Chapter Text
Castiel’s father used to say that life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned it.
He certainly didn’t plan to lose his wife to a sudden illness when Castiel was only three years old, and he didn’t plan to be raising his young son alone.
But another thing Castiel’s father taught him is that even when life puts a big, fat X through your best laid plans, you can still do great things with what you have left.
In Dad’s case, doing great things meant finding little bits of magic in the mundane existence of a single father in small-town Illinois. He’d find treasure maps in the scuffs left by sneaker soles on the grimy floor of the grocery store. He’d claim to have seen the imprint of a monster’s claw in their backyard mud, or the flash of a silver blade in the edge of a raincloud.
Castiel grew up on a steady diet of fanciful stories about monsters and heroes, dragons and those who slayed them. And when Dad realized that Castiel seemed more interested in admiring handsome warrior princes than beautiful, feisty princesses, he changed his stories to fit the person that Castiel still barely understood himself to be.
Castiel still remembers the spine-tingling thrill he felt the first time Dad told him the story of a monster-slaying prince falling in love with another man — a former angel warrior who had fallen for the prince in every sense of the word. It became his favorite story in short order; he asked for it so many times that he could soon recite it word for word himself.
The angel, you see, wasn’t meant to love humans, but the prince had such a good and righteous heart that it warmed the angel’s own until he no longer cared about the cold strictures of his Heavenly home.
Unfortunately, Dad’s life also failed to turn out as planned. It was cut short by a stroke when Castiel was twenty-five and had just parlayed his English degree from Northwestern into a comfortable existence as a junior associate with a marketing firm in Chicago.
Once he’d clawed his way out of the worst of his grief, he decided to take his father’s example and do great things with what he had left.
Great things, he decided back then, would come to him if he joined the young, idealistic staff of a single mom who was then campaigning for the Congressional seat in Castiel’s district. Kelly Kline won that election, so Castiel followed her to Washington, DC. She’s won every election since then too, and without Castiel quite noticing, seven years of being a Congressional staffer have passed.
As the years hurried along, Castiel somehow failed to acquire a family, or even the right partner with whom to start one. He spent some time dating, but all his attempts at relationships eventually fizzled out — subsumed by the professional ambition of the fellow Capitol Hill staffers he’d tried to connect with.
At some point, probably around his thirtieth birthday, he simply stopped trying.
He’s not without human connection, of course. There are Meg, Alfie, Corbett and Ambriel — the other members of Kelly’s staff. There is Jack, Kelly’s twelve-year-old son, who pretends to do his homework in the corner of Kelly’s office each afternoon. There is Castiel's landlord Donatello and even Donatello’s son Richie, for all his faults.
But there is no one who is only Castiel’s. Not until the Christmas that Castiel will later think of as the point in his life when everything changed.
***
A few days before that fateful Christmas, Castiel finds himself particularly grateful for Donatello.
“You’d think that if you pay $45 for a Christmas tree, they’d at least deliver it to your apartment,” Castiel tells his landlord somewhat sheepishly as he eyes the top of a handsome Douglas fir, which he accidentally put through Donatello’s second-floor window while attempting to hoist it up from the courtyard to his own third-floor apartment.
What Castiel learned in this attempt is that he’s not skilled at rigging up homemade rope-and-pulley systems.
He tugs on the zipper neck of his light gray sweater (one of his favorites), armoring himself against the cold wind whistling through the broken windowpane.
“Eh, it’s alright. The insurance should pay,” Donatello says wearily. He’s already pulled up the appropriate paperwork on his ancient desktop screen and is beginning to fill it out. “But next time you need something lifted, ask Richie for help.”
“I will,” Castiel says, though he hopes it won’t ever come to that. Richie has recently been paroled on fraud charges that he only went to prison for in the first place because his fraud scheme was spectacularly stupid. A reasonable man probably wouldn’t steal the emergency lights off police cars, but especially wouldn’t then attempt to sell them back to the police at a profit.
As if summoned by Castiel’s uncharitable thoughts, Richie appears in the doorway, scratching his belly, yawning and blinking owlishly at Castiel. Castiel checks his watch: It’s the middle of the afternoon.
“Heya, Cas,” Richie says, and shuffles onward.
“You know,” Donatello sing-songs meaningfully, “Richie’s still single.”
Castiel suppresses his first instinct, which is to mutter “shocking” under his breath and goes instead for the other obvious objection. “Is your son even gay? Or bisexual?”
“I don’t know.” Donatello shrugs in a loose, what-can-you-do sort of way. “But maybe he could be?”
***
In addition to Castiel’s work colleagues, his landlord, and his landlord’s dubiously intelligent son, there is really only one other person who could possibly qualify as a social connection.
His name is Mr. Metro. Castiel calls him that because he has never actually learned the man’s name, and the only place they ever see each other is on the platform at Columbia Heights Metro Station, each morning before they both take the Green Line to work.
Castiel doesn’t think Mr. Metro is a fellow Congressional staffer — despite the large size of Congress, the world of Capitol Hill can be surprisingly incestuous. Once you’ve noticed a face, you’re likely to see it again and again. At press briefings, in the cafeteria, or when all of Congress assembles to hear the President or a foreign dignitary speak.
But Mr. Metro’s well-cut coat and handsome leather briefcase do speak of a certain wealth. A lobbyist then, or a lawyer.
Each one of their interactions follows a certain script: one of them will arrive on the platform for the Branch Avenue-bound trains and find the other already there. They’ll take up positions approximately ten feet apart from each other and exchange a small smile and a nod. Sometimes, if Metro is operating on a delay (as it is most days), they will exchange the occasional eye roll while the “minutes to arrival” time on the digital display fails to grow smaller.
Castiel then spends the rest of their wait time engaged in busy daydreaming. Mostly, he wonders what it would be like if he had someone like Mr. Metro to come home to. Instead of being a lonely single Congressional staffer, he could be one half of a power couple. Maybe, instead of living in a slightly dingy apartment in Columbia Heights, he would live in a townhouse near Dupont Circle, surrounded by embassies. Or in Foggy Bottom, where the inhabitants are too fancy to so much as snicker at the neighborhood’s name.
It’s not even that he’s particularly attracted to Mr. Metro himself, though he’s certainly handsome and has very nice, shiny hair. Rather, the idea of him is endlessly appealing.
And so Castiel looks forward every day to their minimal interaction on a train platform before they both go their separate ways. It’s a little glimpse of the sort of life he thought he might one day have — the sort of life that slipped through Dad’s fingers when Castiel’s mother died — and he can’t help reaching for it with the clumsy desperation of a falling man’s outstretched hands.
***
“So you know how I’m staying with my aunt over Christmas?” Ambriel asks Castiel on the final official workday before the holidays.
He looks away from the screen, grateful for the interruption. He’s been trying for the past hour to formulate a statement from Kelly about a recent decision by the Illinois governor that is, in a word, baffling. But using the word “baffling” in a political statement about the actions of someone in Kelly’s own party is frowned upon.
“Yes, and?” Castiel asks.
“And you know how my aunt lives in Tuscaloosa?” Ambriel twinkles innocently at him through her horn-rimmed glasses.
“Yes, and?” Castiel repeats, with a great deal more suspicion than before.
“And you know how you’re the only other person in the office who knows how to do video editing?”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Castiel says. Alfie is undoubtedly a disaster at anything tech-related, and Castiel wouldn’t trust him near their professional-grade camera equipment if he was paid to do it. But he’s reasonably sure Meg would do fine. She just chooses to pretend she doesn’t understand the equipment so she won’t be roped into recording Kelly’s semi-regular video messages to her constituents. “I’ve definitely seen Corbett use the software before.”
Corbett looks over from his desk, which sits at a ninety-degree angle from Castiel’s. “Sure, but I got the short straw last year.”
Castiel is beginning to put the pieces together. Each year, Kelly records a video message wishing her constituents happy holidays. Each year, they all try to get this done early, but then Kelly is pulled into a million different pre-holiday events all over Capitol Hill and the filming never actually happens until the morning of Christmas Eve. After which the staffer who has been put in charge of the project will inevitably spend the rest of Christmas Eve and some of Christmas Day editing the footage and sending it out via all of Kelly’s official social media channels.
To her credit, Kelly feels bad about this, but it’s just one of those things, like the sky being blue and the office always being a little too cold and drafty. Especially when someone opens the door, as Kelly does now, striding into the office with a harassed-looking Alfie at her heels.
“Every time,” she says. “Every single fucking time.”
Castiel makes a sympathetic face. “Zach Adler from the Chronicle again?”
“Of course,” Kelly says and pauses briefly next to Castiel’s desk, her eyes flashing with righteous indignation. “I used to think he’d eventually get tired of making every single question about how I’m a single mom, but apparently I severely underestimated him.”
“I’ve always thought he was an assbutt,” Castiel says, semi-diplomatically.
“Totally out of line,” Corbett agrees, while Alfie nods along fervently even as he tries to keep a stack of printouts from sliding out of his arms and onto the floor.
“Fucking dick,” Meg chimes in from her desk in the far corner, because she’s never one to mince words. “I could arrange for him to have some kind of accident.”
She sounds disturbingly certain about this.
Kelly gives her a strained sort of smile. “I appreciate the support, Meg, but we probably shouldn’t plot to kill members of the press inside a government building.”
Meg grimaces and tips her head to the side, as if reluctantly conceding the point.
A short, slightly awkward silence descends, which Kelly breaks with, “So, Cas…”
Castiel sighs, resigned to his fate. “Yes, I can do the Christmas video thing.”
“I know it’s not fair. You were already here over Thanksgiving.”
This is true, but Castiel is also the only one in the office without family commitments around the holidays, so it makes sense that if someone has to work, it should be him.
“It’s fine,” he tells Kelly, and almost means it too.
***
And so it happens that Castiel is on the Columbia Heights train platform on Christmas morning, bound for the office so he can finish editing the footage they shot yesterday and send it out.
He doesn’t expect to see Mr. Metro, who undoubtedly will be spending time with his family like the entire rest of the world. Yet, when Castiel arrives at the steps that lead down to the platform, there is his usual companion.
In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anyone except Mr. Metro, and Castiel wonders if he should finally make an effort at actual communication. Maybe Mr. Metro can tell him the secret to living a happy life. Or at least the secret to his shiny hair.
But before Castiel has even made it all the way down the steps, two other people emerge from the shadows at the back of the platform. They’re young men and their body language is aggressive. They bump into Mr. Metro, jostling him, and Castiel thinks he overhears the words “don’t want any trouble” and “it’s Christmas, guys.”
Castiel hurries the rest of the way down the stairs, adrenaline speeding his steps. “Hey!” he calls out.
The two men whip around, and Castiel has just enough time to regret the fact that he isn’t carrying anything with which to defend himself when he realizes what’s happening: one of the two men must have shoved Mr. Metro as he turned towards Castiel.
Castiel watches in horror as Mr. Metro loses his footing and plummets backwards off the platform, onto the tracks below. His assailants trade an alarmed glance before taking off at a run, their shoes slapping against the platform tiles.
“Mr…. Mister?” Castiel calls out, cursing himself for never once bothering to learn the name of a man he met every single day. He drops his work bag and closes the rest of the distance to the platform at a run.
He peers over the edge, and his heart drops all the way into his stomach. Mr. Metro is lying on the tracks, limbs sprawled around him. He’s landed a safe distance from the third rail, but that’s cold comfort when he’s obviously unconscious and possibly dead.
What’s worse, Castiel can hear the telltale screech of an approaching train. A quick look up at the display shows him that the Branch Avenue-bound train has just gone from being one minute away to “approaching.” Of all the days for Metro to run on time, it had to be this one.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck!”
He doesn’t allow any space for further thought or hesitation. He leaps off the platform and onto the tracks, landing next to Mr. Metro. “Hey. Hey!” he calls, shaking the man’s shoulder. “You need to wake up. There’s a train coming!”
Staring down the tunnel that dead-ends at the platform, he can now see the lights of the train reflecting off the wall. Any second, it’ll round the corner and the driver will see them, but there won’t be time to stop. They’ll both be killed.
“Sir!” Castiel jostles him again, but there is no sign of life. The train has rounded the corner now. Its headlights catch in Castiel’s eyes, blinding him. The horn sounds next, making Castiel’s eardrums vibrate. All around Castiel, the tracks are rattling with the force of the oncoming train.
Frantic, Castiel looks around. There is just a little bit of space between the rails and the platform. Possibly even enough to accommodate two men. It’s their only chance.
He wraps his arms around Mr. Metro’s torso and heaves him up, rolling them both to the side. His back collides painfully with the rail as he yanks them both up and over it, but that’s a concern for later. For now, they need to survive.
He tucks them up against the bottom of the platform as close as they can go, shielding Mr. Metro’s body with his. Seconds later, the train comes barreling past with a screech of brakes.
It doesn’t touch them.
They’re alive.
***
Everything becomes very confusing after that. EMTs and police officers appear, prodding at Castiel and asking questions about Mr. Metro’s assailants. He’s given a clean bill of health other than some bruising along his side where he hit the rail, and he does his best to describe the two men, but his focus is mostly on the EMTs who are carefully transferring Mr. Metro onto a gurney and carrying him off the platform.
One of the police officers is going through Mr. Metro’s wallet, pulling out a driver’s license. “Sam Winchester,” he tells his colleague. “Lives just a couple blocks from here.”
Sam. After all this time, Mr. Metro finally has a real name. Given the circumstances, Castiel wishes he’d never learned it.
Helplessly, he watches as the EMTs hurry down the platform and up the steps to street level, with Sam still unconscious on the gurney.
“Excuse me,” he asks the police officer standing nearest to him. “Where are they taking him? Which hospital, I mean?”
“George Washington University,” the cop — Officer Lafitte, according to his name tag — says. “Want me to give you a ride?”
Castiel hesitates. Officer Lafitte probably extended the offer because he assumes that Castiel is friendly with Sam in some way, or that they’re family members who spent Christmas morning traveling to a celebration together. He should correct this error, take a different train to his office, and maybe try to visit Sam at the hospital at a later date.
But the mere idea of doing any of that fills him with dread. He wouldn’t be able to focus on a thing; he’d constantly be thinking of Sam, wondering if he’s still alive.
Kelly’s Christmas video message will simply have to wait.
***
The ride through downtown in the back of a police car is hair-raising. Officer Lafitte turns on the overhead siren and flies down each block at a frankly ludicrous speed. The roads aren’t nearly as traffic-choked as they would be on a work day, but Castiel still covers his face with his hands and peers only occasionally through the spaces between his fingers at the office buildings and townhouses that flash past them.
By the time they pull up at the emergency entrance of GWU hospital, Castiel has managed to sweat not only through his oversized gray-and-white sweater but also his trenchcoat.
“Good luck in there, brother,” Officer Lafitte says, not unkindly, and Castiel waves a weak thanks at him as he staggers out of the car.
He manages to locate the doors to the ER and steps through them into absolute chaos. All around him, people are shouting and there is some sort of alarm blaring shrilly in his ears. Castiel glances around in bewilderment, trying to locate the reception desk.
A formidable-looking woman in nurse’s scrubs sits behind the desk, and Castiel arranges his face into what he hopes is a trustworthy expression. “Excuse me, ma’am.” He checks her name tag. “Ms. Moseley. I’m here for Sam Winchester. I believe he was just brought in.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “Are you family?”
Before Castiel can tell the egregious lie he’s considering, another nurse appears behind Ms. Moseley: a scrawny young man with ears too big for his face. “Excuse me, Missouri. I got this one,” he says, tapping a pin on his chest. It reads, in rainbow colors, I’m a GWU Sensitivity Training Champion. “We’re doing everything we can for your husband, sir.”
Castiel shakes his head; he was possibly prepared to lie about being some sort of relation of Sam’s, but this is too big a falsehood. “He’s not my husband.”
“Boyfriend then,” the nurse — Fitzgerald, according to his name tag — says, nodding sagely.
“Garth,” Ms. Moseley says warningly. “If he’s not family, we can’t give him any information about the patient. You know this.”
“Roger that, ma’am,” Garth says cheerfully as he rounds the desk. He claps Castiel on the shoulder and leads him away from Ms. Moseley and her narrow-eyed looks. Once they’re out of earshot and Ms. Moseley’s attention has been drawn by another confused-looking hospital visitor, he says, “Don’t you worry yourself about Missouri. She’s a stickler for the rules, but you and I know that a boyfriend is still family. Now let’s find you a nice, cozy place to wait until Sam’s ready for visitors, shall we?”
Castiel considers correcting Garth’s mistaken assumption as to the relationship between him and Sam, but he does want to know how Sam is doing. And maybe it doesn’t matter whether a stranger at a hospital thinks he’s romantically involved with Sam. After all, what possible harm could it do?
So he simply says, “Thank you,” and lets Garth lead him to the nearest waiting room.
***
About half an hour after he left Castiel in the waiting room, Garth rematerializes. By now, Castiel has answered ten text messages from Kelly — first a faux-casual one asking about his progress on the Christmas video message and then, when he told her he was at the hospital, a flurry of increasingly concerned follow-ups asking about his health, his mental state, and whether he’s had a chance to eat something.
To her credit, the video message hasn’t come up again.
“You can come see him now,” Garth tells Castiel as he pokes his head in through the doorway of the waiting room, ears first.
Sam looks peaceful when they arrive at his room. There is a bandage on his head and he’s connected to an IV and several monitors, but if one were to ignore all that, he might as well be sleeping.
“He’s in a coma,” Garth tells Castiel as he retrieves a chair from one corner of the hospital room and places it next to the bed, gesturing for Castiel to sit. “But his vitals are good. The doctor thinks he’ll make a full recovery.”
“That’s… good, thank you,” Castiel tells him, and sinks into the proffered chair.
Garth retreats from the room on tiptoes, giving Castiel a slightly misty-eyed smile. Castiel returns it with an uneasy grimace.
Outside the room, Garth stops to talk to Officer Lafitte, who apparently is still here as well. As they speak, Officer Lafitte and Garth both glance back at Castiel through the window glass that separates Sam’s room from the hallway, identical doe-eyed expressions appearing on their faces. The closest equivalent Castiel can think of is the way people look at small dogs performing adorable tricks. He shifts uncomfortably on his chair.
The fact of the matter is that he should leave now. He should go to his office and finish editing Kelly’s video. Then he should return to his lonely apartment and celebrate another Christmas by himself, hoping he won’t be so desperate as to ask Richie to keep him company while he watches Jeopardy.
Instead, he plucks at a loose thread on his chunky black sweater, telling himself this small imperfection is important business to be taken care of before he can possibly contemplate going back out into the cold.
And so Castiel is still sitting by Sam’s bedside when a commotion breaks out in the hallway beyond Sam’s room. As the commotion grows nearer, Castiel identifies it as the sound of at least five different people talking over each other.
Alarmed, he sits up and watches through the window as a group of people approaches Sam’s room. It may be that they’re bound for a different room, he reasons. They might be someone else’s family.
But Castiel is simply not that lucky. And so, before he has a chance to even contemplate a retreat, the group bursts through the open doorway, followed by a harassed-looking doctor.
“You can’t just barge into my unit like this,” the doctor yelps, addressing a bearded man in late middle age who’s wearing a trucker hat that probably originated in the Nixon administration.
“Of course we can,” says a woman about the same age as the man. Her messy blonde hair, heavy work boots and thick flannel look about as out of place as it’s possible to be in the upscale environs of downtown DC. “That’s my son.”
Castiel allows surprise to take the place of unadulterated panic for just a moment. Whenever he imagined the family of the polished professional man he shares a train platform with each day, he thought they might be the sort to host cocktail parties and own racehorses. Plainly, he was mistaken in that assumption.
“Oh, poor baby,” says an older woman whose faded blonde hair — and flannel — suggest a close relation with Sam’s mother. Ignoring the doctor’s ongoing squawking, she sweeps over to the bed, gripping Sam’s hand. Another woman with shoulder-length light brown hair, closer in age to Sam’s mother, steps up next to the older woman, putting an arm around her shoulders.
The man in the trucker hat is now demanding updates on Sam’s condition, scowling at the doctor as if it’s his personal fault that Sam is currently unconscious.
“And who are you?” says the final member of the group — a boy of about fifteen or sixteen.
Unfortunately, this question is addressed to Castiel.
He opens his mouth to say that he was present for Sam’s accident and will be leaving now. But the doctor, obviously relieved to have an excuse to cut short his conversation with the irate cap-wearing man, says, “Yes, that’s what I’d like to know! Visits on this ward are restricted to family only.”
“But he is family!” Out of nowhere, Garth has materialized in the room, all lanky limbs and smiles and the shiny rainbow pin on his scrubs. “That’s Castiel, Sam’s boyfriend.”
Oh god. This is the single worst situation Castiel has ever been in. Not only has he been caught in a lie, but he’s been outed in front of an entire blue-collar family who probably won’t take any too kindly to the suggestion (the likely untrue suggestion, just to make this situation even more tangled) that their precious son is queer.
“His boyfriend?” Sam’s mother asks, eyebrows rising as she studies Castiel. She looks absolutely thunderstruck.
“Sam is queer?” the older woman chimes in. “But he never said.”
“I thought it was only Dean,” says the woman with longer hair.
“I thought Sam was dating that god-awful Ruby woman,” the man in the trucker hat growls.
“Sam doesn’t owe it to anyone to come out before he’s ready,” the boy says, with the easy confidence of the very young. “And Mom, you can’t just go around talking about Dean’s sexuality. It’s not for you to share.”
“The fact of the matter is,” the doctor interjects, in a futile effort to raise his voice above the commotion, “only family members—”
Castiel chooses this moment to rise out of his chair, grab his coat and start backing away from Sam’s hospital bed. If he has to flee the room, being upright will at least put him in a slightly better position to gain a head start.
“Mr. Novak here also saved Sam’s life.” That’s Officer Lafitte, who for some reason known only to him still hasn’t left the hospital and has now materialized in the room next to Garth. “When Mr. Winchester was pushed onto the tracks, Mr. Novak jumped down to pull him to safety.”
Absolute silence falls over the room. After the previous chatter and chaos, the sudden absence of noise makes Castiel’s ears ring.
“You did?” Sam’s mother whispers, her eyes swimming with unshed tears. “Oh. Oh, come here.”
Castiel’s eyes dart to the doorway and the promise of sweet, sweet freedom, but before he can dash away, Sam’s mother has pulled him into the tightest hug he can remember receiving in years. Possibly ever. His father, for all his good qualities, wasn’t much of a hugger.
“Son,” the man in the trucker hat says, clapping Castiel on the shoulder so hard that he thinks his knees might buckle if Sam’s mother weren’t holding him up. “I think you’d better tell us everything.”
