprised by how possessive and jealous he feels over Cas the second they get out of the truck. At the stop outside of Chicago, he sees at least two boys hanging around, and three girls, and he keeps looking at Cas to check if the man is glancing at them, to make sure he’s not returning their come-hither gazes.

It would be….inconvenient. If Cas got tired of him now, and replaced him.

Yeah. Inconvenient. Not anything else.

Knowing he’s lying to himself, he’s nonetheless been relieved every other night when the man just chooses to sleep in his truck with Dean, not bringing anyone else into the mix. So it alarms him, today, when they don’t just leave the cab to stretch their legs and grab a bite this time, but seem to actually be heading towards the main building of the lot.

When Dean hangs back, though, nervous about what’s going on, Cas just grabs him by the wrist and tugs him forward.

He’s not resisting very hard, but it’s still embarrassing to be manhandled so casually. He knows what he looks like, in his skin tight shirt and tattered jeans, getting yanked along by a bigger, stronger man not even looking his way.

There’s people around. Dean hadn’t thought he had any pride left, but apparently he does, because he picks up the pace.

“Where are we going?” he asks Cas, as he moves in a little closer, just so it’s less obvious that he’s not being given a choice about being brought along.

“Shower,” Cas says shortly, nodding towards the gray building. “We’re both disgusting.”

That’s true. Neither of them have washed outside of bathroom sinks in a week.

Nonetheless, Dean immediately starts pulling at Cas’s hold on him again, without even meaning to, just because he’s alarmed.

“I don’t think I should go in there,” he says, nervously. “I’m not a trucker.”

“You’re with me,” Cas says casually, as if that changes the fact that Dean is a beaten up twink for sale.

He puts his foot down. He stops walking, actually stops, using all his strength to keep his feet on the ground. Cas lurches to a stop, and looks back at him.

The man is stronger than him, and could really just drag him inside if he wanted to. It seems, though, that he’s not actually willing to do that when Dean is truly unwilling to let himself be tugged along.

“Dean?”

Dean can’t really see the expression on his face in the darkness, just a vague outline of shadows and features.

The air is both cool and warm at the same time, the way it always is at night in the summer. The world sounds like a highway, but smells like the fresh pine trees that lay just beyond where the cars drive.

“Cas, I can’t go in there. Someone is going to rape me.”

The showers are communal. He knows, because he’s been inside them before.

Twice because he was paid, twice because somebody put their hand over his mouth and dragged him into the building. Each time, he’s come out more beaten up than he can remember otherwise being, aching from the feeling of half a dozen sullen men letting their unhappiness out on his ass.

“No one is going to rape you, Dean.”

Dean scoffs.

“Easy for you to say.”

Cas isn’t a 23 year old male prostitute with a pretty face and tattletale bruises all over his body. He has no interest in testing out Cas’s theory for what will be the 5th time, no matter how tempting it is to imagine getting clean.

“I’ll get some wet wipes and use the sink in the men’s room,” he tells the trucker, with what he hopes sounds like finality. “I’ll meet you back at the truck.”

But Cas doesn’t let go of his wrist. For one, two, three, four seconds.

For some reason, Dean doesn’t try to yank his arm away.

He looks at the ground.

“Has this happened to you before?” Cas asks him, quietly. Suddenly gentle.

“Yeah,” Dean tells him bluntly, not knowing what else there is to say.

Cas’s grip, wrapped around his wrist, suddenly moves down to the whore’s empty palm. As Dean watches, he entangles their fingers together, like he doesn’t mind how it changes what they look like, holding hands.

Dean’s throat feels dry

“I will not let anyone else touch you, Dean,” Cas tells him, very earnestly, and Dean blushes, suddenly ten times more aware of the people who could be looking their way.

They’re few and far between, but it makes Dean anxious, and he glances around with more than a little stress.

“Christ, Cas,” he mutters, nervous. “We look like a couple’a fags, holding hands like this.”

He tries to untangle his hand from Cas’s quickly, but the man doesn’t let him, keeping his fingers tightly wound around Dean’s own. It’s bizarre, and embarrassing, like Cas doesn’t care how this makes him look as weak as Dean.

And it does. It really does, whether the weird guy understands that or not. There’s such a difference, out here on these long roads, between seeing some trucker roughing up a twink, and seeing a pair of fairies playing house.

Dean knows they’ve been teetering dangerously closer to the second option for a couple of days now, but no one else around here has to know that.

“If you don’t let go of my hand before someone sees this, it’s not just me who’s gonna have to be worried about getting jumped.”

He tells this to Cas sort of angrily, and he can see the outline of the man’s face starting to frown at him in the dark.

“I’m not scared of these men, Dean.”

“You should be.”

“No. I shouldn’t.”

Cas speaks so certainly that it actually makes Dean hesitate, unsure if the man is bluffing, or if he’s actually some kind of John Wick.

His eyes search the man’s face in the shadows. There’s quiet, as Dean struggles to give in.

When he does, his shoulders drop.

It’s as much the embarrassment of how gross he must be to Cas that convinces him, as it is the trucker’s weirdly earnest promises.

“Christ,” he mutters, looking down at his beat up sneakers on the asphalt. “Fine, but if I get my ass torn up, I’m sending you the hospital bills.”

He's kidding, but Cas, as always, doesn't seem to understand.

“There won't be any hospital bills,” the man answers, and then he grabs Dean’s shoulder, and steers him towards the showers.

**************

The showers are ugly, and the men in them even uglier, but the room is full of steam and warmth and the good smell of cheap soap Dean sometimes steals.

It’s a large room, with about thirty showerheads lined up across two walls, but only six or seven of them running, over six or seven men burly older men.

Even Cas looks like a twink next to them, which makes Dean feel a little nervous. Two of the men look up at them when they come in, but don’t say anything, and Dean crosses his arms over his still-clothed chest.

The fabric is already starting to get damp from the steam, but that doesn’t last long. Cas, next to him, slips out of his clothes and undresses himself, dumping his things on a steam-wet bench besides them. Then, quite unceremoniously, he turns and undresses Dean too.

With that characteristic attitude that borders the line between dominant and just socially awkward, Cas pulls his companion's shirt off, and then pants, without saying a word.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that he has to.

Because, well, he doesn't. Dean certainly isn't going to resist his clothes being taken off.

Still, it's weird as hell, especially when he sees the other men’s eyes drifting back to them both.

“Man,” he mutters halfheartedly, as Cas bundles up his clothes and shoes and dumps them onto the already-crumpled pile on the bench.

“Your clothes will be fine,” Cas tells him shortly, as if that’s what Dean is whining about. It isn’t, but he’s not going to embarrass himself by saying anything about how weird this is out loud.

The trucker steers him towards one of the nearer showerheads, and Dean goes with him, feeling awkward but unresistant. He stands outside of the spray as Cas turns it on, and checks the temperature, only moving under it once the steam starts rising from the ground.

Cas grunts and gestures at him then to come closer, and Dean does.

Hot, almost scalding water streams over his body, and it feels heavenly. It’s been literally months since Dean had a hot shower, and, despite how tense and exposed he feels, he can’t help how his eyes flutter shut.

“Good water pressure,” he murmurs, and Cas hums non-committedly.

He hears the click of a cap, and for a moment Dean thinks it’s lube, and Cas is going to fuck him.

Then he opens his eyes, and sees that it’s just the man pouring some shampoo into his hand.

That doesn’t worry him like his first thought, and his eyes drift away from the man he’s traveling with, back to the other truckers he can see on the other side of the room. Four of them now are looking at them, and Dean isn’t surprised. He knows what they look like. What he, specifically, looks like. Cas is hot and young, but muscular, and masculine. Dean, on the other hand, has the kind of beaten up, underfed body that tells everyone he’s for sale.

Cas is one of them. Dean is not.

He drops his eyes, but doesn’t blush. Unlike when Cas had held his hand.

He doesn’t know why it’s harder for him to think of being perceived as Cas’s boyfriend than his bitch.

One of the men whistles, as Cas is washing his hair.

“That’s a nice piece of ass you got there,” the man across the room says, loudly. “You thinkin’ of renting it out?”

Cas, hands rubbing at his scalp, frowns, and looks at Dean.

He doesn’t seem to realize he’s being spoken to. He seems to think the man is talking to Dean.

But of course he isn’t.

Dean crosses his arms over his chest again.

“He’s talking to you,” he mutters, nodding in the burly man’s direction. The older trucker has graying hair, and a dick bigger than Cas’s, which looks like it would hurt getting shoved inside his sore hole.

He’d really rather not do anything with the guy, but that probably isn’t up to him. Hoping Cas’s possessiveness holds out against cash offers, he turns away, like he’s not worried, and grabs the bar of soap off the wall.

He starts washing himself as Cas seems to consider the man’s offer, or at least, is silent enough that he could be considering it.

Dean pretends he isn’t worried as he soaps up his hands and rubs under his armpits, too self conscious right now to rub anywhere near between his legs.

There’s more relief than there really should be, when Cas finally says, “Dean is with me.”

It’s the kind of relief that isn’t just about worry, but about not having your stupid, ill-thought out feelings hurt.

He’s getting attached.

Behind him, the gray-haired man laughs.

“I know he’s with you, that’s why I’m not askin’ him,” he says, easily. “Come on, how much for a go at his ass? Fifteen bucks?”

It’s a humiliatingly low number, but not much less than Dean has taken on more than one recent occasion. He was never exactly prime real estate, but lately, he’s really gone down hill.

Ashamed, he nonetheless scowls, and turns back to Cas with a seed of irritation in his chest.

“He’s trying to scam you,” he tells the man, annoyed at the older guy. “Ask for twenty, at least, or tell him to fuck off.”

If Cas is going to take the man up on his offer, he at least wants the guy to get his damn money’s worth.

But Cas doesn’t look like he’s anywhere near going for it, whatever the monetary gain is. He’s glaring, rivulets of water running over his furrowed brows and tense muscles, and he’s looking in the direction of the older man like he’s a piece of gum stuck to his shoe.

“I already told you, he’s mine,” Cas snaps at him, growling, sounding like he’s barely holding back the anger underneath his voice. “I don’t share, cash or no cash.”

“Thirty?”

“Fuck off.”

He turns away from the other man, planting himself between him and Dean.

Like he’s shielding his body from the man’s line of sight, in some possessive, protective gesture. Dean doesn’t really know what the difference is, and doesn’t really care anymore.

Feeling his face heat a little, he looks down at the ground as Cas crowds him, grabbing his shoulders and pushing him backwards. He lets the man manhandle him backwards, until his back is pushed up against the tile wall.

It’s cool, despite the heat of the shower. It feels nice against the bruises on his back and ass.

In front of him, Cas’s body is solid as a rock, and as hot as the water. For some reason, he flinches when the man reaches out towards him, but it turns out he’s just reaching over his head.

At the shampoo again. The man’s own hair has already been rinsed clean.

He still uncaps the bottle for the second time, and squirts a dime of the liquid into his palm. Dean watches him, conscious of the other onlookers who can still see him, several of who are staring intently at the two of them, crowded up against the wall as Cas lathers his hands.

“Thirty’s a lot, Cas,” he mumbles quietly, feeling his hair stand on end as one of the other men crosses the room to come towards them. “Maybe you should just take it? Pays for some of the gas, at least, and we don’t want to get jumped.”

He’s hyper aware of that possibility as the man coming towards them stops under the showerhead to their right, and turns it on hot. He has dark skin, unlike the first guy, and a smaller cock that nonetheless looks like it could hurt just as bad.

“No,” Cas says, putting his hands in Dean’s hair, starting to wash it without asking first if he can.

He doesn’t have to ask, but Dean still blushes red as a beet at being pampered like that with six other scary looking guys hanging around.

The guy who’s nearest to them takes his cock in his hand, as Cas washes him, and starts jerking himself off without any attempt to hide it at all.

He’s staring right at Dean’s cock, as he does it, which for some reason is lengthening a little. It twitches as the guy besides them pumps himself, and as Cas’s fingers massage his scalp into bliss.

“They’re all watching us anyway, man,” he hisses, conflicted and embarrassed, as heat grows between his legs as quickly as fear. “Just take the cash and let them have at me.”

“They can look all they want. But I said I wouldn’t let them touch you, didn’t I?”

That’s true. But that had been before a guy had offered him $30 to break that promise, which Dean hadn’t had much trust in even to start.

And that had been before another guy had planted himself besides them and started masturbating to the sight of Cas crowding Dean up against the wall and washing him, and before his own cock had started twitching in confusion at being watched.

You’re such a slut, he thinks, ashamed of himself, and baffled at the fact that Cas doesn’t seem to be upset.

It’s not like he doesn’t notice. Dean’s breathing gets faster, as Cas looks down, hums, and then reaches towards the hooker’s mild erection to give it a few casual strokes.

The man besides them groans audibly, as does another man, from somewhere else in the room.

It must be someone else who’s watching this, even though Dean can’t see him, too crowded up against Cas’s chest.

His hips stutter, and his cock gets much harder.

“S-sorry,” he gasps, hands curling up into fists.

Cas doesn’t answer, just gives his cock a few more short, gentle tugs, before he lets go of it and puts his hands back in Dean’s hair.

He doesn’t keep rubbing his scalp, this time, though. Rather, he grabs onto Dean’s locks, and pulls at his head.

Forward and down, and at first he thinks Cas is pushing him to his knees to suck someone’s cock now. But the grip on his hair stops him at halfway leaned over, and he realizes it’s just the man’s weird way of rinsing his hair.

“I can rinse my own hair,” Dean says quietly, but Cas ignores him, so he just blushes, and waits quietly as the water runs over it. Dripping down his face, down his nose, down his back, down his ass, rivulets of hot water sliding intimately between the curve of his cheeks and over his hole.

He clenches at the feeling, nervous, not sure how much everyone can see.

From the increasingly frantic breathing he can hear from not too far besides him, he assumes it’s a lot. He assumes it’s almost everything.

I must look like such a whore.

Cas’s bitch, being manhandled and pampered.

It gives him weird feelings, because it’s not like he doesn’t like it. It’s still embarrassing, though, to be looked at like this and judged for it, to have guys masturbating to just the sight of how easily he goes along with whatever Cas wants.

Like the difference between Cas holding his hand and yanking him along, Dean thinks he’d feel less self conscious if the man just sold his ass like he should.

This, though, this weird protective thing, with everyone watching, seeing him get coddled.

It makes his insides squirm with humiliation, at the same time as it makes his cock strain.

“This is so fucking weird, man,” he whispers, just because he needs to say it. Without the expectation of anything changing, or getting an answer at all.

He’s right on both counts. Cas just holds him in place, forced to look down at the tiles and the trucker’s thick, mostly hard cock, until the water finally runs clear, and the pressure on his head pulls him back up.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, slightly gasping.

“No, my name is Castiel,” Cas says, very flat.

Dean can’t even tell if he’s kidding, but it doesn’t matter, because he only has a second before Cas is turning him around.

“You gonna fuck me now?” Dean asks, getting ready to brace himself against the wall if he has to.

“Yes,” Cas says back, very simply.

Breath hitching, Dean feels the blush on his cheeks spread down to his chest. His gaze slides to the side, towards the man who’s watching him so close.

That man’s eyes are dark, and he can hear the sounds of other men breathing heavily.

Is everyone in the room right now watching, jerking off to me getting pushed around?

The answer is almost certainly yes, and Dean doesn’t know how to feel about it. His heart is pounding, and he’s scared they’re gonna get jumped, but his cock is harder than he can remember it being in maybe his entire pointless fucking life up ‘til now.

Cas’s hand is on his back, splayed right between the wingbones. Pushing insistently, and Dean doesn’t resist it, leaning forward and bracing his forearms against the tiled wall.

“Spread your legs.”

The man watching from next to him groans loudly, and Dean, unable to hold it back, groans loudly with him. He listens, and spreads his legs, because he always listens, always does whatever the fuck anyone he’s with ever wants.

Something is fucking wrong with him, and he knows that, and clearly Cas knows that too, since he handles him like this. He doesn’t seem to care, though, doesn’t seem disgusted with Dean, nor interested in hurting him.

He’s the only guy Dean’s ever been with who hasn’t been disgusted, who also hasn’t wanted to hurt him, for being this fucked up, eager to please thing that he is.

It should be revolting, but Cas isn’t revolted, judging by the hardness of the cock poking firmly at his hole.

He’s all fucked out from earlier in the day, but still, it burns with the stretch as Cas pushes into him.

So fucking careful with me over stupid shit like showers, then he fucks me like an animal in heat.

It’s so fucking hot.

As always, Cas isn’t gentle, but he isn’t rough either. He grabs Dean by the shoulders and pistons in and out of him forcefully, unconcerned with the men who are watching, and apparently unaffected by the desperate, seizing noises that Dean can’t help but make.

It burns, the stretch of his big cock pushing him open, but feels so fucking good too, makes him feel so fucking owned.

Dean doesn’t know why he likes that feeling so much, but he does, he fucking loves it, at least with this man, who hasn’t hurt him. Who’s letting the whole world see what he does with Dean, but not letting them do it too, not letting them touch him at all.

His cock is rock hard.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, Cas!”

The man is hitting that spot inside him that so rarely ever gets hit.

He’s slamming into it like a battering ram, and Dean lets out, pathetic, guttural noises. Distantly, he hears the guy next to them cumming, but it means nothing to him under the feeling of being fucked.

“Beautiful boy,” he hears Cas mutter behind him, and he moans, loudly, not knowing what else to do.

It’s so- it’s so degrading, at the same time as it’s so sweet, and he doesn’t understand what’s happening. He can’t hold himself back any longer, and he almost lurches one of his arms off of the wall, to shove it down between his own legs and start to tug.

“Cas- please-”

He never does this with clients, unless they’re getting off on touching him, but he can’t- he can’t-

“Cum, Dean.”

Dean does.

He does it with a white-hot shout of pleasure that’s so intense it almost feels like pain, and it wracks his body like a violent riptide as he shudders through it while being taken from behind.

When it’s over, he goes limp, so exhausted that he can’t even hold himself up. His knees give out, and Cas grabs him by his waist, holding almost his entire weight up as Dean clutches weakly at the tiles in front of his face.

The man growls, moving faster. Dean whines, because he’s so oversensitive now, and all fucked out like a rag.

Cas just uses him like a toy, though, jerking in and out of Dean with hot pants as Dean whines weakly, until finally, after what seems like forever, the man releases his seed into Dean’s raw, fucked out ass.

“Fuck,” the man hisses, and Dean lets out one last weak moan, as he feels the molten liquid fill him, making him burn from the inside out.

When the trucker behind him pulls out, he feels the cum start to leak out of him. He expects the man to drop him like the slut he is, now that he’s done with him, but instead finds himself gently lowered down to his knees.

“Oh my god,” he mumbles, dizzy, panting. “Oh my god.”

The tile floor is hard and warm under his knees and palms.

He’s grateful he hadn’t been dropped onto it. It would have hurt, with how bruised his knees and shins already are.

Such a small thing to be grateful for, but he feels it expanding to take up his whole chest.

Cas crouches down behind him. There’s a strong hand on his shoulder, gentle and firm.

“Are you alright?”

The man’s voice lays in stark contract to how dominantly he’d just fucked Dean’s brains out.

Dean’s chest is heaving, with exertion and shock. He stares down in blank confusion at the ugly green tiles and the water streaming from under his knees.

It’s still steaming hot, and hissing. He can see some of the cum coming out of him being washed away down the drain.

There’s no blood.

Cas’s hand rubs his shoulder.

“Dean?”

“I’m fine,” he whispers. “I’m good.”

He’s more than good, but he doesn’t know what to say beyond that. He doesn’t know how to explain how close he is to crying, without feeling like something is wrong at all.

Chapter Text

They get kicked out of the rest stop.

Turns out five of the seven guys Dean had assumed were watching him and Cas were not actually watching them, and had left pretty much as soon as it had been clear what direction their interaction was taking. Dean hadn’t noticed, too busy getting his brains fucked out in front of the two weirdos who’d stayed. It hadn’t been five minutes after they’d finished, though, that security had come in and threatened to call the cops if they didn’t all get the fuck out.

They all got the fuck out.

“I didn’t even know places like this had security,” Dean says in amazement, as they pull out of the parking lot.

“Me either,” Cas answers, and that’s all they say to each other for a while.

His ass is real sore, and he curls up in the passenger’s seat in a way that keeps most of the pressure off of it. It’s late, well past midnight, and it’s not too long before he starts to drift off.

The hum of the highway puts him to sleep, as well as the gentle rocking of the cab. It feels like a lullabye, and every time Dean pulls his eyes slightly open, all he sees in front of him are bright lines on the asphalt shining in the headlights, against a pitch black background, stretching off into infinity.

He stops trying to pull his eyes open at all pretty soon.

He doesn’t know how long he’s asleep for, or if he’s asleep at all, before he feels the sensation of the truck slowing down, and making a long, long, low turn.

It’s only then that he does start to sit up again, and rub his eyes, and look around again.

They’re not in another rest stop, but in the middle of nowhere. Off of the highway, in some divot that bleeds into a corn field.

Cas turns the ignition off.

Dean hadn’t realized how loud it had been until it isn’t any more. He hears nothing, for a long time, and then, very distantly, the sound of crickets.

“Where are we?” he asks.

Cas pulls a cigarette out of the glove compartment.

“Nowhere.”

Ominous and weird and dramatic.

Dean snorts, and the man lights the cigarette and takes a drag.

It occurs to Dean how freaked out he would be right now, if this were anyone else. How freaked out he probably still should be, but just isn’t.

The guy fucks him in public in some weird possessive display of dominance, then drives off into the night with him and pulls over in a corn field without explanation.

It sounds like every late night radio crime show he’s ever heard of, and Dean wonder’s if he’s losing his edge, or his mind. But he just can’t find it in him to be scared of Cas, no matter how weirdly the man behaves, how ominous or strange.

“‘Nowhere’” Dean echoes back at the man, using air quotes, and a low, silly voice meant to mimic Cas’s. “Gee, thanks. I hadn’t picked up on that. I mean what are we doing here?”

Cas glances over at him, side eyed. Like he’s considering Dean carefully.

“We’re going to sleep here,” he says anticlimactically after a moment. “The next nearest rest stop is hours away.”

That makes sense. They’re not meant to have to travel between more than one of them in one night. You have to create quite a fuss, Dean thinks, to be suddenly unwelcome somewhere so seedy.

They had, apparently, managed to do that. Maybe Dean shouldn’t be surprised.

“Yeah, sorry.”

He looks down at his threadbear jeans.

“Didn’t mean to get you into trouble, man,” he offers awkwardly, guilty without knowing why.

Cas doesn’t seem to know why either. The man looks at him critically, like he doesn’t understand him.

“Fucking you in the showers was obviously my idea,” the trucker tells him brusquely. He never really seems to mince words.

Blushing, Dean rubs at the back of his neck. The man speaks the truth, even if Dean is surprised to hear him acknowledge it.

“I guess,” he acquiesces. “Yeah, I guess.”

They go back to being quiet together.

Cas takes another drag on his cigarette. He’s staring off into space, like he usually does. It’s pitch black outside now, without the headlights illuminating the corn field, without the road ahead of them. Far away from the street lights or even the company of other cars, they’re as alone in the world as people nowadays really can be.

“Dean, are you really ok?”

The trucker’s voice comes out of nowhere, just as Dean had started to wonder if he really was going to get murdered. Since it didn’t seem like the man across from him was anywhere near actually going to bed like he said.

Surprised to hear the question, Dean blinks, and turns his head towards the other man quietly.

“Yeah, man, of course. I’ve been through way weirder shit than that.”

It’s just the first thing he thinks to say, but it must have been the wrong thing, because Cas just winces, and purses his lips.

“I didn’t mean to ‘put you through’ anything. I…got carried away.”

He speaks in a surprisingly quiet voice, for someone who’d had Dean bent over in front of a bunch of burly guys less than an hour ago. A little startled, Dean frowns at the other man in the darkness, taking in the outline of his features, illuminated only by moonlight in the night.

The tip of his cigarette, glowing red, seems to hover in the darkness. Dean’s eyes follow it as he struggles to find the words to respond.

“It’s fine, Cas. You paid for me fair and square by letting me tag along with you.” Then, because he suspects the man might be…feeling guilty, or something. “That was really hot back there, you know. I….wasn’t upset.”

Cas hums.

He puts his cigarette out on the ashtray between them, and Dean watches as the red glow disappears.

“I know I don’t act normal,” the man answers him, in a very low, very carefully tepid manner. “I know I…scare people sometimes. I hope I don’t scare you.”

His voice, usually so flat, sometimes so dominant, suddenly sounds excruciatingly vulnerable. Feeling his heart ache with the weight of the moment, Dean clutches his knees, and becomes aware of some pressure in his chest.

“I’m not scared of you,” he tells the man honestly.

“Good,” Cas says back, and then he rolls the window down.

He doesn’t say anything else, but just lets the smoke from his bad habits drift slowly out the window. Warm, heavy air floats inward in exchange, fresh as the daytime that is still hours away.

It smells nice. Like dirt and grass and the promise of rain. Dean likes it, and it makes him long for a world he can’t find.

“I like riding with you, Cas,” he whispers finally, after a long time has passed. “I’ll be….sorry, to say goodbye, when we go our separate ways.”

Cas looks down at his hands, and mumbles, “Me too.”

A quiet confession, and one that Dean doesn’t know how to counter.

He just bites his lip, feeling weirdly sad, all of a sudden, for this weird as fuck lonely trucker, and maybe, just maybe, for himself.

Chapter Text

Cas doesn’t fuck him the next morning, but he does take a look at his hole, while Dean is lazing about in the trundle bed again, reading about all the horrible ingredients in the trucker’s Marlboro cigarettes.

“Dude, these are like, insanely bad for you,” he comments, casually. “Did you know that this shit can give you lung cancer?”

Kneeling behind him, Cas just hums in acknowledgement, pulling Dean’s boxers down under his ass as he spreads the hooker’s cheeks.

“That’s common knowledge,” the man acknowledges absently. Dean, laying flat on his stomach, flips the box over in his hands, studying the fine print on the packaging as the trucker pokes and prods at his hole.

“One of these things has like a hundred carcinogens in it. And they’re like four bucks a pack, who the hell can afford this kind of thing?”

“Hard to quit once you’ve started,” Cas tells him, before letting go of Dean’s asscheeks. From behind him, he can feel the weight of the mattress shifting significantly, as Cas moves from leaning over, to sitting back on his knees.

Looking backwards over his shoulder, Dean smirks at him.

“Like what you see?” he asks, wiggling his bare butt a little for dramatic effect.

Cas just frowns at him. “Not exactly. You’re very red, like your hole is chafed.”

Snorting, Dean rolls his eyes a little, and drops the pack of Marlboros he’s holding onto the comforter beneath him. They land with a thud on the blue cross-patterned blanket he rests his elbows on.

“Dude, you fucked me like an animal twice yesterday, once without lube. Of course I’m chafed, man, it’s not a big deal.”

He means it, but Cas just keeps frowning at him, like he’s actually worried, or something. It’s ridiculous, but Dean can’t help but be flattered.

It’s kind of nice, to have someone worrying after him for once, even if it’s ridiculous, even if it’s overdramatic. Having a sore hole is hardly a new experience for him, or particularly upsetting. But it’s weirdly nice to have the guy who’s fucking him concerned over it, even if he’s still being possessive as hell, his hands all over Dean’s ass.

He’s certainly never had anyone else be worried about it, be worried about him, in such a silly, overdramatic kind of way. Like he’s some fragile thing that’s going to break if used too much, or like he’s gonna be traumatized, or something. From a few rough fucks here and there, and some chafing. Like being fucked past the point of pleasantness when sore is gonna having him crying and falling apart.

Dean blushes a little. Not bothering to pull up his briefs, he rolls himself over on the bed.

So he’s looking straight up at Cas, flat on his back, bare except for the fabric tangled pointlessly around his thighs. Maybe he should bother covering his genitals, at least, but he has a feeling Cas would like it better if he let the trucker decide when to pull them up for himself.

He smiles a little at the man, who’s looking down at him with intense, concerned eyes.

“Dude, I’m really fine,” Dean tells him gently, almost coaxing. “I’m used to a rough crowd. You’re not gonna break me anytime soon.”

He means it, but it doesn’t seem to comfort Cas. The man just frowns, looking down at Dean’s naked body.

There’s still a lot of bruises on his chest and thighs, from rougher customers he’d gone with well before Cas had found him. Without speaking, Cas reaches out to trace some of them, drawing the tip of his finger up the lines of his abs and circling his bitten nipples.

They get hard. His cock starts to get slightly hard too, at the man’s ministrations. He’s very easily turned on, nowadays, he’s discovering. Cas seems to do that to him.

“You don’t take good care of yourself.”

Cas comments quietly, casually, like the words aren’t at odds with how he’s stroking Dean’s skin.

“Um,” Dean says back, uncomfortable at the earnestness.

It’s not something he’s been able to get used to, even after more than a week of traveling with this guy.

He bites his lip as Cas moves his middle finger down to one of the scars on his abdomen, and traces it gently like he’s trying to wish it away.

Going pink, he looks up at the metal ceiling of the cab above him, finding himself unable to keep looking at Cas while displayed like this. It’s too weirdly vulnerable, as so many things are recently. He doesn’t know why the man can’t just fuck him, like he had the day before.

“I take care of myself just fine,” he mutters, a little resentful, a little nervous. A little turned on, and confused by how easily that feeling comes.

“You don’t,” Cas says back. “You’re too thin, and you clearly let men hurt you for money.”

It’s too close to spot on, and Dean scowls, sitting up abruptly and batting Cas’s curious hand away.

“Hey, what’s with the psychoanalysis all of a sudden, Dr. Freud?” he snaps, irritated. “I didn’t agree to get thraped today, thanks very much.”

Cas just blinks at him.

“Thraped?” he asks. Then, without waiting for Dean to clarify, says, “I’m just worried about you.”

Dean scowls even harder.

“Well, don’t be. I’m fine. You’re the one inhaling a half pack of cancer sticks every two hours. I’d worry about my own health, if I were you.”

Then, because he’s annoyed, he yanks his own boxers up, even though it feels slightly dangerous. He half expects Cas to stop him when he does, pretty accustomed by now to getting manhandled by the possessive guy.

But the man doesn’t stop him, or say anything, as Dean re-covers himself. And he doesn’t say anything about Dean’s budding erection, which the hooker is determined now to ignore.

“How ‘bout this,” Dean grumbles resentfully, as he tries pointlessly to hide it from the half-mute man. “You don’t worry about me, and I don’t worry about you. Capiche?”

He’d sort of curled up into an approximation of a crumpled up little ball in the time it took him to pull up his underwear, having managed to put only about two feet of space between himself and Cas, who’s still also completely seated on the very small bed.

The man, who doesn’t seem to be sure what to make of Dean’s reaction, just stares at his tense body, and frowns at it.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he says confusedly. Then, “Did I do something to scare you?”

And Dean feels bad again, and feels responsible. So he looks down at his knees, and runs his fingers through his finally-clean hair.

“No, no,” he mutters. “It’s not- I’m fine.”

The comforter under his mostly-bare skin feels soft, and warm.

He shuts his eyes.

“I’m just not used to people fussing over me, is all. Like I’m some princess. You’ve been real nice to me and shit, but I don’t- Let’s just not pretend we’re something we’re not.”

Like. Boyfriends, or something.

Like guys who are ever going to see each other again, after the next week or so has passed.

Cas is quiet, and Dean thinks he’s probably hurt his feelings, for some fucking reason. His shoulders drop, and the tenseness leaves his body. Replaced by guilt, at being such a prickly fucking bitch.

“Listen, man,” he mutters, trying not to sound pissed off, or too pathetic. It’s a delicate balance to mind. “Listen, I like you a lot, and you’re real sweet. But I’m not- I’m not actually yours, like you said last night, you know?”

“I know.”

Cas speaks quietly. Dean doesn’t believe him.

“Really? ‘Cause you’ve been treating me like I’m- like I’m you’re fuckin’ girlfriend or somethin’, and it’s…making me kinda nervous to tell you the truth.”

It’s also been making him horny, and, well. Really really attached to the weird trucker. A kind of attached he’s not going to be able to afford to keep feeling, when they part ways in a couple of days or weeks and Dean goes straight back to his shitty old life.

But he doesn’t know how to say all that, so he keeps it short and simple.

“You brought be along to fuck me, and now you’re not even doing that, ‘cause you’re fussing.”

“I just want to know you’re not hurt.”

“Sure. Whatever. I’m not hurt, man, ok? I’m not hurt.”

Furrowing his brow, Cas shifts his weight on the bed, which squeaks under his movement. He looks like he’s thinking, dressed for the day in a gray T-shirt and jeans.

The shirt has a Nirvana print on it. Dean suspects the man wouldn’t even know who Nirvana is, if he were to ask him. Which he won’t, because that would be painful. And because the throb of fondness he feels at the thought is getting dangerously strong.

He glares at his own bruised knees.

“So, what, you want me to fuck you while you’re clearly too sore for it?” Cas asks him bluntly, as Dean continues to pointedly look down at his legs. “Maybe you’re not injured now, but you would be if we kept going like this. I suspect you know that, with your experience. Do you really want me to hurt you, just to prove some asinine point to yourself about how strong you are?”

It’s a vicious observation, and Dean flinches at it.

Can’t believe I was feeling bad for this guy thirty seconds ago.

“Oh, fuck off,” Dean snaps, defensive, without looking over at the other man next to him.

He doesn’t like being seen through like this, by anyone, and especially not by some weird as hell client who’s been fucking him across the US for more than the past week.

His defensiveness tightens, as he hears Cas let out a scoff.

“You’re incorrigible,” the man says, and Dean huffs,“I don’t even know what that fuckin’ means.”

As if that’s some kind of gotcha.

It isn’t, but Cas doesn’t rub his stupidity in his face like Dean probably would.

The man just stands up, looming over Dean’s mostly naked body like he’s exasperated. Dean tries not to feel afraid, becoming hyper-aware of how he’s cornered against two walls and a bed.

“Give me the cigarettes,” the trucker says, out of nowhere. Deadly serious, putting his hand out for them, leaving Dean’s gut to sink to the ground.

His muscles tense.

Flight or fight response kicking in, but there’s nowhere to run to. He wouldn’t even run if he could, not from this.

If Cas wants to burn him, now, he knows he deserves it, for being such a mouthy brat. This isn’t what the man agreed to when he said he’d bring Dean along with him, and Dean’s lucky if the guy just wants to put some cigarettes out on his thigh rather than kick him out along the side of the road.

He’ll never get to California, if that happens.

Why can’t you just keep your stupid fucking blabbing mouth shut?

No one cares what he has to say anyway, least of all his clients. If he could just learn to keep his thoughts to himself, he’d be better off.

Cas isn’t moving from in front of him, either in anger or in sympathy. His hand is still outstretched, and his eyes are cold.

Unaffected by the way Dean tenses. It’s fine. Whatever. Whatever. He deserves it.

He fumbles for the little cardboard box he’d dropped somewhere behind him, and hands it over when he finds it, trying not to look like he’s scared.

When Cas takes hold of it, though, he doesn’t flip open the packaging, doesn’t light the end of one of the cigarettes and demand that Dean spread his thighs.

Instead, to Dean’s surprise, the man walks right over to one of the open windows and tosses the box right on out of it. Dean hears it land with a light thump, on the asphalt outside.

He blinks in surprise.

“What…?”

His voice kind of trails off, confused and fumbling. Not sure what he just witnessed, or what’s going on anymore.

“You don’t like my cancer sticks?” Cas asks, mostly rhetorically. “No more cancer sticks.”

He gestures towards the window out which he’d just tossed them all.

“Now you can’t call me a hypocrite about my health, or for worrying about your health. I can give up my vices, Dean, but I’m not sure one could say the same about you.”

Startled by the intensity the trucker addresses him with, Dean flounders, half dressed, feeling exposed and confused on the bed. Still catching up to the fact that the man isn’t about to burn him, he pushes himself up on his elbows, trying to look more serious as he struggles to find a way to respond.

“Dude. I wasn’t, like….trying to get you to quit smoking,” is what he comes up with, falling back on the cynicisms that get him through most conversations nowadays.

“I know you weren’t,” Cas says back, immediately. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not quitting smoking. But if it bothers you, I can certainly get rid of my cigarettes to prove a point.”

Dean blinks.

“It doesn’t bother me…”

(He thinks it’s pretty hot actually.)

Then his big brain catches up to his little brain, and he says, “Wait, what point does that prove?”

“That I’m not in the habit of hurting myself like you are,” Cas says coldly, bluntly. “And that I certainly am not expecting you to enable me, if I am.”

The trucker speaks with a finality that makes Dean feel small and stupid, and even more so because he still really doesn’t know what’s going on at all. For the first time, it dawns on him that the guy he’s attached himself to for the indefinite future might be like, smart, or something, and for some reason it kind of freaks him out more than the idea of him being a serial killer.

He swallows, sitting up straight on the bed, and curling his hands into fists in the comforter.

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” he admits, quietly, not even trying to be sarcastic.

He half expects Cas to yell at him, because he still seems angry. But the man just huffs, and then comes back over to him, standing very close.

Unexpectedly, he grabs Dean’s hair, and tilts his head back, firmly. Forcing Dean’s eyes to look up at him, forcing the nervous bob of his adam’s apple to be exposed.

Going still, Dean freezes, but feels less afraid than when Cas had asked for the cigarettes. It feels like the kind of dominant move the man had pulled in the showers, very possessive, but weirdly protective at the same time.

The man glares down at him.

“Do not ask me to fuck you while it would hurt you again, Dean,” he says, with a voice that’s low and soft and goes right down to Dean’s groin.

Dean remembers that this guy is a little crazy.

He swallows, feeling the bent line of his throat move with the motion of it.

“Yeah, sure. Sorry. Sorry.”

Cas doesn’t let go.

“I don’t know what masochistic tendencies you have, nor do I understand your many obvious psychological problems. But I am not a sadist, and I will not be involved in the way you inflict harm on yourself. Out in the world, you behave as you want to. With me, though, you will not try to manipulate me into hurting you again. Is that understood?”

Breathing shallow, Dean blinks at the nothing between his and Cas’s faces, because it feels like it would be too much to look at the man directly, feels like it might result in some unbottled feeling spilling over and making a mess.

It’s still so hot, in the cab, in the world outside the cab, which feels so distant. Everything feels condensed down to this moment, with Cas standing an inch and a half away from him, fingers tangled deep in his hair.

He shudders, quiet.

And tries to nod, against the grip on his scalp.

“Dean.”

The man wants a verbal answer. Dean tries to salvage his voice, from wherever the fuck it had fled.

“Yes,” he rasps, and he thinks it will come out sounding frightened. Instead, the word is low and breathy, like a come-hither gaze in the night.

His cock is swelling.

Cas lets go of him.

“Good,” the man says, and moves away, heading towards the front of the cab.

Chapter Text

Something is fucking wrong with this guy.

Dean sort of already knew that, but it only dawns on him for real after Cas lets go of his hair.

Without saying anything about how weird all that was, the man just goes back to the driver’s seat of the cab, and turns the ignition on. And he pulls the truck out from the corn field divet and back onto the highway, like nothing abnormal had passed between them at all.

Dean keeps expecting the man to say something else, or at least act weird, be tense or something, or maybe apologetic like he’d been last night.

Instead, the trucker just merges into the lane of traffic like the rest of the morning world, cruising down the road under the blazing sun without a glance in Dean’s direction.

He seems completely fine. Normal, even, for whatever passes for normal with him. Quiet, as always, he just stares generically out the window as they drive, not even getting irritated when they end up behind a line of stagnant cars.

“Traffic’s worse than normal,” he comments casually, after a minute of not being able to move more than a few feet in short bursts.

Dean, who’s still shaking slightly from the trucker’s little demonstration, just stares at him in confusion from where he’s stayed behind on the bed.

He’s too intimidated to come back over to the passenger’s seat, now, but it’s dawning on him that Cas doesn’t realize that.

What the fuck, he thinks, as the man taps his fingers absently on the steering wheel.

What kind of guy grabs another dude’s hair like that, and then goes back to acting normal, like it was nothing out of the blue?

Dean licks his lips.

Still sitting in just his boxers, he feels self conscious about the half-hard erection that’s still visible through them, another thing the trucker had declined to comment on, or declined to acknowledge at all.

It’s all weird as hell, and he grabs his own jeans without thinking, throwing them on quickly without looking to see if Cas is watching him. It’s so hot that he’d usually just chill with his shirt off, but he feels awkward about it after Cas had made a big deal about his scars.

“There’s always traffic on I-90,” he says back, as he grabs another one of Cas’s discarded shirts off the ground in front of the bed, and shoves it on. His voice tremors a little as he lets it out of him, but, once again, Cas doesn’t seem to notice at all.

“Hm,” the man hums back absently. “I don’t usually take this route.”

It’s the most boring conversion Dean has ever had in his life, and surreal after the conversation they’d just had a few minutes before.

“Guess it’s a bad route,” Dean mutters, and then he huddles nervously on the trundle bed, wishing halfheartedly that he could close the blue faded curtains that would separate it, that are pinned to the wall like they’ve never been used.

He’s not sure what he’s feeling now, but he knows it’s uncomfortable, something that teeters close to the eroticism he’d felt getting fucked in public but is a little too self aware this time to be all the way engulfed.

He knows there’s something wrong with him, for getting turned on by being pushed around so much, but now he’s realizing that it takes two to tango.

Stupid realization to have so belatedly, but he’s never really been known for his smarts.

Point is, he knew Cas was weird, but this is really weird, actually, like the kind of weird that gets hookers into trouble, maybe into unmarked dirt pits. He should probably be more freaked out than he is, about how bizarre Cas is, about how blatantly possessive. His dick may be into it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to end well.

All this psychoanalysis…that’s serial killer behavior, right?

Dean thinks he heard that somewhere, at some point. That Ted Bundy made profiles on his victims, or something like that.

He doesn’t actually think Cas is planning on murdering him. Especially not because he tried to get the guy to fuck him too hard, or whatever.

But still. It’s so fucking uncomfortable to be seen through the way Cas had seen through him, to be manhandled in the middle of it…it makes Dean’s alarm bells start to go off, and he’d thought they were broken. This is so fucking beyond normal, though, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Maybe he should….leave?

Try to make his own separate way to California.

He’d been on his own for months before he met Cas, after all, and without anyone but Dad for years before that.

He knows how to make his own way up and down these infinitely long highways….though he hadn’t been making much progress in one direction before Cas, to be fair.

But. He also hadn’t really been trying too hard. He’s been such a fucking wreck for weeks and weeks.

No wonder Cas can tell you’re falling the fuck apart, he thinks bitterly, looking down at himself.

He’s clothed, now, but he knows the mess of bruises and scars that lay under the fabric. It’s never been pretty, but it’s been getting a lot worse ever since Dad died.

He hasn’t…had much reason to look out for himself, recently. Before, at least, he needed to stay alive to look after his old man.

Since John kicked the bucket, though, he’s been really adrift in the middle of a sex-addled nothingness. It’s a miracle he hasn’t already gone and developed twenty five drug addictions, which he probably would have if he’d had anywhere to get anything other than liquor at all.

He feels ashamed of himself.

He doesn’t like that Cas can see that.

He likes the idea of fucking off into nowhere, leaving the man and his weird judgemental protectiveness far far behind.

This isn’t what I thought I was getting into when I agreed to go with him, he thinks, mostly truthfully.

He could tell Cas was weird as hell and mostly isolated, but didn’t expect all this attachment, and this emotional rollercoaster he’s just noticed he’s been on.

“Do you want to play your music?” Cas asks him, from the driver’s seat in front of him.

They make eye contact in the mirror, and his eyes look earnest.

I’ve got to get out of here, Dean thinks, feeling his hair stand on end.

Serial killer sixth sense? Maybe. Probably. Probably.

Probably, it’s that, and nothing else that’s freaking him out.

He swallows, hard.

“Nah,” he mutters, not too excited about the idea of having to come back over there to sit next to the guy to turn the radio on besides him. “I think I gotta take a leak actually.”

The words feel stuck in his throat as he says them, coming up with the sticky sensation of something he doesn’t actually want to say.

Which is. Ridiculous. It’s time to move on from this guy, before he gets murdered, or psychoanalyzed and put in an asylum for pathetic weirdos, which would honestly be worse than being stabbed in the gut.

Cas looks at him in the mirror again.

“You should have told me that before we pulled onto the highway. Now we’ll be stuck in traffic for who knows how long.”

I was a bit busy getting pulled around by my hair because I wanted to not make a big deal out of sex.

He doesn’t say that. Instead, he coughs, in irritation, and looks at his knees.

“Dude, I wasn’t gonna piss on the side of the road. We were in public.”

“So? You give blow jobs on the side of the road, in public, all the time.”

The worst part is Dean honestly doesn’t think the guy is trying to insult him, really. He’s just telling it as he sees it.

Wincing, he tries not to show the hurt he feels on his face in front of the trucker, though he knows by now from their many weird interactions that the guy probably wouldn’t be able to tell.

Yeah, time to move on.

“That’s different,” he says, a little choked.

“How?”

“Does it matter? I don’t wanna piss in public! Can you just take me to a rest stop, please? When you can?”

Cas’s eyes on him, in the mirror, are steady. Unmoving, because they don’t currently have to look at the road.

Dean feels awkward, and analyzed again, and worried that the man can somehow tell what he’s planning. For some reason, he doesn’t feel like it’s a good idea to tell the guy the truth.

He’d be murdered probably, maybe, or just lectured again about his “masochistic tendencies.” Either way, it’s not something he’s eager to go through.

“Please?” he says again, and Cas nods, rather shortly.

“Of course,” the man tells him, looking back towards the highway. “As soon as we’re out of this traffic, we’ll find a place to stop.”

************

They’re stuck in traffic for about an hour, and then spend almost another full hour just cruising down the highway, looking for a place they can pull off. Midwest America seems to be built to trap people together, the expanse of land with nothing to punctuate it so long and vast that one might start to forget the world beyond their car even exists.

But it does it exist, for better or for worse, and they do encounter some hint of it eventually. A sign, advertising a rest stop with a Wendy’s, still thirty minutes out and several exits away.

Thank god Dean is lying through his teeth about needing to piss, because otherwise he’d be pissing his fucking pants.

As it is, he’s just anxious to get out of the car, to slip away from Cas and this whole fucking fever dream, almost eager to return to what passes for a sense of normalcy in his world, the endless days of endless men and emptiness that keeps his heart at bay.

He needs that back, badly. Whatever’s going on between him and Cas is getting to be way too much.

Besides, he’s still not sure he’s even really safe, here, with how weird and possessive the man has been acting over him. Who knows if the trucker is even planning on letting him leave, in California, if he’s already so comfortable getting all up in his business now?

Part of him knows it’s weird, that he’s more alarmed by Cas lecturing him about his psychological problems, than he was about the man fucking him in front of a bunch of guys. A bigger part of him doesn’t care, and is willing to lie to himself to get away from the discomfort. Cas is being weird as fuck, and that’s as good an excuse for Dean to get the hell outta dodge as any.

And when the truck starts to slow down along the side of the road, still twenty minutes out from the rest stop…

Dean’s throat starts to feel dry, and he starts think maybe he’s not just making excuses. He starts to think maybe Cas has caught on to his plan, and is pissed off.

“Um,” he says, stupidly, as Cas rolls to a stop along the shoulder of the highway.

To the left, a few cars continue to rush past, busy and oblivious. To the right, there’s a metal railing, and then some weeds, that sprawl quickly out into woods.

Not exactly a place a hooker wants to be driven to without explanation.

Cas seems to be a fan of doing that, but Dean feels more nervous now than he had last night.

“Um, where are we?” he risks asking, when the man doesn’t volunteer the information.

He’s still lazing about in the back of the cab on the bed, so he can’t see Cas’s face from his perspective.

That makes him anxious, especially when Cas doesn’t answer him, or even look at him in the mirror. Instead, he stays weirdly hunched over, like he’s studying something beneath him that Dean can’t see from where he is.

It freaks Dean out.

“Cas?”

“Shh.” The trucker hushes him abruptly.

Out of instinct, Dean goes quiet, and there’s another few seconds before the man once again speaks.

“Ant.”

“What?”

“Ant. There’s an ant.”

Staring at the back of the trucker’s hunched head, Dean just blinks, very lost.

“There’s an ant?”

A pause. Clearly, Cas is concentrating.

“Yes. I’ve almost got it.”

Then.

“Dean. Can you bring a cup? There should be a few under my seat.”

Dean, acting automatically, slides off the bed and to his knees on the floor. He’s accustomed to being here for non-ant related reasons, but it’s weird to be a grown man crawling along the ground for something else.

Still, he scrounges around in the space under where Cas is sitting until his fingers find something that feels like a styrofoam cup. He pulls it out from where it was hidden, squashed and crumpled, and straightens it back out until the old 7/11 logo is legible again.

“Here,” he says from the ground, trying to hand Cas the barely-functional trash he’d salvaged. He can see the man better now, from a low close perspective, see the way his eyes are narrowed in concentration, like he’s defusing a bomb.

The ant seems to be on the underside of the dashboard. Cas’s hands are cupped against the pleather, making a shape like he’s praying. There’s something profound in that, probably, but Dean isn’t smart enough to figure it out.

“It’s under my hands,” the trucker confirms without moving, brow furrowing at his own fingers, like they’re a puzzle he’s trying to solve.

“Gonna have to move your hands to get it,” Dean points out, still holding the cup out.

He’s figured out, by now, that the bug is not set for execution. On the contrary, they seem to be involved in a rather complicated rescue operation, which Dean suspects will just continue on if the ant escapes now.

“Yes.” Cas agrees with his obvious point. “When I pull my hands away, can you trap it.”

Doubtful, Dean raises his eyebrows. “I mean, I can try.”

“Try,” the tucker tells him, and then he pulls his hands away, and Dean moves in very quickly.

“Don’t squish it!” the trucker says as he does so, with rather a lot of alarm.

Dean doesn’t squish it.

“Got it,” he says. “Hand me a piece of paper.”

Cas does, and Dean slides it underneath the open side of the styrofoam cup.

Then he pulls the whole contraption away from the dashboard, and Cas, very quickly, takes it from him. The man puts his hand over the paper with a flat palm and firm pressure, making sure the ant can’t escape.

The pressure on Dean’s knees aches with strange intensity. He blinks up at Cas with what feels like a rock stuck in his throat.

“Open the door, please,” Cas tells him, oblivious to whatever is going on in Dean’s throat or head or heart or anything. Pushing it aside for now, Dean nods, and scrambles up again, unlocking the heavy door and swinging it open, letting the heavy heat and rushing sounds of the highway stumble in.

He jumps down from the perch, down to the asphalt. Then he helps Cas get down, since both the man’s arms are occupied with what’s in his hands.

Cas steps over the railing at the edge of the highway before crouching down to let the ant go. He seems very invested in making sure the bug reaches somewhere it could potentially survive from, and Dean sees him poking a small hole in the dirt for the ant to be released safely into.

Sticking his hands in his pockets, Dean looks down at the ground. It’s overcast today, which he’s grateful for at the moment, because he doesn’t think he could handle having this moment illuminated more than it already is.

“Is it ok?” he asks the trucker, when the man comes back from where he’d been.

He’s holding the cup, and the paper, but there’s no ant in sight.

“Yes, you didn’t hurt it. I think it will be ok, here.”

He actually sounds concerned, like it really matters if this environment suits the needs of a bug.

Dean swallows thickly.

“Great,” he says weakly. “Good.”

They’d pulled a twenty thousand pound truck over on the highway to rescue an ant the size of a freckle.

Cas had pulled a twenty thousand pound truck over on the highway to rescue an ant the size of a freckle.

I can’t believe I thought he might try to hurt me.

He feels stupid as fuck, and he feels very ashamed.

When they get back in the truck, Dean’s eyes feel like they’re stinging, and his chest, usually so empty, feels like it’s stuffed too full and might burst.

He doesn’t say anything else to Cas as they drive to the rest stop, but he does sit in the passenger’s seat again. And when they get where they’re going, he goes to the men’s room to take a piss. Cas is waiting for him when he comes out, with a burger and fries.

Dean accepts them silently. And he gets back in the cab. They leave the rest stop behind them in the rearview mirror, and Dean feels like he’s missing out on nothing at all.

Chapter Text

In the evening, Cas sits down on the bed, and Dean goes to him, lying down besides him with his head in the man’s jean-clothed lap. He starts kissing Cas’s cock through the fabric, and the man doesn’t stop him. So he unzips the fly and pulls the organ out from where it had been hidden.

He sucks Cas’s cock, slow and lazy, curled up besides the man on the bed with his head resting lightly on strong thighs. Cas touches his hair while Dean blows him, and Dean loves it, loves the whole thing like the needy, pathetic bitch that he is.

When Cas cums, Dean swallows his seed down quietly, and doesn’t take his mouth off of the man for a few, delayed, drawn out seconds.

Comfortable. Reluctant to move. He pulls away regretfully, and tucks the man back into his jeans.

It all feels so weirdly domestic and easy. Like he could get used to being in this position every day, like maybe he already is.

Not used to sucking cock, exactly, which he’s been doing forever, but used to…being touched during it. Used to putting his head in the lap of the guy he’s blowing, without the guy shoving him away and calling him a fag.

It’s…nice.

When he looks up, Cas is smiling down at him.

Just slightly, but it’s warm, and feels good.

He’s not disgusted by how Dean reaches out instinctually to him for comfort. Doesn’t call him names or hit him.

When the man leans over and kisses his forehead, Dean can hardly stand it, and he feels tears spring to his eyes.

He looks away.

Cas’s hand in his hair feels too nice, though, for him to move away from it, and he finds himself unable to really hide.

“Dean?” the man above him asks, sounding gentle. “What’s wrong?”

Like he actually gives a shit.

“Nothin’” he mutters, but denying it is pointless. “Just ain’t used to guys bein’ all sweet on me, is all.”

It’s a stupid thing to admit, especially after their little drama earlier in the day. It’s not like Cas doesn’t already know full well that he spends his days getting roughed up.

He doesn’t like making a big deal out of it, doesn’t like wallowing in self pity. But he feels like a child, suddenly, curled up with Cas holding him. Feels abruptly a terrible ache in his heart, for a life he already knows he can’t have.

His loneliness swallows him.

Cas hums, and touches his cheek.

“When you get to California, will your brother be able to help you?”

Like that’s why Dean is heading that way, to make Sammy’s life harder.

Dean winces, insides shriveling up even at the thought. He’d rather let Cas run him over right here and now, than be a burden to his brother, or anyone else.

“I’m not going to him for help,” Dean says back to the man, maybe a little harshly. “I’m not…like that. He’s in college. I’m going to help him.”

“Oh.”

The trucker frowns.

“Help him how?”

Shrugging, Dean doesn’t make eye contact.

“Howdya think? Money. Figured I’ll work the truck stop route around San Jose.”

There’s quiet after that, for a few seconds, like Cas is thinking. The radio is on, very low.

Whatever classic rock station they’d been playing has transitioned into just plain old oldies by now, this late in the evening. There’s an old song drifting through the air that Dean distantly recognizes, weaving between the sounds of crickets and distant car tires.

“You really think your brother will take the money you make from hooking?” Cas asks finally, and Dean feels himself blushing.

“I dunno,” he mutters, uncomfortable. “Why wouldn’t he? That’s what my dad always did.”

Cas is quiet again, and then he hums.

“I see.”

His fingers tangled in Dean’s hair are the only reason Dean doesn’t move away.

As it is, he can’t stand to be turned towards the man any longer, with his silent kind of sympathy and knowing eyes that Dean doesn’t need looking at him. Moving his head, he looks out towards the empty cab, overly illuminated in yellow by the ceiling’s overenthusiastic night lights.

Staring back towards the mumbling radio, he thinks of nothing, while feeling everything at once. It’s peaceful and quiet, where they’re parked, in the middle of nowhere again, away from everything. Dean doesn’t mind the emptiness, or the feeling that nothing else exists in the whole world.

“My dad kicked the bucket ‘bout two months ago, now,” Dean says out of nowhere. “Drunk driving. Wrapped his car and his head around a tree. Haven't had much to do with myself, since then. Been drifting. Figured getting to Sammy and helping him out is better than just floating along out here.”

He pauses.

“He doesn’t have to know.”

There’s no question about what he’s referring to.

He means the hooking. Being all but homeless, making his way between various men for little cash.

He hadn’t actually thought that far ahead about what he would tell Sam, about where the money came from, or if the kid would give a shit. He doesn’t even know if Sam will want him to stick around to begin with, and he doesn’t like putting the cart in front of the horse.

But maybe he should.

Above him, he hears Cas sigh a little. For a second, Dean thinks the man is gonna argue with him.

Or talk to him about ethics or something. Lecture him about taking care of himself, for a second time.

But he doesn’t do that. He just puts his fingers on Dean’s chin, and turns his face back to him.

Then, when they’re making eye contact again, he reaches down between Dean’s legs and gropes at his member through his jeans.

Dean huffs, blushing a little more. Spreading this thighs without a word.

Cas reaches inside his pants, inside his underwear, to palm his cock. Strokes it, once, twice, with strong eye contact, and Dean is fully hard.

“Jesus, Cas,” he mutters, as Cas masturbates him, holding his head in his lap with one hand, stroking his cock with the other.

It feels gentle, and absurdly intimate, and he’s panting with desire before he can get control of himself. Cumming only a few minutes later, making a mess inside of his pants, all over Cas’s hand.

His instincts are to feel like it’s disgusting, but Cas doesn’t seem to mind.

“I like taking care of you,” is all the man says, in blunt explanation.

Never mincing words, or dancing around how he feels.

It makes Dean feel shy.

“Yeah, I’ve picked up on that,” he mumbles, distantly, feeling like his head is stuffed with cotton in his post-orgasm haze.

“Good,” Cas says back, and then pulls his hand out from Dean’s pants and wipes it on a crumpled fast food napkin, which he picks up from off the ground.

How sanitary, Dean thinks, but he doesn’t have the energy to give a shit. Kicking off his jeans, he lets Cas pull off his boxers and wipe off his dick, with the same stupid napkin now stained with cum.

Then he pulls himself off the man’s lap, finally, finally, and, butt naked, rolls over to squish himself between the Cas’s back and the wall.

“I’m passing out, if that’s cool,” he murmurs into the blue comforter his face is squished into. It’s an abrupt transition, maybe, but he’s all worn out, from so much sex and so much talking, about shit he’s never talked about with anyone before.

It doesn’t feel bad, but he’s tired of it. Tired all around.

“Of course,” Cas says from behind him. “Do you need a blanket?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

The warm air cloaks him well enough, keeping him weighed down and heavy. Still, it’s sweet of Cas to ask, and his heart flinches a little, from feelings he doesn’t understand.

That he doesn’t want to understand. He closes his eyes. Lets the distant sound of Frankie Vallie’s voice from the radio cover his ears.

He doesn’t want to hear anything else, anymore, doesn’t want to think or feel or move from this safe spot again. He’s happy here, blissed out and thoughtless, and he drifts off wishing that he’d never wake up.

Chapter Text

The heatwave breaks, that evening, finally, finally, like a stick cracked over a beaten man’s back. It snaps like willpower, sometime between midnight and morning, and Dean wakes at the edge of it, right as the world is starting to cool.

It’s still night time. Still dark outside. Cas had turned the lights off, and is sleeping behind him on the bed.

Still and silent, he hears nothing, but feels the groan of relief that the sky is giving. Letting out a sigh like a heave of affection, that comes down to the world in the form of fresh, cold air.

Naked, his bare skin is the first to feel the leak of coolness trickling in from outside, and he wakes with goosebumps, and confusion, to which he pops his head up on the bed.

Looking over Cas’s dark silhouette of a shoulder, he sees very little, because it’s not daytime. There’s a gray cast over everything, though, that he can see bleeding in through the windows. The gun-metal gray of the early morning sky.

It’s September, he thinks. Knows in his bones, before he even counts backwards. From the days he’s been with Cas, to the day he last saw a newspaper in a gas station shop.

Nine days, that feel like longer. The last, heaving throws of summer dying.

It’s September 1st, now, and he’s not alone anymore. He’ll be alone again soon enough, but not for now.

He sits up.

Quietly, slowly in the dark. He doesn’t want to disturb Cas, like the man is a beast in the night.

He should go back to sleep, but he doesn’t want to. He’s cold. He’s empty.

Like he’s hypnotized, he gets up in silence, climbing over Cas to stand up besides the bed.

There is mist on the cab windows, and the fake leather of the seats beside him are cool to the touch. Everything is draped in gray, in shadow, and he can’t see anything outside the cloudy dashboard except 4AM’s thin attempt at light.

It’s not here yet, the morning, but the world is tinted and strained in a way that threatens it’s coming soon. Like a reminder that silence can’t last forever, the silver cast leaking through the fogged glass around him tells him that the sun is clawing its way back up and out of the pit it had been pushed into. Just like it does every day.

Dean, for some reason, feels disjointed and disoriented. Like he’s missing a part of himself, another limb he can’t name.

You didn’t sleep enough, he tells himself. The nightime does this to people.

His dad used to get disoriented too, when he woke up past midnight. He would have always been drinking, though, and Dean had a hard time putting him back to bed.

Maybe he understands why John was so resistant, now. Dean hasn’t been drinking, but his head feels cloudy like he has.

He doesn’t want to go back to bed.

He wants to go….somewhere. Do something. Be something.

Cas’s breathing is heavy and steady behind him, and for some reason, Dean sits down in his seat.

The driver’s seat. It feels sort of dangerous. Like he’s not supposed to be there, in the place that moves the truck along.

It’s not like he even has the key, not like he could even turn the car on if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. But it just feels weird, to be seeing from this perspective. The perspective of control, of being the one in charge.

Silly. He drove the Impala a lot, before his dad crashed it. Never when dad was really conscious, but most nights, when the man got blackout drunk.

It wasn’t his car. Wasn’t his to move, but he didn’t want exactly what had eventually happened anyway to happen. He’d drag John out of whatever bar he was being kicked out of, push him into the back seat, and get the hell outta dodge.

Wherever John wanted to go, that’s where Dean took them. Detroit or Minneapolis or the next motel they could find.

He never really questioned what he was doing, or thought that he didn’t really have to actually listen. It’s not like dad even remembered what he’d said the night before, so it’s not like he would have been mad.

It only dawns on Dean now that he could have said no, or gone wherever the hell he wanted to. He could have taken them both where he wanted, or just taken himself. Left dad behind, found his own way in the world.

It makes his hair stand on end.

You’re so fucked up.

He knows it’s true. But none of that kind of thing matters to him anymore.

He’s been so fucked up for so long, so lonely and tired. It doesn’t matter to him what the world thinks of what’s inside him, as long as he can keep from being hurt for it, as much as he possibly can.

Eyes drifting up, his gaze finds the rearview mirror, finds Cas’s silhouette in it, laid out in darkness on the bed.

He’s sleeping on top of the sheets like Dean had been, and the blankets under him are a big crumpled mess. The man never bothers to make the bed in the morning, but also hasn’t gotten mad at Dean when he’s quietly done it for him instead.

His heart aches. For Cas, who’s weird and lonely too, but mostly for himself.

It’s so sad and pathetic, that he makes the beds of the guys who fuck him in their trucks. And then expects them to get pissed at him if they notice, to hit him and call him a fag.

They usually do, and that makes the fact that he continues to do it even worse.

Dean looks down at his bare thighs.

He likes that Cas doesn’t hit him, likes that the man doesn’t seem to mind what a fucking fairy Dean is, pathetic and attention seeking. He doesn’t seem to care that Dean spills his guts like a faggot, that he cuddles up to him like they’re boyfriends, that he likes when the man touches his hair…

Maybe Cas is actually gay?

Jesus. Maybe.

Is Dean gay? He has no fucking idea.

Like it matters.

He rubs his face, and leans back against the seat he’s collapsed himself into. He’s in way too deep to be having thoughts about what he actually likes, what he actually is, fucking now.

In January, he’d turned 23, and in March, he had been hooking for a decade. Way too young, and he pretends it doesn’t matter, but he knows it fucked with him beyond belief.

He knows the fucked up thing he is now isn’t fucking unrelated to how long he’s been living like this. He was a kid, back then, scared and desperate, and guys had messed with him until he doesn’t know how to be anything else but what they want.

Who he is, who he could have been, none of it matters in the face of reality. It’s been too long a life with him drifting between truckstops for him to ever fix it and have some sense of normalcy now.

No matter what his heart wants.

“Jesus, you’re a fag,” he mutters to himself. All these fucking feelings. What a mess he’s made of himself, what a mess he’s let himself become.

Letting his guard down like an idiot, all for a pair of nice blue eyes and strong, dominant hands in his hair. Like that’s gonna last longer than the second it takes for Dean to push them away from him, after he gets out for the last time in the sunshine state.

His throat feels thick. He can’t believe how attached he’s gotten.

It’s September. Sam must be starting his classes already. His dad’s birthday is coming up, though that doesn’t matter anymore.

But still. He has a life, shitty and fucked up as it is. He has responsibilities, and Cas doesn’t want him tagging along with him indefinitely anyway.

Making his bed isn’t gonna make up for the cost of keeping Dean along, no matter how often he sucks the man’s dick at night. Dean knows he’s not worth keeping, and wouldn’t stay, even if he was worth it. He’s always put his family first, above everything, even his safety. That’s not gonna change now, just because he likes playing house.

Drifting, his eyes find their way back to the rearview mirror. Back to Cas’s sleeping form on the bed.

Slightly more light is trickling in, now, or, more accurately, the dull gray cast of the world has become a little brighter. He can see the trucker’s features now, see how they look peaceful as he sleeps.

Something aches inside him, deeply. He’s struck by how young Cas really looks.

Older than Dean, but not by much. Still young enough to want reckless things.

Would Cas keep me, if I asked?

The thought comes in against his will, even though he knows he never would stay.

He wishes he could lie to himself and accept the easy answer that he is never wanted, but the truth has the vicious bite of a dog.

And the truth is he just doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what Cas wants, doesn’t know who the man is almost at all. He knows nothing about Cas, other than that he’s quiet, and lonely, and that he likes to push Dean around without hurting him, and likes to rescue ants.

Jesus, the ants. What kind of grown man rescues ants.

What kind of grown man fucks some bought twink in a public bathroom in front of people, and the pulls a two thousand ton truck over on the highway the next day to save a bug.

Cas sighs in his sleep, and Dean stares at him in the mirror. He wonders who the fuck this guy is, and what he wants.

The mist on the dashboard window is trickling away now, with the hiss of a drizzle. Drops stream down the cool glass, revealing the dampened world out in front.

It’s wet, and green, and gray, and barely visible. A dirt road stretches out in front of them, that the truck would never fit down.

Must be why we stopped here.

There was no room at the rest stop.

There are trees, outside, and soggy, half run over grass.

Dean glances at it, dull and foggy and faded, and then glances back at Cas, who has yet to open his eyes.

It’s gonna be a while, he decides, and then he open’s Cas’s glove compartment, because the man doesn’t lock it, because he trusts Dean way too much.

He’s so fucking weird like that. Pushy and almost scary in one moment, then something that can only be described as naive in the next. What kind of grown man rescues ants, what kind of grown man doesn’t know what music he likes. What kind of man pays for hookers behind bathroom stalls at truck stops, and then lets them hitchhike cross country with them without demanding almost anything else at all.

So fucking weird.

There’s a bunch of crumpled up trash in the glove compartment, unsurprisingly. Cas is not the neatest person on the planet, Dean has come to find.

Thoughtlessly, Dean scoops most of it out, holding it on his bare lap and then on top of the dashboard when he runs out of room, determined to dig around deeper, to find anything of note at all.

What he finds is this:

-Nine empty 7/11 cups

-Twelve bags from McDonalds

-Two Happy Meal boxes, and two happy meal toys

-A paperclip

-A nail

-A shoestring with a needle stuck in it

-Six different maps of the country, with scribbled notes all over them about roads being changed

So. Nothing. Unless one counts a fast food addiction as fascinating information. Frustrated, Dean scowls at the lack of insight he’s gotten, at the lack of personality or backstory he can find anywhere in the truck.

Other men decorate the insides of their cabs, with porn and signs and tchotchkes from places they’ve been while trucking. Other men tie things to the grill at the front of their trucks, and keep pictures of their families tucked between the dashboard and the glass.

Cas has none of that. His truck is old and worn down, but otherwise empty, like it had just come off the factory line and then been left to rot for 20 years. He has no pictures, no signs of religion, no souvenirs or evidence of a past life.

No evidence of a future, either, no stickers of places he wants to go or evidence of hobbies and things he wants to be. It gives Dean a strange feeling, like he’s encountered a man who really doesn’t exist outside of the truck he drives, like he’s encountered someone as lonely as he is, but with even fewer connections to the world.

“Fucking hell.”

He whispers, because he doesn’t want Cas to wake up. He thinks the man would be mad, though honestly, he doesn’t even know anymore.

That annoys him, and he doesn’t know what to think or feel, sitting there butt naked in the driver’s seat of the cab. With fast food trash all around him, he feels ridiculous, and feels the rain like it’s judging him. Outside, making steady hisses and whispers, like it’s gossiping, or laughing about his attempts to feel seen.

Assholes, he thinks at nothing, and then he scowls, and starts to shove the trash back into the glove department from where it had come. He feels stupid, like this was all pointless, and feels like an emo chick left out to dry.

The sun is finally coming up, just barely, but it wakes him up more and makes him feel crazy. Naked and staring at nothing for an hour, thinking about his problems, trying to dig up someone else’s too.

I should go back to bed, Dean thinks, as he tries to fit all the trash back into the tiny compartment it had somehow exploded from. I should go back to bed before Cas wakes up and sees me snooping, and tells me to get out of his truck.

No doubt the man would be much less dramatic about it than Dean had been imagining. No doubt he’s being crazy, again, thinking the man would give a shit.

Swallowing, Dean tries to tamp down on how ridiculous he feels, as he crams the Happy Meal boxes in alongside the 7/11 cups. He’s trying not to think about anything, except pretending this never happened and going back to bed, until suddenly, he hears something thump to the ground.

Heavier than fast food garbage. Definitely heavier than a paperclip, or a nail.

Surprised, Dean first looks down at the McDonalds box it had fallen out of, not having realized there was anything hidden inside.

The bottom of it is open, having come undone from its folds among all Dean’s manhandling. The cardboard is redder than Dean expects it to be, reminding him that the sun is coming up.

He blinks. Glances up at the rearview mirror. Cas looks asleep, but Dean still turns fully around.

Just in case. But the mirror hadn’t been lying. The man has rolled over, but is still breathing steadily. Unmoving, besides the rise and fall of his unconscious chest.

Dean turns back around. He finished cramming the trash back into the glove department, and closes it. Then he slips down to what has become a very familiar position over the years, on his knees in the cramped space between the driver’s seat and the dashboard above.

This time, though, he’s not here to suck a cock, or to grovel at some guy who’s threatening to kill him. This time he’s just being nosey, feeling suddenly so desperate to find something behind Cas other than a blank slate of control.

He doesn’t know what he expects. Some dark sex toy, maybe, or a secret photo album of the guy’s family. Maybe a burner phone with all his hidden contacts, all the other boys he fucks and doesn’t feel the need to tell Dean about.

Or. Maybe. More trash. That would be the worst, he thinks.

And he thinks that’s what he’s getting, at first, when his hands first find the box in the darkness. When he lifts it up, and finds more cardboard, of the boring and easily discarded kind.

Marlboro

Dean scoffs, unsurprised at the logo. Cas has obviously been smoking for a very long time.

With his cleaning habits, or lack thereof, it doesn’t surprise Dean that there’s an empty box left over.

Until he registers the weight of what he’s holding, and realizes it isn’t empty at all.

Blinking, Dean glances over to where Cas is still sleeping. Then he looks back down at the box, and opens it up.

He tilts it, and a whole box of cigarettes, with two missing, slips out into his hand. They’re obviously new. The paper around them hasn’t faded at all.

For a long time, Dean just stares at them, and stares at them, and stares at them, and then he smirks, satisfaction stepping smoothly in to take over curiosity’s role.

His entire feeling of helplessness seems to just evaporate, suddenly, his lack of understanding and feelings of inadequacy fading away.

Because Cas was lying, he was fucking lying, or at least he hadn’t been able to stick to his promise. And Dean had caught him, after not even 24 hours had passed, giving right back in to those same vices he’d so dramatically thrown away.

Dean has to pinch his lips together very tightly, because he’s so close to giving himself away with a laugh. Cas is fucking addicted to smoking, and it’s the funniest thing Dean has ever learned in his life for some reason, and he feels lighter, all of sudden, like he won’t have to be so ashamed in the light of day.

When the sun does come up, Dean doesn’t hide from it, feeling more like someone who’s not going to burn up if looked at too close. Tired, but nonetheless in a good mood, he steps out into the sunlight, still naked, and not caring if anyone sees.

On his way out, he grabs the lighter Cas had been pretending not to use, left tossed in the ashtray that had only been out of use when Dean hadn’t been there to see. He takes the Marlboros with him, and plants himself next to the truck. And he smokes one of Cas’s cigarettes, as his hair gets damp from the rain.

Chapter Text

He stays out there for a long time, just enjoying the morning, the fresh air and the drizzling rain on his skin. Dean smokes cigarette after cigarette, as he passes the time, staring off towards the empty fields they’d been parked next to, and a windmill he can see in the distance.

Cas wakes up eventually, and Dean can hear the rustling sounds of it, from inside the cab, from where he’s stood leaned up against the tire. He doesn’t bother trying to hide himself when the trucker comes out eventually, looking for him, just stares back at the other man with his best innocent, doe-eyed look as Cas hops down with him into the mud.

They stare at each other quietly. Cas looks irritated. Dean smiles at him blithely, finding that he doesn’t feel scared.

Leaning back against the truck, totally nude, he takes a lazy drag off the man’s cigarette.

“Good morning,” he says, cheerily. Holding the so-called cancer stick absently in hand. “Beautiful sunrise we’re having, if you can get past the rain.”

He nods in the direction of what he’s referring to, where the sun is blazing orange. He speaks the truth, but Cas doesn’t even glance at it, too busy glaring at Dean with an unamused look on his face.

The man looks tired, and damp already. Over Dean’s antics, before they’ve even started.

“I see you went through my things,” he says flatly, dryly. Without bothering to address that Dean’s nude.

Smirking, Dean makes a face of confusion. Over the top, but pretending he wants it to be believed.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, dramatically. Waving the cigarette clutched between his two fingers around, for dramatic effect.

The smoke leaks out between them, and Dean’s cock twitches at the way Cas glowers him into dust.

“You’re lucky you’re cute.”

Like Dean could be anything else.

Dean grins at him, pleased with himself.

“I’m always cute.”

“That’s what you think.”

Snorting, Dean looks down, not sure whether or not to be self conscious. His whole body is slightly wet, from the drizzle, that’s gotten light enough now that it can almost be considered a fog.

It still makes everything damp, though and turns the dirt road they’re on into something a little closer to liquid. Blushing a little, Dean looks down at his muddy feet, and wiggles his toes in the dirt.

“Why are you out here naked,” he hears Cas ask him, and he just shrugs slightly.

“I dunno,” he says back. “Why are you hiding Marlboros in your glove compartment a day after saying you weren’t gonna smoke them any more?”

There’s a pause. Then, “I may have overestimated my self control.” Cas’s voice sounds resentfully embarrassed, like he’s not sure if he should feel caught or just annoyed.

It’s pretty funny, now that Dean is less scared of the guy snapping. Smiling a little, he takes another drag off the cigarette, then looks back up at the other man with an eyebrow raised.

“Well, right back attcha.”

“Keeping your clothes on in public is an issue of self control?”

Cas sounds doubtful, but Dean just goes along with it, amused.

“Sure. Isn’t that what you were saying the other day, about my psychological problems? They’re getting really terrible. That’s why I went through your glove compartment and stole your secret cigarettes, too.”

The hiss of the fading drizzle laughs at his joke, even if the trucker doesn’t. Appreciating it, Dean smirks and tilts his head back, letting the water rain down light on his skin.

The metal of the truck behind him is cold and wet on his bare back against it. His ass is getting cut into by some bent out of shape piece of it, but Dean finds that he can’t really care.

“You are such a pain,” Cas grumbles, eventually.

“Nah. You know I’m hilarious.”

“You’re annoying. You shouldn’t have gone through my things.”

“You gonna spank me about it?”

“Maybe I should.”

Cas doesn’t sound like he’s kidding, and that makes Dean shiver, in a way that’s not unpleasant, and sends electricity straight down to his cock.

There’s no hiding what the statement does to him, because he’s butt naked, and has no way to cover it. Blushing, Dean tilts his head back down to glance at Cas, not sure if he’s nervous or turned on or what.

“You’re fuckin’ with me.”

But the man obviously isn’t. He’s looking at Dean with that intense glint he gets when he’s about to fuck him into the 9th dimension.

Dean’s cock starts to swell without his permission, and his confidence falters. His eyes drop, and he takes another drag off the cigarette, aware of how the trucker is watching his arousal grow.

“You sure are into some kinky shit, man,” he mutters, as if he hasn’t encountered guys who want to cut off his toes or whatever.

“Like you aren’t,” the man says back to him, and there’s no real point in denying it. Not with his dick already pointing due east, while he’s standing out in the rain butt naked.

“Maybe,” he shrugs. Goes to take another drag of the cigarette.

It doesn’t make it to his lips, though. In a flash, Cas has surged forward, is standing besides him. Grabbing his wrist, stopping its movement towards his mouth.

Startled, Dean jumps a little, and then feels a surge of heat in his lower regions when he sees how Cas is looking at him. As he stares, the trucker reaches with his other hand towards the cigarette, and plucks it from Dean’s fingers.

He puts it back in his own mouth, where it belongs. Dean breathes heavily.

“So much for quitting,” he murmurs, as Cas inhales and takes a drag.

“I didn’t say I was quitting,” the man says back, voice gravely. Then he hauls Dean closer by the wrist and kisses him, breathing smoke into his mouth.

Dean’s knees go weak, and he moans, and starts coughing, against Cas’s lips without being able to pull away. When the man does let him pull back, there’s a burning sensation in his throat and his eyes are watering. Inhaling fresh air deeply, he tries to pretend he isn’t choking, even though he knows that was probably the whole point.

He blushes. He’s so fucking hard again. Cas is smirking at him, and he looks good with his fog dampened hair.

“Jesus, Cas, warn a guy, would you?” he stutters, when he finishes remembering how to breathe normally.

“Now where would be the fun in that?” Cas asks rhetorically, and then he smacks Dean sharply once on his ass.

It’s playful, but it still surprises a whine out of Dean, an embarrassing, turned on noise that betrays his sarcasm as he jumps. It’s hot as hell, even though Dean feels cold, in the cool morning. Probably related to the whole, decided-to-come-out-here-naked-just-to-fuck-with-Cas thing.

He really is a tease.

For once, though, he doesn’t hate himself for it, finds his lips turning up again at the thought of how he’s managed to rile Cas up so fast.

He really likes Cas. He really likes how into him Cas is. He really likes how he can mess with the guy and tease him, without Cas getting pissed off for real and beating him up.

Nah. He just…breathes smoke into his mouth and smacks his ass to prove who’s still in charge.

It’s hot as hell.

Dean lets himself grin. He likes the change of pace, tired of the gentling since he got fucked in the showers. He wants Cas’s dick in his ass.

“I want your dick in my ass,” he says outloud, unashamed and unafraid that Cas will be threatened or annoyed by his upfrontness.

He’s right. Cas’s eyebrows raise to his hairline, but he’s obviously far from pissed off.

He’s still holding Dean’s wrist.

“You’re horny today.”

“I’m always horny. You didn’t fuck me yesterday, it’s got me all pent up.”

It’s sort of true, which is insane, considering that the guy had jacked him off just last night. It isn’t enough for him, anymore, not with this man. He’s become such a pervert, even more than usual, just in the past couple of days.

He doesn’t care. He’s enjoying all this too damn much.

Cas snorts.

“The lube is in the cab.”

“Just fuck me raw.”

“Absolutely not. You’re still too sore.”

Wanting to argue, but not wanting another smack on his ass, Dean starts to open his mouth, but then just huffs.

“You’re so precious about everything.”

The grip on his wrist tightens briefly, and Dean thinks maybe he’s been successful at goading Cas into it. But then the trucker lets go of him, and says, “Go get the lube.”

Figures. The guy really is precious, especially when it comes to Dean, and not hurting him. It’s a little annoying, but a lot flattering, and sweet, in a way that makes Dean’s stomach flutter.

But the look in the man’s eye when Dean doesn’t move for a moment isn’t precious, doesn’t make his stomach flutter. It makes his dick ache with burning need.

“Sure,” he breathes, and, naked as the day he was born, he yanks open the heavy metal door and climbs up to the cab. His feet are muddy, but he doesn’t bother cleaning them, just lets his legs dangle out of the doorway as he climbs halfway over the driver’s seat.

Draping himself across it, he’s not really thinking about what position he’s put himself in as he scrounges around on the floor with his hands. He’s just thinking about the fact that he last saw the lube somewhere on the ground between the seats yesterday, and getting it as fast as possible.

He becomes aware, though, that he’s bent in half with his ass up in the air like the whore he is, when he hears Cas whistle from outside.

Then, at the same moment he spots the lube, he hears Cas climbing up after him. It’s instinct, to tense, when he feels Cas’s hands on his hips, feel the man pulling him a few inches backwards to rub his ass against the trucker’s hard bulge.

But the man doesn’t release him, and after a few seconds, Dean relaxes.

“You sure are excited today,” he mumbles, feeling his heart stuttering, his cheeks pinkening.

“You decided to prance around naked, and thought I wouldn’t get hard?”

He rubs the thick outline of his member into the divet between Dean’s asscheeks, pointedly. Moaning, Dean drops his head down, and spreads his legs.

His hard cock hangs halfway down as Cas lifts his hips slightly, dragging along the cold gray pleather of the seat and almost certainly leaving a trail of precum.

“Cas…”

“Pass me the lube.”

Dean does, grabbing it from where it had rolled under the other seat and passing it backwards to the man behind him. Cas takes one of his hands off Dean’s hips to grab it, but Dean’s body doesn’t lower. The trucker is able to hold much of the weight of it with just his one hand under his pelvis.

It’s so hot. Dean’s penis twitches against the seat, as he hears Cas flick off the lube cap. He spreads his legs further, and the trucker’s strong fingers reach down to find his hole.

They’re insistent and prodding, neither violent nor gentle. Firm, and Dean squirms on instinct to get away from them, but Cas is very good at holding him still.

He gasps.

“Oh, fuck.”

The trucker pushes two fingers in at once, which, despite the fact that Dean can’t exactly be described as tight anymore, still burns.

He whines, and jerks his hips, but Cas holds him fast as he pumps the digits in and out of him. It’s dominant and forceful and not very careful, and Dean doesn’t know why he was stupid enough to call the man precious to his face at all.

Now you’re in for it, he thinks, but he isn’t scared of what’s happening. Rather, he feels his heart rate pick up in excitement, feeling how Cas handles him like some rowdy animal that needs to be broken in.

Or at least, be reminded who’s in control here. Dean moans, and moans, and moans. Cas fingers him open with little consideration and little coaxing, until Dean hears the sound of him undoing his belt.

“Fuck me, Cas,” he murmurs.

“I very much intend to,” Cas says back.

And then he does.

His cock pushes in steady and hard and stretches Dean open, and Dean moans, dropping his head towards the floor. He pushes back towards Cas as the man pumps heavily in and out of him, panting and whining like a dog.

He feels like an animal, because he is an animal, is becoming one more and more every time Cas touches him between his legs. He loves it, so much more than he ever has with anyone else in all the years he’s been getting fucked, because Cas is so strong and pushy and weird and hot but so careful of him at the same time.

“Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck, man, jesus!”

“My name, as I’ve said,” Cas pants. “Is Castiel.”

Dean laughs, short and hard, but it quickly turns into a moan. The smile on his face left over from it, though, doesn’t fade.

Having sex with Cas is fun.

What a novel experience.

It doesn’t take very long after that for Cas to cum, nor long after the man pulls out for Dean to jerk himself off as well. They’re both horny, and easily pushed into desperation, and the cool morning air feels fresh on Dean’s skin and reminds him that they are, technically, outside.

That’s hot too, even though no one is actually around. It has him shivering through the last aftershocks of his orgasm, as he lies there panting, feeling Cas’s cum leaking out of his hole.

Cas’s hand touches his asscheek, and then his lower back.

“Are you alright?” he asks, sounding sweet again.

Dean smirks at the personality shift. He’s sensing a pattern.

Rolling over on the seat, lazy and naked, he lets it all hang out as he makes bedroom eyes at the other man, not trying to hide the way he’s barely holding in a laugh.

“I’m good. You get whatever that was out of your system?”

The trucker has the grace to look embarrassed.

“I might have gotten carried away again,” he says, awkwardly, but Dean isn’t having any of it, and just lets out his laugh.

He sits up, and reaches out, and pulls Cas towards him to kiss him.

The man kisses hard and desperate, and when Dean pulls away, he says, “Man, if that’s what you call getting carried away, I’m gonna be stealing your shit whenever I can.”

Chapter Text

“So what’s your story, man?”

Dean asks the question a couple of hours later, sitting back in the passenger’s seat of the truck, ignoring the ache in his ass. His feet are up on the dashboard, and he’s happily slurping away at an oversized cherry icy Cas had got him at 7/11 twenty minutes back.

They’re rocking out to Bon Jovi, or at least Dean is, bobbing his head and humming along intermittently as they cruise down the highway high above everyone else.

He’s feeling good. More confident, now, more comfortable with Cas besides him, awkward and silent as ever.

More than before, he feels sure that the guy likes him, and isn’t going to rip his head off for asking nosey personal questions about his weird stoic life.

He’s right. The man frowns a little as Dean tilts his head towards him, but doesn’t lash out of him, or even seem particularly upset.

Moreso, he just seems a bit puzzled, like he’s not sure exactly what Dean means.

“My story?” he asks, sounding confused, like he’s never heard that expression.

It’s pretty endearing. Dean snorts, and takes another sip of his very-artificial tasting slurpee.

“Yeah man,” he says, when he finishes swallowing, blasé. “Your story. Like, where you’re from, how you’d end up here in the middle of nowhere. The works.”

He waves the hand that’s not holding his cup around a little for dramatic effect. Cas doesn’t take his eyes off the road to see it, but Dean feels like adds something to the scene anyway.

The trucker is focused on driving, in any case, but his brow furrows in thought at Dean’s prodding.

“I don’t know…It’s not very interesting. I’m from North Dakota. I drive because I need to pay bills.”

It’s the least involved explanation Dean has ever received about anything, as literal as if Cas were filling out a form at the DMV. Short and simple, and if Dean was another kind of person he might assume this was Cas’s way of avoiding the question.

Knowing what he knows about the man, now, though, he’s more inclined to believe that the trucker literally doesn’t understand what Dean is trying to ask. Or, at least, if he does understand, that he has no idea how to answer it. Cas never has seemed very good at talking about himself, or honestly holding any kind of basic conversation whatsoever.

Dean rolls his eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Spock. I figured out you’re from North Dakota from your license plate, actually. And everyone has to pay bills.”

Cas just frowns again, and Dean sighs dramatically.

“Come on, man, you’ve got to give me something. I spilled my guts to you the other day, like a fucking pussy. You kind of owe me at this point, don’t you?”

Why Cas would be responsible for alleviating Dean’s embarrassment over how emotional he’d been, Dean doesn’t really know, and doesn’t care about. The point isn’t to be logical, it’s to get Cas to talk to him. He’s betting that the man is too awkward to realize that what Dean’s saying doesn’t make a lick of sense in space.

He’s right. The trucker, still frowning, glances briefly over to him. But doesn’t call Dean out on how pushy he’s being.

Instead, he just says, “I suppose that’s true,” like he’s not really sure about it.

Because it doesn’t actually make sense, but Dean doesn’t let him off the hook.

He takes another slip of his slurpee, loud and obnoxious, as Cas seems to think about what to say.

“What do you want to know?” the man asks him eventually, still sounding uncertain. “I really don’t think there’s very much to tell.”

Dean disagrees, and now he has his hooks in the guy. Grinning, he shifts his whole body towards the driver’s seat.

“Well, I know you have a family. A big one, that you don’t talk to. For ominous, unspoken reasons.”

He’s being an ass, but he’s nosey, and Cas seems willing to talk to him, now. He’s maybe the first guy in Dean’s whole life who’s given off the vibe that he could be asked questions about his personal life without becoming homicidal towards Dean.

And Dean likes to hear things about people. If he’s honest with himself, he knows he’s a friendly guy.

Or, at least, he would be, if the life he lived allowed it. He likes to hear people’s stories, is genuinely interested in learning about what they have to say.

It’s just shit luck that he’s found his way into a “career” that involves so much sex and violence and shutting the fuck up on his end, if he wants to survive it. That he’s usually in the position of biting his tongue to keep from asking about the pictures a guy has on his dashboard, to keep Detroit Joey or whoever from throttling him to death for reminding him about his little girl.

Yeah. It’s hard to be friendly like Dean is, when you’re a truckstop hooker. It’s hard to be nosey like Dean is, when you want to survive on the highways for more than a day.

Maybe he better remind himself of that a bit more frequently, because Cas is still quiet. As nice as the guy has been to him, maybe he doesn’t appreciate being interrogated, especially by some twink he’s fucking, and especially not in such a casual, irritating way.

Dean cringes.

“Sorry, man. You, uh, you don’t gotta answer that.”

Blushing, embarrassed, he takes another slurp of his slushie, rather urgently. He gets a brain freeze, and, when it passes and Cas still hasn’t said anything, reaches with his feet still on the dashboard towards the radio to turn the music up.

An attempt to fill the awkward silence. But, only a second after he sets it to blasting, Cas undoes his work, and turns the music back down to lower than it had been before.

“No, it’s alright,” the man says, as Dean looks over to him in surprise. “You’re right, you’ve told me about your family. It stands to reason that you want to know about mine.”

Then he’s quiet again, and they cruise past a red car on the highway. Then a blue one, then a black one, and then Cas says, “They’re very religious.”

Dean’s eyebrows raise slightly. He sits up a bit straighter in his seat.

“Oh.” He pauses. Then, he says, “We talking Seventh Heaven type religious, or was it more of a Jonestown thing?”

Maybe expectedly, Cas doesn’t seem to understand what he’s talking about. Tilting his head slightly, he looks back towards Dean with a blank kind of confusion on his face.

Then he looks back at the road.

“I don’t know what you are referring to. But if you’re asking how religious they were, the answer is very.” He huffs. “I had twelve brothers and sisters, and that may…give you some understanding. My father believed it was his earthly mission to produce more servants of god.”

“Oh.”

Dean’s starting to feel uncomfortable. Sipping on a slurpee feels like it’s maybe not the best look during this conversation, suddenly, and he quietly puts it down in the cupholder.

He takes his feet on the dashboard.

“Guessing your dad wasn’t really the “girl power” type, huh?”

Looking grim, Cas purses his lips.

“Not exactly. He wasn’t exactly the “anyone power” type, aside from God, and, of course, himself. I…” He trails off. Sighs. Admits, “We lived on a compound. With a handful of other families who held the same beliefs. My father generally led the sermons and…everything else. None of us were allowed to speak to anyone outside of the faith.”

He says this flatly, and Dean gets the feeling “the faith” doesn’t mean broad-band Christians. Looking down at his hands, Dean starts picking at his nails again, feeling like a real fucking moron for bringing this up, for picking at old wounds like the scabs wouldn’t be covering anything, and then being surprised when he peels them away and finds blood.

“Oh,” he says, awkwardly, for a second time. Then, because he can’t just not address the elephant in the room, abruptly adds, “That sounds like a cult.”

Sort of hesitantly, because he’s not sure if it’s something Cas is going to be sensitive about. Despite his unhappiness with his family. It doesn’t always matter, and god knows Dean knows a thing or two about getting defensive about relatives who have objectively really fucked you up.

But maybe they didn’t fuck Cas up as badly as Dean’s own family had fucked Dean up, somehow, because the trucker doesn’t get angry, or tell him off for calling a duck a duck.

Instead, he just nods, and says, “Yes, it does seem to fit the technical definition, doesn’t it.” Then he says, “I don’t know that anyone was ever investigated. But I know illegal things were going on.”

He doesn’t volunteer any more information on what those illegal things might be, but Dean gets the gist. Christian cults always seem to start and end in the same song and dance, and Dean grimaces at the idea of Cas being stuck in one of those things.

At being raised in one of them.

Mother of fuck. What a life.

No wonder the guy is so fucking weird.

Not even being allowed to talk to anyone else…

“Is that why you’re not so great at talking to people?”

The words are out of Dean’s mouth before he thinks better of them, like an idiot.

He only registers what an offensive fucking question that is after he says it, and he cringes at his own stupidity. But, weird and nice as ever, Cas, once again, doesn’t get mad.

He just says, “Yes,” and then leaves it at that, at least for a few seconds, before he adds. “Well, at least partially. I was always a bit strange, even to my siblings.”

Dean hums, just glad the man hadn’t thrown something heavy at his head for blatantly calling him a weirdo, and goes back to picking his nails, because he doesn’t have a clue what else to do.

“I’m sorry, man,” he mutters eventually, because that’s all he can think of. “I’m, um. I’m really glad you got out.”

Cas purses his lips. He puts his turn signal on, and merges into the left exit lane. Then, quietly, he says, “Me too.”

***********

They pass Topeka in relative silence, and then Kansas City in a similar state, stewing in their own complexities like the ice that melts rapidly in Dean’s slushy under the late summer heat. They turn the fans on, and Dean goes back to fiddling with the radio, and when he looks up again they’re entering Missouri.

“This don’t look like the way to California,” he comments, without much expectation that what he says will be addressed.

Cas often ignores him, especially when he’s whining about something. Seems like the man doesn’t even know he’s supposed to answer, half the time, and doesn’t bother answering if he doesn’t think it’s worth the breath.

This time, though, Cas does hum in acknowledgement.

“I took a pickup down south. We’re making a detour.”

Not that concerned about it, Dean just nods, and fiddles with the fan adjustments.

“Sure,” he says casually, and goes back to what he was doing, which is essentially nothing, like he’s been doing all day.

He falls asleep after a while, bored and sated, like a cat in a beam of sunlight, comfortable and without worry of being attacked. Right in the passenger’s seat, curled up at awkward angles. Too lazy to move back to the bed, and too happy in Cas’s company to want to.

He wakes up a few hours later, and they’re in Springfield, at the truckstop. Cas is just finishing the offload, and comes back into the cab a few moments later.

“You could’a woken me,” Dean mumbles, rubbing his eyes as he pokes his head up.

Cas slams the door, and shakes his head at the same time.

“What for? You couldn’t have helped me.”

He gestures bluntly at Dean’s underfed physique, and Dean blushes.

“Christ, you’re a charmer,” he grumbles, not sure whether or not he’s actually offended. It’s still really weird, to be around someone who has so little incentive to mince his words.

At the same time, it’s kind of nice. Makes things simpler, and easier to navigate. Not to mention, it’s not like the man is wrong, that he’s a lot stronger than Dean. It’s still pretty sweet, how the guy doesn’t want him doing things where he might strain his bruised muscles or get hurt.

Even if he’s rude about it.

“Alright, whatever,” he mutters, as Cas turns the ignition back on. “Could’a stretched my legs for a minute at least, but it’s fine.”

He’s just complaining about nothing, as he often does when he’s butthurt, but Cas surprises him again by taking him seriously, nodding as they merge back out onto the road.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be stretching your legs soon enough. We have something we’re going to see.”

Confused, Dean pokes his head up from where he’d been starting to settle it again.

“Another detour?”

Cas nods again, without elaborating on what this detour is.

Dean blinks.

“Well, what is it?”

“You’ll see,” is all Cas says, ominously. And Dean bites his tongue, because he has to.

He wants to know, wants to badger the man incessantly, but he suspects he’s done enough prying for one day already. As tolerant as the man is, he’s still just a man, who doesn’t like having his plans derailed by whiny hookers who don’t know when to shut up.

So Dean shuts up.

“Fine,” he sighs, mildly annoyed with everything. “I’ll just go back to sleep, then. Wake me when we’re there.”

Cas hums in acknowledgement, and Dean tries to keep his promise, curling his knees back up to his chest and resting his head on them, trying to let the gentle rocking of the cab ease him back into a nap.

He can’t quite get the hang of it, though, having slept too much already for it being not too long past mid day. He’s tired, but not really the kind that feels physical. It’s too hot, and the sunshine is too bright for him to rest.

Irritation crawls up his throat, not just at his boredom, but at whatever detour they’re once again making. He doesn’t know what mysterious thing Cas wants to show him, but he knows it must be some kind of peep show or sex club.

Guys always have their usual haunts, places they like to take Dean, on the occasions that Dean’s riding along with them. Dean always goes along with it, because he generally goes along with everything. It doesn’t mean he’s a huge fan, of getting groped under the table at a strip club or getting fucked in the back of some seedy bar.

But it’s whatever. It’s whatever. He started all this by goading Cas into fucking him on the side of the road.

Stands to figure the man thinks he’s up for grabs anywhere and everywhere now. What does he expect, when he acts like such a slut.

He huffs, and adjusts himself in his seat. Turning himself away from Cas, and pretending to sleep.

“Are you hungry?” Cas asks at one point, a few hours later. Caring as always, and Dean feels guilty for being annoyed.

It’s hard, though. More and more, he’s starting to be aware of what direction they’re going, and that they’re taking quite a long route to California after all.

It’s not that he’s anxious to leave Cas, but he is anxious to see his brother. And he can’t help but be anxious, too, that the trucker he’s with might not be as inclined to let him go as he’d hoped.

His stomach twists a little, and he tells himself he’s being ridiculous.

“I’m fine,” he mumbles into the pleather seat, eyes still shut.

Clearly, though, his fake-sleeping isn’t working, so he sits up a few minutes later. They’re in the middle of nowhere, again, somewhere in Mississippi, now. The sun is starting to go down.

“This is some detour,” Dean comments, trying to sound casual about it. Not like he’s pissy, or reluctant to get fucked in public again.

“I think you’ll like it,” is all Cas says in response, and hell, why wouldn’t he think that. Not like Dean’s done anything so far but beg the guy to fuck him, and cum on the ground like the slut he is when the man had taken him in front of a crowd.

He rubs his eyes.

“Sure. Yeah. I’ll like it. It’s just far.”

“We’re in no rush.”

“I kind of am.”

Cas is silent after Dean says this, and Dean’s chest clenches a little, in a seize of guilt, and of panic. Not sure if he regrets what he’s said, or of how Cas will respond to it, he just looks down at his knees as they drive.

After a minute, Cas doesn’t seem angry, still, or like he’s on the verge of kicking Dean out for being an ungrateful fuck. Nervous, but semi-sure of himself, he looks out the window and swallows.

“We gettin’ to California any time soon, man? Seems like we’ve been riding for a while.”

And they’re still nowhere near San Jose. That fact hangs heavy in the middle of them, as they cruise down the highway towards the deep south.

Not the West Coast. They’ve been driving in circles.

He doesn’t think Cas was lying when he said he was heading out towards the sunshine state, but maybe the man has been stalling a little longer than Dean has wanted to address.

More than he’s had an incentive to address. Riding with the guy has hardly been a pain.

But it can’t last forever. This little daydream has to come to an end at some point, and it’s better to get it over with. He’s gotten way too attached as it is, and he’s starting to suspect he’s not the only one who feels that way.

Looking over at Cas, he’s almost sure of it. The man’s face is stoic, but there’s a guilt behind it that tells Dean his suspicions were right.

“Look, man…” he starts, but Cas interrupts him abruptly.

“I understand. Your father is dead. You need to see your brother as soon as you can.”

It’s a little more complicated than that, considering Dean himself hadn’t exactly made any moves towards getting himself to Stanford for the past two months….but it’s as good a reason as any, so he nods when Cas glances his way.

“Yeah. I’m sorry,” he says, a little awkwardly, but Cas just waves him off, without betraying any expression of hurt.

“There’s nothing to apologize for. I’ve enjoyed traveling with you, but there will be no more detours after this. We will get you to California, Dean, as soon as we can.”

Dean swallows again, around a lump in his throat, that he pretends is relief and not distress.

“Thanks,” he says quietly, and he looks down at his knees again. And they continue on, careening towards an unpleasant evening that Dean will have to pretend to enjoy.

Chapter Text

It’s some biker bar on the side of the road. Just as Dean had suspected, and pretended he wasn’t dreading.

His heart sinks as the truck pulls up along the side of the highway, and Cas parks along the shoulder. And he berates himself internally for feeling anxious, when there’s nothing to be anxious about.

It’s not like Cas is gonna let anyone murder him for kicks, or whatever. That, at least, he’s been sure about, ever since the guy had gone out of his way to rescue an ant.

“Looks nice,” he mutters, somewhat ironically, as he eyes the bar from his seat above the road.

He sees dim lighting, shining through the windows to the street that’s gone blue with the evening. He sees about sixteen motorcycles lined up against the outside of the building, and hopes Cas doesn’t expect him to take them all in one go.

He hopes, deep down, that the man doesn’t expect him to take any of them. He doesn’t like being shared, especially once he’s gotten attached.

The man’s been real possessive of him. Maybe he just wants to dangle him in front of other men again, fuck him in front of them and show them what they can’t have.

Dean wouldn’t mind that so much. He’s been fucked in public plenty, and last time Cas had done that, he’d come out of it feeling pretty protected and liked.

Which was. Weird. But better than feeling sick. Cas turns off the ignition, and Dean tries not to show reluctance. God knows he owes the man more than whatever little fun he wants to have now.

He’s done much worse for much less. And he likes Cas, and wants to make him happy.

If he’s honest with himself, he knows he could squirm his way out of this. Could start crying or some shit about how he doesn’t want other people to touch him, and get Cas to pull them back onto the highway after less than five minutes of the pathetic act.

The man isn’t the type to force him. But. Dean would rather fucking kill himself than cry about something Cas wants him to do.

You owe him, he tells himself, as Cas opens the cab door and jumps down from the driver’s seat. This isn’t a big deal. You’ve done this shit so many times before.

It’s true, so he sucks it up, and follows the trucker down onto the street below. It’s cooler now, with the sun tucked away again, and the wind blows the blue light of the sky past their skin.

He can hear rowdy yells and jeers from the bar already, all the way from across the street. It’s only nine or so, but everyone already seems really drunk.

Dean looks down at the asphalt, and scuffs his shoe along the gravel.

“Ready to get this party started?” he asks, around the discomfort and resentment knotted in his neck.

Cas seems puzzled by his comment, but tilts his head, and says, “I suppose,” in a slightly confused voice.

Not caring enough to figure out what the man isn’t understanding this time, Dean just nods, and starts walking across the street.

Taking the lead, this time, which Cas probably doesn’t actually want him to do. He can’t really stop himself, though, just telling himself he’ll pull back once the ball is rolling. For some reason, it feels too hard to just wait around and let Cas lead him, when he just needs to get this over with as quick as he can.

His steps make a quiet crunch, crossing the ill-kept asphalt road. Technically a highway, but so run down and empty that he can hear the sound of the gravel he’s kicking up in his wake.

He can hear Cas’s steps behind him, too. As Dean makes a beeline for the bar’s entrance, Cas is making a beeline towards him.

The sounds of drunken bullshit get louder as he approaches, and he makes eye contact with two men who are hanging out outside of the building smoking. They eye him up, and Dean slows down a bit, not wanting them to think he’s come here alone.

He can guess how that will turn out.

I belong to someone, he wants to tell them, though he’s not really sure that that’s true.

But he slows, and comes to a stop at the edge of the highway, not crossing the line between the road and the dirt ground the bikes are all parked on. Nervous again, he sticks his hands in his pockets, and looks off to the side as Cas catches up to him from behind.

The man puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder, which Dean can’t help but be relieved by. Another sign that he’s protected, in some way or other, that he’s not going to just be left here by himself to deal with whatever all this is.

He resists reaching up to touch the man’s knuckles. Way too gay a move, in front of other people.

“Here we are,” he mutters, unhappily, instead of grabbing Cas’s hand and trying to drag him back across the street.

Cas, standing behind him, says, “What?”

He sounds confused, and then Dean is confused, and he doesn’t say anything else, because he doesn’t know what’s happening.

There’s a few quiet seconds, where neither of them speak, and Dean hears a glass shatter from inside, and some people cheering.

Closer now, he’s surprised to hear women’s voices.

Wait, what?

He looks up, and notices a silly looking cartoon pig attached as a sign on the door.

Abe’s BBQ! Best BBQ in Missouri, Since 1924!

Dean has to read the words twice to register them, and his heart has some kind of mini spasm when he does.

What?

He’s never seen a cartoon pig in a bowtie at a sex club before. Nor has he ever been to one that serves barbecue.

“Excuse me,” Cas’s voice says from directly behind him, loud enough that it’s clearly not meant to be directed at Dean.

Dean looks towards the bikers, and they look back, still smoking.

“You lookin’ for the sign?” one of them says casually, as if that’s supposed to make any sense.

But Cas doesn’t seem to be confused like Dean is.

“Yes,” he calls back. “Is it down the road? I remember passing it somewhere around here, last time I was in the area.”

“Yeah, it’s right up past the next bend. Don’t bother driving, it’s a five minute walk.”

“Thank you.”

Cas lifts his hand off Dean’s shoulder very briefly to wave slightly at the men, and then puts it back down where it had been again. He starts leading Dean away down the street by his shoulder, pushing him from behind, and Dean goes, having no idea what’s going on anymore.

He’d thought he’d figured out what was happening.

His insides are all twisted up in confusion now that he’s realizing he may have been wrong.

“Cas?” he asks, nervous, but trying not to betray the anxiety in his voice to the man.

“Shh,” Cas says behind him. “We’re almost there.”

He sounds excited, like he thinks Dean is excited, or will be, like he isn’t planning on axe murdering Dean.

Despite the fact that they’re now walking away from the bar and towards the empty road after the sun has gone down. Dean can’t think of a way this is going to end well, but he keeps walking, despite realizing that if this was literally anyone else on the planet guiding him that he’d be literally running for his fucking life.

He holds onto that memory of the ant.

“You’re a real man of mystery, aren’t you,” he says awkwardly, after a minute of just walking in silence along the mostly-abandoned road.

As always, Cas doesn’t seem to be phased by the quiet, but it leaves Dean uncomfortable, and itching to fill it.

The crickets he can hear coming out aren’t enough. He can see fireflies coming out at the edge of the woods.

“Look, lightning bugs,” Cas says, pointing, as if Dean can’t see them.

“Pretty,” Dean acknowledges. “Is that what we came here to see?”

He’s not even being sarcastic. He doesn’t even know at this point, with Cas.

The man is so fucking weird, and so unpredictable. He thought he was about to get fucked in a bar, but it seems like it was just a barbecue. Now he’s maybe getting serial killed, or shown some pretty bugs in the middle of nowhere.

Who fucking knows. It all seems equally likely.

To Dean’s brain, at least, but not to Cas’s.

“No, of course not. There are fireflies in all states.”

“Right,” Dean says, like his suggestion had been serious. He doesn’t even know if it hadn’t been.

Then, abruptly, before Dean can say anything else, Cas comes to a sudden stop, the hand on Dean’s shoulder forcing him still. It’s strong, the grip, and Dean doesn’t resist it, his breath catching as the trucker behind him moves in very close to him, and he feels his other shoulder get heavy with the weight of the man’s other hand.

He feels the man’s breath on his neck, and he shivers. Cas is standing very close, and they’re very alone.

He can still hear the bar, very distantly, but only because it’s so quiet. He wouldn’t be able to see it if he turned around anymore, and he wouldn’t try to turn around, because Cas is standing at his back.

His heart beats fast. He doesn’t know if he’s scared or turned on or peaceful or what. The air is cool, and Cas’s breath is warm.

“Cas?” he asks, again, uncertain and shaky.

“There,” the man’s voice says against his ear, low and gravely. As Dean shivers again, the trucker's hand comes off his right shoulder to point ahead.

Still with the grip on his left shoulder firm and solid, and Cas standing behind him firm and solid too. Dean looks towards where Cas is pointing without moving, following the line of his finger. Forwards and up, towards nothing fascinating. At first, he thinks Cas is pointing at the big, round, white moon.

It’s quite striking, in the gray, blueish sky of summer evening. Where the light is leaking away steadily, the last pathetic streaks reaching out pointlessly to cling to the air.

Almost gone now. Leaving little but a purple tint in their wake. The moon shines brightly through it all, dominant, illuminating everything in its path.

Backlighting everything. Even Cas’s finger. It looks silvery, as do the pine trees, and the telephone poles.

The wires cross the sky in blunt shadow, cutting it into sections. There’s a large guitar-shaped sign attached to one of the poles that blocks out a whole chunk of the horizon, which Dean’s eyes initially skim over, desensitized to highway billboards by now.

But, when he doesn’t see anything else that the man behind him could realistically be pointing to, his eyes refocus on the strangely shaped sign, and he blinks.

“Is that…?”

He trails off, eyes adjusting to the light and taking in the details. The sign isn’t an advertisement, but a simple outline of a light blue guitar.

His eyes narrow at the sight of it, because he recognizes it, from his real old school rock and roll phase. Confused, and then startled, he takes in the details, then turns to Cas, still not sure what’s going on.

“Is that Robert Johnson’s guitar?” he asks, baffled, having no idea what it’s doing floating in the middle of nowhere.

Draped in shadows, Cas nods at him, as Dean finally turns halfway around to look at his face.

“Yes,” the man tells him. “Well, it’s a model of it, anyway.”

As if Dean needs to have it explained that a thirty foot metal replica mounted on a telephone pole isn’t the real thing. As if that remotely explains anything about what it’s doing here, about what they’re doing here, about what in the name of fucking god is going on.

Why does Cas have to be so fucking weird.

Why do they have to be in the middle of nowhere in Missouri with the sun going down, staring at a dead man’s guitar hanging in the sky with no explanation.

He thought he was going to get fucked six ways to Sunday again, in front of people. But this? This? This is what Cas had brought him out here to see?

What?

Dean swallows. Takes in the sign that says Crossroads, under the dimly lit guitar. Takes in the two road signs above it, and the two real roads the whole structure sits at the real crossroads of.

Abandoned and dark, it feels ominous and strange and confusing.

“How do you even know who Robert Johnson is?” he asks Cas, because he doesn’t know how to ask all the other questions.

And because he truly doesn’t know how the man’s aware.

He’s been playing music for the trucker over the past few days, playing it incessantly, flipping between different classic rock stations and giving mini lectures on every song.

He’s talked Cas’s ear off about the Eagles, about Pink Floyd, about how disco ruined rock and about how real artists built it. The man has let him run his mouth incessantly, but at no point does he remember reaching this far back in time.

To the 1930s. To blues and Jazz and stories about getting dragged to hell. It’s a little creepy, and he pulls away from Cas slightly, looking back at him, turning around so they’re finally again face to face.

Cas tilts his head.

“My father played his music,” he says simply.

Surprised, Dean’s eyebrows jump up to his forehead.

“Your Christian nut dad played Crossroad Blues?”

Nodding, Cas looks over towards the big blue sign.

“And Me and the Devil Blues. And Hellhound on My Trail.”

“Oh.”

“He called it Satanic music. But he liked the message. Told us a story, about a man who’d sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads for musical talent, and spent the rest of his time on earth singing about how he was scared of going to hell.”

Cas’s face looks calm, and contemplative, as he stares off towards the sign in the sky. Dean feels a chill run down his spine, and isn’t sure if it’s excitement or fear again.

“That’s pretty creepy.”

“Yes, well. My father was a pretty creepy man.”

There’s a pause, after that, that even Dean doesn’t know how to fill. He shoves his hands in his pockets, and so does Cas.

After a minute, the man starts walking down the road towards the sign, towards the crossroad it marks in the half-lit darkness. Dean has to fight the urge to call out for him, to tell him to come back, not to be stupid and go that way.

But of course, when Cas reaches the crossroad, reaches the sign, nothing happens. Dean looks after him for a moment, at his faded silhouette, head tilted up towards the guitar in the dark.

No devil appears. Perhaps because there isn’t one. Perhaps, and Dean feels strangely in his bones, perhaps more likely, because there’s no deal to be made with a man such as Cas.

He doesn’t seem the type to sell his soul for anything. Not wealth or pleasure, or more time on earth.

Dean, however, doesn’t have the same strength of character, or the same confidence in himself to resist temptations. When he follows Cas, he feels hesitant, and hovers awkwardly at the edge of the road.

Not quite stepping into the area that can be called the crossroads. Pretending that it’s because he doesn’t want to get run over, when he knows that’s not the reason why.

“You’re lucky there’s no cars coming,” he says, loudly, so his voice will project across the street to where Cas is standing.

The man doesn’t turn back to look at him. And doesn’t raise his voice, when he says, “No one ever comes here.”

Dean hears him perfectly clearly. He shivers a little, and looks down at his feet.

“This is where it happened, didn’t it?” he asks, and he lets his voice be quiet this time. The empty American road lets his voice travel, with nothing else as a burden to block its hesitant way.

“Where what happened.”

“You know. Where he sold his soul to the devil.”

Now Cas does look back at him. With a contemplative look in his eye, that Dean can see even meters away.

“Supposedly,” the man concedes, nodding. “But the devil isn’t real, Dean.”

Not so sure about that, Dean just looks off to the side, and tilts his head.

But he’s not going to argue with a guy who got out of a religious cult.

“Sure,” he says easily.

Cas keeps staring at him from across the street, though, and Dean gets the feeling he’s not being as subtle about avoiding the crossroad as he wishes he were.

He crosses his arms over his chest. He’s a little bit cold now, with the sun gone. In his stupid, threadbare shirt he’s always wearing to draw men in.

“Are you scared of the devil, Dean?” Cas asks him, and Dean scoffs, even though it’s a fair question.

Most days I feel like the devil, man, is what he thinks, melodramatic and unhappy. But he bites his tongue, and that’s not what he says.

“Nah,” he mutters, “I’m not religious.”

To prove his point, he steps over the invisible line he’d created in his head.

Onto the crossroad proper, and, surprise surprise, no shadowy figure appears out of nowhere.

It’s just Cas, with his blue eyes and tempting body, leading him further and further astray.

He walks over to the other man, who’s still standing close to the base of the sign. The base is big, once he’s next to it, as big as a telephone pole.

The trucker is looking at him intensely, dark blue eyes matching the tone of the sky and the conversation, ominous. Dean finds it hard to look straight at him, and so, as often happens, he finds safety in looking at the ground.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, bringing you here,” the man tells him, quietly. His voice is earnest, and Dean nods, because he knows it’s true.

“I’m not scared.”

“I thought you’d like this. Since you’re always telling me about rock and roll, and its beginnings.”

“Yeah. It’s cool. Lotta people say Robert Johnson was the first rock star.”

Cas hums. He looks over towards the sign they’re standing next to, and, without a word, reaches his hand out to touch the base of the pole.

Dean watches him do it from under his eyelashes. The man is strikingly handsome, and it becomes even more obvious now, under the dimming gray light.

They say the devil comes looking and acting like everything you ever wanted, Dean thinks, and then bites his lip, because he’s being ridiculous.

But his heart is starting to hurt in his chest again, because no one has ever been so sweet on him like this before. Despite how weird and creepy this all is.

Cas is weird and creepy, sometimes, a lot of the time. Maybe all the time, if Dean is being honest.

But he’s also kind, and caring, and protective, and all of a sudden it’s hard not to have tears springing to his already tired eyes.

I want to stay with you, he thinks, stupidly, helplessly, even though he knows he has responsibilities he can’t just abandon.

What he wouldn’t give, though, to keep tagging along with this fucking weird guy who drove eight hours out of his way to show Dean some rock and roll novelty, just because he thought Dean would like it.

What he wouldn’t give. He’d give his fucking soul.

But he doesn’t have it anymore, to trade in to anyone. It’s long gone, traded away to a thousand devils, in little pieces, over the years.

He sighs through his nose.

“I thought you were bringing me to some bar to fuck me, or whatever. Like last time.”

Cas looks at him.

“Like the showers?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

The man doesn’t say anything, so Dean says, “You really like me, huh?”

“Yes.”

There’s no hesitation in Cas’s answer, no feeling of shyness. It’s like he doesn’t even know he should hide his feelings, like he doesn’t even know that’s how to keep them from being hurt.

Dean wants to cry. But he knows better than Cas how not to. Instead, he pulls his heart together, from the millions of pieces it became when it fell apart.

He scuffs his shoe on the ground.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” he acquiesces quietly. Because he can’t ask to stay, because he knows he never would.

“You’re welcome.”

Cas says the words back gracefully, letting his hand drop finally from the base of the sign.

It comes off in a loose shape, but quickly merges into something purposeful, turning into a pointed finger that Cas directs towards the other side of the road.

Eyes following it again, Dean half expects to really see the devil this time, or at least, some sheriff who’s about to tell them to stop loitering in the middle of the street.

Instead, all he sees is some lonely metal box that he hadn’t noticed before, glinting in the moonlight. Looking like it had been there since the 1950s, Dean can vaguely make out that it’s some kind of speaker.

“It plays Crossroad Blues for $1.50 in quarters,” Cas tells him.

“That’s highway robbery,” is what Dean says back.

But when Cas reaches down into his pocket and pulls out a handful of coins, Dean doesn’t reject them. He takes them out of Cas’s hand quietly, and silently walks across the shadowy road.

He puts them into the slot one by one, hunched over, with his back turned on the crossroads and Cas. It feels creepy, like he shouldn’t take his eyes off either, but he does anyway, because he has some feeling of blind trust.

Each clink of the quarter falling into the machine makes him think more and more of how sweet this all was, in a weird, messed up way. No one’s ever taken an interest in what he likes before, not even Dad, not even Sammy. No one’s ever gone out of their way to take him somewhere, to show him something they think that he’d like.

Everything aches.

When the song turns on, it cranks out low and slow and empty, sounding as lonely and seeking as it had when it had been recorded a better part of a century ago. The sad, mournful sound of Robert Johnson’s voice crackles across the abandoned road like it’s looking for something, like it’s trapped under the muffled sound of the old recording, and knows that it will never get out.

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy"

Save poor Bob, if you please

Dean turns around. Looks at Cas, and Cas looks at him.

The man has started crossing towards him, but he stops when he sees Dean staring. Stands right in the middle of the crossroads, right in the middle of the colliding, empty streets.

“He died a year after recording this,” Cas tells him, as the wind picks up around him. It blows his hair wildly, and rushes through the grass beside the roads. Like something is coming, that Dean doesn’t want to see.

“Yeah. Just 27 years old.”

“No one knows why.”

“I do.”

He doesn’t elaborate on what he means, because he doesn’t have to. Cas, whatever his opinions are, doesn’t argue.

Dean approaches him.

“I wonder if it was worth it,” he says, when they meet in the middle. “Giving it all up, for just a year of his dreams.”

Unexpectedly, Cas touches his face.

“I think it was worth it. I’d give my soul up too, if what I wanted could so easily be mine.”

He doesn’t pretend like he’s not staring at Dean with desperation, and Dean doesn’t pretend not to see it. Feeling some strange longing open up inside him where it had never been before, Dean shudders. Not knowing whether he’s scared or happy, but knowing something deep within him is being stolen away.

Dean breathes.

Breathes.

The wind is harsh, but the sound of singing doesn’t fade at all.

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

He kneels down. Right in the middle of the road, and Cas doesn’t stop him. They keep their eyes locked, as Dean sinks down like he’s praying, and leans gently forward, to kiss Cas’s bulge.

The man isn’t hard, yet, but he doesn’t pull Dean away. Doesn’t tell him not here, doesn’t try to move them both to somewhere more safe.

There’s no one here. Like Cas had said. There’s no one ever here.

He unzips Cas’s pants. Takes his cock into his mouth. Sucks it, because he’s a whore, and that’s what he does.

That’s how he knows to say thank you, how he knows to say I love you. With his body, with his mouth, with crawling, degrading acts of service that most people reject in disgust.

But Cas doesn’t reject him. He doesn’t yell at him, for being so broken, doesn’t tell him to get up and out of the fucking street like a normal fucking person would.

He just lets Dean suck him off right there on the concrete, lets him say how much he’s thankful in the only way he’s ever really known how. And when the man touches his hair, when he pumps in and out of his lips with gentle pressure, Dean knows Cas understands it, understands him, and likes him just how he is.

No matter how broken that may be.

Dean tears up.

Didn't nobody seem to know me?

Everybody pass me by

Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy

Dark gon' catch me here

A long time ago, he heard a myth about crossroad deals. That they had to be sealed in the middle of the street, with a kiss.

What they’re doing isn’t kissing, but it feels as final as one, feels as intense. If a kiss with the devil steals your soul away forever, Dean doesn’t want to think about what he’s giving away to his longing right now.

Cas cums, hot and intense, down his throat, and Dean swallows all of it. Like he always does, when he’s hoping someone will like him. Which is most of the time, but now more than ever before.

When he pulls away, Cas tucks his cock back in his pants, but keeps touching Dean’s hair in the way he’s clearly realized Dean likes. Dean, startled, lets him, and doesn’t get up again.

He tells himself to get up, and tells himself again, and again.

But Cas keeps looking at him, and touching his hair, and he just doesn’t….he doesn’t fucking move.

He doesn’t move, and Cas doesn’t move, and Dean feels like he’s never going to be whole again once he leaves this man who likes him. They stay like that a long time, and Dean dreams about the devil, and how quickly he’d give himself over to him if only he could stay right here for the rest of his life.

You can run, you can run

Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown

You can run, you can run

Tell my friend-boy Willie Brown

Lord, that I'm standin' at the crossroad, babe

I believe I'm sinkin' down