Clipped Wings

[TWO] Trench Coat Theif

"I'm gonna be late, I'm gonna be late, I'm gonna— c'mon baby, you can do it." Dean mumbled into his Impala's dash, praying that she would start up.

The ole '67 Chevy Impala was in for a repair, but he couldn't bring himself to bring her into the auto-shop. He was still angry about getting laid off. She usually still got him to where he needed to go, but today was not one of those days.

"Dammit!" Dean swore, slamming his palms against the steering wheel. It was at least a 15 minute drive to the grocery store that he had work at. And, he had about 30 minutes to get there... on foot.

Dean threw open the car's door, stumbling out with his jacket in his hand and slamming the door behind him. It was the typical, dry-cold kind of December morning that chilled the inside of Dean's lungs.

"Running never hurt anyone." Dean muttered to himself as encouragement. But, at about 10 minutes in, he was thinking quite the opposite.

Why does my life suck so bad? Dean thought, his lungs already burning.

He was only 10 minutes late, his chest heaving as he stumbled his way through the back door of the grocery store.

"You're late, Winchester!" Naomi, snapped. She held her clipboard up to her face and wrote down his time.

"Car problems, Naomi, I had to run all the way here." Dean managed to say, gasping for air.

"Not an excuse, Dean." She barked, narrowing her venomous eyes at him. Dean rolled his eyes, wondering why she was in more of a bitchy mood than normal.

"Sorry." Dean mumbled, finally returning to a normal breathing pattern.

"It's fine, Dean. This is your first warning." Naomi stated, peering over the clip board at him. "You're assigned to house keeping for most of the day. There were a lot of misplaced items lately. We can't have this sort of disorganization during the holidays. I'm sure you can fix the problem." And with that, she turned on her heels and walked away to lecture her next victim.

"Great." Dean muttered to himself, rolling his eyes and heading to drop his jacket off in the break room. It's going to be a long ass day.

===========================

"Who puts an apple by the apple juice? Those are completely different forms of apple!" Dean ranted, frustrated. How stupid can people be?

Dean turned to walk back to the front of the store, thinking he's picked out all the misplaced items. It was pretty dead in the store today considering there was only a week until Christmas. So, Dean whistled a song to himself and walked through the store, feeling surprisingly content with his shitty life at the moment.

That was until he strolled passed some lunatic opening up a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and eating them in the middle of the isle. Dean back tracked his steps, blinking a few times to make sure he was seeing what he thought he saw. A man with dark hair wearing a tan trench coat over a suit, was eating a bag of chips.

"Uh, sir?" Dean asked, taking a couple steps towards the "hard to miss guy" he was pretty sure Jo was talking about yesterday.

His eyes glanced up to Dean, stopping him in his tracks. They were blue. A bright, sapphire blue that surprised Dean so much he couldn't remember why he was bothering him. After a couple moments of awkward eye contact, the trench coat guy was the first to break the silence.

"Hello." He greeted, his voice deep and rough, but sounding strangely smooth. He dropped his eyes and reached his hand into the bag of chips, bringing Dean out of his thoughts and into reality.