Dean's family had barely finished unpacking their few possessions and settling into their own house when yet another new arrival upset the neighborhood. A moving truck parked in the driveway of the house right next door to the Winchesters', and a seemingly endless procession of loud young men began trekking back and forth between it and the house, unloading furniture and boxes while constantly laughing and teasing each other. Two of them spent a good twenty minutes mock-fighting with two lamps before a voice called to them from inside the house and they stopped. (Dean observed all this from his own second-storey window, staying well hidden while able to keep an eye on all the action next door.)

Dean and Sam and their parents had moved in almost two weeks ago now, and they still hadn't met any of their neighbors. The locals appeared to be doing their very best to make the newcomers feel completely unwelcome. John growled impolite things about the lack of community spirit to Mary while she baked her famous pumpkin cake, announcing her plans to take pastries door-to-door and introduce herself. Two hours later she was back, cake still in hand; not a single door had been opened.

Dean didn't really mind it––they'd moved enough times by now that he didn't even bother trying to make friends anymore––but the lack of a social life was clearly getting to Sam. The kid was moping about missing his friends back in Florida, where he'd been halfway through his freshman year of high school when they'd packed up and hit the road again, the way they always did. John made these decisions from time to time, and the rest of them had learned not to argue with him.

So off to Iowa it was, and now Dean found himself stuck in the most boring and unfriendly small town he'd ever known, with the less-than-charming prospect of starting at a brand new high school for his last semester of senior year. So, yeah, he had pretty much no chance of making any friends here anyway. Not that Dean made friends easily. Acquaintances, sure, but real friends were something different. Friends were something you had to invest time and effort in, and Dean's life hadn't given him much opportunity for the former nor motivation for the latter.

In fact, "lack of motivation" was a commonly heard complaint from Dean's teachers. He was smart, and he knew it, but switching schools every few months made it damn hard to keep your grades up, so somewhere around sophomore year he had just stopped trying. He knew he didn't stand much chance of getting into a good college at this point, but he didn't really care. He'd always preferred cars anyway. Houses, you had to leave behind; cars, you could take with you. They were like a home on the road.

Yeah, cars were good. Houses, though? Boring. Towns? Interchangeable. And people? They were all the same after a while, too. Nowadays, Dean left the socializing to Sammy and spent most of his time messing with any local junk cars he could get his hands on, or else holed up in his room, writing. His writing was his secret; no one else in the family knew he did it. Dean knew he wasn't that great a writer––not yet––but he liked creating worlds in his mind, fantasy worlds with a family that stayed in one place and kids that had friends and maybe even pets... worlds with stability.

He'd gone up to his room today to write, actually, but then the new neighbors had arrived, all merry and ubiquitous, and Dean had stopped writing to peer down from his window and try to figure them out. At first there had seemed to be about twenty of them, but after a while it became apparent that their non-stop activity and conversation only made it seem that way. In fact, there were only three guys––no, four––and a redheaded girl. Two of the brothers were tall, one dark-haired and one fair; another was a bit shorter and scruffy-looking; and the last was physically the smallest but more than made up for it in energy and enthusiasm, constantly dashing around laughing and talking a mile a minute, often while eating candy. They all seemed so different from one another it was hard to believe they were related, but it seemed they were, for when they were all being particularly rambunctious at one point and that voice had called out to them, they'd answered practically in chorus "Sorry, Dad!" Weirdly enough, Dean hadn't heard the voice itself; it must have been too quiet. He still couldn't tell if there was a mother in the picture or not.

But anyway, Dean reminded himself, the antics of the new neighbors were just a temporary amusement, nothing to take too seriously. He definitely wasn't even considering going over there to say hi. In any case, the red-haired girl was too intimidatingly attractive, and the lively brother with the sweet-tooth was too intense, while the two eldest were constantly either joking or fighting with each other, so he wouldn't really feel confident about approaching them either. The last one, the quiet kid with the messy dark hair, might be okay though... that is, in theory. Not in practice. Because in practice, making friends was wasted energy. Might as well turn that energy to something productive instead, like working on his latest story.

In practice, though, things don't always go as planned. When the neighbors' house finally seemed quiet towards evening, Dean wandered into his own new backyard to look around and see if there was a good spot for a grill. The weather would be getting warmer soon, and he liked cooking up some hotdogs outside on a sunny afternoon.

As it turned out, there was already an old fire pit near the chain-link fence that divided their house from the neighbors'. It was covered with leaves, but still unmistakable as a dip in the ground surrounded by a patchy ring of bricks. Dean was scraping away the leaves with the toe of his boot when a low voice to his right said casually, as if continuing a conversation, "We've got some extra bricks over here, if you need them."

Managing to conceal his surprise, Dean glanced up to see the neighbor kid, the one with the perpetual bedhead, leaning on the fence and looking at him with unabashed interest. Dean's first wave of awkwardness was quickly replaced with irritation. What'd the dude think he was doing, standing there watching Dean like TV? How long had he been there anyway?

"Nah, I'm gonna put a grill out here," Dean answered, matching the casual tone with one of his own. "Thanks anyway, though."

"How long have you been here? Are you new to the neighborhood as well? It's just, I noticed that you have a lot of boxes in your garage too. I think these are your bricks, actually, in any case; they match the ones you've got there. I'm not sure how they ended up on our side of the fence. Unless you put them there, of course. But I don't think you did; there's no reason to. I'm Castiel, by the way. Most people call me Cas. And I think you're Dean, right?"

This flood of mixed-up information had all been delivered in the same uninflected voice, the half-bored tone betrayed by the wide, unblinking stare of what Dean now noticed were extraordinarily blue eyes. At a loss, Dean found himself with nothing to say but "Uh, yeah, right. Hi." And he'd thought this kid was the quiet one... clearly that had been a mistake.

"Nice to meet you, Dean. I saw you watching us from your room earlier. You didn't think I could see you, but I could. Those were my siblings, by the way; Mike, Luc, Gabe, and Anna. They all have longer versions of their names too, of course, but I won't trouble you with that. I don't expect you'd remember them in any case. You didn't answer my question...?"

His voice trailed off almost elegantly, and Dean, still reeling from the shock of his new acquaintance's machine-gun conversational style, scrabbled through his short-term memory to try to remember what the question alluded to might have been. No luck. He was about to open his mouth, planning to hedge a vague answer and then put some distance between himself and this crazy guy, when Cas spoke again.

"I see you've forgotten it. No worries, keeping track of multiple pieces of information in the brain can be difficult at times. I asked how long you'd been here, and hypothesized that you are similarly new to the neighborhood. You don't actually need to answer; I was merely making conversation, having already realized that you and your family haven't even finished moving in yet. I would guess you arrived here about a week ago. Am I correct?"

"More like two weeks," Dean answered. Damn it, he'd been intending to give this guy the cold shoulder and slip back into the house ASAP, but as long as there were practically no breaks in the mostly one-sided conversation, that was proving hard to do. Plus, Cas's patronizing tone was becoming more evident, and if there was one thing Dean couldn't stand, it was being patronized. He could feel himself getting annoyed.

Those weirdly large blue eyes suddenly narrowed at him, and Cas said "Right, of course. Slow unpackers. You would be, wouldn't you. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Dean, I guess I'll see you around." And he turned and strolled back toward his house without giving Dean a chance to reply.