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“Miss Mason wants to talk to you,” Jack announced brightly, hopping into the car and waiting for Dean to buckle him into his carseat.
Dean’s fingers faltered on the myriad of confusing straps. “Miss Mason wants what?” Miss Mason, whom Jack loved, was the guidance counselor for the elementary school Jack attended.
Dean, having grown up the way he did, had a complicated relationship with the idea of guidance counselors in general, but they were retired. They lived in an actual house instead of an underground bunker. Jack was getting a normal life. And besides, he was a bright kid, what were the odds he was actually having issues?
“Okay, buddy. I’ll call and set something up, how about that?”
Jack nodded, giving him a gap-toothed grin. At six, he was about two months into his first grade year and was taking to school like a duck to water. “We learned time today. Mr. Curtis has fake clocks and he would tell us a time, and we would move the clock. To make that time. It was fun.”
“That’s awesome,” Dean said, giving Jack a gentle fist bump. “Bet you got it on the first try.”
Jack nodded. “Can we go to the farmer’s market?”
Dean slid into the driver’s seat. There was a farmer’s market downtown that stayed open until five or six most days, where Cas had a booth. He sold mostly honey and veggies from his garden, and Dean and Jack would often come back from school and hang out with him until it was time to pack up and head home.
“Yeah, we can go to the farmer’s market. Why, you wanna buy a farmer?”
That stumped Jack for a minute, tiny furrows appearing in his brow. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
Dean laughed, reversing the car out of the parking space and heading for downtown. “You can’t. But do you want anything in particular?” They weren’t wanting for money, thanks to Charlie’s bottomless credit card, and Dean absolutely loved that he could finally spoil his husband and their kid.
“Dad!” Jack yelled when they arrived, wriggling out of the car the second the carseat was unbuckled and taking off as fast as his legs could carry him, weaving through groups of people and arriving, panting, at Cas’s booth.
Dean followed close behind, panting slightly and despairing the day Jack would get faster than him.
“Hello, Jack,” Cas smiled. “How was school?”
“It was good. We learned time. What are you hiding behind your back?”
Cas winked at Dean, who slapped a palm to his face dramatically at his husband’s antics. Then Cas pulled out his hand with a flourish, opening it to reveal a small honey candy from the booth three down from them.
Jack squealed, clapping his hands and thanking Cas profusely before plucking the candy off of the open palm and unwrapping it, popping it into his mouth and fastidiously putting the wrapper in a nearby trash can.
“Hey, Cas,” Dean murmured, pulling Cas in and pressing a soft kiss to his cheek. “How was your day?”
Cas hummed in response, bagging up a rutabaga for an old lady. “It was all right. I think some rabbits got into my raised bed, and I’m going to need to start mulching for the cold soon.”
“All right. You gonna take your truck to get mulch? Want me to come along?”
Cas laughed, presenting Dean with a honey candy of his own. “I wouldn’t be opposed to your company. We could go while Jack was at school.”
“Mmm, speaking of which,” Dean said, talking around the candy. “Miss Mason wants to talk to one of us about Jack.”
Cas glanced fearfully up at him. “The guidance counselor?”
Dean nodded.
“Is something wrong with Jack?”
Dean looked over at Jack, who was politely helping a young mother select the best eggplant out of the small pile on the table. “Nah, I don’t think so. Look, do you want to go? Or should I?”
“I’d like to go,” Cas answered, brow furrowing. “But… I’m not sure that would be the best idea.”
“Hey, look,” Dean reassured, tossing a wink in the mother’s direction as he rang up and bagged her eggplant, “I can drive us both and then wait in the car. So I’ll be there if you need me.”
Cas nodded slowly. “Okay. That will work.”
“Dad! Dean!” Jack called from somewhere behind them. “I found a turtle!”
“I got it,” Dean said, already moving toward the sound of Jack’s voice.
***
Dora Mason was having a long day. Like, a really long day. Paperwork had needed to be filed, and she’d had to track down more than a few seniors to nag about their FAFSA filing date. The joys of working for a K through 12 school.
Then a kid in the preschool had a meltdown and she’d had to pry her out from under a table and get her to calm down.
Then she’d gotten school lunch vomited all over her office by a fifth grader.
So by the time a man in a trench coat wandered into her office, she was tired and ready to be done for the day.
The man stared at her. She stared back. “Can I help you?”
“You wanted to talk to me.” His voice was deep and self-assured.
“Are you a parent?” She shuffled some papers around. The man obviously wasn’t great with social cues. She was going to have to help him out a little. “Does your child go here?”
“Yes. Jack Kline.”
Dora experienced a moment of severe cognitive dissonance. This was the man that had raised bright, sunny Jack? “All right, sir. Please, have a seat.”
The man sat down. “My name is Castiel. I should be on his paperwork.”
She navigated to Jack’s paperwork in her computer, noticing that there was in fact a Castiel Novak listed as his primary contact. “Yes, you are. Now, Mr. Novak, I wanted to talk to you about Jack.”
Mr. Novak waited for her to continue instead of actually saying anything back, like one would do in a normal conversation, and she paused for a second before carrying on. “Jack is very intelligent, he’s ahead of most of his class developmentally. I wanted to talk to you about possibly enrolling him in the gifted and talented program?”
“Could you tell me more about that,” Mr. Novak asked.
“Of course!” Dora tried very hard to keep a smile on her face. The man obviously had some sort of intellectual disability. She needed to be nice. “Jack would leave class for a couple of hours every Friday to spend time with one of our teachers and the other kids in the program. They’d be doing projects and learning material that is above the level that Jack is currently working at in school, to enrich his learning experience.”
Mr. Novak tilted his head. “So it would be good for him.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s do that then. Jack will enjoy it?” He fiddled absentmindedly with the hem of his trench coat, which he still hadn’t taken off.
She floundered. “Well, his, erm, difficulties haven’t negatively impacted his-”
Mr. Novak cut her off, leaning forward. “Difficulties? What difficulties?”
Did he- did he really not know? “Well, his, you know. Difficulties.”
“Jack is not having difficulties at school. He loves coming here and he is not having trouble in any of his classes.”
She took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose in an attempt to stave off the impending migraine. “Not his academic difficulties. His, you know, other issues.”
Mr. Novak looked vaguely alarmed. “Other issues? Like what? Have you been feeling cold spots around the building recently?”
She rested her face in her hands, just briefly. To indulge herself. “Sir. I don’t see how the flaws in our central heating relate to your son’s, uh. Special needs.”
Leaning forward in his seat, Mr. Novak tilted his head at her. “Jack does not have any special needs. He has no allergies and requires no accommodations.”
His hand twisted, still fidgeting with the trench coat, and she noticed a flash of gold. Oh, thank god. She wasn’t going to get anywhere with this man, she just didn’t have the patience. “Sir, could I talk to your wife about this?” That was the best option, anyway. Mothers tended to be more invested in their children. Mrs. Novak would, no doubt, be better aware of her son’s needs. Probably because her husband had the same ones, Dora thought somewhat vindictively.
“I don’t have a wife,” Mr. Novak said blankly.
Well. That was just great. So far, she’d failed to communicate on behalf of Jack to his primary guardian, who she wasn’t sure was fit to parent, and she’d brought up his dead wife.
“I have a husband,” he said, and she felt a brief moment of relief that she hadn’t brought up his dead wife, before realizing what he’d said.
So. He was gay.
That was fine. She could deal with that. Anything to get a responsible, sane adult in the building. “Yes. Perfect. Can I talk to him?”
“He’s outside in Baby. I’ll text him.” And he did.
She sat back, mind spinning in several increasingly odd circles before concluding that Baby was probably what this poor confused man had decided to name the family car. Hopefully the husband would be able to clear up some of the conversation.
For that matter, were they sure that Mr. Novak was of sound enough mind to be married at all?
The door banged open and a man in a paint-splattered flannel and ripped jeans walked through, eyes wandering around the room.
The light overhead flickered slightly (faulty wiring, a nest of squirrels had chewed through some of the attic’s wires) and his hand went almost instinctively to his waistband.
Like he was going for a gun.
Dora cleared her throat and inclined her head to the other empty seat in front of her desk. “The other Mr. Novak, I presume?”
“Winchester,” he said gruffly. “Cas, you wanna wait in the car?”
“ Yes ,” Mr. Novak said immediately, obviously uncomfortable, and left. Mr. Winchester tossed him the keys on his way out.
“Mr. Winchester,” Dora started, leaning forward. “We’d just established that Jack would do well in the gifted and talented program, since his disability doesn’t seem to negatively impact his learning.”
Mr. Winchester’s eyebrows rose. “Disability?”
Dear God. Was he really that stupid? Could he not see that both his husband and his son obviously had some sort of issue?
Okay. She really had to be as delicate as possible about this. “Sir, after having talked with both your son and your husband…” She trailed off, hoping he’d connect the dots.
He had to connect the dots. He lived with them, presumably. He had to have picked up on it.
Mr. Winchester leaned back in his chair, chuckling. “Yeah, Cas is kinda touched in the head, guess Jack does take after him.” He circled one finger by his ear, whistling a short two-note sequence.
Dora sat back in her chair. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, had he really just said that? Did he say things like that to Jack’s face? That was obviously not a good situation for the poor boy to be in. And if he knew that his husband was, well, slightly off, that raised questions about a possible imbalance of power in the relationship. She’d have to handle the situation with kid gloves.
“Mr. Winchester, an intellectual disability doesn’t make someone, uh, touched in the head. Out of curiosity, have you ever had Jack evaluated? Possibly for something like autism?”
“Hey now,” Mr. Winchester said, leaning forward and fixing her with a glare. “Jack’s just perfect the way he is. And so’s Cas. Don’t think I don’t hear that judgemental tone.”
“Mr. Winchester, the fact remains that, that certain differences can-”
“Are you telling me,” he asked, standing up, “That you think there’s something wrong with my family?”
“It is very possible,” she answered, before realizing that that was a bad thing to say.
Mr. Jackson, the principal, poked his head in, knocking on the doorframe, and Mr. Winchester jerked around, hand again going to his waistband. “Miss Mason,” he said. “Did you get the Jack situation dealt with? You can head home if so.”
“The Jack situation,” Mr. Winchester repeated, voice going deadly calm.
Mr. Jackson winced. “Mr. Novak, I presume?”
“Winchester. Jack’s other dad.”
Mr. Jackson twitched slightly at that. “Explains a good bit,” he murmured to himself.
“What did you say.” Mr. Winchester was falling back, almost unconsciously, into a fighting stance. Not for the first time in the last ten minutes or so, Dora wondered what on Earth the man’s life had been like. Was still like.
Seriously, how had this man and Novak produced a kid like Jack? He had some issues, sure, but he was sweet and smart and well-mannered. Novak was just plain weird, and Winchester was obviously some sort of dangerous mess with a hair trigger.
“I said, uh, I said. Well. It doesn’t matter. Have you discussed what to do with Jack?”
Winchester bristled. “He’ll be joining the gifted and talented program.”
“And about his other issues?”
Winchester was, if possible, bristling even more. “So you think there’s something wrong with my goddamn son .”
Dora took it upon herself to intervene. “He just, he takes after your husband. Which isn’t necessarily bad, they just both may have some special needs.”
Winchester widened his stance, flexing his hand. “You thing there’s something wrong with my fucking husband, too ?”
“Sir,” Dora said, despairingly.
“Winchester, see here now,” Jackson responded.
“Dean,” Novak said soothingly from the doorway. “We can put him in the program. It’ll be good for him. Let’s go to the farmer’s market.”
Dean followed Novak out, grumbling the whole while, and Dora breathed a sigh of relief.
With his parents like that, it was a wonder Jack was functional at all.
***
“They thought something was wrong with you,” Dean grumbled as he set down a crate of cucumbers with extreme prejudice. “And with Jack.”
“Dean.”
“Well, fuck them. You two might not be exactly like every other damn person, but that doesn’t mean shit.”
“Dean.”
“I love you both just the way you are, you know that, right? Whatever that woman said to you before I got in there, don’t listen to her, okay?”
Cas sighed like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Are you sure?”
Dean caught Cas’s hand as he laid out his eggplants, pressing a kiss over his knuckles. “I’m sure. You, you and Jack, you’re both perfect. I couldn’t ask for a better family.”
“I’m glad to hear that. And I’m glad you didn’t punch the principal.”