Chapter Text
Every day is the same.
Dean Winchester’s alarm goes off precisely at 6:37 a.m. because he can’t fucking stand waking up to anything so normal as six-thirty or seven. Though the time is odd and random, he never changes it. Anarchy and control coexisting in the most mundane, underappreciated way.
No monotonous beeps or elevator-worthy coma-inducing melodies rise from his phone. No fucking thanks. It’s the battering, blaring cacophony of hard rock and metal that abuses his eardrums instead. Necessary auditory violence to jumpstart his brain into consciousness.
This, he does change. Month-by-month, he swaps his selection from Metallica to Rage Against the Machine, to Pantera, to whatever the hell seems most acoustically offensive at the time.
Shit, there's really no better way to greet an unwelcome morning than by having James Hetfield scream at you.
Not to mention, Dean needs the constant barrage to ensure he doesn’t fall back asleep. Being unconscious is the only time his brain ever fucks off. And once he’s shut down, climbing back out of that damn hole ain’t easy.
Hence... the noise.
And same as every other damn day, two hard thuds echo through the wall behind his head.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dean mumbles, punching back on the drywall once.
He reaches over and gives his nightstand a shove. With only the slight agitation, the app he designed picks up on the vibration and cuts off the hard-rock rooster call. It was a simple thing he made after one-hundred-thousand too many mornings of blindly feeling out for his phone’s smooth screen only to wind up nudging the fucking delicate device straight onto the hardwood floor. Just because he can fix a busted screen doesn’t mean he wants to.
Throwing off his heavy grey duvet, Dean climbs out of bed—his body stiff, the wood cool and flat beneath the soles of his bare feet. With half-lidded eyes, he shuffles to the door.
In the wide apartment hallway, touting his bare ass and inked skin, he passes his roommate, business partner, and best friend. Talk about a trifecta of constant togetherness.
At this ungodly time of day, Castiel Novak is nothing more than a sleepy glare, pillow lines, and chaotic dark hair.
Roommates of the world might have a problem with Dean’s stark nudity and lack of apology for it, but he and Cas have been sharing space for about eight years—four in university, four since.
All decency goes out the window after that long of a cohabiting stint. Once you’ve wrestled in sweaty underwear for a spot in front of the window-sized box fan during a sweltering Manhattan heat wave, few boundaries remain.
As per usual, they don’t speak as they stumble past each other.
Not Dean’s preference; he tends to be rather chatty in the mornings once he’s actually vertical. A little hi-how-are-ya to the neighbours outside, bit of a flirt with the local barista. That sort of thing. But Castiel… yeah, that man has a solid murder-eye he enjoys dishing out if you try to make his brain crank gears before he’s been injected with coffee.
Dean ducks into the Ikea-catalogue bathroom, doesn’t bother to close the door and takes a piss. He stares at the Eric Lacombe above the toilet. It’s a shared favourite. The depiction of monster and man combined, captured in blacks and reds and muted browns. It’s not in-your-face sinister but denying its hellish nature is impossible.
Dean greets it everyday, contemplating the balance of his own persona.
In a half-tuned way, Dean listens to Cas readying the coffee. Followed by the muted pads of his buddy’s socked feet moving back down the hall where he’ll lay on his bed until Dean brings him a full mug of go-juice.
This is their routine, and it more or less hasn’t changed in close to a decade.
Dean flushes the toilet and detours to his room on the way to the kitchen. He snags his phone and throws on some boxer-briefs. Vibrant blue today.
Moving to the small square kitchen, he opens the scheduling app he designed. None of the others suited his needs. Pretty interfaces, but limited. With his coding skills and Cas’ stellar design work, he now has both.
There is only one bagel left because it’s Friday. Dean slices it and sticks it in the toaster oven. He pours coffee into two mugs, one he leaves on the island for himself and the other he carries back to Cas’ room.
When he walks into the messy colourful space, he frowns—wishing as he does every day that Cas would let him clean it. Fucking pigsty. But after doing so without asking in university earned him an earful about privacy, he’s been diligently keeping his neurotic tendencies at bay for the last eight years and some odd days.
Cas doesn't sleep in the buff like Dean.
But christ, he might as well... given the way his boxers are never fully in place come morning. Guy tosses and turns like a fussy toddler when he sleeps. Already passed out again, Cas is on his back sprawled across the mattress, the sheet wrapped around his knee, a pillow over his outstretched tattooed arm and partially shoved under his chin. Deep brown hair stuck to his temple. A faint trail of dark hair traces a line from his belly-button to the just visible edge of his pubic region.
“Morning sunshine,” Dean says quietly.
Nada. Dead to the world, this guy.
Dean learned early on never to nudge Cas awake with a mug full of blistering hot coffee. Second-degree burns just aren’t worth it. Instead, he lingers until the smell saturates the air and his morning greeting carries through the fog.
Eventually, Cas flinches, grumbles, and sits up. With his blue eyes hidden behind sleepy lids, he blindly reaches for the cup. Dean guides the cool handle into Cas’ waiting fingers, suffering a second’s burn as the curve of ceramic briefly greets his skin. But like the coffee itself, this too wakes Dean up.
By seven-fifteen, Cas is leaving on his pedal bike to go to work. Dean will follow suit about twenty minutes later on his much-loved 1978 Harley Shovelhead, but only after some needed solo time. Which basically translates into taking his coffee into the bathroom, opening a game on his phone and doing his business in utter solitude.
It’s odd though, he supposes, how they leave at different times on different modes of transportation when their intended B destination is the same: A graphic design office they jointly own, specializing in website creation, apps, logos, marketing campaigns, etc.
A business they fell into partly by accident and mostly cause they were hungry.
During the summer before junior year at MIT, he and Cas had been craving pulled pork sandwiches and had heard about a kickass food-truck vendor selling “the best sandwiches ever”. Apparently. Turns out the fucking place was cloaked or some bullshit because they never did find it.
Maybe it was kismet. Or fate. Or Tinkerbell. Who the fuck knows.
Because one of them had said something along the lines of: “Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app for that?” It’s strange how one sentence, one nanosecond of time, spawned on the heels of a craving for shredded meat, could change the course of their lives.
Then again, quality meat is life-changing.
The app idea rolled into a tireless couple nights of Dean putting to use his coding skills, incessant phone calls to vendors, and Cas mocking up the graphics. After one or two brief arguments over Cas wanting to go exorbitantly lavish with the theme and Dean telling him if he had to code that schmancy shit for a food-truck app he was going to claw his friggin’ eyes out, they managed to get something up and running.
Of course, all this went down long before there were a million apps for everything under the sun. Hell, smartphones were only just starting to become a thing. It’s amazing what the need for something decent to eat can accomplish.
After “Truck-It Eats” became popular, more apps followed and they couldn’t stop. Smartphone software spiralled into website design, logo creation, graphic marketing, etc. Before they knew it, they had a growing company to manage between a demanding undergraduate schedule. By graduation, it had become a profitable well-known business.
With the formal creation of ONE / OH / SIX, any aspirations they had for the future got pushed aside in favour of seeing it through. They went from a dorm room (#106, surprise surprise) to a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village on West 15th.
All in all, Dean has zero regrets. Running a business with his best friend is more than he ever could’ve asked for. They’re making bank and he’s his own boss; what’s not to love?
So. Let’s be logical here.
All of this should add up to some kind of happiness, or a moderate equivalency. Right? But no such luck. Patterns of old are getting tiresome. He gets up, he works. Every now and then he goes and gets laid but lately, he’s just been feeling kind of meh about the whole fucking strangers business.
That’s not to say he’s not horny. Cause, oh, he’s horny. In a twenty-four seven, can’t stop thinking about it kind of way.
True enough, Dean’s always been hot in all senses of the word. Hot-blooded, hot-headed. But the recent decline in his desire to bang randoms has him worrying.
Giving him definite suspicions. Awful suspicions.
That maybe, just maybe, the reason his normal parade of strange ass isn't cutting it is that maybe he no longer wants random. Maybe he’s sick and tired of being worried about whether they’re carrying some gnarly disease. Or they’re married. Because let’s face it, he’s at that age now. People are pairing off.
The bigger question isn’t what’s he to do now because heck the internet has an abundance of porn for the taking. No, no. The question he wants to know, what he’s too emotionally stunted to unravel himself, is whether he’s simply tired of the game or he’s craving something else. Something monogamous. Something in the realm of going out and finding a suitable mate. Clubbing them over the head and dragging them back to his cave.
Or, you know, something less of a caveman mythological fairytale.
Besides, who the fuck would he settle down with? He’s a neurotic head case who writes code for a living and goes to cosplay festivals with his geekiest employee. Considering he and Cas run a software and marketing design firm… being buds with the geekiest employee is really saying something. And not anything good on his part.
Oh, and there’s also the moving target of his sexuality. Not to add any complications or anything! Fuck. His brain is just all sorts of scrambled regarding the boobs and dick situation. One day it’s like yeah check out those and oooh she has a gorgeous smile. But then wham, it’s Thursday, and suddenly he’s all well some dick would be nice.
Cas thinks it’s funny. Tells him unequivocally that he is probably bi, and Dean can settle nicely into that category should he so wish.
But why have a category at all?! Dean’s of the mind some things aren’t meant to be categorized. All the power to the undecided! Freedom to fuck… or not to fuck! Whatever, whoever, whichever, however… with what, on who…
Okay, now he’s turning himself on. Somehow.
Not the time, Winchester. Actually… he should probably check the time.
Dean takes a cursory glance of the stove clock while he rinses his mug and places it in the dishwasher, studiously ignoring the partial he’s got going on downstairs. Ten minutes to go. Dean wipes the already clean counter and adjusts the dishcloth hanging from the oven handle.
He likes things neat, okay. Besides, with Cas as a roommate, if Dean doesn’t keep things in order the damn place would be in perpetual chaos. Quickly, he heads back to his room to put on more clothes than his current getup of primary blue boxer-briefs.
Their office may be casual but ninety-percent nude is probably a shade too casual. Even for Charlie, he snorts. Damn ballsy redhead.
Dean opens his double-door closet, revealing a shallow walk-in and a mirror hanging from the inside of each door. Surveying his collection of this and that, he glimpses his physique on the sidelines. Parts of his body stand out in the crisp reflection.
Dark lines, flashes of colour, and bold patterns.
Various tattoos decorate his skin, old and new, stretching over his decently muscular six-foot-plus frame. Some are meaningless, others carry truckloads of history he often prefers to ignore.
But that sort of thing happens when both your parents are six-feet under.
He lets out a long breath through his mouth. Not a day goes by he doesn’t miss them. Even though he barely knew his mother, being four when she died. And his father? Well, John Winchester wouldn’t have ever won a father-of-the-year award. Being a neglectful drunk has that effect. Still, John was his father.
A father who went and got himself killed, unfortunately. It hurts, but Dean remembers what he has. Awesome younger brother, extended family, kickass best friend. Life moves on, and all that shit. The tattoos he has, the ones that remind him of his parents, are vestiges of those relationships he’s lost; an ode to the Mary and John he knew as a kid.
Dragging himself out of the reverie, he snags a black, long-sleeve shirt from a shelf and tugs it on. It’s mid-November and cold enough to warrant layers so he reaches for a green-grey button-up and some jeans.
Once he’s dressed, he ducks into the bathroom again. He brushes his teeth and stares back at himself, watching the white minty foam slather over his lips. Faceted green eyes stare back, assessing the man in the mirror.
At the arguably young age of twenty-six, he looks a little run down. There are lines on his face he was sure weren’t there two years ago. Were they even present two days ago? Who the fuck knows.
Maybe he needs to buy face cream or something.
He supposes this is what he gets for deciding to take Computer Science and Engineering at fucking MIT. Hours upon hours staring at a screen, nights without sleep. Coffee being chugged by the keg. Truth be told he could be doing far more innovative things with his time than running a graphic design and marketing business.
But why the hell would he? He works alongside his most favourite person and has close to zero stress in his life.
Dean spits in the sink and wipes the water from his lips and chin, taking stock of his two-day-old scruff. It softens the hard edge of his jaw, while at the same time roughens his entire appearance. A face he’s been complimented on his whole life, nothing but a collection of features he’s considered a blessing and a curse. Symmetry is all it boils down to. Well, that, and apparently a fuckable mouth. Or so he’s been told.
Tip to the masses, never ever tell someone any part of their body is fuckable. They might be inclined to beat you senseless. Until you’re a whimpering mommy-pleading mess.
Not that he’s done anything like that of course. No, no. Never.
Dean turns away from the mirror, where time seems to speed up and he’s out the door.