Chapter Text
Every Biggerson's is the same. Perfectly identical, nothing defining one from the other except the strikingly similar staff working there. Waiters with the same personality, the same fake smile, the same uniform. The same type of plates, the same level of beverages in freshly poured cups, the same wallpaper. Even the views outside the small windows were similar- they gazed out at vague, unrecognizable roads. The pictures hanging on the walls were all the same, too- abstract pictures of hamburgers and ice cream, as if that would make the lukewarm, mildly tasty food any better. Even the smell of the rarely-used floor cleaner is the same, mingling with the scent of deep-fat-fried onions, dropped in whole.
Castiel takes only a moment in each one that he visits, long enough to take a breath and a picture. It's something of an obsession of his, the only thing that he can think about anymore. He's careful- very careful, of course, as he has cultivated himself to be- and he has not yet been noticed. After twenty visits, he changes clothes, parts his hair differently, and begins to place himself in a new position during his visits. It's easiest to start in the broom cupboard: dark, private, and very rarely visited.
He did once arrive in a broom cupboard with one of the waitstaff, but fortunately they were snorting cocaine and didn't exactly feel inclined to tell anyone what they'd seen, or what they thought they'd seen. Once in a blue moon Castiel would arrive in a bathroom, always going for the first stall of the men's restroom- the one nobody ever used because a) nobody wants to use a Biggerson's toilet, and b) if worst came to worst and a man had to use a toilet, they'd use the last one just by psychological urge to be less ostentatious.
And extremely rarely, only when he began to get bored with his locations, he would arrive just outside the restaurant, by the dumpsters. When he felt extremely daring, of course, that was when he'd arrive in the restaurant itself, tempting fate and checking how observant Biggerson's customers were.
When he begins to feel hungry- it's not very often- he'll order a turkey sandwich and an iced tea with no ice, because he couldn't possibly stomach anything else on their menu. Most of the time he'd just walk calmly into the dining area (the trick was to seem perfectly at ease, as if everyone else was wrong) and snap a picture before leaving.
Only twice has someone said anything to him about the pictures- the first time a waitress tapped him lightly on the shoulder and asked if he was a journalist, and the second time a pot-bellied man eating a cheeseburger tried to shove him against a wall and tell him that he had not agreed to have his picture taken. Castiel had disappeared immediately, and the echo of an image of the man gasping lingered in his mind as he slipped into a broom closet of a new Biggerson's.
Castiel has never lived a normal life- never formed an attachment to anyone, never held a job, never had a real conversation. He's never paid for anything- it pains him slightly to do so, but he flicks in and out of motel rooms and Biggerson's to sleep and eat on the rare occasions that he need to do so.
He isn't entirely sure when he became completely immersed in his traipse through the Biggerson's of the world. Maybe it was the time that he checked back through his photographs before going to sleep one day and saw him again. Castiel had cursed himself at the time, realizing that he should have been using an old camera, one that would print the picture immediately so that he could write down the location of the Biggerson' the picture had come from. He had shook his head at his own stupidity- he'd gotten so enveloped in taking the photographs that he hadn't been looking at the restaurants until he went back through to look back. If he started doing both those things- looking and labeling, then he could see him firsthand and go back to the same restaurant to see him again, take another picture.
His system is flawed, of course. His obsession with this stranger combined with his desire to remain separated from humanity leaves him in a strange limbo- he does not simply want to snap pictures and leave, he wants to own this man, in his heart at least.
He'd happened into a Biggerson's by accident the first time. He'd messed up, landing there instead of on top of the Statue of Liberty, and as he had his camera out already, to take a picture of the New York skyline, he pushed his finger down and snapped a picture before realizing where he was. He flicked away from that restaurant quickly, and glanced down at his camera once he was safely in a hotel room, and found that in the very center of the photograph, a man stared straight into the lens. Not any man- not an ugly man, not a plain man, not even an ordinary man, but an immaculate man. Castiel had never experienced any kind of attraction, or even pleasant observance, of any man or woman until that moment. The man glared out of the picture, unknowingly centering himself in the photograph and suddenly in Castiel's life.
His life became confusing at that moment, when his empty heart suddenly was pierced by this stranger's green eyes. It took him six thousand visits to Biggerson's to find the man again, and has been to four thousand more moments in Biggerson's since then. He's kept a log of the visits, a fat notebook in his coat pocket, bulging with the records of Castiel's whole life's purpose. He did not know where he was when he first found the man, but he does know where he found the man the second time- but he doesn't know the when.
Castiel briefly brings himself to a shed in Canada in two thousand and five, arriving five seconds after he left the last time. One of the bins of his clothes is slipping off the shelf from where he disrupted it on his last visit, a visit twenty Biggerson's ago. He catches the bin and opens it, pulling out a suit and tie, and as an afterthought, a trench coat. It was the exact same outfit he'd been wearing the first time he'd captured the man's image, and considered it a lucky combination of clothes.
With a sigh Castiel shifts into a Biggerson's restaurant. Santa Fe, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Tucson, Lincoln, Reno, Bangor, Portland, Hartford, Medford, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Palm Bay flicked by, and he collects those images. He pauses in Palm Bay, labeling all twelve of those new photographs before he could forget. The man is not in any of them, of course- Castiel had been looking around each restaurant, so that if the man were there he could have taken more pictures, and taken a chance to really stare into the man's eyes, see if the photographs had exaggerated the grassy green of his eyes.
Castiel wonders sometimes if he ought to create some kind of system, progress slowly through time and look for the man. But he can't bring himself to do that- it would take too much effort. It would take thousands of visits for every day in Biggerson's history, and he wants to get lucky for once, find the man with just a shred of good fortune. And besides, chances are, the man hasn't been to the future or the past, and only has a small window of time during which he's visited Biggerson's, maybe forty years. When he thinks about it, his whole modus operandi doesn't make sense. He's relying wholly on the idea that he'll stumble into the man again- he's managed it twice before, after all. He sighs again, wondering why he even bothers. He ought to stick to the location he found the man before, shovel through the debris of time until finding that same moment. But he could run into himself again, that's the whole problem.
He fights the temptation to punch a wall, and instead moves to another Biggerson's, another time. He follows his instinct, hoping that some God would smile on him, guide him to the man.
Castiel sees another brown wall, another set of mops, and steels himself, bringing out his camera before stepping out of the broom closet. It's six steps to the main restaurant, it always is. Six steps, left out of the closet, a sharp right turn, and there it is. Another Biggerson's, another time. A tiny sign by the kitchen he passes proclaims that it's Black Rock, New York, and a glance at a customer's cell phone tells him that his time aim is right, or at least within a year.
He positions himself by the random plant in the corner, as he always does, and raises his camera, about to take the picture, when he hears a shout.
“Congratulations!” a man screams, and a little bell goes off before some singing starts and balloons careen from the ceiling. Castiel lowers his camera and stares, and watches the host of the restaurant hand a large check to two men.
He walks quickly closer and peers at the men, and nearly chokes when he sees their faces. One is the man, and he's smiling hugely, and his eyes aren't the same as the pictures, they're better- they're a olive toned, bright green, much better than the grassy color they take on in the photographs.
Castiel waits until the two men sit down to walk up to them. He knows that he shouldn't, he knows that he should just take a picture and leave again, but he's curious.
“Hello,” he says, standing beside their table.
Both men look up at him, and the larger one, the one he's seen in the pictures with his but has never paid attention to, lowers the top of his laptop slightly.
“Can I help you with something?” the larger one asks politely.
Castiel falters. “I just thought I...recognized you.”
The man narrows his eyes slightly.
“You stared at us in a Biggerson's last week,” he says, his voice creamy with just a crackle of something, like crunchy peanut butter. “You had that same creepy trench coat on, and then you disappeared.”
Castiel shifts away from them slightly.
“Oh,” the larger one says. “I remember when you told me about that...I thought you were hallucinating, Dean!”
Dean.
“No, I was definitely not,” Dean says, rising. “What are you?”
Castiel shakes his head.
“I just thought you were someone I knew, I'm sorry to trouble you,” he says, stumbling away from Dean, suddenly afraid.
“Demon?” the larger one suggests, seeming disinterested.
Dean reaches for something in his coat, and Castiel turns and walks quickly around the corner, hearing Dean's footsteps behind him. Castiel glances over his shoulder as he enters the broom closet, and sees that Dean is only a few steps behind.
When Dean opens the door to the closet, scarcely a millisecond later, Castiel is gone.
Castiel regroups in a hotel room, sinking onto a bed. He hadn't even taken a picture. All he'd done was get himself actually involved with humans, humans that didn't find it baffling for him to have disappeared.
He presses his lips together, thinking. He considers stopping, giving up on Dean, and his stomach drops at the thought. He swallows dryly and stands up. He couldn't possibly give up, not now. He'd already gone and broken his first rule, to not become someone anyone actually knows. Why not break every other rule in his book, and go further?
Castiel has never lived a human life, but for the first time, as he stands in an inconsequential hotel room, he wants to. If he had been obsessed before, his state after being chased into a broom closet by Dean could not be named, it is too enormous, too incomprehensible. It consumes him. It is not an obsession, it is his entire world.