Chapter Text
June 24th, 2011
Dean likes to walk.
Part of that, sure, comes from going without cars for a lot of his life. He sure didn’t like walking when he was a kid, having to walk to get to school and walk to get to the store and walk home carefully balancing twelve bags of groceries. But then he grew up, and when you grow up, you kind of learn that if you have to do something you hate, you might as well do your best to enjoy it.
So, Dean likes to walk. It helps him clear his head after a show, to make a steady pace beneath his feet, feel the solidity of the pavement.
There’s a difference, though, between walking in most other places and walking in Florida. Walking in Florida is constantly like you’ve just wrestled for an hour and now you’re just walking around covered in sweat and grime, except it’s like that when you’ve just showered, too. It always kind of feels like you’re sweating even if you’re not, in Florida.
Still, Dean needs to get from the FCW arena (barely an arena, really doesn’t qualify for the word, but Dean likes that; he likes that he works for the fucking WWE now and he’s still wrestling in what’s essentially a glorified school gym) back to his apartment, which is still in Winter Park, but about four or five miles east. That’s nothing, not really – Dean’s a pretty damn good walker – and he’s made the walk before, looking up at the sky, occasionally catching a glimpse of a star or two where the light from the city hasn’t faded the sky brown.
When a car’s headlights catch on him on a turn, he doesn’t pay much attention. Cars are a nuisance at worst when he’s walking, and most pass him right on by. There’s a couple times since he’s been here when he’s gotten drunken shouts out a window, but Winter Park isn’t exactly a party city, so they’re few and far between.
It’s new, though, that the car slows down just before it reaches him, coming to a near stop to keep pace. The window rolls down, and Dean glances toward it, curious. He doesn’t stop walking.
“Ambrose?” The voice is familiar, the accent flat and Midwestern in a different way to Dean’s. He likes to think he doesn’t sound that nasal, but he’s probably wrong. Everyone from Ohio thinks they don’t sound that nasal, and all of them do.
“Rollins,” Dean notes. He’s seen Seth Rollins around; guy’d been there for a while before Dean got the call to sign, and he’s doing pretty well for himself in FCW. Dean wonders if there’s anyplace Rollins hasn’t done pretty well for himself. He seems like the kind of guy who refuses to be anything but the very best.
“What’re you doing?” Rollins asks, and Dean looks sardonically down at his own feet, then back to Rollins’ face peering out the car window at him.
“I’m walking,” he says unnecessarily. “I’d’ve thought that was pretty obvious.”
Rollins’ mouth turns down at the corner like he doesn’t appreciate Dean’s tone. Well, Dean doesn’t appreciate people who don’t appreciate his tone, so fuck him.
“Okay, I’ll rephrase,” says Rollins. “Why are you walking?”
“Same reason most people walk,” Dean replies. “To get to the place I want to be.”
Rollins sighs like Dean’s trying his patience. What a drama queen. He’s the one infringing on Dean’s space, not the other way around. “Where are you trying to get to?” he asks.
“Show’s over, darlin’,” says Dean, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I’m goin’ home. To get some sleep? You might’ve heard of it?”
“And you’re walking?” This time Dean can’t place the tone in Rollins’ voice, but from experience, he could assume it’s something like pity and probably not be far off. He’s not offended – he hates pity and being pitied as a concept, but Seth Rollins means exactly nothing to him, and his opinion of Dean even less.
“Gotta get there somehow,” says Dean.
Rollins pauses for a moment. He’s still keeping pretty good pace with Dean, the car moving at a slow crawl. Burning up gas like a motherfucker, Dean wants to tell him.
“Want a ride?”
Dean was half expecting that and half not at all, and it delays his response a second.
“I’m okay, thanks,” he says. He doesn’t think Rollins was expecting that, because he sputters a little.
“Your place has to be six or seven miles away, at least, and that’s assuming you live in the city—“
“—I do—“
“—still! Just get in the car. Let me give you a ride home.”
“It’s good cardio, walking,” Dean says breezily. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Ambrose,” Rollins needles. “Come on. You can owe me if it’ll make you feel better about it.”
“I don’t want to owe you,” Dean says. He thinks that’s pretty reasonable. “Not to mention you obviously have your own car. Why would I owe you a ride somewhere when you have a car and I don’t?”
Rollins makes a noise like some birds Dean’s heard early in the mornings. “Come on,” he says again. “If you don’t I’m just gonna keep driving like this until you do.”
Dean weighs his options. For some reason, this seems important to Rollins, and although the petty, childish part of Dean (which usually wins out) finds that to be more of a reason to keep telling him no, there’s part of him that’s curious enough about why Rollins wants to give him a ride so bad to give it a shot.
He sighs, making a show of how put out he is. “I guess,” he says. “Only because you’re annoying and I like peace and quiet.”
Rollins’ face lights up, as much as Dean can see in the dark. Not a bad-looking guy. Not that this is the first time Dean’s looked at him, but, well. He’s better looking when he smiles. In the ring he takes himself too seriously.
The car stops (was almost at a stop anyway) and Dean swings around the front to pop open the passenger side door and lower himself into the front seat. He wrinkles his nose almost immediately, closing the door and then digging beneath the seat for the lever to control how far back it goes.
“Who was sitting here before me, Hornswoggle?” he demands to know, adjusting the seat until his knees aren’t shoved up to his chin.
“Yeah, my best bud,” says Rollins. He puts the car back in gear and Dean looks down with slight surprise.
“Wouldn’t’ve pegged you for a guy who drives stick,” he notes.
“It’s what I learned on.” Rollins eases on the gas, and doesn’t look over at Dean. “My first car was a stick-shift. I only learned how to drive an automatic when I was like twenty-two.”
“And how old are you now?” It’s only polite, Dean thinks, to make conversation. Guy’s giving him a ride home, he can pretend to be a polite person for a few minutes. “Twenty-two and a half?”
“Funny,” says Rollins, and Dean likes the way he says it, sarcastic sarcasm, like it wasn’t funny but he kind of wanted to laugh anyway. “No. Twenty-five. Just turned twenty-five end of last month.”
“Not doing too bad for yourself, huh?” asks Dean. He keeps looking out the front windshield, even though he can see Rollins look at him out of the corner of his eye, maybe trying to measure Dean’s sincerity. Well, he’ll have good luck with that – Dean prides himself on never being obviously sincere.
“Doing all right,” Rollins agrees after a moment. He turns back to look at the road, thank god, and Dean takes the opportunity to get his own look over at Rollins in.
He looks young. That’s probably the most obvious thing about him (when he’s got a shirt on, at least), that he looks his age. Dean wonders if that’s why he grew the beard, to make himself look older. It works, a little, maybe. He looks his actual age instead of twenty, with those Bambi eyes and his hair long. Dean wonders what he’d look like with short hair. Or no beard. Or maybe both.
He tries to picture it. The Rollins in his head looks about twelve years old. He probably wouldn’t look that young, but he looks pretty damn young already, so Dean’s not sure.
“You have any idea when they’re bringing you up to television?” Rollins asks. His fingers drum on the steering wheel. Dean wonders if he’s regretting picking Dean up, if he hadn’t thought this all the way through.
Dean shrugs a shoulder carelessly. “Nah,” he tosses out. “Keep hearing different things. First they were telling me this month sometime, now they’re saying they might push me back until August. Long as I’m still getting paid, I don’t care much. It’s nice to be able to afford dinner and not have to like, shove glass in my eye to do it.”
He stops talking. He hadn’t meant to give that much of himself away, and he can tell from the way Rollins looks over at him again that Rollins caught exactly all of the things in that comment that Dean hadn’t wanted to come through.
Dean waits, tense, for Rollins to bring any of those things up.
“What’s it like?” Rollins asks, which actually isn’t what Dean was expecting him to. He does like surprises. “All that death match stuff. I’ve never really… it wasn’t my area of expertise.”
“You don’t say.” Dean smiles to himself thinking about Seth fucking Rollins of all people trying to navigate a match that has nothing, really, to do with technical wrestling, and everything to do with making the other person hurt as much as physically possible. “I dunno. It was work. Like I know it was probably different from what you’re used to, but it was all just wrestling, for me. Just different strategies.”
“Hm.” Rollins actually sounds interested; points for him. “Y’ever actually shove glass in your eye?”
Dean actually laughs at that, and he thinks that might surprise Rollins, from his little jump. “Not on purpose, nah. Had it shoved in there for me, though. Lotta accidental glass to the eye, too. Sometimes you’re just looking the wrong way, y’know.”
“I really don’t know,” says Rollins, but he’s nodding anyway. “What d’you like better?”
“I told you,” Dean replies, “it’s all the same to me. It’s all wrestling, whether it’s with someone like you or someone who’s using a cheese grater on me.”
“Jesus, ow,” Rollins says. “I’ve only seen that kind of shit on old ECW tapes.”
“Well, that’s kinda the point.” Dean shrugs. “Promotions that do death match shit are just trying to emulate ECW, for the most part. I’m sure some of ‘em would say they don’t, they’re better, but that’s all horseshit, you know. Everything’s inspired by something else. Nothing’s original anymore.”
“That’s kind of a cynical way to look at it,” says Rollins. He looks over at Dean and this time, Dean looks back at him. Rollins is kind of frowning. “Just because something’s inspired by something else doesn’t mean it can’t be original.”
“That’s the definition of the word unoriginal,” Dean points out. “If you’re getting all your shit from other places, which, come on, that’s what wrestling is, it’s not original. You’re looking at it the wrong way.”
“What way am I looking at it?”
“You’re looking at it like something’s gotta be original to be good,” says Dean. He thinks Rollins is actually, genuinely listening to him. He feels weird about that. He expected Rollins to be… different. “Just ‘cause it’s inspired by something else don’t mean it’s not any good, it just means it’s been done before. But everything’s been done before. So stop looking at it like you’ve gotta be the first person to do something for it to matter.”
“I didn’t think that’s how I was looking at it,” Rollins mutters, and his mouth is set all the way in a frown now, the corners turned down. “How’d you do that?”
“Do what?” Dean asks. He fiddles with the string coming off the hole in the knee of his jeans. “I’m just talking, man.”
“No, you—“ Rollins huffs a little, blowing out a stream of air before he continues. “You took this, this really negative sounding thing, like, a word everybody thinks of as a negative thing, and you made it a positive thing.”
“Well, it’s not my problem other people think wrong.” Now Dean’s frowning. He’s not sure what Rollins is trying to say. He’s just saying things the way he thinks them. He doesn’t think of shit like that, positive and negative, right and wrong. It’s just how something is or how something isn’t. And sometimes someone else thinks something else, and that’s on them. Got nothing to do with Dean.
“So unoriginality is a good thing?” Rollins says. He sounds skeptical, which he should, because now he’s just saying dumb shit.
“Don’t put words in my mouth, ‘specially when they’re stupid words.” Dean rolls his eyes and deliberately stretches his legs out as far as they’ll go. “I just don’t think it’s got to be a bad thing. I don’t think it’s anything, by itself. It’s just a word. People use words all the time, and they use them wrong, like, what does unoriginal even mean if you use it like that?”
“It means not original,” says Rollins. Smartass.
“Yeah,” Dean responds. “And that’s all it means. It just means something’s not original. The definition’s not, it doesn’t say in the dictionary next to unoriginal, it doesn’t say ‘a real bad thing to be.’ Because it’s not, on its own.”
“I don’t understand.” It sounds like it was hard for Rollins to say, and Dean can appreciate that. He doesn’t like admitting when he doesn’t get stuff, either.
“Okay, look,” Dean says, sitting up straight, since this is apparently a real big boy conversation he’s having. “Like, uh, has anyone ever compared you to anyone? The way you wrestle?”
Rollins’ mouth twists a little. “Yeah, I guess,” he says, hesitant, like he thinks this is a trick.
“Let me guess, Shawn Michaels? I bet you get Michaels a lot,” says Dean.
Rollins’ shoulder hunch, just a little. “I – maybe. Once or twice,” he allows.
“And were you like, holy shit, how dare you compare me to one of the best wrestlers of all time,” asks Dean, “or were you like, wow, actually, that’s a real big fuckin’ compliment?”
“Oh,” Rollins says, with vague surprise in his voice. “I guess I never really. I guess I just never thought about it like that.”
“Well, you should start. You’d be a lot less uptight.” Dean pats Rollins on his shoulder, a quick one-two hey-chum kind of pat, which surprises both of them, he thinks.
“I’m not uptight,” Rollins argues. He’s still all frowny; his forehead’s gonna wrinkle prematurely if he keeps doing that. “What the hell, you don’t even know me.”
“You got real uptight over me calling you uptight,” Dean points out. God, is he actually having fun? Antagonizing Rollins has really made his night better. He should say thanks. This is much better than walking home by himself would have been.
“That’s not—!” Rollins sputters. “What about me is uptight?”
Dean takes a moment to consider what will piss off Rollins the most. “You just kinda look like it, man,” he says. “Like, high-maintenance. I bet you like your coffee one way and you refuse to drink it if it’s not that way.”
“Everybody has a way they like their coffee!” Rollins protests.
“I bet you,” says Dean, “I bet you have a routine. I bet you wake up every morning and you know exactly what you’re going to do every day.”
“Well, what does that have to do with anything?” Rollins asks. He’s full-on sulking now, and this is the most fun Dean’s had in quite a while. “I’m not uptight because I have a schedule.”
“Not just because you have a schedule,” Dean corrects. “You just look uptight, y’know. Like when you look at someone and you’re like, how small is your dog? Real small, I bet.”
Rollins’ lips press together hard. Dean would bet any amount of money that Rollins’ dog is real, real small.
“I would think uptight people would have cats,” says Rollins. His hands have gone tighter around the steering wheel, and Dean doesn’t point out how uptight Rollins is being about how uptight he is again.
“Rookie mistake.” Dean shakes his head sadly. “Y’see, cat people are actually super not uptight because their animals need no upkeep. Cats don’t need humans. Cats don’t give a shit about humans. Cat owners only know their cats are there when the cat’s like, hey, scratch my belly. Taking care of a dog is a full time job. Taking care of a cat is like, like having a roommate who works weird hours and poops in a box.”
Rollins doesn’t say anything to that, which Dean’s a little upset about, because he’s pretty proud of that analogy. The next mile passes in silence. Dean’s started recognizing buildings as being in his neighborhood, so maybe he and Rollins just won’t speak to each other for the rest of this ride.
No luck. Or maybe good luck – Dean’s enjoying this conversation, as much as he enjoys any conversation these days.
“I still don’t think I’m uptight,” Rollins finally says, but his frown’s relaxed a little, like he’s hearing what Dean’s saying at least. “But I get what you mean. I don’t agree with it, but I see why that’s how you think.”
“Thanks,” says Dean. He doesn’t even try to make it sound less sarcastic than he wants to. “I’m glad I have your blessing.”
Rollins rolls his eyes and it’s so aggressively young that Dean laughs. He’s not even much older than Rollins, he doesn’t think, but despite his talent, the way Rollins carries himself fluctuates between upstanding member of a prominent company and twelve year old boy fighting with his parents.
Dean likes it. It’s charming.
“That’s not what I meant,” says Rollins. He’s starting to sound all prissy again and Dean likes the way that he seems to realize it, making a face at himself. When he starts speaking again, he sounds less fussy, anyway. “I just meant I understood. Why do you turn everything into some sort of slight against you?”
“’Cause it usually is.” Dean slowly pops his gum. He’s more charmed than he’d like to be by how this legitimate stranger thinks he knows Dean so well, because he’s not wrong, at least not so far. And Dean admires that he’s got the balls to pretend, even if he doesn’t. “People don’t like me very much.”
“Are you sure you don’t encourage that?” Rollins asks, glancing sideways at him. “I mean, you really don’t seem the type to… endear yourself to people.”
“You saying you don’t like me?” Dean asks, only half caring about the answer.
Rollins sputters a little. God, that’s fun. “No, I – I don’t even know – No,” he finally says conclusively. “I’m saying you don’t seem like you really care about what other people think of you.”
“That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it.” Dean grins and blows a bubble. It gets stuck on the bristles where he hasn’t shaved in a few days and, annoyed, he shoves it back into his mouth with his thumb.
“Is it a wrong way of putting it?” Rollins asks.
Dean muses on that for a few seconds. “Nah, not really,” says Dean. “Lemme guess, you do?”
“Do what?”
“Care about what people think about you,” Dean prompts. “Get real upset if someone doesn’t like you?”
Rollins’ mouth twists. “I don’t think people who get upset when someone doesn’t like them survive long in this industry,” he points out. Dean concedes the point with a nod of his head.
“Yeah, but you know what I mean,” he says. “People you respect. Not just random fucks who wanna tell you how to do your job, like, actual people who matter.”
“Doesn’t everyone get upset when people they admire don’t like them?” Rollins asks.
“Not if you don’t admire anybody.” Dean winks at Rollins, though it’s kind of pointless since Rollins is still looking at the road. “There’s just a difference, you know, between getting upset about it and taking it into consideration. It’s about realizing there are people who might know more about something than you do.”
There’s a long pause, and then Rollins says, “I can’t picture you ever thinking anybody knows more about anything than you do.”
Dean laughs, full-on, a big belly laugh powered by surprise. Surprise that Rollins up and said something like that, something that wouldn’t have been out of place if it had ended with ‘you egotistical jackass,’ frank and honest. Lord, Dean’s surprised someone hasn’t eaten this kid up, saying everything he’s feeling every second of the day like that.
Not a kid, really. Old enough to know better than to go around with his thoughts out loud like that. But Dean appreciates that at least someone in this locker room isn’t a total bore to be around.
“Not many people do, you’re right about that,” acknowledges Dean, still knuckling under his eyes where they started watering. “I’m pretty much top authority on everything.”
Rollins is smiling now, Dean can tell without even looking at him. “Except how to get people to like you,” he says.
Dean waves a hand, dismissive. “No, no, you got me all wrong. I know how to get people to like you, I’m real good at it. I know exactly how to fake your way into someone’s good graces. I just don’t bother ‘cause it’s stupid and if someone don’t like me for me then fuck ‘em. I got better things to do with my time and better people to do ‘em with.”
“That’s a pretty idealistic way of looking at things,” says Rollins, which Dean hadn’t been expecting. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t intrigued.
“How so?” he asks, leaning back in his seat. He crosses his ankles one over the other and waits patiently. Rollins doesn’t look like he was expecting that, and it takes him a second to start talking. It’s darling, really; Dean wants to pinch his cheeks or some shit.
He knows logically that he’s only like six months older than Rollins, but he feels a fucking decade older than this guy, with his big booboo eyes and his penchant for saying whatever’s on his mind. There’s got to be more to him than that, though; you don’t get this far by just being a cute loudmouth. There’s a lot of those in this business and they usually get beat down until they’re not that anymore. You’ve got to be more to make it to the big time, there’s got to be something more to Rollins and Dean wants to find out what and he wants to know now.
He’s not a very patient man.
“I just think it’s really optimistic to think you don’t need anybody to like you,” says Rollins, finally. “Especially here, where people liking you is the only way you’ll ever get farther than gyms and high school auditoriums. Sure, you can say you don’t need to be liked to get far, and that could be true, whatever, but you gotta be liked by someone for something. If someone doesn’t like you for you here then you become someone else. That’s just… I mean, that’s how it works.”
Dean’s eyebrows have slowly been raising throughout this little speech, and when Rollins goes quiet again, Dean finds himself reluctantly impressed by the logic. It’s more coldblooded than Dean might have expected from ol’ booboo eyes.
“Adapt or perish, huh?” he asks. He peers at Rollins, trying to see what his face is doing, how the expression is changing. “That’s remarkably cynical for someone like you.”
“Hell does that mean, someone like me?”
Dean just gestures to Rollins, because it’s obvious, isn’t it – the face, the title, the flips and shit in the ring. He’s got future company golden boy written all over him.
Rollins doesn’t seem to feel the same way, though, because he just looks over at Dean, narrow-eyed and for long enough that Dean feels tempted to reach over and push his face so that it’s looking back out the fucking windshield, Rollins, what the fuck, you’re in control of a motor vehicle. He doesn’t do that, but he does motion broadly until Rollins looks back to the road.
“What does that mean?” Rollins repeats, glaring sulkily out the windshield.
“Y’know,” says Dean, purely because he knows it’ll piss Rollins off some more.
“Clearly I don’t, Ambrose,” Rollins says.
“Like, look at you,” says Dean. “You’re exactly what they’re looking for, obviously. There’s no way you’ve had to adapt anything about you because you is what they want.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” says Rollins, like Dean’s being at all unclear, but he looks less grumpy. “If I was exactly what they’re looking for, I’d be a foot taller and on the main roster already.”
His hands visibly clench on the steering wheel. Dean wonders if some of those rumors are true that he’s heard, about Rollins clamoring to be called up and getting shot down. He’s probably ready, just skill-wise, but maturity-wise Dean thinks he’s probably got a ways to go.
Then again, Dean’s been sure he was ready for the main roster since the day he started wrestling, so maybe he shouldn’t be making any noise about egos getting in the way of sense.
“Right, because you’re doing so badly for yourself in the meantime,” Dean says.
Rollins shrugs a shoulder. “Best here is still nothing there,” he mutters. Okay, a lot more cynical than Dean had originally anticipated. He’s not sure how he feels about that. He thinks he might like it, but he doesn’t particularly like that.
He doesn’t like, actually, how endeared he is by Rollins in general. He keeps catching himself being charmed by the guy, in little ways, and he thinks: oh. That’s probably how he gets you.
It’s a startling thought, that maybe Dean’s gotten swept up in someone’s tricks. Not even tricks, really, just what Rollins had been saying before, christ, he’d all but told Dean he knows exactly how to make himself likeable no matter who he’s talking to. He wasn’t even being subtle about it and Dean still fell for it.
He’s still impressed, just in a more pissed off way. It’s a completely different kind of manipulative from what Dean’s used to, from what Dean is – Dean gets people to underestimate him by manipulating their perceptions of him, how they look at him, what they think he’s capable of. He’s decent at it. This, though, what Rollins is, what he’s been doing this whole conversation, that’s… not something Dean’s dealt a lot with.
He’s manipulated Dean into liking him.
God, Dean hates him for that.
“Hey, so, I don’t actually know where you live, dude,” says Rollins after a few beats of silence, only interrupted by Dean drumming his fingers against the arm rest. “I’m just kind of driving around in a circle hoping eventually you’ll be like, take a right.”
“Oh.” Dean’s still angry, but he would eventually like to get home, especially if home means away from Seth Rollins, who is some kind of wizard but not in a cool way. “Left, actually. On Sinclair.”
“Gotcha.” Rollins takes a smooth left, steering with his wrist like a douche. God, everything about him is the worst. How did Dean not realize it? Has his time here really dulled his senses that much?
“Right,” says Dean when they get to an intersection, and Rollins nods. His eyebrows are pulled together a little. Dean wonders if it has something to do with his sudden reticence. He hopes so. Fuck you, he mutters in his head.
“Are you a cat person or a dog person?” asks Rollins out of nowhere, and Dean blinks. Is that what he’s been thinking this whole time? Dean hates him.
“Dog,” he answers. He doesn’t think Rollins can do anything with that information, though he has no doubt he’s cataloguing it just in case he can use it against Dean later.
Rollins nods again, and his frown has eased. “That mean you’re an uptight person, too?”
“Nah, no, because I don’t have a dog, I just am a dog person,” Dean says. He’d have thought that was obvious, but maybe Rollins still doesn’t understand the small details here. “I just like dogs better. But I would never get one because I’m not uptight enough to want my entire life to be scheduled around something that eats garbage and shits outside.”
“I have a Yorkie,” says Rollins. It sounds like a confession, and maybe it would be, if Dean hadn’t already figured out the guy had to have the tiniest dog in the fucking world.
“Fuckin’ told you,” he mumbles.
“You didn’t have to tell me I own a little dog, I already knew that,” says Rollins. “Considering it’s, you know, my dog.”
“God, shut the fuck up forever,” says Dean. It’s the most honest thing he’s ever said in his life, probably, but Rollins just laughs like it’s a funny joke, and turns left when Dean irritably flaps a hand in that direction.
It’s past midnight now, almost half past, and Dean’s stuck in a car with someone who thinks it’s funny when he tells him to shut the fuck up and also is probably an evil mastermind. Not that Dean can’t appreciate a good evil mastermind, he fancies himself a fair one on a good day, but not when they’re using their freaky mind powers on him.
The worst part is that Dean knows it’s nothing like that, nothing supernatural, nothing more than humans and what humans can do. Rollins isn’t a wizard. He’s just a guy who’s good at getting what he wants.
There’s a chance that he doesn’t even know how good he is at it. Dean doubts that very much, though. He’s pretty sure Rollins knows exactly how good he is, knows that he can get someone to like him with a smile and a few well placed words.
Maybe Dean’s just paranoid. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he’d rather be too paranoid and keep himself from getting fucked over than think the best of someone he doesn’t know and get himself screwed.
“First building on the left,” Dean grunts, and Rollins pulls into the lot of his apartment building, which fucking sucks; now Rollins knows where he lives. What if he does something with that? Dean doesn’t know what he might do, but… something. It’s possible.
“All good?” Rollins asks, pulling up in front. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Dean’s on to him, which could work to Dean’s advantage. If Rollins thinks Dean likes him, thinks Dean’s all grateful to him, he won’t be expecting it when Dean shows him that he doesn’t, that he isn’t.
“Yeah,” Dean says. He even manages a smile, and it feels as natural as any smile does, when he turns it toward Rollins. “Hey, thanks again for the ride, man.”
Rollins looks surprised, and pleasantly so. He tucks some of his hair behind his ear. “Uh, no problem, man. Any time. Well, maybe not any time, because sometimes I won’t be there, or you’ll probably have another—“ Rollins cuts himself off, and seems to roll his eyes at himself, and Dean punches down the part of himself that still finds Rollins' constant exasperation with his own personality charming. “Any time,” he repeats, firmly.
“Careful, man might take you up on an offer like that,” says Dean. He lets his fingers linger on the door handle, reluctant to leave, or appearing so. He can’t figure out which, whether he’s pretending to be charmed or actually charmed but pretending to not be but pretending to be. This is why he fucking hates Seth Rollins. He can’t figure out his own damn feelings, now, and he hates when he can’t figure out his own damn feelings.
“Wouldn’t make it if I was worried about being taken up on it,” Rollins smiles at him, tentative, sort of, and Dean smiles back. He hopes it looks less insincere than it feels.
“I guess I’ll probably see you around,” Dean says. He finally opens the door, and leans one leg out of it.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Let me know when you’re coming up to television, I want to be around to see it,” says Rollins.
“No problem.” Dean can feel his smile get wider. “I’ll make sure you’re in the building before it happens.”
He swings his other leg out of the car before he can give anything away. Rollins, behind him, is a presence Dean can’t shake, like a shadow he can feel.
“See you around, Ambrose,” Rollins says.
Dean tips a wave over his shoulder. He’ll make sure Rollins sees him sooner rather than later. He just has to hope the powers that be won’t mind him debuting on TV by calling out their favorite boy.