18 Dates - Destiel High School AU

Castiel

Castiel's mornings were not normally this hectic. He was usually set and ready for school an hour before he even had to leave the house.

This was because he was generally a morning person and liked preparing for the day ahead. It meant he was always punctual, but today... not so much.

He had spent most of the night finishing various sheets of homework, as he had nothing better to do, and somewhere along the way, the teen had fallen asleep and crumpled over his desk.

It felt as uncomfortable as you would imagine it to feel, his face pressed against the paper, books, and solid hardwood of his work space, but Castiel had slept there all night without waking, which left him aching and unready for the following day.

He had not put any of his stuff ready for school, nor had he changed out of the clothes he had been wearing the day before. All in all, he was a mess.

The clock on his wall read a time far too close to the time he was supposed to leave, and he was only now doing up the buttons of a nice white shirt.

People tended to share their opinions on Castiel's clothes freely and loudly, usually accompanied by his books being smacked out of his hands in the school hallways or pushed into the long metal lockers that lined those same hallway walls, but it never seemed to deter him.

He liked his button-up shirts, liked that he had many colours, patterns, and materials of them, or liked that he could choose to do the collars up to the top or leave them open enough to show off whatever T-shirt he put on underneath.

He liked his skinny jeans and his dress pants. He liked wearing oxfords or brogues, and he liked sometimes accessorising with ties, belts, and suspenders crossed at his back or hung at the hips.

People called him all sorts of things for it, like theatrical or hipster, whatever that is.

Usually, he just gets called gay.

On more than one occasion, though, he had been called a... well, there was no point being sensitive about it. He'd been called a fag. A lot.

That word terrified him. It was nasty and unnecessary, thrown around like knives by cruel people with only the intention of hurting. It was a disgusting and closed-minded thing to call someone.

Regardless, he tried very hard not to care about any of the name-calling or bullying. He has actually spent a lot of time convincing himself to only care about his need for expression. As a closeted gay kid, dressing up how he really wanted to seemed the only way to let himself be himself without, well, actually being himself.

He could not be open about the gender he liked, but he could be open about the clothes he liked, and in the end, rumours were just rumours. Castiel would deny everything until he ceased to exist or the world ended, whichever came first.

As he tucked his shirt into his trousers and bent to put his shoes on, he noticed his brother across the hall. The kid was lying across his bed, not having a care in the world. They were, sort of, polar opposites. It was probably to be expected considering they were not blood-related.

None of Castiel's siblings were actually.

The five of them were all adopted into the family early on in their lives. His dad had told him when he was younger, explaining where they'd come from, that it was because his mother had a big heart and too much love to give, which was true, but he had also found out a few years later that she could not have kids of her own, so she adopted as many kids as she could to give love to.

She had adopted Lucifer (not his real name, but a joke that had stuck) and Michael together because they were biological brothers and kept together in the system. They were a year apart in age, currently twenty one and twenty, respectively.