Chapter Text
Castiel hated dating apps. Not just disliked, no, no—hated.
They felt like cheap theater. Everyone claimed to love hikes, dogs, and brunch, which statistically could not be true. If they loved hikes, someone would be on the trail when he went. If they loved dogs, the shelters wouldn’t keep calling for fosters.
Brunch, he allowed, was the one collective claim that bordered on plausible.
People lied so casually about things they would be caught in within a week. Why start a relationship with a small, stupid fiction?
And yet, they all seemed comfortable doing it. Comfortable enough to keep going, to swipe and match and chat as if none of it mattered very much. As if this was simply how things were done now.
Even the honest ones sounded polished and edited within an inch of their life. The longer he scrolled, the more false he felt by proximity, like standing in a room where everyone had agreed not to mention the smell. No one was pretending it wasn’t there. They just didn’t treat it as a problem worth solving.
When he’d first gotten started, he gave thoughtful answers to questions. He wrote carefully, precisely. He found that he got very short responses, and when the other guy actually responded with a question in return, nine out of ten times it was just: hbu?
He adjusted.
Shorter answers. Fewer specifics. Less effort. It worked better that way. Not well, but well enough.
He wouldn’t have downloaded the app at all if Gabriel and Meg hadn’t conspired to torment him.
Gabriel was the only sibling he still spoke to, and Meg was, somehow, his best friend. She’d sat beside him at a gay bar his first week in the city while he tried (and failed) to figure out how people met each other. One moment he was awkwardly clarifying that he wasn’t interested in women; the next, he was agreeing to help her argue with a stranger about the ethics of karaoke rotation. He still had no idea why she’d decided they were inseparable, but he didn’t regret it.
Gabriel and Meg teaming up was never a good omen. They’d made the whole thing a project: signing him up, posing him for photos, bickering over adjectives they claimed made him sound “less bleak.” Bookish got vetoed. Mysterious won, mostly because neither could say it without laughing.
He wanted to delete the account immediately. Gabriel bribed him with $200 up front if Castiel promised to keep it. Then came a bet: last six months on the app and earn another $300; quit early and get nothing. Meg added her own clause: if he quit because he met someone, she’d hand him the $300 herself.
It was less a bet and more a trap with incentives.
Meg, unfortunately, took her role as accountability partner very seriously. She’d snatched his phone more than once to ensure he was “engaging.” She’d even typed replies for him once, resulting in a brief, horrifying exchange with a man who had opened with a picture of himself, unclothed and alarmingly confident.
The whole ordeal was a study in secondhand embarrassment.
Still, Castiel was stubborn, and stubbornness had always masqueraded as virtue in his family. So he scrolled. He swiped. He endured.
It wasn’t that he was lonely, at least, not in a way he liked to admit. His life was fine. Quiet. Predictable. He had good friends, a job that demanded focus but not devotion, a small apartment lined with books and clean dishes drying in the rack. He liked reading late, walking at dusk, making tea and letting it steep too long. His solitude was deliberate. It fit him.
Love, in theory, was pleasant enough. Sex was fine, too. He enjoyed it but it wasn’t the drive for him the way it seemed to be for other people. Mostly he wanted someone to send cool pictures to.
On his morning runs, he sometimes paused to photograph the sky, a bird perched where it shouldn’t be, or a mural half-finished on a brick wall. Ordinary things made strange by timing or angle. He wanted someone to show those to. Someone to eat dinner with, watch television beside, and lie in bed next to with both of them scrolling their phones, sharing the quiet.
Things didn’t have to be perfect. They just had to be livable.
His actual relationships, however, had been anything but peaceful.
Ketch had been charming right up until he wasn’t. Every disagreement turned into a power play that Castiel was expected to lose gracefully. Castiel still remembered coming home one evening to find his bookshelves rearranged, Ketch explaining that it was “more logical this way,” as if Castiel’s system had been an inefficiency to correct rather than a preference to respect.
At the time, Castiel had stood there and catalogued the damage. Nothing broken or missing. There was just a quiet violation that could be explained away if one tried hard enough.
In hindsight, the man had been abusive, though Castiel hadn’t named it that until much later. He’d been venting to Gabriel about something Ketch had said. Another comment framed as concern or another correction masquerading as care, when Gabriel asked why Castiel kept brushing things aside. Castiel told him he was trying to pick and choose his battles.
Gabriel had looked at him for a long moment before asking, gently, “Are you ever going to pick one?”
It still took him a while to leave. But that question lodged somewhere it couldn’t be ignored. A crack, finally, in the story Castiel had been telling himself about endurance.
Alfie, by contrast, had needed reassurance like oxygen. He grew anxious if Castiel didn’t respond to a text quickly enough. Castiel’s habit of disappearing into a book for hours became proof that he didn’t care. At one point, Alfie presented him with a list of things he needed from the relationship.
Castiel read it carefully. He always did. He’d understood, line by line, that he couldn’t give any of them to Alfie.
When Castiel tried to end things, Alfie insisted he’d take whatever Castiel could offer. Anything was better than nothing.
No. Castiel wasn’t staying in that kind of half-life either.
What both relationships had in common, he realized later, wasn’t control or need , no it was how easily he’d learned to adapt around them. To minimize himself. To translate discomfort into something manageable. He was good at living alongside the wrongness of things, as long as it didn’t demand immediate action.
Castiel was beginning to suspect he simply wasn’t built for dating. He wanted to skip ahead to the quiet middle of a settled relationship, where the sharp edges had already been sanded down and the day-to-day was easy. But there was no skipping. So he slogged through introductions, small talk, and disappointment.
Eventually, he tried treating the whole thing like a social experiment: Evaluate. Swipe. Dismiss. Move on.
Distance made it easier to endure.
Then Dean Winchester appeared.
The first photo wasn’t even spectacular: Dean at a dim bar, forearm braced on the counter, smirk half-formed. The others were worse for his libido. One in a tight black T-shirt, leaning against a classic muscle car like he hadn’t noticed the effect. Another at a grill wearing an apron that read MEAT MAN. And the last, Dean in flannel, attempting to bite into a burger that was clearly too large for his mouth was gross, and stupidly endearing.
His profile was funny, too. Dry, clever. The kind of humor that didn’t feel curated. Though, given he worked in marketing, he was probably very good at making a line sound effortless.
Castiel felt his thumb drifting right before he even realized it.
And then it hit him.
Dean Winchester. From work.
The one who sarcastically thanked the printer when it miraculously cooperated. The one who lingered by the breakroom espresso machine, humming half-songs under his breath. Attractive. Confident. Kind.
Dangerous too, though not in a dramatic way.
Men like Dean Winchester did not date men like Castiel.
Not without embarrassment. Not without someone eventually realizing they could do better.
Castiel didn’t need to imagine how that would end. He’d already lived adjacent versions of it. The easiest way to keep something from becoming a problem was not to start.
He swiped left.
Castiel locked his phone, exhaled, and told himself it was better this way. Whether or not he believed it was beside the point. Belief was optional; containment was not.
The problem was that Castiel had noticed Dean long before the app ever suggested he should.
Dean was smart, in that offhand way that made it seem effortless.
Once, Castiel had been in the break room refilling his coffee while a coworker stared helplessly at the crossword. She’d asked if anyone knew a seven-letter word for a dramatic exit.
Dean, walking past with a granola bar, said “flounce” without breaking stride and then exited the break room in a way that Castiel could only describe as exactly that.
Another time, one of the copywriters, Hannah, complained about a noise their car had started making. Dean asked them to imitate it, nodded once, and told them it was probably the serpentine belt. He scribbled Singer Auto on a sticky note and said to tell Bobby that Dean had sent them.
Even Chuck, who cornered anyone who would listen to talk about the novel he was writing, something about a monster hunter who falls in love with a shapeshifter, kept going to Dean for plot advice. Dean pretended to hate it, but he still spent twenty minutes at lunch helping Chuck figure out why his big reveal chapter wasn’t landing.
Even when he was being an ass, there was a self-awareness to it that made people laugh instead of bristle. He knew where the line was, and he knew how to step just close enough to it to be interesting.
He was always talking to someone. Always surrounded. If a stapler jammed, he fixed it. If someone short couldn’t reach a file box, he was already standing. Dean Winchester lived like gravity bent toward him. People adjusted their trajectories without realizing they’d done it.
Castiel noticed because he did the opposite. He made room. He stepped aside. He learned how to exist without disturbing the flow of things.
Dean didn’t need to ask for space. He took it and the world reorganized around him.
Castiel was not that.
The problem wasn’t envy. It was that people like Dean didn’t just enter systems, they permanently changed them.
Castiel knew his own limits with a precision that sometimes felt cruel.
He wasn’t bad-looking. He took care of himself, dressed neatly, paid attention to the things he could control. He was intelligent, steady, and well employed. But none of that translated into interesting. Conversation eluded him the way rhythm eluded tone-deaf singers. He never seemed to catch the right moment to speak, or to laugh, or to mirror the easy cadence of other people.
Sometimes it felt like the world had been handed a script and he’d missed rehearsal entirely.
So yes, Dean Winchester was exactly the kind of man he’d want to swipe right on. And if he’d been a stranger, Castiel probably would have. But he wasn’t a stranger.
He was Dean from the marketing department, who smelled fantastic, who said Morning, Cas like he actually meant it, even though he probably said the same thing to everyone. Which somehow made it worse. Wanting something abstract was manageable. Wanting someone real, someone already woven through his days, was not.
Castiel closed the app and set his phone face-down on the table.
That was enough pretending for one night.
He reached for the book beside him, thumbed the edges of the pages until he slipped back into the story of a man trapped in a malevolent bookstore (a place that demanded choice, demanded commitment, demanded surrender) and who refused, stubbornly, to be forced into a life he didn’t want.
By morning, the impulse had dulled to something manageable.
His alarm woke him before the sun. He laced his running shoes and stepped into the cool air. The streets were empty except for the sound of his breath and the low, hypnotic drawl in his earbuds: Welcome to Night Vale.
He ran until his legs burned and his thoughts smoothed out. Until the wanting lost its edges and became part of the background hum of things he lived with.
By the time he turned toward home, Dean Winchester’s dating profile had settled into the same mental category as everything else he didn’t pursue.
Not a loss. Merely another manageable risk, safely normalized.