Chapter Text
When he first meets him, Castiel doesn’t like Dean. He doesn’t like that he roughhouses. He doesn’t like how toothy he smiles or how he gets special foods at lunch time or how he always wins heads-up, seven-up (he’s pretty sure he peeks). And most of all, he doesn’t like being told what to do, and all the adults tell him he has to be nice to Dean because Dean’s sick.
Dean doesn’t seem sick. They watch a video on the sick Dean is supposed to have when he first joins the class, halfway through the school year. He never can remember the stupid name of it, but the video makes it sound like Dean’s got a year-round cold that no one else can catch. When Castiel has a cold, he has to skip school and sit around miserable in bed. Dean has a cough sometimes, but aside from that, he’s just as loud and rude and overactive as anyone else Cas avoids on the playground.
When Castiel says so, his mom tells him that Dean’s sick is a “progressive illness,” and then she tells him that “progressive” means it’s going to get worse and worse.
“People like Dean die young, sweetie,” she says, eyes all squinched up and shiny. “People like Dean don’t usually live past thirty.”
Who cares. Thirty, Castiel thinks privately, is ancient. By the time Castiel is thirty, he’ll be married to someone cool. He’ll be a famous astronomer. He will have already been to the moon. He may have already been to Mars, but he figures it will take a long time to get there and back, so he might not be home from Mars yet. Either way, Dean doesn’t deserve special treatment just because he’s going to die someday, when he’s an adult. Castiel is going to die someday, too. His dad says that’s what makes people human.
“Nobody lives forever, Castiel,” he’d always say, drinking his adult drink and clinking ice cubes in his glass. “Remember that.”
Castiel does remember, and it’s why he spends his time reading books and doing homework instead of acting like an idiot like Dean. Cas spends a lot of time between math worksheets watching Dean screw around and get away with it just because no one wants to tell him “no.” Not even the teacher.
Apparently, no one told Dean he was going to die sooner rather than later. If somebody told Dean, he’d probably work a lot harder to make a name for himself, just like Castiel’s dad did when he wrote his first bestselling novel at twenty-three—“Like Hemingway,” his dad would say while his mom rolled her eyes in the background.
So one day, when Dean’s hogging Castiel’s favorite computer during playtime, he tells him, parroting what his mom told him in a high, authoritative tone.
“My mom says you’ve got a progressive illness,” he says. “My mom says you’re going to die young.”
Dean was playing a multiplication game on the computer, but he stops when the words come out, and the problems all pile up on the bottom of the screen and he loses. He looks at Castiel and Castiel looks back, arms crossed, even though he can kind of see all the things that are sick about Dean now that his shoulders are all drooped and he’s up close. He’s got thin arms. He’s got red under his nose like he’s been rubbing it. Bags under his eyes like he’s tired. And a soft rasp at the edge of every breath. Which either means he can’t breathe good or he’s about to cry.
“What’d you say?” he says.
Castiel can’t go back on it, though. “I said my mom said you’re gonna die soon.”
And it turns out he wasn’t about to cry at all, because next thing Castiel knows, he’s on the ground, and Dean is pounding his face with tiny, hard-edged knuckles. When Castiel punches back, shoving Dean hard, right in the center of his chest, until he coughs, Dean looks surprised. He’s got on this face of wide-eyed wonder before he manages to get in another couple punches.
After they pull Dean off him, they both get punished. Dean didn’t tattle on Castiel for what he said, but one of the girls on the computer next to them did. Dean gets off with just a missed recess and some bruised knuckles, but Castiel has to go to the principal’s office and write an apology letter to Dean that afternoon.
They do their best to pound into his head that saying something like that isn’t nice, which was kind of the whole point at the time. But Dean cracked right before he threw the first punch, and Castiel saw it. For a second, he wasn’t just the dumb goofball he always was in class. He looked sad and scared, like Castiel does after he has one of his falling nightmares.
So Castiel thinks he means his apology, anyway. Even though he doesn’t know exactly why.
Castiel’s mother kept the front page of the local newspaper from the day he was born. When he gets old enough to read it for himself, his mom tells him it was just her own sentimentality that made her keep it. She thought he might like it later, knowing what was important on the day he came into the world. But it’s all inconsequential, small-town stuff. The most prominent article is about a fat, red-faced farmer taking the “Big Jud Challenge” at the local diner and finishing a two-pound burger nearly twice the size of his head in under thirty minutes.
Under that, there’s an article about the famous local swimming hole—just a blurb about how some grad students from the community college were trying to figure out where the “natural phosphorescence” of it came from. When he asks, his mom tells him that “phosphorescence” means that sometimes, in the right light, the swimming hole seems to glow. Castiel’s never seen it himself because he’s never been there at night, but some of the kids from school swear it’s true when he asks them if they’ve seen it.
“They were all afraid the silly thing was radioactive,” his mother tells him. “Which is ludicrous. People are hopelessly paranoid.”
“Ludicrous,” Castiel repeats, though he secretly wishes it was radioactive, because he’d been swimming there enough that he’d probably have some kind of comic superpower by now if it was. Maybe he’d have sprouted more arms or a tail or wings or something.
He takes the newspaper to class for show and tell just before his ninth birthday and explains what his mom told him about the glowing and the not-so-radioactive pool, and Dean raises his hand halfway through the presentation, a cough caught just behind his lips, just like it always is.
“Where’s the swimming hole?” he says. Everyone in class looks at him and starts whispering. By then, nearing the end of the school year, the novelty of being the new kid in class has started to wear out, and Dean doesn’t really have friends. The adults all say that Dean’s sick isn’t something that anyone else can catch, but that doesn’t mean people like to listen to his coughing or his gross huffing all the way through the school day. Not knowing the most popular hangout spot in town is just one more strike against him. If Dean doesn’t know, it’s because no one cares enough to invite him.
“You mean you don’t know?” One of the boys sneers. Dean furrows his brow and shakes his head.
The teacher intervenes to take pity on Dean and explain that Dean’s only just moved here, and that, besides, “Dean’s cystic fibrosis might mean he’s not able to swim with everybody else. Remember how we talked about being sensitive?”
Dean slams his way to his feet. “I can swim,” he says, red-faced. Which is weird, because he doesn’t normally look red-faced. He normally looks pale. A little blue around his lips and dark around his eyes. “I can swim just as good as anybody.”
Castiel stands awkwardly at the front of the classroom with his yellowed newspaper wilting in his hand, and he’s got half a mind to tell everyone that he saw it himself just because he doesn’t like the idea of a teacher telling Dean what it is he can and can’t do. But he stays quiet and the teacher backtracks, patting at the air with her hands.
But Dean gets a lot quieter after that. And after school gets out, Castiel thinks of Dean the whole summer he’s swimming in the swimming hole, because the way Dean said he could swim makes Castiel wonder if he ever even had before. He goes almost every day in the summertimes, and sometimes he doesn’t even touch the water. He reads on the rocks, turns brown in the sun, runs his hands through the coarse sand at the shores. The swimming hole is aptly named—it’s settled in the remnants of an old quarry, so to get to the water at all, you have to go down a set of steps that somebody carved a long time ago to do work at the very bottom of the pit. It’s stuck into the ground like a footprint, like something from the sky touched down one day and then immediately decided to go back up. The water is the bluest he’s seen anywhere, and in the years since the old, barren pile of rocks has filled with water, green has started to creep all along the quarry walls, so now there are flowers and vines and trees growing out of the walls at odd angles, skimming close to the water’s surface. It’s pretty. It’s the prettiest place Castiel knows. He likes to sit on the shore and look in. He likes to float on the water and look up. He feels quiet in it. His brain does.
Dean’s quiet, but not the right kind. He’s the muffled kind of quiet that seems like he’s always holding something back. He seems like he could use this kind of quiet. The quiet that’s quiet because there’s nothing there to say.
That summer, though, he sees everyone but Dean, so he can only assume no one bothered to tell him where the best not-so-secret spot in town was, or Dean had been lying and he really couldn’t swim at all.
He’s not in Dean’s class in the fall. There are three fourth-grade classes, and Dean’s been placed in the smallest one. Which has always been code for he needs the most attention. He hears from his friend Arthur that Dean’s not there at all, though. They called his name during roll and no one answered.
“You don’t just miss the first day of school. Maybe his whatever-it-is got him over the summer,” Arthur says at recess on the first day after summer vacation, twisting the chain on his swing up so he goes flying in a crazy circle when it unwinds. “Maybe he’s dead.” Castiel had been doing the same thing on his swing, but he stopped because he felt dizzy. He chalks the unbalanced feeling he gets when Arthur suggests as much to that, but he still feels off-kilter and weird about it all day. After school, when his mom puts a hand to his forehead and tells him he looks pale, he thinks about asking if Dean’s disease is so bad he could die “today,” because today is a lot sooner than age thirty is. Maybe Dean could die today without anyone ever having taught him to swim.
Dean didn’t die, though, so Castiel casts that thought aside. Castiel has special permission to read in the library some recesses, because the adults figured out he’ll just sit by the door and read if they make him go outside when he doesn’t want to. And inside, the librarian is able to put him to work reshelving books sometimes. Dean starts showing up there, too, about three weeks into the new school year.
He looks different. Before, you had to look real close to see the sick in him, but now he’s wearing it like a coat. He’s breathing heavy, he’s stuffed up in his nose, and every once in a while, he breaks off staring at his book to cough and cough and cough like that’s the only way he can breathe.
Arthur tells Castiel that Dean’s annoying in the classroom. Everyone in class thinks so. And it’s annoying in the library, too. Even more annoying probably, because it’s quiet and Castiel gets shushed when he rustles in his bag for too long, but Dean is just allowed to sit there and cough up gunk as loud as he can, as long as he can, into a gross paper cup. Castiel dismisses all the thoughts of Dean being quiet that he once had.
“What are you lookin’ at?” Dean says one day when Castiel has glared at him over the top of his book one too many times. Castiel knows he’s not even being very subtle about it, because half of him wants Dean to notice. He scrambles to look back down at his book when Dean speaks, but Dean’s already getting up from his chair a couple tables over with a loud scrape. A few seconds later, Dean’s paperback slams onto the table in front of him with a hard, sharp slap. Castiel jumps.
The librarian has to notice this. They can’t see her, but she’s sitting just behind them, a couple shelves over, and she hears plenty well when Castiel sniffles the wrong way. Her super librarian senses are probably telling her that it was the sick kid that made this noise, so he gets a pass.
“I said,” he rasps out. Castiel hasn’t heard him talk in a while. He’s talking rougher than Castiel remembers. “What are you lookin’ at?”
Castiel scowls, mostly just annoyed he’d been caught. “I know you’re used to everyone paying attention to you, but I was just reading my book.” Unlike Dean, Castiel whispers.
Dean sits down next to him. The hand that hadn’t plunked the book on his table had been down at his side, holding something, and when he brings the something up to put it down next to the book, much more gently, Castiel sees that he’s holding a rescue inhaler. Like his friend Jo, who has asthma, uses when she has an attack.
Castiel rolls his eyes.
“Why you got such a big problem with me, huh?” he says, hand twitching toward the inhaler. “You been after me since last year. I mean. I’m sorry I laid you out. But I don’t got a problem with you.”
“I don’t have a problem, either,” Castiel says lightly, shifting his attention down his nose to his book in lieu of looking Dean in the eye. “I’m probably the only one who doesn’t. You just think everyone does ‘cause you like the attention.”
Castiel stares pointedly at his book while Dean stares pointedly at him. Castiel thinks that eventually he’ll give up and head back to his seat across the library, but at some point, Dean just picks his book back up and starts reading again. They read together, side by side, in pointed silence, right up until the end of recess, and then they have to walk back to class together, because all the fourth-grade classrooms are right next to each other. Castiel doesn’t say goodbye and Dean doesn’t either.
Castiel thinks that will be the end of that, because he thought he’d been pretty clear about not wanting to waste his recess dealing with Dean, no matter how many times his mom tells him it’s nice to do that for a sick kid. But then Dean starts sitting by him. Every day. Recess after recess. Eventually, Castiel has to teach himself to phase out the coughs and the sniffs and the throat clearing and the huffing or else he’s going to go bonkers. And it works, Dean’s a lot less annoying for a little while. Right until Dean starts talking to him.
“Why do you read so many books about space?” he says just before Halloween, when he himself has some kind of dumb spooky stories book open in front of him. Despite the gross scowling ghost on the cover, it’s clearly not holding his attention.
Castiel doesn’t answer. Dean taps the back of Castiel’s astronomy book with his fingernails on one hand and coughs into his fist with the other. His rescue inhaler is never far from him, and today’s no exception. He takes it in and out of his right pants pocket to fiddle with it, running his fingernails along the lines of it.
Finally, Castiel looks up. “Because I’m going to go there one day,” he says. Dean looks mystified. “To space,” Castiel clarifies, just in case it was unclear.
“That’s awesome,” he says, smiling brightly. He goes back to his book and leaves Castiel to it, just like that, like he’d never asked anything at all.
The next day, he asks, “What are you gonna do in space? Like, do you want to work on the uh—” he searches for a word, sipping little breaths in his congested chest like it helps his thinking. “Uh. The space station? Or like. Are you going to like, go looking for aliens or—”
“That’s not the way working for NASA works,” Castiel says with a sniff, like he doesn’t have grand, lofty daydreams about cruising through the stars for months at a time and building a colony on Mars. “They’re gonna tell me what they want me to do and I’m gonna do it. They’re not gonna like, give me my own rocket so I can go do something stupid like look for aliens.”
“It’s not stupid to look for aliens,” Dean mumbles, turning back to his book. “If NASA ran their dumb operation like an episode of Star Trek, watching the news would be a whole lot more interesting.” He kicks his feet under the table. Castiel has no idea what Star Trek is about.
The next day, Dean asks if he believes in aliens. Castiel says he does, and Dean smiles.
“It would be stupid to believe that we’re the only life forms in this universe,” he elaborates.
The day after that, Dean asks what he thinks it would be like to live on Mars. He tricks Castiel into talking the whole recess about the differences in the atmosphere and the climate and the lengths of the days, and he just stares at Castiel and listens.
And it goes on like that, until Castiel finds himself waiting for Dean to ask him the questions, because he likes to talk about space, and Dean treats him like an authority. There are days that Castiel spends on the playground, but Dean never does. When Castiel goes outside and swings or slides or plays tag with the other kids, he wonders what Dean does. And he doesn’t talk about it, because people hate Dean more than ever, and Castiel doesn’t want to have even fewer friends than he already does. But still—how does he occupy himself when Castiel isn’t around to indulge him his stupid questions about black holes and supernovas and the atmosphere on Mercury?
Sometime before Thanksgiving, Castiel asks Dean his own question.
“Why don’t you ever go out to recess anymore?” he says, not even pretending to crack open his book. Dean fiddles with his rescue inhaler, plucking at it where it lays on the table while he breathes audibly into the stale air. “You always went out last year. I thought you liked it.”
Dean shrugs, lifting his shoulders. It’s kind of an underwhelming gesture on him, because there’s nothing to his shoulders. He’s skinny.
“I did like it,” he says. “I’m, y’know. Sick. I got a real bad infection at the beginning of the year and my lungs still suck.”
Castiel counts back the months to the beginning of the school year in his head. Dean missed the first three weeks of school, so some of August and some of September. It’s November, now. Nearly three months of this.
“You’ve been sick a long time,” Castiel says.
Dean shrugs again. “I guess I’m gonna be sick for forever. That’s what everyone says. But I’m more sick right now. Like, I get more sick and less sick. And the less sick is like healthy.”
They sit there for a second while Castiel tries to puzzle that one out. How life can be just different levels of sick and there’s never any better. He can’t.
Then Dean asks him what Saturn's rings are made out of, and Castiel has to answer. It’s a good question.
Here’s the thing about not liking Dean: it’s easy. Dean’s easy to hate because Dean’s weird, and Dean’s different and everyone at school knows it.
In the springtime that year, when all the trees are dropping flower petals and everything is covered in dusty yellow pollen, the doctor deems Dean well enough to go outside during recess again. Castiel finds that however annoyed he was with Dean’s grossness when he first showed up there, the library is quiet without him. So he goes outside to read. Sometimes, he even plays with Arthur and Jo.
For the most part, he avoids Dean.
Dean does try to talk to him, sometimes. He’ll sit down next to him or try to get his attention from across the playground. But Castiel doesn’t know how to feel about spending time with Dean outside the library, where everyone can see. He doesn’t want anyone to think that he’s been spending all this time inside to be close to Dean, or that he’s sick like Dean is. So even though Dean tires too easy when he’s playing on the soccer field and he can never quite climb up a slide without breathing so hard he has to stop, Castiel decides Dean seems mostly okay and he determinedly stops paying attention to him.
Which is why Castiel’s mom calls it “divine intervention” when he’s the one who saves Dean’s life one day in late April.
His mom is the type of person who thinks that everything happens for a reason. So she thinks that all those recesses he spent watching Dean play with his rescue inhaler were god’s way of preparing Castiel to know exactly where Dean had his inhaler stashed on the day he doubled over panting into his knees and collapsed, alone beneath the shade of the big, overgrown tree on the edge of the playground.
Castiel isn’t sure. Because he was the only one who managed to notice, sure. Maybe he was the only one who cared enough to notice, after all those weeks of talking in the library. And he was the only one to sprint across the playground. His were the only fingers that fumbled to take Dean’s inhaler out of the velcroed pocket of his cargo pants when he was too far gone in his struggling to get at it himself.
And he’d seen Jo have an attack before, so he’d seen Jo use her inhaler a couple times. He knows how it’s supposed to work. He knows how to bring the inhaler up to Dean’s mouth, and how to fit it against his teeth, and how to wrap Dean’s hand around it, and how to help him push down the red button at the top when it turns out his fingers are too weak to push the medicine into his own mouth.
He knows to take Dean to the nurse’s office just as soon as he can walk again, because he’s still all disoriented and breathing funny, and he knew from being in class with Dean that he saw the nurse throughout the day at school and needed her help when something bad happened.
The nurse, a tall, thin woman with bright red hair and dark brown eyes, tells Castiel that Dean is lucky he was there when Castiel explains the situation. She smiles prettily at him and gives him a lollipop and says he can stay with Dean while he waits for his uncle to come pick him up and take him to his doctor. And later on, Castiel’s mom will give the “luck” a fancier name, and she’ll say “divine grace” and smile at him like Castiel was touched by an angel.
But when Castiel is sitting beside Dean, both of them kicking their legs in big, tall chairs outside the nurse’s office—Castiel’s toes just skimming the ground and Dean’s not even coming close—and Dean says, “I wish it hadn’t been you to find me. You were the one person in this whole stupid place that treated me like a human being,” in a wrecked, rocky voice, Castiel doesn’t want to think it’s god. Because any dumb adult could have figured out that Dean was having an asthma attack. Any dumb adult could have gotten him his rescue inhaler. Any dumb adult could have saved his life. It wasn’t like it was hard.
But if god was the one that made him watch Dean wheeze so hard his eyes bulged, or god was the one who slicked up Castiel’s palms so that he flubbed the inhaler until he wasn’t sure he was going to get it to Dean’s mouth in time, or god was the one who pushed up his gorge until he felt like he was going to vomit, or god was the one who left him shivery and shaky for hours after Dean left with his uncle for the doctor’s office—
Or, most important, god was the one who sparked off two realizations in Castiel at the exact same time: 1) That he kinda liked Dean, and 2) Dean was Sick, and being Sick wasn’t just better snacks and more attention. Being sick was scary.
Well. If that was god, god was kinda a jerk.
And here’s the thing about liking Dean: it’s hard.