MOST OF THE time, the denizens of the Bunker were quick and conscientious of the dishes they used at each meal, washing and drying and putting away whatever plates and pans and utensils they had used the moment they were done with them. Sam had picked up the habit in college and, once they had their own kitchen with their own dishes to keep clean, Dean had been quick to adopt the practice. Castiel, when he was given the chance to spend time in the Bunker for meals, followed the brothers’ example of cleaning dishes immediately after use. It was efficient, a sensible economy of use and reuse that appealed to the part of him which still craved the structure of angelic hierarchy. Others who came and went quickly picked up on the unspoken rule of the Bunker’s dishwashing and followed suit.
Naturally, as with most rules by which the Winchesters lived, there were exceptions – two, specifically – which hinged both subtly and overtly on Sam. The first was in regards to dishes used to bring meals, usually consisting of a sandwich or some other finger food, to Sam (or Kevin) when he was deeply entrenched in research and forgot about the human necessity of feeding and hydrating himself. Dean was most often the one who brought the food to the stolid researcher and collected the dishes later after their contents had been consumed, though Castiel took his turn to deliver sustenance when he could. Occasionally he or Dean would have to remind their self-assigned charge that the food did more good on the inside of their bodies than sitting neglected beside them, but the cycle carried on and mercifully no one in the Bunker had yet died of starvation.
The second exception was, perhaps unsurprisingly, linked to the first, though it was not precisely due to Sam that the exception was made. The Bunker’s kitchen had come fully stocked with plates, bowls, cutlery, and glasses, and had also included a serviceable array of plain off-white coffee mugs. Castiel could not have pinpointed who began the process, but he suspected Dean had been the one to purchase dedicated markers for use in decorating the unremarkable ceramic surfaces. The decorations ranged from symbolic (as in literally just a collection of lines and pictures or symbols of no particular esoteric or mystical significance), to inspirational quotations, to pithy quips and sarcastic comebacks– occasionally a whole conversation of witty banter crammed onto the side of a single mug. Other mugs joined the collection, purchased or purloined from shop shelves for reasons only known to the ones who acquired and later added them to the Bunker’s collection, but the inscribing of those plain mugs with whatever came to mind continued, as did their use and circulation.
And circulation was indeed the most accurate term. What Castiel suspected was Sam’s instigation was the coffee mugs’ tendency to migrate to various and sundry points throughout the Bunker, carried by hands belonging to hunters in varying states of awareness or consciousness, distractedly sipped at until either the cup was emptied or something required the use of both hands, at which point the mug was set down upon whatever flat surface was nearest to hand and left to gather dust, whatever contents remained growing cold and developing a bacterial colony until the inevitable would occur– cleaning day.
This, Castiel knew, was very much Sam’s doing. Once per week, usually on a Thursday, Sam would hunt down every single coffee mug strewn about the Bunker and engage in a frenzy of washing and disinfecting them before carefully returning them to the cabinets to resume the cycle. Castiel had taken to joining him for these targeted cleaning efforts, switching off with Sam over who scrubbed the mugs and who wiped them down with first an alcohol pad and then a dry towel. The companionship had prompted Sam to read aloud some of the random quotations and commentary before the markings were scrubbed away, and Castiel obligingly reciprocated when it was his turn to scrub, sharing whatever inscription caught his attention as either poignant or entertaining, and sometimes hearing the stories from Sam about what had prompted their inclusion.
“The Blood of My Enemies” had originally been written by Kevin, angry and bitter and stewing in his own apparent helplessness, and now got written by Sam or Dean once a week in memorial to the young Prophet.
“If the Apocalypse is happening, beep me,” turned out to be a reference to a television series about a young warrior chosen to fight and kill vampires as a sacred duty, and had been written by Sam in a fit of irritation over the latest world-ending crisis that had come calling at the Winchesters’ doorstep.
“Tea-Drinking Apparatus” plus a crooked little pentacle showed up in Dean’s familiar scrawl in the wake of one of Rowena’s brief tenures as a guest in the Bunker, along with the long-cold and “well-cultured” remains of uncharacteristically milky coffee– Dean’s way of being petty towards the witch, Castiel guessed.
“This Is My First Cup: Silence Please” had actually been written by Castiel before he had presented the filled mug to Dean, causing Sam to very nearly spit out a mouthful of coffee when he woke enough to register the words. Sam’s mug that day had received the inscription “The Best Part of Waking Up is Waking Up to You” in tiny letters that Sam blushed to read, which Castiel had taken as a good sign. Unfortunately, his decision to flee with Kelly and hide her and her unborn Nephil child had interrupted the burgeoning flirtation and he had died again before they could speak about it any further.
Jack would have changed the routine of dish and mug use, Castiel knew, assuming that Dean had allowed the newborn into the Bunker. He was right, but only in that the fully grown Nephil had slotted into the same rotation of washing dishes as they were used and leaving coffee mugs lying around in random places. There were more mugs than Castiel remembered, too, because Jack kept acquiring new ones.
Jack had a mug from the sheriff’s office where he’d been held and where Sam had protected him, and another that Sam had bought for him as a combination of joke and encouragement that read “If You Believe In Telekinesis, Raise My Hand.” He had explained their origins to Castiel while carefully pouring coffee into the mug that had come from the town where he had worked his first case as a hunter, a dark blue oversized mug that Castiel suspected might have been intended to hold soup rather than coffee.
There was a collection of six mugs from random tourist stops and travel centers left in the Impala to be found after the mess with Kaia and the Bad Place, as the brothers had termed the dimension they had been sent to, separated from Jack and Mary by something unknown.
A mug reading “The secret to aging is to pick a number and stick with it,” showed up around the same time that Rowena became a regular resident despite Jack not even being in the same dimension at the time and no one could figure out how it got there with the yellow sticky note in Jack’s handwriting that looked uncannily similar to Sam’s.
A plain black mug with a chip in the bottom edge found its way into the cupboard after they returned from the “Apocalypse World”, and Castiel had actually been with Jack when he found the mug that read “Never Drive Faster Than Your Guardian Angel Can Fly” with the single painted gold feather.
In the wake of Lucifer’s death, possibly in an effort to distract them from the loss of Dean to the Apocalypse world’s Michael, Jack had procured two matching “World’s Best Father” mugs, one in blue and the other in an odd honey brown with green flecks that turned out to be hand-painted. Both of the mugs had been hand-painted and fired – by Jack, it turned out – at a pottery studio two hours away in Salina, and Jack had been hesitant as he presented the mugs to the pair. “I know that biologically it doesn’t work, but… I’m a Nephil, which means I have one angelic and one human parent, and you’ve both assured me that family isn’t just a blood connection–”
Sam, wonderful Sam, had cut off their son’s ramblings with a hug, one of those incredibly encompassing embraces that Castiel always failed at describing adequately despite fluency in every language ever created. Castiel did not wait for his turn, but instead stepped in close as Jack’s hands fisted in the back of Sam’s shirt and wrapped both arms and his tattered wings around the man he had mentally designated as his beloved and their son, communicating through the brush of his own brittle and damaged feathers against Jack’s young and much healthier primaries the acceptance, awe, joy, and love that suffused his Grace, emotions that magnified as Jack tentatively wrapped his own wings around his fathers.
It was only afterwards, when he and Sam were picking up their respective mugs only to be told by Jack to switch so that they would have each other’s eye color instead of their own, that Castiel realized Sam had not flinched away from the feel of their wings.
AN: This took a bit longer than I had anticipated, and required some rewriting after my computer glitched and I lost the first draft. Hope it’s what you were looking for!
THE BUNKER WAS very different from the motel room. There was more space, but also more walls and doors that closed to keep people in or out. There was also a steady humming itch in the air that Jack couldn’t quite make himself ignore, though Sam and Dean seemed unaware of it. Castiel had caught him rubbing his arms earlier, and the look in his eyes was understanding and sympathetic, so maybe that itch was part of his angel side reacting to something supernatural about the Bunker. He tried not to let it put him on edge, but in the privacy of his room, with the hum and itch the only thing he could perceive, it felt incredibly isolating.
Karate Girl 