Standing Together

Chapter 75

As soon as the door to his limo opens, he's blinded by the bright, flashing lights of the cameras. He steps out onto the red carpet, stone-faced. It's what a lot of the other male artists do, and they look damn good doing it.

Usually, Castiel would be standing out by making funny faces at the cameras, but he really just wants to blend in today. Hopefully, if people don't pay any special attention to him, they won't notice how nervous he is to be here. He's back in a crowded place, and he wouldn't be able to see if anything's wrong. Any one of these camera people could have brought and left a backpack on the ground, and no one would notice until it blew up —

Stop it, he chides himself. He goes through this every time he leaves the house. It's about damn time to put his foot down and tell himself to quit worrying. He's going to ruin his life if he keeps freaking out like this.

If only it were that easy.

In other news, the most boring part of the Grammys is definitely getting pictures taken. He stands against the backdrop and looks at the cameras amidst the yelling that he can barely make out. He looks in various directions and turns his head in different ways so they get a bunch of different pictures, which is the stupidest thing he's ever done, but he has to do it. Occasionally, he'll catch snippets of what the people are yelling at him from behind the cameras to entertain him.

"Over here!"

"Look at me!"

"Give us the weird faces!"

"To your left!"

"You're not looking!"

Castiel rolls his eyes, exasperated. "No shit, I'm not looking. There are seventy different people here. I physically don't have enough eyes to look at all of you at once."

He goes back to his picture taking, but there's a brief pause in the flashes as the camera people laugh. That's kind of nice. He's sure he'll get crucified online for it, but if they laughed, his fans will laugh, so at least there that.

Next comes the interviews. Going into detail about all of them would take far too long, so let's just take a sneak peak into the first interview, and then the last one.

"Castiel, it's so good to meet you," the interviewer, Leah, says.

"You, too," Castiel says politely. "And I love your hair!"

She pats her artificially curly brown hair almost instinctively as she says, "Oh, thank you!"

Castiel can't help but smile to himself. He always compliments the interviewers on the red carpet. If they like him, they're usually a bit nicer to him.

"Well, welcome to the Grammys!" Leah says. "We haven't seen you at anything in, what, six months?"

"Just about," Castiel agrees. It's been a little longer — the terrorist attacks were in June, and it's February now. The number of pictures the paparazzi have gotten of him in that time period probably makes it feel like it's been less time, though. They know pictures of him have been in high demand lately, so they catch him every time he leaves the house.

"What have you been up to?" Leah asks.

"Pretty much nothing, honestly," Castiel says. "I know that's a boring answer and I should probably lie to sound more interesting, but I haven't really done anything lately." He hasn't been able to, if he wanted to avoid the paparazzi.

"Well, you do have a new-ish song with Jack Kline out now," Leah says. "It's in the running for song of the year. How's that feel?"

"It's honestly amazing," Castiel says. "The original version of 'Remember' that I sent Jack is absolutely nothing like what you hear on the radios. He put such an interesting spin on it, and it worked out so well. It's just nice to see that work is being recognized, because he really is the reason it got so big." It's a bit of an exaggeration, but he wants Jack to get all the credit for this, and he honestly deserves it.