Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The view through Dean’s windscreen is fucking amazing. The remnants of the old buildings punch through the layers of smoke and cloud and sunset, broken bits reaching like claws up into the sky. This high up, held in Baby’s cockpit with her still settling gently around him, it’s like Dean’s the only human left in the whole damned world.

The trouble is, he’s not, and that’s not what’s going through his mind right now anyway.

“Yeah. Yeah, maybe you do have a couple more good races in you. I think you do. You’re a legend. Dean Winchester driving his Impala 2067, at the starting suspension, hah! I know that, everyone knows that. But…”

There’s always a ‘but.’

“But what about your brother? What about Sam?”

Even two days later, that squeaky, soft-spoken voice still echoes in Dean’s ears.

Of course, Dean knows exactly what Sam would say about this situation—what faces he’d make, the deliberate way his chin would draw back and tuck inwards in that froth of ridiculous hair, the way his voice would take that deep, judgy echo. Yup. He’s pretty sure he knows exactly what Sam would have done, if the great Chuck Shurley had come to Sam Winchester with this proposal, rather than to Dean.

(Dean doesn’t know what surprised him more: that one of the biggest corp leaders in the exoregions was bothering to meet with him in person, or finding out that the great Chuck Shurley, head of Angelcorp, wears lifts.)

“It’s such a little thing,” Chuck said, opening big, brown eyes wide, his lower lip tightening into something that could have been sympathy underneath his thick, brown beard—or maybe a smirk. “So easy, right, Dean? All you have to do is… is let it go.”

Right. As if throwing away the one principle that Dean’s managed to hang on to his whole damned life is ‘easy.’ Maybe to a sleazebag little rich dude with credits coming out of his ass, it is. Dean, honestly, wanted to punch him in the crotch and then tell him exactly where he could shove his “proposal.”

Sam, though. Sam would have said “Thank you for your consideration. I’m going now,” all with that careful, uncomfortable smile on his face that makes it clear exactly when he thinks someone’s being a dickwad. (Dean’s very, very familiar with that face: Sam’s made it at him often enough.)

Trouble is, Chuck did come to Dean with this “proposal.”

Trouble is, for all that Dean’s pretty sure Sam would have politely told Chuck to stick his offer up his ass like whatever credstick he’s dangling in front of them, Sam is the one Dean’s doing this all for in the first place.

“It’s the dream, right?” he tells Baby, running his hand gently over the tight, smooth wrapping of her steering column. “You know you’ve made it as a racer when you’ve got rich guys coming to you with ‘proposals.’”

Yeah. Maybe that’s true. But even just saying it aloud, his own voice echoing in Baby’s tight, familiar cockpit, makes something thick and sour move through the back of his throat.

Baby doesn’t have an answer for him, of course. She’s quiet and settling into stillness around him, her triple engines silent. Outside, he knows her wing flaps are slotted so neatly back into place that all that’s visible of them is the seam through her jet-black paint job. She’s heavy, his girl; it’s why she can take turns so cleanly, why she doesn’t wobble in the wake cast by other flyers. She doesn’t rock in the thin wind that he can hear splitting against her wings. This high, there’s no debris to rattle off her hull.

Through the drop-down of her windscreen, Dean can still see the barest tops of the very tallest skyscrapers. The old, worn craggy stones of them climb through the low-hanging clouds. They’re mostly just ghosts and skeletons by now, of course, and if Dean flew any closer, he’d be able to see their girders, their struts, the old rot of wires and insulation that the wind hasn’t scoured free. But from this distance, the old husks look like weird, angular mountain peaks. The sky beyond them is spiked with orange and pink, shaded with a purplish dusk at the very top.

Up here, it’s just the sky and the obstacles; no ground to crash into. Yet.

He always takes the time, the day before he’s about to fly a race, to bring Baby into the clouds, give them both a good vantage point. Dean’s always been really good at finding a stable spot high up to put Baby up and take in the view. All the girls have always thought so, anyway.

Some of the boys, too.

Well, one boy. Just one.

Why the fuck is he thinking of that now? Dean scoffs at himself. He hasn’t thought of him since… since…

Yeah, who the fuck’s he kidding. Even if Dean didn’t think of Cas so much more often that he should, considering all the years that have passed since Cas walked out on him… being here, perched higher than any drones can fly over the ghost city that makes up the course for the Chicago Race, yeah, of course that’d bring back some memories.

“No way, Cas. Not a fucking chance. The Chicago? That’s the biggest damned purse in racing. That’s for… for corp racers. With datajacks and strategy teams and shit. Not for small circuits like us.”

Like Dad, Dean didn’t say, not then, because even when it was just the two of them looking down at the Chicago race track together, saying that felt disloyal.

“Why not?” Cas answered immediately. “Do you think Baby can’t handle it? Or do you think you can’t?”

Dean tilts his head back in his headrest and smiles thinly up at Baby’s windscreen. God, Castiel always was such a know-it-all asshole.

But Cas was also the one who started this whole head-above-the-clouds tradition. Who said, “Why not go higher? We should find the highest point that Baby can settle on stably. Give her a look at everything that’s her domain.” Cas always came out and said shit like that, like he had no idea it was weird.

Cas would’ve loved this view. Wouldn’t he? This is so much higher than they went, the last time Dean was here. He’d probably have said something really poetic, something about watercolor ponds rippled by thrown stones, or how from this far away, the tops of the old, broken buildings look like islands in an ocean, the clouds the froth on top of the waves. Probably would have even been able to name some of the buildings, because he was always a sucker for old Terra history stuff.

Dean chokes out a little laugh. The last time they were in Chicago, Dean wasn’t the least bit interested in what these buildings were called, not with Cas looking at him and licking his lips.

Cas was a sucker for a lot of things. He didn’t care about things like curfew, like how much trouble he’d get into with his uncle Zachariah for hanging out with the ‘wrong sort,’ like whether his fancy cram school uniform fit properly or his tie was tied right.

But other things, well, best not to get him started. Flyer tech. Astronomy. Heights. Oh, yeah, those things got him going.

“That’s Canopus,” Cas said, pointing at a fleck of light piecing its way bravely through the clouds. He directed his finger just a little to the side. “And that, that one’s the Academy.”

“How do you know that isn’t a star, too? Or a satellite? Or space trash in re-entry?” Dean asked, laughing.

“It doesn’t have the right trajectory,” Cas answered, serious as anything, as everything. “Also, it has a faint luminescent halo. My eyes are very good, you know.”

“Hell yeah they are,” Dean answered, bored with the talk of stars and the Academy, turning to kiss him.

“I’m sure that’s supposed to be some sort of innuendo, but right now, I don’t care,” Cas answered, smiling faintly into Dean’s lips. “This is wonderful. Thank you for bringing me up here.”

Well, of course Dean had. Why wouldn’t he? Cas loved being in the sky so much.

Hell, the first time Cas had Dean in his mouth, it wasn’t at nearly this altitude, but they were still high up on an abandoned building—just them and Baby and the wind tugging at Cas’s tie, Dean’s back against the flyer’s still-warm engine block, his jeans around his knees. Cas had no idea what he was doing, but his mouth was hot and sweet and unsure as he kissed and licked his way enthusiastically up and down Dean’s cock, ducked his nose into the ticklish spot where leg met groin. God, Dean was so hard, splayed out over Baby’s flank, that he didn’t even know if his cock was twitching all on its own or if that was the little flicks of Cas’s tongue.

It’s a good memory. A really good one. When it comes to Cas, most of them are, to be honest. And Dean still, the day before every race, goes off on his own and seeks out the highest point he can land Baby on safely.

And if Sam never asks why, well, Dean never tells him.

Cas always really loved the view from high up—as high as he could get. Closer to the sky, the exoregions.

Closer to the Academy.

Maybe there was something to that, considering the Academy got him in the end.

Suddenly, Baby’s confines are too tight, and Dean pops her glass with a grunt, pushing it open—no fancy magnetic openers for her; her windscreen moves like he does, with good ol’ muscle and counterweights and nothing else. But the smooth oval dome slides easily on its tracks, well-maintained, lifting comfortably on perfectly balanced levers and letting him out. He doesn’t bother to switch open her side hatch, just swings his legs up and climbs his way carefully out.

Dean keeps a hand on the edge of her solid bulk as he settles his weight on the gritty, cracked surface she’s resting on, though, testing to make sure the old concrete under his feet is solid before he lets go. Dean might be more familiar with and better with heights than most people, but if a badly timed gust of wind tosses him over the edge, well, Baby’s altimeter tells him they’re some four hundred meters up in the air. It’d be nothing but the screaming until terminal velocity killed him.

Baby’s solid bulk, all of her metal and plastiglass, doesn’t shift or rock as he leans back against the frame of her cockpit. He thinks this flat space that he found must’ve been a helipad or something in the bad old days, because he’s been to a lot of racing cities, but it’s pretty much the widest perch he’s found this high up. Up here, in the sky of one of Earth’s oldest ghost cities, the air is thin and sharp and sour, but without the thick, choking smog of one of the populated areas, or the filtered sparkle of the contained arcology cities.

There’s nothing left in Chicago but the race.

But that’s not nothing. That’s far from nothing.

If Dean looked over the edge, he knows he’d see the flyer starting circles already lit up in their team colors, suspended high above the ground. He’d probably be able to see the faint, glowing yellow holographic stripes that line the raceway, far below. If he went down there and walked among them, he’d be able to stick his hand through the lights and feel the faint push of the repulsion magnets.

Sometimes he wonders why they bother with those repulsion guardrails, though, in places like this. Sure, they’ll keep humans out of the raceway; the lines have enough electromagnetic charge for that. When he was a kid, Dean thought that was what they were for—making sure passersby didn’t end up in the flight lanes when the racers were going past.

Dean remembers his dad holding him up to a guardrail when he was still knee-high to a gnat, and pushing his hands out, laughing with delight as the translucent yellow barrier shoved back at him. It seemed like magic, then.

He had no idea, of course, not when he was a kid. No one in their right mind goes anywhere near an active race: the sound of unshielded flyer engines firing on full bore will burst eardrums, and the wind kicked up by a racer going at full momentum will knock a pedestrian ass over teakettle like they were standing in a zero-grav spin.

Maybe on one of the open plains—the straightforward, straightaway races—it makes sense to set up those translucent lines of light that determine how far lateral a racer can stray, how tightly they can take a curve without being disqualified. In a really close race, those centimeters of squeaking by in a turn tight as a magnetic dress can make the difference between a prize pot and walking away with pockets empty of anything but the receipt for the entrance fee.

(Yeah, Dean still enters the kind of races where the betting slips and the receipts and, sometimes, even the payouts, are in good old paper notes, not metal and certified credstick. Paper’s still legal tender—well, okay, it’s legal tender most places. But he and Sam can’t afford to turn up their noses at a nice little egg of a prize, just because it doesn’t come accredited to one of the megacorp banks. Plus there’s the fact that at that kind of race, generally at least one of the other racers will buy them dinner and drinks that night, back-slapping them good-naturedly and asking how they do it, old-fashioned and techless like Dean is. And, well, that’s one less meal that Dean has to shell out for, right?)

But here? In one of the ghost cities? Those bright yellow repulsion lines are set up so close to the buildings around them that if a racer crosses them, they’re not looking for disqualification, they’re looking for a body bag. Even the media corps send multiple drones to film, because in every city race, at least a few of the little nuisances crash into corners, or get clipped by racing flyers, the tiny little red eyes snuffing out in a spray of sparks. The stakes are high in these big races, the bets are astronomical, and the pot is a sweet, sweet deal.

It’s how they make their living, after all. Sam’s not up to Dean’s level, but all the same, there still aren’t many who can take the gutters and curves of a canyon the way Dean’s baby brother can. Sammy probably still holds the record for the River Raisin Run. (Dean has no idea whether it’s actually the most crooked river in the United States, but it sure as hell seemed it when he was sitting in the ready room, watching on the screen as Sam’s lighter, smaller electric flyer skimmed over the surface of the water so lightly he barely sent up a wake behind him.) Sam may not love and live the thrill and roar and fever of the racing life the way Dean does, but say what anyone will about him: Samuel Winchester does not half-ass things that he’s set his mind to.

Chicago is an urban track, though. It’s the urban track. It’s impossibly sharp angles, nose up to the open sky and the tall skeletons of the building clawing the clouds. In the cities, Dean’s always been better. He’s always been better than almost anyone.

Dean’s good. Hell, he’s better than good. He’s the best out there.

And if no one knows it’s because Dean started street racing to put food on the table at sixteen, illegal as fuck, while Dad applied to big race after big race, coming home empty handed and high on ethanol plugs and big dreams, well. Dean was never caught, never charged or disqualified, so what does it matter?

It doesn’t matter, not anymore. It doesn’t matter to the skies or to the stars that Dean doesn’t even have a datajack or sim-implants: hell, Baby doesn’t even have a rig setup for them. He rides her the old-fashioned way: hands and feet, stick and eyes, the flyer and the horizon—like he always says.

Doesn’t make them much, but it makes them enough. It doesn’t even matter that Baby doesn’t have a dedicated dock to settle into for the night, so Dean has to use the public electric charging stations right along with the wagons carting the working stiffs to and from the skyways.

None of that matters: Dean still made it.

“Here I am, Cas,” he says, up here, where no one can hear him talking to a guy who probably barely remembers his name. “I made it. Skies and stars, here I am. Can you believe it? Doing the Chicago run, just like you always said I would. Only independent racer to qualify for a first-start seed in, like, six years.”

He looks up into the darkness crawling over the tops of the buildings. Yeah. Curfew, soon. Time to go—this altitude is too high for most drones to hover, but he’s still got to get back to the racing city in the outskirts. It’d be too damned embarrassing to get himself snagged by a surveillance drone and disqualified, this close to the race.

But this is Dean’s favorite time, his favorite kind of altitude—so high that it’s like there’s no one else but him.

Up here, above the heavier smog layers, if he squints, Dean might see a star or two. He might even see the brighter, fast-moving glow of the suborbital city of the Academy, in the right light.

But the lights shining up from the raceway below tint the sky with light pollution, and there are no stars to be seen.

As he climbs into Baby and her engines fire with a familiar thrum under him, all he can see is the way the tops of the buildings, crumbled and long since gone lightless, fade off into the dark.

Dean made it. Here he is. Yup.

And it’s a hell of a view.

But he’s got to say this, too—to Baby, if no one else. He squeezes her steering column, feeling the padding of the leather wraps around them—wrapped new yesterday, for luck, like always. He closes his eyes and feels her hum and tremor eagerly underneath him, around him, as they rise into the sky. His faithful, beautiful girl. She’s always been so good to him.

“Too bad,” he says, with his tongue moving too slowly and his throat thick, “that I’m gonna be throwing this race.”

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

Along with their allotted ration of tasteless, fortified bread—all the vitamins and minerals anyone could possibly need, want, or digest!—he and Sam have real eggs for dinner. Dean can always tell the difference between real and synth, no matter what anyone says about the quality of protein synthetics. They might not look any different from real eggs, but he can tell. He even treats himself to one strip of salty, savory bacon (yeah, yeah, that one’s synth; Dean’s not spending the payout he’s getting from Chuck tomorrow until it’s actually in his pocket).

Sam makes a face at Dean’s bacon, but after Dean pokes at him, he allows himself one serving of hydroponic lettuce, taking the biodegradable bowl out of its dispensing slot as carefully as if he’s handling the synthetic gear oil they can only afford to stock up on once a year, and, to Dean’s disgust, dabbing on a splash of vinegar.

“Crunchy water?” Dean scoffs. And not even with cream sauce on it? Sure as Saturn that was not what he meant when he said that Sam should treat himself. “Seriously, Sam? Seriously?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Gotta keep hydrated,” he shoots back, and crunches on his lettuce obnoxiously loudly.

With his mouth closed, though. Of course. Because that’s just Dean’s little brother for you.

(The only reason Dean bothers to chew with his mouth closed is that he’s savoring the flavor of his piece of bacon. Stars above, every time he thinks he’s imagined how good bacon is, he gets to taste it again, and fuck. It really is that good. Sometimes he wonders if the real thing could possibly be any better than synth.)

“I saw Jody while you were at registration this afternoon,” Sam reports, once he’s through masticating the first few leaves of his lettuce.

Dean’s back relaxes a little. What sucks the most about these really big races is the fact that he can’t dock down with Baby. All the flyers get housed together in the main warehouse to prevent unauthorized mods, and the racing commission sets up its own independent security. Sure, that does mean that he doesn’t have to pay a public dock to charge Baby up: she’ll be as topped-up tomorrow as she ever gets.

But if Jody’s running head of security and Donna’s doing the tech inspections, at least Dean can be sure that everything’s on the up and up and that Baby will be snug and safe in her assigned spot overnight.

‘Cause if Chuck feels so damned strongly about Dean throwing the race, well, Dean’s not a fucking idiot. Yeah, he agreed to the deal, but what if he hadn’t? Or what if he changed his mind? Sure, Shurley struck him as the kind of higher-up who wouldn’t know how to get his hands dirty if he were wrist-deep in a mud pile, but that doesn’t mean shit, with as much money as he’s got.

It’s gotten a lot harder to sabotage a flyer before a big race like this—that’s what race inspectors like Donna are for—but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

“Awesome,” Dean says, and means it. “Damn, how long has it been since we saw her and Donna?”

“A year, maybe two,” Sam admits. “Jody said the racing commission keeps them pretty busy. Alex is in cram school now in the South Dakota arcology.”

Dean’s eyebrows jump, and he whistles. Shit, he remembers when Alex was still in her government school jumper and pigtails. And grouchy even then. “No way. Yeah?”

“Yeah. Top of the scoreboards already—no shock, right? She’s aiming for the nursing institute on Tau Ceti.” Sam grins. “Jody was getting teary-eyed just talking about it.”

Dean has to admit, he is impressed. It’s not often that the specialized schools take someone from Terra, rather than from one of the inhabited—much richer—exoplanets. It used to be different, Cas told them; people used to get to finish high school and apply, and then just go, but now? Pretty much the only way to get off this rock and into one of the fancy offworld academies is to finish high school and then pay through the tailpipe to get filtered through one of the specialized feeder programs.

Of course, there’s fancy exo-schools, and then there’s the Secular Intergalactic Academy of Law, Business, and Economics—the closest to Terra, and, maybe, in some ways, the furthest away.

That’s gonna be Sam’s school, Dean thinks—carefully, poking at the idea like he used to poke at the hole left behind when a tooth fell out. And it doesn’t put a knot in his stomach to think it. That’s a good sign, right? He did the right thing, making that deal with Chuck.

Sam’s quiet as they drop their bowls into the disposal slot with the familiar splish-hiss of the acid at the bottom of the receptacle. The sprawling racing village on the outskirts of Chicago, just outside the dead city, is surprisingly well-lit, and there’s no trash in the streets as they leave the diner. Sure, the whole town is still mostly coffin hotels—yeah, yeah, they’re technically called ‘capsule hotels,’ but the rooms are still the size of, y’know, coffins—and crash shops for emergency repairs. But considering that he and Sam grew up in a place that earned the name of being a wreck squat—because most of the area was built on the wreckage of old buildings and downed flyers—Dean thinks it’s even kind of nice.

The air is smoggy and full of particles, the way it so often is this close to a major racetrack after the exhibition races the day before, and Dean can hear the whirr and whine of a crash shop hard at work off the main strip. But there are no cracks in the pedestrian sidewalks, and the lane lights for commuter flyers overhead don’t flicker, bright lines catching the dust in the air. The compactors on the corners aren’t overflowing or leaking their acid out of the bottom, and there are no bars in any of the windows. The restaurants and stores—actual stores, not just flyer parts and bookies—are lit with electric lighting, not halogen—Dean can hear the thin whine of it in his back teeth. Now that it’s past flight curfew, there are whole families walking around in the streets, some of them pretty well-dressed.

Dean almost trips over his own feet when a small kid darts in front of him, zooming along on a tricycle and yelling “VRRRR!” in a high-pitched imitation of a racing flyer. The kid’s big sister isn’t nearly so lucky, though, and she crashes headlong into the electric pole that is Sam Winchester’s legs. Fortunately, she’s on foot.

“Hey, whoa!” Sam laughs, steadying her by the shoulders. “Are you okay?”

The kid looks up at Sam, whining, “Owwww,” and Dean stares.

Because there’s a radiant purple circle at the kid’s temple, casting a lavender haze into her blond hair. In the dark, a glowing series of broken dashes and dots carve their way down the side of her face in the classic paired meridians of corporate racing implants.

She can’t be older than ten.

What the fuck?

Before he can say anything, though, the kid’s little brother has turned around and pedaled back to them, yelling, “I win, I win!” When Dean looks up, still stunned, he realizes the little boy has the same marks on his face, too—purple circle at the temple, dots and dashes in a long line down both sides of his face, a triangle in the center of his forehead. But his are drawn on, in sweat-blurred purple ink.

“Did not!” the girl squeals, pushing away from Sam’s legs with enough force that he blurts out ‘Hey!’ “There was an… an obstacle!”

“You’re supposed to go around things, slowpoke!”

“I’m not a slowpoke, you’re a slowpoke!” the girl whines, stamping her foot.

It takes Dean that long to realize that the little glowing lights creasing the girl’s face aren’t flashing or changing, even as hot under the collar as she’s getting. And, most telling, there’s no glow in her irises.

Shit. Wow. Okay. They’re realistic as hell, but they’re not real. No one’s putting corporate racing implants in kids. Fuck. Okay.

That’s when he remembers to breathe.

“Whoa, whoa, racers,” Dean says, stepping between them and crouching down, putting a hand on the front wheel of the little tricycle. “Hey, why’re you fighting, aren’t you both on the same team?” It’s just a guess, but there’s a vague similarity to the markings on their faces.

That makes them pause and consider.

“Yeah…” the boy mumbles, peeking suspiciously over at his big sister in a way that makes Dean want to smile. The kid reaches up to touch the pattern on his cheeks, blurring the ink further as he knuckles at it. “I guess.”

(He doesn’t sound thrilled about it.)

“Nice tech. The Vampires, right? From New Orleans?” Sam says, leaning his shoulders over so he doesn’t look so tall—for all the good that does. “Hey, Dean, don’t you have a friend who races for them?”

“Really?” the girl says, eyes going wide. This close, Dean can see that the fake implants must be some kind of lume stickers, not actually embedded into flesh, the way he first thought. But they’re pretty damned believable, for a kid’s decoration. It’s kind of impressive.

“Uh-huh. Sure do,” Dean agrees, stretching a smile he’s not sure he feels onto his face.

“Wow!” the kids whisper together, wide-eyed and awed, their competition forgotten.

“Are you a racer too?” the boy demands.

“No way,” the little girl says crushingly. “Look, he hasn’t got any implants!”

“But racers don’t have to have the lights!” her brother complains. He scrubs at his cheeks, smearing the ink across them like bruises. “I don’t wanna race for a team. I wanna just race.”

“You can’t!” she insists, pointing at her own face. “All the best racers have the cool lights.”

“There’s one guy racing tomorrow who doesn’t! He’s even seeded!” the kid insists, wiping harder at his face. “First seed, and he didn’t have to join a… a corp! He’s just awesome by himself.”

Dean feels his whole stomach jump. ‘Cause the kid clearly hasn’t got the first idea who he is, but he’s just belting that out on the street right here—singing Dean’s praises, fighting with his sister about it like this is something someone just says.

Fuck, Dean doesn’t know what he feels about that. His heart jumping? Lights flashing in front of his eyes? The roar of his blood in his ears? He doesn’t know if he’s embarrassed or happy or what.

He doesn’t have the time to figure it out before the little girl scowls and insists, “Yeah, but he’s old!”

Sam’s laugh nearly explodes out of his nose.

 And yes, Dean kicks him.

By that point, the parents have caught up to their little racers, and they smile at Sam and Dean as they gather their kids—still bickering—and the tricycle.

“Old, huh?” Sam muses, grinning as they start walking again.

“Shut up,” Dean growls, and proves how mature he is by shoving his stupidly tall little brother by the shoulder. “Don’t make me regret letting you win when we used to play racer like that.”

“You didn’t let me!”

Dean smirks. “You go on thinking that, Sammy,” he teases, and Sam lets the conversation drop.

It’s true, they did play like that when they were kids—running through the squat and jumping over obstacles, their arms out to their sides like wings.

They wouldn’t have been drawing patterns on their faces, back then, though.

There were racing teams even when they were kids—nice to have someone to trade rides off with, Dean imagines, and pool the costs for repairs. Or to have a place to bunk down rather than living on the road. A dock for all the vehicles, not a public charging station; a garage for repairs, not a crash shop.

But teaming up isn’t nearly the same thing as going corporate. The kind of implant tech whose copy is glowing on that girl’s face only really took off about ten years ago—that was when the corps got interested in racing.

But damn, it took off in a big way.

Dean feels the smile that was curling at his lips lose its antigrav and droop back down.

The fact is, little independent racers like Dean and Sam, they mostly can’t compete with big deals like the Vampires—or, heck, Chuck Shurley’s own Angels—anymore. Dean can’t remember the last time he saw someone at one of the big races—Chicago, New York, St. Paul—who didn’t have at least one implant. Maybe a racer on their own, part of a bigger team, could afford one of the superficial ones—corneas, maybe. But the funds needed to overhaul a flyer to interface with the big implants? Haptic gear, fiber wiring, sync tech? That takes sponsors, and that… that means a corporation.

Forget a charging dock for Baby: Dean sure as hell doesn’t have a strategist planning angles for him, or a sim unit so he can try out a race before he ever fires up his engines.  Even Benny—fucking Benny, who Dean once shared race profits and a training cycle with—joined the New Orleans Vampires six months ago.

Livin’ it up in the Big Easy, Benny said. “Never thought…” he started, before he trailed off.

Yeah. There’s been a lot of ‘never thought’ going around, lately.

“Why the hell does it even matter to you who wins the Chicago?” Dean asked Chuck—hell, in for a penny, in for a pound, right? “You don’t need the prize money.”

Chuck gave him a shocked look. “The money? You think this is about the money? Oh, Dean.” He sighed, looking so sad and disappointed that Dean almost took a step back. “It’s just—and don’t take this the wrong way—you’re just… you’re such a bad example. To the kids, you know?”

“Excuse you?” Dean snapped.

“I said that wrong!” Chuck answered, hurriedly. “But you’re a relic. This… this hand and eye nonsense you’ve got going on… no one does that anymore!” He shook his head and looked at Dean with those wide, tired brown eyes. “This is exactly what we have implants for. Upgrades. Sync tech. Strategy teams. All of these things, they’ve made racing faster, but also… cleaner. Safer.”

Dean can’t deny that. That’s the hell of it. Interface racing tech means screaming along the corner of a repulsion barrier at top speed and never once worrying whether you’ll actually hit it, because you know that the haptic gloves curling at the back of your hand, the fiberoptic lines along back and arms and driver suit, sending you all those signals, will yank you away before you can.

But. But.

“How the hell is anyone supposed to get any of that crap unless they sign their whole damned lives over?” Dean demanded. “Implants, upgrades, fiberwire… no one has those unless they’re racing corporate!”

Chuck sighed. “I know,” he said sadly. “I know, that’s the price of progress. But that’s where the future of racing is, isn’t it? Starting from the very beginning with the right training. The right team. The right vehicles, built from the ground and into the sky, that can accommodate anyone, any racer.” He spread his hands, his eyes rising, and he meant this bullshit—Dean could see it in his droopy eyes. “No learning in the middle of a street race. No crashes from jury-rigged engines. Everything clean, in its right place.”

Controlled, Dean thinks, remembering it now. Everything under control.

“Kids believing they can make it the same way you did, drive like you do… it’s a fantasy. A dirty, dangerous fantasy. How many of the people you trained with are still racing?”

Not many. But that isn’t because they went down on the wing. Most of them retired to the ground—like Jody, like Donna, like Bobby—because they’d gotten edged out of the raceway. Didn’t want to get their skulls drilled, didn’t want to join up and sign their soul over to a corporation.

“So, what then?” Dean said, and swallowed hard. His voice came out harsh and rough. “You want me to, what. Lose to your flyer and then sign up for your little Scooby gang? Is that it?”

“You?” And Chuck laughed. He laughed. “A no-pedigree, self-taught guy like you? No, no. No way! You’d just keep on making everyone look bad.” He blinked those big, earnest brown eyes. “I just want you to, you know. Lose. Then go off, enjoy your sunset. Your well-earned retirement! And stop being an anomaly.”

The nice dinner he and Sam had twists in Dean’s stomach, just remembering it.

But he thinks of those kids, the marks on their faces. Their smiles.

Fuck.

He’s quiet the rest of the way to their lodgings. Sam doesn’t try and make him talk.

Sam found them a pretty good coffin stack this time around—just on the outskirts of the little race town, but without the prices jacked up too high for race day.

Their double room is still tiny, of course, just barely big enough for two sleeping cradles: if Sam lay down on the floor and stretched out, he’d probably be pressing his palms against one wall and his toes against another. But Dean actually feels clean after a run through the waterless decontam shower, and in their room, the walls and roof are solid enough that Dean can’t hear more than the faintest thud and rumble of feet around them. They can’t stand up in their space, of course—they crawl in, like always, after a brief trip up a ladder. But the space is constructed high enough that even Sam can sit up without clocking his head on the ceiling once he repositions the sleeping cradle. For them, it’s practically a suite at the Hilton Space Station.

Sam, because he’s a good little brother, offers Dean his choice of cradle, and they settle in for the night. After the sensors register that they’ve both gotten into the sleeping cradles, their bodies tucked into the molded foam, the room lights flicker off, leaving Dean staring into blackness lit just by the faint green eye of the security sensor in the corner.

Sam’s normally not the one of them who gets insomnia. So Dean’s surprised to hear a long sigh coming from the opposite cradle. In the tiny room, it’s so loud that it’s like Sam’s breathing right into his ear—like the bed they used to share back near the Kansas track, when they were still living in one of the government stacks with Dad.

“What is it?” he asks, gruff. Maybe Sam’s nervous about the race tomorrow, too? Dean knows it ain’t easy to stand at the sidelines for something like this—hell, he still gets twitchy every time he has to cheer Sam on and he’s not flying himself. But even with all the races he’s won this year, Sam does best on the nature runs or the sprints. He’s not a long-run city racer. He didn’t qualify for the Chicago, much less seed.

“I thought… I dunno. Maybe it’s being back here. We haven’t been anywhere near here in…”

“Eight years,” Dean fills in, as Sam trails off.

Eight years since Dad tried out for the Chicago exhibition qualifiers, bringing them along with him like the tail in the wake of a comet. Sam was still in high school, then—pretty much the only reason they still lived in the Kansas sidelines; Dean spent so damned much of his teens dodging the truancy drones and there was no way Sam was gonna do that. But that was the one time Sam got official permission to get pulled out of school for a family trip.

Yeah, it was awesome.

It was anyone’s bet if John Winchester even noticed the one extra person hanging out in the flyer prep pit with Sam and Dean. Bobby did, of course, but he just did what he always did and stuffed Cas into a jumpsuit and put him onto the engines, side by side with Dean.

Eight years ago, Dad was still alive. Sam hadn’t run away yet. Cas…

Yeah.

The smoggy, scraped surface of Terra had still seemed like the whole world, then.

To Dean, anyway.

“It’s been that long, huh,” Sam says, softly enough that Dean twists towards him. The material of the sleeping cradle moves with him—more slowly than the nanobeads probably should, but they actually move, which is better than, like, ninety percent of the coffin cabins that they normally get around a raceground. It’s pretty nice.

“Yup. So what short’s got in your circuit?” Dean demands. “You see the ghost in the machine?”

“Maybe,” Sam answers, much to Dean’s surprise.

“That so?” he answers. Sam claims that race ghosts don’t exist. Dean doesn’t know about that. He’s felt the chill down the back of his neck when he’s settled into the starting position, especially in these old cities. He wouldn’t be surprised if the races woke up something restless, that’s all he’s saying. All those people that died in ‘em, back in the oil wars; all those people who never made it out.

“Hmm. I… I thought… well… it was just for a second, when I was setting up your maintenance pit. But I… thought I saw Cas.”

The name is like a punch, like a splash of cold water from a leaky line, like the sound of a racer losing control of their flyer and careening into the repulsion barrier. Dean feels his whole body twitch, and in their little coffin room, even on this shitty mass-issue sleeping cradle, he doesn’t doubt that Sam can hear the creak of the beads even though the darkness is nearly absolute around them.

“Not possible,” Dean answers sharply.

“Why not?”

“You know why not.” Dean jabs a finger towards the ceiling, as if there’s anything to see through it that isn’t insulation and padding and layers upon layers of coffin rooms. “He went to the Academy, Sam. The fucking Academy.”

Sam shifts in his own cradle with a squeak. “He could’ve come back.”

Dean scoffs. “Planetside?” Like, here in the dirt and the dust of the racetrack, and not watching from one of the insulated arcology bubble-cities? Fat fucking chance. Even the most dedicated racing fans just license full-experience drones to project the experience into their living rooms: all the stink and roar, no blown eardrums or eyes burnt out by sandblast.

“You make me want to stay. I’ll be back, I promise,” Cas said.

Yeah, he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Dean knew it was bullshit even then.

“Okay, I know, there aren’t many people who do that who aren’t racers or, or charitable organizations, but—well, he grew up outside an arcology, didn’t he? Like us,” Sam insists. “And Angelcorp has a huge presence at the Chicago Race. Doesn’t Chuck Shurley always come himself, every year? Like, not a projection, but… in person?”

Yeah, Chuck Shurley does, Dean knows that for a fact now. And Castiel might’ve been from the wrong side of Chuck’s marriage contract, but he’s still a Shurley, still that asshole’s son.

The fact that it’s even possible tastes like combustion exhaust, like something gone burnt and toxic.

“Drop it, Sam.”

“But—”

“Drop it.”

Sam does, and for a good minute, there’s no sound but the whirr of the air scrubbers and the soft, staticky creaking of the coffin tower around them.

“I guess you’re right. It probably wasn’t him, couldn’t really have been. I just…” Sam finally says, sounding tired. He trails off.

He doesn’t say anything else, but maybe he’s remembering the same thing Dean is: Cas sneaking out his school projection globe and setting it up in the middle of Dean’s and Sam’s squat, lighting it up and pointing out the inhabited exoregions to Sam one by one—Callisto, Io, Ganymede, practically neighbors. Further out: Proxima Centauri b (“no, Sam, I don’t know why there’s Proxima b, c, and d, but there isn’t an ‘a’. I’ll ask”), Gliese, Tau Ceti. Little lights and cities dancing on the walls and the ceiling, widening out to full color, scrolling text, as Cas touched each one.

Dean doesn’t remember all those inhabited planets’ names. Sam probably does. Cas definitely did.

Or maybe Sam’s remembering the way Cas always shared whatever few credits for treats he could wheedle out of Zachariah, that tightfisted asshole ‘uncle’ of his—buying a sleeve of fried soy chips big enough for all three of them to share rather than the small real-meat slider burger Dean knew Cas would have preferred; a little tin of paint to smooth over Baby’s bumps and bruises.

Maybe Sam knows that even though it’s been, what, seven years, now, Dean still thinks about Cas so much more often than he should.

Or maybe not. Because it’s not like Dean ever told Sam how often Cas comes to his mind. It’s not like he ever told Sam what they were to each other. (Sometimes, Dean himself isn’t sure he knows what the hell that was.)

“I guess I always wondered what… what happened to him,” Sam finishes quietly, because Dean’s goddamned baby brother doesn’t know the meaning of ‘drop it.’ “Why he just… he left like that. I never got it.”

“He’s going to claim me. As his son, Dean! He’s going to arrange for me to go to school! Secure entrance for me offworld. The Academy!” Cas’s deep voice fluttered and broke with how excited he was. “And all I’ll have to do is… is…”

Leave. Give them up—everything about Kansas, like Cas was a suborbital and he was going to leave Dean and Sam choking in his dust. Like he hadn’t worked elbow to elbow with Dean in the maintenance pits in the Chicago Race the year before; like he hadn’t traced Dean’s face with his fingertips, counting his freckles aloud, one by one, the same way he counted the stars when they looked up at the sky together.

Yeah, Dean had heard him the first time. He just hadn’t been able to believe the words had come out of Castiel’s mouth. But here Cas was, about to say them again.

But then Cas stopped, because maybe even he, as much as he never watched what he said, knew that wasn’t the right thing to say. Not again. Maybe he saw Dean’s face.

“That’s not what I—” he tried, then lapsed off. “It’s just… Dean, please try to understand.”

Oh, Dean understood all right. “Oh, I understand, all right,” he said, and his voice came out strong and slow. “Gonna sell your soul to the Devil, huh, Cas? Go and be a good little megacorp pod person for him?”

Cas reached out his hands, fingers spread, steady, like he was waiting for Dean to take them. “No one has ‘body-snatched’ me,” he said, with that intensity that could’ve been sarcasm, or it could’ve been pure seriousness. “This is my decision, Dean. This is what I want.”

Even after all these years, Dean remembers just how surprised he was that Cas actually got the old-school Invasion of the Body Snatchers reference.

Maybe that’s why he flinched back from Cas’s reaching hand. Maybe that’s why he said what he did.

“Fine, buddy. Fine, but let’s not pretend he’s not using you. All of a sudden, now the big daddy man wants to admit you exist? He never gave a shit about you before. Don’t fucking fool yourself he cares about you now.”

Maybe that’s why he didn’t think of how cruel it was until it was out, echoing between them.

But Cas didn’t react like Dean had hurt him. He just drew his hand back towards himself and raised his chin, his whole body tilting up like he could stretch himself right into the sky, so fucking proud even down here on the ground like they were. He continued, straight-backed, impossibly solid. “I’m informing you as a courtesy, because I care about you. I’m not naïve. I know there must be… ulterior motives.” Then, to Dean’s scoff, “I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand what it feels like to want to be acknowledged by my father.”

Like a blow. No—a slap, open-handed.

Cas knew what saying that would do. He had to know.

Dean flared up. “My dad’s not some… some deadbeat who threw me away, and only wants me back because he thinks I can make something of myself, Cas!”

Cas’s chin rising, the flash of his blue eyes, the curve of his mouth going cold. “Oh? Really? I beg to differ.” He spread his hands and looked around at the tiny little flat issued by the housing division—empty of John Winchester. “Where is he, then?”

Cas should have known better. He must have.

Right?

Dean shakes away the memory, the sour taste of the rest of their last fight, the stiff, white-clad arch of Cas’s shoulders as he walked away for the last time. Cas’s last words to him, over his shoulder: “I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t serve Terra, Dean. And I don’t serve you.”

And that was it.

He never heard from Cas again. Terms of the deal.

Yeah, ‘cause Cas, at the end of the day—smart, ambitious, Cas, who always did every fucking thing his guardian wanted—wanted the Academy, wanted that life, more than…

Fuck. Dean stares up at the roof, so close to his face in the security lighting that he knows he could reach up and touch it. The beads of the sleeping cradle creak rustily around him.

He can’t even blame Cas, though, can he? Not really. Hell, Sam left, when he turned eighteen the next year—ran off to a cram school, put in the nights at an ethanol bar to pay the tuition. And Dean didn’t blame him.

(It’s not the same, though. It’s not.)

It’s not the first time Sam’s mentioned Cas, not the first time he’s wondered out loud what happened to their friend, but it’s been a while. A few years. Maybe that’s why the memory feels so vivid, now; Dean thought he had it closed away, locked up nice and tight.

“Skies, what’s there to get?” Dean demands. “His rich dad finally claimed him. Zipped him off to the sky-school with all his connections. He moved off this shitty little broken globe, the way he always wanted to. Probably off running the, I dunno, the statistics on the microeconomics of Proxima Centauri as we speak. The end. What’s with the trip down memory lane now?”

Sam doesn’t answer. There’s a deep sigh from the cradle across the tiny room. If Dean stuck his hand out from his sleeping cradle, he’d be able to touch his brother’s arm, but he doesn’t.

He’s still not sure why he never told Sam what happened with Cas. Why he cut them off altogether. How, once the great Chuck Shurley decided to take Cas back into the fold, he just couldn’t have the illegitimate son he’d basically ignored for years associating with the ‘undesirables’ who manned and staffed the Terra race courses anymore.

That was the deal: Chuck would whisk Cas away, Cas would get to go to that fancy school in the sky he’d been dreaming of all these years, and father and son would both pretend Castiel Shurley hadn’t spent the first twenty years of his life living just outside the wreck squats that sat a hop and a skip from the Kansas racetrack. All because Cas had gotten those amazing scores at the ranking board at his high-class cram school. All that work had finally paid off, right?

Sure, Cas might have tried to insist that he’d come right back as soon as he was done at the Academy—before they threw down, before he made it bad between them and Dean, probably, made it worse—but it wasn’t like Dean would have been able to hold him to that anyway. He sure as shit wasn’t going to believe it. Cas had left to finally chase his dreams, and if all his dreams had cost him was his relationship with ‘undesirables’ like Dean and Sam… Cas had shown he was willing to pay that price.

He’d said as much.

“He says… Father says I have to leave everything behind. That I have to concentrate on… on what’s important.”

Well, fuck him with a wrench anyway. Dean might be an undesirable all the way, wire and scrap metal down to his bones, but Sam? Sam’s space dust and starlight. Sam can do better things. Other things.

Sam can reach the skies, if Dean does this.

Chuck wasn’t wrong about it being a hell of a deal when he made his offer to Dean. Getting Sam into the Academy, the most exclusive training program in the six exoregions, is worth more than… almost anything, really.

It’s even worth more than the stupidly excessive payout Chuck’s offering Dean as a lump sum. And even that number’s ridiculous. The Chicago Race prize pot might be more money than Dean’s seen in one place in his entire damned life, but the number that Chuck has earmarked for release on the bearer credstick he handed Dean, well, that made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth.

Dean didn’t tell Chuck that he might’ve agreed to throw the race even if Chuck hadn’t offered him any money at all. ‘Cause an Academy acceptance for Sam and then the tuition to pay it off, well, there’s no number Dean can put on that.

Sam can make it in the Academy, the same way Cas did. Sam can get his lawyer license—the firms practically bid on Academy grads. He can get folded in by a corp, if he wants to be. Take his pick of the exoregions to be stationed in. He’ll be made.

The racer life isn’t for his little brother, no matter how good a driver he is. Dean knows that, he knows. Sam fought so hard against it in the beginning—even ran away to enroll in that law-prep cram school when he was eighteen.

In some ways, Dean thinks he blames Cas for that, too—for letting Sam believe that that kind of life could be possible for small sparks like them. Sure, maybe with a daddy like Chuck Shurley sweeping out of the stratosphere to scoop him up, put up the tuition to the most exclusive school in the known worlds, it was possible—for Cas.

But for them? Well, in the end, Dean had to go and fetch Sam out of his cram program after Dad died—after Dean found out just how deep in hock John Winchester had gotten to the wing-breakers, entering race after race that he couldn’t win. Hadn’t won.

Dean feels his own jaw throb—he didn’t realize he was clenching his teeth. Grinding them. The tension of it beats in his temples. He wonders if the soft echo he can hear is coming from him or the whirr of the sleeping cradle adjusting noisily.

“Sorry,” Sam says softly. “Didn’t mean to drag up bad memories.”

“You didn’t,” Dean snaps, and consciously relaxes his teeth. “Cas, huh? Doubt it was him. I barely remember the guy anyway. Probably wouldn’t recognize him in a crowd.”

It’s a lie, of course. He’s pretty sure he’d still recognize Cas anywhere. Sometimes he still turns too fast, thinking he saw the slightly droopy line of his shoulders, the way his hair was always fucked like it has its own gravitational force.

But it’s never Cas. No one else has those blue, blue eyes. No one else raises their chin like they’ll take on the world.

This time, Sam doesn’t give him the dignity of pretending otherwise: he snorts.

“Go to sleep, bitch,” Dean growls.

“Uh-huh,” Sam answers, and turns over.

(Dean doesn’t feel like he got the last word.)

It shouldn’t really matter. He doesn’t sleep well the night before a high-stakes race anyway.

Still, he and Sam always pay out for a real sleeping berth the night before a big one—no use in hedging their bets in the wrong direction by crashing on Baby’s pull-out pillows, one of them in her cockpit. Wherever they go, she’s always one of the biggest of the medium-class flyers. Dean’s been in smaller races where they even pull out the measuring lights to check, because some inspectors have never seen her model or make and officials don’t always believe she’s up to spec. So even as tall as he and Sam are, Dean’s Baby is big enough for both of them to stretch out and spend a night, if necessary.

There have been a lot of nights where it was necessary.

Doesn’t make it a comfortable night, though. ‘Specially if there were burritos at dinner.

The nightmare he has before race day is familiar and regular as the tick of the countdown clock above every race city. It’s the screech of metal, the yellow lighting of the morgue; it’s the way they let him see Dad’s face, slack and cold, but even Dean can tell that there’s just not enough of him left underneath the shiny metal drape. It’s the sick drop of Dean’s stomach when he gets the first projection chip from the debtors.

It's the same nightmare as always. Until it isn’t.

“What would you do with the Chicago track prize money if you won?” Cas asks, blurry and hazy and soft in dreams the way he wasn’t in real life. Cas was all rounds and corners and contrasts, sharp nose and dimpled chin and lips made for tiny smiles.

(It was a face to be looked at from multiple angles, finding the way the light caught at him, lapped at his mouth and his eyes. But that day, his cheeks were pink, his dark hair matted, sweaty at his temples, and his eyes were so blue Dean reached out and thumbed under them, half-teasingly looking for the glow of implants.)

Dean snorts and turns onto his side. The old sleeping mat under them, its foam nearly worn through, squeaks softly. “The fucking Chicago? What’s the point of even thinking about that? Might as well ask where I’d fly if I had my own suborbital.”

“You’d never,” Cas answers, and pinches Dean’s bare thigh. “No matter how often I tell you that suborbital tech is even safer than flyer tech. Even with all the new advances in racing modification.”

Skies and stars, he never changes. “Yeah, dude, that’s my point.”

Cas’s eyeroll is dramatic enough that his eyeballs should end up in one of the moon’s seas. “It’s a hypothetical. That’s what thinking is about.” The tiniest smile curls the corners of his lips, and for once, there’s nothing wistful about it. “So. What would it be? Trip to a resort satellite? Real steak dinner? New paint job and engine overhaul for Baby?”

“I’d take Sam and Dad on vacation. All the way to one of the protected coasts. One of the fancy California arcologies,” Dean blurts, while he’s still feeling loose and soft and easy, the leftovers of the orgasm Cas stroked out of him with neat little flicks of his wrist still beating like blood in his ears. “Toes in the sand, couple of those fancy ethanol plugs that snap out into little umbrellas when you push a button.” He grins shakily, getting into the fantasy. “Matching hula shirts. Some hula girls, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Cas says, dry as a freshly raked track.

Dean smirks over at the sulky line of the side of Cas’s face, the way he’s ducked his chin. He’s so fucking cute when he’s jealous. “I guess you can come along, too. If you’re really gonna twist my arm about it.”

“How generous of you,” Cas drawls.

Dean doesn’t stick his tongue out, because he’s twenty-one, and fucking mature, thanks. “Fine, then. Don’t come along on my totally imaginary trip to the beach.”

“But I want to,” Cas complains, and turns on his side to sling an arm over Dean’s waist, leaving them face to face, nose to nose. His thumb strokes a little vibration up and down Dean’s side. “I always want to.” He pauses, and squints, visible even in the half-dark. “No hula girls, though,” he announces sternly.

“What? No?” Dean teases.

“No,” Cas says firmly, and his fingers tangle through Dean’s.

Then you gotta stay, Dean didn’t say, then. Because he didn’t know he had to.

Not that it would have made any difference at all.

It’s a good dream, overall. It’s a good memory. So, so many of them are.

It might as well be a nightmare, because Dean’s no less tired when he wakes up the next morning.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

“Oh, you are such a beautiful boy,” Donna coos, tossing her neat blond ponytail behind her shoulder in a flirtation flick. “Come here, you.”

Dean feels his eyebrows jump. “Nice to see you, too, Donna,” he says, amused.

She grunts inelegantly and swats his chest backhand. With her implanted hand, too, so it genuinely stings, the metal lumps of her knuckles knocking him in the sternum. “You shut your mouth, Dean, I wasn’t talking to you,” she laughs, then takes two steps past him. “Oh, hello, hello,” Donna croons, putting her hand on the clear windglass of Baby’s cockpit and trailing her metal-laced fingertips along the dark sides as she starts to walk her slow circuit around Dean’s flyer. “Makes my little heart go pitter-pat. Not many flyers like him anymore.”

“Hey!” Dean complains, laughing and shaking his head. It’s the same thing every time. “Don’t you even start. Baby’s a lady, and well you know it.”

“Well, I’m doing the inspection here, Dean, I should know what he is,” she insists. She continues to Baby’s right-hand wing stabilizers. When she presses the sensor in her palm up against them, her eyes lose focus for just a second, and then her fingernails glow green. She continues on to the first engine block—clear—then to Baby’s blunt, stubby tail. “Besides, don’cha think I know a little more than you do about what makes a lady and what doesn’t?”

Dean snorts and raises an eyebrow at her. Skies, she’s a treasure. “Uh-huh. I wouldn’t even put paper notes down on that, Inspector Hanscum. You got Jody now, but I remember Doug.” He smirks. “Both of them.”

Donna peers at him over the wing, her warm, brown eyes narrowing playfully. “It’s all about quality, Dean, quality, not quantity. Don’t you think you can compare my Jody to your little fly-by-nights. Or Doug. Either of them.” And, like that’s the end of any and all arguments, she checks the third engine block, humming softly to herself as her sensors scan Baby’s systems one by one for errors—dangerous—and unapproved hardware mods—illegal.

Dean rolls his eyes, but he’s not going to argue the point. Alright, yes, he was a little surprised when he found out about her and Jody being together. Hell, he’s known Jody even longer than he’s known Donna—she’s been a security officer for the racing commission since Bobby was flying races.

And okay, he might’ve said something a little… embarrassing about the two ladies at the time. It was a post-race celebration! There were ethanol plugs involved!

“How is she?” he asks fondly.

“Ask her yourself,” Donna answers. “She’s here, and she’ll be real mad if you forget all about us after you get dragged away towards all those shiny endorsements. After you win, don’cha know.”

Dean shifts just a little uncomfortably. “Donna,” he protests.

“I’m just sayin’. Betting odds might be against you, what with you being all-natural, but I’ve seen you fly,” she says confidently, and finishes her round around Baby. She pulls her registration tablet free and sets her palm on it, her fingernails flashing through a rainbow of colors as she inputs her inspection results into the racing commission’s database. “Your ancillary engine block’s got a bit of residue buildup,” she adds with a frown, looking up at him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know.” Even though Dean does more maintenance on his own flyer than most people, he still has to pay to get stone residue professionally cleaned out of the engine blocks. Most of the leftover of his savings went towards getting the three mains scraped shiny before today, but there wasn’t enough to take care of the backup engine. And he wouldn’t take it when Sam offered his own savings. “All good. If I end up needing my ancillary, I’m screwed anyway.”

“Don’t say that,” she scolds, and tucks away her tablet.

“Everyone else passed so far?”

“Nah. Three unapproved mods so far already yesterday. And that idiot Roy got his ass kicked out of the qualifiers. Disposable magnetic destabilizer, can you believe it?” She curls her lips. “Thought he could keep it under his big-ass engine block and I wouldn’t know.”

“Fu-uck,” Dean mutters, with feeling. His stomach chills. “Here? He trying to get someone killed?” Losing an engine charge rounding one of the Chicago track’s notorious right-angle corners? Forget finishing—no one in that flyer would walk away from that crash.

“Chicago fever is real, buster,” she sighs, shaking her head. “You heard Gordon Walker’s teamed up with Creedy and Kubrick now?”

Dean blinks. “Wait.” He thinks hard. Creedy and Kubric are racers for a corporate team… what is it they call them? “He’s flying for the God Squad?” Sponsored by the United Church of Earth, amen. “Since when does he buy into that speed-is-salvation bullshit?”

“Don’t know that he does,” she says, and smiles at him, a little sadly. “Not many left like you and Sam, that can make it on their own. Most everyone else is corp-backed, now. Sims and skillsofts and implants up the wazoo.” She trails both fingers down from her temples to mimic the shining electronic lines of the meridians that mark most corporate pilots’ faces. “It’s a whole new world.”

“Not my world,” Dean answers.

But the back of his tongue tastes bitter. After today, that’ll all be more true than Donna knows.

“That’s why we love you, boyo.” She rolls her eyes. “The Angel team’s so sure of their vehicle and strategists, they’ve got a pilot I’ve never even met before sitting in their cockpit today.” She scoffs. “Inias, that’s his name. Guess they’ve got the credits to burn on the fee, and it’s not like they need to take the pot.”

“What, seriously? How’s that…” Then Dean shakes his head, realizing. It’s the Angel team that qualified into the race—so technically they can stick in whoever the fuck they want as a driver. Fucking corporate head games. “Why would they even bother, though?” Dean asks, confused. “If they’re testing out new racer tech, skies, there are loads of smaller races. And I bet they’ve got access to every race simulation skillsoft ever created.”

Donna eyes him, frowning. “Don’t you watch the trid?” she demands.

Dean shrugs. If he’s going to watch the trid, it’s sure as hell not going to be the news.

She huffs loudly at him with a muttered, “Uffda. Trillion credit tech that’s gonna revolutionize racer-flyer synchronization, they’re debuting it today, and you’re telling me your pretty face doesn’t know anything about it?”

“Nothin’ to do with me, Donna,” Dean says—though that’s not true. That’s not true at all.

Ah, fuck. Well, that explains… a lot.

But she doesn’t have time to finish lecturing him before a sharp, crisp voice calls out, “Hey! Donna, are you monopolizing my boy?”

“What if he’s monopolizing me?” Donna demands. But Dean doesn’t miss the way her tone goes warm and throaty and flirty. Hell, they probably couldn’t miss it from top of one of the building skeletons towering overhead.

“Oh, he knows better than to do that,” Marshall Jody Mills announces, striding over to them. “He’d answer to me.”

“Look, I might be a dumb racer jock, but I’m not that dumb,” Dean jokes. But his smile at her is real: Jody’s damn good people. Even if she didn’t take race security seriously—and she does; she’ll come down like a meteor on anyone trying sabotage—more than one racer down on their luck over the years has found themselves bullied into a sandwich in their pocket to tide them over, or a top-up for their flyer at the race pumps when they didn’t quite have enough to pay for for a full charge.

As if she’s reading his mind, she asks, “When’re you going to come over for dinner, huh? I’ll get Bobby to come, and you bring that tower you call a brother. It’s been too long. I’ll even fire up a real roast chicken for you.” She winks. “If you win, of course.”

Dean has no idea what to say to that, so he’s lucky when Donna jumps in, laughing, with, “Oh, no, Jody, if he wins, he’s taking us all out to dinner, don’cha know!”

“Ladies, ladies, no fighting over me, there’s plenty to go around!” he insists, laughing.

(He doesn’t try to dodge the punch that Jody aims into his left shoulder. She doesn’t use her augmented arm to do it, which, well, that’s just nice of her.)

“You put some thought into what I mentioned to you last time?” she asks, as Donna steps away with a blown kiss for both of them and hurries over to the next flyer that’s up for inspection. It’s the Roadhouse flyer—they’re not seeded, so they must be flying in the qualifier races that come after the main deal. Just like Dean did, the last time they were held, two years ago.

Dean pushes one hand uncomfortably into the pockets of his flame-retardant racing suit. It’s just a flight suit—well, actually, it’s an old mechanic jumpsuit that Bobby reworked for him so the extra fabric doesn’t catch in Baby’s safety harnesses and won’t slide around when Dean’s turning a sharp corner. Unlike most racers’ uniforms, it doesn’t have anything electronic to it, nothing to interact with a flyer’s systems. Hand and foot, stick and eye, the flyer and the horizon, that’s him.  

But it does have pockets, at least.

“Maybe,” he hedges. He waves to Jo and Ellen, who are already bickering, and Ash, who looks like he’s doing a last-second look-over at the engine. Ash pops the hatch shut, looking guilty, as Donna beelines for him. They fly for the Heineken Holding Corp Inc., and Dean’s always thought that their implants are the exact same shade of amber-gold as a beer held up to the sun.

Jody doesn’t let herself be distracted. “You’ve gotta retire sometime,” she says, and shrugs. “It’s good, hard, honest work, being a racing inspector. Keepin’ the good boys and girls safe. Keeps you in the business. Can’t imagine you going to work as a corp racing strategist, anyhow.”

“Nah. I mean, what the hell would I know about implants and skillsofts and sims and that kind of shit?” Dean answers—truth—and then lies through his teeth. “I dunno if retirement’s for me, yet, Jody. And even if I did wanna retire, I wouldn’t want to stop flying.”

Jody laughs. “What would you do with that, drive a shuttle?” she asks fondly, clapping him on the shoulder. “

“Maybe. But I’m not ready to get put out on a suborbital resort yet,” Dean insists.

“Dean, my man, I thought you said they’d have to take your corpse up to get you on a suborbital!” a drawling voice exclaims from around Baby’s other side, and he and Jody both turn.

The truth is, he and Garth didn’t get along in the beginning. Dean doesn’t pretend he’s the height of fucking professionalism, but Garth, well, Garth just never seemed to know what the fuck he was doing, and in a flyer going five kilometers a minute, well, that’s asking for disaster. If there was any racer in the circuit that Dean would have voted, “Most likely to splatter themselves against the side of a building like a bug,” it would have been Garth Fitzgerald IV.

Except that in the past six years that Garth had been racing, he somehow hasn’t totaled himself into space dust or accidentally flown into a terrestrial black hole. Hell, he’s here, isn’t he?

Dean feels the smile starting somewhere in the line of his own jaw, and squishes it down. In general, it’s a bad idea to encourage Garth. Bobby told him once that some people march to their own drummer, and some people just plain jump out of the middle of an oil drum during an active flyer race, and if that isn’t Garth, Dean doesn’t know what is.

“Exactly,” Dean says, with a snort, as Garth rounds the corner. “And I’m not dead yet, am I?”

He’s known Garth a long time. Hell, Garth took training and refinement under Bobby, same as Dean did.

So it’s an out-and-out shock when Dean catches the glow of red implants on Garth’s skinny, angular face—so new that the skin is still a little swollen around the edges, where circuitry meets flesh.

Not even Garth’s dense enough to miss Dean’s sharp intake of breath. He reaches up and fingers the edge of one of the bands of circuitry. “Oh… yeah,” he says, but he’s grinning, his narrow chest puffed out with pride. “Meet the newest member of the Wisconsin Werewolves!”

Jody reaches out and yanks Garth’s arm downwards. “Don’t touch that!” she grumbles. “You know better.”

“They’re not gonna get infected, Jody, they’re already three months old, and I got all my shots!” he grumbles, but his proud grin doesn’t fade.

“But… what the hell, Garth!” Dean demands. “I’ve seen you fly, you don’t need any of that shit…”

He trails off.

He has seen Garth fly—plenty of times. Garth doesn’t need strategists whispering angles in his ears, doesn’t need enhancement. Hell, Dean can just imagine what the guy would say to a strategist—some long-winded story about his cousin who helped prep so-and-so for a race and he said to do such-and-such, or the angles that his aunt took when she was a long-haul racer in the Shenandoah mountains…

Garth’s big smile fades a little around the edges. He shrugs. “I didn’t—I don’t—but…” His expression goes sharp and bright, startling, like looking up into the sun through clouds. “Things change, you know? Bess, she’s having—we’re having babies, Dean! Twins!”

“Uh, wow. Okay…?” Dean says, confused.

“Well…” Garth says, with a little half-shrug—or what would be a half-shrug, if it weren’t Garth. As it is, it looks like his whole torso rises and falls, like it’s not entirely connected to his legs. “It’s… things change,” he repeats. “You know.” But he doesn’t look at all sorry. “Did you know these things can go both ways? Pretty cool! So all the strategists have ‘em, too. That’s what I’m gonna be doing soon. No more running around the country for me—I get to come home to the babies every night!”

And then Dean understands. He gets it.

Not everyone can live like John Winchester and his kids, in their government pile on the outskirts of a racetrack—the one they moved out of and onto the road pretty much the moment Sam had completed his mandatory government schooling requirements. Not everyone wants to.

And flying races, yeah, it’s a living, but it’s not always an easy one. Some months, he and Sam have enough to put by—fresh food every meal, detailing on Baby, a hotel and not a coffin stack.

Some days, they sleep in Baby.

(Skies, who’s Dean kidding? Some months, they sleep in Baby.)

It’s a hell of a life. No nice house, no perks but the thrill of the flight and the company of his brother. It’s enough, for Dean, though. It’s awesome, and he has no regrets. If anyone had asked Dean a month ago, he would have said he wouldn’t give up what he does for all the credits in the world.

But.

But if there was anything Dean was ever going to sell out for—anything—it was always gonna be his family.

It’s always gotta be about family first. Dean knows that better than anyone.

So yeah, he gets why Garth went with the lights. Kids—damn.

Dean wonders, for just a second—just a second, before he steps on the poisonous thought like a cockroach, how his life would’ve been different if his dad had made the same choice as Garth.

“Congrats,” he says, biting off the uglier, sour things that are coursing in the bottom of his throat. He manages a smile. “Still gonna leave you in the dust, though.”

“Bring it on,” Garth says, and behind his eyes, the deeper portion of his implants flashes an eerie red. But then he sticks his chin out and narrows his eyes—which, with his long neck, makes him look a little bit like those old videos of storks.

It’s so completely damned unthreatening that part of the hard knot in Dean’s stomach loosens, and he doesn’t bite Garth’s or Jody’s heads off before they leave.

Skies know, it’s the last time he’s ever gonna race against the guy.

And dammit, Dean’s gonna miss it.

Even though Dean’s got a sick, achy twist in his gut still, he can’t help but feel a little thump-bump of pride when he gently flies Baby into her slot at the starting suspension line and sets her down. The actual takeoff positions—their starting circles—are up in the sky, of course, already glowing in a rainbow of colors, but the rings that denote each flyer’s standby location for setup and last-minute checks are on the ground, just underneath those spheres of light. Some of the other flyers are already buzzing like drones in their circles overhead, but Dean doesn’t see the point in wasting Baby’s charge hanging around in a starting circle when he can run his checks on terra firma.

No one believes that anyone hovering is just warming their engines anyway, and Dean doesn’t need to swing his dick around to use it well.

(“I don’t think anyone finds waggling genitals to be all that intimidating. Why would they? And what does that have to do with Baby? I thought you refer to her by female pronouns.”

“Shut—just shut up, Cas.”)

Dean’s spot in the lineup—first seed—is the one furthest from either edge, of course. So it’s not actually an advantage, being situated where he is: he’ll have to fight the rest of the pack from the moment the starting siren blares. The inner edge will go to the ninth seed—here, in the Chicago, it’ll mean a sharper turn right out of the gate, but a shorter distance than anyone else will have to go. The tenth seed has the widest curve, but the cleanest one to make a break and get altitude without fighting for airspace with everyone else.

Sitting in the second seed slot, next to Baby’s, is the Angel team vehicle. It’s smaller than his beautiful girl, because most modern flyers are, and cleaner-lined, though Dean hates to admit it—pure, stark white, with etchings of silvery feathers on the two narrow, swept-back wings. It looks fast. It looks… what’s the word, ergonomic. (Dean joked once that the Angel flyers look like bullet vibrators with wings—and they do! Kind of egg-shaped otherwise, perfectly pale except for the thin sheen of their front windscreens.) The edges of the doors are so cleanly aligned with the rest of the flyer’s flank that he’d bet he can run his fingertips over the sides and not feel a seam. The paint job must be a complete bitch to re-detail after they get dirtied or scuffed up at every race.

But, grudgingly, Dean has to admit that visually, the Angel flyers are… kind of pretty. Sort of. Not gorgeous and angled and rugged, like Baby, but… yeah.

The one perched here in the second seed spot—a Seraph, for this weight class, not one of the smaller Cherubs or a suborbital-class Archangel—is quiet now, quiescent, none of the lights on yet. Dean knows that when the pilot fires it up, the headlamps—in this case, a strip curving all around the gently tapered nose—and the feather lines on the wings will light up from silver to that proprietary shade of white-blue that no other corporation is allowed to use under pain of… litigation, or something. It’s the same unique shade of blue as the implants on their pilots’ faces.

(Dean once asked one of their drivers, this dick called Uriel who’d once said Baby belonged in the scrapyard, how it felt knowing that they’d been painted to match their flyers rather than the other way around. Uriel just sneered.)

There’s no getting around the fact that the color can’t be mistaken for any other, though. For a single weird second Dean wonders if Shurley’s lawyers would go after the toy manufacturers who make the glowing stickies for little kids’ faces.

Probably not. Good publicity, and all that shit. Either that, or they put them out themselves.

Damn, the crap that corporations concern themselves with, seriously. Rehabilitating the slums outside the race tracks? Nah, that’s not a priority. But making sure no one else uses their extra-special shade of blue? Stars above, call the lawyers!

(If Sam decides that that’s what he wants to do with his life once he graduates from the Academy, Dean’s punting him into the stratosphere himself.)

But the thought of Sam actually having a career based on what Dean does today makes his back straighten and his chin lift.

There might be one of the cute little Angel flyers in existence, there might be a hundred. They’re all completely interchangeable, visibly identical; probably on the inside, too, and in the engine, where it counts. That’s the whole point of corporation flyers. The whole point of their drivers, too, Dean guesses. Chuck’s spiel, and the official Angel team party line, is “from the ground up, any racer, any flyer,” but hearing Chuck parrot it with that weirdly intense look in his eyes was the first time Dean realized that the guy actually believes it. Shurley really thinks that with the right mods, the right flyer and the right strategy team, any racer can take the gold.

If he didn’t buy that bullshit, the Angels wouldn’t be putting a brand new guy at the starting suspension in Terra’s biggest race.

(Of course, if Chuck really, really believed it, would he be paying off Dean at all?

For some reason, that makes Dean feel better. A little.)

Forget it. It doesn’t matter how little Dean likes this compactor acid he’s agreed to. It doesn’t really matter for shit that he’s probably helping push some corper’s pet theory about how little all the years of experience Dean and Baby have going for them actually mean. It doesn’t even matter that there isn’t gonna be a spot on the winners’ circle waiting for him today.

At the end of the day, he made it—here, to the starting suspension line at the Chicago.

At the end of the day, he started racing to make sure Sam got to have something in his mouth that wasn’t just his daily ration of nutrient bread, shoes that the kids wouldn’t make fun of at school, and this… this is for Sam.

So Dean’s gonna play today like it’s any other day. He’s going to walk over to that fucking newbie—what’s his name? Inias?—driving the second seed vehicle, and shake his hand, and wish him clear skies and a sharp transmission.

And then he’s going to race his fucking ass off, because Chuck never said he had to lose to the Angel team flyer, and if the newbie crashes and burns—not literally, Dean would not wish a flyer crash on any racer—well, that’s not Dean’s problem, not the terms of the agreement.

Not that it isn’t going to be a fight one way or another, if that Inias guy knows the clouds from the cement. The turns that the Angel flyers can take are no joke, and the way they can gain and lose altitude sometimes makes them look like they’re fucking teleporting.

Anyway, Chuck’s asshattery is probably not this guy’s fault, and Dean’s spent his whole career making good with other drivers. They just get it. Corporate or team or solo, they do get the rush of the race, the cut of the wind across the screen, the cry of the machine around them. Even those that give up the freedom to choose their own races in exchange for a salary and a regular paycheck and benefits outside the prize money know that they’re all kind of a crazy family.

It’s Dean’s last day as a racer, probably. He can take ten seconds to live the life a little longer—to be nice to a newbie, even if he’s taking a spot in the wind he didn’t earn.

Sure.

He rounds around Baby’s flank and says to the thick-shouldered, dark-haired guy currently doing a last inspection on the curve of his flyer’s pale, upswept wing, “Hey, I’m Dean Winchester. Hope you’re ready to fly, rookie, ‘cause Baby and I are gonna wipe the skies with your ass.”

(Hey, for him, that’s nice. What’s a little trash talk between drivers?)

“I expect you might… if I was on foot,” the man answers, in a dark, rough voice.

Dean’s brain skips gears, pumps the clutch, and stalls.

The Angel team driver, in a branded corporate flight suit, all dark lines and glowing circuits in the shape of wings flowing down a very nice back, turns around.

There are blue eyes looking at Dean, level and calm and deep-set, from a face with a funny-shaped mouth, a dimpled chin, a forehead just a little too long for all the rest. It’s all put together in a way that shouldn’t make sense—but the look in his eyes, the stare down that long nose, just dares anyone to make anything of it.

Because of that, it works. It really, really works.

And for one second—one mad, terrible second—Dean’s so sure he’s gone right out of his mind. He got totaled on his way to the starting rings, and this is what he’s seeing twirling around over his head rather than planetarium stars.

That’s somehow more comforting than the idea that Dean could actually be looking at goddamned Castiel Shurley.

Because all of a sudden, it’s ten years ago.

All of a sudden, there’s a tall, skinny guy in the long sleeves and the necktie of one of the cram schools bending over Baby’s wing, and Dean’s barking, “Hey! What d’you think you’re doing?!”

He still remembers Cas’s answer—the calm way he straightened from Baby’s flank, like Dean didn’t outweigh him by a good thirty pounds back then, probably all of it muscle. “Is this really an Impala-model flyer?” he asked, blue eyes wide and a suspicious wrinkle between his eyebrows, completely unafraid of Dean’s aggression. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one this old.”

All of Dean’s hackles went up so high, it was a miracle his hair didn’t stand on end. “What do you think you know about flyers?” he sneered, stomping towards him. “Get away from her.”

The prep school baby in the snow-white, clean shirt with the buttoned sleeves didn’t even blink. His head tipped carefully to the side. “What do I know? I know this one’s a 2067 model,” he answered, frowning and tilting up his face, proud and straight-backed. “And that it’s in absolutely beautiful condition.” He flicked his fingers towards Baby, his chin up like he was challenging Dean by complimenting the Winchester family flyer. “If its engines are as well-maintained, it must roar into the wind. Does it have an original antigrav maintenance field? The newer vehicles can’t compare with that stability.”

Yeah, Cas was always turning Dean on his head. Always.

He blinks twice, three times, to get his eyes to focus right and shake away the memory: look, look, skies and stars, what the fuck, Winchester. The dude’s wearing the premium of corporate racing gear, fine lines of Angel-blue light glowing along an all-black skin suit, the skeletal, metallic claws of a haptic set curling over the backs of his fingers. There’s the gleam of active skillsofts in the bright, feather-shaped racing implants curling along his temples, and the meridian lines of brilliant light leading from them down his jaw are an unbroken curve…

Dean’s brain plays hopscotch and trips over a rock as he meets those eyes.

Because it’s been years, but who the fuck is he fooling? Those eyes haven’t changed. That face hasn’t changed, not really. Maybe a little less soft, now. He’s got the same frown lurking around the middle of his forehead, like that’s easier for him than smiling.

He hasn’t changed in anything that really matters.

It’s Cas.

It’s Cas, Dean’s pulse tells him, thundering in his ears, throbbing behind his eyes.

Castiel Shurley is looking at him, serene and serious as ever, standing beside an Angel team racing flyer with one hand loose by his side, the other resting lightly on the white wing of the vehicle. His hair is neat, combed flat in a way that Dean’s never seen it. He’s not any taller than Dean remembers, but he’s bigger—shoulders, legs, hips.

He has implants in his temples.

There are racing stripes glowing on both sides of his face.

“Hello, Dean,” he says, his voice darker than Dean remembers—rougher, like he got caught in the wake from liftoff and got a lungful of particulate.

He doesn’t pretend he doesn’t recognize Dean. He doesn’t pretend Dean’s not gonna recognize him, even though it’s been years.

“You…” Dean hisses, his throat thick and hot. He probably had something smartassed to say to Cas’s original comment, but whatever it is, it’s gone, now, and only the anger, old and rich, is left.

Not just because it’s Cas, the asshole who Dean thought he might’ve loved before he picked up and sold out to his rich dad all those years ago.

But because Dean looked at him today, and the first goddamned thing that came to his mind was, “Fuck, fuck, he’s gorgeous.”

Time has shaved away some of the softness of his cheeks, leaving the angles of them even sharper, his eyes even deeper-set under the heavy hint of a frown. Against it, his lips (Dean’s had those lips on him, those lips against him, around him) look even fuller than they used to.

Hell, Dean knows how that mouth went soft and startled with pleasure—the way Cas squeezed his eyes shut whenever Dean thumbed at the head of his cock. The way those heavy eyelids drooped, but didn’t close altogether, when Dean was moving carefully inside him—not too fast, not so fast, no matter how incredible it all felt. Yeah, it was just the one time that they went all the way, but it’s not like Dean could’ve ever forgotten it.

After all, it was less than an hour before Cas told him he was cutting all ties with them.

And here he is now, familiar, unfamiliar—unamused, looking at Dean like a popsicle wouldn’t melt in that soft, full mouth. He doesn’t sneer, but he doesn’t need to.

But curls of light brighten in the circuitry flowing down his temples and disappearing into his hair, slender lines of it arching down his jawline, internals glowing blue-white behind those eyes—making them look even more unearthly than before.

Dean wouldn’t have thought that was possible.

The questions crowd in Dean’s mouth like used semiconductors piling up in a junk bin. He doesn’t know which of them are still live, or which of them might burn out his system if he plugs them in.

He’s a little surprised when the one that finally falls out is, “Shurley sent you to check out his little toy?”

“Are you referring to the Seraph, or yourself?” Cas asks—raising his eyebrows like it’s a real question, not a jab, and that’s it, that is it.

Fuck. So apparently, Cas knows about Dean’s deal with Chuck. There’s nothing else that could mean, and it feels like the plunge of a knife right through his gut.

And that’s rich, that’s real fuckin’ rich, him throwing that like confetti in Dean’s face, considering that Dean might be selling out today—but Cas? Cas sold out to Shurley seven years ago. That was why he left.

But before Dean can take more than one step towards him with his hands clenched into fists, Cas shakes his head. “Either way: no. I’m racing.” And he gives a little flick of his hand down the line of his body, like Dean could have possibly missed the way that he’s dressed from neck to ankle in full gear—covered throat to toes with that mix of circuitry and skintight cloth, gloves with the palms and fingers free and the lines of haptic conductors making a bright skeleton over the knuckles, the impossibly soft-looking shoes that would provide no protection at all against a real street.

Dean saw all that. He couldn’t have missed any of that any more than he could miss the sun going nova. But, well, maybe like a sun going nova, he was too busy keeping his other shit together to think too hard about it, because with what Cas just said? Dean’s thoughts try to bounce off a repulsion line that isn’t there and careen right into a building, taking everything down in flames.

“You…” Dean says, his throat thick and hot and shocked, and he can’t even get out a comeback.

Yeah, Dean’s gonna throw this match. Yeah, he’s gonna lose. He knows it. That decision’s done and dusted, and no one will ever be the wiser. Sure, Dean will know what a failure he is at the one thing he was ever really good at, but… Sam’ll make it. Sam will have a future that’s not here under the sandblasted sky.

But it hits different, looking at fucking Castiel Shurley now.

Except… wait. No. Donna said there was a new driver taking the Angel ride. But his name sure as hell wasn’t Castiel—

“What the fuck, Shurley wouldn’t even let you keep your own name?” he blurts out.

Cas blinks. It’s the first sign today that his whole nervous system hasn’t been replaced by fiberoptics, for all the reaction he’s shown to seeing Dean again after seven fucking years. “What?”

“And what’s with the weird name?” Dean continues, ragged. Skies and stars, what’s he even saying? “I mean, seriously, ‘Inias’?”

“Oh.” Cas shakes his head slowly, his eyes narrowing. “No. No, I’m not… Inias is one of the Angel drivers. He was assigned to take the Seraph on the Chicago run today. I decided I wanted to give it a try, instead. Since I was already here.” He shrugs. “He didn’t argue.”

Just like that.

Just like that, into the goddamned biggest race on Terra. Something that’s made a racer’s career, got them set. Something that could have made Dean’s career, if things were different.

“You’re not a driver.” It’s a statement, not a question, and it dives out of Dean’s mouth, gaining momentum as it goes. “You’re not a racer.”

“No, of course not. I dabble,” Cas answers, cool as could be, expressionless again. He reaches up to trace one fingertip down the brilliant, steady blue of the meridian line along his left cheek, rubbing up and down at it thoughtfully, like a familiar, comforting habit. “Piloting a racing flyer is an engrossing hobby. You understand, I imagine.”

Oh yeah. Yeah, Dean understands, all right.

Never mind that when he and Cas met, Cas hadn’t so much as sat in a cockpit before.

“Wait. What do you mean, you don’t know how to drive?”

“Why would I know how to drive? Zachariah would never allow me to pilot a flyer.”

“Skies! Forget that douchenozzle.”

“How does that insult make any more sense than ‘assbutt’?”

“I—just—shut up. You’re twenty-one, dude! And no one calls it ‘piloting a flyer.’ What is this, the ‘50s?”

“That’s a peculiar thing to hear from someone who drives a ‘67. And I’m not sure why you think that my age would magically imbue me with the ability to…” Cas paused, staring straight into Dean’s face and arcing an eyebrow like the stubborn ass he was, “…pilot a flyer.”

A hobby, huh. Yeah. Of course it is. Of course this thing that people have sold their whole lives to corporations to get themselves involved in—this career that puts food in Dean’s and Sam’s mouth, a roof over their heads, charge in Baby’s circuits—is a hobby for Castiel Shurley, now.

Of course his daddy’s money and power and fucking name got him into the second-seed race spot in the most exclusive flyer race on Terra. Why wouldn’t it? After all, it got Cas into the Academy, the most exclusive school in the galaxies.

(It’s gonna get Sam into the Academy, too.)

Things make sense, now. Things make a lot of sense, now.

“Just let go,” Chuck told Dean. “Just… drift off into obscurity. That’s all you’ll have to do. You’ll be comfortable. It’ll be easy.”

Oh, yeah. Easy, peasy. Maybe Chuck was just hedging his bets with that bullshit. Because if Dean loses at this, the race of his career, to some rich pretty-boy who hasn’t so much as driven a qualifier before, well. His career’s over no matter what. He loses, he’s done.

Dean wonders how much Chuck paid off the other teams’ drivers. Or maybe he didn’t have to, since all of the top ten seed, they’re all corporate except for Dean. Maybe they all got their marching orders from their strategists, and, Dean was the only one who had to be paid off.

Maybe their skillsofts are programmed just the tiniest little bit off, and they don’t even know they’re doing anything wrong. Maybe they’re innocent.

Yeah, like anyone’s innocent here anymore. Because Dean’s just as dirty as the rest.

Maybe that’s why what he says is, “Wow. Couldn’t even keep one little promise, could you.”

And skies, he feels so stupid the moment it’s out. Who the hell even cares what Cas promised? Not Dean. Not least ‘cause when Cas, his eyes big and serious and his head high, promised he’d never race against Dean if Dean taught him how to fly, Dean just laughed and squeezed his hands and pulled him in for a kiss.

Probably for anyone else, it would’ve been a joke, but out of Cas, it was the best kind of promise—a promise they never thought would be broken, could be broken. Of course Cas was never gonna race against him. Cas didn’t even have a flyer.

But this new version of Cas in front of him, this entitled asshole, doesn’t miss a beat. He doesn’t even blink. He just sighs out a little huff of breath that doesn’t even move his shoulders and chest, like he can’t believe Dean said that.

“We promised each other lots of things,” Cas answers, cool as can be, with a small shrug of one shoulder. He doesn’t look away, like taking his eyes off Dean is equivalent to taking his eyes off the horizon while accelerating. “You promised me you’d always listen. I promised I’d never race against you. None of that actually meant anything. That’s the nature of being children.”

But we weren’t children, Dean wants to say. I wasn’t a kid, Cas. I haven’t been a kid in a really fucking long time.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s true.

‘Cause Dean… Dean meant it, when he made his promises to Cas. When Cas sat on that park bench, back straight, knees together, looking out over the little kids playing on the reclaimed landfill like his hands weren’t gripped white-knuckle tight in his lap. When Cas, Dean’s brave Cas, said, “Can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul?” and told him that Dean made him want to stay.

More fool him, then. ‘Cause Dean can’t imagine this fancy, Angel-striped asshole in front of him even thinking anything like that.

Dean stops looking for the boy he knew under the man—skies, he didn’t even know that he was still looking until he takes a step back, then another, backing up towards Baby because he doesn’t want to turn his back on Cas.

No, fuck, not Cas. Not anymore.

Castiel watches him go, his eyebrows just slightly arched up in a mild confusion that’s horribly familiar—that made Dean laugh so many times before, but he’s sure as hell not laughing now.

Dean wants to say that, in retrospect, he wasn’t that surprised about Cas’s decision to turn his back on Terra back in the day. He wants to say that after all these years, he’s not mad about it. It was the logical decision, as Cas told him, so fucking earnest about it that it scalded across Dean’s eyes and left him seeing red.

But the funny thing is, Cas was always kind of arrogant. A little snotty. (Sometimes a lot snotty.) A know-it-all. Sweet as hard sugar candy underneath it all, sure—he’d give the shirt off his back to someone he cared about, and Dean knows this because it happened—but just as likely to break your teeth if you mistook him for being soft. Dean knew all that.

None of that prepared him in any way for seeing what Castiel has become. Skies and stars, it’s worse than anything Dean’s imagination could have come up with, wanted to come up with even in the worst moments, the angriest ones.

It’s so, so much worse.

“Not going to wish me clear skies and a sharp transmission?” Castiel asks, softly, dangerously, and the little familiar lift of his chin almost ruins Dean right into the cement.

“Go sit on a sunspot,” Dean says intelligently, and turns his back just long enough to vault himself into Baby’s cockpit.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

It’s still too early. There’s another thirty minutes until Dean even has to put Baby into her starting circle, the large sphere of light projected by a drone—just plain, ordinary white, for him, since he doesn’t belong to an affiliated corporation with a proprietary color—that’s hovering cheerfully about twenty feet overhead.

He starts running through his flight checks anyway.

When he turns on his comm and starts flipping his circuits alive, it’s just race chatter in his ears, at first, and the stats being read. The names and racing statistics of the flyers and their drivers pop up and start scrolling on the screen—yes, he still has a real screen, what use does he have for a holographic projection that’s not the race tracker on his windshield?—just to the right of Dean’s steering column.

First seed: Unaffiliated. W, Dean. Chevy Impala 2067. 142/12/8.

Second seed: Angels. S, Castiel. Edlund Seraph 2122. 0/0/0

Third seed: Inferno. G, Lilith—

By that point, Dean’s not even reading anymore.

He should be worried. The outer corners of initial placement—ninth and tenth seed—are the best for untying from the pack of flyers jostling for position, getting a clean break and taking the open skies. But the third seed spot is prime placement for putting first and second seed in your wake. If you play the accelerator right, you can really ruin their headwind and foul them up with wake and turbulence. Lilith’s a bitch, but skies and stars that bitch can drive, and she drives dirty.

It's not Lilith Dean’s thinking of, though.

Fuck.

Dean stares at the screen until the brightly lit words and numbers start to blur.

0/0/0. Wins, losses, defaults.

It wasn’t his imagination that he’s never seen Castiel Shurley on the track in all of Dean’s years professionally racing. It wasn’t just that their paths didn’t cross, somehow, on the racing circuit. The asshole wasn’t just blowing wind up his tailpipe with that ‘hobby’ bullshit.

Castiel’s never fucking raced. Not a qualifier, not a speed trap, not a sprint—not anything where he’d get a tick mark from the racing commission on his score sheet.

“Dean!” The snap in Sam’s voice on the comm, loud enough that Dean knows he’s repeated it more than once, jerks Dean back against Baby’s pilot seat, sharply enough that she creaks a soft protest.

“What?” he growls, and raises his hand to start checking each of Baby’s systems. Yeah, Donna did the automatic systems check at the mechanical and materials safety level, but just like any driver worth his sky, Dean always makes sure each of Baby’s parts is responding to him and ready to ride. Clutch. Accelerator. Antigrav. Brake. Gyroscope. Altimeter.

“I saw—is that—skies and stars and Saturn’s stripes, Dean!” Sam rambles into the overheads.  “In the Chicago? What the hell is going on?”

Yeah, that’s what Dean would like to know. Though, at least Sam’s not saying ‘I told you so—’

“I told you so, Dean, I told you I saw him yesterday!”

Goddammit.

“Yeah, yeah, give the satellite tower a prize pot,” Dean mutters, running his fingertips over Baby’s steering stick, testing its wiggle and the smoothness of its circuit. His hand isn’t fucking trembling, okay? It’s just the adrenaline. He’s ready to ride. He’s always ready to ride. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter?” Dean can’t even blame Sam for the way his voice rises high and sharp at that.

“Skies, why would it?” Dean answers.

Dean’s intentionally not switching over his screen from the scrolling race statistics to the camera. He’s looking at the wind velocity at the different altitudes… holy hell, that is a nasty turbulent flow going through the top of the buildings, better stay away from that shit. The lake’s got a good warm updraft, though, if Dean can get to it early enough…

So he can’t see Sam’s face when Sam says, “Um, because this is the Chicago, and he’s flying on one of the most challenging courses on Terra with triple oughts?”

“Well, maybe he’ll hit the repulsion line right out of his circle and we’ll all have a laugh.” If Cas doesn’t crash right into another flyer taking that first ninety degree turn, fuck. Dean’ll be on the outside edge of him for that, thank the stars.

He ignores the sick clench in his stomach. If that happens, it’ll be fine—the first turn is only a few hundred meters from the starting suspension, so no one will have had any time to build up any acceleration yet, not even in an Edlund Seraph. The flyer might go down, but no one’ll get hurt.

Probably.

Sam’s silence is as loud and as damning as the big, hurt puppy eyes Dean can’t even see.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say, Sammy,” he barks, when the silence gets to be too much. “I don’t know what the hell the Angels are thinking, putting a rookie in the cockpit.”

“That this will showcase the fancy new sync tech they’ve been advertising all over the trid?” Sam says immediately—yep, just what Donna was talking about. “You really need to watch something other than Dr. Sexy reruns.”

“But the boots, Sammy, the boots.”

Sam sighs loudly. Once he’s got an idea launched, he’s not cutting the rockets until it lands on its target. “But what is Cas thinking?” Sam insists. “He’s clearly not even a rookie—I mean, he’s not a racer at all? What is he, an amateur flyer? This is really dangerous! Dean, you know him better than anyone, why—”

“Don’t know where you get that idea that I know that asshole from Adam,” Dean snaps. “Now shut up and let me run my race checks.”

Since he knows that telling Sam to shut up is pretty much the best guaranteed way to make him not shut up, Dean turns off the intake of his comm. See? One advantage of having no implants. He gets to do that. He can’t imagine how annoying it might be to plug in, and on top of all the feedback that implanted racers get from their flyers, immediately have to listen to Sam yammering, all the time.

Yeah, Dean’s pretty sure that if he had to fly corp, with a race strategist in his ear yelling things the whole time, he’d crash himself into a repulsion barrier.

Dean runs through the rest of his systems check on autopilot as he plots out the rest of the course in his head. With a flick, he calls up the race map until it projects its full transparent length onto his windscreen.

Most of Chicago’s narrow thoroughways have lost their names to time—whatever street signs they must have had half-buried under rubble that’s never been cleared out. So the race has taken the names of the neighborhoods, instead: Wicker, Logan, Hyde; Avondale, Bronzeville. It’s insane to think how many people used to occupy the ghost cities, especially the bigger ones like this, and now they’re mostly populated by race repulsion lines and the plants crawling their way up old buildings, maybe a pack of feral cats curled up warm in the remnants of human habitations.

All the human life in the area now is outside, in the racer villages that encircle the ghost cities like the dust in Saturn’s rings—where there’s no chance of a broken piece of building vibrating down from sonic boom and crashing on someone’s head.

But the bigger streets in the Chicago—the ones that racers talk about in low, excited tones, the ones big enough for flyers to be flying side by side and pulling ahead of each other, swinging the corners so sharply their wingtips brush—yeah, those still have their names. Dean traces the shining lines of them on Baby’s windscreen with a fingertip. The River—dry, now, dammed up. LaSalle. Halsted. Wacker. Lakeshore, skimming its way against the water. There’s a shortcut from Navy Pier, the curve of it jutting out over the water like a finger, to the Lakeshore path, but Baby’s heavy enough that Dean doesn’t like flying over water if he can help it, even though her antigrav is good for it.

Then there’s the Magnificent Mile, that last straightaway after the spirals through the city that make up the race—just barely wide enough for four flyers wingtip to wingtip, and ending the Chicago at the very center of the ghost city.

Dean leans forward and puts a finger on the victory circle, touching cool glass in the middle of the holographic projection. Baby’s little glowing dot—silver, unaffiliated—is at the bottom right corner, in this zoomed-out view, tightly bunched with all the other vehicles at their starting positions, a tiny little rainbow of flyers in a neat little line.

There’s something comforting about how big the Chicago race is, how many ways there are to get to the finishing circle. High road or low, into the clouds or skimming the pavement, cutting across the lake or following the streets. But right here, right at the beginning of what used to be some kind of a highway going into the city, they’re all going to be jostling for position, and Dean fucking cannot wait.

Even with his comms off, he hears the loud chime outside that practically rattles Baby’s cockpit, and Dean leans back into his seat and keys the map projected onto his windscreen into street view. He has the pathway he’s going to carve through the city memorized anyway; this view just gives him an idea of where the other racers on the track are, and keeps the repulsion lines that border the course outlined neatly in red, since when they’re moving at top speed, even that bright yellow isn’t immediately visible.

Reluctantly, he flicks his communication system back on. Sam must be sulking, because Dean doesn’t hear anything out of him until today’s race moderator says, “First seed check. Winchester, all systems go? Fly fair, now,” and Dean acknowledges with a roll of his eyes and a grin.

Fucking Victor is such a boy scout. Dean’s known him a long time, though it was kind of rough in the beginning when Dean started on the racing circuit: Victor almost managed to pull him over—once—for racing without a license. Dean outflew him, but they both know it was him. (He wonders if Victor’s ever done the math and realized that at the time, Dean wasn’t old enough to have a racing license.)

Then Sam says, “Good luck.”

“I don’t need luck, bitch,” Dean says, but he’s grinning.

Then he remembers. He doesn’t need luck.

Because he’s not gonna win today.

Right.

Fuck.

His smile fades.

“Take it anyway, jerk,” Sam answers into the silence, and Dean’s never been so glad that they don’t have a built-in overhead camera in Baby, so Sam can’t see the look on his face. Dean’s required to wear the clip-in scanners and bracelets that make sure he’s not having a heart attack mid-flight or losing blood to his brain taking too many Gs or something, but unlike pretty much everyone else racing today, he’s not wired in. That means that someone might be watching his heart rate spike right now, but that’s about it.

Dean turns the ignition and feels Baby growl herself awake.

But he’s not alone. On Baby’s right side, Garth is already up in the air in the fifth-seed starting circle—he can afford to showboat, because the Rabbit he’s in gets better flight-per-distance charge than any other flyer going today—but the thinner, higher whine of the Seraph starting up in the position beside his makes its way even through Baby’s thick hull, setting Dean’s teeth on edge.

He concentrates on maneuvering his girl upwards, careful of the tight quarters with the other flyers—she’s not like the Rabbit, to pull up into the air in a ninety-degree vertical liftoff. There’s that familiar little wobble right between when her jets kick off and her antigrav kicks in.

With Castiel Shurley so fucking close, right there, Dean can’t help but remember the way Cas yelped the first time he had his hand on her stick and Baby did her little takeoff shimmy like that—because even though Cas had ridden in her before, it really isn’t the same thing as being the one guiding her up and feeling her rebel a little under his hand, sassy lady that she is.

Being Cas, he bit down on the scared little noise he’d made like he was going for its throat, then gritted his teeth and stuck his chin up into the air like Baby gave two shits about his dignity. His knuckles were white with how hard he was gripping her leather wrappings, but they didn’t shake.

“Easy,” Dean laughed, leaning forward to run his fingers down the side of Cas’s neck. “Easy, buddy. Don’t hang on like that, it’s too much for her.” He tilted forward deeply enough that he could smell Cas, sweat and detergent, even over the smell of Baby’s cracked vinyl interior. “Treat her sweet, and she’ll do the same to you.”

“I feel like that’s advice you’d give me about a woman,” Cas growled.

“Yeah, probably, what about it?”

Cas cut his pretty blue eyes sideways, and his expression, if anything, got even grumpier. “I’m terrible with women, and have no interest in being better.”

Dean laughed so hard that he almost knocked himself forward into the cockpit, and they had to put a pause on the lesson for the next few minutes, Cas hovering Baby uncomfortably in position with his hand still white-knuckling her steering column.

‘Cause, yeah. Dean’s the one who taught that asshole how to fly.

So he’s watching a little too closely as Castiel draws the Seraph smoothly into his starting circle in the sky, the blue light of the markings on the flyer’s wings casting bright lines into the air even through the projected color of the drones. Dean can see Castiel’s head and shoulders through the transparent windscreen of his little white flyer, all silhouetted by the sparkle of the implants on his face and temple—and Castiel is paying not a bit of attention to him at all.

Until he is. Until he turns his chin, and meets Dean’s eyes through two layers of glass, unsmiling.

His eyes flash an impossible, gorgeous, luminous electric blue as his implants fire, and Dean goes fucking hard in his goddamned pants.

Skies and shitballs, there is really something wrong with him.

(Dean’s not even sure which ‘him’ he’s referring to.)

He jumps when Sam says, “Dean? Your heart rate just spiked,” into the comms.

“Race fever,” Dean says, and shit, he really wishes he could turn off the comms. He might be reckless, but he’s not suicidal. “Ready to dance, that’s all.”

Sam sighs loudly. “Did you used to say things like that to Charlie?”

Before she got herself banned from the racing commission? Yeah, Dean did, and the remembrance of his best friend makes him smile. Charlie might not be able to legally work as a race strategist anymore—and they’d ban Dean for sure if she hopped onto his audio channel in the middle of a flight—but she’s still the one who plotted his course for him today. That’s still legal work for her—mostly. “Yeah, she’s just better at making me suffer for it than you.”

But then there’s no more banter, because Dean’s settled in his starting circle.

Here’s the truth. Dean loves to fly. He does, he really does. There’s nothing like putting Baby into one of the airways with Sam settled behind the cockpit with a book, brushing up on something to do with race legality and how many races they’ve got to win to qualify for the next big thing; what the stats are for each flyer and pilot who took each race. There’s something peaceful as hell about just him and his brother up in the sky, making their way to their next place, the next prize, the next fight.

But Dean fucking loves to race.

Baby purrs around him as the countdown starts, the holographic numbers flashing down on his windscreen. Around him, the air vibrates with the noise of the other flyers getting their motors ready, charging their antigrav. The noise builds, as much a pressure in the air as a sound, higher, higher, and Dean breathes it in, breathes—

He almost doesn’t need the blare of the siren through the comms, inside and outside, to know that the race has started.

On his left, the Hellhound jumps forward with a snarl, almost clipping Baby in the wing because Lilith really does not give a fuck like that. But the Seraph on Dean’s right darts forward right out of the starting circle—a straight line, not taking any altitude. It’s a rookie mistake for anyone in a lighter flyer like that, who hasn’t got Baby’s bulk. Around Dean on either side, flyers charge forward, fighting for position in the air before they get to the first turn.

Dean lets them go—lets them jostle for airspace, and just gives Baby her head, lets her ride in her lane. He knows how to do this. He cues on Runnin’ With the Devil and taps his fingers against the stick to the beat, watching the flash of the flyers’ lights in front of him.

Baby’s his girl, and she’s beautiful, but she’s not made for the sprint. She builds her momentum like no other flyer on the circuit, and once she’s got her head and her wind and Dean’s songs beating the bass through her cockpit, she’s unstoppable. But all of that is because she’s bigger, heavier, and it means Dean can’t wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am into a takeoff the way a lot of these new modern flyers can. He’s gotta ease into it.

Dean doesn’t care. He’s always liked taking his time, anyway. Build it up slow, make it last, make it count. Mm-hm. Yup. (He can hear Sam snorting in the back of his mind, but that doesn’t make it a lie.)

Yeah, it’s not uncommon, especially on these long-haul flights, for him to be looking at taillights and contrails up until halfway through a race. They’ll be staring at Baby’s license plate, in the end. And he can learn a lot about how someone flies from how they take themselves out of the starting gate and into the first few turns, before they settle into the rest of the hundred-kilometer course.

He still doesn’t expect just how fast the little white-winged Seraph is when Castiel bolts out of his starting circle with barely a whirr. The Angel markings on his wings and his taillights leave a bright streak across Dean’s vision, the tiny blue marker on Dean’s hologram projection pulling immediately ahead of the small, neutral white of Dean’s, and the bright orange one of Lilith’s.

So he sees it, he’s right fucking there, when Lilith pours her Hellhound into full acceleration like smoke—and, rather than ducking high or low to escape the wake of the Seraph—not much of a wake, with how smooth and round it is cutting through the air—rushes straight towards the little flyer’s tail.

Shit. There’s dirty, and then there’s that.

It’s a bully technique, tailgating. It’s not illegal, but it’s… not safe, either. It only works on inexperienced drivers, of course, ‘cause anyone used to being on their feet rather than in the air is used to working mostly in two dimensions, not three. If they’re not gonna go right or left to let someone pass—and with the pack of flyers still spreading out from the starting circles, there’s not much room for that—they’re going to accelerate forward.

Which is still the best way to lose control: taking too much speed, too quickly, and the turn is coming up on them fast.

Castiel Shurley’s pretty much the definition of an inexperienced driver, and he just proved it by pulling the Seraph straight ahead.

Dean has about half a second to think about what he wants to do.

By the time he’s decided, his hand is already on the com activation pad beside him, and he’s already yelled out the emergency connect code. It’s not that they can’t talk to each other as drivers—they can, and they do, but normally Dean would have to handshake in and have the connection accepted, and he’s not going to take the chance that the asshole’s not going to take the call. He slams himself into the emergency connect band, and it’s so weird that the inside of the Seraph is so silent. Skies, how’s anyone supposed to race like that?

“This is Seraph—” Castiel’s voice over the comm is thin and sharp in the roar of Baby’s engines, but Dean doesn’t give him the time to callsign, or demand who’s got him on the emergency channel.

“Cas—” he bites out. “Don’t fucking accelerate!” That’s what she wants. “Up!”

Alright, so him calling the guy Castiel lasted basically no time at all. Well, shit. But ‘Castiel’ is too much of a mouthful, always has been.

(Dean isn’t thinking of the way Cas tilted his head, once, and said, “Oh, but you didn’t think I was too much of a mouthful yesterday,” with such brutal sincerity in his tone that Dean, to this very day, still has no idea if he was serious or if he was yanking Dean’s chain. He’s not.)

Yeah, taking altitude will lose the Seraph some of that speed that’s the real benefit of the Angel Corps flyers. That’s the point—bleeding the acceleration out so that he doesn’t crash nose-first into the repulsion line that’s coming up really fucking fast in front of them, because it’s a goddamned ninety-degree angle turn from Roseland into Washington Heights, and they’re not even in the parts of the Chicago race where anyone has to dodge any buildings yet.

Cas doesn’t listen. Skies, he doesn’t listen, he never listens.

‘Cause Castiel fucking Shurley doesn’t point his flyer’s nose towards the sky and take the air. No.

No.

He drops.

He points the Seraph’s smooth nose towards the fucking ground underneath them, diving down in a smooth curve towards the unforgiving surface. For how fast he goes down, Dean would almost bet he’s silenced his antigrav.

Dean’s not the only one shocked. On the wide-band comm, he hears “What the blazes—” from Mick, and “Holeeee shit!” from Garth. Lilith doesn’t say anything at all, but in front of Dean, the Hellhound judders in the turbulence kicked up by the Seraph’s sudden drop from the air in front of her. Dean can barely see the Seraph anymore, it’s heading so close to the ground, fuck, fuck, he’s gonna, he’s—

Castiel Shurley pulls up so close that someone standing on the cement could have probably reached out and touched the undercarriage of his flyer, bleeds off the momentum in a full 360 barrel roll that Baby couldn’t have taken if she’d had two extra engines, and takes that right-angle corner so goddamned cleanly that Dean almost pops a boner.

Again.

Skies and stars and fucking Saturn!

Fuck.

“Thank you for the warning,” Cas says, in that deep, gritty voice, and Dean almost jumps—he forgot he still had the emergency band open into the Seraph. The genuine gratefulness in Cas’s voice almost knocks Dean out of the sky.

Cas doesn’t add, “Unnecessary though it was,” though, well… it was, as it turned out.

Fuck, okay, so Cas can actually fly, and now he’s in the goddamned lead.

The “I’d’ve done it for anyone, don’t think that changes anything,” dries up and shrivels on Dean’s tongue.

“You’re welcome,” he grunts instead.

But Dean’s got no time to think of that. Garth took altitude from his starting circle rather than speed, and he’s angling down in front of Dean. Dean’s still on the open receiver channel, so he hears Garth’s “WooHOO!” as he sweeps his Rabbit down right in front of Lilith’s nose.

It’s completely ironic that that makes her veer crazily to the side—probably not used to someone bullying her rather than the other way around, the bitch. She almost loses the sharp corner, but she catches herself at the last second.

More’s the pity—but that makes it all the more satisfying when Dean shifts gears and muscles Baby right past her on the turn, the Hellhound wobbling with the force of Baby’s passage and then losing stability in her turbulent wake, spinning in the air. Dean watches the bright red flyer shrink in his rearview camera, and taps to broadcast. Through his speakers, Walk on the Wild Side starts up—right on time.

“Nice one,” he says, as Garth accepts the comm handshake.

“She got Garthed!” Garth says, shameless as ever. “Won’t work on you, though.”

Hell no, it won’t.

The pack is still pretty tight on each other’s wingtips, but they’re starting to spread out—high and low, left and right. The Seraph is still in sight view at the front, a glowing flash of blue and white slicing through the air like the Academy star. Mick is starting to edge up closer, though. The Men of Letters flyers are like that; not as maneuverable as some, but they can pull acceleration on a straightaway even if they can’t get up to the same top speeds. Even as Dean watches, Mick darts under and to the side of the Seraph, and takes the lead, the tiny green dot on Dean’s projection screen pulling forward and around the second corner, from Washington Heights into Beverly, Max Banes nipping at their tailpipes in his spindly Borrower, trailing lavender light as he burns around the edge.

But Dean’s got his own racing to worry about.

He overtakes Jennie Plum not long after the next turn, just as they’re crossing from Beverly into Gresham, just as Walk on the Wild Side transitions into the sweet howls of the Immig. rant Song. Or maybe it’s Jamie: he can’t tell the two sisters apart, and good riddance. He has no fucking idea how those girls made it past the Chicago qualifiers this year, except maybe they cheated (or seduced a race official; he would not put it past either of them). ‘Cause the way that flyer shudders in Baby’s wake and almost plunges into a repulsion line sure as the skies are blue isn’t the way an experienced racer handles turbulence, not even the turbulence from a heavy flyer like Baby.

Edgar’s trickier: it’s not until Dean’s soundtrack is halfway through Livin’ On A Prayer that he manages to overtake the Leviathan, with its pale yellow streaks glowing at the edge of its wing tips. They’re the ugliest flyers in the circuit, he’s always thought: black, like Baby, but with little jagged, shrunken wings on a big, bulbous hull, the front not in the least bit aerodynamic. But the rounded nose means it takes even the sharpest corners like a dream—so it’s always on a straightaway that Dean can overtake them, and he does. Just like he knew he would.

He knew.

Dean’s breathed the Chicago, spent the past few months since he qualified living this moment, song by song. The soundtrack playing on his speakers thumps through his blood, and Pour Some Sugar on Me croons him past Kevin Tran, in his stone-grey Tablet. (He spares just a second to say hello to the kid through the comms, because, hell, recruited right out of high school by Prophet Corp and qualifying for the Chicago in his first race season at eighteen? Skies, Dean only wishes he was that good… and he has to laugh when Kevin’s response is a remarkably cheerful, “Sit on a rocket and rotate, old man.”)

They’re through Englewood and into Bronzeville by the time he catches up to Lydia, and it’s gonna get ugly if he doesn’t get past her before they get to the water—Dean’s not embarrassed of the fact that they’ve got history, but that was the first and last time he ever fooled around with another racer. She started talking about babies and retirement and recruiting him for Amazon Corp, and fuck, fuck no, and there’s something truly ironic in the fact that it’s Money for Nothing that thumps through his soundtrack as she screams at him, and he leaves her behind as he blazes into Hyde Park.

Just four more dots projected on the race map on Dean’s windscreen. Just four more.

He leaves Mick behind just before Lakeshore—Mick must have lost all his acceleration on that ugly 130 degree turn, now that they’ve started to really get into the remains of the old buildings. Dean saw Mick climb into the sky earlier, which was a mistake, and the Brit got himself tossed around a little by the high winds before he made his way back down. On the comms, he hears Mick sigh—he’s been around as long as Dean has, and for a second, Dean wonders if he’s looking into retirement, too.

But up ahead, Garth is powering his Rabbit down Lakeshore Drive, happily chasing after the lavender contrails of Max’s Borrower, and, not far behind him, the brighter electric blue-white wings of the Seraph.

Castiel’s fucking holding his own. Sure, no doubt he’s got the best damned strategists in the world yelling stats and strats at him, and Dean knows just how maneuverable those little Angel flyers are, but no. No, no, fucking no, Dean will bleed antifreeze before he lets fucking Castiel take this race.

Oh, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

“Who? That’s an absurd name.”

“It’s a video game.”

“You don’t play video games.”

“It’s the principle of the thing!”

“What principle is that? What is Donkey Kong on? If something is on like him. It? This is all very confusing grammatically.”

“Shut up, Cas.”

Baby can’t match anyone on the waterways, the road that Castiel is taking, with the Seraph gliding a foot or so over the water and barely sending up a spray: Baby’s older antigrav and heavier hull sends up too much of a water wake for it to be efficient. But on a straight, even track like Lakeshore, pouring them up towards Lincoln Park before they have to take that killer turn to get onto the Magnificent Mile and the end of the race?

Dean chases Garth’s Rabbit down to Rock You Like a Hurricane like it’s his goddamned job.

Because it is.

Garth gives him a fight about it, he really does—trying for traction, dipping low down to the ground to push his momentum. He’s good at getting out of a flight path, darting in and out to break someone’s momentum. But Baby has her wings now, and she’s fucking unstoppable; when she roars past, she sends the Rabbit spinning, wobbling in the air, and then Dean’s through. He’s through, and it’s just Max and Castiel in front of him now, going into the last stretch—

“Yeah!” Garth cheers as Dean pushes around the corner, sending sand and water spraying in his wake from how close he’s flying to the ground and the lake, and Dean thinks his heart swells about ten sizes. ‘Cause yeah, Garth would cheer, ‘cause he’s just that kind of guy. He might have sold out to a corp, like Benny did, but they’re still Dean’s friends, and if Garth isn’t gonna win, he’d still want Dean to—

Dean almost lets go of the steering column.

He’s supposed to lose. He forgot. Fuck, he’s supposed to—

But not like this. No. No, not like this. Yeah, maybe he’ll pull up at the last second. But he’s not gonna go down like this.

Up ahead, Castiel and Max are darting around and through the buildings of Lakeview like a pair of fireflies. The tiny lights of the news drones burn like moths around them, every so often sparking against one of the skyscrapers as they crash. Bohemian Rhapsody trills “Let him go!”

“You’re not bad, Dean,” Cas tells him over the public comms. “Going obsolete, but very skilled.”

Cas. Fucking Castiel says that to him, and Dean’s suddenly so surprised he can’t even speak.

“Dude,” Kevin says, into the shocked silence. “Pretty bold for a triple-ought.”

That’s not why Dean’s surprised, though.

Because it doesn’t sound like an insult—even though it was one. It sounds casual and playful. It sounds like something Dean would say to Garth, to Jo; hell, it’s something he used to say to Bobby, before Bobby retired from racing.

But he and Castiel Shurley aren’t friends.

They aren’t. They aren’t, anymore.

Dean’s answer of, “You asshole,” doesn’t come out anywhere near as determined as he thinks it should.

“Very original, Dean. Why not something like ‘assbutt’ instead?” Castiel offers, and yeah, it’s definitely Castiel now.

“Is that an American word?” Mick wonders aloud, and Garth laughs.

Shit. Shit, Dean’s really gonna miss this.

But he can’t think of that right now. He can’t think of any of it. Max’s Borrower has maneuverability on him, but Dean has all his momentum now, and that’s the thing about the slender Borrowers: they’re great at maneuverability, but they burn out pretty fast, and he can see it starting to lag as it twines its way through the buildings.

So Dean sees the exact moment when Castiel’s little Seraph takes the lead again.

He hears it, because Joan Jett tells everyone how much she loves rock ‘n’ roll, and over the speakers… Castiel fucking Shurley starts warbling along.

Dean can’t even call it singing. It’s terrible. Like, really terrible.

But he knows all the lyrics.

What the everlasting fuck.

Dean can’t help himself. He has no idea if Cas is going to take the comm handshake, but he can’t help himself—he dials in on a narrow band.

Cas takes it. With, “This is Seraph,” like a total nerd—like Dean doesn’t know exactly whose comm he dialed into.

“How are you still committing crimes against music after all this time?!” Dean demands, turning Baby along the girders of a building so old and creaky that it seems to sway a little as he roars past.

“Being tone deaf isn’t something that one outgrows, Dean,” Cas answers, pleasant, so fucking pleasant as he pushes the Seraph’s engines with a roar that Dean feels right through Baby’s hull. He’s still dancing ahead of Dean, the delicate white-and-blue Seraph as light as a fucking soap bubble.

Taking the next corner, Dean wrenches his steering column so hard that Baby almost turns on her side, and she does not normally move that way. “So you’re trying to make me wipe out on a building with the unholy power of your voice, is that it?”

“If you think I have that ability, then you’re nowhere near the driver you think you are.”

And in the wake of that little bit of sweetness and light, Cas croons the last few notes of the song winding down, as out of tune as ever.

Oh, it is on.

Dean forgets this is the goddamned Chicago. He forgets that it’s been years since he held Cas in his arms; he forgets the look in those blue eyes when Cas turned and walked out on him. ‘Cause Cas still, after all this time, can’t sing, and Dean forgets about everything except that, once upon a time, he taught this asshole how to fly—

And God, look at him now.

‘Cause yeah, Dean’s always loved to race, and fuck. This… this is what racing’s all about.

Dean pulls up alongside the Seraph less than five minutes later, just as Cas pulls one of those stomach-churning 360 twists to get around a corner again.

“Showoff,” Dean mutters, and guns Baby’s engine, pushing just a little ahead of the Seraph. If he looked sideways, he bets he’d be able to see Cas’s expression right through his windscreen, but he’s not taking his eyes off the horizon in front of him, the obstacle course of buildings grasping the sky.

“I think the expression is, ‘If you’ve got it…’” Cas answers.

The old skyscrapers are getting higher and higher around them as they twine through what was once Chicago’s Downtown, making their way past Ravenswood and cutting that final corner towards the Loop. Garth overtakes them both once, startling Dean so badly his hand jerks on the steering column, but Garth has to cut speed on the Rabbit when Dean undercuts him and leaves him spinning again in the heat turbulence Baby’s putting out.

Dean shouldn’t be proud of Castiel; he sure as hell shouldn’t be happy.

But Cas is still singing along to every one of Dean’s songs as they come on one by one—badly—and dancing that little Seraph in and through buildings like they’re playing tag, like they’re kids chasing each other through these broken streets, and maybe that’s why Dean never could give up racing.

Because Dean Winchester never did get to be a kid.

As he blazes through the finishing ring, nose to the sky with Baby’s entire carriage screaming Hotel California as a victory song around him, Dean’s laughing. His foot is so hard on the acceleration, it’s like he’s trying to shove his boot through the floor. He’s laughing so hard he’s gonna give himself hiccups. He and Cas are both yelling “SUCH A LOVELY PLACE!” and “SUCH A LOVELY FACE!” at each other as they pull back and forth, wingtip to wingtip now as they fight for airspace, like they’ve lost their goddamned minds to a G-force brain-bleed, and—

And it’s only when Baby screams across the green-lit line, and fireworks pop off around him, shocking him into a wobble—

The victory circle lights up that impossible shade of silver around him, so bright through Baby’s unshielded windscreen that he’s dazzled, so blinded he almost veers Baby sideways—everything, every projected light in the endzone, is lit up in the victor’s colors.

In this case, neutral silver; unaffiliated silver.

Not Werewolf-red.

Not Angel-blue.

And with a crash of realization that sends Baby wobbling around him, Dean remembers.

Fuck.

~to be continued~

Chapter Text

Dean’s expecting cheers when he walks into the racer pit. He fucking took the Chicago. Okay, he didn’t mean to, that wasn’t—but he did, and—

But that’s not what greets him.

It’s silent. It’s terribly, horribly silent, full of the sound of breathing and rustling and awkwardness as a short, bearded man with more money and more power than any one soul on Terra should have stomps towards Castiel Shurley.

No one’s standing near Cas. In fact, one of the race techs edges a little away from where Cas is standing straight-backed. It’s like they think him losing is contagious. And even as Chuck charges closer to Castiel, a pimple-faced young racer just behind him, in pastel corporate training colors, shuffles backwards.

Cas doesn’t move, still as the corpse of a gargoyle on one of those old stone churches; as the wreck of the Navy Pier Ferris wheel.

“You!” Chuck shouts, advancing on Cas, loud enough that more than one person flinches. “You! Why can’t you just… why can’t you just do what you’re told? Why can’t you just stay in your place?”

A few people shift uncomfortably. It’s not that no one here has seen the fuss that can happen when a racer doesn’t take a prize pot—when a coach or a strategist flies out of the bullpen with froth and insults on their lips. They all know how it goes. Frankly, Dean’s been there. Even before Dad died, there was nothing his old man could’ve told him those times when he lost that he wouldn’t have told himself first.

But it’s different when the person doing the yelling isn’t a coach, or pit crew, or a strategist. Isn’t it? Yeah, Chuck’s got more money than God, but he doesn’t have the right to tell Cas—to tell anyone—how to drive, how to fly. And when he starts yelling, well, that’s not right. That just isn’t right.

It was a good race. The race of Dean’s life.

But if Dean sticks his nose into it—Dean, who didn’t throw the race he was supposed to; Dean, who’s the asshole responsible for the dressing-down that Cas is getting now—is that gonna make it any better? Or worse? Chuck might be an asshole, but he’s Cas’s father, too.

Shit. How did Dean forget that?

What would have happened to him if someone had stuck their nose in where they weren’t wanted, at a time when John Winchester had been letting Dean know what-for? (Nothing good later on, that’s for sure. Dean knows that one from experience.)

But Dean knew better than to talk back, when that happened.

Cas?

Cas, he’s pretty sure, has never once in his fucking life ‘known better.’

“My place?” Cas says. “Or where you want me?” His eyebrow arcs upwards, and oh yeah, oh yeah, the look of trouble on that face hasn’t changed, either. “I’m not sure why you think they’re the same thing.”

Both of Chuck’s hands fist, and he takes one step forward. Another. “You ungrateful little piece of Terran trash—you’ve been nothing but a drain on my resources since the very beginning, since I took you in, and—”

Garth tries to catch Dean’s eyes, but even he looks unsure. Dean can’t blame him. If one of them lays a hand on Chuck Shurley, tries to separate them, what happens then? The guy doesn’t have physical bodyguards anywhere that Dean can see, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there—and he’s almost a hundred percent sure the guy has a kill-level bodyguard shield system.

Cas doesn’t back away. Or back down. “Terran trash? You paid for enough of my upbringing to keep me compliant and downtrodden, and then swooped in like a rescue drone when I proved I was worth your attention.” Cas smiles, thin and sly and humorless. “I’ve made millions for you over the past few years. So any claim that I’ve been a ‘drain on your resources’ is objectively untrue. Perhaps that argument works better on someone who believes you care.”

And he arches that familiar, familiar eyebrow.

Chuck’s face goes an unhealthy shade of red, color swirling in it like the storm of Jupiter’s spot. In the end, no one moves. Dean can’t watch, but he can’t turn away, either. Not all the way. He can’t move.

So he hears it as much as sees it when Chuck rears back and swings for Cas’s face, open-handed.

There’s a sharp smack, but there’s something about the sound that’s strangely… metallic.

And then there’s a whine and a creak of servos.

Dean looks up, startled.

Cas caught Chuck’s wrist before it hit his face. He’s still wearing his haptic sync-glove—that’s where the little whirr is coming from. And the contrast between Chuck’s slender, pale hand poking out of his fancy, shiny robes, and the long, skeletal fibers curving over the backs of Cas’s fingers, the way Cas is looming over Chuck now, chin raised and lip curled just slightly, pale blue arcs of conduction trailing down his facial meridians… well.

Well, then.

“No,” Cas says, very quietly. Dean doesn’t know what Cas does—whether it’s something in his expression or something he did with his hand—but Chuck gasps a little.

Dean’s only had a sync-glove on a half dozen times in his whole life—always hooked up to a neural helmet, of course, since he isn’t jacked. The truth is, he doesn’t much like it—even though it is supposed to help his reflexes, and therefore his driving. But there’s no doubt that it makes for a very, very dramatic whirr of gears when Cas flings the hand from him with enough force that Chuck ends up spinning into the motion a little.

It sure doesn’t help that, rather than cutting the spin and turning back towards Cas, Chuck turns all the way around, spinning in a circle until he’s facing Cas again.

It sure as hell doesn’t help that a couple of the racers hovering protectively nearby—they might not like Chuck’s racers, or Cas, but they’re not going to turn their backs all the way on another racer who’s having trouble with a paper-pusher, either—actually chuckle.

Cas’s expression doesn’t change, cool and remote as a statue as he looks down at the asshole who sired him. The only sign that any of this is affecting him at all is the brightening gleam still at his temples, and the slightest hint of a furious blue glow ringing his irises.

“You think you can just—just—” Chuck sputters, clutching his wrist. “You threw that race! You threw the Chicago Race, just to spite me—to make me look bad!”

Cas raises one dark eyebrow. “Please,” he scoffs. “Not even you are petty enough to believe that. If you look at my statistics in that race, I’m reasonably sure you’ll find I outflew any of your nicely regulated, perfectly calibrated little crew of… ‘pilots.’”

And he flickers up his fingers in air quotes.

He’s not wrong about that, either. Fuck, the asshole can fly.

“You’re fired,” Chuck spits, after a long moment of his lips moving emptily, flecks of spittle catching on his lips, his beard, probably spraying all over Cas. “You’re fired, see if any other corporation will take you onto their team now. After this, this… insubordination.” Then, as he straightens, a terrible smile curls over his lips as he reaches out and jabs a finger at Cas’s chest.

But the finger stops before it actually touches Cas, like he might be a live wire and Chuck isn’t sure what will happen if he makes contact.

Instead, Chuck says, still with that awful, smug smile on his face as he raises his chin. “Actually, you know what? You’re not just fired. I think we’re done,” he says. “I think I’m done with you. I’ve tried, Castiel, I’ve tried so hard. But you just… you don’t fit in, do you? You really don’t fit in anywhere.” He shakes his head, sadly. “At this point, I really have to rethink whether I consider you my son.”

No one else reacts around them—or if it is, it’s to scoff. One or two of the others around them turn away, now. Dean all but sees what they’re thinking. Oh, rich brat family drama, I see how it is.

But that’s not what goes through Dean’s brain.

Fuck, Dean thinks, and his stomach bottoms out inside him. For all his and Cas’s differences—for everything that they were and they weren’t to each other, all those years ago—that one thing doesn’t change: the reason why Cas left in the first place.

“I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand what it feels like to want to be acknowledged by my father.”

And this? All this? Just because Cas lost one race?

Fuck.

Cas doesn’t flinch. And his expression still doesn’t change.

“You don’t have to rethink it,” Cas answers, calm, calm, calm, his eyes flat and serene. His implants glow a steady, delicate blue. “I don’t think I ever was your son.”

He turns on his heel and walks away, back straight. For all his poise, agitated color glitters at his temples and sparks in a curve through his dark hair as he moves, like sequins catching the light on a girl’s dress.

Chuck gapes after him like Cas turning his back on him—one of the most powerful people on this globe—would never have occurred to him.

It probably didn’t.

Dean, after a long pause, after listening to the rush of the wind and his heart thundering in his ears, hurries down the raceway.

I’d go after any racer who got shat on by their management like that, he tells himself. That ain’t right.

It isn’t. It really isn’t.

But that isn’t why Dean goes after him.

Cas doesn’t go far. Dean has no idea how he knows where he’s going, or even if he does, but he’s walking like someone with a purpose, like somewhere to be—shoulders back, stride long, head high. Like his fucked-up family situation doesn’t bother him one bit.

Even though there’s nowhere to go. Everywhere’s the race, here.

Of course, he’s gotta know that someone’s following him. But he’s not walking like he’s afraid. He’s walking like he knows that if he doesn’t, he’s gonna punch something.

Yeah, okay. Dean knows that feeling.

It doesn’t keep him from getting in Cas’s face when Cas turns around to face him, though, just as he edges into one of the pedestrian side channels leading to the crash shops.

The expression pointed at Dean is pissy and sharp, and not the least bit surprised. “If you’re here to lecture me, don’t bother,” Cas says coolly, all crisp control all over again. The cocky asshole even leans back against a wall, pushing his black-clad shoulders against the plasterboard and crossing his arms in front of him like they’re having a nice little chat. “As you no doubt heard, that’s already been done, and I’m very sure he’s better at it than you.”

Yeah, Dean was imagining that camaraderie they shared, that moment of laughter when they were both flying side by side. All his own imagination. Or maybe his own wishful thinking—and skies, isn’t that the most fucked-up thought of all? He doesn’t get to wish a single damned thing when it comes to Castiel Shurley.

“Skies and stars, why did you even come back? Why are you here, Cas, what the fuck is this all about?” Dean jabs a finger at Cas’s face. “And if you tell me it was to screw over your dad, I’ll—”

“You’ll?” Cas asks, raising his chin—because Cas never knew when to back down, when not to call someone’s bluff, never. That eyebrow—that fucking eyebrow—cants upwards at him. Somehow, with the delicate glow of the implant at his temples giving the small, dark hairs a blue sheen, it looks even sassier than it always used to. He pushes away from the wall like Dean’s anger is all that he needed to get his servos going again. “What will you do?”

“Fuck you,” Dean snarls.

“Hmm. You’ve already done that, don’t you remember?” Cas answers immediately. “Though it has been a few years, by this point.”

He drops that little warhead with a completely straight face. A completely straight face, the sharp angles and soft, stern mouth all lit up even in the dim alley by the faint racing stripes twinkling sharply along the curve of his jawline.

Dean doesn’t know if he wants to shut him up with his lips or with his fist. So instead, he does absolutely nothing, because he just doesn’t know what the fuck will happen if he lets himself do either of those things.

He doesn’t know if touching Cas in any damned way is going to turn out like antimatter, with them canceling each other out, or like a fusion reaction that’ll take out everything around them.

Cas peers thoughtfully up at him. “Though maybe it wasn’t that memorable for you,” he continues, smooth and easy as flying down a perfectly straight track. “You weren’t this ambivalent about it the last time you offered.”

Then he smirks. He fucking smirks through those thick, dark eyelashes, a tiny little tilt of his full lips, that naughty little crinkle at the corners of his eyes.

Dean’s the one who takes a wobbly step back. He steps back, because he doesn’t know whether he’s going to go with pinning Castiel against the wall with his body or plain ol’ violence, and being far enough away for either is seeming like a better and better idea.

This time, Cas laughs.

But it’s not a real laugh, and it’s not pretty. His eyes squinch at the corners, and his lips thin. The teeth the laugh shows off are white and perfect and straight, but there are too many of them showing, and when Cas fades off and dips his chin, it’s still with that big smile creasing up his own face.

“You really couldn’t let me win, could you,” he says to the toes of his driving boots, lips still curved. “No matter what was at stake, you just couldn’t let me beat you.”

His voice is still a surprise—still a little deeper than anything that should be coming out of such a pretty face, a little rougher than Dean remembers. He’d be, what, twenty-eight, now? Twenty-nine? But those whiskey tones still zip a familiar track down Dean’s spine and curl in the pit of his stomach like coming in on the landing pad at the end of a long track, and just like that, just like that, Dean’s mad all over again, the fury coming in waves like hot air currents swirling off cement.

Yeah, Dean won. Yeah, Dean fucking won, he took the Chicago. And what should be the biggest goddamned triumph of his career tastes like ash in his mouth.

There’s something really, really, head-over-heels, zero-grav weird about the fact that Dean’s so pissed that he won.

Because he wasn’t supposed to, and Cas couldn’t even let him have that?

“You bastard,” Dean hisses. “What is this, a fucking game to you? You just, you don’t—” Cas hasn’t got a damned idea what he ruined, what was at stake. How could he?

“Don’t I?” Castiel shakes his head, still with that little curve to his mouth. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to throw a race if you were racing against me,” he says, sounding so goddamned triumphant. “I knew it. Not any race, but not this race. Not for anything. Not even to get Sam into the Academy.”

He doesn’t even pause. Dean’s biggest goddamned shame just drips off that poisonous tongue like it was nothing.

Well, that answers the question of whether Castiel Shurley knew the exact terms of Dean’s deal with Daddy Dearest.

But Dean’s brain spins like stripped gears, unable to catch and fly and drive. He’s moving again even before his mind locks onto anything, skittering around like a handful of screws in an earthquake. Nothing makes sense. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Cas didn’t mean to lose—but he expected Dean to win? Even though he knew what was at stake?

“You fucking hate me that much, Castiel?” he hisses, shoving forward, getting right into his space. His hands come up, and once upon a time, he’d have cupped that gorgeous face, curved his fingers around the back of his neck, run a thumb down the sharp arc of his jaw. He’d have enjoyed that.

But that was a long time ago. Now, he has this rich pretty-boy by the open collar of his fancy, circuited uniform, shoving him back hard enough that Cas’s back thunks against the wall behind him, and the haptic metal of his gloves scrapes hard against the reconstituted stone.

“What the hell did I ever do to you, huh?!” he snarls.

But Castiel just laughs again, like Dean’s said something genuinely funny. He tilts his head back, baring the vulnerable curve of his throat, the way his Adam’s apple rises above the high neck of his racing uniform.

Like he has no idea how easy it’d be for Dean to damage him. Break him.

Some nauseated, terrible, furious part of Dean wants to.

“To me? Why would you even… no. You did nothing at all to me.” Castiel says, with a small smile arching upwards at the corners of his mouth. “Skies at midnight, Dean, you were magnificent! I can’t believe you really did it.” He laughs softly again, and there’s something shaky and strange at the end of it. “I knew you were good—of course, I’ve been following your career—but… Dean! What a run! They’ll be talking about it for decades.” He shakes his head as if he’s forgotten that Dean has him by the uniform. His hair fluffs against the stone behind him, and his meridians glitter along the sides of his face, blue and quiet now, pulsing gently. “I don’t think anyone can say anything about independent racers now.”

Dean stalls, confused, his hand twitching in its grip.

Because that… that expression on Cas’s face is familiar. So familiar.

It’s teasing. It’s triumphant. It’s almost… tender.

Fuck, Dean’s getting whiplash.

“Fat lot of good that does anyone,” Dean answers, and even he can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“It does,” Castiel answers, and meets Dean’s eyes. He doesn’t look bothered by how close Dean is standing to him, by the hands still so near to his neck that all Dean would have to do is squeeze. Maybe those kinds of things don’t happen in Castiel Shurley’s world, because his hands are loose and relaxed at his sides, and the color of his lights is slowing to the easy waver of a candle. “It makes all the difference. To every little boy who believes he has to enlist in a corp feeder program to become a racer. To every little girl who wants a branded sim because she thinks it’s the only way she can fly. To every rookie pilot who ever wanted to argue with their strategist. It matters.” He raises his chin, the flicker of muscle moving along Dean’s knuckles from how close his hands are to Cas’s face. “You matter. You’re amazing, Dean. You’re just so close you can’t see it.”

Cas always said things that left Dean spinning. That left him looking at the world from a different perspective. He was always so fucking confusing, and Dean just couldn’t stop trying to puzzle him out.

Looks like that hasn’t changed, either. Because the sudden rush of compliments—from this rich, smug asshole—leaves him dizzy. He doesn’t step back, and he doesn’t let go, but he feels his hands loosen until he’s holding, not shoving.

“What the hell do you know about any of that?” Dean demands, staring. It’s backwards and weird to hear all that from a racer with circuitry at his temples and Angel-blue glowing in his meridians, the electric ring of the implants inside his brain brightening in his irises.

It’s impossibly fucking weird to hear that from Cas, of all people—when Cas was the one who cut them off to join a corp system, to go offworld.

Sure, it was Chuck’s corp—Cas’s dad’s corp. But that doesn’t change the fact of the matter.

Cas sold out. He chose, and he sold out a long, long time ago.

Didn’t he?

Cas just shakes his head. “I’m going to reach into my pocket,” he says. “Don’t hit me.”

Well, at least he acknowledges that the possibility of that is there.

But when Cas holds out a small, silvery button of tech in his palm, no bigger than Dean’s thumb, Dean doesn’t take it. “What’s that?” he asks, suspiciously. It’s not a credstick—which is good, because Dean would have broken that pretty, straight nose if Cas had tried to fucking give him money.

“My fa—Chuck,” Cas corrects himself. “Chuck is very rich, and he’s very powerful. That’s true. But he lied to you.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Yeah? Golly gee whiz. Tell me something I don’t know.” He gives Cas a little shake, just for good measure.

What would Dean have done if Chuck had told him that Cas was going to be at the starting suspension? If he’d known ahead of time that he wouldn’t be racing against one of the Angel stable of racers, but against one of Chuck’s sons? Against Castiel? He’s got no damned idea.

“Me being in the race wasn’t his fault, actually,” Cas answers, startling. “I’m sure he had no idea I was driving until the first simulcasts started.”

Dean stares. “What?”

“Chuck is not in the habit of keeping track of my whereabouts, and when I told Inias that I was taking over on Chuck’s orders…” He chuckles softly. “Well, the Angel drivers aren’t exactly encouraged to ask questions, either.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you, rich boy,” Dean sneers. But this time, he lets go of Cas’s collar.

What the fuck is happening here?

“Yes. I really would—better than anyone,” Cas answers, stern in that way that always made Dean feel a little small. He doesn’t smooth his collar, and the wrinkles on it catch the light of his implants. “I know a good deal more now than I used to about the things that money can buy, and the things that money can’t.” He pushes the button towards Dean again, fingers outstretched.

Dean blinks. This time, he takes it. It’s a simple little thing: a teardrop shape, a little activation button at the wider end, with the faint green glow ringing it. A projector chip?

“The exoregions… they’re not desperate the same way many places here on Terra are,” Cas starts. “There are… some things matter, they matter more than anything. More than credits.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Spoken like someone who’s never had to sell their own flyer engine to pay one of the wingbreakers.” They never got that desperate—not even in the bad times, just after John died—but there were times it was close. Too close.

Cas, to his surprise, nods. “That’s true, but that doesn’t change one simple fact: no matter what he told you, Chuck couldn’t have gotten Sam into the law school at the Academy. Their guiding principle is honesty and truth in academics. No matter how much money he can throw at them, that doesn’t change.” He chuffs a soft, knowing laugh, through his nose. “That, I imagine, is a good part of the reason Sam even wants to attend. And Chuck even trying to pay his way in would have been grounds for automatic rejection.”

Dean always had a feeling that every other word out of Chuck’s mouth was a lie—even the ones that Chuck seemed to actually believe. So it shouldn’t be a surprise, hearing that. It shouldn’t.

“So it was all… all a…” Dean trails off, bile making his mouth water unpleasantly. He doesn’t jerk back, but he does take just one step away from Cas. From how fucking naïve and stupid Dean was. “So if I’d… if I’d…” He can’t even finish the sentence. “After it all, he’d have, what. Told me, well, sorry, here’s the money, you can forget about the other thing?”

Of course he knew it might be a devil’s bargain. Of course he knew there were no guarantees. If he threw away his career and Chuck didn’t pay up, well, Dean was fucked with nothing to show for it. He knew that.

“No,” Cas answers, cryptically.

“Okay, what?” Dean demands.

“Chuck didn’t get to where he is by making deals he can’t make good on. It’s bad business, and even if you were discredited, other racers would still believe you if you started telling everyone that Chuck didn’t hold up his end of a bargain. He knows the power of reputation,” Cas says. “The credits to pay you out, that would have been easy. That would have cost him nothing—well, metaphorically speaking. He wouldn’t even have had to pull any money from the corporate fund for that.”

Yeah, trust the son of one of the richest people on the planet to call more money than Dean’s ever seen in his life ‘nothing.’ Dean sneers. “Just say what you mean, dude, I’m tired of this bullshit.”

Cas rolls his eyes. He fucking rolls his eyes. “Then activate the damned projector, Dean.”

Dean lifts one side of his lips, but he pushes the button, pointing the business end of the projector towards the ground. The small figure that rises up off the pavement like it’s levitating out of a tar pit, wearing long robes that drape around its feet in a puddle, is about as big as his hand. Still, the voice coming out of the projector in Dean’s hand is so loud that it’s almost startling.

“Congratulations, Samuel Winchester, code 5434326, on your unconditional acceptance to the Secular Intergalactic Academy of Law, Economics and Business for the class of…” it intones.

Dean drops the projector like it’s fresh out of a forge. It bounces off his boot and clatters against the pavement. From the gravel near their feet, the little man keeps droning on, sounding bored and official.

“What the fuck?” he blurts, staring.

“There would have been no ‘negotiation’ for Sam’s acceptance.” Cas’s dorky little air quotes make something go sticky and hot in the back of Dean’s throat. “All of Sam’s pertinent information would have been submitted to the Academy by one of Shurley Corporate’s educational coordination programs. They reached out to his prior schools for his recommendations, his references, his biohistory. Samuel Winchester was accepted to the Academy on his own merit—probably long before Chuck ever approached you.” Cas smiles—small and bright and just a little vicious. “And unlike the money he offered you, he can’t take it back. That, unlike most other things, is not under his control anymore. Once admission has been offered, it can’t be undone.”

Dean stares at the little projection droning in a bored voice at his feet like it’s reciting winning lottery numbers.

In a way, it is.

Except Dean hasn’t got the creds for that lottery ticket.

“Fuck, we can’t…” Dean squeezes out. “Cas, Sam and I, we can’t… we can’t pay for that kind of tuition shit. We don’t…” How much does something like that cost? Shit, he knows how much Sam’s cram school cost back in the day, and that was just on Terra. Dean’s never once in his life even tried to book passage on a suborbital. He can’t even physically get his little brother up to the school, much less pay for everything else that must come with an elite program.

But… Baby.

Skies and stars. If he sells Baby…

Cas’s head tips to the side. “Pay… for…?” he repeats, looking startled. “No. Dean, that’s what an unconditional acceptance means. It’s why the Academy is so sought-after, why there are cram schools specifically to secure acceptance. They put a premium on education. That means acceptance is very selective, but it is unconditional. There’s no tuition. There’s no housing fees. Sam won’t even have to pay for transport.” His lips tip. “Though I don’t know if they’ll agree to him bringing his flyer.”

“That little eco-toy gives a bad name to racers anyway,” Dean answers, on autopilot, before he sags down into a squat, watching as the tiny, tinny man in robes says something about matriculation day. “What the fuck, Cas, what the fuck,” he squeezes out, his throat tight and sour. “You’re telling me that this started… Chuck set this all up… even before he asked me? No way. No way, there’s no chance, that’s fucking insane, why—”

Skies and stars, he’s dizzy.

“Did he ask if Sam wanted to matriculate into the Academy?” Cas asks. “Or did he offer?”

Dean stares. From this point of view, Cas is all chest and chin and nostril, and his legs, in those black racer slacks, look like they stretch out the length of the sky.  

“I don’t doubt he’s had it in the works for weeks, if not longer.” Cas’s smile has absolutely no humor to it. “My father doesn’t look like much, but he plays an impossibly long game.”

“No one ever said—but Chuck didn’t—”

Dean bites off the rest of that sentence before he can finish it. Of course Chuck wouldn’t have told him that there was no way for even one of the richest men in the exoregions to buy Sam’s way into the Academy. Of course not. Why shouldn’t he let Dean believe he was doing him some unbelievable favor?

“Chuck Shurley is very good at getting what he wants,” Cas answers. When Dean looks up at him, he’s still leaning against the wall, looking expensive, like a statue carved from hematite and helenite. The glowing lines of the circuits at his back cast a faint halo around him on the rough stone. “And telling an underling to hunt down and send on some records would have cost him little, and gained him… much.”

Skies, Dean’s such a sucker. He’s a complete, complete sucker. “He was that sure I’d take the deal.”

Cas doesn’t nod. He doesn’t have to. In fact, the asshole’s voice is dry when he says, “Dean Winchester, I’m reasonably sure people can see from Ganymede how much you love your brother.”

“You knew—” Dean spits. Then he ducks his head between his knees and tries to slow his breathing. He’s not gonna pass out. He’s not. “You—you—”

“I only found out what he was planning a few days ago—when we came for the race. And even if I’d said anything when I saw you at the starting circle—would you have believed me?” Cas answers softly. “Would you have had any reason to, with how we left things? With how I left?”

Yeah, Dean knows the answer to that, too.

The funny thing is, Dean wants some part of this to be Cas’s fault. He does. But it isn’t. It can’t be.

Dean took that bargain with Chuck. Dean was also the one who reneged on it—whether or not he meant to. None of that has any fucking thing to do with Castiel Shurley at all.

But it looks like Dean got what he wanted out of it anyway.

Fuck, how did that even happen? How’s that even possible.

Dean realizes he’s breathing too hard, too fast, and there are lights starting to twinkle unpleasantly at the edges of his vision. Cas doesn’t move towards him, though he does shift on his feet. Maybe he thinks Dean might come up swinging if Cas comes any closer.

He’s not wrong, either.

It was so fucking close. Dean almost threw away everything he’d spent all these years clawing towards. He was standing right on the edge of that terminal velocity drop with the wind whistling around his ears, and he never even knew it.

“Sam…” he says, before he even knows what he’s going to say.

“Sam has been accepted to the Academy,” Cas says softly—clearly—putting it in terms that no amount of blabber about ‘matriculation’ and ‘academic excellence’ can match. “His term starts next year, if he wants to go.” Dean can’t see Cas’s smile, but he can hear it—the way it lilts up at the edges of that raspy tone. “Good things do happen, Dean.”

“Not in my experience,” Dean rasps—but he looks up.

“This is your problem, Dean,” Cas says softly. He has his hand out to him, stretched downwards, the metal curving against the back of his fingers gleaming. “You have no faith.”

Dean’s reaching for the outstretched hand almost before he knows he’s going to. And it’s weird, and it’s backwards, because Cas is the one who got shoved against a wall, and he’s still got his back to it, but he’s also the one helping Dean to his feet with a careful tug. The servos in his haptic gloves creak gently, like a sleeping cradle.

“You’re… sure,” Dean grinds out, letting go once he’s got his balance. He can’t take his eyes off the projection chip on the floor, its activation button live and glowing green again, ready to replay the impossible. “You’re sure, Cas, you’re really fucking sure about this.”

“Yes. I know how the Academy’s academic system works,” Cas says, gesturing with his chin to the now-silent little teardrop of the projector that Dean’s still staring at, next to his boot. Even without looking directly at Cas, Dean can see the motion of it out of the corner of his eyes. “And I know how Chuck works—because it’s how he got me, after all.”

Oh.

Oh, shit.

If Chuck couldn’t have gotten Sam into the Academy, did that mean…? It must’ve.

He couldn’t have gotten Cas in either, could he.

Yeah, Cas knows exactly how Shurley’s game works, ‘cause he lost at it.

Dean looks up from his feet.

Cas is still staring at him like he’s forgotten how to look away, with his lips curved into a small, humorless smile. “You were right,” he says softly. “In case you need to hear it. You were right, when you said that Chuck… he wanted me to be… a pod person. He might have dangled my own dreams in front of me, but he had no actual desire for me to be anything that made me… me.”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

It doesn’t feel good that he was right, though. It doesn’t even really feel good that Cas, dressed in a racing uniform today he’s got no actual right to wear, must’ve spent the past seven years fighting against that, rather than just… giving in.

For the first time in a goddamned long time, Dean thinks about the way Cas looked that day.

Not when they fought; not when Cas walked out. But before that, earlier that day—when Cas was curled up next to him, not even all the way out of his clothes, with his white shirt crumpled and open over his shoulders, those long, bare thighs so damned sexy, tie a puddle by the mattress on the floor—sweaty and pink and wet-eyed with sex. And so goddamned hopeful that he might get a father, a future up in the sky.

And that Dean would let him go with an open hand, wish him well. Kiss him goodbye, maybe.

Ask him to come back.

Was that what Cas was thinking would happen?

Dean might not have been a kid then, not at twenty-one—not really, not anymore.

But Cas still was, in a way. Sure, he was from the wrong side of a contract. Yeah, he’d grown up just outside a racing slum. But he’d gone to a fancy cram school, had a guardian who wouldn’t let him learn how to drive. He might’ve still believed, then, that Big Daddy Shurley might actually want to be a dad to him.

He might’ve even still believed that Dean was enough of a good person to let him walk away gracefully.

“Yeah,” Dean repeats, and clears his throat. “Yeah, and that… that’s just bullshit. It is.”

“It is,” Cas agrees softly. When he sighs, there’s something shaky and old and tired at the end of it. “It is, and it shouldn’t happen to anyone else. No one should believe they have to pay with their soul for something freely given.”

And just like that, Dean’s dizzy again. Because what Cas is saying is so huge that it’s like the horizon on a lake run—there’s nothing to see but the sky and the water, and if a flyer’s gyroscope goes out, it’s possible the racer will never make it to land. “Is that… Cas, no. No, that’s not… that’s why you came back to Terra?!”

Shit, shit, Dean’s going to kiss him. He’s going to kiss him, and Cas is going to shove him and tell him to get the fuck away from him, and—

Cas, a snarky asshole even here and now, raises an eyebrow. “Well, it wasn’t for Terran food,” he answers. “That still mostly tastes like molecules. It’s disgusting.”

Never mind. Dean’s going to punch him. He steps away and starts pacing, his boots clumping. He needs to get away. He needs to—no one does this shit for him, for Sam. They’ve supported themselves since Dean was fucking sixteen, practically. Nothing’s ever been given to them.

But the projector chip that Dean scoops up feels cool and real and so fragile between his fingers.

But Cas is real, and standing here.

“I promised,” Cas says, more softly, to the side of Dean’s face. “I promised I would, didn’t I?”

“I know it’s… it’s awful, that Father thinks… he thinks you and, and Sam, you’ll be a… distraction, from my studies,” Cas said, his eyes blue and hurt from how Dean was backing away from the mattress he was lying on. He leaned up on one arm, his expression so open that Dean wanted to slam it back shut, like an honest-to-God old-fashioned book. “But after I graduate, after I’m done with school, I’ll be back, Dean. I told you, you make me want to stay. I’ll be back, I promise.”

Dean stops pacing. “We were kids.” Dean hears himself parrot Cas’s own words, and maybe, for a moment, he even believes them. Because yeah, they were young, and so stupid, and maybe Dean’s not any brighter now, because he wants to believe in this. Fuck, he wants—

“We were,” Cas answers, “And kids make so many promises they can’t keep. That they don’t keep. I’ve broken so many. I broke one today. I’m not sorry I did.” He shakes his head, and one side of his lips curves upwards in a wry, almost teasing little smile. “But the one about coming back? I meant that one.”

Cas pushes off the wall behind him with a small shove of his fingers, and only the fact that Dean has moved away keeps their bodies from bumping in the narrow space. “You tried to keep me from making a devil’s bargain, once, Dean. You did try. It didn’t work, but… you still tried. How could I just… step aside and not try to do the same for you?”

How? Because Dean was an asshole and he doesn’t deserve that kind of fucking grace?

And he still is, he still is an asshole, and maybe he shouldn’t say anything, but his chest hurts, and it squeezes the truth out of his throat like the last squeak of oil in the canister. “Yeah, okay, but… that wasn’t why I said any of it, Cas. Not… not really.” He shakes his head, and he can’t meet Cas’s gaze as he rubs the back of his own neck. “I just… I’m a selfish sonofabitch, so don’t make like there was anything noble to it. I just didn’t want you to go.”

Cas blinks—slowly. Like that’s actually a surprise. “Oh,” he says.

Dean can’t take the softness of his tone anymore. “But you got a real funny idea of what ‘help’ looks like, buddy,” he snaps. “What the hell, jumping in on the biggest damned race of my career?” he demands. “What the fuck kind of logic is that?”

Cas doesn’t even have to think about the answer. “Yes, I realize that it could have gone either way. Either I beat you honestly—which means you collect your payout from Chuck, and walk away. Sam goes to the Academy, you accept the payment and retire quietly into obscurity, and no one is ever the wiser.” He shakes his fingers like he’s flicking water off them. “Or you win, equally honestly, and prove your worth to every racer out there, to every exoregion tuned into the simulcast. To every child cheering you on. To yourself.”

Dean wants to scoff. He wants to say ‘You? Beat me?’ He wants to say ‘I made it here, I got nothing to prove to myself.’

But before he can gather enough spit in his mouth to get the words out, Cas cocks his head in a motion so familiar it bruises. His eyes bore all the way through Dean until Dean’s tempted to turn around and check to see if Cas has melted a hole right through his spine.

“Tell the truth, Dean,” he says, in that low, soft roll of thunder, like the rattle of gravel from flyer liftoff. “Did you ever actually think you could take the Chicago?”

Dean has no honest response to that. Or at least, he’s got no response he’s willing to ever admit out loud.

He knows the answer. Maybe they both do.

“Pretty fucking cocky for someone with three zeros after his name,” he says instead. “What would you have done if someone else had taken the lead anyway?”

“Confidence has never been my problem,” Cas answers—without batting a long dark eyelash. “I was reasonably sure I could at least give you a run for your credits.”

Dean snorts. “But… wait. Wait, if… if you weren’t the driver originally calibrated into that flyer…?” Dean’s eyes flick between Cas’s implants, glowing at his temples, following the bright, beautiful arc of his meridians down his face. “How the hell did your implants sync into the Seraph, then?!” he sputters.

Dean’s never flown jacked in, but Sam has. It would’ve taken at least sixty seconds for a flyer’s system to sync into a brand-new pilot’s biostats even with the very top-of-the-line implants, and even in a long-fly race like the Chicago, a sixty second delay like that would’ve been too long. And there would’ve been no time and no way for any of the fancy-schmancy strategists to plug in Cas’s statistics beforehand anyway…

Cas’s lips tilt, and against the wall, his shoulders straighten. Oh, yeah, that’s a proud, smug look. “They didn’t,” he answers. “I didn’t plug in.”

Dean thinks that for a good long heartbeat there, he stops breathing.

“Wh-what?” Skies and stars and Saturn. Castiel Shurley flew one of the longest, most dangerous races on Terra without so much as an active safety plug? Which, yeah, so did Dean, but Dean doesn’t have implants, and he’s always flown without a safety. “Why the fuck wouldn’t you—”

“Well, as you noted, it would have taken too long to sync, and I’d have lost a fair advantage,” he points out, in that low rumble that he’s always gotten when he’s trying to convince Dean that something batshit cray-cray is reasonable. “And the moment I jacked in, the other Angel strategists—” Other strategists? Other strategists? “—would have started yammering in my comms. They likely would have even been able to safety override the Seraph.” He considers, tapping his fingers lightly on the side of his thigh. “I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had. Even though I think some of them probably were rooting for me—I think Hannah suspected what I was going to do—it’s not good business practice to encourage someone who is rendering one aspect of your job redundant.”

Dean’s still stuck on one thing. “You’ve never raced, and you… without even…” Fuck, this stunt could have gotten Cas killed, and the chill of that makes Dean want to grab him by the shoulders and shake and shake and maybe squash him back against the wall with his whole body until Cas swears never to do anything so fucking stupid again.

Cas cocks his head, narrowing his eyes at whatever expression Dean must be making. “Why do you look so shocked? Of course I can fly. You’re the one who taught me to drive the proper way—hand and foot, stick and eyes, the flyer and the horizon. I’ve kept in practice, you know. It really is my favorite hobby.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Dean chokes out. Sure, there’s learning how to fly from an old trad-style driver like Dean back in the day… and then there’s whatever the fuck that was out there on the Chicago course!

Cas shrugs. “I’ve personally simmed the Chicago route solo beforehand—a dozen times or more. Enough to have mapped my own route. That course is my favorite.” He smiles, and there’s a story there, one of standing on a rooftop and looking down at the glow of the starting circles, spinning big dreams about impossible prize pots. “It’s always been my favorite.”

Dean has no idea what he wants to say to that.

“Lemme get this straight. You inserted yourself into a high-stakes race that coulda gotten you killed, when you’ve never fucking raced in your life, and you didn’t even use your goddamned tech… just to, what, prove a point?!” Dean drawls, finally, once he can hear something other than his heartbeat in his own ears. He doesn’t give Cas a chance to answer that, because, hell, Dean knows the answer. “Dramatic sonofabitch, aren’t you.”

Cas doesn’t blush. He just raises an eyebrow. With just a hint more grit to his voice, even deeper, he growls, “It’s been said.”

“But… Fuck, man, you are a hell of a racer,” Dean admits reluctantly.

And that—that’s what makes Cas’s meridians brighten down his jawline—just a little.

Yup. Yup, Dean never had much of a thing for racing stripes. Hell, he kind of thought of them as a sign of everything that was going wrong with racing nowadays.

But looking at the way they broadcast Cas’s blush even though his cheeks never get one hint of pink, he thinks he could really get used to these.

Cas grins—a real one. Unpretty, all teeth, his eyes squeezing almost all the way closed. Boyish, if not for the little sun-rays creasing the corners of his eyes, the way time is starting to carve arches on either side of his mouth. No dermafill smoothing treatments for Castiel Shurley, no sir.

“Thank you. Yes, I am,” he says, with a complete fucking lack of modesty. “It shouldn’t surprise you, of all people, that I’m as intense about my hobbies as you once accused me of being about… everything.”

Dean did say that—more than once. He said that about Cas’s attitude towards cram school, his betting strategy at the track—yeah, they were betting for food, but it was still betting—and even the way Cas listened to Bobby rambling on with his eyes narrowed and his shoulders bent in towards the old grouch, when Bobby decided that the hanger-on kid needed to learn his way around an engine.

He said that about the way Cas kissed. The way he fucked. The way they fucked, gasping and nipping, Cas discovering pleasure in parts of Dean that even he didn’t know were sensitive—and when they met at nineteen, Dean thought he already knew everything there was to know about sex.

Oh, you asshole, he thinks, helpless with the way the memories of it—Cas biting his nipples, rubbing his knuckles gently against the spot behind Dean’s balls—curl his fingers against his sides, his nails catching on the coarse fabric of his flight suit.

Dean paints his gaze up and down Cas, letting his eyes lick against that black-clad, fucking sexy silhouette. When Cas straightens up to his full height under the weight of Dean’s eyes, a frown starting to crease his forehead, Dean notes that he’s still shorter—though just a tiny bit.

He wants. Skies and stars, even after all this time, he still wants, and what the hell is wrong with him?

Dean scoffs, instead, though the noise comes out through a throat gone uncomfortably tight again. “Got it all figured out, don’t you.”

Cas shrugs, tucking both hands behind himself and pushing off the wall again, rocking forward. “Yes. I aced my strategic planning classes at the Academy,” he answers. His smile is just a little sad. “I was… very good at them. Chuck was not best pleased when I told him I wanted to pursue race strategy and statistics after I graduated from the Academy, rather than econometrics, but he couldn’t argue with the results.”

All of a sudden, a lot more makes sense. A lot. Dean’s eyes dart over the bright implants on Cas’s cheeks, his temples. ‘I’ve made millions for you,” Cas spat at his dad.

“You… you’re a professional race strategist?” Dean says, wondering.

“I am,” Cas answers, then looks down at his hands, tucking them behind himself again like he’s hiding the haptics. “Or I was.”

A fucking corporate racing strategist—all vectors and statistics, wind speed and turbulence and acceleration. There are computers involved, teams that map out numbers, turning angles. All the shit that Dean knows at the stick, either ‘cause he’s felt it or ‘cause he’s lived it, Cas calculates.

Except for one damned thing: he’s just gotten fired.

“So… what happens to you now?” Dean asks.

‘Cause they both know that only corp teams get to have professional strategists. And competitiveness be damned, even if Chuck didn’t have enough pull to keep Cas from getting hired by any of them—and he probably does—there’s no way any of them want would take on someone who crashed right through the limits of his position and took off into the sky, like Cas just did.

Cas stiffens, for the first time, quickly enough that the metal curved over the back of his hands scrapes against the wall behind him. When he relaxes, it’s one muscle at a time; flickers of it are visible right through his pilot uniform.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I didn’t really think this far, to be honest.” He shakes his head. “But I’ll figure things out. I have savings, and an education.” His lips tilt, a little sadly, and for all the brave, tight set of his shoulders, his meridians are almost navy-blue, not a lot of light showing from them at all. “It’ll still be better than living under Chuck.”

Dean doesn’t know what he’s going to say to that, only that he already has his mouth open, when the sound of boots makes them both look up.

Dean relaxes the moment he sees who it is. Cas doesn’t.

“Boys,” Jody says, her voice wary, one hand out in front of her even though her eyes aren’t lit up, and neither is the implant in her palm; there’s no threat in her outstretched fingers. “Everything alright here? Heard that there was a… disturbance.” Her eyes flick to Cas, though, not to Dean.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and smiles to show her he means it—a real smile. “Yeah. Peachy.” ‘Disturbance,’ huh? He wonders who called it in—one of the other racers, who saw Cas storming off and Dean going after him? Or Chuck?

“Just fine, Marshall,” Cas answers. “Everything…” His lips tilt upwards and he smiles at Dean. Maybe it’s Dean’s imagination that there’s something a little wistful about it. “Yes. Everything is just fine.”

“Well, then, you two better get back out there to the victory circle before the media drones come looking for you,” she says briskly, and stands to the side, holding out an arm to escort them out of the causeway. “Or, even worse, the other racers. You, missing the afterparty, Dean? It ain’t like you. Everyone thinks you’ve got motion sickness.”

Dean scoffs. “Jodes, I’ve been tasting the sky since before I was legal to fly.”

Jody shakes her head at him. He likes to think it’s more fond than it is exasperated. Then again, he thinks that a lot about Bobby, too, and he knows he’s not always right about that. “You do know you shouldn’t be telling me that, right?”

“It’s probably past any statute of limitations by this point,” Cas answers, and pushes off the wall with a slow ripple of muscle, moving past Dean.

Holy shit, in the hurray of getting back here, Dean did not notice that the Angel team’s racing trim really does show off everything—the thick lines of Cas’s thighs, broad shoulders, flat stomach. Neat, trim bulge, sweet little bubble-butt.

“Damn. Hey, what exactly happens if you get a hard-on in that getup?” Dean blurts.

Jody’s grey eyebrows fly into her neat hairline, and she chokes.

Cas doesn’t so much as bat a dark eyelash. “I wouldn’t know,” he answers over his shoulder, cool as a spritz of Frost-Eez on an overheated engine. “I don’t typically consider racing a sexual experience.”

Dean smirks. “Maybe you’re not doing it right.”

“Okay, then, guess everything’s hunky-dory,” Jody mutters, but even she looks amused. “Come on, boys. Chop chop.”

They fall into step side by side, and walk out of the alleyway and into the daylight. There are weak, orange-tinged rays of sun shafting down through the clouds, and in the dust kicked up by the race, the beams of it slant through the buildings, making the air glitter around the edges. It’s almost pretty. Jody shades her eyes—she’s got her back turned to them, which Dean supposes says as much as anything about how much she trusts him.

But Cas tilts his chin upwards as they walk, even with the noise of the racing crowd getting louder. Dean would bet he’s looking at the patterns that the light carves through the falling specks of minerals. He knows he’s right when he has to nudge Cas to keep him from walking into a marker.

Some things haven’t changed, he’d guess.

“Hey, uh… Sam and I, we were…” Dean huffs out the rest of his breath, stops, then tries again. “We were gonna head to the coast after this. Just for a little bit.”

“The California beach preserves?” Cas asks, not looking at him. “There’s no racing allowed within two hundred kilometers of there, so I imagine you’re going to spend some of your ill-gotten gains?”

Jody glances over her shoulder and narrows her eyes a little, but she knows racer back-talk. She doesn’t say “Don’t be a sore loser, rookie,” but it’s in the glare she flicks sideways.

Dean knows Cas is teasing, but he’s still not taking any of that bullshit lying down. “Hey, ain’t nothing ill-gotten about them, I won ‘em fair and square!” he growls.

Skies, and that’s the truth, isn’t it? It’s the fucking truth.

Dean took the Chicago race, stars and skies and stripes forever.

Fuck.

Fuck, this is real. This really happened.

Cas is really here.

Cas studies him. “Yes, Dean,” he says, and it sounds like prayer. One side of his mouth tips upwards, and his stripes sparkle delicately, like they’re faceted and glittering. “You did.”

If Dean had thought that Cas couldn’t pull up that same impossible earnestness anymore, skies, he would’ve been wrong. So wrong. It still hits him like whiplash; like the antigrav cutting out from under him.

Dean licks his lips and swallows the thick knot of disbelief still trying to tangle the back of his throat. “You wanna come? With me and Sam?”

Saying it makes it real.

Jody doesn’t stop walking, but she does turn over her other shoulder and flick a look towards Dean with her eyebrows raised. Yeah, he can see how this looks. There are going to be so many questions. That, though, is a problem for Later Dean.

Cas stumbles on his fancy soft-soled racing shoes. “You’re inviting me?”

“You heard me,” Dean answers, rolling his eyes because that’s easier than looking at the way Cas is staring at him with those wide, hopeful eyes. “Besides, if Sam’s going to be taking a suborbital up to the Academy next term, we deserve that beach vacation we’ve been talking about for ages.”

“The Academy? Say what, now?” Jody inserts, wide-eyed. This time, she stalls, turns all the way around and puts her hands on her hips. “Well, that rascal didn’t tell me that when I saw him last night!”

“Long story,” Dean admits. It’s even true—considering that Sam probably doesn’t know about his acceptance yet. Oh, sunspots. Yeah, they’re gonna have to make something up about this. ‘Cause telling Sam the truth, uh… Yeah, no. “So what d’you say, Cas? Could be fun.” He smirks to hide the way his pulse is beating in his throat.

“Hmm. I’ve been fired from my job—with good reason, I suppose—so I should likely clear out my cubicle before everything in it is thrown out,” Cas answers, shockingly lightly. Just as Dean’s about to pull back and close up, though, he turns his chin—just enough to meet Dean’s eyes. Is that a hint of pink flushing his cheeks? Dean can’t tell, but he thinks the faint blue glow of his meridians is a little brighter again. “But… but maybe I can meet you there?” he continues, hesitantly. “At the beach. I’d… if you… if that’s alright.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and smiles—small, shyer than he’s been in, fuck, he doesn’t even know. “Yeah, for sure. No hula girls, though. Right?” he says carefully.

He feels so goddamned stupid the moment it’s out. Stars, that conversation was years ago, a quickie in the middle of a summery, nothing afternoon. There’s no way Cas would remember—

Cas’s eyes go wide, and his chin jerks as he turns. Dean’s breath clamps tight in his chest, warm and sticky.

Cas remembers. He remembers, too.

“You’re fired? What, really? After a race like that?” Jody blurts, before Dean opens his mouth and something really obvious and vulnerable and way too soon comes falling out of it. She throws both hands up into the air. “And you think losing one race is a good reason for that bullshit? You had eight of the best racers in Terra eating your contrails, boyo! Skies and stars, what’s this business coming to? Shurley let them fire you? Is he an idiot?”

“You have no idea,” Cas answers, with a dryness that Jody just wouldn’t be able to understand—but Dean does. Yeah, he does. “But yes. I was very publicly terminated.”

He doesn’t point out that Chuck did the firing himself, fuck him up the tailpipe anyway.

“Well, if that isn’t a damned crash on reentry. So where’re you gonna go?” Jody asks, her voice gentler, lower. Bobby calls it her ‘mama voice,’ and he doesn’t even sound mocking when he says it. (Which is probably why she hasn’t walloped him for it.) “You’re corporate, right? Do you even own your own flyer?” Cas shakes his head and opens his mouth, but Jody keeps going. “Skies. You got family?”

To Cas’s credit—he doesn’t flinch. Even though Dean nearly does.

Cas tries to push his hands into pockets that he doesn’t have, then looks down at the formfitting curves of his racer uniform, wrinkling his nose in an expression so fucking cute that Dean almost pushes him right back against the wall right there. “No. None worth speaking of,” he answers softly, and Dean thinks part of his whole chest caves in. There were days where Dean didn’t have much to call his own—not even a full stomach or a place to sleep. But he always had his family. “I’ll be alright, Marshall Mills. I will.”

“Well, then, after your little vacay with the boys, you should crash with me and Donna and the kids. Just until you’re on your feet,” Jody pronounces firmly, before Dean can do something really, really stupid. “Nothing like living with a pair of teenage girls to put your life back in perspective.”

Cas stops in his tracks altogether, his soft-soled boots skidding awkwardly again until Dean reaches out a hand to steady him by the elbow. He stares, his mouth hanging open—more startled than Dean’s ever seen him. His temples and his meridians light up in brilliant flash-fades, like the flare of a meteor shower. “Wh-what? But… Marshall, you don’t even know me.”

“I don’t,” Jody answers easily, tucking her thumbs into her belt loops. She doesn’t stop walking, and after a moment, Cas hurries to catch up with her. “Or. I don’t yet, rookie. But we stick together down here, don’t we? Angels cast you down, we’ll help you get yourself back up.” She glances in Dean’s direction, but there’s something a little more knowing to it than Dean likes. “If Dean’ll vouch for you, that’s good enough for me.”

“Sure,” Dean says, before Cas can share something—anything, something about who he is or where he came from or his last name—that he probably shouldn’t. He doesn’t keep himself from reaching out and putting a hand on Cas’s back, between where the circuits in his flight suit curve around his shoulder blades.

Cas’s whole body jerks rigid at the touch, but before Dean can yank his hand away again, Cas leans back into it—far enough that if Dean pulled away now, Cas might just go falling on his ass.

“Sure,” Dean repeats, and spreads his fingers to balance him, the lines of dull electric fire along Cas’s racing suit as warm as skin. “Cas is good people.”

 “Marshall—” Cas tries again.

“Geez, they are stuffy on the corp teams, aren’t they? Jody. It’s Jody,” she tells him, rolling her eyes.

“Jody.” Cas pronounces her name carefully, like he’s holding it gently in his mouth. “I… I can’t accept. I appreciate it—you have no idea how much—but I don’t think you understand what I mean.” His mouth curls, then flattens. “I’m not really a driver. I’m a… an imposter.” He touches a finger lightly to where one of the lines of light and electricity curves down his jaw, and grimaces. “I have these because I’m a racing statistician. Or I was. Careerwise, I’m probably going to be blacklisted from every corporation with a team, now.” He shakes his head as Dean’s chest squeezes hard again. “I have some savings, but I have no idea how—or when—I’m going to be able to stand on my own again. I can’t prevail on your generosity like that.”

It hits Dean then: Cas still did everything he did today, knowing all that. He must’ve known this could be the outcome from the very beginning.

He still threw everything away.

For Dean.

Jody snorts, and prods him in the side. When Cas looks down at it, then at her, the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepening, she jabs the same finger outwards, at where they can already hear the rumble of people and cheers and laughter. “Not a racer? So what do you call what you did out there, huh? On one of the hardest tracks on Terra?” She rolls her eyes. “Not really a racer,” she drawls, again, the sarcasm in it blistering like a sunburn.

Cas’s lips flicker into a small, proud curve—uh-huh—before he murmurs, “Well, I didn’t win.”

This time, they both try and smack him. He dodges the swat Dean aims at his chest, but not Jody’s kick to his ankle.

(Since Jody does forget how strong she is—she’s got security mods up the wazoo, after all—Dean doesn’t think that Cas’s flinch is entirely faked.)

“Ouch,” he grumbles, hopping away from her awkwardly, but he’s smiling, small and sweet.

“Seriously, though. You ever thought of racing full time?” Dean asks, steadying him by the shoulder. He feels the edge in his smile when he adds on, “Y’know, not just as a hobby?”

Cas squints at him suspiciously. Jody gives them both a strange look, and her mouth forms the word ‘hobby?’ But she doesn’t interrupt.

“Well… no,” Cas answers. He straightens. “No, I… no. Of course not. It wouldn’t have been a… an option.”

Before, he doesn’t say. Because before was Cas in cram school, trying to impress. Before was him always trying so hard to be the good little soldier, even if it meant throwing away everything he had and everything he was.

Until, suddenly, he stopped trying.

And maybe it was Dean who ruined him. Maybe this really is all Dean’s fault, in a way. Maybe Dean’s the one who dragged him back down, here in the dirt and smoke, with the grit in the air and the skeletons of the buildings looking down on them—the bright lights of the exoregions so, so far away.

It’s funny, but Dean doesn’t feel the least fucking guilty about that.

Yup. Yup, he’s gonna do something stupid.

He stops walking, and Jody and Cas stop in step with him.

“Well, you should home base with Jody. But you can train up with me and Sam—up until he goes to school, anyway. We’ll show you the ropes. Introduce you around, you know? Hell, you already know how to drive, everyone saw that.” He wobbles his eyebrows at Cas, but nothing about the look on his face actually feels all that playful. “Could give you a couple of tips.”

Cas scoffs, but the sound of it is soft and shaky and thin, almost a gasp, and he’s looking at Dean like Sam looked at the Grand Canyon before he got to fly it for the first time.

“Just sayin’, I wouldn’t mind having a, y’know. A…”

A what? A friend? A partner? A… whatever the fuck they were to each other before life tore them apart?

He trails off.

Stay, this time. Maybe you could just… stay.

Dean didn’t say it then, and he doesn’t say it now. Not yet.

Cas’s full lips form words, but he doesn’t let them out.

At least, this time, he doesn’t say “No.”

He doesn’t walk away.

“Watch out, Winchester,” Jody says, but she’s grinning at both of them, showing a few too many teeth. Like she knows something. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to sound like you’re inviting him to join your little team, and everyone knows Dean Winchester doesn’t team up.”

Dean laughs, and there’s something a little cracked about it, a little crazy. He doesn’t. It’s true, he doesn’t. It’s been just him and Sam and their flyers all along. No corps, no backers. No home, no ties.

But…

“Well, why not? An old-school racer with an ancient flyer, a hippie greenster with an Academy ticket in his pocket, and a fallen Angel? Might make a good team.” He grins giddily and reaches out, looping his index finger awkwardly through the loose arc of Cas’s.

Cas jumps with all his muscles, so suddenly that his suit and his haptic gloves creak around him, and Dean’s heart tries to take a vertigo-laced leap off the top of the tallest building.

But a second later, Cas’s fingers close around Dean’s—all of them, not just a little finger touch, so tightly that it’s almost painful.

His palms are still so, so soft.

“That doesn’t sound bad,” Cas says softly, staring at Dean with those vivid eyes—glowing, now, even in the murky evening sunlight, the sparks of conduction along his cheeks dancing in a pattern that Dean suspects he’s going to end up knowing by heart. “That… that doesn’t sound bad at all.”

“Right? Got kind of a ring to it,” Dean agrees, and doesn’t let go.

“Well,” Jody says. “Well, well.”

Dean knows what color his face must be, so he doesn’t look at her.

Cas squeezes Dean’s hand. Dean squeezes back.

This time, they step out into the boiling crowd of racers and pit crew and friends and family hand in hand. There’s the briefest pause when they’re spotted, but then the howl of celebration and “Winchester!” and “Dean!” drowns out any sounds of surprise at seeing them walking out together.

They don’t know Cas’s name yet. That’s okay. Cas won’t care. Doesn’t care, if his wide, delighted eyes as he looks over the cheering, boiling crowd are any indication.

And they will know his name. They will.

Well, all right. At least one person here is gonna recognize him.

Somewhere off to the left, Dean sees Sam’s jaw sag, sees him stumble in the way he’s elbowing himself to the front of the crowd. He sees his brother’s gaze jerk between them, twitching back and forth between him and Cas like Sam’s jacked in a skillsoft and is learning a subroutine.

Dean sees the moment Sam’s eyes take a gravity drop down their bodies and come up short at their linked fingers.

Dean grins, and grins, and grins—and raises both their joined hands into the air, punching the sky. Around them, the crowd roars.

This time, Dean doesn’t let go.

~to be concluded~

Chapter Text

Dean groans. “What do you mean, you want to do another run-through?”

“You clearly heard me the first time.”

“But—”

“Dean,” Cas says, in that ignition-sharp tone that means he’s not gonna take any of Dean’s bullshit.

“Cas,” Dean answers, low and slow in his throat, topping it off with the cherry of a smirk, just to let Cas know he’s going to give him bullshit anyway.

The way the meridians dance little shivers of light up and down the sides of Cas’s face? Yep, those tell Dean that maybe, just maybe, Cas doesn’t mind as much as he pretends to.

Dean loves Cas’s pretty blue colors. Fuckin’ loves ‘em. Sure, he still has some kind of feeling about Cas wearing Angel colors on his face until the end of time, unless Cas decides someday to pay a hack to have them taken out. Dangerous, painful, and if he does, he’ll wear the scars on his skin forever; no way around that. Well, fuck that with a rusty girder.

Besides, with how well Dean knows him, the way those fine lines flicker up and down his face in little patterns of light and dark are practically as good as turn signals about how Cas is feeling.

Plus, hell, he can light up their whole room when he comes extra-hard. Mm-mm. Yeah.

Alright, so Dean might not have implants to telegraph what he’s feeling, but the way Cas is glaring at him makes it pretty obvious that he knows just what Dean’s thinking about anyway. And it isn’t racing.

“C’mon, buddy,” Dean wheedles, grinning and grabbing him by the wrist, then spinning him around until he can pull Cas back against him—carefully, because they are high up, and even though there isn’t much air movement tonight, he’s not taking any chances. “Yeah, yeah, you’re the hardest-ass strategist that ever rode a driver’s ass, I get it.” And oh, boy, does Cas ride him when he’s in a mood. “But it’s downtime now. Enough run-throughs. I know the track. Skies, I’ve flown this track.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” Cas snaps. “I was there. And the last time, you almost lost to a first-time racer who wasn’t even synced into his flyer’s system.”

Dean smirks against the side of Cas’s neck. The whole talking about himself in the third person thing is pretty weird, even for Cas. “Didn’t, though, did I?” he teases, and watches Cas’s right meridian flash silver-white as Dean nuzzles gently at the silky patch of skin just under his ear. “Funny, where was everyone else, huh? ‘Cause if I recall, there were eight other flyers on that track, eating our wake. But you’re not busting their balls. Eh?”

Cas doesn’t have much to say to that. Though maybe that has something to do with the fact that Dean’s turned the kisses into little nibbles.

“I want nothing to do with their testicles,” he answers finally, with grumpy dignity, “whereas I’m very invested in yours.”

Dean barks with laughter, and it comes out as a noisy splash of breath against Cas’s skin. “Relax, sunshine,” he chuckles, and tugs on him again. “Hell, you used to make me drag your ass around to all the highest spots, and now you want to fuss ‘bout racing? Enjoy the view.”

Cas grumbles, but he lets Dean tuck his hands fully around that firm, tight belly and rest his chin on Cas’s shoulder until they’re almost cheek to cheek, his implants cool against Dean’s face, the curve of his ass settled sweet as sunset against Dean’s groin and thighs. Behind Dean’s back, Baby is warm and solid.

It was a bitter pill when Cas told him and Sam that the way they were choosing their races was “inefficient” and said that he could help. (And yes, Dean knew already by then that keeping their cred under the seats of their flyers wasn’t exactly the best place for it either, but what the hell else were they supposed to do with it? The look on Cas’s face when he found out, though, damn. Dean really thought he was gonna cry.)

But it turns out that racing strategists, with all that business of analyzing patterns and wind speed and individual racers’ records and flight patterns, are really good at calculating odds. Like… really good at them. And that’s why the corps have gotten so damned into racing—not just for the pretty publicity for their products.

The uber-elite racer tech that the Angel team—and Chuck, probably—supposedly debuted at the Chicago last year never made it onto the market. Not a shock, considering that the drivers who took first and second place at the Chicago Race that year were both racing without being jacked into a flyer the way good little corporate eggheads should be.

But when Cas told Dean how much Angelcorp probably lost on the Chicago last year just in wagers, plus whatever stock dip they took after that big-ass fancy project died like it had fallen into the lake… Shit, those are numbers that Dean can’t process any more than he can really think about how far a light year is. They’re never going to be pulling in anything near those sums. Not ever.

But Cas is putting in the bets for them now, helping him and Sam pick what races they’re going to be flying in, rather than just letting them go with what’s nearest and most convenient. He’s been working with Charlie to map out flight courses for them, too.

Dean loves to just plain fucking race, and he kind of hates just how much research and planning are going into every race these days…

But he’s also seen a few young flyers out on the racing circuit without corp colors on their faces this past year, grinning at him. Not a lot of them, and always the little races, but more than he’s seen in years.

They know his name. They know Sam’s name. They’re starting to know Cas’s.

Dean has a bank account, for the first time in his life. They’ve got their own place now, as of two or three months ago—an old industrial bunker just outside Kansas, on the opposite side of the state from the race slum where he and Sam and Cas grew up. It has its own little charging station, though they still spend more time on the road. And seeing Charlie and Cas sitting cross-legged on the floor in the ‘library’ together with a flight map stretched out between them and arguing loudly over optimal turning angles, Sam stretched out on the one big armchair with his e-reader cradled in his hands, reviewing some kind of law protocol… dammit, Dean can’t take it sometimes.

Dean has his own room.

(Okay, Cas lives in it too. But still.)

And Cas has his own flyer, now, though they don’t take it most places. It’s a heavily modified ‘78 Lincoln Mark V that Cas won the pink slip for in a high-stakes exhibition race six months ago—because the idiot still has no survival instinct. Cas loves the Lincoln beyond all reason, which means he clearly has no fucking taste whatsoever. It’s not legal for qualifiers or big races like the Chicago or New York, but in the smaller races, no one cares, and Cas has—weirdly—gotten his own following: the pretty guy with the corporate racing stripes down his face, driving an ugly-ass flyer for an independent team.

Dean’s embarrassed to be seen in the thing, frankly.

(The last time Dean said anything about the Pimpmobile and Cas’s questionable tastes, though, Cas gave him a long, thoughtful, considering look that made Dean really afraid of what was gonna come out of that impossible, grumpy mouth. So Dean shut Cas up the moment Cas’s lips started to part. Using his own mouth. It worked a treat.)

“It really is a very pretty view,” Cas finally says, just a little grouchily. Then, more quietly, with his head tilted back against Dean’s shoulder, “I can see the Academy from here.”

Dean feels his whole body go still.

Six weeks after Cas defected from Angelcorp, the offer came: an Academy teaching position. Advanced statistics. Cas’s specialty. Dean tried to get him to take it. It was their first big fight.

He’s still not sure who won.

(That’s not true. He knows exactly who won the argument. Cas did, and every goddamned day Dean’s so fucking glad that Cas fought him.)

But all Cas says to that tiny little twinkle of light overhead is, “I’m glad Sam decided to defer his acceptance another year.”

“He shoulda just gone,” Dean grumbles, ducking his head. “Get that skin glue off, you know? Got nothing to worry ‘bout down here. Now he’s just stalling.”

“Leaving everything you know is very frightening, even if it’s for a lifelong dream,” Cas says, because he can still absolutely wreck the world with his earnestness sometimes. “And he wouldn’t have missed you being in the Chicago again this year for the world.”

Dean grunts, because, okay, Cas has that one free and clear. They watch the flash of the race setup far, far below them, so high up that the people are the lights they’re carrying rather than shapes. They breathe in the thin, hot air, on the same helipad that Dean perched Baby on a year ago.

His arms tighten around Cas’s waist.

Yeah, the view’s fantastic—but it’s even better when he’s not alone with his own thoughts up here.

The peace lasts a good few minutes longer before Cas breaks it with, “But we really should do another run-through. You know that Benny has a new training—”

Dean groans, cutting him off. The only reason he doesn’t shove him is that even without any wind, they’re really high up in the air.

Cas has this incredibly weird skip in his gears about Benny. Dean just can’t figure it out. Yeah, Cas can get really intense, but Dean figured that as easygoing as Benny is, they’d still get along just fine once they finally met.

He was half right. Benny was easygoing about it.

It can’t be that Benny’s driving for the Vampires, still corporate and happily so—it’s the same with Garth, and Cas has no problem with him. (Well... all right, it’s hard to have a problem with Garth.)

“Come on,” he complains into the back of Cas’s shoulder. “Hey, look, if I give you a blowjob, will you shut up about racing for the rest of the night?”

Dean thinks Cas is probably going to get himself all riled up again no matter what Dean says at this point. Which is... probably more fun than Dean should have teasing someone he has to share a bed with—yes, when they’re not out on the road and racing, they’ve got a real bed, not a sleeping cradle.

Dean can see Cas’s eyes narrowing, and Cas isn’t even facing him. “I’m reasonably sure that’s not how mouths work.”

Dean snorts. Only reasonably sure? “Tough crowd.” He nuzzles Cas’s ear and feels him soften just a little—well, metaphorically speaking, probably—against his chest. “Okay, fine then—if you give me a blowjob will you shut up about racing strategy for the rest of the night?”

“Here?” Cas says, without missing a beat.

Dean blinks.

Okay... Cas never, ever says what Dean thinks he’s going to.

But Dean’s not backing down, no way, especially since he is the one who started them down this lane line, so… “Hah! Yeah, why not?” He smirks, and he knows that Cas can feel it. “Y’know. Old times’ sake, and all.”

With how Cas’s stomach tenses under Dean’s hands, Dean would think he was mad his bluff got called... if not for the fact that he can see Cas’s meridian stripes brightening out of the corners of his eyes, and the glow of them, the way the blue brightens and dims in little waves, is... very familiar.

Well. Wow.

That really just goes to show that Dean loses at chicken with Cas every single damned time. Even when he wins.

“You… like that idea, huh?” Dean says. He doesn’t even know if he’s amazed or shocked. Sure, they’ve done it before, but at the time, they were horny twenty-year-olds with no privacy and with barely a sleeping mat to fool around on. “Sucking me off again, right here in the open air?”

“I do,” Cas answers—blunt as ever, in that way that makes Dean’s thighs tighten with want. Still always a surprise. Still. “You were my first, after all. It’s a very nice memory, for me.” He leans his head back against Dean’s shoulder and peers at him through the corners of his eyes.

When he turn around in Dean’s arms, though, there’s nothing coy about the glow brightening those eyes of his. Or the way he pushes Dean back against Baby with his weight—a slow, deliberate pressure of thighs and sharp hipbones, pinning Dean against the metal behind him.

“I should show you how much better at it I’ve gotten,” he purrs, so close he’s breathing the words against Dean’s lower lip.

Dean doesn’t pretend he’s smart. But he’s nowhere near dumb enough to point out that Cas has shown off plenty of times just how good he is at using that mouth. And his everything else. The first time Cas fucked him rather than the other way around, Dean yowled so loud Sam came running. (And then left muttering something about sticking his head into a blast furnace.)

“Yeah…” Dean’s agreement comes out a little higher and thinner than he meant it to, and the way Cas smiles against the corner of his mouth, his hand tightening on Dean’s hip, makes it clear that he heard. “Yeah, you should do that.”

He’s still not a hundred percent sure it isn’t a bluff up until Cas sinks to his knees in front of him in the coarse, rough debris and, very deliberately, reaches for the waistband of Dean’s jeans with those big, graceful hands.

“Skies,” Dean breathes, half awe, half everything else.

“Mmm,” Cas agrees, and leans forward, nuzzling into the now-open front of Dean’s jeans with his nose and lips. His voice is shockingly casual as he adds, “You should watch the horizon, Dean. Make sure that we’re not going to get caught. I don’t want anyone to see you like this but me.”

Dean doesn’t bother to point out that surveillance drones don’t fly this high. He sure as hell doesn’t point out that if Cas was actually worried about them getting caught, he really shouldn’t be preparing to suck Dean off with them perched together on top of an abandoned building. Because his cock has already made its opinion of Cas’s low, throaty, commanding tone pretty clear.

So, obediently, Dean looks up and away, towards the bright lights of the raceway far, far below them. He can see the electrical banners flashing the team colors in the starting circles already, from here, testing them out for race day tomorrow. Angels, in that same brilliant blue that Cas will always wear on his skin. Vampires, in purple. Werewolves—red, though Garth isn’t driving this year. Roadhouse, in dark gold, ‘cause Jo kicked ass at the qualifiers this year.

And theirs, in the fourth seed position—Team Free Will, in perfectly plain, ordinary, noncorporate silver.

But then Cas’s mouth wraps soft and hot and shockingly gentle around Dean’s cock, and all of his attention gets pulled away from the glowing, glittering, building-studded horizon to the dark hair bobbing over his stomach, the full lips stretched tight around him, and the upturned blue eyes watching his reaction, Dean’s stomach and thighs lit brightly with the glow of Cas’s enthusiasm.

Oh. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a hell of a view.

~fin~