Crumble: A Destiel AU

[14]

XXX [Castiel] XXX

"And I expect your three page essays on anxiety on my desk by next class, you're dismissed." Dr. Langford was one of the best professors I've ever had. He gets straight to business and tells us what he wants. He hold the psychology lecture on the first class of the week, gives us our assignment and takes questions afterwards, and then leaves us to do our work. We turn in our assignments the last day of the week and he grades them over the weekend. We have our graded paper when we come in the next week and we start the next lecture. It was simple and it didn't call for any funny business. So far, he had us learn some of the technical vocabulary and the differences between different psychological diseases. We had a large discussion about depression and how it can affect a person, and how it's not just sadness and they can't just turn it off.

"Hey, is that another assignment for psychology?" Dean asked as he came downstairs after his shower. "Yeah, it's an essay over childhood trauma and how it affects the child growing up and into adulthood." He quickly skimmed it, nodding at certain parts and scoffing at others, like he knew exactly what it was talking about. "How long does it have to be?" he flipped through the pages of the rough draft. "It's supposed to be three pages, that's just a rough draft." I told him, continuously typing on my laptop. "Cas, this is already six pages, what are you doing still working on it. This is literally your third time writing this essay." He asked like I usually don't put this much effort into all of my essays. "Yes, but I like to be thorough, you know that. This is my last copy, I promise. I'm just adding more information and taking our useless bits." My best class in high school was English; I was kind of the class grammar Nazi. I always used perfect grammar when writing and speech, weather everyone got annoyed by it or not. I always had the longest essays and always got the best grades on them. I also found that if the first paragraph is about the topic, they wouldn't even read the rest of it and just give it a 100%. I wrote an essay once about how a dinosaurs favorite vegetable was a potato and they died because of over consumption of potatoes. I got thirty bonus points for such a long essay, even though the essay was supposed to be about Hamlet.

Dean liked to look at my work; it was kind of cute actually. He was really concerned about my studies and he liked to ask questions like "What does this word mean?" and "So basically what you're saying here is..." followed by "I'm so glad I'm not becoming a doctor." He took a real interest in psychology; he liked to know how people ticked just like I did. It was genuinely endearing, and it made me love him even more.

XXX [Dean] XXX

Well, thanks to Cas' psychology class, I know how bad my dad fucked me over. All of the childhood trauma and abandonment stuff he put me through was basically the entire basis of me being a whore back in high school, and also his anger issues were very impressionable to me, so there's that. I know knew that he had severely killed my ability to be able to have an open mind about anything he hated, and he's also the reason I know nothing about or express an interest in anything except mechanics. He's the reason I didn't want to be a lawyer like Sammy, or a doctor like Cas, or maybe even go into the military. I only ever wanted to be around cars because that was the only constant in my life. I ate, slept, and breathed cars for 90% of my childhood. I don't know how I'm just now figuring this out, but I now kind of hate him.

It came on me one day, just some random rainy afternoon; I didn't feel like anything. I didn't feel sad, or angry, or any of the usual emotions. I just felt numb. Nothing had triggered it, it just kind of came over me, one minute I was laughing at a comedy on TV and the next I'm blankly staring out the wet window, as if something was going to happen. It was Sammy; not the dog, my little brother. It had been over eighteen years since he died, and every year it's gotten easier to get along without breaking down on his birthday or the day he died. Today was neither, in fact; both were months away. Today, I just thought of him, and I felt numb. I wasn't upset he was gone, or mad at my father for what he did; just numb. "Dean, what's wrong?" Cas had only been home a few minutes, and I hadn't moved from the window in over an hour. i didn't respond, and he knew I had a shut down. "Dean, whatever it is, you can talk to me about it. I'm here for you, you don't have to go through anything alone, I'm here for you." He rubbed my shoulders as he sat behind me. The gesture was nice, but I still didn't react. "Is it the people here? Are they giving you a hard time again?" no response. Part of me was wanting to tell him everything, break down in tears and just let everything out, and another part was telling me to not do anything at all, don't speak, don't move, don't feel. "What's wrong Dean? I want to help you, but I can't help you if you won't talk to me." he kept pushing and pushing, I couldn't handle it anymore.

"It's about Sam." And in that sentence, I cracked open like an egg. The dams in my eyes crumbled and the tears flooded my face, and I felt his sweater on my face.