Pull Me Up (a destiel au fanfic)

chapter 10

When I got inside, Claire and Charlie were still sitting at the table, but this time Claire was blindfolded and trying to put makeup on Charlie, who was laughing hysterically. I sighed and tried to sneak past them. 

"You're back early," she commented, looking at me over a blonde head of hair. 

"Yeah, I ran into-" I stopped, deciding it would be better if I didn't mention Castiel. "The restaurant got crowded so I left."

"Alright," shrugged and Claire took her blindfold off, then they both laughed. I rolled my eyes and began to walk back to my room. 

"Wait, Dean, guess what!" she stopped me, grabbing my arm with a blindfold still strung across her hair. I looked at her expectantly. "My mom apparently has known that my dad was cheating on her for six years, and it's been with Alex every time. One of the emails said that she was having an affair with him at one point, too and he knew that they were married, so they weren't mad when they found out about the affair."

I pulled my arm gently from her grip and said softly, "Your parents are a mess." 

"I know," she grinned halfheartedly. I looked down, then kept going to my room.

Sometimes it almost bothered me what a constant state of calm Claire was always in. It wasn't normal for her to just not care that her parents were cheating on her with the same person. It should upset her that they don't care about what happens to her. It should make her sad that if she told them she was staying with a 24 year old man they wouldn't ask questions. 

So as I locked the door behind me and threw my stack of work onto my bed I sat on the edge, burying my face in my hands. It wasn't normal for her to never be bothered, especially as a teenager. I decided to dismiss it for now, despite the fact that it was a constant nagging in the back of my mind. 

I wanted to finish reading the birthday note, but I figured I would have to eventually talk to Cas about it. For some reason I wanted him to be there with me when it happened. His presence was incredibly calming to me, and I couldn't tell if it was because it's what he trained to be as a therapist or if it was because I had feelings for him. 

I'd known him for over a month now and I hadn't known he was supposed to be a therapist the whole time, so it made sense that I would just feel that fondness about him either way. I couldn't just trust my emotions, though, because they were strewn all over the place. I wasn't able to decipher one from another, even though somewhere in the back of my mind there was the thought that I was just trying to protect myself from losing someone I love again.

After what I figured had been fifteen minutes of me stewing in my own thoughts, I pulled Sam's phone from the stack of notebooks and opened back to where I'd been listening to The Choice of Love. I didn't quite know how it fit into his psychology/law majors, but I knew he had his reasons. This time I didn't put headphones in and pressed play, laying back on my bed. 

"Once you heal, or in other words, the feelings go aw- shit. Ugh, okay Sam. *clears throat* Once the symptoms fade away, what you're left with is nothing. You no longer feel the heat that was once there, but instead only lingering fondness. You care about whoever- whomever? Dammit"

I chuckled when I realized that this must have been a rough draft and continued to listen.

"You still care about whomever you had the feelings for, but the feelings are no longer as heighted as they once were at the beginning. What this means is that you're past what people call the "honeymoon stage" or staying true to the metaphor, the brute of the sickness. You're left with- at first- a hangover type feeling. It's not exactly as bad as a hangover, but it gives you thoughts of 'Why am I not feeling this anymore? Did something go wrong?' and now you don't exactly know what to do. During this stage you just have to push through it, because there is nothing wrong with you. This is just your hormones balancing and adjusting to having this new person in your life. There's nothing wrong with it.