18 Dates - Destiel High School AU

Dean

Dean Winchester has never been a morning person. He never felt fully rested, just more worn out, as if he'd not slept at all. It sucked, but it was life, and so Dean pressed on... and drank copious amounts of coffee to keep himself awake, but that was whatever.

Shutting off his alarm without smashing it into tiny little pieces like he really wanted to, Dean dragged himself out of bed.

He made his way to his closet to change into everyday clothes and out of his baggy sweatpants. His hands shook from the chill in the room.

Looking through the hangers, Dean decides to pick one of the four almost identical-looking green flannel shirts he loves so much, throw it on over a black tee, and put on some old-looking denim jeans. But hey, it's what you're comfortable in that matters, right?

The teen heads for the stairs, his socked feet barely making a noise on the carpet as he walks, and drapes the necklace he'd pulled off of his desk as he'd left his room around his neck. The small metal pendant is cold to the touch, even through the fabric of his shirt, and Dean wraps his fist around the thing to warm it up.

Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, having just narrowly avoided all the wooden steps that squeak, Dean grabs his old boots and sits on the last step to put them on.

He takes his sweet time doing up the laces and stares up at the clock when he's done. It's six o'clock. He sighs. Did school really have to start so early?

"Morning, Dean." His dad's voice pulls his eyes away from the clock. The younger man tenses at the sound of the older man.

He didn't have the best relationship with John Winchester.

Most of the time, Dean didn't want to speak to him, and even more of the time, he didn't want to be around him.

All that being said, Dean did usually end up having to converse with the oldest Winchester. He was his dad after all, and unfortunately, Dean still lived under his roof, which made giving him the silent treatment hard to achieve.

It didn't help that Dean was sarcastic to the bone and sort of hot-headed, as was his dad, and sometimes stuff just slipped out of his mouth. Snide comments and whatnot—you know the deal. It was a minor detail. The point was that they bashed heads regularly over the smallest and stupidest things.

Their relationship hadn't always been a fractured mess, though. There was a time when they had been happy, but shit had happened since then, and his dad had thrown that happiness out the window for reasons Dean couldn't understand.

Fathers were meant to support their children. John had decided he didn't want to do that for Dean a long time ago.

"Mornin'." Dean mumbles back and pushes off of the step to make his way to the kitchen. He started looking for a mug once in there, opening and closing cabinets so he could have a hot cup of coffee to feel more alive.

He felt his dad's eyes on his back the whole time he was pouring the drink and could almost perfectly envision how this conversation was going to go. Far too many mornings had started like this, and just because the location was never the same didn't mean Dean couldn't still feel the atmospheric change.

"So..." His dad speaks up. Dean does not turn around. He just sipped his cup of coffee. "I have to leave early this morning. For work reasons," Of course, it was always work-related. If his dad was up early enough to catch Dean before he carted himself and his little brother off to school, it was always to say that they had to leave and that they were moving again.

Dean would bet his life that the man was going to tell him that both he and his brother needed to pack their bags. Sam will be mad. They'd only just gotten here—four days ago, to be exact—and they hadn't even started going to the school their father had enrolled them in yet.